Themes For December 20th to January 17th

We have a few cosmic wrinkles heading our way as we approach this next lunar cycle. The first one is that right after the New Moon on the 20th fades, we have the Winter Solstice on the 21st. For the rest of the cycle, and on until the Summer Solstice in June, the daylight hours will then begin to increase again. The irony of course is that as the light returns, the Winter enters our lives again.
So we get the double whammy of facing a new season along with the slow and steady addition of more daylight. Factor in the holidays and the New Years' celebration and it's one bumpy cycle, eh?

The Winter system brings us in contact with our phase of expiration. We must learn to die and be here at the same time. You'll feel it the first morning you spend shoveling snow or scraping ice off the windshield. Winter compels you to go within, while the light beckons to you through the cold.
As far as pattern recognition, we're right back at the beginning of the Cycle of Transition. We must shed our awareness of the last journey and open the 1st Somatic Interface again, just as we did back when the Summer began. Take a moment to note how your life looked back then. Has your status quo improved or dipped down in the last six months? Your answer will determine how you'll spend the next six months. Will it be a time of growth or a time of repair? You set the agenda now.

If you chose growth, get in touch with all three dimensions of your desire. What is it you want to accomplish? What will you avoid in the process? And what will be preserved that's here with you now? It's only when you have all three elements clear in your heart that lasting positive change is possible. Now, if you chose repair, where is you life mending itself? Which domain(s) needs support?
Do you need to be Mr. Fix-It and tend to your tools and be a better EXO? Do you have relationships that needs bridges made and fences taken down? So how will you be a more open PHYLO? Are you needing to get more connected with nature, with your spiritual tribe or just try new things? If so, then how will you exert more ECO attention from within? And finally, are you regulating your life in a way that feels light and free to you? Are the ideas you get fresh and sharp? If not, then it's time to delve into more ONTO-ish activities as the years begins. Once you have your plan, check in with your circle and see where they're at so you can be integral in their lives too. This is essential now.

The first cycle also raises the curtain on confronting fears and welcoming calmness. Many people sit down on New Year's morning and write down their resolutions. The reason why most don't stay committed to them is not due to some loss of will power or a fatal character flaw. It's simply a shallow exhalation breathing rhythm that communicates an affect of exhaustion to the system...
Lasting positive change cannot occur in an exhausted organism. If you want to see if your resolutions are reaching your somatic core, read them one by one and take a deep breath inward.
Holding that breath at it's peak, move your eyes up and then let the air leave your body. Then take stock and see if you feel invigorated (core inspiration) or relief (superficial expiration). That's a great tool to just use in a general way to determine if your life is feeding your core or starving it of joy...

With that, I'll take a bow for 2006 and return to blog central station on New Year's weekend with some thoughts about how we can enter 2007 with somatic vigor...stronger than dirt as they say.

Tacitly, MRF 12.17

Additional Reading...
http://ibdcrohns.about.com/cs/mentalhealth/a/newyearresolve.htm
http://www.webmd.com/content/article/52/50396.htm
http://www.mercola.com/2003/oct/29/flu_shot.htm

Shame On The Moon

I thought I'd celebrate the last Full Moon of 2006 by sharing an old map I used to use to help people be more in touch with the emotional theme of each lunar cycle. Here's a list of each full moon and it's accompanying set of self-directed questions to help you to use that cycle to 'search within'.

A good practice on the days leading up to including the day of the full moon is to do the infamous Rip-A-Day Diary. Spend 10-15 minutes alone writing, recording or typing your thoughts about the question that Full Moon has for you. Once you finish, review it and discard any writing, recording or typing to your left. If you're by a PC, just move your desk around so the screen is off to the left. If you're recording your thoughts, simply erase them using the same tactics as you did for writing this.

1st Full Moon of Winter: Vulnerability (Fear In The Past)
Ask yourself, "How can I think of my shortcomings as hidden strengths?"

2nd Full Moon of Winter: Apprehension (Fear In The Present)
Ask yourself, "How can I think of my present obstacles as hidden opportunities?"

3rd Full Moon of Winter: Anxiety (Fear In The Future)
Ask yourself, "How can I think of the uncertainty of my future and feel comfortable about it?"

1st Full Moon of Spring: Bitterness (Anger In The Past) Ask yourself, “How can I move old grudges, losses and hurt feelings to a new and better place in my life now?"

2nd Full Moon of Spring: Rage (Anger In The Present) Ask yourself, "How can I reposition my anger as a fuel to overcome new obstacles, rather than reanimate old ones?"

