Soma-Significance
An Experiential Approach to Genealogy
The Malady is the Message
by Iona Miller, 2015
Matter Is Influenced by Meaning
Intergenerational Heritage
An Experiential Approach to Genealogy
The Malady is the Message
by Iona Miller, 2015
Matter Is Influenced by Meaning
Intergenerational Heritage
Soma Sophia, Iona Miller, 1993
As I tried to explain yesterday, the two things - the psychic fact and the physiological fact - come together in a peculiar way.
They happen together and are, so I assume, simply two different aspects to our minds but not in reality.
We see them as two on account of the utter incapacity of our mind to think them together.
Because of that possible unity of the two things, we must expect to find dreams
which are more on the physiological side than on the psychological, as we have other dreams that are more on the psychological than on the physical side.
The dream to which you refer was very clearly a representation of an organic disorder.
These 'organic representations' are well known in ancient literature.
The doctors of antiquity and of the Middle Ages used dreams for their diagnosis.
~Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology Theory and Practice, Pages 72-74
As I tried to explain yesterday, the two things - the psychic fact and the physiological fact - come together in a peculiar way.
They happen together and are, so I assume, simply two different aspects to our minds but not in reality.
We see them as two on account of the utter incapacity of our mind to think them together.
Because of that possible unity of the two things, we must expect to find dreams
which are more on the physiological side than on the psychological, as we have other dreams that are more on the psychological than on the physical side.
The dream to which you refer was very clearly a representation of an organic disorder.
These 'organic representations' are well known in ancient literature.
The doctors of antiquity and of the Middle Ages used dreams for their diagnosis.
~Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology Theory and Practice, Pages 72-74
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself. --Erich Fromm
He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
Carnal, Carnation & Incarnation
Carnal is a related term of carnation. As adjectives the difference between carnal and carnation is that carnal is relating to the physical and especially sexual appetites -- the material, or natural body; connected by birth -- while carnation is of a rosy pink or red color, like human flesh. As nouns the difference between incarnation and rebirth is that incarnation is an incarnate being or form while rebirth is reincarnation; new birth subsequent to one's first.
For as the son of his father, he must, as if often the case with children, re-enact under unconscious compulsion the unlived lives of his parents. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 307
It is the mourning of the dead in me,
which precedes burial and rebirth.
~Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
What & Who is Reborn?
Our ancestors inhabit our energetic being, tissues,
and central nervous system.
The world comes to live in the symbol. Images can interact with bodily tissues in a dialogue with cells, organs, tissues, and CNS, effecting change. When the whole body is involved in a strong emotional state, the autonomic nervous system is activated, hormones secreted, as a primal arousal grips us. We cannot leave the body behind in our self-exploration and neither do our dearly departed, who give us hand-me-down genes and epigenetics. This is not reincarnation, but perpetual incarnation which requires no theory or philosophy to close the carnal gap. Soul migration is incremental.
Ancestral patterns also inform the gut (gut wisdom, gut rumbling, digestive disorders) and the heart with its EM field, symbolically, metaphorically, and literally. In some sense, they 'live' there within us. Structural metaphors ground our conceptual, behavioral, and functional systems. The coherent structure of experience partly metaphorical and partly emergent. Therefore, it is well-suited to transformation through experiential process work and finding new insights and self-healing.
Symbolically Modeling the Internal Landscape
The whole range of affect is bound up with embedded tissue memory and coherent metaphor -- how we know what we know about self, world, and cosmos. Such reactions are inherently linked to the human nervous system. Dysfunction has the potential to cause effects in the physical body and unusual states in the mind but unconscious skill also resides in the parasympathetic nervous system, where they interrupt our natural drive to express ourselves.
Imagination has tangible effects on the body; changing attitudes has physical, emotional, and behavior effects. Attending to such body language can be grounding and calming to the nervous system. Our 'physical presence', large or small is an embodiment of our ancestors and our experience. We bury not only relatives, but our feelings; we stuff them down. Different 'parts' of ourselves go through changes in physiology and function. We can despise our behaviors by dissociating attempts to vacate the body, saying we were 'beside ourselves.'
Touch, kinesthesia, and proprioception help us sense the dark body, as do magnetoreception, thermal sensing, haptics (pressure), balance, thirst, hunger and 'skin talk'. We can act out such sensory metaphors, as the 'thirst' for knowledge, 'hunger' for affection, feelings of vertigo when triggered by issues, blowing hot or cold, getting 'chills' being on or off balance, grounded or ungrounded feelings.
We talk about others being 'a pain in the neck,' or elsewhere. Anger 'chaps my hide,' we grind our teeth and clench our jaws, and a variety of other descriptions of our reactions, that sometimes become literal or pathological as they are so unconscious. Recognizing our pain leads us toward wisdom and self-knowledge, and how our immediate and ancestral family might be embodied in more or less meaningful ways. This leads us toward transgenerational integration.
Processes below the threshold of sensory awareness are associated with the autonomic nervous system. There is a cycle of meaning and understanding that plays out in symbols, mythology, rituals, and physical experience. It informs human awareness through reinforcement of the power of enacted symbols that take us deeper into the mind. The primordial serpent bites its tail.
He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 233.
Carnal, Carnation & Incarnation
Carnal is a related term of carnation. As adjectives the difference between carnal and carnation is that carnal is relating to the physical and especially sexual appetites -- the material, or natural body; connected by birth -- while carnation is of a rosy pink or red color, like human flesh. As nouns the difference between incarnation and rebirth is that incarnation is an incarnate being or form while rebirth is reincarnation; new birth subsequent to one's first.
For as the son of his father, he must, as if often the case with children, re-enact under unconscious compulsion the unlived lives of his parents. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 307
It is the mourning of the dead in me,
which precedes burial and rebirth.
~Jung, Liber Novus, Page 242.
What & Who is Reborn?
Our ancestors inhabit our energetic being, tissues,
and central nervous system.
The world comes to live in the symbol. Images can interact with bodily tissues in a dialogue with cells, organs, tissues, and CNS, effecting change. When the whole body is involved in a strong emotional state, the autonomic nervous system is activated, hormones secreted, as a primal arousal grips us. We cannot leave the body behind in our self-exploration and neither do our dearly departed, who give us hand-me-down genes and epigenetics. This is not reincarnation, but perpetual incarnation which requires no theory or philosophy to close the carnal gap. Soul migration is incremental.
Ancestral patterns also inform the gut (gut wisdom, gut rumbling, digestive disorders) and the heart with its EM field, symbolically, metaphorically, and literally. In some sense, they 'live' there within us. Structural metaphors ground our conceptual, behavioral, and functional systems. The coherent structure of experience partly metaphorical and partly emergent. Therefore, it is well-suited to transformation through experiential process work and finding new insights and self-healing.
Symbolically Modeling the Internal Landscape
The whole range of affect is bound up with embedded tissue memory and coherent metaphor -- how we know what we know about self, world, and cosmos. Such reactions are inherently linked to the human nervous system. Dysfunction has the potential to cause effects in the physical body and unusual states in the mind but unconscious skill also resides in the parasympathetic nervous system, where they interrupt our natural drive to express ourselves.
Imagination has tangible effects on the body; changing attitudes has physical, emotional, and behavior effects. Attending to such body language can be grounding and calming to the nervous system. Our 'physical presence', large or small is an embodiment of our ancestors and our experience. We bury not only relatives, but our feelings; we stuff them down. Different 'parts' of ourselves go through changes in physiology and function. We can despise our behaviors by dissociating attempts to vacate the body, saying we were 'beside ourselves.'
Touch, kinesthesia, and proprioception help us sense the dark body, as do magnetoreception, thermal sensing, haptics (pressure), balance, thirst, hunger and 'skin talk'. We can act out such sensory metaphors, as the 'thirst' for knowledge, 'hunger' for affection, feelings of vertigo when triggered by issues, blowing hot or cold, getting 'chills' being on or off balance, grounded or ungrounded feelings.
We talk about others being 'a pain in the neck,' or elsewhere. Anger 'chaps my hide,' we grind our teeth and clench our jaws, and a variety of other descriptions of our reactions, that sometimes become literal or pathological as they are so unconscious. Recognizing our pain leads us toward wisdom and self-knowledge, and how our immediate and ancestral family might be embodied in more or less meaningful ways. This leads us toward transgenerational integration.
Processes below the threshold of sensory awareness are associated with the autonomic nervous system. There is a cycle of meaning and understanding that plays out in symbols, mythology, rituals, and physical experience. It informs human awareness through reinforcement of the power of enacted symbols that take us deeper into the mind. The primordial serpent bites its tail.
Garth Knight
DISTRIBUTED CONSCIOUSNESS
SOMATIC PSYCHOLOGY
Adversity in childhood can create long-lasting scars, damaging our cells and our DNA, and making us sick as adults
We find that there are no significant differences between grandparent and parent identity meanings and that men and women are more positive about their grandparent identities than they are about other adult identity meanings. Further, grandparent identity is significantly related to well-being when it is the only identity in the model but not when parent identity is included in another model. Finally, intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being.
Discussion. The findings confirm the expectation that grandparent identity meanings may encourage well-being. Further, the intergenerational identity reflects the overlapping meanings and experiences of being a parent and a grandparent.
Identity, in general, and grandparent identity, in particular, bridge two theoretical traditions. Erikson (1963) proposed eight psychosocial stages that reflect the lifelong interplay between ego identity and social interaction. Healthy middle-aged and older adults, accordingly, face challenges of aging and the issues of generativity and ego integrity. From this theoretical perspective, grandparenting may enable older adults to work through psychosocial crises and enhance well-being (Roberto, Allen, & Blieszner, 1999). Kivnick (1982) used Erikson's psychosocial stages to suggest that grandparent identity contains meanings of immortality through descendants and the continuity of the family, being a valued elder, and reinvolvement with one's personal past. Symbolic interactionism borrowed identity from Erikson in order to focus on social and cognitive self meanings. Identity from a symbolic interactionist perspective refers to self meanings in roles as opposed to Erikson's more general ego integrity (LaRossa & Reitzes, 1993). As individuals move through the life course, acquiring new roles and exiting other roles, they actively construct identities in their roles. In an earlier analysis, we predicted that positive identities would contribute to increased well-being, and we found that worker and parent identities did influence self-esteem for older working men and women (Reitzes & Mutran, 2002).
Grandparent identityOf all the studies of grandparenthood, including its norms and values, behaviors and conduct, relatively few have investigated the grandparent meanings and identity. This was true 40 years ago and still remains the case today (Neugarten & Weinstein, 1964; Szinovacz, 1998b). In one of the earliest studies, Neugarten and Weinstein (1964) suggested three dimensions: (a) the degree of comfort with the role, (b) the significance of the role, and (c) the style with which the role is enacted. Robertson (1977) distinguished a social and a personal dimension of the grandmother identity. More recently, Thomas (1990) constructed her own measure of grandparent identity, including symbolic meanings, authority, and satisfaction dimensions. Hayslip, Shore, Henderson, and Lambert (1998), in their investigation of custodial grandparents, created a positive grandparent meaning measure that combined Kivnick's five meaning dimensions (1982) with Thomas's satisfaction dimension (1990), and Silverstein and Marenco (2001) proposed an affective–cognitive dimension of the grandparent role that included perceived emotional closeness, self-assessment of performance as a grandparent, and the importance of being a grandparent.
Grandparent and parent identitiesSymbolic interaction theory (Stryker & Burke, 2002) recognized that roles and identities do not exist in isolation but emerge in contrast and comparison with related role meanings. Thus, being a grandparent is expected to overlap and share meanings with being a parent or great-grandparent. However, although it is expected that roles share meanings with related roles, the relationship between grandparent and parent suggests extensive overlapping meanings.
Past research highlights the interesting and complex nature of the ties between grandparents, their adult children, and grandchildren. Kivett (1998) described the grandparent–parent relationship as one of interlocking roles. Several researchers recognized that parents serve as gatekeepers and mediate the amount of contact and the quality of the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren (Hodgson, 1992; Silverstein & Marenco, 2001; Whitbeck et al., 1993). The divorce of parents can have a direct impact on the quality and quantity of grandparent–grandchildren relationships, as can new kinship ties that result from the remarriage of parents (Johnson, 1998).
Grandparenting also has been described as an extension of the parent role. Fingerman (1998) noted that grandparents may consider the successes or failures of grandchildren as a reflection of their parenting abilities. Roberto, Allen, and Blieszner (2001) concluded that men accepted responsibility for grandchildren out of a sense of obligation and love for their children. Among older women, Roberto and colleagues (1999) found that relationships with adult children were very important to them, whereas ties to grandchildren were meaningful to these women but much more peripheral to their everyday lives. Others have conceptualized the grandparent role from the perspective of common intergenerational ties, sentiments, and exchanges of support that link grandparents, parents, and grandchildren (Silverstein et al., 1998). Tomlin (1998) identified six direct and mediating paths of influence linking grandparents, parents, and grandchildren.
Reitzes and Mutran (1994) propose that three meanings dimensions suggested by Mortimer, Finch, and Kumka (1982) are generally applicable to identity meanings in later life roles. They include items to tap (a) competence, which is similar to the evaluation dimension of Osgood, Succi, and Tannenbaum (1957), or the task-directed dimension of Bales (1951) and covers instrumental identity meanings; (b) confidence, which captures Turner's identity-directed dimension (1968) and reflects emotional or affective identity meanings; and (c) sociability, which indicates interest in others and is similar to Bales's expressive dimension.
We found that these dimensions contain a common structure and can be summarized into a single grandparent identity. Thus, our grandparent identity meaning measure shares with that of Silverstein and Marenco (2001) the recognition of an affective–cognitive dimension to the grandparent role and with Thomas (1990) an understanding of the symbolic meanings of being a grandparent, as well as the efforts of Hayslip and colleagues (1998) to construct a positive grandparental meanings measure. However, our grandparent identity measure is different in that it will allow us to compare identity meanings across roles. We are interested in whether men and women hold more positive grandparent identity meanings than they do identity meanings in other roles and expect that as a result of overlapping meanings, there will be no differences in grandparent and parent identities.
The earlier work on the grandparent identity focused on grandmothers, so the question arises of whether there are similarities or differences in the way that men and women perceive themselves as grandparents. On the one hand, traditional gender norms suggest that women are expected to invest more of themselves in family and caregiving roles (Spitze & Ward, 1998), so women are expected to have stronger and more positive grandparent identity meanings than men. On the other, several studies report at least some similarities in the responses of men and women to grandparenthood (Cherlin & Furstenberg, 1986; King & Elder, 1998; Silverstein & Marenco, 2001). One of the advantages of our study is that our sample includes both men and women. We are able to explore gender differences in grandparent identity meanings.
The second direction of our research is to explore the relationship between grandparent identity meanings and well-being. Well-being reflects a wide range of cognitive and affective self-assessments (Rowe & Kahn, 1997), so we selected self-esteem and depressive symptoms to capture two very different dimensions of well-being. Self-esteem highlights cognitive and evaluative assessments of one's self-worth. It is a global self concept that tends to be stable across situations and over time (Rosenberg, Schoenbach, Schooler, & Rosenberg, 1995). Depressive symptoms, in contrast, tap an affective assessment of emotional well-being that may be more sensitive than self-esteem to current experiences and events and less stable over time. Although clearly different, we expect that these indicators of well-being will be related to grandparent identity meanings.
It is our expectation that grandparent identity meanings will be positively related to self-esteem and negatively related to depressive symptoms. Reitzes and Mutran (2002) found that whereas the grandparent role was not as personally important as the parent or spouse roles, it nevertheless was among the most important roles held by middle-aged workers. The grandparent role ranked fourth for both men and women. Positive identity meanings in the grandparent role, as a valued role, should encourage positive self-regard and thwart depressive symptoms. What is unclear is the extent to which grandparent identity meanings will be independently related to well-being when both grandparent and parent identity meanings are included in the same analysis. Third, we are interested in pursuing the implications of the interlocking ties between the grandparent and parent roles. Recognizing the overlapping linkages between grandparents, parents, and grandchildren (Fingerman, 1998; Silverstein et al., 1998; Tomlin, 1998), we created an intergenerational family identity measure that combines parent and grandparent identities. Our expectation is that intergenerational family identity meanings also will be positively related to self-esteem and negatively related to depressive symptoms.
Relationship Between Grandparent Identity, Parent Identity, Intergenerational Family Identity, and Well-Being
http://psychsocgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/59/4/S213.long
We also are interested in exploring the relationship between grandparent identity and well-being as measured by self-esteem and depressive symptoms. Three different models are considered: (a) when only the grandparent identity is included in the analysis, (b) when both the grandparent identity meanings and the parent identity meanings are included in the analysis, and (c) when grandparent and parent identity meanings are combined into a single intergenerational family identity construct. In addition to the identity meanings, the models also include five social background factors: poor health, being retired, marital status, family income, and education. The first step is to explore whether there were gender differences in the way that the entire set of independent variables are related to self-esteem and depressive symptoms. We compared the sum of squared residuals for models including only grandmothers with models that included only grandfathers (Chow, 1960).
SOMATIC PSYCHOLOGY
Adversity in childhood can create long-lasting scars, damaging our cells and our DNA, and making us sick as adults
We find that there are no significant differences between grandparent and parent identity meanings and that men and women are more positive about their grandparent identities than they are about other adult identity meanings. Further, grandparent identity is significantly related to well-being when it is the only identity in the model but not when parent identity is included in another model. Finally, intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being.
Discussion. The findings confirm the expectation that grandparent identity meanings may encourage well-being. Further, the intergenerational identity reflects the overlapping meanings and experiences of being a parent and a grandparent.
Identity, in general, and grandparent identity, in particular, bridge two theoretical traditions. Erikson (1963) proposed eight psychosocial stages that reflect the lifelong interplay between ego identity and social interaction. Healthy middle-aged and older adults, accordingly, face challenges of aging and the issues of generativity and ego integrity. From this theoretical perspective, grandparenting may enable older adults to work through psychosocial crises and enhance well-being (Roberto, Allen, & Blieszner, 1999). Kivnick (1982) used Erikson's psychosocial stages to suggest that grandparent identity contains meanings of immortality through descendants and the continuity of the family, being a valued elder, and reinvolvement with one's personal past. Symbolic interactionism borrowed identity from Erikson in order to focus on social and cognitive self meanings. Identity from a symbolic interactionist perspective refers to self meanings in roles as opposed to Erikson's more general ego integrity (LaRossa & Reitzes, 1993). As individuals move through the life course, acquiring new roles and exiting other roles, they actively construct identities in their roles. In an earlier analysis, we predicted that positive identities would contribute to increased well-being, and we found that worker and parent identities did influence self-esteem for older working men and women (Reitzes & Mutran, 2002).
Grandparent identityOf all the studies of grandparenthood, including its norms and values, behaviors and conduct, relatively few have investigated the grandparent meanings and identity. This was true 40 years ago and still remains the case today (Neugarten & Weinstein, 1964; Szinovacz, 1998b). In one of the earliest studies, Neugarten and Weinstein (1964) suggested three dimensions: (a) the degree of comfort with the role, (b) the significance of the role, and (c) the style with which the role is enacted. Robertson (1977) distinguished a social and a personal dimension of the grandmother identity. More recently, Thomas (1990) constructed her own measure of grandparent identity, including symbolic meanings, authority, and satisfaction dimensions. Hayslip, Shore, Henderson, and Lambert (1998), in their investigation of custodial grandparents, created a positive grandparent meaning measure that combined Kivnick's five meaning dimensions (1982) with Thomas's satisfaction dimension (1990), and Silverstein and Marenco (2001) proposed an affective–cognitive dimension of the grandparent role that included perceived emotional closeness, self-assessment of performance as a grandparent, and the importance of being a grandparent.
Grandparent and parent identitiesSymbolic interaction theory (Stryker & Burke, 2002) recognized that roles and identities do not exist in isolation but emerge in contrast and comparison with related role meanings. Thus, being a grandparent is expected to overlap and share meanings with being a parent or great-grandparent. However, although it is expected that roles share meanings with related roles, the relationship between grandparent and parent suggests extensive overlapping meanings.
Past research highlights the interesting and complex nature of the ties between grandparents, their adult children, and grandchildren. Kivett (1998) described the grandparent–parent relationship as one of interlocking roles. Several researchers recognized that parents serve as gatekeepers and mediate the amount of contact and the quality of the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren (Hodgson, 1992; Silverstein & Marenco, 2001; Whitbeck et al., 1993). The divorce of parents can have a direct impact on the quality and quantity of grandparent–grandchildren relationships, as can new kinship ties that result from the remarriage of parents (Johnson, 1998).
Grandparenting also has been described as an extension of the parent role. Fingerman (1998) noted that grandparents may consider the successes or failures of grandchildren as a reflection of their parenting abilities. Roberto, Allen, and Blieszner (2001) concluded that men accepted responsibility for grandchildren out of a sense of obligation and love for their children. Among older women, Roberto and colleagues (1999) found that relationships with adult children were very important to them, whereas ties to grandchildren were meaningful to these women but much more peripheral to their everyday lives. Others have conceptualized the grandparent role from the perspective of common intergenerational ties, sentiments, and exchanges of support that link grandparents, parents, and grandchildren (Silverstein et al., 1998). Tomlin (1998) identified six direct and mediating paths of influence linking grandparents, parents, and grandchildren.
Reitzes and Mutran (1994) propose that three meanings dimensions suggested by Mortimer, Finch, and Kumka (1982) are generally applicable to identity meanings in later life roles. They include items to tap (a) competence, which is similar to the evaluation dimension of Osgood, Succi, and Tannenbaum (1957), or the task-directed dimension of Bales (1951) and covers instrumental identity meanings; (b) confidence, which captures Turner's identity-directed dimension (1968) and reflects emotional or affective identity meanings; and (c) sociability, which indicates interest in others and is similar to Bales's expressive dimension.
We found that these dimensions contain a common structure and can be summarized into a single grandparent identity. Thus, our grandparent identity meaning measure shares with that of Silverstein and Marenco (2001) the recognition of an affective–cognitive dimension to the grandparent role and with Thomas (1990) an understanding of the symbolic meanings of being a grandparent, as well as the efforts of Hayslip and colleagues (1998) to construct a positive grandparental meanings measure. However, our grandparent identity measure is different in that it will allow us to compare identity meanings across roles. We are interested in whether men and women hold more positive grandparent identity meanings than they do identity meanings in other roles and expect that as a result of overlapping meanings, there will be no differences in grandparent and parent identities.
