Sunday, August 27, 2006

Themes for August 23rd to September 21st


As we enter the 9th lunar cycle of 2006 and face the seasonal transition of Summer to Fall, our awareness is about to shift from our outer life to our inner life. If you've noticed, the days are a little shorter now and the overall vibe is just a tad slower, more sedated. On the social landscape, this cycle is frought with transition as the recent high school graduates head off to college, the work force or vocational school. Soon you'll see the periennal faces of new mothers watching their children begin their academic lives. It's a very intense time.
This is why we are drawn to focus on the 3rd somatic interface (individual to indvidual) during this lunar cycle. It brings us into contact with our coping mechanisms, our 'emotional body', and our capacity to TRUST the unknown. On a physiological level, we are more sensitive to changes in tactile and thermal patterns. This is when we see those late summer allergies that signals to us that our immune system needs support to deal with the transition. If we've been tending to our inner world over the Summer, this task is not overwhelming. If we didn't though, it can trigger the early physiological cues for SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder, which will begin to intensity once we enter the Fall proper at the end of September. PHYLO's and ECO's pay attention!
What I wanted to point to this month is the work of Jacob Moreno (1889-1974). His work was called sociometry and it was designed to promote greater degrees of mutuality amongst people and greater authenticity in relationships. Today, interpersonal research is the found mostly in the science of social networks. What Moreno uncovered was that despite our highly specialized social hiercharies, we all possess a capacity to relate at a deep level. What Moreno revealed is that our awareness of interconnectedness is a learned process. He developed tools that are still used now to help organizational groups, creative teams, and global networks optimize their resources and bring a more human to human (2nd interface) element to the world of work. What I wanted to share in this post is how some of Moreno's core concepts of sociometry relate to our (1st interface) soma to soma interactions...
Tele - the two-way flow of feeling from one person to another...Tele has qualities of attraction, drawing people closer together; rejection, i.e. not chosen or moving away from the other; or neutral, where there is no movement...Emanating from the limbic system, tele enables us to gain insight to, appreciation of and feelings for the makeup of the other person – tele creates interpersonal chemistry, hitting it off with another without ‘knowing’ them, personality clashes, or just negative vibes. Forming the emotional and psychological geography of a community, these networks greatly influence what occurs in families, and within and between groups, organisations and societies.
Social Atom - Each of us has two types of social atoms: the private and personal, and the work or vocational. Our original social atom usually comprises family members or carers. People grow and develop as a result of significant experiences and interactions with those around them. New behaviours are learned and formed with both new and repeated experiences, and with new members entering and leaving the individual’s social atom. The social atom of each person makes up the larger patterns of social networks in groups, organisations and societies. The mix of role relationships of central individuals and groups form the culture and behaviours within organisations. As individuals move to new organisations, membership of the social atom of those involved alters, however, research shows the role relationships are recreated and the behavioural patterns persist, particularly under stressful conditions. Each individual is born into a social network. At a time when Rutherford was defining the atom in chemical life, Jacob Moreno (1889 – 1974) was defining the social atom as the smallest unit of society each of us has. The social atom comprises the smallest number of emotionally significant people and their inter-relationships around an individual in order for him or her to be alive and learning.
Cultural Atom - Instrinsic to the social atom is the cultural atom which includes the people and the role relationships - the patterns of behaviours between each dyad.
Social Atom Repair - the process of change and development occurs through altering patterns of relating in the social atom. This creates change in the cultural atom. Examples of changes to the social atom includes expanding the number of people in the social atom, generating new experiences, building capacities to build relationships on a range of criteria (emotional expansiveness), learning new behaviours through training, practice and experimentation.
The material below was a clipped summary of broader defintions found on...
So how can we take this map and relate it to the 4 Domains? I'm often asked which domains works best with
say a PHYLO or how can an ECO deal with the relentless directness of the ONTO's in their lives. This misses the point of opening up your somatic awareness. While it's valid to understand the way the 4 Domains exchange and complement each other, it's more useful to become more adept at Moreno's concept of social atom repair. For example, you may be in asymmetrical relationship like a parent-child one and yet the child is an ONTO and you are a PHYLO. Now what? If you take an authoriative stance, what does that do to the 'tele' of the relationship? On the other hand, if you yield to the ONTO's assertiveness, the PHYLO is left to fret that their child is a) a brat or b) a bully. Again, not the best 'tele' there. What's needed there is to use this double-binded conflict to acquire signatures from the ECO and EXO domains. The parent can engage the child in a coherent way by altering their extrapersonal world (color of their room, music in the home, shifts in the cultural palette the child is fed, etc...) which is an ECO path. Conversely, they can rearrange the furniture in
the home, feature family pictures, or post a 'duty roster' for household chores and EXO the child to cohere...
The point is we can venture into any of the 4 Domains to get the resources we need to harmonize our relationships within our social and cultural atoms. It is through this process that lasting postive change is realized since we can go through transformational change until we've completed our translational ones in each domain. It's not only a good practice to operate outside our primary domain; it's imperitive if we want to evolve as a whole person (5th interface) that can embody both their history and their destiny in the here and now and remain self-aware of the needs of the other whole person that shares that moment with you...
Wishing You Much Good 'Tele' , MRF 08.27
Further Reading...