3rd Full Moon of Spring: Wistfulness (Anger In The Future) ”Ask yourself, How can I shift my attitude away from obstacles in front of me? How can this perspective alter the course my life seems to be following now?

1st Full Moon of Summer: Rejection (Loneliness In The Past) Ask yourself, "What can I realize about allowing others to enter and leave my life according to their own path? How can I design my life to make myself more attractive to …myself?"

2nd Full Moon of Summer: Abandonment (Loneliness In The Present) Ask yourself, “What thoughts, feelings, and choices can I allow myself to step courageously beyond now? How will my life shift in its daily focus when I call a renewed, vital wiser self forward?

3rd Full Moon of Summer: Isolation (Loneliness In The Future) Ask yourself, “What aspects of my life do I feel the necessity to divide and conquer? Who does it divide? Who does it conquer? How can I allow myself to notice more similarities between myself and others? What’s in it for me to establish a unique identity?"

1st Full Moon of Fall: Regret (Loss In The Past) Ask yourself, “What thoughts, feelings, and actions trigger an experience of separateness in my life? How can I transform these symbolic boundaries?”

2nd Full Moon of Fall: Sadness (Loss In The Present) Ask yourself, “How can I allow myself to acknowledge defeat with an awareness of it’s temporary 'now-ness'?"

3rd Full Moon of Fall: Pessimism (Loss In The Future) Ask yourself, “How can I use my unresolved fear of failure and/or success as a life lesson?

Feel free to create your own questions as well. It's intended to be sculpted by you and evolve as your awareness of the world within expands. A good general idea to hold to is that the surfacing of a 'negative' emotional state indicates you have gone beyond the boundaries of your life experiences and entered the vast realm of your existence. Use the novelty of that moment to embrace your future. It's heartbeats away. The price for all growth and change involves realizing that anything you personally experience represents the collective experience of everybody. The key is to remember that your life can only reflect what is unique to you about what is shared with all of us...

Until The Winter Arrives, MRF 12.03

Additional Reading

http://www.innerself.com/Astrology/Emotions_and_the_Moon.htm

http://www.yogasimpleandsacred.com/white_sands.htm

http://www.worldharmonyunlimited.com/html/store_embrace_moon.shtml

Themes for November 20th to December 19th

Although we emphasize cycle of transition in The Extended Self Program, we’re a ‘culture of destination’. Every transition has a point of departure and point of arrival. We’re social conditoned to attend to the arrival – where we end up, rather than how got there. When a transition ends, we speak of it as a ‘recovery’ of the status quo, which is now enhanced with novel experiences. During this lunar cycle, many new college students will return home after a few months away at school. They’ll return to find that their home town looks a little smaller, a little more vanilla than when they left in September. One of the cardinal signs of recovery is what’s known as jamais vu – which is when the familiar appears foreign.

Nowhere is this aspect of our self-awareness more apparent than when we detect a shift in voice mode. To be complete, we track 4 different ‘voices’ when we’re in a conversation with ourselves or others. Surprised?

1) Nonvocalized, Nonverbalized – PHYLO Voice Mode
2) Nonvocalized, Verbalized - ONTO Voice Mode
3) Vocalized, Nonverbalized – ECO Voice Mode
4) Vocalized, Verbalized – EXO Voice Mode

Society tends to focus on the verbal > nonverbal and the vocalized > nonvocalized. People, on the other hand, pick up on the way words are expressed (tonality) and how their body reacts to them (psychoacoustics). By becoming more sensitized to the voice mode of your primary domain, you can develop a resonance between your social and biological channels.

Let’s use the 4 Domains and their voice modes to migrate through a cycle of transition in the context of a conversation. Again, we’ll use the somatic interfaces to chart the journey. That 1st interface is where we begin. Here our primary domain is operating and we are within the boundary conditions of what we recognize as familiar, whether that offers us a high or low level Sense of Coherence. We are guided by our primary domain’s voice mode, using the other domains as support and a means of cross-checking things that occur close to the edge of those boundary conditions. When transition begins, that bubble is burst and we are bounced from the stable and predictable world of the 1st interface into the spiraling, dizzy one of the 2nd interface. We are now departing…

When the status quo we occupy is disturbed, the PHYLO voice mode is activated. If our primary domain is PHYLO (and for most of us, it is), when tend to not notice the drop in coherence right away since PHYLO’s are a naturally unstable crowd. Almost any stimuli will launch them into a cycle of transition. This makes sense, since PHYLO’s have the longest trip to make to fully translate their raw experience into all 4 voice modes. If a journey can be otherwise known as a quest, a conversation is launched with a question. That question is posted in a nonvocalized, nonverbalized voice mode. By that we mean that our inner voice is manisfested as bodily tension or apprehension.