The earlier work on the grandparent identity focused on grandmothers, so the question arises of whether there are similarities or differences in the way that men and women perceive themselves as grandparents. On the one hand, traditional gender norms suggest that women are expected to invest more of themselves in family and caregiving roles (Spitze & Ward, 1998), so women are expected to have stronger and more positive grandparent identity meanings than men. On the other, several studies report at least some similarities in the responses of men and women to grandparenthood (Cherlin & Furstenberg, 1986; King & Elder, 1998; Silverstein & Marenco, 2001). One of the advantages of our study is that our sample includes both men and women. We are able to explore gender differences in grandparent identity meanings.
The second direction of our research is to explore the relationship between grandparent identity meanings and well-being. Well-being reflects a wide range of cognitive and affective self-assessments (Rowe & Kahn, 1997), so we selected self-esteem and depressive symptoms to capture two very different dimensions of well-being. Self-esteem highlights cognitive and evaluative assessments of one's self-worth. It is a global self concept that tends to be stable across situations and over time (Rosenberg, Schoenbach, Schooler, & Rosenberg, 1995). Depressive symptoms, in contrast, tap an affective assessment of emotional well-being that may be more sensitive than self-esteem to current experiences and events and less stable over time. Although clearly different, we expect that these indicators of well-being will be related to grandparent identity meanings.
It is our expectation that grandparent identity meanings will be positively related to self-esteem and negatively related to depressive symptoms. Reitzes and Mutran (2002) found that whereas the grandparent role was not as personally important as the parent or spouse roles, it nevertheless was among the most important roles held by middle-aged workers. The grandparent role ranked fourth for both men and women. Positive identity meanings in the grandparent role, as a valued role, should encourage positive self-regard and thwart depressive symptoms. What is unclear is the extent to which grandparent identity meanings will be independently related to well-being when both grandparent and parent identity meanings are included in the same analysis. Third, we are interested in pursuing the implications of the interlocking ties between the grandparent and parent roles. Recognizing the overlapping linkages between grandparents, parents, and grandchildren (Fingerman, 1998; Silverstein et al., 1998; Tomlin, 1998), we created an intergenerational family identity measure that combines parent and grandparent identities. Our expectation is that intergenerational family identity meanings also will be positively related to self-esteem and negatively related to depressive symptoms.
Relationship Between Grandparent Identity, Parent Identity, Intergenerational Family Identity, and Well-Being
http://psychsocgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/59/4/S213.long
We also are interested in exploring the relationship between grandparent identity and well-being as measured by self-esteem and depressive symptoms. Three different models are considered: (a) when only the grandparent identity is included in the analysis, (b) when both the grandparent identity meanings and the parent identity meanings are included in the analysis, and (c) when grandparent and parent identity meanings are combined into a single intergenerational family identity construct. In addition to the identity meanings, the models also include five social background factors: poor health, being retired, marital status, family income, and education. The first step is to explore whether there were gender differences in the way that the entire set of independent variables are related to self-esteem and depressive symptoms. We compared the sum of squared residuals for models including only grandmothers with models that included only grandfathers (Chow, 1960).
Eighty percent of the human immune system resides in the gastrointestinal tract. Alongside it are the trillions of symbiotic bacteria, fungi and other single-celled organisms that make up our guts’ microbiomes. We don’t yet know if there are weird organisms in our gut. But we know that there are weird genes. Our microbiomes also help calibrate our immune systems, so our bodies recognize which co-inhabitants should be there and which should not. Yet mounting evidence suggests that when our resident biota are out of balance, they contribute to numerous diseases, including diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, autism and, it appears, MS by inciting rogue immune activity that can spread throughout the body and brain.
In a fascinating new study, researchers at ETH Zurich have identified how “gut instincts” coming up to the brain via the vagus nerve are linked to different responses to fear. The vagus nerve is constantly sending updated sensory information about the state of the body's organs "upstream" to your brain via afferent nerves. In fact, 80-90% of the nerve fibers in the vagus nerve are dedicated to communicating the state of your viscera up to your brain.
The terms “afferent” and “efferent” typically refer to nerves that lead into or out of the brain. Afferent signals are sent from a nerve receptor into the brain while efferent signals are sent from the brain to the peripheral body.
Visceral feelings and gut instincts are literally emotional intuitions transferred up to your brain via the vagus nerve. In previous studies, signals from the vagus nerve traveling from the gut to the brain have been linked to modulating mood and distinctive types of fear and anxiety.
As with any mind-body feedback loop, messages also travel "downstream" from your conscious mind through the vagus nerve (via efferent nerves) signaling your organs to create an inner-calm so you can “rest-and-digest” during times of safety, or to prepare your body for “fight-or-flight” in dangerous situations.
For this study, the Swiss scientists snipped the afferent nerve fibers of the vagus nerve going from the gut to the brain. Cutting the vagus nerve turned the usual feedback loop between gut instincts and the brain from a two-way communication into a one-way street. This allowed the researchers to hone in on the role that the vagus nerve plays in conveying gut instincts up to the brain.
In particular, the researchers were interested in identifying the link between innate anxiety and conditioned or “learned” fear. In test animals, the brain was still able to send signals down to the stomach, but the brain couldn’t receive signals coming up from the stomach.
Healthy vagus nerve communication between your gut and your brain helps to slow you down like the brakes on your car by using neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine and GABA. These neurotransmitters literally lower heart rate, blood pressure, and help your heart and organs slow down so that you can rest-and-digest.
The Vagus Nerves Is Linked to Fear Conditioning
The new Swiss study explored the consequences of a complete disconnection of signals from the vagus nerve coming up from the gut to the brain and how this affected innate anxiety, conditioned fear, and subsequent neurochemical changes in the brain.
In a fear conditioning experiment on rats, the researchers in Zurich linked an unpleasant experience to a specific sound. Interestingly, the gut instinct signal from the vagus nerve was necessary for unlearning a conditioned response of fear. Through a variety of behavioral studies, the researchers determined that the rats without a fully functioning vagus nerve were less afraid of open spaces and bright lights compared with controlled rats with an intact vagus nerve.
However, without the two-way communication of the vagus nerve between the brain and gut the rats showed a lower level of innate fear, but a longer retention of learned fear. From this discovery the researchers concluded that an innate response to fear appears to be influenced significantly by “gut instinct” signals sent from the stomach to the brain. This confirms the importance of healthy vagal tone to maintain grace under pressure and to overcome fear conditioning.
Mark Twain addressed the backlash of conditioned fear when he said, “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”
In my book, The Athlete’s Way, I write extensively about ways to overcome learned fear and innate anxiety. If you’d like to read a sample from the book with some practical tips on how to overcome conditioned fear responses click here (link is external).
A simple mantra I've used as an athlete to engage my vagus nerve when faced with a threatening challenge is to take a few deep breaths and recite a line by Corra Harris, author of I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, "The bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage and act accordingly."
Using positive self-talk and taking deep breaths is a quick and easy way to engage the vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system to calm yourself from both the top-down and from the bottom-up.
The most exciting discovery of this study is that under closer scrutiny of the rats' brains, the researchers found that the loss of signals coming up from the abdomen via the vagus nerve altered the production of both adrenaline and GABA in the brain.
When the researchers switched from a negative to a neutral stimulus, the rats without gut instincts coming up to the brain via the vagus nerve required significantly longer to re-associate the sound with the new, “safe” and neutral situation. The researchers point out that this finding is congruent with other recently published studies which found that stimulation of the vagus nerve can facilitate learning.
Conclusion: The Vagus Nerve Has Powerful Psychological Influences
These new findings about the vagus nerve offer exciting possibility for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Stimulation of the vagus nerve might be able to speed up the process by which people with PTSD can learn to reassociate a non-threatening stimuli which triggers anxiety with a neutral and non-traumatic experience. Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is currently used to treat epilepsy and depression, although the psychologcial benefits of VNS remain controversial.
In a press release Meyers concluded, "We were able to show for the first time that the selective interruption of the signal path from the stomach to the brain changed complex behavioral patterns. This has traditionally been attributed to the brain alone. The study shows clearly that the stomach also has a say in how we respond to fear; however, what it says, i.e. precisely what it signals, is not yet clear."
The researchers intend to do more research to better understand the exact dialogue between the vagus nerve and the brain which will hopefully lead to more effective treatments for PTSD and other anxiety disorders.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201405/how-does-the-vagus-nerve-convey-gut-instincts-the-brain
In a fascinating new study, researchers at ETH Zurich have identified how “gut instincts” coming up to the brain via the vagus nerve are linked to different responses to fear. The vagus nerve is constantly sending updated sensory information about the state of the body's organs "upstream" to your brain via afferent nerves. In fact, 80-90% of the nerve fibers in the vagus nerve are dedicated to communicating the state of your viscera up to your brain.
The terms “afferent” and “efferent” typically refer to nerves that lead into or out of the brain. Afferent signals are sent from a nerve receptor into the brain while efferent signals are sent from the brain to the peripheral body.
Visceral feelings and gut instincts are literally emotional intuitions transferred up to your brain via the vagus nerve. In previous studies, signals from the vagus nerve traveling from the gut to the brain have been linked to modulating mood and distinctive types of fear and anxiety.
As with any mind-body feedback loop, messages also travel "downstream" from your conscious mind through the vagus nerve (via efferent nerves) signaling your organs to create an inner-calm so you can “rest-and-digest” during times of safety, or to prepare your body for “fight-or-flight” in dangerous situations.
For this study, the Swiss scientists snipped the afferent nerve fibers of the vagus nerve going from the gut to the brain. Cutting the vagus nerve turned the usual feedback loop between gut instincts and the brain from a two-way communication into a one-way street. This allowed the researchers to hone in on the role that the vagus nerve plays in conveying gut instincts up to the brain.
In particular, the researchers were interested in identifying the link between innate anxiety and conditioned or “learned” fear. In test animals, the brain was still able to send signals down to the stomach, but the brain couldn’t receive signals coming up from the stomach.
Healthy vagus nerve communication between your gut and your brain helps to slow you down like the brakes on your car by using neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine and GABA. These neurotransmitters literally lower heart rate, blood pressure, and help your heart and organs slow down so that you can rest-and-digest.
The Vagus Nerves Is Linked to Fear Conditioning
The new Swiss study explored the consequences of a complete disconnection of signals from the vagus nerve coming up from the gut to the brain and how this affected innate anxiety, conditioned fear, and subsequent neurochemical changes in the brain.
In a fear conditioning experiment on rats, the researchers in Zurich linked an unpleasant experience to a specific sound. Interestingly, the gut instinct signal from the vagus nerve was necessary for unlearning a conditioned response of fear. Through a variety of behavioral studies, the researchers determined that the rats without a fully functioning vagus nerve were less afraid of open spaces and bright lights compared with controlled rats with an intact vagus nerve.
However, without the two-way communication of the vagus nerve between the brain and gut the rats showed a lower level of innate fear, but a longer retention of learned fear. From this discovery the researchers concluded that an innate response to fear appears to be influenced significantly by “gut instinct” signals sent from the stomach to the brain. This confirms the importance of healthy vagal tone to maintain grace under pressure and to overcome fear conditioning.
Mark Twain addressed the backlash of conditioned fear when he said, “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”
In my book, The Athlete’s Way, I write extensively about ways to overcome learned fear and innate anxiety. If you’d like to read a sample from the book with some practical tips on how to overcome conditioned fear responses click here (link is external).
A simple mantra I've used as an athlete to engage my vagus nerve when faced with a threatening challenge is to take a few deep breaths and recite a line by Corra Harris, author of I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, "The bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage and act accordingly."
Using positive self-talk and taking deep breaths is a quick and easy way to engage the vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system to calm yourself from both the top-down and from the bottom-up.
The most exciting discovery of this study is that under closer scrutiny of the rats' brains, the researchers found that the loss of signals coming up from the abdomen via the vagus nerve altered the production of both adrenaline and GABA in the brain.
When the researchers switched from a negative to a neutral stimulus, the rats without gut instincts coming up to the brain via the vagus nerve required significantly longer to re-associate the sound with the new, “safe” and neutral situation. The researchers point out that this finding is congruent with other recently published studies which found that stimulation of the vagus nerve can facilitate learning.
Conclusion: The Vagus Nerve Has Powerful Psychological Influences
These new findings about the vagus nerve offer exciting possibility for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Stimulation of the vagus nerve might be able to speed up the process by which people with PTSD can learn to reassociate a non-threatening stimuli which triggers anxiety with a neutral and non-traumatic experience. Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is currently used to treat epilepsy and depression, although the psychologcial benefits of VNS remain controversial.
In a press release Meyers concluded, "We were able to show for the first time that the selective interruption of the signal path from the stomach to the brain changed complex behavioral patterns. This has traditionally been attributed to the brain alone. The study shows clearly that the stomach also has a say in how we respond to fear; however, what it says, i.e. precisely what it signals, is not yet clear."
The researchers intend to do more research to better understand the exact dialogue between the vagus nerve and the brain which will hopefully lead to more effective treatments for PTSD and other anxiety disorders.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201405/how-does-the-vagus-nerve-convey-gut-instincts-the-brain
Energy, Matter, & Meaning
Physicist David Bohm introduces the word, 'soma-significance', to replace 'psychosomatic': a term which, he suggests, implies a dualism, two separate entities - mind and body -which interact. This, he proposes, introduces a split or fragmentation between the physical and the mental that does not properly correspond to the actual state of affairs.
In his approach, 'soma', which means body or matter, is connected with 'significance' or meaning. (i.e. the meaning of matter.) Meaning is given the key role, rather than mind or matter as distinct entities. The notion of soma-significance, then, provides a bridge between mind and matter. It relates, simply, to two aspects of one over-all field of reality, to be distinguished only for the purposes of thought.
Meaning, he suggests, is primary, and is fundamentally indefinable. At least explicitly; although we know, tacitly, what we mean when we consider meaning, and this will unfold and change as we consider it. Meaning, and the idea of the implicate order are, thus, closely related. The implicate order can be seen as a way of illustrating how meaning is organized. But, as with the whole idea of the enfolding-unfolding orders of the universe, unbroken wholeness provides the essential perspective.
He further suggests two more aspects: manifest and subtle, which are closely related to soma and significance. but which are clearly relative, since what is manifest on one level may be subtle on another. The flow between various levels of subtle and manifest can be described as the apprehension of the meanings of meaning, a process which, he suggests, may lead on to a grasp of very subtle meanings in a flash of insight.
The emphasis need not only be from the direction of the mental or 'significance' realm, where each physical (somatic) configuration has a significance. They can be approached from the physical side too, here termed 'signa-somatic', where the total physical response of a human being can be seen to be profoundly and actively affected by what physical forms mean to him. For example, if a shadow means an assailant rather than just a shadow, both mind and the chemistry of the body will respond accordingly.
But in this view, nothing exists in this process except as a two-way movement between the aspects of soma and significance, as well as between levels that are relatively subtle and those that are relatively manifest. Ultimately, this process extends even into the environment, linking up the whole of society in one vast web extending even to man's relationship with nature and with the cosmos. All of this flows back and forth between what it means to us, and, possibly, what we may mean to it.
Out of this, there arises the notion of intention, which we sense as a feeling of being ready to act in a certain way. In other words, intention unfolds out of meaning. But most of that meaning remains implicit; we cannot possibly describe more than a small part of the total significance we sense at a given moment. So, meaning and intention are seen to be inseparably related as two sides of one activity.
http://upi.cc/dialogue/soma/
Physicist David Bohm introduces the word, 'soma-significance', to replace 'psychosomatic': a term which, he suggests, implies a dualism, two separate entities - mind and body -which interact. This, he proposes, introduces a split or fragmentation between the physical and the mental that does not properly correspond to the actual state of affairs.
In his approach, 'soma', which means body or matter, is connected with 'significance' or meaning. (i.e. the meaning of matter.) Meaning is given the key role, rather than mind or matter as distinct entities. The notion of soma-significance, then, provides a bridge between mind and matter. It relates, simply, to two aspects of one over-all field of reality, to be distinguished only for the purposes of thought.
Meaning, he suggests, is primary, and is fundamentally indefinable. At least explicitly; although we know, tacitly, what we mean when we consider meaning, and this will unfold and change as we consider it. Meaning, and the idea of the implicate order are, thus, closely related. The implicate order can be seen as a way of illustrating how meaning is organized. But, as with the whole idea of the enfolding-unfolding orders of the universe, unbroken wholeness provides the essential perspective.
He further suggests two more aspects: manifest and subtle, which are closely related to soma and significance. but which are clearly relative, since what is manifest on one level may be subtle on another. The flow between various levels of subtle and manifest can be described as the apprehension of the meanings of meaning, a process which, he suggests, may lead on to a grasp of very subtle meanings in a flash of insight.
The emphasis need not only be from the direction of the mental or 'significance' realm, where each physical (somatic) configuration has a significance. They can be approached from the physical side too, here termed 'signa-somatic', where the total physical response of a human being can be seen to be profoundly and actively affected by what physical forms mean to him. For example, if a shadow means an assailant rather than just a shadow, both mind and the chemistry of the body will respond accordingly.
But in this view, nothing exists in this process except as a two-way movement between the aspects of soma and significance, as well as between levels that are relatively subtle and those that are relatively manifest. Ultimately, this process extends even into the environment, linking up the whole of society in one vast web extending even to man's relationship with nature and with the cosmos. All of this flows back and forth between what it means to us, and, possibly, what we may mean to it.
Out of this, there arises the notion of intention, which we sense as a feeling of being ready to act in a certain way. In other words, intention unfolds out of meaning. But most of that meaning remains implicit; we cannot possibly describe more than a small part of the total significance we sense at a given moment. So, meaning and intention are seen to be inseparably related as two sides of one activity.
http://upi.cc/dialogue/soma/
Meaning is the Activity of Information
David Bohm has proposed a notion which supersedes the term psychosomatic. Soma-significance emphasizes the unity of body and significance or meaning.
“The notion of soma-significance implies that soma (or the physical) and its significance (which is mental) are not separate in the sense that soma and psyche are generally considered to be; rather they are two aspects of one overall indivisible reality. By such an aspect, we mean a kind of view or a way of looking. That is to say, it is a form in which the whole of reality appears (i.e., displays or unfolds), either in our perception or in our thinking. Clearly, each aspect reflects and implies the other (so that the other shows in it). Although we describe these aspects by using different words, we imply that they are both revealing one unbroken whole of reality, as it were from different sides.” (Bohm, “Soma-Significance”).
Bohm says: Meaning is inseparably connected with information. The Operative notion here is that information has to do with form. Literally 'to inform' means ‘to put form into' something. First Of all, information has to be held in some form, which is carried either in a material system (e.g. a printed page) or in some energy (,.g. a radio wave). We find that in general a pure form cannot exist by itself, but has to have its subsistence in some kind of material or energetic basis; and this is why information has to be carried on such a basis. Thus, even the information in our sense impressions an d in our thought processes has been found to be carried by physical and chemical processes taking place in the nervous system and the brain.
http://www.implicity.org/Downloads/Bohm_meaning+information.pdf
David Bohm has proposed a notion which supersedes the term psychosomatic. Soma-significance emphasizes the unity of body and significance or meaning.
“The notion of soma-significance implies that soma (or the physical) and its significance (which is mental) are not separate in the sense that soma and psyche are generally considered to be; rather they are two aspects of one overall indivisible reality. By such an aspect, we mean a kind of view or a way of looking. That is to say, it is a form in which the whole of reality appears (i.e., displays or unfolds), either in our perception or in our thinking. Clearly, each aspect reflects and implies the other (so that the other shows in it). Although we describe these aspects by using different words, we imply that they are both revealing one unbroken whole of reality, as it were from different sides.” (Bohm, “Soma-Significance”).
Bohm says: Meaning is inseparably connected with information. The Operative notion here is that information has to do with form. Literally 'to inform' means ‘to put form into' something. First Of all, information has to be held in some form, which is carried either in a material system (e.g. a printed page) or in some energy (,.g. a radio wave). We find that in general a pure form cannot exist by itself, but has to have its subsistence in some kind of material or energetic basis; and this is why information has to be carried on such a basis. Thus, even the information in our sense impressions an d in our thought processes has been found to be carried by physical and chemical processes taking place in the nervous system and the brain.
http://www.implicity.org/Downloads/Bohm_meaning+information.pdf
Transgenerational transmission and familial unconscious
http://www.viaggioaritrosoneltempo.com/excerpt/c5p5.pdf
http://www.viaggioaritrosoneltempo.com/excerpt/c5p5.pdf
Meanwhile, pointing to the heterogeneity of this group, Danieli (1981) identified four subtypes of families of Holocaust survivors: victim families, numb families, fighter families and families of "those who made it." In a seminal study, Solomon et al. (1988) examined Israeli soldiers who developed posttraumatic stress disorder during the Lebanese war and found that soldiers who were offspring of Holocaust survivors had a more protracted course of PTSD. Thus, the existence of a factor of vulnerability carried by healthy children of survivors was raised. Nader (1998) reported similar findings in children whose parents experienced significant traumata in life. Such children were more likely to present symptoms of PTSD after witnessing a violent incident.
Drawing on findings that repeated trauma exposure may alter the responsiveness of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenocortical axis even before the onset of PTSD, Yehuda et al. (1998) found that healthy offspring of Holocaust survivors are more likely to develop PTSD after traumatic events and report a larger number of symptoms. Similarly, Novac and Huber-Schneider (1998) reported increased comorbidity in previously healthy children of survivors who were seen in a psychiatric clinic for anxiety and depressive disorders. The authors hypothesized on the different mechanisms of transmission of trauma.
Other studies have further confirmed that offspring of Holocaust survivors are more vulnerable to psychological distress after developing breast cancer (Baider et al., 2000) and that healthy children of war veterans may show abnormalities in the Stroop Color Test (Motta et al., 1997). Danieli (1998) also covered a large number of studies in detail, including animal models for transmission.
