Themes for September 22nd to October 21st

Here’s a lunar cycle with something for everyone. We celebrate the Autumn Equinox on the 23rd and the Harvest Moon is late this year, falling on October 6th. This sets us up for the other ‘turnings’ of the Fall; particularly the end of Daylights Savings at 2am October 29th. All of this ushers in one of the tried and true ‘allopathic annual’ syndromes; Seasonal Affective Disorder. Every year, from September to April, millions of people will begin to experience a range of symptoms from eyestrain, to headaches, to agitation, to nausea, to feelings of depression. Not for nothing, but in my world, I call that a good Monday. LOL. Let me explain this from a somatic vantage point to spell this out.

The perception that each day is a nice, neat little square on the calendar is false and misleading. In actuality, we live in an ocean of rising and falling waves of activity that interlock many levels of our ever-evolving relationship with our environment and ourselves. Thomas Hanna first articulated this when he authenticated that our behavior follows a rhythm that has nothing to do with our personality, but our somatic design. He explained our behavior in terms of our core biological drivers.

“…at the most general level of behavioral description, ethologists see all animals as being motivated by four basic adaptive drives, each of which is very practical: flight, aggression, nutrition, and mating — or, if you prefer a subjective listing: fear, anger, hunger, and lust. All animals display these major "big four" drives — as Lorenz terms them-a-nd each species displays each of these drives in very particular ways, according to its phylogenetic blueprint.” http://somatics.org/library/htl-beyondbodrev.html

He broke these four drivers down further to two oscillating processes ; assimilation and accommodation. From the four-fold pattern, we get these two complementary sides of the wave, exertion and recovery. The first, assimilation, is a tricky concept. We usually perceive that as a passive process of blending in, when in somatic terms, it’s an active one of aggressively pushing back at the environment (anger) or pulling away from it (fear). The second one, accommodation, lets more of the environment into our organism, as we do when we eat (nourish) or mate (lust). Here’s how Hanna tells this story of our somatic ebb and flow…

"The prime modes of assimilatory adaptation — those which defend, protect, and preserve the structure of any animal — are the modes of flight and aggression. That is their ancient and practical function when the organism must hold its own against some threatening presence within the environment: remove yourself from that threat, or remove the threat from yourself. The prime modes of accommodative adaptation-those which reach out, flow with, and merge with the structure of the environment — are the modes of nutrition and mating. That is their ancient and practical function when the organism must surrender to some hungered-for presence within the environment: ingest the desired presence or be ingested by it.

Fear and anger are assimilative events which, when the occasion arises, aid in the survival of living creatures. Hunger and lust are accommodative events which, when other occasions arise, also aid in the survival of living creatures. Both forms of adaptational behavior are necessary. None of these is any more important for survival than the other; they are equally important. Out of the phylogenetic repertoire of drive systems, the type of behavior which adaptively comes forth is that which is appropriate to the organism's environmental situation at that moment. We must bear in mind the perennial business of life, of adaptation, is to relate appropriately to the environmental situation. An assimilative response to an inviting situation is, in the long run, destructive: in the same way, an accommodative response to a menacing situation is, in the long run, equally a farewell to survival.” http://somatics.org/library/htl-beyondbodrev.html

When we take that awareness and transpose it to the lunar cycles and our knowledge of the 4 domains we see how all our friends our represented. The initial rising part of the lunar cycle is marked from New Moon to Full Moon, which encompasses the PHYLO (rising mood of vulnerability, Goodman) and ONTO (rising mood of creativity, Goodman). In somatic terms, the PHYLO phase is associated with the receptive accommodative or allowing in our nourishment (feeding) and the ONTO phase is associated with the assimilating new conceptual information, which is experienced as a exerting our beliefs (fighting) in a social context. So as we rise up the wave of the lunar cycle, we experience a rhythm shift of mood from the yielding, externally-focused PHYLO to the unyielding, internally-focused ONTO somatic orientation. A wave within a wave…