That old PHYLO feeling of vulnerabilty allows our filters to open and allow more stimuli in to assess our surroundings to locate the source of this change. As this search contunues the 2nd somatic interface can be readily distinguished now and even PHYLO’s will experience the transitional state of shock. As the PHYLO voice mode intensifies, we reach a threshold where we begin to convert that nonverbalized tension into verbalized inner dialogue. This is when we have re-stabilized ourselves into the 3rd somatic interface, where we activate our coping mechanisms. The ONTO voice mode takes over here and we chain together sensations (stimuli) and feelings (responses) into an emotional schema (meaning). The moment we recognize our inner voice, we can once again manage our state, using it’s many maps. This gets us half-way.

The migration from status quo (stable) to shock (unstable) and back to coping (stable) happens in lock-step fashion. It’s hard-wired into our stress response. In general semantics, this whole section of the conversational arc is called our semantic reaction. Here’s their fast take.

[The semantic reaction] can be described as the psycho-logical reaction of a given individual to words and language and other symbols in connection with their meanings, and the psychological reactions, which become meanings and relational configurations the moment the given individual begins to analyse them or somebody else does that for him. [italics original] (S&S 4th. Ed, p. 24).

http://www.xenodochy.org/gs/sr.html

Most people are satisfied at this point. They trust their inner voice and feel secure what it is telling them is sufficient to deal with everything. But remember, this whole process began with a question. We still haven’t found the outer source of the internal dialogue. Society teaches us to resort to skip ahead to the formal language of the 5th interface. That’s where we enter into crisis and seek the support of our social relationships. And many of us lack an adequate ‘roster’ to restore order.

In fact, the opposite effect is usually seen. The more we talk at this point, the more we seek support. Eventually, we find ourselves in the 4th interface, the realm of contradiction (yes, unstable again). Now the ECO voice mode is in charge. We’re still able to speak, but the words of the old status quo are less impactful. It’s sort of like when we drive out of range of our pre-set car radio (for all those who remember terrestrial radio). We begin to get the bleeding in of other stations broadcasting on the same frequency in a neighboring town. The ECO voice mode delivers us to a space outside our old truth. We begin to learn a new dialect of it.

As the contradictions we enter the 4th interface with unravel, we begin to organize ourselves again and now we can return to the 5th interface and truly relate our new truth to others. This allows us to cross over any boundaries we had place on ourselves in the old truth’s maps. We’re almost there! Things feel more stable again and we’re sensing a return to normlacy is approaching. We can detect the runway for our point of arrival. Once we touch down though, when we return to the voice mode of our primary domain, something has changed. Unlike the 1st interface, when we were safe in our cocoon, the 6th interface is the exact opposite.

We are now completely outside our boundary conditions. There’s a feeling of fullness within from translating a seemingly random life event into a refined, time-binding form that is now freed from within us. In this way, we complete the conversational arc and the cycle of transition. In time, this new awareness will become familiar and well be right back into the 1st interface again, awaiting the bugle of the PHYLO voice mode to once again set sail on another trip through the rhythmic tides of change.

If we land in that 6th interface and notice we are in a very novel place that offers no logical chain of events back to where we started. We have not only succeeded in translating experiences using all 4 Domains. When we cannot use reason to explain our current circumstances, we have been transformed by the process of journeying through the cycle of transition. When we experience this, instead of the more conventional jamais vu, we are consumed by it’s more ECO-ish psychosocial cousin, presque vu…

The cycle of transition only offers us it’s design. It’s up to us to develop the inner flexibility to be able to leave our primary domain and use the voice mode that best suits the interface we are experiencing life through. Although we get to use our primary domain’s voice in both the 1st and 6th interface, plus one along the road that connects them, we must actively seek out opportunities to witness our truth through other voice modes.

May you all use this last cycle of 2006 to explore your ‘unspoken’ self.

