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“…upheavals are part of nature’s mysterious tendancy to create self-organizing systems at critical boundaries”. —Lawrence Gonzales, Deep Survival
Last year this column explored the inherent creativity at the edge of the unknown. Transitions in time and space—the edges of both things and experience—where relationship happens.
Transitions are ripe for breakdown, edges are fertile with possibility. The known, the solid ground of identity, can feel oh so safe; but, increasingly, life calls us into unknown waters—creation’s evolutionary playground. (or temple, laboratory, classroom, workshop…..what is it for you?)
How do we tend and befriend ourselves? Might we meet the unknown open-heartedly? Can we dance in good humor with the unexpected?
Consider Intelligence: the ablity to respond to stimulae we receive from the environment, including internal landscapes. How do we do this—become adaptable, resilient and creative in relationship with our interior realms and the world around?
We know that “mind is like a parachute, it functions only when open.” Easy to say, harder to do; especially when we feel a threat to our person, identity, or beliefs. The response to perceived threat can be life-saving; it can also constrict our capacity.
We can change our biological repsonse to pain and suffering. We can create new patterns in our nervous sysem, shift our chemistry, change habituated postures in our bodies and in our thinking.
This includes : Flash reactions. Pervasive, persistent moods. Repetitious, unconcious stories. That familiar pain in a certain place. Habituated movement patterns . Our visceral sense of Self, Other and life.
Habit and pattern-making are endemic to human existence, necessary for operating a biological organism (the body) through time and space. Luckily we don’t have to intervene in breathing & digestion or emergency responses.
But intelligence—response-ability—requires we be touched, affected. Permeability to our environment, our capacity to inquire, ingest, filter, process and expel information---through sensation, impulse, thought, perception---this proscribes our relationship to all levels of reality.
So how do we get alive and intelligent?
HERE NOW
Focus. Single-pointedness. The mind can only hold so much information in its working storage banks, the rest is filed for use as needed. Over-load the working system and, voila, senior moments aren’t just for seniors anymore—also called TMI (too much information) Syndrome. Essential antidote, then, to practice quality rather than quantity. Single pointed-ness is medicinal for all of us. Some tradititons call this concentration; others, meditation. Artists experience the muse, being in the groove or in the zone, healers channel unseen forces for the benefit of all. We become fully engaged, even subsumed—the potent present streams through us. This nourishes the nervous system and enhances experience.
CURIOSITY/NOVELTY
Paradox: the greater our circle of Knowing, the larger our perimeter of Unknowing. The more we are willing to not know, the more permeable to our environment we become. Communication increases. Novelty awakens the nervous system. We become more intelligent the less we know and the more we wonder!
Compare the physiology of curiosity and innocence with the felt sense of certainty and blame/shame. Turn a child’s eye upon the world. Key words: Transcend, Entertain, Speculate. Get out the box, shake it up, what’s coming out of left field? cultivate spontaneity. Let go, surrender, notice. What arises?
HEART THINKING
The powers of the frontal lobe—intellect and logic—respond to deeper forces. They either function in the service of the oldest brain, the reptilian fight or flight brain; or they serve a higher imagination—the heart—our most subtle sense organ.
“The heart is the most powerful oscillator in the body and its behavior is naturally non-linear and irregular….when the heart is entrained to the brain’s oxcillating wave-form, rather than vice versa, the heart begins to, over time, lose coherence.” It becomes more regular, “…entraining to a linear rather than a non-linear orientation….When any system begins to lose this dynamical-chaos (italics, the author) aspect of its functioning and becomes more predictable, it begins to lose elegance of function. In many pathological conditions, the heart’s electrophysiologic system acts as if it were coupling itself to multiple oscillatory systems on a permanent basis. In other words, it behaves as if it can’t make up its mind, and its cells no longer beat as one unified group….Holding the consciousness to one state of being…..of necessity produces diminished heart function, a shallower mix of emotional states, and an impaired ability to respond to embedded meanings and communiction from the environment and from the self.” “The narrower the range of the electromagnetic spectrum, the more regular the beating patterns of the heart and the less ‘hearty’ we become…..Conversely, increasing heart coherence and (brain to heart) entrainment has shown a great many positive health effects.” —Stephen Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants, the Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature
PERCPECTIVE
Get Some! Try on a new one. Shift. New points of view reveal (revcl in) new meanings. Prisms, eagles, vistas…they all whold the wisdom of perspective. Our capacity to inhabit different perspectives creates new possibility. Sense of self expands. More connection, more possibility, more resource.
