Month: December 2016

I mentioned Sensation, Image, Feeling, Thought the other day, as a heuristic therapists use to help people become more familiar with their internal world, and more capable of useful introspection.

It seems to me this is also the order in which things happen.  Our body consists in large numbers of nerve endings, and a vast perceptual array which is mostly unconscious.  We are always hearing the background, even when focused on something else.  We are aware of smells, sights, tastes in our mouth, and all our skin, our gut, our heart, our hands and feet, all the muscles in our body.

When we tense up in response to an external stimulus or internal thought it amounts to the same thing.  Thoughts lead to feelings lead to a static image lead to sensations.  Traumatized people have fixed tension within their body, that lead to fixed images (of which they are mostly unaware), muted emotionality, and difficulty thinking clearly.

When we get distracted, it is because a feeling became too strong, intruded, and forced another focus.  This is how you get scatter brained.  And when meditation or yoga or some other discipline seeks to treat this, it optimally works backwards.  Yes, you want to reduce attachments to thoughts, but also to feelings, also to images, and work back to pure sensation, which is unlabeled.  I feel this is approximately correct, although I also feel something is incomplete here.

The other day I was laying in bed and I felt emotional wounds “load” in my consciousness, like computer programs in a computer which is booting up.  I felt one, then another.  Both hurt.  I felt the pain.  But it occurred to me I am slowing down, which is how you see these sorts of things.  You have to watch how you become you in slow motion to see the constituent parts.  We all become ourselves every morning when we wake up.  In sleep, our self is more mutable and latent.  This is why dreams can be so useful.

And I felt, just prior to writing this, so relaxed I didn’t want to write. I  just discovered an important and very helpful addition to my Somatic Elicitation program.

When I woke up this morning, my stomach was unusually awake, specifically the muscles of my abdomen.  They felt pregnant with feeling and considerable tension.  So I massaged them a while–this is a Kum Nye exercise iterated in several different ways in different exercises, since this is a major place where unresolved tensions reside–then it occurred to me that logically the most tension ought to reside in all the contracting muscles which lead to a fetal position, starting with the stomach muscles.

So I rolled my stomach 3 minutes on a Coregeous ball, then sat 3 minutes, then again, then sat, then a third time.  Then hip flexors.  I rolled one side three minutes, Couch Stretch 3 minutes, then 3 minutes sitting.  I learned long ago with Feldenkrais that it is sometimes good to do one side, feel what happened, then do the other.  You teach yourself to feel your tension that way.

Then I rolled and used a lacrosse ball on one butt cheek and side of my hip, then Pidgeon, then sit, then the other side.  Then I did two side stretches to stretch my lats–key in contracting–and sat three minutes.  Then I decided to just sit nine minutes, feeling.  About half way through it occurred to me that I used to do Feldenkrais movements very slowly in my head.  It was in fact a method I used to relax myself.

So I thought, why not imagine a very relaxed movement to each side, mimicking the stretch I had just done, but very slow, very loose, very pleasant, warm and open.

I’ll be damned if I did not get this deep, deep relaxation come over me.  So here is what I am going to try tomorrow: same routine, but in the 3 minutes rest, do the same movement in imagination, but so, so relaxed, easy, pleasant, warm and open. THEN sit 10 minutes and feel what is happening.

This system obviously can evolve depending on how you grow in flexibility or your perceived need to address areas of tightness, and self evidently can be tweaked to individual preference.

If I had been consistent–and I am rarely consistent–I would also have rolled my pectorals. But that was enough for today.  The butt would not be part of the fetal position, but being something of a hard ass–these words come from somewhere, like pain in the neck and stiff upper lip–it felt right for me today.

It is a Leftist myth, one universally cherished, that government as a CULTURAL form can somehow be superior to the people who constitute it.  Take all the people who work for the Federal Government, and put them to work in the private sector, and they are in the Leftist world diminished somehow, even granted the same morality, same competence, same jobs.

The Social Security Administration, in this peculiar and entirely unexamined way of thinking, is inherently more virtuous than those same people administering private pensions and personal retirement savings, EVEN IF in the latter case vastly more money would be available to the public, under their direct control, and not being made available only through an intergenerational Ponzi scheme, which is bound to crash sooner or later.

http://www.infowars.com/mainstream-fake-news-the-devious-limited-hangout/


http://www.progressive.org/0901/anth0498.html

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/erdogan-says-he-has-confirmed-evidence-us-supports-islamic-state

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-23/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-us-created-isis-tool-overthrow-syrias-president-assad

Net: we seem to have sold Saddam Hussein essentially ALL the WMD components which suddenly became a problem in 1991 when apparently, or perhaps intentionally, incompetent diplomacy led to his invasion of land he had long considered part of Iraq, and a strong response, which included the bombing of military facilities we KNEW had chemical and biological agents in them, and the exposure to sarin gas of up to 100,000 US troops, an exposure that I think up to this day has not been admitted.