Tacitly, MRF 11.19

Further Reading…
Alfred Tomatis

http://www.tomatis.com/English/index.htm

Don Campbell http://www.mozarteffect.com/RandR/RandR.php?search=toning+voicework

Mantak Chia http://www.redwingbooks.com/products/books/IroShiChiKun.cfm

Sherry Edwards http://www.soundhealthinc.com/about.html

William David/AKA Elias DeMohan http://snipurl.com/116m8

Anacoluthian Processes: From the Greek "anacoluthon" (inconsistency in logic), a general term for system processes or methods facilitating self-organization and emergence. In these processes traditional procedures are followed while at the same time they are transgressed, thereby allowing the emergence of something radically new. An example of an anacoluthian process is the crossing-over of chromosomes from both parents in sexual reproduction. An example in a business or institution when people from diverse organizational functions are brought together in a project team, hopefully resulting in the emergence of an innovative organizational structure. http://www.plexusinstitute.org/Services/Edgeware_archive/think/main_gloss1.html

Local Whirls

Somatics offers us a chance to taken our unique experiences and unify them in a way that allows us to perceive our lives on a grander scale. Somas consist of a self and it’s surroundings ‘yoking’ themselves into an enformed whole. What we describe as our ‘body’ or our ‘mind’ in the traditional 3rd person perspective divides that up and makes our life events appear ‘external’ to us. Let’s correct that.

Back in the early 90’s, I was directed to read Michael Talbot’s book, “The Holographic Universe”. It’s still on my book shelf today actually. During the course of the book I was introduced to two very different scientists. One was David Bohm, a physicist by training, but a philosopher by trade. The other scientist was none other than Karl Pribram, MD, a man who would become a mentor to me in a few years as I shifted into studying brain development and his holonomic model. What I came away with from Talbot’s book was that reality wasn’t ‘out there’ at all. In fact, some of this ‘stuff’ I took for granted like colors weren’t ‘out there’ either. That realization reoriented me. I was trained to be very literal in my work and to focus on only those thing I could see and measure. No one told me that by doing that for any length of time, I was constructing a map inside that was filtering out information that could potentially help me help someone else. I was doubt-ful.

Using some of the evaluation tools I learned through the study of both General Semantics and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, I replaced that doubt with curiosity. Over time I collected and internalized many maps of human experience. Not too much later on I had maps of my maps papering the walls of my office. Today I have boxes and looseleafs stuffed with these maps. I don’t need them now.

Here’s a crash course in how somatics simplifies things…

Early on, we see things and we attempt to name them. That’s a verbal form of codifying that is shared with everyone else. But then we tweak things according to their nonverbval idiosyncrasies – we also nickname things we see according to their dominant characteristics. This combination creates harmony in the brain. To use an old metaphor from music, the DO at the beginning of the DO-RE-MI and the DO at the end are not the same. They represent the circular path we take as we travel through what Pribram called an octal code. Long story short, the brain takes multiple variables and weights them in a pre-set template that neurologically allows it to form perceptions and act upon them. So between naming and nicknaming things, there’s a ‘middle six’ that operates to unify the two within us.

Those six are where the somatic interfaces operate. We’ve discussed them before, but not let’s apply them to some of this maps I worked with over the years…

Edgework
Back in 2003, I introduced a system of generating integration of vision and posture using physical landmarks as an ‘experiential anatomy’ to observe ourselves internally. The idea was to develop people skills for life puzzles we have in common. Here’s a chart to summarize how what this attempted to coordinate…

Body Markers
I continued to use the same landmarks in my YES Trainings of 2004 to help people use the discord they experience socially as an opportunity to re-thread their system.

1) Feet – This area nonverbally relates to the life puzzle of INDENTITY – Who am I?
2) Knees - This area nonverbally relates to the life puzzle of REALITY – How am I?
3) Pelvis - This area nonverbally relates to life puzzle of SEXUALITY – Why am I?
4) Belly - This area nonverbally relates to life puzzle of PRIORITY – Where am I?
5) Hands - This area nonverbally relates to life puzzle of EQUALITY – What am I?
6) Heart - This area nonverbally relates to life puzzle of POSSIBILTY - What else am I?

In this way a person can take any image they focus on and it’ll activate and settle into a one of these body markers. It helps to let us reveal our perceptual landscape.

Blissful Practices
Finally in 2005, I combined the 12 Blissful Practices I’d developed for my e-book, The YES Factors, with these same 6 areas to provide an even deeper awareness of the sensory (passive witnessing) and motor (active witnessing) we do everyday…

Do you notice how these maps are intertwining and give us a new way to experience how our physical (literal) and mental (figurative) world in an embodied way? Now let’s go to the next step and toss another one of our maps on top of all this. What if we superimposed the Somatic Centers on the Edgework landmarks?