posted by Dr. Mark @ 3:27 AM   0 comments

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Oh Those Conflicting Intentions!



There’s an old saying in baseball, from the man known as the ‘Fordam Flash’, NY Giant announcer, Frankie Frisch. He was a stickler for fundamentals and he was known to wail his catchphrase, “Oh, those bases on balls.” For the non-baseball fan, Frankie’s complaint was that well, simple; make the other team beat you and stop handing them easy opportunities. When a pitcher walks the leadoff batter, that runner goes on to score 60% of the time. In somatics, the fundamental equivalent to this baseball self-sabotage surfaces in the form of conflicting intentions.

Dave Buck, President of Coachville.com, defines conflicting intentions this way…
Conflicting intentions - intentions that are unspoken and often unseen - are caused by conditioning from your past. Conditioning that causes you to try to be something that you are not and believe things that are not true for you. The intentions that come out of this conditioning are typically in conflict with what you really want in your life. http://www.coachville.com/conf/absenceofyou.html
These suckers feed into one of Dave’s best Venn Diagrams (and these life coaches are full of them!) to illustrate how this plays out in terms of life experiences…
From this principle, Dave then spirals into a discussion of these 12 Core Dynamics that feed into our conflicting intentions. Now the Venn Diagram gets a bit stickier.
The beauty of somatic awareness, and the elegances of the 4 Domains gets us beyond dissecting these from a psychological perspective and allows us to go down to the biological roots of these cyclical, patterned, intrinsic aspects of being.

Here’s the 12 Core Dynamics listed in order…

1) Resisting Feeling Things Fully
2) Ignoring Your Intuition
3) Being Judgmental
4) Avoiding The Present
5) Looking For Yourself Where You’re Not
6) Mistaking Need For Love
7) Resisting Change
8) Limiting Self-Expression
9) Forcing An Outcome
10) Excluding Other Perspectives
11) Manufacturing Interpretations
12) Over-reacting To Circumstances
If we simply place these 12 Core Dynamics into their proper domain, we get…
Now if you know which somatic orientation you’ve ‘claimed’ as your primary domain, the conflicting intentions you apply are now revealed to you. What’s also uncovered are the way these 12 core dynamics arrive at a wholeness of their own. When you know how the 4 Domains all ‘fit’ together, the infrastructure of what was once a purely psychological construct, suddenly surfaces in the somatic terrain. You can begin to see how we get stuck in these conflicting intentions when you know the inherent ‘conflicts’ or antagonisms of the 4 Domains. This awareness becomes part of your somatic fundamentals as you become more adept at embodying your intent. Let me give you a quick example of this process…