We created ISIS as a tool to help the Qataris build their natural gas pipeline across a Syria now ruled by Islamic radicals.

I really hope the early indications that Trump scares the shit out of a lot of the power elite indicates that he is going to get our shit straight.

Add to all this government complicity at least in a cover up regarding 9/11, and we have Presidents and senior leaders who belong in jail or shot.  All the killing, the torture, the ruined lives and nations: they are worth something.  And much or all of it was unnecessary policy, pushed by psychopaths to further primitive emotional purposes.

I am listening to this book right now, and finding it quite amusing. The relationship between Patrolman Mancuso and his Sergeant is thus far my favorite part.

It did occur to me that Ignatius Reilly might well serve as a template for the modern snowflake: utterly cocksure about everything–and authoritarian in impulse because of it–hostile to alternative opinions, profoundly stupid and unobservant in every possible practical way, lazy, dependent but absolutely certain that he is owed a great deal for his very being and nobility.

Maybe we could call it “Reillyism”.  Ignatism?

We could also use this standard to anoint Trump a genius: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Logically, if as a society we want to help struggling young mothers, we need more mothers.  More hands rocking the cradles.  Less stress and more love.

you can give a child is secure attachment in a two parent–male and female–home. This is how we are wired, in my view.  Men have something to offer–most notably an increased sense of security, and ideally emotional stability–and women of course are wired for nurturing and mirroring.

In my view, this is biology.  It may be politically inconvenient, but there are very real consequences to doing experiments in children’s development.

As I think about it, I think insecure attachment is likely the core problem with the black community in this country.  The data is clear that children from one parent homes do worse in virtually every metric you can measure, and as I have noted repeatedly, if you compare white kids raised in single parent homes you see all the same problems that plague the black community.  You see increased criminality, failure to complete free schooling, teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, delinquency, and I would guess lower average IQ’s.

Babies can’t speak.  They can’t remember.  None of us can describe our early childhood, but the scars or blessings, as they may be, remain, and remain highly relevant in every moment of every day.

It is impossible for me to believe that very many young girls provide the security babies need to flourish.  They lack the emotional skill and maturity at that age, and in a great many cases they are likely scared: scared of the responsibility–having in a great many cases been raised themselves by a scared mother–and justifiably scared of poverty.

And mothering as a vocation, as something admirable, as something noble, has been under continual attack for many decades.  If I might alter slightly an old saying, the hand that rocks the cradle CREATES the world.  All of us come from somewhere.  All of us were helpless for a number of years, and all of us breathed an atmosphere of calm and peace, or fear and pain.  Most of us of course are somewhere in the middle.

I continue to believe that urbanization, the decay of a sense of place and local culture, frequent moving for jobs, and the decline of the extended family have all made the average American less secure in their attachment than was the case 100 years ago.  We are smarter, certainly, IQ-wise, technically, but in our ability to feel deeply, to love deeply, I wonder if a great many of us are not scarred in ways we cannot see, diminished in something possible but unexpressed because unknown.

It was Social Security and Medicare that got us old folks homes.  This I believe.  A century ago, grandma lived with the family, and took care of the kids, typically with a stay at home mother.  There were multiple hands rocking the cradle, many sources of love and nurturing, and much more TIME to nurture.  There was hard work and hard times sometimes, but those are small problems compared to the feeling of being lost and alone.

You can own the world and be alone and miserable.  This is obvious.  And you can live in a one room shack with  a dirt floor and feel rich, because you are nested within a HOME, with people who love and care for you.  Kids in Africa and India who literally shit in the street can grow up happy and content.  Kids in America who retreat at an early age to commune with electronics in their comfortable rooms, with air conditioning and plentiful food in the house, can and with increasing frequency DO become despondent. This is human nature.  We need each other.  We need loving families.  We need emotional security.  We need a sense of place, of community, of people around us who share our values.

These are all obvious truths, but who is speaking them, outside of people the Left brands as somehow evil? What can the “utopians” offer us but a number and a cell?

I asserted in 2008 that any citizenry capable of electing Barack Hussein Obama was capable of believing anything.  I will now call this the Obama Principle.  The idea is that our media, by and large, has in fact gone the Soviet route and that they LITERALLY act as propaganda organs of the Democrats.  As one obvious example, Obama never furnished a legally valid birth certificate in 8 years–despite being asked to do so repeatedly–and the media propaganda around this was so effective that pointing it out gets you branded a kook, even by alleged moderates.