THE POWER OF IMAGINATION
Mind generates incessantly, have you noticed? The comparison with monkeys high in the jungle canopy is apt. They chatter incessantly. If you focus on them, they’ll drive you crazy. You turn your attention elsewhere, their activity recedes. Good capacity, but let’s not forget that Monkeys are extremely resourceful creatures, if their natural capacity can be directed!
Just so, the mind.
It will create. It is wired to produce. The brain isn’t a great boss, it’s a middle manager. It produces both unconsciously and in partnerhsip with intention/attention--our consciousness. You can pull unwanted thoughts, like weeds, out of the mind’s garden until you are blue in the face. Better yet, plant a cover crop of nutrient rich thoughts that will outgrow the weeds and strengthen the soil. When we partner the inherent, undirected capacity of the mind with the direction of our attention, our choice…..watch out!
We spin stories about past and future contantly.
What if they were enticing, delightful, the essence of our desire; rather than projections of what we do not wish?
How good can it get?
Take a flight of fancy, daydream.
Get out your magic wand; see what you conjure up
INTERVENE / INTERRUPT
The nervous system is designed to make familiarity go fast. We can call this instinct or reflex, response, or habit. If we wish to take a new action, we must literally mylenate new nerve pathways. In order to do this, we have to be around to intervene and direct impulse down a new route. Moments of consciousness create space to intervene and choose. Miraculously, if we offer ourselves something easier and more pleasant, our biology will return to this. What a gift! All we need to do is catch ourselves lovingly. Potent forces—our body, our thinking, our feelings—all line up to engage the directionintentionattention which allows more ease. This doesn’t take long. One truly peaceful breath can create a sufficient interruption for visceral re-membering—when the body gets the message. Interruptions my clients and I commonly use are: singing to loud music, car monologues, spontaneous movement, yelling into space, the ground or a tree; aerobic activity; water: hot to soak, cold to splash, flowing or a mirror to watch; stillness /silence; drumming; walking; simple work. You probably already know what works for you.
RE-SOURCE
Connect Contextualize Complete the Circuit
The isolated self, an individual creature in a mechanical universe, functions in alignment with Newton’s law’s of Motion—systems breakdown: entropy results. The interconnected Self , embedded within a web of relationship, operates within the principles of physics—interdependence, infinite energy, non-locality, the re-vitalizing interplay of stability and change.
The study of tonic function (how we orient in space) shows that when threatened, we engage in concentric motion, drawing inward, separating ourselves from our environment. When we move eccentrically, out to the horizon, radiating as the sun, we engage an entirely different chain of muscles. This in turn engages our system in an entirely new streaming of chemical, emotional and intellectual response. We create an essentially changed internal reality, one resourced in connectivity and the endless flow of energy.
The body can flucuate on a spectrum from fully encapsulated—self identified, protective, held—to exquisitely resourced by the environment and lifeforce—supported and at ease. What are your resources? How do you re-Source, in your body, your thinking, your emotions, your soul?
ROCK YOUR BOAT
Our culture specializes in muscle and bone consciousness. Too often our exercise, our work, even our play is dry and mechanical. But all life is born and sustained in fluid. Our fluids are permeable rivers and waterways in a great inner sea. Each has its own purpose and rhythm, yet, miraculously, all fluid can embody the intelligence of any system it permeates, be it the rhythm and pulse of blood, the beat of lymph, the ebb and flow of interstitial, tidal salt waters, the delicious pull and draw of connective tissue, the undulation of organs floating suspended in vitrious space. Our living waters are the most responsive medium for restoration and nourishment.
Lymph, which cleans toxins out of the body, is tremendously stimulated by the simple medicines of water and walking. Synovial fluid, which bathes our joints (and tends to dry out with age), is generated not by aerobic or weight bearing exercise, but by spontaneous, unweighted movement. Sound like anything you do?! The body likes to roll, jiggle, oscillate, shake, vibrate, undulate, flow and pour.