The importance of this subject has also been recognized by the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), with the founding and maintaining of a Special Interest Area Group on Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma and Resiliency. At the annual ISTSS meetings, there are an increasing number of presentations on intergenerational transmission. There are also progressively more reports of psychopathology in the "third generation" (i.e., grandchildren) of Holocaust survivors.
In clinical practice, patients with parents suffering with PTSD often describe damaged, preoccupied parents who are emotionally limited. Symptoms in parents such as traumatic reliving, emotional numbing and dissociative phenomena do not help a child develop a reasonable sense of safety and predictability in the world. These parents are also less able to respond optimally during usual developmental crises and help the world to be more comprehensible to the child. The parent suffering with PTSD also has difficulty modeling a healthy sense of identity and autonomy, appropriate self-soothing mechanisms and affect regulation, and maintaining a balanced perspective when life challenges arise. Instead, they can model catastrophic or inappropriately numbed and disassociated responses. Therefore, the parent's high levels of anxiety can significantly interfere with the child's developmental progress.
Children's self-image and object relations are also obviously affected by their image of their parents. Parents' success in coping and being resilient determines whether the child can be proud, ashamed or confused about their parents.
- See more at: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/intergenerational-transmission-trauma-introduction-clinician#sthash.Q8lMDGRD.dpuf
Drawing on findings that repeated trauma exposure may alter the responsiveness of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenocortical axis even before the onset of PTSD, Yehuda et al. (1998) found that healthy offspring of Holocaust survivors are more likely to develop PTSD after traumatic events and report a larger number of symptoms. Similarly, Novac and Huber-Schneider (1998) reported increased comorbidity in previously healthy children of survivors who were seen in a psychiatric clinic for anxiety and depressive disorders. The authors hypothesized on the different mechanisms of transmission of trauma.
Other studies have further confirmed that offspring of Holocaust survivors are more vulnerable to psychological distress after developing breast cancer (Baider et al., 2000) and that healthy children of war veterans may show abnormalities in the Stroop Color Test (Motta et al., 1997). Danieli (1998) also covered a large number of studies in detail, including animal models for transmission.
The importance of this subject has also been recognized by the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), with the founding and maintaining of a Special Interest Area Group on Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma and Resiliency. At the annual ISTSS meetings, there are an increasing number of presentations on intergenerational transmission. There are also progressively more reports of psychopathology in the "third generation" (i.e., grandchildren) of Holocaust survivors.
In clinical practice, patients with parents suffering with PTSD often describe damaged, preoccupied parents who are emotionally limited. Symptoms in parents such as traumatic reliving, emotional numbing and dissociative phenomena do not help a child develop a reasonable sense of safety and predictability in the world. These parents are also less able to respond optimally during usual developmental crises and help the world to be more comprehensible to the child. The parent suffering with PTSD also has difficulty modeling a healthy sense of identity and autonomy, appropriate self-soothing mechanisms and affect regulation, and maintaining a balanced perspective when life challenges arise. Instead, they can model catastrophic or inappropriately numbed and disassociated responses. Therefore, the parent's high levels of anxiety can significantly interfere with the child's developmental progress.
Children's self-image and object relations are also obviously affected by their image of their parents. Parents' success in coping and being resilient determines whether the child can be proud, ashamed or confused about their parents.
- See more at: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/intergenerational-transmission-trauma-introduction-clinician#sthash.Q8lMDGRD.dpuf
We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.
--James HIllman
--James HIllman
“The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. . .Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.” (FLOW; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
The alchemical motto Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultuum Lapidem means “Visit the innermost parts of the earth; by setting things right (‘rectifying’), you will find the hidden Stone.”
Jung more or less identified the unconscious with the autonomic nervous system. Such sympathetic identification is integral, interiorized or internalized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect -- the soul. This psychophysical mimesis, or power of imitation, is direct experience by total submergence of the unconscious tendencies of the ancestors. So, we can visit the interior of our own earth, our physical body for treasure of embedded ancestral memories it has hidden for good or ill.
Disorientation and suffering.
Like any Great Work, Jung suggests that the opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role. Working through the invisible loyalties of the family system is just the beginning of our journey back through time, the unconscious, and our genetic history. Epigenetics demonstrates that we inherit our parents' trauma and family secrets. Children of survivors may be born less able to metabolize stress, more susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes.
Vicarious Traumatization Burden
Trauma can be defined as an event that induces intense fear, helplessness, or horror. PTSD occurs when the dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a body’s default state. Provoke a person with PTSD, and the heart pounds faster, startle reflex is exaggerated, we sweat and the mind races. The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune system underregulated.
The result can be the kind of over-inflammation associated with chronic disease, including arthritis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, agitated nervous systems release adrenaline and catecholamines, both involved in the fight or flight response, unleashing a cascade of events that reinforces the effects of traumatic memories on the brain. This may partially explain why intrusive memories and flashbacks plague people with PTSD. Also, extreme stress and PTSD shorten telomeres—the DNA caps at the end of a chromosome that govern the pace of aging.
Genes & Memes
The dragon's egg of the primordial unconscious or archetypal container signifies the eternal cycle of life, primordial unconsciousness, the unity of opposing forces. Jung said there is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. So, the ultima materia means the total recapitulation of the species evolution beginning with conception moved by telos. Julian Huxley argued that evolution moved to the psychosocial realm and DNA was replaced by memory and language inside minds that could understand it, giving evolution a purpose.
The brain is the Tree of Life. If our reptilian brain and brain stem is our internal Tree of Life, then the higher brain and limbic system (with the amygdala) is our Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. Wisdom of the divine becomes wisdom of the self -- the seed of cosmic consciousness and Immortal Mind. In Hermetic doctrine, a circular relationship exists between mankind and the divine. The cosmos mirrors mankind's need for self-knowledge through recognition.
The alchemical motto Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultuum Lapidem means “Visit the innermost parts of the earth; by setting things right (‘rectifying’), you will find the hidden Stone.”
Jung more or less identified the unconscious with the autonomic nervous system. Such sympathetic identification is integral, interiorized or internalized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect -- the soul. This psychophysical mimesis, or power of imitation, is direct experience by total submergence of the unconscious tendencies of the ancestors. So, we can visit the interior of our own earth, our physical body for treasure of embedded ancestral memories it has hidden for good or ill.
Disorientation and suffering.
Like any Great Work, Jung suggests that the opus consists of three parts: insight, endurance, and action. Psychology is needed only in the first part, but in the second and third parts moral strength plays the predominant role. Working through the invisible loyalties of the family system is just the beginning of our journey back through time, the unconscious, and our genetic history. Epigenetics demonstrates that we inherit our parents' trauma and family secrets. Children of survivors may be born less able to metabolize stress, more susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules, neurons, cells, and genes.
Vicarious Traumatization Burden
Trauma can be defined as an event that induces intense fear, helplessness, or horror. PTSD occurs when the dysregulation induced by that trauma becomes a body’s default state. Provoke a person with PTSD, and the heart pounds faster, startle reflex is exaggerated, we sweat and the mind races. The amygdala, which detects threats and releases the emotions associated with memories, whirs in overdrive. Meanwhile, hormones and neurotransmitters don’t always flow as they should, leaving the immune system underregulated.
The result can be the kind of over-inflammation associated with chronic disease, including arthritis, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Moreover, agitated nervous systems release adrenaline and catecholamines, both involved in the fight or flight response, unleashing a cascade of events that reinforces the effects of traumatic memories on the brain. This may partially explain why intrusive memories and flashbacks plague people with PTSD. Also, extreme stress and PTSD shorten telomeres—the DNA caps at the end of a chromosome that govern the pace of aging.
Genes & Memes
The dragon's egg of the primordial unconscious or archetypal container signifies the eternal cycle of life, primordial unconsciousness, the unity of opposing forces. Jung said there is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites. So, the ultima materia means the total recapitulation of the species evolution beginning with conception moved by telos. Julian Huxley argued that evolution moved to the psychosocial realm and DNA was replaced by memory and language inside minds that could understand it, giving evolution a purpose.
The brain is the Tree of Life. If our reptilian brain and brain stem is our internal Tree of Life, then the higher brain and limbic system (with the amygdala) is our Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. Wisdom of the divine becomes wisdom of the self -- the seed of cosmic consciousness and Immortal Mind. In Hermetic doctrine, a circular relationship exists between mankind and the divine. The cosmos mirrors mankind's need for self-knowledge through recognition.
The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths. --Jung, "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (November 1929)
Context & Emergence
Our genealogical lines may all look like good little soldiers lined up in neat succession marching back through time. But we can also discern complex, nonlinear and cyclic dimensions among the patterns of connectivity that include our primordial consciousness. In this article we will focus on the activity of meaning rather than 'consciousness' itself, a Mystery about which little can be said.
The Family Tree is a growing network of understanding. Genealogy demonstrates that our indefinite lifespan will come to an end just like all relationships. It also demonstrates another level of organization -- simultaneous coexistence and interconnectedness of life. "The motif of the net is the attribute of wisdom; it represents the logos and is the net of understanding in which the Mother can be caught," says Jung, in Modern Psychology, (Vol. 2, Page 148).
We were born into connection and emerge from connection. We have real attachments and internalized relationships. We discover ourselves in the interpersonal field, the stream of impulses, fantasies, and bodily sensations. We find real life beyond habitual socially-ordained responses. We become more conscious of ourselves by including intuition, dreams, and what our body teaches us by extending our playful awareness into active engagement.
Ancestors can be a barrier of trapped emotions or royal road to the unconscious. Genealogy is a relation matrix as is our subtle body. The relational edge is in psychophysical work and embodied therapeutic dialogues. The relational approach is the core of body therapies. Patterns tend to repeat. History repeats itself. Mythic history repeats in cycles.
Primordial Creation
When history begins to speak, it speaks as a Tree, represented as the progenitor of the human race. The very first written story from Sumeria -- the world's oldest poetry -- is a creation story about Inanna and the sacred Tree of Life -- a World Tree with instinctual DNA knowledge living in it. This Tree of Life is the first legend and the link between the transcendental and phenomenal worlds. Our kinship bonds and genealogical ancestry are expressed through the sacred tree archetype.
Joseph Campbell (1965) said Inanna was the Tree herself, the "cosmic tree of life and death" (p. 64). She is the ineffable totality of what is -- the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge which are one and the same as the Tree of Truth.
Jung reminds us, "In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams." (Psychological Reflections, 76).
Vision Tree
The tree is our vegetative self, involuntary action and life in the body. Such experiences are closely related to death, which is a permanent resident of the psyche. The creatures that live in the tree, including the serpent, are our instincts. Jung notes that, "The serpent in Genesis is an illustration of the personified treenumen; hence it is traditionally represented in or coiled round the tree." (CW 9, Aion, Pg 235). The serpent is the tree's voice.
Your body is your subconscious mind. Mind and body are the same because mind is distributed. We are all interdependent. The problem is we have isolated ourselves from each other, from animals, plants, and the inorganic ground of cosmos. We have forgotten our origins and embody a myth of loneliness. Our emotional and intuitive mind naturally engages with and is interactive with nature.
Mindell (1982) likens the dreambody ("subtle body") to a tree. Half is above the ground and can be described medically or biologically as the 'real' body and half is below ground as roots we can sense when we focus our attention on subtle signals in psychophysical reality. Dreambody appears in body images, rituals, and physical therapies.
Jung is very clear that, "...there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them." (CW 8, Pages 399-403).
The root is a deeper, universal description of matter, symptoms, and experiential realms where experiences are a matter of life and death. It's the hidden dimension, the "dark matter" of our existence. Mindell says, "The trunk of the tree is a dream symbol that bridges the world between deep sentient experiences and symbols."
We can amplify that somatic process by combining instincts, dreams (or trance), and images. The connection depends on unfolding subtle sensations of psyche-matter interactions of psychophysical reality. Somatic rhythms include pulsation, form, flow, construction and deconstruction, and oscillating polarities.
All of our cells are intelligent entities. The autonomic system is loaded with all kinds of receptors modulated by peptides stored in the spine all the way down. They can be emotionally expressed through movement and body-centered work.
There are receptors for chemical messengers on every cell of the body, and this is where memories are stored. Memory is how much the receptors have been stimulated or not. All the history is there. Emotions are universal. They arise at the cellular level from molecular information -- the remote smart key that fits the subconscious lock.
We have receptors in the central nervous system, gastric, endocrine, cardio, circulatory, immune, and skin systems. Peptide receptors are found in all organs, particularly the heart, which has all receptor types for information molecules on it. Our feelings are filtered by these molecules. Chakra regions are like mini-brains. Each is a nerve plexus of receptors that push the body state to do what needs to be done through the wisdom of the body -- Soma Sophia.
The Sumerian goddess takes the sacred tree home to her garden where she nurtures and cares for it. The tree mirrors Inanna herself -- the mirror of divine realities which has all the information of the universe. She comes to terms with all the creatures, including the serpent, that live in that tree, representing the duality of the goddess.
The snake is a personification of the unconscious, for, as early as the Gnostics, it was used as a symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, where the vegetative psyche is localized. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.
This serpent does not represent "reason" or anything approaching it, but rather symbolizes a peculiar autonomous mind which can possess one completely,
a spirit of revelation which gives us "Intuitionen" (intuitions).
~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.
Psyche symbolically unites the lower instinctual urges with the higher spiritual instincts and expresses them in the clear vision of modified and integrated images. The soul creates symbols that anticipates future alterations of consciousness, presaging uniting the opposites in wholeness -- upper and lower worlds.
Later she turns her tree into her throne and bed used in the "Sacred Marriage." She also makes the first recorded initiatory descent into the realm of the dead -- the realm of metatruths. Jung reminds us, "We don't attain any "ultimate truths" at all, but on the way to them we discover a whole lot of astonishing partial truths. (Letters Vol. II, 504-506)
Scholars (Wolkstein & Kramer 1983:51-89) link the cutting of the World Tree to the destruction of a cyclical view of life, death, and renewal to a linear view of life and death with the underworld as its end.
Descent & Renewal
The underworld is a dreamland of soul where we can retreat to interact with other psyches. We can explore the ancestral underworld through myths, folklore and visionary journeying, as a place of ageless wisdom and regenerative power. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The underworld and its powers of transformation and rebirth are the roots of the tree, essential to anyone on a spiritual path. Death is not the psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that holds away death prevents life. When the physical form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds things in their form is the secret of death.
Jung says, ""He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. (Liber Novus, Page 244). There is nothing to be done when we are emptied of certainty, doing, and being. Imaginal images don't require validation from external events. Hades means invisible -- unseen yet absolutely present. The invisible, whether we call them archetypes, gods or whatever, are only visible as metaphors which speak for themselves.
Metaphorical death, our morbidity is an enactment of that fantasy -- a way of mythologizing -- a disheartening mortification. In alchemy, mortificatio is the process of death, destruction and decomposition. It is a death-sentence for the ego from immersion in the unconscious. But if we remain paralyzed too long, we suffer the consequences. When we look for the cryptic key we ask what this particular image has do with my death.
Our deep nature is primordial wildness, aliveness, and intensity of images which automatically free the butterfly of the soul. As Hillman says, the revelations of fantasy expose the divine. Resemblance is a bridge to events. We can't be just objective observers because we participate in, are subjected to, wounded by, and suffer our images. The abysmal reality is that all changes and life demand sacrifices.
Even if we are fearful, we can repeat Inanna's journey to the underworld, the psyche with its radically altered view of life. This bed-rock of reality is devoid of feeling and empty of meaning. She makes an initiatory descent to reclaim the neglected side of life for the sake of making soul. The underworld and its dreams are not to be exploited to help to fix up our daytime life. We should not mine our dreams for images, ideas, and information that can help us be more productive and functional in mundane life.
Hillman (1979) cautions that, "It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn."
In her dark descent, Inanna reclaims the unloving, unloved, abandoned, instinctual, raging, greedy, desirous, unfulfilled, and desperately lonely parts by attending to the depths, by giving it attention, by valuing it, by expressing it. She renews the relationship with her dark ancestress-sister and queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal. The creative energy of the primordial beginning feeds us and heals the suffering heart and soul. Instinctual life informs and powers our work. The creative process is renewed.
The Threshold
In the poem, Inanna moves inward and abandons the mundane world, the physical world, for her adventure into chaos by following her uncertainty. She deals with matters affecting her deeper soul -- imaginative possibilities in our nature -- and connects to her own power. The constructed notion of self is challenged and dies. For this to work for ourselves we must understand that medication, impatience, and fear of death are obstacles. Our pathologizing is a way of seeing and part of our wholeness.
The Sumerian word for ear and wisdom are the same. Inanna opens her ear to the Great Below, she "tunes in" or "listens up" to natural wisdom, the harmonization of thinking and feeling. She enters through the "seven gates" - the chakras or central nervous system. She is depressed, grieves and mourns the existence of suffering and pain in the world.
The myth speaks to anyone who undergoes a transformation. We must release or at least challenge our values or perspectives, and become vulnerable to the frightening possibility of change. The conscious part of the psyche witnesses the events below. Mourners rescue Inanna and bring her back to life. She is regenerated, resurrected by moving from a dissociated state to the detached observer self, to an associated state.
In our genealogy work, we mourn and resurrect our ancestors. We associate with them. Our family tree, our family system or ancestral field of information and energy is like a torus whose branches reconnect with their roots -- a hyperdimensional labyrinth that is the model of our universe.
When we visit the underworld, we visit our roots that fund our being. Flow emerges from awareness. Campbell likened the successful adventure to unlocking and releasing the flow of life into the body of the world. The living tree is our living web of interactions, including habits (trunk), our senses (branches), situation awareness (tip of branches), reasoning (emergent guidance), and resource flow (nurturance). Connecting those fields is flow.
Into the Labyrinth
Feeling is the entry point of this epic journey which may seem like a foreign country with a language you don't yet know. Subtle signals can be aroused within the genealogical exploratory process that we can use for deepening our connections, while we hold onto the red thread that maintains our connection to the present.
A journal or sketch-book may help. Attention can be directed to all manner of processes where something new is being formed -- in creative process, learning, thinking, and decision making. What's familiar is what was there first. What was there first is family and the first remembered experiences between 0-5 years old -- what feels good and what feels bad.
You can make a somatic bridge -- a channel to a subliminal or subjective feeling in your body that reflects your internal states so you can change the structure of the experience. States have two components: increasing absorption and a continually narrowing focus of attention. That is a trance. It communicates primally in spatial location, proximity, direction, size, movement, and feeling. We can locate where it is in the body by a first impression. The information is there when we know how to ask for it.
We may not be sure which direction we're going or how far we've gone. The path may twist or slowly turn into an experience that’s about being lost, both literally and metaphorically. The maze starts to feel more like a forest. It starts to feel like it’s changing as you 'walk' the labyrinth. Voices may start telling stories about experiences that threw their world out of order or made them feel more complete.
Feeling our way into the dark may sharpen other senses in the absence of sight and hearing. We may wonder if there are walls to the labyrinth, or just empty space. We have to reach far enough to find out. We have to focus right where we are as we continue stepping forward into nothing. It may feel bigger than we expected.
Genealogy is our map of the unconscious. When we enter the dark door, the Red Thread shows us the way, igniting the imagination, awakening the soul. You link your Tree to the World Tree, your history to world history and mythology.
Immersion is virtual reality, like actually "being there." We learn certain well-worn pathways from the present into the past. Focusing means holding a kind of open, non-judging attention to an internal knowing which is directly experienced but is not yet in words. We can use focusing to become clear on what we feel or want , to obtain new insights about our situation, and to stimulate change or healing of the situation.
The World Tree maintains the cycles of life and death. The old cyclical understanding of death as merely one stage in the eternal round of birth, death, and renewal, symbolized by the tree, was replaced by a linear perception of life with death and the underworld as the end.
Walking the Labyrinth of our ancestral lines is a deeply meditative process that arouses spirit, intuition and gnosis from a deep sleep. It is a way of soul retrieval, uniting our personal and collective unconscious. It is a process of digging through the past, overturning old notions. Nothing lives as long as deep memory. Emotional states reveal and change what we pay attention to. Our nervous system filters our experience before it becomes conscious.
Pattern Recognition
Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life. Jung notes, "Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness." (CW 20; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 246; Para 330.)
There are things we cannot find at all but dream they can be found in other people, including our ancestors. Perhaps the real question is how did we ever so thoroughly cut off our recent and distant ancestors -- our own Grail? How did we lose knowledge of who we are and where we come from when traditionally ancestry has a high cross-cultural value?
In our dreams we are occupied by different souls, night after night. We too easily define ourselves as individuals. Isn't the question always, "Why?" "Why am I like this?" when it could be "Who" -- who in me is this like? But to truly answer it we need a list of the "usual suspects" to suss it out.
We need to get to know them -- to form some kind of relationship to their essential being. Richard Tarnas has called synchronicity "an invitation to a relationship with the mystery of life." It is an ongoing spiritual relationship we can use as a compensation to our one-sided conscious ego attitude. Jung reminds us that, "At all events wisdom cannot be taught by words. It is only possible by personal contact and by immediate experience." (Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.)
Mindell says we must risk sacrificing our conscious and cultural principles and follow the unpredictable dictates of the body symptoms and relationship signals. The dreambody uses all our channels of perception including unintentional movements.
Symptoms arise from the collective world -- the primal field. The unconscious is all around us in the ensouled world as Anima Mundi, giver of wisdom and enlightenment. We remain open to the possibility that the world around us carries symbolically saturated meaning.
As we become more conversant with our ancestral lines, we find ourselves looking more and more in the right direction for resonating patterns, then asking, "What does it all mean?" In this way genealogy leads toward the perennial questions of identity and direction.
There are many ways to feel the shift. We help the felt sense form and accurately identify its meaning by trying out words that might express it. We can test these words against the felt sense. Felt-sense will not resonate with a word or phrase that does not adequately describe it.
We may feel movement or even feel stuck, but we are still having fresh insights and intuitions about what steps to take next. The essence of focusing is a sense of flow where we become aware of the meaning behind words and images.
Archetypal Transference
For those working through their genealogy without a therapist, transference may still occur. According to Jung, "A transference in the clinical sense does not always need a personal relationship as a bridge, but can take place via a book, a piece of hearsay, or a legend." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506)
Archetypal transference is a bridge to feelings, ideas, impulses, needs, fantasies, and images. It may also arouse fear, shame, anger, and hostility. They won't feel like they belong to your subjective mind, but are a bridge to your reality, who you are and how you adapt.