It seems clear he was not even a US citizen when he was elected.  He was and likely remains technically an Indonesian.  He is likely here illegally.  But nobody wants to ask those questions.

Be that as it may, I would like to assert that the propaganda offensive around Aleppo should scare the shit out of all of us.  What seems to have happened is that we trained and armed large numbers of violent Muslims who fairly quickly “purified” their ranks to include only people sympathetic to Al Queda. Al Nusra, as one example, seems to have been a main “rebel” force in Aleppo, and it was revealed today that they treated the civilians in their area horribly, and seem to have used them as human shields, which is why the civilian casualties were so high.  They more or less kept everyone in their area of operations on lockdown, so that any Syrian/Russian offensive was bound to get more civilians killed, that they could point to for propaganda purposes.

I want to be clear: these are the people we allied with.  We armed and trained AL QUEDA, and when it began to appear likely they were going to lose, the government, and its propaganda arm went on the offensive, to beat the war drums for us to intervene on their behalf, even if it meant a global war with Russia.  Ponder that.  Ponder those priorities.  Ponder WHY any sane person would want to replace a bloodthirsty thug like Bashir Al Assad, with people ten times WORSE?  Why would any sane person risk nuclear war for that aim?  What is really going on?  Can you see that it is not a desire for American security, global peace, or humanitarianism?

It really does seem to me that our government under Obama, and perhaps even under Bush, has been bought by the Saudis and their allies.  The SAUDIS want Assad out so they can build a natural gas pipeline to Europe. They also want their brand of Islam expanded and consolidated.  They are likely behind nearly all Islamic radicalism in the world, at least that which is not funded by Iran.

January 20th can’t come soon enough. I think God daily that the American people retained enough sense to steer very clear of Hillary, who would have ruined this country completely.

Peter Levine developed a method called Somatic Experiencing.  Basically, it involves focused attention to the body, to its sensations, to feelings.  Dan Siegel describes something he calls SIFT, which is paying attention to Sensations, Images, Feelings, and Thoughts.

In both cases, the intent is to reconnect victims of trauma to their bodies, within which is a lost sense of self and agency.

Kum Nye contains this, but goes further.  You do movements of various sorts,  THEN do somatic experiencing.  I propose this be called Somatic Elicitation, specifically what I call Mild Somatic Elicitation.

I developed last week a method I would call Strong Somatic Elicitation.  I do 2 three minute rounds of fairly strong stretch, then 3 minutes of sitting and feeling, for about an hour, then sit ten minutes, feeling.

My first round consisted in 3 minute side bends on each side, then 3 minutes each side rolling my hip flexors, then 3 minutes each side Couch Stretch, then hamstring work, then rolling my chest and doing a backbend, then Pidgeon pose three minutes each side, squatting three minutes, then finishing with a pose where I put a yoga block under my mid back and stretch the back of my neck and upper back.  It was very relaxing.

And I would distinguish relaxing through Savasana from the intent of Kum Nye, which does also have relaxation as its aim.  Seemingly, the underlying belief in yoga is that if you can wring the tension from your muscles, and then relax them fully, that you become relaxed.  Unquestionably, this is somewhat true. It is a salubrious practice for nearly everyone.

But I read people sometimes find themselves crying doing yoga, or feeling strong feelings come up.  That is a result, but not the intent.  With Kum Nye that IS the intent.  The goal is to learn to feel more consciously, to learn to process and claim your inner world, and in so doing, to let go of all the anxieties and griefs and horrors that existed in your past.  They survive in the dark, but if you go into the dark and shine a light, they want to come out and be free.  No part of us wants to carry trauma.  It just has no choice.  Until it is seen and owned, loved and cherished and released, it enacts the same drama day after day after day, all our lives.

On a related but tangential note, it occurred to me that the reason trauma victims have troubles with self regulation is that delaying gratification implies an empathetic relation between the present self and a future self.  I read recently where some experiments seemed to confirm this hypothesis.

The trouble is, trauma victims really don’t have a present self, and thus cannot easily imagine a future self.  Everything is eternally present, or perhaps more accurately, locked in the past, as the world changes around them.  You cannot be kind to someone who does not and never will exist.  You cannot grow, when you cannot first exist.

Every day something new is revealed to me, some small piece of the puzzle ceases hiding and surrenders for my inspection.  It is a very, very long process, dealing with Developmental Trauma, but as long as forward motion is maintained–and it will be–long term success is inevitable.