A PHYLO, let’s say good old Jessica Simpson, has a conflicting intention about her career path. She used to be seen as a wholesome, religious, pop icon, but now, like Britney before her, she’s morphed into a divorced, decedent diva. Her old fans, now moving into their late teens are no longer aligned with her. What can she do?
Well, what’s the conflicting intention here? Jessica wants to remain popular, yet she cannot get there with the old formula. Her new one, while still popular, is bringing her negative press from her ONTO detractors. Jessica, as a PHYLO, has to find a way to overcome this, but not from her primary domain. She has to decide where her core dynamics issues, which led to this dilemma [1, 5, and 12] are being perpetuated and then shifting her somatic orientation to that domain. To help her discover her ‘source of coherence’, let’s revisit
Dave’s original Venn Diagram…


Now that you can ‘see’ Jessica’s conflicting intentions mapped out with an awareness of her primary somatic orientation highlighted, her path to back to wholeness is to ‘exchange’ #12 with #9. This means, she needs to stop over-reacting, which in somatic terms boils down to vulnerability. Remember a PHYLO gets their source of coherence from their relationships. She needs to shift to the domain of core dynamic #9, which deals with forcing an outcome. That’s an ONTO somatic orientation. The source of coherence for an ONTO is their map of reality, their intrapersonal world. In a nutshell, Jessica needs to go within more.

If we were working with her using the tools of The Extended Self Program, we’d tell her to open her somatic centers, right? But PHYLO’s stink at this for the most part. They have trouble paying attention to internal processes for very long. So we can take the same 12 core dynamics and plop them into the somatic interfaces…
If we study the YES Factors, we’re aware that they are 12 Blissful Practices related to them. Each YES Factor has 2 Blissful Practice, one for sensing, or passively witnessing and one for mobilizing, or actively witnessing. If we just matched up the 12 core dynamics and the aligned them with 12 Blissful Practices, here listed in parentheses we’d get…

The 12 Core Dynamics With Their Blissful Practices
1) Resisting Feeling Things Fully (#1 Hang Time)
2) Ignoring Your Intuition (#2 Window Seat)
3) Being Judgmental (#3 Cheshire Cat)
4) Avoiding The Present (#4 Jungle Eyes)
5) Looking For Yourself Where You’re Not (#5 Scratch Match)
6) Mistaking Need For Love (#6 Elevator Meditation)
7) Resisting Change (#7 Feature Focus)
8) Limiting Self-Expression (#8 Innocent Bystander)
9) Forcing An Outcome (#9 Elbow Room)
10) Excluding Other Perspectives (#10 The Other Hand)
11) Manufacturing Interpretations (#11 Safe At Home)
12) Over-reacting To Circumstances (#12 Already There)

Can you see how by placing Jessica in the physical position of the Elbow Room practice, which amounts to that Superman stance of having your hands defiantly on your hips, would induce an ONTO somatic orientation and generate a new source of coherence? This is easier than attempting to open her somatic centers from the inside, where PHYLO’s get lost. Again, I’m not trying to ‘teach’ this in detail here. All I wanted to point out was that by understanding a few somatic fundamentals, you can approach psychological barriers to wholeness from a nonverbal angle…

This whole subject taps into the underlying transitional state we’re experiencing during this lunar cycle. We’re shifting from the SECURITY we established last month to the more dynamic transitional state of MOTIVATION. Take the rest of the falling side of this lunar wave to examine your motives in the projects and plans you have for the rest of the year. You can take the verbal route and use the Rip-A-Day-Diary method and end each day with some stream of consciousness writing. Write whatever comes to mind for a few minutes, read it, and then throw it away, always to the left of the body so it’s neurologically filed in your past.
The faster way to self-assess your conflicting intention is to test these 6 primal patterns of movement. Consult the chart below to map that self-check into somatic practice.

Or, you can be like me and just do your SIMPLES and enjoy your rest week!

ECO in 10, MRF 08.13

Further reading…
http://www.baseball-fever.com/showthread.php?p=299564

posted by Dr. Mark @ 4:14 AM   0 comments