This connects us with our essential being and keeps the process moving. It holds a wealth of meanings beyond personal likes and dislikes. The symbolic, psychological bridge is built of similarities and differences.
We learn to touch and relate to other views through our subjective reactions and fantasies to build relationship. Merging and mirroring expands our felt-sense with this experiential approach to the interactive relational field.
Felt-sense is pre-verbal and largely unconscious. The felt sense is the embodiment (bringing awareness inside the body) of our ever-changing sensory/energetic/emotional landscape. It moves our focus from actions and things happening outside us in the world to qualities of our present, internal experience (e.g. textures, colors, temperature, sensations, trembling).
Soma & Sophia
A guiding force can emerge from a single ancestor or collective -- a field phenomena which can be more than projection of the wise old person. Following Jung, “When something long since passed . . . comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.” (Red Book)
The mobilization of the transcendent function orchestrates the process of transforming the family system. This dynamic urges us toward growth, consciousness, and transformation. We give up the psychological safety net and enter into the flow of life, just as we are. We enter a life of immanence where life is sacred.
When we say 'trust the process' for creating experience inside we mean let go of self and trust the transcendent process. Overinvestment or a need to control the situation can undermine ability to trust the process. Effortless intention is wanting to succeed but not really caring if you do or not.
Emotional Shift
Playfulness and openness facilitate processing. The body itself becomes an instrument. We invest by having an interest in an outcome without needing to control events. Controlling the process is not the same as controlling the event.
As part of the process we respond in a cooperative manner. We change what we pay attention to. Invest in the process not the outcome. Jung suggests, "For me the archetype means: an image of a probable sequence of events, an habitual current of psychic energy." (Letters Vol. II, P. 504-506)
Part of openness is ability to suspend disbelief or willingness to see what happens when the critical faculty relaxes. We let go of the need to analyze and acquire enough familiarity and sensory acuity to find comfort in this process of renewal. The sense of energy is focused awareness, openness, trust, and guiding the process.
The process can be guided by visualization as long as you energize it. Colors and temperatures are connected to feelings and the first impression is important just as it is in identifying where in the body the feeling resides. The more data we ask for the more absorbed we become. Guidance is gentle, almost effortless in intentional and spontaneous experiences, and engagement of imagination.
Awareness is the most powerful tool because it is generated by your nervous system. 'Knowing' emerges as knowledge with no known explanation for the information. We can't explain it and we don't need to. It may involve many subtle sources -- forgotten, subliminal, factual, unconscious cues, ESP, etc. This is the 'Know thyself' of self-realization and gnosis -- direct experience, emotional memory and intuitive response.
Knowing guides energy, order and sequence, intensity and flow. Energy itself is a form of knowing and feedback. Knowing is perceptible as changes in the body and feedback of sensory information in a way the nervous system understands -- the deep trance of neurological absorption. It may feel like you're making it up, but that is fine. Just pay attention to the process that is happening. The process is guided by the state and energy flow. The state focuses awareness and guides the energy.
No matter what the state, the body is the quickest way to change your state. Body position can be a trigger for events. In the process you learn how to regulate your nervous system more effectively with confidence in the outcome.
Knowing is closely associated with or enhanced by feelings of connection and sensing energy through the body. You can use your hands and breath and voice. Knowing is an integral process involving proprioception and mirror neurons (the physiological feedback of intuition). The human energy field is a highly organized information grid.
Instinctive knowing may always be there but may go unrecognized, though it is a part of the guiding process -- redirecting your awareness. Changes in how your body feels guides the process. You don't have to believe it; just don't fight it. You can change if you fully engage in the project and become focused and absorbed.
We can go back and explore or change the story. We can focus on the energetic level and sense certain qualities and what is needed in our system. So, connection and sense of energy combines with physical state, focused awareness, and embodied cognition.
The mind is not only connected to the body, the body influences the mind. Cognition isn't confined to the brain but grounded in bodily experience and embodied in metaphorical thought. Metaphors are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain as primary experiences.
Knowing or intuition can tell us what to do. We know what needs to be done and we do it. We simply know how to accept and express. Let the system process and express. No matter what you think, the nervous system always knows, and we don't need to know consciously. Everything that bothers you is in your body. The first impulse on where it is in the body is always it. This body wisdom is known as Sophia by the gnostics.
Rites of Passage
Genealogy makes us think about the nature of time and space, our own deepest nature, and cosmos -- and our relationship to it. Entering our genealogy with a sensitivity to the phenomena that might arise means we are more attuned, more likely to notice when they arise within us and what they call forth. We may or may not recognize them as indirect contextual hypnosis -- essentially trance states. We have to know what to look and listen for.
Fear and pain are the great equalizers of life from which no one is immune. All molecules of emotions modulate pain. Emotions are fueled by an underlying feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness -- stress. Our reactions to our inherited issues and the behavior of others may range from avoidant to compensatory, from alienation to compassion. All emotions are feelings but not all feelings are emotions.
Emotions play out in the body. Feelings come from subconscious cognition after an emotion -- a mental association and portrayal of body states. They are experiences of body states that play out in the mind as the brain interprets emotions and assigns meaning. Feelings are physical states arising from the body’s responses to external stimuli, such as threat, fear, and horror. They are influenced by subjective experience, beliefs, and memories.
The light at the end of the generational tunnel is our rebirth -- the hope that we do transform as we become more conscious of the deep past within us and can learn to carry our inheritance more gracefully.
We do not need to presume the notion of past lives as much as the idea that we can learn from any number of relevant passed lives that are mobilized from the collective unconscious. If the soul needs an outer drama to awaken, it pulls into conscious awareness the inner myth and seeded story it carries within. Genealogy provides just such an epic drama.
"That people should succumb to these eternal images is entirely normal, in fact it is what these images are for. They are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation." (Jung)
Rapport, Resonance, Entrainment
State control leads to rapport. Physiology controls psychology. As we become more keenly attuned to the psychophysical sensations of arising emotions, we become more keenly attuned to their significance within the ancestral field. At the informational level, our bones are their bones, our nerve pathways are their nerves, our blood is their blood. Sometimes images emerge from the mist of the unconscious through the body.
This meaning is clearly more subtle than the form itself. But in turn, such a meaning can be grasped in yet another somatic form; electrical - chemical and other activity in the brain and the rest of the nervous system - which is evidently more subtle than the original somatic form that gave rise to it. This distinction of subtle and manifest is clearly only relative, since what is manifest in one level may be subtle on another. (Goertzel)
Intuition gives insight into the underlying meaning of our disorders and life challenges. We can learn our own body's unique perceptive language. By learning to pay attention to, read and understand our sensations, movements, dreams, memories and the signals of distress and disease, we can strengthen our mind-body consciousness with this sensory feedback loop. If we fall under the sway of an ancestral affect, we can gauge and pace our hyperarousal. Otherwise, we might dissociate, freeze, or be overwhelmed.
Some body sensations describe the state of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). We can learn to recognize under or overarousal of the ANS. A quick body scan not lingering on any sensation too long, and awareness of active bodily sensations anchors us firmly in the present. Sensing the body we can also remember sensations and feel those now.
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We may yearn for that which we cannot name. Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. We will be confronted repeatedly with digesting ancestral trauma narratives. Simple body awareness can calm hyperarousal and stop persistent panic attacks.
We can build a structured increase of tolerance for bodily sensations. We can practice dual awareness -- holding simultaneous awareness of multiple stimuli. We can view whatever we perceive, for example, from an observer self.
In some sense, we are the resting place of the ashes, or the tomb of the family as well as its renewal. Unfortunately, inherited or epigenetic, half of all children now have either chronic illness or are overweight.
Shifts in neurotransmitter levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we consciously or unconsciously "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us, within us. Such patterns and internalization tend to repeat within families.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply-connected with an intuitive sense of meaning (active information), in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality.
Bohm talks about levels of somatic unfoldment of meaning. Each level goes toward a more manifest somatic state. And this goes on until the action finally emerges as a physical movement of the body that affects the environment.
So there is a two-way movement of energy. Each level of significance acts on the next more manifest somatic level. And the perception carries the meaning of the action back in the other direction.
Mythologically, our spine is a Tree of Life that connects from deep in the center of the earth, to high in the sky -- a cosmic Axis Mundi.
Sensory & Pre-sensory Levels
So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even unconscious fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams. They may be as primordial as oscillations, vibrations, twinges, spasms, floating, or even sensory deprivation. Tears welling up, or a stinging sensation when we resist crying, can be related to any intense emotion, not just sadness.
Motion & Emotion
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or get a sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. But affective proprioception is more than a map of peripheral receptors. Curiosities such as phantom limb phenomena, the dreambody, and our energy body show the imaginal and primal aspects of proprioception. Proprioceptions affect us from the subquantal, to cellular, to holistic level.
Somatosensory Feedback
Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement in psychical and imaginal life. It links us with temperature, tactility, texture, and the four primordial elements -- fire, air, water, and earth, as well as their transmutation. Inflammations, flights of fancy, inundations, tilling and grounding all have a place in our psychophysical life. It may be as simple as the felt-sense of the rhythms of life.
This holistic process includes symbol formation, which can include disease or images of disease -- the feared cancer, the exploding heart, boiling blood, the holding-in of stoicism and repression, the crushing weight of depression. We may experience 'guilty' headaches that are like torture, or 'conceive' of the malfunctions or abuse of our reproductive systems.
We know Jung has famously said that "the gods have become diseases," and the same may be true of some ancestors. We can ask ourselves how we are "like" them based on what experience and history tell us about their lives and deaths.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. We can use sculpting, dance, movement therapies, and a host of other techniques to discern where those impulses want to go. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal, each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. For example, energies ascend and descend along the spine. Other communication channels are biophotons, electromagnetic effects, and chemical signals such as neurohormones -- the chemicals of emotion. Emotions obviously have bodily effects.
Dark and scary things lurk at the edge of our existence. "Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations within (or without) the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty. A change of meaning is a change of being.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia.
Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing -- form and flow.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell.
Many disorders begin in the womb, from fetal alcohol syndrome to the sense that the world is not a safe place based on the mother's body chemistry and poisons conveyed to the unborn child even by her dreams and mental state. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing.
At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
"Here, here's where we live
Here is a sea, my family
We'll always be young as we've ever been
Death will not part us again nearer to heaven than
10,000 ancestors who dream of me
Well I hear you dreaming of me
Yeah sometimes, dream of me!"
The Albatross, (Rickie Lee Jones/Leo Kottke/John Leftwich)
Exploring the unconscious through genealogy or psychogenealogy is a healing process, an uplifting engagement that is foundational to self-realization. We are no longer relegated to a single contemporary place and time. The ancestors remained an important part of daily life not so long ago, and remain so for many indigenous societies.
We Are Highly Improbable
Scientists have calculated that each unique individual is highly improbable -- apparently a rather miraculous 400 trillion to one chance. The odds of us existing, 1:400 trillion, are virtually zero. Conversely, by the 40th generation we have over a trillion ancestors. We have to consider the odds of our parents meeting relative to the number of people on Earth. Then consider the odds of contact leading further in competition with all the others we meet.
The probability dwindles of a long-term relationship and reproduction, the right sperm and egg combining, and finally the probabilities of each of our trillion+ ancestors successfully mating with all the variables of genetics that make up the chain of those all those ancestors -- the Tree of Life of perfect eternal fruits. Jung notes obviously that, "Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter."
You are a virtual miracle, which is simply an event so improbable it is unlikely to occur. So each life is unique and precious to the nth degree as the result of the cumulative process of increasing information. Even Jung might be challenged to call it a fortuitous series of synchronicities. We are an emergent phenomenon. There are mere chance occurrences as well as synchronicity. So, another model is self-organizing chaos in multiple systems.
Field, Form & Fate
Self-organization is the structure of creation -- a process where pattern emerges at the global (collective) level through interactions among the components of the system at the individual level. These interactions explicitly specify the global pattern. We are self-similar to our predecessors and all their reiterations. In the vernacular of chaos theory, we are “strange attractors” or patterns of order within chaos, which never exactly repeat themselves. An observer can never predict exactly what will happen, yet we display a quality of orderliness which hints at underlying “laws not yet discovered.”
As times change so do our metaphors, psychological and otherwise. Self-organization, chaos, and complexity are the basis of the new biology, but it strains the imagination to consider it operating transgenerationally. We might consider the overall effect as a transgenerational field effect -- a relationship of archetypal fields within fields. Memories are accumulating affecting the soul.
Yet here we are, unpredictable though it may be. Souls extend from other souls. Order emerges at the edge of chaos and we are that leading edge of our descent. Our life somehow dances into being. And this is precisely the Mystery of our being, formed by historical, psychosocial, and genetic forces. We are active psychophysical elements of the entire creation. Information and spiritual knowledge is accumulating if we know how to listen deeply with a close attunement to our ancestral and generational themes.
Intuition
Intuition is our common sense, if we just listen to it. Our inner self or unconscious teaches our conscious awareness -- inner tuition, inner sight. We all experience it spontaneously. It appears unpredictably from "out of the blue," or through a dream, as an inspiration, or a "gift" of the Spirit. The language of intuition speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
This sudden, unexpected, often illogical, internal form of perception includes hunches, gut feelings, multisensory sensations, and emotional insights. Both the mind and body have a language of intuition that speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
Intuition is characterized by the following:
1) confidence in the process of intuition;
2) certainty of the truth of intuitive insight;
3) suddenness and immediacy of knowledge;
4) emotion/affect associated with intuitive insight;
5) nonanalytic, nonrational, nonlogical impressions;
6) gestalt nature of knowing;
7) associated with empathy;
8) difficulty putting images into words;
9) relationship to creativity, (Schulz, 1998).
It may be associated with selflessness, letting down barriers, forgetting or going beyond the individual self, feeling united with the All.
Rapport
Rapport is an empathetic or sympathetic relation or connection with another. It is experiencing the world through the same frame as the person you're communicating with. Rapport doesn't require understanding. Sharing rapport is like jumping inside another's nervous system and suddenly understanding the way they make sense of reality. Rapport is also the ability to bond instantly with others.
Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Empathy needs a face! This concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy understood as a unique kind of intentionality. Human empathy is inherently developmental.
Empathy & Mirroring
Consciousness of ourselves as embodied individuals in the world is founded on empathy -- our empathic cognition of others and their empathic perception of us. Empathy is evolved biological capacity. Gestures and tones and sight of the other are recognizable to the infant. We learn and evolve by emulating, imitating, by mirroring.
The mind isn't in the head, but the whole body. Our primordial sensory self-image helps us make the rudimentary distinction between self and non-self. Pre-verbal communication is through gestures and action. The face is an expression of a self available for others.
Human empathy is inherently developmental; we learn it in infancy in the CORE DYAD, coupled dynamics with care-givers. It opens us to pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity -- shared virtualities.
In process-oriented therapy, we share one dynamic pattern of neural-somatic activity. Empathy is essentially a "mimicking" of one person's emotional state by another. Our awareness of ourselves as embodied individuals embedded in the world depends on empathy, in particular our empathic grasp of the Other's empathic grasp of oneself.
Our empathic experience of another depends on our 'coupling' or 'pairing' with the other. It is enhanced by sensitivity to psychophysical cues from the other -- a rudimentary form of mind-reading. To be empathic implies intersubjective openness. This is the nature of empathy -- a dynamic feedback loop. We experience another person as a unified whole through empathy; the more whole we are within ourselves the more that perception is amplified. We transpose ourselves to the place of the Other.
Empathy occurs through the immediate 'pairing' or 'coupling' of the subtle bodies of self and other in action. Through our mirror neurons we are paired in the biological depth of empathy, at the level of passive association of living bodies of self and other in embodied action.
At the level of intentionality, conscious mood-matching, emulation and participation mystique we engage consciously in the process. The empathic grasping of another as animated by his or her own fields of sensation has been called 'sensual empathy' or 'sensing in.'
Facial expression of feelings and emotions are paradigms of some aspects of empathy. We all inherently understand them. Interwoven with this sensual empathy is the experience of the Other animated by the feelings of life.
It is through sharing the sensory dimension of these feelings, our fields of sensation, that we find common ground and begin to merge. The deeper this experience, the greater the degree of merging. When the common ground is the ground state -- the Void -- we merge in cosmic consciousness.
Empathy provides a viewpoint in which one's center of orientation becomes one among others. Our locus of consciousness changes to "all over." The new, more universal zero-point is a new spatial perspective which contains one's zero-point as simply one spatial point among many others.
Literally, no matter how we turn in our bodies, we are always 'here,' but we can also evolve toward a non-local perception of our embedded nature in Nature and Cosmos. It is through empathy as the experience of oneself as an Other for the alter-ego that we gain a viewpoint of our own embodied being beyond the first-person singular.
Reciprocal or reiterated empathy is a self-reflexive, mirroring process. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective. Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathetic experience of me. I experience myself as recognizably conscious from your perspective, the perspective of Other, and the feedback loop is closed. One's sense of self-identity, even at the most fundamental level of embodied agency is inseparable from recognition by another -- and grasping that recognition empathetically.
Empathy -- like imagination, recollection, and reflection -- can be described as a 'self-displacing' or 'self-othering' act. It involves a displacement or fission between my empathizing self and the empathized Other; recollection between my present recollecting self and my past recollected self. It is an imaginal process between myself imagining the Other's viewpoint of my self imagining. It is a house of mirrors of myself reflecting between my reflecting self and the experiences I reflect upon.
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http://imagomundi.com.br/psicologia/hillman_poetic_psychology.pdf
Our genealogical lines may all look like good little soldiers lined up in neat succession marching back through time. But we can also discern complex, nonlinear and cyclic dimensions among the patterns of connectivity that include our primordial consciousness. In this article we will focus on the activity of meaning rather than 'consciousness' itself, a Mystery about which little can be said.
The Family Tree is a growing network of understanding. Genealogy demonstrates that our indefinite lifespan will come to an end just like all relationships. It also demonstrates another level of organization -- simultaneous coexistence and interconnectedness of life. "The motif of the net is the attribute of wisdom; it represents the logos and is the net of understanding in which the Mother can be caught," says Jung, in Modern Psychology, (Vol. 2, Page 148).
We were born into connection and emerge from connection. We have real attachments and internalized relationships. We discover ourselves in the interpersonal field, the stream of impulses, fantasies, and bodily sensations. We find real life beyond habitual socially-ordained responses. We become more conscious of ourselves by including intuition, dreams, and what our body teaches us by extending our playful awareness into active engagement.
Ancestors can be a barrier of trapped emotions or royal road to the unconscious. Genealogy is a relation matrix as is our subtle body. The relational edge is in psychophysical work and embodied therapeutic dialogues. The relational approach is the core of body therapies. Patterns tend to repeat. History repeats itself. Mythic history repeats in cycles.
Primordial Creation
When history begins to speak, it speaks as a Tree, represented as the progenitor of the human race. The very first written story from Sumeria -- the world's oldest poetry -- is a creation story about Inanna and the sacred Tree of Life -- a World Tree with instinctual DNA knowledge living in it. This Tree of Life is the first legend and the link between the transcendental and phenomenal worlds. Our kinship bonds and genealogical ancestry are expressed through the sacred tree archetype.
Joseph Campbell (1965) said Inanna was the Tree herself, the "cosmic tree of life and death" (p. 64). She is the ineffable totality of what is -- the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge which are one and the same as the Tree of Truth.
Jung reminds us, "In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams." (Psychological Reflections, 76).
Vision Tree
The tree is our vegetative self, involuntary action and life in the body. Such experiences are closely related to death, which is a permanent resident of the psyche. The creatures that live in the tree, including the serpent, are our instincts. Jung notes that, "The serpent in Genesis is an illustration of the personified treenumen; hence it is traditionally represented in or coiled round the tree." (CW 9, Aion, Pg 235). The serpent is the tree's voice.
Your body is your subconscious mind. Mind and body are the same because mind is distributed. We are all interdependent. The problem is we have isolated ourselves from each other, from animals, plants, and the inorganic ground of cosmos. We have forgotten our origins and embody a myth of loneliness. Our emotional and intuitive mind naturally engages with and is interactive with nature.
Mindell (1982) likens the dreambody ("subtle body") to a tree. Half is above the ground and can be described medically or biologically as the 'real' body and half is below ground as roots we can sense when we focus our attention on subtle signals in psychophysical reality. Dreambody appears in body images, rituals, and physical therapies.
Jung is very clear that, "...there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than the historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them." (CW 8, Pages 399-403).
The root is a deeper, universal description of matter, symptoms, and experiential realms where experiences are a matter of life and death. It's the hidden dimension, the "dark matter" of our existence. Mindell says, "The trunk of the tree is a dream symbol that bridges the world between deep sentient experiences and symbols."
We can amplify that somatic process by combining instincts, dreams (or trance), and images. The connection depends on unfolding subtle sensations of psyche-matter interactions of psychophysical reality. Somatic rhythms include pulsation, form, flow, construction and deconstruction, and oscillating polarities.
All of our cells are intelligent entities. The autonomic system is loaded with all kinds of receptors modulated by peptides stored in the spine all the way down. They can be emotionally expressed through movement and body-centered work.
There are receptors for chemical messengers on every cell of the body, and this is where memories are stored. Memory is how much the receptors have been stimulated or not. All the history is there. Emotions are universal. They arise at the cellular level from molecular information -- the remote smart key that fits the subconscious lock.
We have receptors in the central nervous system, gastric, endocrine, cardio, circulatory, immune, and skin systems. Peptide receptors are found in all organs, particularly the heart, which has all receptor types for information molecules on it. Our feelings are filtered by these molecules. Chakra regions are like mini-brains. Each is a nerve plexus of receptors that push the body state to do what needs to be done through the wisdom of the body -- Soma Sophia.
The Sumerian goddess takes the sacred tree home to her garden where she nurtures and cares for it. The tree mirrors Inanna herself -- the mirror of divine realities which has all the information of the universe. She comes to terms with all the creatures, including the serpent, that live in that tree, representing the duality of the goddess.
The snake is a personification of the unconscious, for, as early as the Gnostics, it was used as a symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, where the vegetative psyche is localized. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIII, Page 111.