The 4 Domains
PHYLO
Sybil (possibility) meets SECURITY from opening Somatic Center #1 (breathing)
ONTO
Ida (identity) meets TRUST from opening Somatic Center #3 (feeling)
ECO
Lita (equality) meets INFLUENCE from opening Somatic Center #5 (relating)
EXO
Orie (priority) meets SPONTANEITY from opening Somatic Center #6 (expressing)

Isn’t it interesting that Big Al (reality) and Lotus (sexuality), which map to the knees and pelvis respectively do not overlap with the Somatic Centers? What we get here is that opening Somatic Center #2 (moving) which fosters MOTIVATION is geometrically linked to the landmark of the knees. The distance from our head where Somatic Center #2 is located (over the bridge of the nose) to the knees is the same as the distance of the heart (the landmark associated with the PHYLO domain) to the feet (the landmark associated with the ONTO domain). Isn’t our perception of reality a conversation between our heart and our head? The other landmark, the pelvis, would be left to map to Somatic Center #4, located on the chin. Here we form another geometrical association between the ENTHUSIASM that center fosters through what we say and how we ‘face the world’ and what we do with pelvis to ‘engender’ the passion behind those words. When they are aligned we experience an integration of all 4 Domains often associated with bliss. When we misalign our say/do ratio, we express our passions in a ‘bliss-less way’…

So to sum up, we can use our awareness of universal body landmarks as an objective way to track how well we’re using the full extent our innate resources to perceive and act on those perceptions in an integral way. This helps to paint our ONTO-somatic experience of our own physiology in a more PHYLO-somatic or shareable syntax. This process also gives us new portals into the world within each of the 4 Domains and how those worlds all blend to co-create our somatic terrain.

Use the balance of this lunar cycle to reflect on how centered your perceptions are.

Or Knot, MRF 11.05

Further Reading…
http://quanta-gaia.org/reviews/books/holoUniverse.html
http://www.100thmonkey.com/sacredgeo.html
http://www.innerworlds.50megs.com/enlightenment.htm

Themes for October 22nd to November 19th

Welcome to the nitty-gritty of 2006. This is what you’ve all been waiting for all year. First, we get to play Shaman. Unless you live in AZ where the real Shamans are, next weekend most of the country will be reverting from daylights saving time to standard time. This is a cultural manipulation of our daily experience. Soon we’ll rise in darkness and head home in darkness each evening. It’s the first of three indicators that we’re entering the ‘dark side’ the cycle of transition. First we change the clocks, then the darkness envelops us, followed by the cold. We won’t emerge from this 'chill-ness' until the clocks are magically ‘sprung forward’ on March 11, 2007. That’s right, a month sooner. In our never ending attempt to manipulate our biological rhythms so we can extract some economic gain, next year we’ll have ‘more time.’ If we can print meaningless money, we can create fake time...

On August 8, 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change dates for Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday of March and end the first Sunday of November. The Secretary of Energy will report the impact of this change to Congress. Congress retains the right to revert the Daylight Saving Time back to the 2005 time schedule once the Department of Energy study is complete. http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/b.html

As an aside, I liked this little verbal jab at the name ‘daylight saving time’.

The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight SavingS Time. Saving is used here as a verbal adjective (a participle). It modifies time and tells us more about its nature; namely, that it is characterized by the activity of saving daylight. It is a saving daylight kind of time. Similar examples would be dog walking time or book reading time. Since saving is a verb describing a single type of activity, the form is singular. Nevertheless, many people feel the word savings (with an 's') flows more mellifluously off the tongue. Daylight Savings Time is also in common usage, and can be found in dictionaries. Adding to the confusion is that the phrase Daylight Saving Time is inaccurate, since no daylight is actually saved. Daylight Shifting Time would be better, but it is not as politically desirable. http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/b.html

But let’s focus on this lunar cycle, an interval we can’t vote on. It’s a critical one in terms of how we want to align our relationships with our lifestyle as we wind down the Summer-Fall Cycle of Transition and prepare for the inner world musings of the Winter-Spring one set to begin December 13th.