ENACT EMOTIONS
Emotion is just that: E-motion, energy in movement. When allowed to move, energy naturally trans-forms; moods shift; feelings change. Carl Jung said emotions must be enacted….through the body, the physical vehicle….en-acted. Meaning is a secondary experience. Though inextricably woven from experience; meaning, opinion, assessment, expectation are extraneous to the essential process of trans-forming energy held in emotion. Meaning often arrives in retrospect, during integration.
TRACK SENSATION
Beneath our thoughts, assumptions and expectations, our beliefs and attitudes…..lives the body—and it does not lie. It tells the truth and does so immediately. Clenching in the gut, a flood of warmth, tingling skin, or racing heart; the animal body responds immediately. So too, shame spreads across the skin, anger floods tissue with heat, fear constricts passageways, relief washes through belly and throat. We are biological organisms. Despite any frontal lobe activity (reasoning) which might override this biology, we respond innately, accurately, innocently—as animals—to both care and threat.
Organic, sensate intelligence is closer than intellect to the truth of what is actually going on. It is a direct doorway into the precious meaning, truth and wisdom held in any experience. The language is Psyche’s. She speaks through interplay of image and sensation, memory, dream and story, with emotion, felt knowing, gut response….nerves firing, chemistry streaming. Physical sensation, the force of feeling, the power of imagination—these are maps of experience writ in our tissue. They are keys with the power to expand us into new territory.
The energy currently stuck (…burning, leaden, gripped, agitated, whirling, tingly….) is the very same life force that provides our wellspring of sustenance. When we become curious trackers, what is shifting (re-aligning) rises into our attention. If we do track with true interest, these messengers will deliver precious jewels of insight; the living experience of relief, of rest, of delight; the streaming of life force, freed to create anew.
To top it off, we are gifted with the innate desire to find our way back into this new terrritory again and again until it becomes a familiar place of resource in our landscape of self.BEFRIEND / TURN TOWARD
Turn attention toward that which you seek. You can’t get shoo away darkness—just turn on the light. Forget fighting tension—play, instead, with letting go. Less resistance. More choice. More freedom.
Life is mysterious and vast. The desire to comprehend and mediate this often causes suffering. Might we recall, instead, the heart of wonder and allowing? Cultivate presence, the big lap, the archtypal Mother. Become your own benevolent observer. Compassion sees that what arises is not what is essential, but what is transforming.
Gratitude and appreciation are deep healers. Begin again to embrace more. Humbleness arises from non-judgement. Humble in sight of our own dark mysteriousness, our achievements, our fathomless emotions, the miracle of living. A sense of kinship—this kindles our spirits to flame.
INVITE THE THIRD
Look to the trinities which abound. The three primary colors from which flow all hue and tone. The Three Grandfather Flames of Being in our spine. The many religious/spiritual trinities, the triune human brain. Goodness, Beauty and Truth. The eternal pillars of spirit, art and science. Here lies the miraculous power of two making three (wherever two or more are gathered…). Recall Buckie Fuller’s tensegrity—tension and integrity—in triangles. Wherever we sense polarization between The Two, can we seek The Third? The third way opens new dimensions. It stabilizes any relationship and increases its capacity to hold and transmit energy. What if its not either/or, it’s both/and….what would that look and feel like?
PLEASURE & PLAY
Numberless studies show we learn best when we are in a pleasurable state. Why is this? In order to remember anything, we must re-enter the state in which we learned it. Rather than forgetful, we are, perhaps, wise in our unwillingness to return to painful experience!
Meg Wheatley in her book, a simpler way, describes the universe’s method of creativity as “the logic of play”. It’s hallmark values are experimentation; the dance of messiness and order; what works—not what is right; infinite possibility arising out of opportunity; interdependence & diversity. Pleasurable playfulness is effective!
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In any situation, any experience at all, we can intervene on our own behalf, re-source more fully and generate new possibility. All we need is curiosity, compassionate presence and some simple tools we always have to hand.
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with thanks to my teachers, Susan Harper, Kevin Frank, Caryn McHose
