Culture and Somatic Experiencing

We need to reinvest Western, and to some extent, perhaps, global, culture.  I often ponder this, as any regular readers I may have know.  I think we need to be extremely cautious about assuming our way of life is the best, particularly when we manage to combine being fat, rich, and unhappy.  Still, I think people will adopt what they like, and ignore what they don’t.  We, ourselves, CERTAINLY need to find a new path, one that goes beyond an emotionally and socially dissociated passion for abstraction (yes, they can be combined), and gross carnality.

In the movie Equilibrium they take their doses of high tech Xanax/Valium mood suppressors at regular intervals.  They will be marching around, the bells sounds, and they dose themselves.

What if our culture had the feature of taking 5 minutes 3 times a day to sit quietly and feel our bodily sensations?  I have been doing this for a week or two, and it UNQUESTIONABLY contributes to self understanding, and relaxation.  What if the whole world did it?

All you have to do is sit, and scan your body.  Feel what is going on between your shoulder blades, in your jaw, in your eyes, front and back.  Feel your feet and toes. Try to feel your liver and kidneys.  Feel your ear lobes.  Feel your hands, feel the bones in them, the middle of the bones.

Obviously, some of these areas have few nerve receptors, but I think this practice helps reconnect “mind” and body in a very physical, nervous system sort of way, and permits greater sensitivity to excessive effort, excessive tension; and it relieves emotions like fear and anger, which always begin in the body.

And this is a subtle linkage, a subtle distinction between sensation and emotion.  But what I have found is that if you analyze “fear”, there is an effect on the mind, on your sense of your own relation to the world.  But it is possible to feel the physical concomitants–precursors–of fear, without that same sense. I can note tremors in my upper back and trapezius and neck, feel my eyebrows start to rise, perhaps my mouth open, but not lapse into what we call fear.  They can be separated.

This is a HUGE discovery.  William James–who to my mind is by far the greatest largely unrecognized American genius (in my view because of his participation in the scientific investigation of the after-life)–saw this 100 years ago, but Peter Levine to his credit has rerecognized this, and gone further and integrated it into an effective system for trauma resolution on a deep level.