By now you may or may not have grasped that the calendar we are conditioned to live in and the one we rhythmically move in are disconnected. By that I mean, we are all so indoctrinated into a linear, normative arrow of time by both our narrative coherence (see the first link below) and our social-shared ‘day of our lives’, that we hardly notice the cyclical, recursive nature of human experience. The 5th lunar cycle brings us in somatic contact with the boundary conditions we have formed with time itself. So it’s appropriate that I highlight a resource that exemplifies what I’ll call my Far Eastern Standard Time. Let’s get in touch with this…

The skills required to fully appreciate the subtleties of pulse diagnosis are developed over decades of practice by trained acupuncturists. What we want to do with this readily accessible bit of physiology is awaken some dormant sensitivity in ourselves. Here’s my tried and true method for that… I call it 'Tai Cheating'...

Now, once you get a ‘feel’ for this process you can use it to amplify the underlying theme of this lunar cycle. We’re heading into the phase of the cycle of transition that takes us, as I say in my YES Factors e-book “Beyond The Body”. It’s at this point in the year that we begin to internalize our social interactions and take them below our conscious awareness for integration with our life story. John Barresi’s work on identity points out that we all dovetails the events of our lives between the ages of 17 and 25 to form an autobiographical or ‘extended self’. He describes 4 core processes.

Temporal coherence
the ability to string out events in one’s life in a temporal order.
Cultural concept of biography
learning the rules of biography.
Causal coherence
explaining how events and personality relate to each other and account for change.
Thematic coherence
provide organization to threads of personal change and life-history.
http://jbarresi.psychology.dal.ca/Papers/Tucson2002.html

His work is based on some of the stirring work by English Romantic critic, William Hazlitt. He was one of the first thinkers to factor in the role of personal experience and the emergence of self-interest into human behavior. His ‘prescription for peace’ was concise. It takes a lifetime to do.

#1 The only way for one to connect to the future is through imagination.
#2 One must learn to give preference to ones own future self over that of another.
http://jbarresi.psychology.dal.ca/Papers/Tucson2002.html

So by practicing the Tai Cheating work as part of your entrainment this cycle, maybe doing it before and after your SIMPLES, you are bringing the core to surface. This is a form of what the Toltecs Sorcerers call ‘recapitulation’. We are constantly re-telling our past within ourselves. During this cycle we have an opportunity to embody a new harmomic. Carl Jung used to guide clients through a Western version of this called a Jungian Induction. I’ll leave you to employ this over the ‘time change’ weekend. It’s also a great nightly sleep prep to let the residue of the day dissipate and keep the arrow of time from piercing your kinesthetic bubble.

Jung used the inductive approach to help people access a state of self-knowing that was not fully conscious, yet undisputed by your surface experiences. It uses time.

The “target” for Jung was to expand the sense of self by using the chronological order everyone adopts to effectively “clean the heads” on the memory loops we live in that cause us to identify with our disempowered selves more often than not.

There are several ways to perform a Jungian Induction. Here’s a simple one…

1. Count from now to your birth year slowly to yourself…
2. The trick is to not stop, just observe the images {1980, 1979, 1978…)
3. Then count back to now. Stay in the awareness that you are here and here again.
4. Repeat steps #1 - #3 three times…
5. Now go forward from now the number of years you’ve lived (ex. 2003-2041)
6. Reverse from where you stop and count back to now. Again, you’re always here.
7. When you’ve done steps #5-#6 three times, you are now in that desired state…

This process is augmented by getting in a comfortable position, using all your other tools and by opening yourself up to the images that will present…

See you on the other side, MRF 10.22

Further Reading…
http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/LitEvol.shtml
http://www.hypnosisforyou.com/mind2.html
http://www.headless.org/
http://www.naturalskincare.ws/stuff-0898623820.html
http://www.newvision-psychic.com/bookshelf/ToltecPathof.htm
http://www.yinyanghouse.com/chinesetheory/theory-pulse.html#meridiancorrelations

Face Dances

Back in the stone age, when I first began to study somatics, one of the concepts that I hooked into right away was something called a neural image. In a nutshell, this is a global perception of the body based on the quality of the communication going on in it. For those interested in the fancier version of the story, here’s a short dip in that pool.

The authors of the remarkable book "Segmental Neuropathy," published by Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, proposed the concept of a "neural image," dependent upon the integrity of neural receptors and afferent pathways. If afferent input is compromised, efferent response may be qualitatively and quantitatively compromised. http://www.worldchiropracticalliance.org/tcj/1996/jun/jun1996kent.htm

What the neural image really taps into is the notion of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. What it implies is that if our sensory system is off, our motor system reflects that. This is a great thing to learn, since we can self-regulate our sensory systems by increasing our somatic awareness. So this is not an image we see at all; it’s one we feel. The tension patterns our body uses to adapt to it’s spatial environment are pathways for us to improve the quality of our neural image and establish a higher degree of coherence between ourselves and our extrapersonal or physical environment. The good news is that there’s only six tension patterns to learn (surprised?) and they fit neatly into what SIMPLES do.