This serpent does not represent "reason" or anything approaching it, but rather symbolizes a peculiar autonomous mind which can possess one completely,
a spirit of revelation which gives us "Intuitionen" (intuitions).
~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 215.
Psyche symbolically unites the lower instinctual urges with the higher spiritual instincts and expresses them in the clear vision of modified and integrated images. The soul creates symbols that anticipates future alterations of consciousness, presaging uniting the opposites in wholeness -- upper and lower worlds.
Later she turns her tree into her throne and bed used in the "Sacred Marriage." She also makes the first recorded initiatory descent into the realm of the dead -- the realm of metatruths. Jung reminds us, "We don't attain any "ultimate truths" at all, but on the way to them we discover a whole lot of astonishing partial truths. (Letters Vol. II, 504-506)
Scholars (Wolkstein & Kramer 1983:51-89) link the cutting of the World Tree to the destruction of a cyclical view of life, death, and renewal to a linear view of life and death with the underworld as its end.
Descent & Renewal
The underworld is a dreamland of soul where we can retreat to interact with other psyches. We can explore the ancestral underworld through myths, folklore and visionary journeying, as a place of ageless wisdom and regenerative power. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The underworld and its powers of transformation and rebirth are the roots of the tree, essential to anyone on a spiritual path. Death is not the psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that holds away death prevents life. When the physical form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds things in their form is the secret of death.
Jung says, ""He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. (Liber Novus, Page 244). There is nothing to be done when we are emptied of certainty, doing, and being. Imaginal images don't require validation from external events. Hades means invisible -- unseen yet absolutely present. The invisible, whether we call them archetypes, gods or whatever, are only visible as metaphors which speak for themselves.
Metaphorical death, our morbidity is an enactment of that fantasy -- a way of mythologizing -- a disheartening mortification. In alchemy, mortificatio is the process of death, destruction and decomposition. It is a death-sentence for the ego from immersion in the unconscious. But if we remain paralyzed too long, we suffer the consequences. When we look for the cryptic key we ask what this particular image has do with my death.
Our deep nature is primordial wildness, aliveness, and intensity of images which automatically free the butterfly of the soul. As Hillman says, the revelations of fantasy expose the divine. Resemblance is a bridge to events. We can't be just objective observers because we participate in, are subjected to, wounded by, and suffer our images. The abysmal reality is that all changes and life demand sacrifices.
Even if we are fearful, we can repeat Inanna's journey to the underworld, the psyche with its radically altered view of life. This bed-rock of reality is devoid of feeling and empty of meaning. She makes an initiatory descent to reclaim the neglected side of life for the sake of making soul. The underworld and its dreams are not to be exploited to help to fix up our daytime life. We should not mine our dreams for images, ideas, and information that can help us be more productive and functional in mundane life.
Hillman (1979) cautions that, "It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn."
In her dark descent, Inanna reclaims the unloving, unloved, abandoned, instinctual, raging, greedy, desirous, unfulfilled, and desperately lonely parts by attending to the depths, by giving it attention, by valuing it, by expressing it. She renews the relationship with her dark ancestress-sister and queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal. The creative energy of the primordial beginning feeds us and heals the suffering heart and soul. Instinctual life informs and powers our work. The creative process is renewed.
The Threshold
In the poem, Inanna moves inward and abandons the mundane world, the physical world, for her adventure into chaos by following her uncertainty. She deals with matters affecting her deeper soul -- imaginative possibilities in our nature -- and connects to her own power. The constructed notion of self is challenged and dies. For this to work for ourselves we must understand that medication, impatience, and fear of death are obstacles. Our pathologizing is a way of seeing and part of our wholeness.
The Sumerian word for ear and wisdom are the same. Inanna opens her ear to the Great Below, she "tunes in" or "listens up" to natural wisdom, the harmonization of thinking and feeling. She enters through the "seven gates" - the chakras or central nervous system. She is depressed, grieves and mourns the existence of suffering and pain in the world.
The myth speaks to anyone who undergoes a transformation. We must release or at least challenge our values or perspectives, and become vulnerable to the frightening possibility of change. The conscious part of the psyche witnesses the events below. Mourners rescue Inanna and bring her back to life. She is regenerated, resurrected by moving from a dissociated state to the detached observer self, to an associated state.
In our genealogy work, we mourn and resurrect our ancestors. We associate with them. Our family tree, our family system or ancestral field of information and energy is like a torus whose branches reconnect with their roots -- a hyperdimensional labyrinth that is the model of our universe.
When we visit the underworld, we visit our roots that fund our being. Flow emerges from awareness. Campbell likened the successful adventure to unlocking and releasing the flow of life into the body of the world. The living tree is our living web of interactions, including habits (trunk), our senses (branches), situation awareness (tip of branches), reasoning (emergent guidance), and resource flow (nurturance). Connecting those fields is flow.
Into the Labyrinth
Feeling is the entry point of this epic journey which may seem like a foreign country with a language you don't yet know. Subtle signals can be aroused within the genealogical exploratory process that we can use for deepening our connections, while we hold onto the red thread that maintains our connection to the present.
A journal or sketch-book may help. Attention can be directed to all manner of processes where something new is being formed -- in creative process, learning, thinking, and decision making. What's familiar is what was there first. What was there first is family and the first remembered experiences between 0-5 years old -- what feels good and what feels bad.
You can make a somatic bridge -- a channel to a subliminal or subjective feeling in your body that reflects your internal states so you can change the structure of the experience. States have two components: increasing absorption and a continually narrowing focus of attention. That is a trance. It communicates primally in spatial location, proximity, direction, size, movement, and feeling. We can locate where it is in the body by a first impression. The information is there when we know how to ask for it.
We may not be sure which direction we're going or how far we've gone. The path may twist or slowly turn into an experience that’s about being lost, both literally and metaphorically. The maze starts to feel more like a forest. It starts to feel like it’s changing as you 'walk' the labyrinth. Voices may start telling stories about experiences that threw their world out of order or made them feel more complete.
Feeling our way into the dark may sharpen other senses in the absence of sight and hearing. We may wonder if there are walls to the labyrinth, or just empty space. We have to reach far enough to find out. We have to focus right where we are as we continue stepping forward into nothing. It may feel bigger than we expected.
Genealogy is our map of the unconscious. When we enter the dark door, the Red Thread shows us the way, igniting the imagination, awakening the soul. You link your Tree to the World Tree, your history to world history and mythology.
Immersion is virtual reality, like actually "being there." We learn certain well-worn pathways from the present into the past. Focusing means holding a kind of open, non-judging attention to an internal knowing which is directly experienced but is not yet in words. We can use focusing to become clear on what we feel or want , to obtain new insights about our situation, and to stimulate change or healing of the situation.
The World Tree maintains the cycles of life and death. The old cyclical understanding of death as merely one stage in the eternal round of birth, death, and renewal, symbolized by the tree, was replaced by a linear perception of life with death and the underworld as the end.
Walking the Labyrinth of our ancestral lines is a deeply meditative process that arouses spirit, intuition and gnosis from a deep sleep. It is a way of soul retrieval, uniting our personal and collective unconscious. It is a process of digging through the past, overturning old notions. Nothing lives as long as deep memory. Emotional states reveal and change what we pay attention to. Our nervous system filters our experience before it becomes conscious.
Pattern Recognition
Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life. Jung notes, "Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness." (CW 20; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Page 246; Para 330.)
There are things we cannot find at all but dream they can be found in other people, including our ancestors. Perhaps the real question is how did we ever so thoroughly cut off our recent and distant ancestors -- our own Grail? How did we lose knowledge of who we are and where we come from when traditionally ancestry has a high cross-cultural value?
In our dreams we are occupied by different souls, night after night. We too easily define ourselves as individuals. Isn't the question always, "Why?" "Why am I like this?" when it could be "Who" -- who in me is this like? But to truly answer it we need a list of the "usual suspects" to suss it out.
We need to get to know them -- to form some kind of relationship to their essential being. Richard Tarnas has called synchronicity "an invitation to a relationship with the mystery of life." It is an ongoing spiritual relationship we can use as a compensation to our one-sided conscious ego attitude. Jung reminds us that, "At all events wisdom cannot be taught by words. It is only possible by personal contact and by immediate experience." (Letters Volume 1, Pages 559-560.)
Mindell says we must risk sacrificing our conscious and cultural principles and follow the unpredictable dictates of the body symptoms and relationship signals. The dreambody uses all our channels of perception including unintentional movements.
Symptoms arise from the collective world -- the primal field. The unconscious is all around us in the ensouled world as Anima Mundi, giver of wisdom and enlightenment. We remain open to the possibility that the world around us carries symbolically saturated meaning.
As we become more conversant with our ancestral lines, we find ourselves looking more and more in the right direction for resonating patterns, then asking, "What does it all mean?" In this way genealogy leads toward the perennial questions of identity and direction.
There are many ways to feel the shift. We help the felt sense form and accurately identify its meaning by trying out words that might express it. We can test these words against the felt sense. Felt-sense will not resonate with a word or phrase that does not adequately describe it.
We may feel movement or even feel stuck, but we are still having fresh insights and intuitions about what steps to take next. The essence of focusing is a sense of flow where we become aware of the meaning behind words and images.
Archetypal Transference
For those working through their genealogy without a therapist, transference may still occur. According to Jung, "A transference in the clinical sense does not always need a personal relationship as a bridge, but can take place via a book, a piece of hearsay, or a legend." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506)
Archetypal transference is a bridge to feelings, ideas, impulses, needs, fantasies, and images. It may also arouse fear, shame, anger, and hostility. They won't feel like they belong to your subjective mind, but are a bridge to your reality, who you are and how you adapt.
This connects us with our essential being and keeps the process moving. It holds a wealth of meanings beyond personal likes and dislikes. The symbolic, psychological bridge is built of similarities and differences.
We learn to touch and relate to other views through our subjective reactions and fantasies to build relationship. Merging and mirroring expands our felt-sense with this experiential approach to the interactive relational field.
Felt-sense is pre-verbal and largely unconscious. The felt sense is the embodiment (bringing awareness inside the body) of our ever-changing sensory/energetic/emotional landscape. It moves our focus from actions and things happening outside us in the world to qualities of our present, internal experience (e.g. textures, colors, temperature, sensations, trembling).
Soma & Sophia
A guiding force can emerge from a single ancestor or collective -- a field phenomena which can be more than projection of the wise old person. Following Jung, “When something long since passed . . . comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.” (Red Book)
The mobilization of the transcendent function orchestrates the process of transforming the family system. This dynamic urges us toward growth, consciousness, and transformation. We give up the psychological safety net and enter into the flow of life, just as we are. We enter a life of immanence where life is sacred.
When we say 'trust the process' for creating experience inside we mean let go of self and trust the transcendent process. Overinvestment or a need to control the situation can undermine ability to trust the process. Effortless intention is wanting to succeed but not really caring if you do or not.
Emotional Shift
Playfulness and openness facilitate processing. The body itself becomes an instrument. We invest by having an interest in an outcome without needing to control events. Controlling the process is not the same as controlling the event.
As part of the process we respond in a cooperative manner. We change what we pay attention to. Invest in the process not the outcome. Jung suggests, "For me the archetype means: an image of a probable sequence of events, an habitual current of psychic energy." (Letters Vol. II, P. 504-506)
Part of openness is ability to suspend disbelief or willingness to see what happens when the critical faculty relaxes. We let go of the need to analyze and acquire enough familiarity and sensory acuity to find comfort in this process of renewal. The sense of energy is focused awareness, openness, trust, and guiding the process.
The process can be guided by visualization as long as you energize it. Colors and temperatures are connected to feelings and the first impression is important just as it is in identifying where in the body the feeling resides. The more data we ask for the more absorbed we become. Guidance is gentle, almost effortless in intentional and spontaneous experiences, and engagement of imagination.
Awareness is the most powerful tool because it is generated by your nervous system. 'Knowing' emerges as knowledge with no known explanation for the information. We can't explain it and we don't need to. It may involve many subtle sources -- forgotten, subliminal, factual, unconscious cues, ESP, etc. This is the 'Know thyself' of self-realization and gnosis -- direct experience, emotional memory and intuitive response.
Knowing guides energy, order and sequence, intensity and flow. Energy itself is a form of knowing and feedback. Knowing is perceptible as changes in the body and feedback of sensory information in a way the nervous system understands -- the deep trance of neurological absorption. It may feel like you're making it up, but that is fine. Just pay attention to the process that is happening. The process is guided by the state and energy flow. The state focuses awareness and guides the energy.
No matter what the state, the body is the quickest way to change your state. Body position can be a trigger for events. In the process you learn how to regulate your nervous system more effectively with confidence in the outcome.
Knowing is closely associated with or enhanced by feelings of connection and sensing energy through the body. You can use your hands and breath and voice. Knowing is an integral process involving proprioception and mirror neurons (the physiological feedback of intuition). The human energy field is a highly organized information grid.
Instinctive knowing may always be there but may go unrecognized, though it is a part of the guiding process -- redirecting your awareness. Changes in how your body feels guides the process. You don't have to believe it; just don't fight it. You can change if you fully engage in the project and become focused and absorbed.
We can go back and explore or change the story. We can focus on the energetic level and sense certain qualities and what is needed in our system. So, connection and sense of energy combines with physical state, focused awareness, and embodied cognition.
The mind is not only connected to the body, the body influences the mind. Cognition isn't confined to the brain but grounded in bodily experience and embodied in metaphorical thought. Metaphors are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain as primary experiences.
Knowing or intuition can tell us what to do. We know what needs to be done and we do it. We simply know how to accept and express. Let the system process and express. No matter what you think, the nervous system always knows, and we don't need to know consciously. Everything that bothers you is in your body. The first impulse on where it is in the body is always it. This body wisdom is known as Sophia by the gnostics.
Rites of Passage
Genealogy makes us think about the nature of time and space, our own deepest nature, and cosmos -- and our relationship to it. Entering our genealogy with a sensitivity to the phenomena that might arise means we are more attuned, more likely to notice when they arise within us and what they call forth. We may or may not recognize them as indirect contextual hypnosis -- essentially trance states. We have to know what to look and listen for.
Fear and pain are the great equalizers of life from which no one is immune. All molecules of emotions modulate pain. Emotions are fueled by an underlying feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness -- stress. Our reactions to our inherited issues and the behavior of others may range from avoidant to compensatory, from alienation to compassion. All emotions are feelings but not all feelings are emotions.
Emotions play out in the body. Feelings come from subconscious cognition after an emotion -- a mental association and portrayal of body states. They are experiences of body states that play out in the mind as the brain interprets emotions and assigns meaning. Feelings are physical states arising from the body’s responses to external stimuli, such as threat, fear, and horror. They are influenced by subjective experience, beliefs, and memories.
The light at the end of the generational tunnel is our rebirth -- the hope that we do transform as we become more conscious of the deep past within us and can learn to carry our inheritance more gracefully.
We do not need to presume the notion of past lives as much as the idea that we can learn from any number of relevant passed lives that are mobilized from the collective unconscious. If the soul needs an outer drama to awaken, it pulls into conscious awareness the inner myth and seeded story it carries within. Genealogy provides just such an epic drama.
"That people should succumb to these eternal images is entirely normal, in fact it is what these images are for. They are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation." (Jung)
Rapport, Resonance, Entrainment
State control leads to rapport. Physiology controls psychology. As we become more keenly attuned to the psychophysical sensations of arising emotions, we become more keenly attuned to their significance within the ancestral field. At the informational level, our bones are their bones, our nerve pathways are their nerves, our blood is their blood. Sometimes images emerge from the mist of the unconscious through the body.
This meaning is clearly more subtle than the form itself. But in turn, such a meaning can be grasped in yet another somatic form; electrical - chemical and other activity in the brain and the rest of the nervous system - which is evidently more subtle than the original somatic form that gave rise to it. This distinction of subtle and manifest is clearly only relative, since what is manifest in one level may be subtle on another. (Goertzel)
Intuition gives insight into the underlying meaning of our disorders and life challenges. We can learn our own body's unique perceptive language. By learning to pay attention to, read and understand our sensations, movements, dreams, memories and the signals of distress and disease, we can strengthen our mind-body consciousness with this sensory feedback loop. If we fall under the sway of an ancestral affect, we can gauge and pace our hyperarousal. Otherwise, we might dissociate, freeze, or be overwhelmed.
Some body sensations describe the state of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). We can learn to recognize under or overarousal of the ANS. A quick body scan not lingering on any sensation too long, and awareness of active bodily sensations anchors us firmly in the present. Sensing the body we can also remember sensations and feel those now.
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We may yearn for that which we cannot name. Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. We will be confronted repeatedly with digesting ancestral trauma narratives. Simple body awareness can calm hyperarousal and stop persistent panic attacks.
We can build a structured increase of tolerance for bodily sensations. We can practice dual awareness -- holding simultaneous awareness of multiple stimuli. We can view whatever we perceive, for example, from an observer self.
In some sense, we are the resting place of the ashes, or the tomb of the family as well as its renewal. Unfortunately, inherited or epigenetic, half of all children now have either chronic illness or are overweight.
Shifts in neurotransmitter levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we consciously or unconsciously "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us, within us. Such patterns and internalization tend to repeat within families.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply-connected with an intuitive sense of meaning (active information), in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality.
Bohm talks about levels of somatic unfoldment of meaning. Each level goes toward a more manifest somatic state. And this goes on until the action finally emerges as a physical movement of the body that affects the environment.
So there is a two-way movement of energy. Each level of significance acts on the next more manifest somatic level. And the perception carries the meaning of the action back in the other direction.
Mythologically, our spine is a Tree of Life that connects from deep in the center of the earth, to high in the sky -- a cosmic Axis Mundi.
Sensory & Pre-sensory Levels
So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even unconscious fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams. They may be as primordial as oscillations, vibrations, twinges, spasms, floating, or even sensory deprivation. Tears welling up, or a stinging sensation when we resist crying, can be related to any intense emotion, not just sadness.
Motion & Emotion
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or get a sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. But affective proprioception is more than a map of peripheral receptors. Curiosities such as phantom limb phenomena, the dreambody, and our energy body show the imaginal and primal aspects of proprioception. Proprioceptions affect us from the subquantal, to cellular, to holistic level.
Somatosensory Feedback
Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement in psychical and imaginal life. It links us with temperature, tactility, texture, and the four primordial elements -- fire, air, water, and earth, as well as their transmutation. Inflammations, flights of fancy, inundations, tilling and grounding all have a place in our psychophysical life. It may be as simple as the felt-sense of the rhythms of life.
This holistic process includes symbol formation, which can include disease or images of disease -- the feared cancer, the exploding heart, boiling blood, the holding-in of stoicism and repression, the crushing weight of depression. We may experience 'guilty' headaches that are like torture, or 'conceive' of the malfunctions or abuse of our reproductive systems.
We know Jung has famously said that "the gods have become diseases," and the same may be true of some ancestors. We can ask ourselves how we are "like" them based on what experience and history tell us about their lives and deaths.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. We can use sculpting, dance, movement therapies, and a host of other techniques to discern where those impulses want to go. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal, each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. For example, energies ascend and descend along the spine. Other communication channels are biophotons, electromagnetic effects, and chemical signals such as neurohormones -- the chemicals of emotion. Emotions obviously have bodily effects.
Dark and scary things lurk at the edge of our existence. "Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations within (or without) the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty. A change of meaning is a change of being.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia.
Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing -- form and flow.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell.
Many disorders begin in the womb, from fetal alcohol syndrome to the sense that the world is not a safe place based on the mother's body chemistry and poisons conveyed to the unborn child even by her dreams and mental state. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing.
At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
"Here, here's where we live
Here is a sea, my family
We'll always be young as we've ever been
Death will not part us again nearer to heaven than
10,000 ancestors who dream of me
Well I hear you dreaming of me
Yeah sometimes, dream of me!"
The Albatross, (Rickie Lee Jones/Leo Kottke/John Leftwich)
Exploring the unconscious through genealogy or psychogenealogy is a healing process, an uplifting engagement that is foundational to self-realization. We are no longer relegated to a single contemporary place and time. The ancestors remained an important part of daily life not so long ago, and remain so for many indigenous societies.
We Are Highly Improbable
Scientists have calculated that each unique individual is highly improbable -- apparently a rather miraculous 400 trillion to one chance. The odds of us existing, 1:400 trillion, are virtually zero. Conversely, by the 40th generation we have over a trillion ancestors. We have to consider the odds of our parents meeting relative to the number of people on Earth. Then consider the odds of contact leading further in competition with all the others we meet.
The probability dwindles of a long-term relationship and reproduction, the right sperm and egg combining, and finally the probabilities of each of our trillion+ ancestors successfully mating with all the variables of genetics that make up the chain of those all those ancestors -- the Tree of Life of perfect eternal fruits. Jung notes obviously that, "Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter."
You are a virtual miracle, which is simply an event so improbable it is unlikely to occur. So each life is unique and precious to the nth degree as the result of the cumulative process of increasing information. Even Jung might be challenged to call it a fortuitous series of synchronicities. We are an emergent phenomenon. There are mere chance occurrences as well as synchronicity. So, another model is self-organizing chaos in multiple systems.
Field, Form & Fate
Self-organization is the structure of creation -- a process where pattern emerges at the global (collective) level through interactions among the components of the system at the individual level. These interactions explicitly specify the global pattern. We are self-similar to our predecessors and all their reiterations. In the vernacular of chaos theory, we are “strange attractors” or patterns of order within chaos, which never exactly repeat themselves. An observer can never predict exactly what will happen, yet we display a quality of orderliness which hints at underlying “laws not yet discovered.”
As times change so do our metaphors, psychological and otherwise. Self-organization, chaos, and complexity are the basis of the new biology, but it strains the imagination to consider it operating transgenerationally. We might consider the overall effect as a transgenerational field effect -- a relationship of archetypal fields within fields. Memories are accumulating affecting the soul.
Yet here we are, unpredictable though it may be. Souls extend from other souls. Order emerges at the edge of chaos and we are that leading edge of our descent. Our life somehow dances into being. And this is precisely the Mystery of our being, formed by historical, psychosocial, and genetic forces. We are active psychophysical elements of the entire creation. Information and spiritual knowledge is accumulating if we know how to listen deeply with a close attunement to our ancestral and generational themes.