On the falling side of the lunar cycle, the mirror image is found. As we initially descend from the peak of the Full Moon and move downstream to the New Moon, we enter the assimilating, but actively unyielding ECO phase (rising mood of empathy, Goodman) and the accommodating, yet passively yielding EXO phase (rising mood of suspicion, Goodman). Wow! So even while we physiologically recover and indeed rest during the ECO phase, we are emotionally actively reaching out to others in empathy, which is done out of self-protection (fear). Then as we prepare for the next rising phase and enter the trough of the falling phase, we are transforming that initial PHYLO need to be nourished (hunger), into the EXO need to be satisfied (lust). While both are allowing and essentially passive, one initiates the wave (PHYLO) and the other one completes it (EXO). So now we have yet another example of a wave within a wave…

Of course this whole deal plays out over the course of a single day. We can view a microcosm of the 4-phase lunar cycle by tracking the 4 Domains through the day. Begin at 12am, when we our soma enters the 2nd half of the ‘dark cycle’, which began the previous evening at 6pm. From midnight to 6am is the EXO phase of the day, a time spent outside the soma in deep sleep and recovery (which fits Hanna’s accommodative side of the coin). It’s also a very dangerous time of night where we operate in state of passive disconnection (suspicion) of others socially. It’s also when we coincidently act on our desire more often than not (lust) and let our shadow selves drive our behavioral choices more. That’s why the expression ‘under the cover of darkness’ is not far from the truth. Once we get to 6am, the new day, like the New Moon, is experienced and we migrate from passive and suspicious to passive and vulnerable. We shift from lust back to hunger, from mating to nourishing.

This transformation is akin to the grander life cycle of reincarnation. With the return to the light cycle (6am-6pm), we are effectively re-born into another unique migration up the mortal coil as we literally rise (PHYLO) and shine (ONTO). At 12pm, we shift again from our passive, yielding aspect of our nature to our more active and unyielding side. This is initially experienced as a quest for individuality (anger, terrible 2’s) and then as we get to the 6pm to 12am ECO phase of the day, it retreats into the realization of our fleeting interconnectivity (fear, terrestrial 3’s) as slowly drop curtain on yet another journey (day) and dusk gives way to darkness. We often associate darkness with death (EXO), when we leave the body. Is there anything we’re more fearful (ECO) and suspicious of (EXO) than death? My sarcastic answer to that is yes, and that’s life. LOL.
So to sum up, moods are supposed to swing, but not in some idealistic clock-like manner where we eternally happy and open. That is just as unbalanced and dysfunctional as living in state of closed off sorrow for extended periods of time. What the seasons offer us is a 3-act play on the very drivers, rising moods and somatic rhythms we experience each day into a tighter and subtler spiral of unfolding. We can go deeper still.

In a single breath, we have a portable imprint of the day we are living within ourselves. It has all the elements of assimilation, (impulse to inhale being PHYLO and the phase of inspiration being ONTO) and accommodation (where the impulse to exhale is our ECO signature and the phase of exhalation the EXO’s emptying marker). If we can learn to view this eternal squaring of the circle of life as our somatic calendar, we can embrace the 25,000 times we breathe on average each day as primary source of all our ‘Seasonal Affective’ disorders. If we are locked in a pattern of fear for instance, we’re making spending too much our breath in that Whitney Houston ‘waiting to exhale’ mode. If we observe our body when we are in fear, this is exactly what we are doing. So take the first lunar cycle of Autumn, the ECO phase of our somatic year and use the advent of the dusk of 2006 to harvest your creativity…after all, it’s a long winter. Watch nature. You won’t see a lazy tree or squirrel…

Take it from me, your ECO representative, fix the roof before night falls.
Have a great ride up the wave….back with more the weekend of OCT 8th.

With Turbulence, MRF 09.24

Further Reading, Links…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/seian/123301367/

http://snipurl.com/x0dw

http://www.seishindo.org/practices/release_into_mood.html