I will add too that the more I ponder these things, the more I think substantially all psychological dysfunctions revolve around trauma.  Because some traumas happen in the preverbal, prememory stage of life, they cannot readily be diagnosed, and by the time the person is three or so, it appears as what is assumed to be a birth defect, or something random and incomprehensible.  But I think all the Personality Disorders, and even most psychoses relate to trauma.  It may be that brain markers appear which seem to cause them, but I think the brain changes to adapt to the psychosis, not the other way around, at least most of the time.  I am no expert in the field, but I will note that most experts, for most of the 20th century, more or less completely ignored trauma as a factor in mental health.  So Judith Hermann argued, and it made perfect sense to me.

Our society sometimes feels to me like an enormous machine which seeks daily to expand.  We are all to be cogs, doing our small part diligently to feed it.

I have been profoundly lazy the past few weeks.  I sleep in every day, and some days I do little but sit around and think and feel.  I sit in silence for hours, just watching the breeze blow through the trees outside my windows, or watch a candle burn.

A Facebook friend posted that old story about the ping pong balls in the glass bottle, about how time is precious, about how we have to make time for what is important, and it occurred to me that efficiency implies we know for certain what is worth doing. I am not at all sure most of us do.

If we say love is the most important thing, can we also say it can be done efficiently? Is one whirlwind romance after another, done deeply, passionately, and temporarily, “life” being done efficiently?

In Game Theory, there is an inherent tension between what they call exploring and exploiting.  Exploring is figuring out what options you have.  Exploiting is staying with one option and working it to its fullest.  In life, I think both remain relevant all our days.  You can’t “live” efficiently, in my view.  You can collect experiences.  You can amass wealth and power and fame and success.  But we are all confused, and it is best, I think, to openly acknowledge this.  We can be confused together.  We can laugh and cry about it.  And we can accept it. openly, and willingly.

Confusion need not imply despair.  It can in fact imply a spirit of adventure.  You don’t know what is coming, or what it means to you.  All, or most, options remain open.  This is freedom, too.  It is space.  It is room to move.

I would advise prolonged indolence to anyone.  And I would say that the myth of efficiency is, as Jacques Ellul argued back in the 1960’s, a propaganda which we have bought hook, line and sinker.

As a general rule, Leftists describe the inner workings of their minds when they offer “descriptions” of the Right.  Everything awful within their own twisted minds they project onto us.  We are not saints, obviously, but we are not black hat wearing villains either.  We are human beings, with complexity and diversity which the ideological Left denies.

[Note on method: As I have said before, when I treat the Left as homogeneous, I do so because it is not an accident of birth, but a chosen religion, one which stipulates conformity as a primary and ineluctable virtue, something which is not the case on what is called the “Right”.  This demand for conformity does in fact make it possible to make general statements about them, and to the extent my general statements do not apply, it is because that person is in fact doing a bit of independent thinking.  Such people in most cases do warrant being called liberal, because productive conversations are possible.]

Be that as it may (and I recently realized that I write like I eat: I always try to get too many words into each sentence; it is perhaps a flaw–certainly a flaw in eating!!!–but it makes me happy.  I no doubt would benefit from some instruction both in grammar and etiquette.  Another day, perhaps.) it does seem to me that we saw predictions of “right wing” or domestic terrorism throughout the Obama years, for which there was no basis, but which did accurately portray the inner workings of Democrat minds.  The DHS, which seems to have been corrupted sufficiently to have attempted to hack voting machines at least in Georgia, seems to have dedicated a lot of resources to monitoring Americans who hated Obama.

For their part, no matter how great their fear, most ordinary Americans understood that Obama WANTED violence on the part of white people, so that he could justify further encroachments on our civil liberties.  What terrorism we saw was Islamic terrorism, which was consistently mislabeled for patent political purposes.  White terrorism was the only kind they wanted and needed, and by and large they didn’t get it.  The one good one they got they used to suppress the Confederate flag and all monuments to the Civil War erected by the South.  Effectively, they used it to create an anti-white propaganda offensive, and to normalize anti-white rhetoric, which had been percolating in the universities for years, in the public sphere.

But the riots in Portland and Oakland and elsewhere showed an immediate impulse towards violence, violence which is always just below the surface in Leftists.  This anger, this hatred, this disgust with America is not going to disappear.  They are not going to accept Trump as President.

Thus I predict that we will in fact see instances of terrorism by Leftists in coming years.  It will likely be incompetent, incomplete, and perhaps even childish, but their egos have been too bruised to let this thing lie, the way adults, the way conservatives, would and in fact did.