Its not easy to accept the notion of muscular tensions as the primary source of all our mental anguish? The powerful unconsious stimulation of approach & avoidance muscular postures.
Understanding that such approach & avoidance responses apply just as much to our internal enviroment as our external circumstances, allows better awareness of this primary stimulation.
Take the thought of an unconscious animal nature a step further and insensitive responses to the traumatized come into view?
Try relaxing the muscles of your face, your tongue, the tensions of the jaw & around the eyes & be aware of spontaneous shifts in the depth of breathe. As the your focus turns to awareness of body sensations, the grip of intense dissociation eases within the mind & as the muscular system relaxes the minds activity follows?
This is how I manage the excitement phase of coming up & out of myself & away from fearful traumatized withdrawal, which doctors may call mania, paranoia or many other symptoms of so-called mental illness.
"The motor act is the cradle of the mind - The capacity to anticipate and predict movement,
is the basis of what consciousness is all about" __Charles Sherington
The Brains Motor Cortex & Unconscious Premovement: The brains activity began about 500 milliseconds
before the person was aware of deciding to act. The conscious decision came far too late to be the cause
of the action. It was as though consciousness was a mere afterthought - a way of 'explaining to ourselves'
an action not evoked by consciousness. _Peter Levine "In an Unspoken Voice"
I don't see why the notion of tension needs to be tied to muscles: muscles could be where a form of 'mental tension' is manifest, but the cause may not always be _understandable_ in terms of muscle tension. Looking for causes is a search for solid, logical and reliable explanations which are simple enough for your average practitioner to understand. Overly complex 'explanations' are unhelpful and, if an explanation of a cause is not simple, it is not the real cause. You have found the causes when tracing causal chains back further only increases the complexity of the explanations.
ReplyDeleteNot sure why you think feeling our muscular tensions as a source of mental anguish is overly complex? Are we not, first and foremost an animal?
ReplyDeleteIn my own journey towards a deeper sense of myself, I have needed to let go of mind space rationalizations and feel my reality through the body, instead of escaping a felt awareness of it by discharging its energies in thought.
In the Beginning, before the Word, was Consciousness.
The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to do with cognition.
It is the same as in the animals.
And this pre-mental consciousness remains
as long as we live the powerful root
and body of our consciousness.
The mind is but the last flower, the cul-de-sac.
_D. H. Lawrence.
Perhaps the unconscious urge to affirm our minds existence is shifting? Is a worldwide fascination with body art manifested by an unconscious need for a return to a timeless wisdom stored within the evolution of the body?
First and foremost an animal? NO. We are beings with minds which experience reality. Animal is a human notion, and either your animals have conscious minds which experience reality and have all the trappings of a human mind, or they do not. In the former case it is the human qualities that matter above the animal ones.
ReplyDeleteTo continue the backward series (as poetically as I can manage, so as to answer Mr Lawrence):
Before what was conscious
Was what was aware
And yet it was not without influence.
Aware it became
of the effect that it caused
and thus the self became born.
The self is called conscious
to be apart from what is not,
what is not, that is,
aware of its own influence.
All this had happened
before the physical had form
and well before the appearance
of animals.
The mind is the last flower, but also the first:
It is now, yet has never not been.
All can be reduced to mind and experience,
but mind and experience to what?
To one thing? Surely no.
To two? Only with effort.
So beyond mind and experience, why bother?
Just accept that you are
with mind fully aware
and enjoy what you see in Life.
Life is joy, love and emotion
Just enjoy, experience and share
Attachment to the body is still attachment.
ReplyDeleteYou must let go of all to return to the source.
And this source is not the body.
"First and foremost an animal? NO," are you suggesting that evolution is nonsense? Are you suggesting that the mind arose from something beyond the body? An immaculate conception perhaps?
ReplyDeleteI can't help but feel that you articulate the mental anguish dilemma perfectly as dissociation? Justifying the mind space in which we sufferers live? A flight from sensation, a flight from the body?
The notion of accepting that I am with mind and fully aware, enjoying what I see in life, seems to encapsulate dissociation perfectly, as the minds eye? To suggest though that I have a mind fully aware, I feel is more hubris than existential reality?
Are you affirming your own experience of detachment chalisque? A dissociation of feelings to painful to bare? Overwhelming sensations of heart, lungs and nervous system threatening the fearful collapse of fragile mind, avoided in the simulated never-land of a dissociated mind space, where raw energies are diffused-dissociated?
Obviously I project my own experience here, although I feel that we are all so lacking in self awareness that we can do little more. The perception lens we see through seems so dependent on individual experience, all that I've felt, seen, heard and read, compared to your stock of life experience?
In accepting my own mammalian nature, my nervous system motivations of unconscious, instinctive approach or avoid. My unconscious millisecond scanning of the external environment for threat or resource, I feel my life with an acceptance I have not known before. More comfortable inside my own skin, where dis-comfort reigned in the past, more aware of posture and unconscious body language.
In raising my awareness of body sensations and postural tensions I see myself in others and sense the bonds of our common humanity, more accepting and less reactive than I've been in the past, I think?
Stephen Porges has, I think, lifted the veil on evolution a little further, advancing Darwin's theory by uncovering a third branch to our autonomic nervous system, our unconscious auto pilot, so to speak. A third branch of nervous innervation based on the feedback from the two hundred plus muscles of the unique human head/face, particularly the face.
This brilliant science breakthrough explains why treatment options like the Finnish "Open dialogue" projects work, and underlines our hard wired dependency. The healthy interaction of facial gestures we dissociates are locked out of, perhaps through unconscious shame reactions, an adaptation of our mammalian freeze response.
His brilliant paper on this unconscious scanning, which he terms "neuroception" is available here: http://www.lifespanlearn.org/documents/Porges-Neuroception.pdf
I can't help but feel "neuroception" is a fancy word for instinct though, a dissociation from its felt reality.