First, I want to stick will the stone age theme and give my good buddy, DD Palmer some props. He’s the founder of chiropractic and was an extremely insightful EXO as well. What his far-reaching ideas foresaw was the intermeshing of body/mind into an integral whole. This led to his understanding of man’s intricate material and immaterial nature…

"The dynamic CAUSES of disease are traumas (mechanical), poisons (toxins) and auto-suggestion (psychological)." Realizing that the dictionary definition of the term adjust is, "To settle: to free: to bring to a satisfactory state: to bring into proper relationship, to bring into harmony or balance", it is just as ethical and as necessary to "adjust" the mental and toxic imbalances as it is the structural subluxations.”
“Dr. Palmer indicated that, "In auto-suggestion, which is also known as psychological suggestion, the will and judgment are more or less suppressed and auto-traumatic action is directed to any organ or portion of the body, thereby modifying bodily functions, exciting or relieving morbid conditions by mental processes independently of external influences. This condition is due to an underlying psychical impressionability exhibited in paralysis, contracture of muscles, impairment of vision, sensory and functional disturbances, more or less of the nervous system." Thus D.D. acknowledged that non-neural factors could be involved. He also said, "Thoughts produce disease - malice, revenge, remorse, grief, worry, spite, etc.." Although it is unfortunately not common in chiropractic, homeopathy often searches back to childhood for the source of the disturbance in the vital force.”

http://www.theprover.com/article.php4?id=110

He goes further out into the woo when he discussed how people’s ‘energy’ varied…

"Some persons seem to be surcharged with magnetism, [they] are highly magnetic. They are always giving off their life-force, they

affect not only persons, but animals and plants as well; while others seem to be shut up like clams and some are even absorbents - living upon (the energy) of those with whom they are associated. House plants thrive under the care of some persons, and whither and die by the hand of others whose very presence seems to be poisonous. Persons of a highly sensitive organization are affected pleasantly or otherwise by those whom they meet. Those who are delicate in health may be made to feel stronger or weaker by a call from a neighbor. Some persons seem to tire while others enliven; one person exhausts the invalid while another refreshes. These observations have been recognized for many centuries; they have survived all sorts of opposition, ridicule and argument." http://www.theprover.com/article.php4?id=110

Now you know me. I’m not a pathologizer. I accept that DD Palmer was compelled to use that language, not to label diseases, but to describe what we felt was loss of tone in the nervous system. So if anything, he was simply discussing the devitalizing side of the wave we travel on without including the revitalizing one. DD never met Irv Dardik, eh?

So we have this neural image in us that is pumping out this tension grid inside us. The only thing we need to know is the six fundamental tension patterns that compose it’s core. Once you have a sense of these, the wave of devitalization to revitalization gets more organized and your system can get more of the garbage out before it gets inside.

Here’s the list. Now relax. I have an easier way to work with this stuff. Just skim it fast.
1) Unilateral Tension Pattern

felt-sense of one side of the body more than the other
2) Multilateral Tension Pattern

felt-sense of many sides of the body all at one time
3) Ipsalateral Tension Pattern

felt-sense of the arms and legs on one side of the body
4) Contralateral Tension Pattern

felt-sense of the arms and legs across the body
5) Bilateral Tension Pattern

felt-sense of both arms and/or legs at the same time
6) Collateral Tension Pattern

felt-sense of the inner and outer sides of the body

The neural image can be split 5 ways. Here’s a simple diagram of what they look like…

Now we have a visual to go with the tension patterns. When we interact with others, they are using the physical image of their body to deliver the state of their neural image to you. This process is happening over and over every 4 seconds. There’s two ways to work with it. One is to focus on the way their face and see where they take you. The other is to monitor your own body’s tension pattern to see where your attention is within yourself. You do both in the 4-second window anyway, but it helps to notice if it changes or stays in the same one for awhile. Sometimes I think prejudice is nothing more than a chronic neural image split (usually a right-left one) that divides the person with it in from their own bodily sense of coherence. The ‘others’ is then seen as a trigger or a threat and so their system encodes that visual within that felt-sense pattern and presto…(?)