Intuition
Intuition is our common sense, if we just listen to it. Our inner self or unconscious teaches our conscious awareness -- inner tuition, inner sight. We all experience it spontaneously. It appears unpredictably from "out of the blue," or through a dream, as an inspiration, or a "gift" of the Spirit. The language of intuition speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
This sudden, unexpected, often illogical, internal form of perception includes hunches, gut feelings, multisensory sensations, and emotional insights. Both the mind and body have a language of intuition that speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
Intuition is characterized by the following:
1) confidence in the process of intuition;
2) certainty of the truth of intuitive insight;
3) suddenness and immediacy of knowledge;
4) emotion/affect associated with intuitive insight;
5) nonanalytic, nonrational, nonlogical impressions;
6) gestalt nature of knowing;
7) associated with empathy;
8) difficulty putting images into words;
9) relationship to creativity, (Schulz, 1998).
It may be associated with selflessness, letting down barriers, forgetting or going beyond the individual self, feeling united with the All.
Rapport
Rapport is an empathetic or sympathetic relation or connection with another. It is experiencing the world through the same frame as the person you're communicating with. Rapport doesn't require understanding. Sharing rapport is like jumping inside another's nervous system and suddenly understanding the way they make sense of reality. Rapport is also the ability to bond instantly with others.
Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Empathy needs a face! This concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy understood as a unique kind of intentionality. Human empathy is inherently developmental.
Empathy & Mirroring
Consciousness of ourselves as embodied individuals in the world is founded on empathy -- our empathic cognition of others and their empathic perception of us. Empathy is evolved biological capacity. Gestures and tones and sight of the other are recognizable to the infant. We learn and evolve by emulating, imitating, by mirroring.
The mind isn't in the head, but the whole body. Our primordial sensory self-image helps us make the rudimentary distinction between self and non-self. Pre-verbal communication is through gestures and action. The face is an expression of a self available for others.
Human empathy is inherently developmental; we learn it in infancy in the CORE DYAD, coupled dynamics with care-givers. It opens us to pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity -- shared virtualities.
In process-oriented therapy, we share one dynamic pattern of neural-somatic activity. Empathy is essentially a "mimicking" of one person's emotional state by another. Our awareness of ourselves as embodied individuals embedded in the world depends on empathy, in particular our empathic grasp of the Other's empathic grasp of oneself.
Our empathic experience of another depends on our 'coupling' or 'pairing' with the other. It is enhanced by sensitivity to psychophysical cues from the other -- a rudimentary form of mind-reading. To be empathic implies intersubjective openness. This is the nature of empathy -- a dynamic feedback loop. We experience another person as a unified whole through empathy; the more whole we are within ourselves the more that perception is amplified. We transpose ourselves to the place of the Other.
Empathy occurs through the immediate 'pairing' or 'coupling' of the subtle bodies of self and other in action. Through our mirror neurons we are paired in the biological depth of empathy, at the level of passive association of living bodies of self and other in embodied action.
At the level of intentionality, conscious mood-matching, emulation and participation mystique we engage consciously in the process. The empathic grasping of another as animated by his or her own fields of sensation has been called 'sensual empathy' or 'sensing in.'
Facial expression of feelings and emotions are paradigms of some aspects of empathy. We all inherently understand them. Interwoven with this sensual empathy is the experience of the Other animated by the feelings of life.
It is through sharing the sensory dimension of these feelings, our fields of sensation, that we find common ground and begin to merge. The deeper this experience, the greater the degree of merging. When the common ground is the ground state -- the Void -- we merge in cosmic consciousness.
Empathy provides a viewpoint in which one's center of orientation becomes one among others. Our locus of consciousness changes to "all over." The new, more universal zero-point is a new spatial perspective which contains one's zero-point as simply one spatial point among many others.
Literally, no matter how we turn in our bodies, we are always 'here,' but we can also evolve toward a non-local perception of our embedded nature in Nature and Cosmos. It is through empathy as the experience of oneself as an Other for the alter-ego that we gain a viewpoint of our own embodied being beyond the first-person singular.
Reciprocal or reiterated empathy is a self-reflexive, mirroring process. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective. Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathetic experience of me. I experience myself as recognizably conscious from your perspective, the perspective of Other, and the feedback loop is closed. One's sense of self-identity, even at the most fundamental level of embodied agency is inseparable from recognition by another -- and grasping that recognition empathetically.
Empathy -- like imagination, recollection, and reflection -- can be described as a 'self-displacing' or 'self-othering' act. It involves a displacement or fission between my empathizing self and the empathized Other; recollection between my present recollecting self and my past recollected self. It is an imaginal process between myself imagining the Other's viewpoint of my self imagining. It is a house of mirrors of myself reflecting between my reflecting self and the experiences I reflect upon.
*
http://imagomundi.com.br/psicologia/hillman_poetic_psychology.pdf
Context & Emergence
Our genealogical lines may all look like good little soldiers lined up in neat succession marching back through time. But we can also discern complex, nonlinear and cyclic dimensions among the patterns of connectivity.
The family tree is a growing network of understanding. Genealogy demonstrates that our indefinite lifespan will come to an end just like all relationships. It also demonstrates another level of organization -- simultaneous coexistence and interconnectedness of life.
We were born into connection and emerge from connection. We have real attachments and internalized relationships. We discover ourselves in the interpersonal field, the stream of impulses, fantasies, and bodily sensations. We find real life beyond habitual socially-ordained responses. We become more conscious of ourselves by including intuition, dreams, and what our body teaches us by extending our playful awareness into active engagement.
Ancestors can be a barrier or royal road to the unconscious. Genealogy is a relation matrix as is our subtle body. The relational edge is in psychophysical work and embodied therapeutic dialogues. The relational approach is the core of body therapies. Patterns tend to repeat. History repeats itself. Mythic history repeats itself.
Primordial Creation
The very first written story from Sumeria -- the oldest poetry -- is a creation story about Inanna and the sacred Tree of Life -- a World Tree with instinctual DNA knowledge living in it. Joseph Campbell (1965) said Inanna was the Tree herself, the "cosmic tree of life" and death (p. 64). She is the ineffable totality of what is.
Vision Tree
The tree is our vegetative self, involuntary action and life in the body. Such experiences are closely related to death, which is a permanent resident of the psyche. The creatures that live in the tree, including the serpent, are our instincts. Your body is your subconscious mind. Mind and body are the same because mind is distributed.
We are all interdependent. The problem is we have isolated ourselves from each other, from animals, plants, and the inorganic ground of cosmos. We have forgotten our origins and embody a myth of loneliness. Our emotional and intuitive mind naturally engages with and is interactive with nature.
Mindell (1982) likens the dreambody ("subtle body") to a tree. Half is above the ground and can be described medically or biologically as the 'real' body and half is below ground as roots we can sense when we focus our attention on subtle signals in psychophysical reality. Dreambody appears in body images, rituals, and physical therapies.
The root is a deeper, universal description of matter, symptoms, and experiential realms where experiences are a matter of life and death. It's the hidden dimension, the "dark matter" of our existence. Mindell says, "The trunk of the tree is a dream symbol that bridges the world between deep sentient experiences and symbols."
We can amplify that somatic process. The connection depends on unfolding subtle sensations of psyche-matter interactions. Somatic rhythms include pulsation, form, flow, construction and deconstruction, and oscillating polarities.
All of our cells are intelligent entities. The autonomic system is loaded with all kinds of receptors modulated by peptides stored in the spine all the way down. They can be emotionally expressed through movement and body-centered work.
There are receptors for chemical messengers on every cell of the body, and this is where memories are stored. Memory is how much the receptors have been stimulated or not. All the history is there. Emotions are universal. They arise at the cellular level from molecular information -- the remote smart key that fits the subconscious lock.
We have receptors in the central nervous system, gastric, endocrine, cardio, circulatory, immune, and skin systems. Peptide receptors are found in all organs, particularly the heart, which has all receptor types for information molecules on it. Our feelings are filtered by these molecules. Chakra regions are like mini-brains. Each is a nerve plexus of receptors that push the body state to do what needs to be done through the wisdom of the body -- Soma Sophia.
The Sumerian goddess takes the sacred tree home to her garden where she nurtures and cares for it. The tree mirrors Inanna herself -- the mirror of divine realities which has all the information of the universe. She comes to terms with all the creatures that live in that tree, representing the duality of the goddess.
Psyche symbolically unites the lower instinctual urges with the higher spiritual instincts and expresses them in the clear vision of modified and integrated images. The soul creates symbols that anticipates future alterations of consciousness, presaging uniting the opposites in wholeness -- upper and lower worlds.
Later she turns her tree into her throne and bed used in the "Sacred Marriage." She also makes the first recorded initiatory descent into the realm of the dead -- the realm of metatruths. Jung reminds us, "We don't attain any "ultimate truths" at all, but on the way to them we discover a whole lot of astonishing partial truths. (Letters Vol. II, 504-506)
Scholars (Wolkstein & Kramer 1983:51-89) link the cutting of the World Tree to the destruction of a cyclical view of life, death, and renewal to a linear view of life and death with the underworld as its end.
Descent & Renewal
The underworld is a dreamland of soul where we can retreat to interact with other psyches. We can explore the ancestral underworld through myths, folklore and visionary journeying, as a place of ageless wisdom and regenerative power. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The underworld and its powers of transformation and rebirth are the roots of the tree, essential to anyone on a spiritual path. Death is not the psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that holds away death prevents life. When the physical form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds things in their form is the secret of death.
There is nothing to be done when we are emptied of certainty, doing, and being. Imaginal images don't require validation from external events. Hades means invisible -- unseen yet absolutely present. The invisible, whether we call them archetypes, gods or whatever, are only visible as metaphors which speak for themselves.
Metaphorical death, our morbidity is an enactment of that fantasy -- a way of mythologizing -- a disheartening mortification. In alchemy, mortificatio is the process of death, destruction and decomposition. It is a death-sentence for the ego. But if we remain paralyzed too long, we suffer the consequences. When we look for the cryptic key we ask what this particular image has do with my death.
Our deep nature is primordial wildness, aliveness, and intensity of images which automatically free the butterfly of the soul. As Hillman says, the revelations of fantasy expose the divine. Resemblance is a bridge to events. We can't be just objective observers because we participate in, are subjected to, wounded by, and suffer our images. The abysmal reality is that all changes and life demand sacrifices.
Even if we are fearful, we can repeat Inanna's journey to the underworld, the psyche with its radically altered view of life. This bed-rock of reality is devoid of feeling and empty of meaning. She makes an initiatory descent to reclaim the neglected side of life for the sake of making soul. The underworld and its dreams are not to be exploited to help to fix up our daytime life. We should not mine our dreams for images, ideas, and information that can help us be more productive and functional in mundane life.
Hillman (1979) cautions that, "It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn."
In her dark descent, Inanna reclaims the unloving, unloved, abandoned, instinctual, raging, greedy, desirous, unfulfilled, and desperately lonely parts by attending to the depths, by giving it attention, by valuing it, by expressing it. She renews the relationship with her dark ancestress-sister and queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal. The creative energy of the primordial beginning feeds us and heals the suffering heart and soul. Instinctual life informs and powers our work. The creative process is renewed.
The Threshold
In the poem, Inanna moves inward and abandons the mundane world, the physical world, for her adventure into chaos by following her uncertainty. She deals with matters affecting her deeper soul -- imaginative possibilities in our nature -- and connects to her own power. The constructed notion of self is challenged and dies. For this to work for ourselves we must understand that medication, impatience, and fear of death are obstacles. Our pathologizing is a way of seeing and part of our wholeness.
The Sumerian word for ear and wisdom are the same. Inanna opens her ear to the Great Below, she "tunes in" or "listens up" to natural wisdom. She enters through the "seven gates" - the chakras or central nervous system. She is depressed, grieves and mourns the existence of suffering and pain in the world.
The myth speaks to anyone who undergoes a transformation. We must release or at least challenge our values or perspectives, and become vulnerable to the frightening possibility of change. The conscious part of the psyche witnesses the events below. Mourners rescue Inanna and bring her back to life. She is regenerated, resurrected by moving from a dissociated state to the detached observer self, to an associated state.
In our genealogy work, we mourn and resurrect our ancestors. We associate with them. Our family tree, our family system or ancestral field of information and energy is like a torus whose branches reconnect with their roots -- a hyperdimensional labyrinth that is the model of our universe.
When we visit the underworld, we visit our roots that fund our being. Flow emerges from awareness. Campbell likened the successful adventure to unlocking and releasing the flow of life into the body of the world. The living tree is our living web of interactions, including habits (trunk), our senses (branches), situation awareness (tip of branches), reasoning (emergent guidance), and resource flow (nurturance). Connecting those fields is flow.
Into the Labyrinth
Feeling is the entry point of this epic journey which may seem like a foreign country with a language you don't yet know. Subtle signals can be aroused within the genealogical exploratory process that we can use for deepening our connections, while we hold onto the red thread that maintains our connection to the present.
A journal or sketch-book may help. Attention can be directed to all manner of processes where something new is being formed -- in creative process, learning, thinking, and decision making. What's familiar is what was there first. What was there first is family and the first remembered experiences between 0-5 years old -- what feels good and what feels bad.
You can make a somatic bridge -- a channel to a subliminal or subjective feeling in your body that reflects your internal states so you can change the structure of the experience. States have two components: increasing absorption and a continually narrowing focus of attention. That is a trance. It communicates primally in spatial location, proximity, direction, size, movement, and feeling. We can locate where it is in the body by a first impression. The information is there when we know how to ask for it.
We may not be sure which direction we're going or how far we've gone. The path may twist or slowly turn into an experience that’s about being lost, both literally and metaphorically. The maze starts to feel more like a forest. It starts to feel like it’s changing as you 'walk' the labyrinth. Voices may start telling stories about experiences that threw their world out of order or made them feel more complete.
Feeling our way into the dark may sharpen other senses in the absence of sight and hearing. We may wonder if there are walls to the labyrinth, or just empty space. We have to reach far enough to find out. We have to focus right where we are as we continue stepping forward into nothing. It may feel bigger than we expected.
Genealogy is our map of the unconscious. When we enter the dark door, the Red Thread shows us the way, igniting the imagination, awakening the soul. You link your Tree to the World Tree, your history to world history and mythology.
Immersion is virtual reality, like actually "being there." We learn certain well-worn pathways from the present into the past. Focusing means holding a kind of open, non-judging attention to an internal knowing which is directly experienced but is not yet in words. We can use focusing to become clear on what we feel or want , to obtain new insights about our situation, and to stimulate change or healing of the situation.
The World Tree maintains the cycles of life and death. The old cyclical understanding of death as merely one stage in the eternal round of birth, death, and renewal, symbolized by the tree, was replaced by a linear perception of life with death and the underworld as the end.
Walking the Labyrinth of our ancestral lines is a deeply meditative process that arouses spirit, intuition and gnosis from a deep sleep. It is a way of soul retrieval, uniting our personal and collective unconscious. It is a process of digging through the past, overturning old notions. Nothing lives as long as deep memory. Emotional states reveal and change what we pay attention to. Our nervous system filters our experience before it becomes conscious.
Pattern Recognition
Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life. There are things we cannot find at all but dream they can be found in other people, including our ancestors. Perhaps the real question is how did we ever so thoroughly cut off our recent and distant ancestors -- our own Grail? How did we lose knowledge of who we are and where we come from when traditionally ancestry has a high cross-cultural value?
In our dreams we are occupied by different souls, night after night. We too easily define ourselves as individuals. Isn't the question always, "Why?" "Why am I like this?" when it could be "Who" -- who in me is this like? But to truly answer it we need a list of the "usual suspects" to suss it out.
We need to get to know them -- to form some kind of relationship to their essential being. Richard Tarnas has called synchronicity "an invitation to a relationship with the mystery of life." It is an ongoing spiritual relationship we can use as a compensation to our one-sided conscious ego attitude.
Mindell says we must risk sacrificing our conscious and cultural principles and follow the unpredictable dictates of the body symptoms and relationship signals. The dreambody uses all our channels of perception including unintentional movements. Symptoms arise from the collective world -- the primal field. The unconscious is all around us in the ensouled world as Anima Mundi. We remain open to the possibility that the world around us carries symbolically saturated meaning.
As we become more conversant with our ancestral lines, we find ourselves looking more and more in the right direction for resonating patterns, then asking, "What does it all mean?" In this way genealogy leads toward the perennial questions of identity and direction.
There are many ways to feel the shift. We help the felt sense form and accurately identify its meaning by trying out words that might express it. We can test these words against the felt sense. Felt-sense will not resonate with a word or phrase that does not adequately describe it.
We may feel movement or even feel stuck, but we are still having fresh insights and intuitions about what steps to take next. The essence of focusing is a sense of flow where we become aware of the meaning behind words and images.
Archetypal Transference
For those working through their genealogy without a therapist, transference may still occur. According to Jung, "A transference in the clinical sense does not always need a personal relationship as a bridge, but can take place via a book, a piece of hearsay, or a legend." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506)
Archetypal transference is a bridge to feelings, ideas, impulses, needs, fantasies, and images. It may also arouse fear, shame, anger, and hostility. They won't feel like they belong to your subjective mind, but are a bridge to your reality, who you are and how you adapt.
This connects us with our essential being and keeps the process moving. It holds a wealth of meanings beyond personal likes and dislikes. The symbolic, psychological bridge is built of similarities and differences.
We learn to touch and relate to other views through our subjective reactions and fantasies to build relationship. Merging and mirroring expands our felt-sense with this experiential approach to the interactive relational field.
Felt-sense is pre-verbal and largely unconscious. The felt sense is the embodiment (bringing awareness inside the body) of our ever-changing sensory/energetic/emotional landscape. It moves our focus from actions and things happening outside us in the world to qualities of our present, internal experience (e.g. textures, colors, temperature, sensations, trembling).
Soma & Sophia
A guiding force can emerge from a single ancestor or collective -- a field phenomena which can be more than projection of the wise old person. Following Jung, “When something long since passed . . . comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.” (Red Book)
The mobilization of the transcendent function orchestrates the process of transforming the family system. This dynamic urges us toward growth, consciousness, and transformation. We give up the psychological safety net and enter into the flow of life, just as we are. We enter a life of immanence where life is sacred.
When we say 'trust the process' for creating experience inside we mean let go of self and trust the transcendent process. Overinvestment or a need to control the situation can undermine ability to trust the process. Effortless intention is wanting to succeed but not really caring if you do or not.
Emotional Shift
Playfulness and openness facilitate processing. The body itself becomes an instrument. We invest by having an interest in an outcome without needing to control events. Controlling the process is not the same as controlling the event.
As part of the process we respond in a cooperative manner. We change what we pay attention to. Invest in the process not the outcome. Jung suggests, "For me the archetype means: an image of a probable sequence of events, an habitual current of psychic energy." (Letters Vol. II, P. 504-506)
Part of openness is ability to suspend disbelief or willingness to see what happens when the critical faculty relaxes. We let go of the need to analyze and acquire enough familiarity and sensory acuity to find comfort in this process of renewal. The sense of energy is focused awareness, openness, trust, and guiding the process.
The process can be guided by visualization as long as you energize it. Colors and temperatures are connected to feelings and the first impression is important just as it is in identifying where in the body the feeling resides. The more data we ask for the more absorbed we become. Guidance is gentle, almost effortless in intentional and spontaneous experiences, and engagement of imagination.
Awareness is the most powerful tool because it is generated by your nervous system. 'Knowing' emerges as knowledge with no known explanation for the information. We can't explain it and we don't need to. It may involve many subtle sources -- forgotten, subliminal, factual, unconscious cues, ESP, etc. This is the 'Know thyself' of self-realization and gnosis -- direct experience, emotional memory and intuitive response.
Knowing guides energy, order and sequence, intensity and flow. Energy itself is a form of knowing and feedback. Knowing is perceptible as changes in the body and feedback of sensory information in a way the nervous system understands -- the deep trance of neurological absorption. It may feel like you're making it up, but that is fine. Just pay attention to the process that is happening. The process is guided by the state and energy flow. The state focuses awareness and guides the energy.
No matter what the state, the body is the quickest way to change your state. Body position can be a trigger for events. In the process you learn how to regulate your nervous system more effectively with confidence in the outcome.
Knowing is closely associated with or enhanced by feelings of connection and sensing energy through the body. You can use your hands and breath and voice. Knowing is an integral process involving proprioception and mirror neurons (the physiological feedback of intuition). The human energy field is a highly organized information grid.
Instinctive knowing may always be there but may go unrecognized, though it is a part of the guiding process -- redirecting your awareness. Changes in how your body feels guides the process. You don't have to believe it; just don't fight it. You can change if you fully engage in the project and become focused and absorbed.
We can go back and explore or change the story. We can focus on the energetic level and sense certain qualities and what is needed in our system. So, connection and sense of energy combines with physical state, focused awareness, and embodied cognition.
The mind is not only connected to the body, the body influences the mind. Cognition isn't confined to the brain but grounded in bodily experience and embodied in metaphorical thought. Metaphors are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain as primary experiences.
Knowing or intuition can tell us what to do. We know what needs to be done and we do it. We simply know how to accept and express. Let the system process and express. No matter what you think, the nervous system always knows, and we don't need to know consciously. Everything that bothers you is in your body. The first impulse on where it is in the body is always it. This body wisdom is known as Sophia by the gnostics.
Rites of Passage
Genealogy makes us think about the nature of time and space, our own deepest nature, and cosmos -- and our relationship to it. Entering our genealogy with a sensitivity to the phenomena that might arise means we are more attuned, more likely to notice when they arise within us and what they call forth. We may or may not recognize them as indirect contextual hypnosis -- essentially trance states. We have to know what to look and listen for.
Fear and pain are the great equalizers of life from which no one is immune. All molecules of emotions modulate pain. Emotions are fueled by an underlying feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness -- stress. Our reactions to our inherited issues and the behavior of others may range from avoidant to compensatory, from alienation to compassion. All emotions are feelings but not all feelings are emotions.
Emotions play out in the body. Feelings come from subconscious cognition after an emotion -- a mental association and portrayal of body states. They are experiences of body states that play out in the mind as the brain interprets emotions and assigns meaning. Feelings are physical states arising from the body’s responses to external stimuli, such as threat, fear, and horror. They are influenced by subjective experience, beliefs, and memories.
The light at the end of the generational tunnel is our rebirth -- the hope that we do transform as we become more conscious of the deep past within us and can learn to carry our inheritance more gracefully.
We do not need to presume the notion of past lives as much as the idea that we can learn from any number of relevant passed lives that are mobilized from the collective unconscious. If the soul needs an outer drama to awaken, it pulls into conscious awareness the inner myth and seeded story it carries within. Genealogy provides just such an epic drama.
"That people should succumb to these eternal images is entirely normal, in fact it is what these images are for. They are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation." (Jung)
Rapport, Resonance, Entrainment
State control leads to rapport. Physiology controls psychology. As we become more keenly attuned to the psychophysical sensations of arising emotions, we become more keenly attuned to their significance within the ancestral field. At the informational level, our bones are their bones, our nerve pathways are their nerves, our blood is their blood. Sometimes images emerge from the mist of the unconscious through the body.
This meaning is clearly more subtle than the form itself. But in turn, such a meaning can be grasped in yet another somatic form; electrical - chemical and other activity in the brain and the rest of the nervous system - which is evidently more subtle than the original somatic form that gave rise to it. This distinction of subtle and manifest is clearly only relative, since what is manifest in one level may be subtle on another. (Goertzel)
Intuition gives insight into the underlying meaning of our disorders and life challenges. We can learn our own body's unique perceptive language. By learning to pay attention to, read and understand our sensations, movements, dreams, memories and the signals of distress and disease, we can strengthen our mind-body consciousness with this sensory feedback loop. If we fall under the sway of an ancestral affect, we can gauge and pace our hyperarousal. Otherwise, we might dissociate, freeze, or be overwhelmed.
Some body sensations describe the state of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). We can learn to recognize under or overarousal of the ANS. A quick body scan not lingering on any sensation too long, and awareness of active bodily sensations anchors us firmly in the present. Sensing the body we can also remember sensations and feel those now.
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We may yearn for that which we cannot name. Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. We will be confronted repeatedly with digesting ancestral trauma narratives. Simple body awareness can calm hyperarousal and stop persistent panic attacks.
We can build a structured increase of tolerance for bodily sensations. We can practice dual awareness -- holding simultaneous awareness of multiple stimuli. We can view whatever we perceive, for example, from an observer self.
In some sense, we are the resting place of the ashes, or the tomb of the family as well as its renewal. Unfortunately, inherited or epigenetic, half of all children now have either chronic illness or are overweight.
Shifts in neurotransmitter levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we consciously or unconsciously "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us, within us. Such patterns and internalization tend to repeat within families.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply-connected with an intuitive sense of meaning (active information), in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality.
Bohm talks about levels of somatic unfoldment of meaning. Each level goes toward a more manifest somatic state. And this goes on until the action finally emerges as a physical movement of the body that affects the environment.
So there is a two-way movement of energy. Each level of significance acts on the next more manifest somatic level. And the perception carries the meaning of the action back in the other direction.
Mythologically, our spine is a Tree of Life that connects from deep in the center of the earth, to high in the sky -- a cosmic Axis Mundi.
Sensory & Pre-sensory Levels
So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even unconscious fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams. They may be as primordial as oscillations, vibrations, twinges, spasms, floating, or even sensory deprivation. Tears welling up, or a stinging sensation when we resist crying, can be related to any intense emotion, not just sadness.
Motion & Emotion
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or get a sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. But affective proprioception is more than a map of peripheral receptors. Curiosities such as phantom limb phenomena, the dreambody, and our energy body show the imaginal and primal aspects of proprioception. Proprioceptions affect us from the subquantal, to cellular, to holistic level.
Somatosensory Feedback
Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement in psychical and imaginal life. It links us with temperature, tactility, texture, and the four primordial elements -- fire, air, water, and earth, as well as their transmutation. Inflammations, flights of fancy, inundations, tilling and grounding all have a place in our psychophysical life. It may be as simple as the felt-sense of the rhythms of life.
This holistic process includes symbol formation, which can include disease or images of disease -- the feared cancer, the exploding heart, boiling blood, the holding-in of stoicism and repression, the crushing weight of depression. We may experience 'guilty' headaches that are like torture, or 'conceive' of the malfunctions or abuse of our reproductive systems.
We know Jung has famously said that "the gods have become diseases," and the same may be true of some ancestors. We can ask ourselves how we are "like" them based on what experience and history tell us about their lives and deaths.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. We can use sculpting, dance, movement therapies, and a host of other techniques to discern where those impulses want to go. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal, each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. For example, energies ascend and descend along the spine. Other communication channels are biophotons, electromagnetic effects, and chemical signals such as neurohormones -- the chemicals of emotion. Emotions obviously have bodily effects.
Dark and scary things lurk at the edge of our existence. "Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations within (or without) the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty. A change of meaning is a change of being.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia.
Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing -- form and flow.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell.
Many disorders begin in the womb, from fetal alcohol syndrome to the sense that the world is not a safe place based on the mother's body chemistry and poisons conveyed to the unborn child even by her dreams and mental state. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing.
At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
"Here, here's where we live
Here is a sea, my family
We'll always be young as we've ever been
Death will not part us again nearer to heaven than
10,000 ancestors who dream of me
Well I hear you dreaming of me
Yeah sometimes, dream of me!"
--The Albatross, (Rickie Lee Jones/Leo Kottke/John Leftwich)
Exploring the unconscious through genealogy or psychogenealogy is a healing process, an uplifting engagement that is foundational to self-realization. We are no longer relegated to a single contemporary place and time. The ancestors remained an important part of daily life not so long ago, and remain so for many indigenous societies.
We Are Highly Improbable
Scientists have calculated that each unique individual is highly improbable -- apparently a rather miraculous 400 trillion to one chance. The odds of us existing, 1:400 trillion, are virtually zero. Conversely, by the 40th generation we have over a trillion ancestors. We have to consider the odds of our parents meeting relative to the number of people on Earth. Then consider the odds of contact leading further in competition with all the others we meet.
The probability dwindles of a long-term relationship and reproduction, the right sperm and egg combining, and finally the probabilities of each of our trillion+ ancestors successfully mating with all the variables of genetics that make up the chain of those all those ancestors -- the Tree of Life of perfect eternal fruits. Jung notes obviously that, "Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter."
You are a virtual miracle, which is simply an event so improbable it is unlikely to occur. So each life is unique and precious to the nth degree as the result of the cumulative process of increasing information. Even Jung might be challenged to call it a fortuitous series of synchronicities. We are an emergent phenomenon. There are mere chance occurrences as well as synchronicity. So, another model is self-organizing chaos in multiple systems.
Field, Form & Fate
Self-organization is the structure of creation -- a process where pattern emerges at the global (collective) level through interactions among the components of the system at the individual level. These interactions explicitly specify the global pattern. We are self-similar to our predecessors and all their reiterations. In the vernacular of chaos theory, we are “strange attractors” or patterns of order within chaos, which never exactly repeat themselves. An observer can never predict exactly what will happen, yet we display a quality of orderliness which hints at underlying “laws not yet discovered.”
As times change so do our metaphors, psychological and otherwise. Self-organization, chaos, and complexity are the basis of the new biology, but it strains the imagination to consider it operating transgenerationally. We might consider the overall effect as a transgenerational field effect -- a relationship of archetypal fields within fields. Memories are accumulating affecting the soul.
Yet here we are, unpredictable though it may be. Souls extend from other souls. Order emerges at the edge of chaos and we are that leading edge of our descent. Our life somehow dances into being. And this is precisely the Mystery of our being, formed by historical, psychosocial, and genetic forces. We are active psychophysical elements of the entire creation. Information and spiritual knowledge is accumulating if we know how to listen deeply with a close attunement to our ancestral and generational themes.
Intuition
Intuition is our common sense, if we just listen to it. Our inner self or unconscious teaches our conscious awareness -- inner tuition, inner sight. We all experience it spontaneously. It appears unpredictably from "out of the blue," or through a dream, as an inspiration, or a "gift" of the Spirit. The language of intuition speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
This sudden, unexpected, often illogical, internal form of perception includes hunches, gut feelings, multisensory sensations, and emotional insights. Both the mind and body have a language of intuition that speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
Intuition is characterized by the following:
1) confidence in the process of intuition;
2) certainty of the truth of intuitive insight;
3) suddenness and immediacy of knowledge;
4) emotion/affect associated with intuitive insight;
5) nonanalytic, nonrational, nonlogical impressions;
6) gestalt nature of knowing;
7) associated with empathy;
8) difficulty putting images into words;
9) relationship to creativity, (Schulz, 1998).
It may be associated with selflessness, letting down barriers, forgetting or going beyond the individual self, feeling united with the All.
Rapport is an empathetic or sympathetic relation or connection with another. It is experiencing the world through the same frame as the person you are communicating with. Rapport doesn't require understanding. Sharing rapport is like jumping inside another's nervous system and suddenly understanding the way they make sense of reality. Rapport is also the ability to bond instantly with others.
Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Empathy needs a face! This concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy understood as a unique kind of intentionality. Human empathy is inherently developmental.
Consciousness of ourselves as embodied individuals in the world is founded on empathy -- our empathic cognition of others and their empathic perception of us. Empathy is evolved biological capacity. Gestures and tones and sight of the other are recognizable to the infant. We learn and evolve by emulating, imitating, by mirroring.
The mind isn't in the head, but the whole body. Our primordial sensory self-image helps us make the rudimentary distinction between self and non-self. Pre-verbal communication is through gestures and action. The face is an expression of a self available for others.
Human empathy is inherently developmental; we learn it in infancy in the core dyad, coupled dynamics with care-givers. It opens us to pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity -- shared virtualities.
In process-oriented therapy, we share one dynamic pattern of neural-somatic activity. Empathy is essentially a "mimicking" of one person's emotional state by another. Our awareness of ourselves as embodied individuals embedded in the world depends on empathy, in particular our empathic grasp of the Other's empathic grasp of oneself.
Our empathic experience of another depends on our 'coupling' or 'pairing' with the other. It is enhanced by sensitivity to psychophysical cues from the other -- a rudimentary form of mind-reading. To be empathic implies intersubjective openness. This is the nature of empathy -- a dynamic feedback loop. We experience another person as a unified whole through empathy; the more whole we are within ourselves the more that perception is amplified. We transpose ourselves to the place of the Other.
Empathy occurs through the immediate 'pairing' or 'coupling' of the subtle bodies of self and other in action. Through our mirror neurons we are paired in the biological depth of empathy, at the level of passive association of living bodies of self and other in embodied action.
At the level of intentionality, conscious mood-matching, emulation and participation mystique we engage consciously in the process. The empathic grasping of another as animated by his or her own fields of sensation has been called 'sensual empathy' or 'sensing in.'
Facial expression of feelings and emotions are paradigms of some aspects of empathy. We all inherently understand them. Interwoven with this sensual empathy is the experience of the Other animated by the feelings of life.
It is through sharing the sensory dimension of these feelings, our fields of sensation, that we find common ground and begin to merge. The deeper this experience, the greater the degree of merging. When the common ground is the ground state -- the Void -- we merge in cosmic consciousness.
Empathy provides a viewpoint in which one's center of orientation becomes one among others. Our locus of consciousness changes to "all over." The new, more universal zero-point is a new spatial perspective which contains one's zero-point as simply one spatial point among many others.
Literally, no matter how we turn in our bodies, we are always 'here,' but we can also evolve toward a non-local perception of our embedded nature in Nature and Cosmos. It is through empathy as the experience of oneself as an Other for the alter-ego that we gain a viewpoint of our own embodied being beyond the first-person singular.
Reciprocal or reiterated empathy is a self-reflexive, mirroring process. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective. Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathetic experience of me. I experience myself as recognizably conscious from your perspective, the perspective of Other, and the feedback loop is closed. One's sense of self-identity, even at the most fundamental level of embodied agency is inseparable from recognition by another -- and grasping that recognition empathetically.
Empathy -- like imagination, recollection, and reflection -- can be described as a 'self-displacing' or 'self-othering' act. It involves a displacement or fission between my empathizing self and the empathized Other; recollection between my present recollecting self and my past recollected self. It is an imaginal process between myself imagining the Other's viewpoint of my self imagining. It is a house of mirrors of myself reflecting between my reflecting self and the experiences I reflect upon.
Our genealogical lines may all look like good little soldiers lined up in neat succession marching back through time. But we can also discern complex, nonlinear and cyclic dimensions among the patterns of connectivity.
The family tree is a growing network of understanding. Genealogy demonstrates that our indefinite lifespan will come to an end just like all relationships. It also demonstrates another level of organization -- simultaneous coexistence and interconnectedness of life.
We were born into connection and emerge from connection. We have real attachments and internalized relationships. We discover ourselves in the interpersonal field, the stream of impulses, fantasies, and bodily sensations. We find real life beyond habitual socially-ordained responses. We become more conscious of ourselves by including intuition, dreams, and what our body teaches us by extending our playful awareness into active engagement.
Ancestors can be a barrier or royal road to the unconscious. Genealogy is a relation matrix as is our subtle body. The relational edge is in psychophysical work and embodied therapeutic dialogues. The relational approach is the core of body therapies. Patterns tend to repeat. History repeats itself. Mythic history repeats itself.
Primordial Creation
The very first written story from Sumeria -- the oldest poetry -- is a creation story about Inanna and the sacred Tree of Life -- a World Tree with instinctual DNA knowledge living in it. Joseph Campbell (1965) said Inanna was the Tree herself, the "cosmic tree of life" and death (p. 64). She is the ineffable totality of what is.
Vision Tree
The tree is our vegetative self, involuntary action and life in the body. Such experiences are closely related to death, which is a permanent resident of the psyche. The creatures that live in the tree, including the serpent, are our instincts. Your body is your subconscious mind. Mind and body are the same because mind is distributed.
We are all interdependent. The problem is we have isolated ourselves from each other, from animals, plants, and the inorganic ground of cosmos. We have forgotten our origins and embody a myth of loneliness. Our emotional and intuitive mind naturally engages with and is interactive with nature.
Mindell (1982) likens the dreambody ("subtle body") to a tree. Half is above the ground and can be described medically or biologically as the 'real' body and half is below ground as roots we can sense when we focus our attention on subtle signals in psychophysical reality. Dreambody appears in body images, rituals, and physical therapies.
The root is a deeper, universal description of matter, symptoms, and experiential realms where experiences are a matter of life and death. It's the hidden dimension, the "dark matter" of our existence. Mindell says, "The trunk of the tree is a dream symbol that bridges the world between deep sentient experiences and symbols."
We can amplify that somatic process. The connection depends on unfolding subtle sensations of psyche-matter interactions. Somatic rhythms include pulsation, form, flow, construction and deconstruction, and oscillating polarities.
All of our cells are intelligent entities. The autonomic system is loaded with all kinds of receptors modulated by peptides stored in the spine all the way down. They can be emotionally expressed through movement and body-centered work.
There are receptors for chemical messengers on every cell of the body, and this is where memories are stored. Memory is how much the receptors have been stimulated or not. All the history is there. Emotions are universal. They arise at the cellular level from molecular information -- the remote smart key that fits the subconscious lock.
We have receptors in the central nervous system, gastric, endocrine, cardio, circulatory, immune, and skin systems. Peptide receptors are found in all organs, particularly the heart, which has all receptor types for information molecules on it. Our feelings are filtered by these molecules. Chakra regions are like mini-brains. Each is a nerve plexus of receptors that push the body state to do what needs to be done through the wisdom of the body -- Soma Sophia.
The Sumerian goddess takes the sacred tree home to her garden where she nurtures and cares for it. The tree mirrors Inanna herself -- the mirror of divine realities which has all the information of the universe. She comes to terms with all the creatures that live in that tree, representing the duality of the goddess.
Psyche symbolically unites the lower instinctual urges with the higher spiritual instincts and expresses them in the clear vision of modified and integrated images. The soul creates symbols that anticipates future alterations of consciousness, presaging uniting the opposites in wholeness -- upper and lower worlds.
Later she turns her tree into her throne and bed used in the "Sacred Marriage." She also makes the first recorded initiatory descent into the realm of the dead -- the realm of metatruths. Jung reminds us, "We don't attain any "ultimate truths" at all, but on the way to them we discover a whole lot of astonishing partial truths. (Letters Vol. II, 504-506)
Scholars (Wolkstein & Kramer 1983:51-89) link the cutting of the World Tree to the destruction of a cyclical view of life, death, and renewal to a linear view of life and death with the underworld as its end.
Descent & Renewal
The underworld is a dreamland of soul where we can retreat to interact with other psyches. We can explore the ancestral underworld through myths, folklore and visionary journeying, as a place of ageless wisdom and regenerative power. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
The underworld and its powers of transformation and rebirth are the roots of the tree, essential to anyone on a spiritual path. Death is not the psychological opposite of life; in fact, any act that holds away death prevents life. When the physical form is destroyed, we enter a psychical form of existence. We learn from the shadows. What holds things in their form is the secret of death.
There is nothing to be done when we are emptied of certainty, doing, and being. Imaginal images don't require validation from external events. Hades means invisible -- unseen yet absolutely present. The invisible, whether we call them archetypes, gods or whatever, are only visible as metaphors which speak for themselves.
Metaphorical death, our morbidity is an enactment of that fantasy -- a way of mythologizing -- a disheartening mortification. In alchemy, mortificatio is the process of death, destruction and decomposition. It is a death-sentence for the ego. But if we remain paralyzed too long, we suffer the consequences. When we look for the cryptic key we ask what this particular image has do with my death.
Our deep nature is primordial wildness, aliveness, and intensity of images which automatically free the butterfly of the soul. As Hillman says, the revelations of fantasy expose the divine. Resemblance is a bridge to events. We can't be just objective observers because we participate in, are subjected to, wounded by, and suffer our images. The abysmal reality is that all changes and life demand sacrifices.
Even if we are fearful, we can repeat Inanna's journey to the underworld, the psyche with its radically altered view of life. This bed-rock of reality is devoid of feeling and empty of meaning. She makes an initiatory descent to reclaim the neglected side of life for the sake of making soul. The underworld and its dreams are not to be exploited to help to fix up our daytime life. We should not mine our dreams for images, ideas, and information that can help us be more productive and functional in mundane life.
Hillman (1979) cautions that, "It is this dayworld style of thinking—literal realities, natural comparisons, contrary opposites, processional steps—that must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there—translation, reclamation, compensation. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn."
In her dark descent, Inanna reclaims the unloving, unloved, abandoned, instinctual, raging, greedy, desirous, unfulfilled, and desperately lonely parts by attending to the depths, by giving it attention, by valuing it, by expressing it. She renews the relationship with her dark ancestress-sister and queen of the underworld, Ereshkigal. The creative energy of the primordial beginning feeds us and heals the suffering heart and soul. Instinctual life informs and powers our work. The creative process is renewed.
The Threshold
In the poem, Inanna moves inward and abandons the mundane world, the physical world, for her adventure into chaos by following her uncertainty. She deals with matters affecting her deeper soul -- imaginative possibilities in our nature -- and connects to her own power. The constructed notion of self is challenged and dies. For this to work for ourselves we must understand that medication, impatience, and fear of death are obstacles. Our pathologizing is a way of seeing and part of our wholeness.
The Sumerian word for ear and wisdom are the same. Inanna opens her ear to the Great Below, she "tunes in" or "listens up" to natural wisdom. She enters through the "seven gates" - the chakras or central nervous system. She is depressed, grieves and mourns the existence of suffering and pain in the world.
The myth speaks to anyone who undergoes a transformation. We must release or at least challenge our values or perspectives, and become vulnerable to the frightening possibility of change. The conscious part of the psyche witnesses the events below. Mourners rescue Inanna and bring her back to life. She is regenerated, resurrected by moving from a dissociated state to the detached observer self, to an associated state.
In our genealogy work, we mourn and resurrect our ancestors. We associate with them. Our family tree, our family system or ancestral field of information and energy is like a torus whose branches reconnect with their roots -- a hyperdimensional labyrinth that is the model of our universe.
When we visit the underworld, we visit our roots that fund our being. Flow emerges from awareness. Campbell likened the successful adventure to unlocking and releasing the flow of life into the body of the world. The living tree is our living web of interactions, including habits (trunk), our senses (branches), situation awareness (tip of branches), reasoning (emergent guidance), and resource flow (nurturance). Connecting those fields is flow.
Into the Labyrinth
Feeling is the entry point of this epic journey which may seem like a foreign country with a language you don't yet know. Subtle signals can be aroused within the genealogical exploratory process that we can use for deepening our connections, while we hold onto the red thread that maintains our connection to the present.
A journal or sketch-book may help. Attention can be directed to all manner of processes where something new is being formed -- in creative process, learning, thinking, and decision making. What's familiar is what was there first. What was there first is family and the first remembered experiences between 0-5 years old -- what feels good and what feels bad.
You can make a somatic bridge -- a channel to a subliminal or subjective feeling in your body that reflects your internal states so you can change the structure of the experience. States have two components: increasing absorption and a continually narrowing focus of attention. That is a trance. It communicates primally in spatial location, proximity, direction, size, movement, and feeling. We can locate where it is in the body by a first impression. The information is there when we know how to ask for it.
We may not be sure which direction we're going or how far we've gone. The path may twist or slowly turn into an experience that’s about being lost, both literally and metaphorically. The maze starts to feel more like a forest. It starts to feel like it’s changing as you 'walk' the labyrinth. Voices may start telling stories about experiences that threw their world out of order or made them feel more complete.
Feeling our way into the dark may sharpen other senses in the absence of sight and hearing. We may wonder if there are walls to the labyrinth, or just empty space. We have to reach far enough to find out. We have to focus right where we are as we continue stepping forward into nothing. It may feel bigger than we expected.
Genealogy is our map of the unconscious. When we enter the dark door, the Red Thread shows us the way, igniting the imagination, awakening the soul. You link your Tree to the World Tree, your history to world history and mythology.
Immersion is virtual reality, like actually "being there." We learn certain well-worn pathways from the present into the past. Focusing means holding a kind of open, non-judging attention to an internal knowing which is directly experienced but is not yet in words. We can use focusing to become clear on what we feel or want , to obtain new insights about our situation, and to stimulate change or healing of the situation.