This gets into the way we embed previous experiences into current and future ones. Once we split our neural image, it’s on us to splice it back together. The ‘issue in the tissue’ is still there, even if we become somatic diamond cutters. Our vitality is simply expressed through functional activity – what we’re capable of doing. The potential or ability we develop to retrace (another chiropractic term) our steps and achieve what’s known in the trade as somatic recall – a bodily remembering – when we release a boatload of sensory information that can also be accompanied with profound emotional responses and physical reactions with a range that I’ve seen vary from a yawn to circus level contortionists moves. The point is that when we circle back within ourselves we are literally re-writing the way we integrate our narrative consciousness or life story…

Here’s a diagram that illustrates the maze of life and how time marches on, but we can march ‘in’…


“the data stored at point E includes all information stored at point B in addition to data from the B-C-D-E experience which in all likelihood has in some ways caused alterations in the point B data. Therefore points B and E are not identical even though they both lie on the ideal health line.”

http://www.theprover.com/article.php4?id=110

The other way to work with it is to zero in on their other person’s face. The tension patterns are reflected in the way they allow you to socially connect to them here.

RIGHT-LEFT split
Sometimes, it’s an obvious one…like when you just see that one side of their face is way more prominent than the other. Most of us lack facial symmetry. If you see a lot of it on someone’s face, that’s a function of how SECURE they are within. It’s one of those intuitive things celebrities and public figures know about themselves when they do a photo shoot and focus on their ‘good side’. We all have one though. I think so anyway?

The other four are more ‘postural’ and tend to shift as the conversation progresses…

TOP-BOTTOM split
You’ll spend more time looking into their eyes (non-verbal) or watching their mouth move as they talk (verbal) if they have this split. This one communicates MOTIVATION and tells you if they’re connecting with more you on the right brain (eyes/emotion) or left brain (mouth/mental). It’s a great somatic filter when you first meet someone socially.

FRONT-BACK split
This one is simple, but kinda gross. It’s best to do this one from about 12 feet away first.
Look at the tip of their nose. If you can see up their nostrils, their head is tilted back and if you can’t see any nostrils, their head is tilted down. This is before they speak to you. Then see if they literally turn their nose up or down at you during the conversation. This reflects the degree of TRUST you’re generating in them for you. The more centered that nose stays the better you’re doing. It’s helpful to stand off the side at see if they keep their head up or down when they talk to others or when they’re just standing around.

Another trick is to nod with them and see if they re-center their face when they stop.

TORSO-LIMB split
This one is a little bit woo, but it works. What you’re noticing here is if the person is turning their face to one side as they speak to you and/or as they listen. Do they go the same direction? the same amount of turning? Do they re-center their face or keep it there? This is all a function of the ENTHUSIASM they have for you and you for them. Remember, your face is in this conversation too buddy. So know what you’re showing! A quick screen is to see if their jaw is tilted to one side. Just look at their chin and see if its in line with the center of the eyes. If not, they’re in deep conversation – internally…

HEAD-BODY split
Finally, we have the satellite photo one. Here you’ll notice their whole head is tilted to one side and the body is not. Another pattern is they’ll have the head way out in front o their body or pulled way back like a turtle. This displays the INFLUENCE you have on them to extrovert and push out to you or introvert and pull back. Again, it’s a dance so remember to monitor where you are placing ‘your face in their space’. It’s a big factor…

When we do the SIMPLES, we are using our whole neural image to effectively put a smooth and consistent tension pattern through the whole soma – physically and metaphysically. If all of this was Greek to you, just learn to relate your breathing pattern and the breathing patterns of people you interact with to our devitalization-revitalization wave. When people are inspired and activated they’ll show a more integrated neural image to you. As they inhale, they light up. When they are expired and passive they’ll show a more fragmented neural image to you. As they exhale, they shut off. Capeesh?

OK, now the real value of this is to NOT do it public. Make this an internal game. Hold an image of the person in your mind and see what happens in your body or in your face in the mirror. Many techniques, like the Sedona Method, emphasize how your face will change right before your eyes if you can release the threatening images you hold…

Spend some time before the New Moon on OCT 22nd with this and see if it helps you to open that 3rd interface some more and allows you to relate individual to individual more.

Imagine that? MRF 10.08

Related links…
http://snipurl.com/ygrq
http://www.sedona.com/html/what-is-the-sedona-method.aspx
http://www.facialbeauty.org/divineproportion.html
http://www.theprover.com/images/article_images/brain1235.jpg

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