The World Tree maintains the cycles of life and death. The old cyclical understanding of death as merely one stage in the eternal round of birth, death, and renewal, symbolized by the tree, was replaced by a linear perception of life with death and the underworld as the end.
Walking the Labyrinth of our ancestral lines is a deeply meditative process that arouses spirit, intuition and gnosis from a deep sleep. It is a way of soul retrieval, uniting our personal and collective unconscious. It is a process of digging through the past, overturning old notions. Nothing lives as long as deep memory. Emotional states reveal and change what we pay attention to. Our nervous system filters our experience before it becomes conscious.
Pattern Recognition
Wisdom is recognizing patterns in life. There are things we cannot find at all but dream they can be found in other people, including our ancestors. Perhaps the real question is how did we ever so thoroughly cut off our recent and distant ancestors -- our own Grail? How did we lose knowledge of who we are and where we come from when traditionally ancestry has a high cross-cultural value?
In our dreams we are occupied by different souls, night after night. We too easily define ourselves as individuals. Isn't the question always, "Why?" "Why am I like this?" when it could be "Who" -- who in me is this like? But to truly answer it we need a list of the "usual suspects" to suss it out.
We need to get to know them -- to form some kind of relationship to their essential being. Richard Tarnas has called synchronicity "an invitation to a relationship with the mystery of life." It is an ongoing spiritual relationship we can use as a compensation to our one-sided conscious ego attitude.
Mindell says we must risk sacrificing our conscious and cultural principles and follow the unpredictable dictates of the body symptoms and relationship signals. The dreambody uses all our channels of perception including unintentional movements. Symptoms arise from the collective world -- the primal field. The unconscious is all around us in the ensouled world as Anima Mundi. We remain open to the possibility that the world around us carries symbolically saturated meaning.
As we become more conversant with our ancestral lines, we find ourselves looking more and more in the right direction for resonating patterns, then asking, "What does it all mean?" In this way genealogy leads toward the perennial questions of identity and direction.
There are many ways to feel the shift. We help the felt sense form and accurately identify its meaning by trying out words that might express it. We can test these words against the felt sense. Felt-sense will not resonate with a word or phrase that does not adequately describe it.
We may feel movement or even feel stuck, but we are still having fresh insights and intuitions about what steps to take next. The essence of focusing is a sense of flow where we become aware of the meaning behind words and images.
Archetypal Transference
For those working through their genealogy without a therapist, transference may still occur. According to Jung, "A transference in the clinical sense does not always need a personal relationship as a bridge, but can take place via a book, a piece of hearsay, or a legend." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506)
Archetypal transference is a bridge to feelings, ideas, impulses, needs, fantasies, and images. It may also arouse fear, shame, anger, and hostility. They won't feel like they belong to your subjective mind, but are a bridge to your reality, who you are and how you adapt.
This connects us with our essential being and keeps the process moving. It holds a wealth of meanings beyond personal likes and dislikes. The symbolic, psychological bridge is built of similarities and differences.
We learn to touch and relate to other views through our subjective reactions and fantasies to build relationship. Merging and mirroring expands our felt-sense with this experiential approach to the interactive relational field.
Felt-sense is pre-verbal and largely unconscious. The felt sense is the embodiment (bringing awareness inside the body) of our ever-changing sensory/energetic/emotional landscape. It moves our focus from actions and things happening outside us in the world to qualities of our present, internal experience (e.g. textures, colors, temperature, sensations, trembling).
Soma & Sophia
A guiding force can emerge from a single ancestor or collective -- a field phenomena which can be more than projection of the wise old person. Following Jung, “When something long since passed . . . comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.” (Red Book)
The mobilization of the transcendent function orchestrates the process of transforming the family system. This dynamic urges us toward growth, consciousness, and transformation. We give up the psychological safety net and enter into the flow of life, just as we are. We enter a life of immanence where life is sacred.
When we say 'trust the process' for creating experience inside we mean let go of self and trust the transcendent process. Overinvestment or a need to control the situation can undermine ability to trust the process. Effortless intention is wanting to succeed but not really caring if you do or not.
Emotional Shift
Playfulness and openness facilitate processing. The body itself becomes an instrument. We invest by having an interest in an outcome without needing to control events. Controlling the process is not the same as controlling the event.
As part of the process we respond in a cooperative manner. We change what we pay attention to. Invest in the process not the outcome. Jung suggests, "For me the archetype means: an image of a probable sequence of events, an habitual current of psychic energy." (Letters Vol. II, P. 504-506)
Part of openness is ability to suspend disbelief or willingness to see what happens when the critical faculty relaxes. We let go of the need to analyze and acquire enough familiarity and sensory acuity to find comfort in this process of renewal. The sense of energy is focused awareness, openness, trust, and guiding the process.
The process can be guided by visualization as long as you energize it. Colors and temperatures are connected to feelings and the first impression is important just as it is in identifying where in the body the feeling resides. The more data we ask for the more absorbed we become. Guidance is gentle, almost effortless in intentional and spontaneous experiences, and engagement of imagination.
Awareness is the most powerful tool because it is generated by your nervous system. 'Knowing' emerges as knowledge with no known explanation for the information. We can't explain it and we don't need to. It may involve many subtle sources -- forgotten, subliminal, factual, unconscious cues, ESP, etc. This is the 'Know thyself' of self-realization and gnosis -- direct experience, emotional memory and intuitive response.
Knowing guides energy, order and sequence, intensity and flow. Energy itself is a form of knowing and feedback. Knowing is perceptible as changes in the body and feedback of sensory information in a way the nervous system understands -- the deep trance of neurological absorption. It may feel like you're making it up, but that is fine. Just pay attention to the process that is happening. The process is guided by the state and energy flow. The state focuses awareness and guides the energy.
No matter what the state, the body is the quickest way to change your state. Body position can be a trigger for events. In the process you learn how to regulate your nervous system more effectively with confidence in the outcome.
Knowing is closely associated with or enhanced by feelings of connection and sensing energy through the body. You can use your hands and breath and voice. Knowing is an integral process involving proprioception and mirror neurons (the physiological feedback of intuition). The human energy field is a highly organized information grid.
Instinctive knowing may always be there but may go unrecognized, though it is a part of the guiding process -- redirecting your awareness. Changes in how your body feels guides the process. You don't have to believe it; just don't fight it. You can change if you fully engage in the project and become focused and absorbed.
We can go back and explore or change the story. We can focus on the energetic level and sense certain qualities and what is needed in our system. So, connection and sense of energy combines with physical state, focused awareness, and embodied cognition.
The mind is not only connected to the body, the body influences the mind. Cognition isn't confined to the brain but grounded in bodily experience and embodied in metaphorical thought. Metaphors are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain as primary experiences.
Knowing or intuition can tell us what to do. We know what needs to be done and we do it. We simply know how to accept and express. Let the system process and express. No matter what you think, the nervous system always knows, and we don't need to know consciously. Everything that bothers you is in your body. The first impulse on where it is in the body is always it. This body wisdom is known as Sophia by the gnostics.
Rites of Passage
Genealogy makes us think about the nature of time and space, our own deepest nature, and cosmos -- and our relationship to it. Entering our genealogy with a sensitivity to the phenomena that might arise means we are more attuned, more likely to notice when they arise within us and what they call forth. We may or may not recognize them as indirect contextual hypnosis -- essentially trance states. We have to know what to look and listen for.
Fear and pain are the great equalizers of life from which no one is immune. All molecules of emotions modulate pain. Emotions are fueled by an underlying feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness -- stress. Our reactions to our inherited issues and the behavior of others may range from avoidant to compensatory, from alienation to compassion. All emotions are feelings but not all feelings are emotions.
Emotions play out in the body. Feelings come from subconscious cognition after an emotion -- a mental association and portrayal of body states. They are experiences of body states that play out in the mind as the brain interprets emotions and assigns meaning. Feelings are physical states arising from the body’s responses to external stimuli, such as threat, fear, and horror. They are influenced by subjective experience, beliefs, and memories.
The light at the end of the generational tunnel is our rebirth -- the hope that we do transform as we become more conscious of the deep past within us and can learn to carry our inheritance more gracefully.
We do not need to presume the notion of past lives as much as the idea that we can learn from any number of relevant passed lives that are mobilized from the collective unconscious. If the soul needs an outer drama to awaken, it pulls into conscious awareness the inner myth and seeded story it carries within. Genealogy provides just such an epic drama.
"That people should succumb to these eternal images is entirely normal, in fact it is what these images are for. They are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation." (Jung)
Rapport, Resonance, Entrainment
State control leads to rapport. Physiology controls psychology. As we become more keenly attuned to the psychophysical sensations of arising emotions, we become more keenly attuned to their significance within the ancestral field. At the informational level, our bones are their bones, our nerve pathways are their nerves, our blood is their blood. Sometimes images emerge from the mist of the unconscious through the body.
This meaning is clearly more subtle than the form itself. But in turn, such a meaning can be grasped in yet another somatic form; electrical - chemical and other activity in the brain and the rest of the nervous system - which is evidently more subtle than the original somatic form that gave rise to it. This distinction of subtle and manifest is clearly only relative, since what is manifest in one level may be subtle on another. (Goertzel)
Intuition gives insight into the underlying meaning of our disorders and life challenges. We can learn our own body's unique perceptive language. By learning to pay attention to, read and understand our sensations, movements, dreams, memories and the signals of distress and disease, we can strengthen our mind-body consciousness with this sensory feedback loop. If we fall under the sway of an ancestral affect, we can gauge and pace our hyperarousal. Otherwise, we might dissociate, freeze, or be overwhelmed.
Some body sensations describe the state of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). We can learn to recognize under or overarousal of the ANS. A quick body scan not lingering on any sensation too long, and awareness of active bodily sensations anchors us firmly in the present. Sensing the body we can also remember sensations and feel those now.
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We may yearn for that which we cannot name. Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. We will be confronted repeatedly with digesting ancestral trauma narratives. Simple body awareness can calm hyperarousal and stop persistent panic attacks.
We can build a structured increase of tolerance for bodily sensations. We can practice dual awareness -- holding simultaneous awareness of multiple stimuli. We can view whatever we perceive, for example, from an observer self.
In some sense, we are the resting place of the ashes, or the tomb of the family as well as its renewal. Unfortunately, inherited or epigenetic, half of all children now have either chronic illness or are overweight.
Shifts in neurotransmitter levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we consciously or unconsciously "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us, within us. Such patterns and internalization tend to repeat within families.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply-connected with an intuitive sense of meaning (active information), in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality.
Bohm talks about levels of somatic unfoldment of meaning. Each level goes toward a more manifest somatic state. And this goes on until the action finally emerges as a physical movement of the body that affects the environment.
So there is a two-way movement of energy. Each level of significance acts on the next more manifest somatic level. And the perception carries the meaning of the action back in the other direction.
Mythologically, our spine is a Tree of Life that connects from deep in the center of the earth, to high in the sky -- a cosmic Axis Mundi.
Sensory & Pre-sensory Levels
So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even unconscious fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams. They may be as primordial as oscillations, vibrations, twinges, spasms, floating, or even sensory deprivation. Tears welling up, or a stinging sensation when we resist crying, can be related to any intense emotion, not just sadness.
Motion & Emotion
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or get a sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. But affective proprioception is more than a map of peripheral receptors. Curiosities such as phantom limb phenomena, the dreambody, and our energy body show the imaginal and primal aspects of proprioception. Proprioceptions affect us from the subquantal, to cellular, to holistic level.
Somatosensory Feedback
Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement in psychical and imaginal life. It links us with temperature, tactility, texture, and the four primordial elements -- fire, air, water, and earth, as well as their transmutation. Inflammations, flights of fancy, inundations, tilling and grounding all have a place in our psychophysical life. It may be as simple as the felt-sense of the rhythms of life.
This holistic process includes symbol formation, which can include disease or images of disease -- the feared cancer, the exploding heart, boiling blood, the holding-in of stoicism and repression, the crushing weight of depression. We may experience 'guilty' headaches that are like torture, or 'conceive' of the malfunctions or abuse of our reproductive systems.
We know Jung has famously said that "the gods have become diseases," and the same may be true of some ancestors. We can ask ourselves how we are "like" them based on what experience and history tell us about their lives and deaths.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. We can use sculpting, dance, movement therapies, and a host of other techniques to discern where those impulses want to go. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal, each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. For example, energies ascend and descend along the spine. Other communication channels are biophotons, electromagnetic effects, and chemical signals such as neurohormones -- the chemicals of emotion. Emotions obviously have bodily effects.
Dark and scary things lurk at the edge of our existence. "Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations within (or without) the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty. A change of meaning is a change of being.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia.
Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing -- form and flow.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell.
Many disorders begin in the womb, from fetal alcohol syndrome to the sense that the world is not a safe place based on the mother's body chemistry and poisons conveyed to the unborn child even by her dreams and mental state. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing.
At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
"Here, here's where we live
Here is a sea, my family
We'll always be young as we've ever been
Death will not part us again nearer to heaven than
10,000 ancestors who dream of me
Well I hear you dreaming of me
Yeah sometimes, dream of me!"
--The Albatross, (Rickie Lee Jones/Leo Kottke/John Leftwich)
Exploring the unconscious through genealogy or psychogenealogy is a healing process, an uplifting engagement that is foundational to self-realization. We are no longer relegated to a single contemporary place and time. The ancestors remained an important part of daily life not so long ago, and remain so for many indigenous societies.
We Are Highly Improbable
Scientists have calculated that each unique individual is highly improbable -- apparently a rather miraculous 400 trillion to one chance. The odds of us existing, 1:400 trillion, are virtually zero. Conversely, by the 40th generation we have over a trillion ancestors. We have to consider the odds of our parents meeting relative to the number of people on Earth. Then consider the odds of contact leading further in competition with all the others we meet.
The probability dwindles of a long-term relationship and reproduction, the right sperm and egg combining, and finally the probabilities of each of our trillion+ ancestors successfully mating with all the variables of genetics that make up the chain of those all those ancestors -- the Tree of Life of perfect eternal fruits. Jung notes obviously that, "Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter."
You are a virtual miracle, which is simply an event so improbable it is unlikely to occur. So each life is unique and precious to the nth degree as the result of the cumulative process of increasing information. Even Jung might be challenged to call it a fortuitous series of synchronicities. We are an emergent phenomenon. There are mere chance occurrences as well as synchronicity. So, another model is self-organizing chaos in multiple systems.
Field, Form & Fate
Self-organization is the structure of creation -- a process where pattern emerges at the global (collective) level through interactions among the components of the system at the individual level. These interactions explicitly specify the global pattern. We are self-similar to our predecessors and all their reiterations. In the vernacular of chaos theory, we are “strange attractors” or patterns of order within chaos, which never exactly repeat themselves. An observer can never predict exactly what will happen, yet we display a quality of orderliness which hints at underlying “laws not yet discovered.”
As times change so do our metaphors, psychological and otherwise. Self-organization, chaos, and complexity are the basis of the new biology, but it strains the imagination to consider it operating transgenerationally. We might consider the overall effect as a transgenerational field effect -- a relationship of archetypal fields within fields. Memories are accumulating affecting the soul.
Yet here we are, unpredictable though it may be. Souls extend from other souls. Order emerges at the edge of chaos and we are that leading edge of our descent. Our life somehow dances into being. And this is precisely the Mystery of our being, formed by historical, psychosocial, and genetic forces. We are active psychophysical elements of the entire creation. Information and spiritual knowledge is accumulating if we know how to listen deeply with a close attunement to our ancestral and generational themes.
Intuition
Intuition is our common sense, if we just listen to it. Our inner self or unconscious teaches our conscious awareness -- inner tuition, inner sight. We all experience it spontaneously. It appears unpredictably from "out of the blue," or through a dream, as an inspiration, or a "gift" of the Spirit. The language of intuition speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
This sudden, unexpected, often illogical, internal form of perception includes hunches, gut feelings, multisensory sensations, and emotional insights. Both the mind and body have a language of intuition that speaks through dreams, symptoms of health and disease, voices and visions, emotions, sights, sounds, tastes and smell.
Intuition is characterized by the following:
1) confidence in the process of intuition;
2) certainty of the truth of intuitive insight;
3) suddenness and immediacy of knowledge;
4) emotion/affect associated with intuitive insight;
5) nonanalytic, nonrational, nonlogical impressions;
6) gestalt nature of knowing;
7) associated with empathy;
8) difficulty putting images into words;
9) relationship to creativity, (Schulz, 1998).
It may be associated with selflessness, letting down barriers, forgetting or going beyond the individual self, feeling united with the All.
Rapport is an empathetic or sympathetic relation or connection with another. It is experiencing the world through the same frame as the person you are communicating with. Rapport doesn't require understanding. Sharing rapport is like jumping inside another's nervous system and suddenly understanding the way they make sense of reality. Rapport is also the ability to bond instantly with others.
Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Empathy needs a face! This concrete encounter of self and other fundamentally involves empathy understood as a unique kind of intentionality. Human empathy is inherently developmental.
Consciousness of ourselves as embodied individuals in the world is founded on empathy -- our empathic cognition of others and their empathic perception of us. Empathy is evolved biological capacity. Gestures and tones and sight of the other are recognizable to the infant. We learn and evolve by emulating, imitating, by mirroring.
The mind isn't in the head, but the whole body. Our primordial sensory self-image helps us make the rudimentary distinction between self and non-self. Pre-verbal communication is through gestures and action. The face is an expression of a self available for others.
Human empathy is inherently developmental; we learn it in infancy in the core dyad, coupled dynamics with care-givers. It opens us to pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity -- shared virtualities.
In process-oriented therapy, we share one dynamic pattern of neural-somatic activity. Empathy is essentially a "mimicking" of one person's emotional state by another. Our awareness of ourselves as embodied individuals embedded in the world depends on empathy, in particular our empathic grasp of the Other's empathic grasp of oneself.
Our empathic experience of another depends on our 'coupling' or 'pairing' with the other. It is enhanced by sensitivity to psychophysical cues from the other -- a rudimentary form of mind-reading. To be empathic implies intersubjective openness. This is the nature of empathy -- a dynamic feedback loop. We experience another person as a unified whole through empathy; the more whole we are within ourselves the more that perception is amplified. We transpose ourselves to the place of the Other.
Empathy occurs through the immediate 'pairing' or 'coupling' of the subtle bodies of self and other in action. Through our mirror neurons we are paired in the biological depth of empathy, at the level of passive association of living bodies of self and other in embodied action.
At the level of intentionality, conscious mood-matching, emulation and participation mystique we engage consciously in the process. The empathic grasping of another as animated by his or her own fields of sensation has been called 'sensual empathy' or 'sensing in.'
Facial expression of feelings and emotions are paradigms of some aspects of empathy. We all inherently understand them. Interwoven with this sensual empathy is the experience of the Other animated by the feelings of life.
It is through sharing the sensory dimension of these feelings, our fields of sensation, that we find common ground and begin to merge. The deeper this experience, the greater the degree of merging. When the common ground is the ground state -- the Void -- we merge in cosmic consciousness.
Empathy provides a viewpoint in which one's center of orientation becomes one among others. Our locus of consciousness changes to "all over." The new, more universal zero-point is a new spatial perspective which contains one's zero-point as simply one spatial point among many others.
Literally, no matter how we turn in our bodies, we are always 'here,' but we can also evolve toward a non-local perception of our embedded nature in Nature and Cosmos. It is through empathy as the experience of oneself as an Other for the alter-ego that we gain a viewpoint of our own embodied being beyond the first-person singular.
Reciprocal or reiterated empathy is a self-reflexive, mirroring process. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective. Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathetic experience of me. I experience myself as recognizably conscious from your perspective, the perspective of Other, and the feedback loop is closed. One's sense of self-identity, even at the most fundamental level of embodied agency is inseparable from recognition by another -- and grasping that recognition empathetically.
Empathy -- like imagination, recollection, and reflection -- can be described as a 'self-displacing' or 'self-othering' act. It involves a displacement or fission between my empathizing self and the empathized Other; recollection between my present recollecting self and my past recollected self. It is an imaginal process between myself imagining the Other's viewpoint of my self imagining. It is a house of mirrors of myself reflecting between my reflecting self and the experiences I reflect upon.
https://books.google.com/books?id=_glIAB9cCAoC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=body+sensations+associated+with+emotions&source=bl&ots=dWlkrfmKQF&sig=gui4c5UK2_GLcy6DaJkJMPy8lxc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBGoVChMIuJXEl7SKyQIVBqMeCh2KtwBV#v=onepage&q=body%20sensations%20associated%20with%20emotions&f=false
Although feeling and affect are routinely used interchangeably, it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions. As Brian Massumi’s definition of affect in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus makes clear, affect is not a personal feeling.
Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal.
A feeling is a sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled. It is personal and biographical because every person has a distinct set of previous sensations from which to draw when interpreting and labelling their feelings.
An emotion is the projection/display of a feeling. Unlike feelings, the display of emotion can be either genuine or feigned. We broadcast emotion to the world; sometimes that broadcast is an expression of our internal state and other times it is contrived in order to fulfill social expectations.
An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. Of feeling, emotion, and affect, affect is the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realized in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness (Massumi, Parables).
Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. The body has a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language because it “doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts…” (Massumi, Parables 30).
Although feeling and affect are routinely used interchangeably, it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions. As Brian Massumi’s definition of affect in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus makes clear, affect is not a personal feeling.
Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal.
A feeling is a sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled. It is personal and biographical because every person has a distinct set of previous sensations from which to draw when interpreting and labelling their feelings.
An emotion is the projection/display of a feeling. Unlike feelings, the display of emotion can be either genuine or feigned. We broadcast emotion to the world; sometimes that broadcast is an expression of our internal state and other times it is contrived in order to fulfill social expectations.
An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. Of feeling, emotion, and affect, affect is the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realized in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness (Massumi, Parables).
Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. The body has a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language because it “doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts…” (Massumi, Parables 30).
Most human emotions (there are some exceptions) fit into five basic categories. When you’re not sure what you’re feeling, ask yourself if you feel MAD, SAD, GLAD, SCARED or BAD (guilt and shame.)
Emotions are made up of two components: visceral, physical sensations, and our mind’s interpretation of those sensations based on the context. These physical sensations are most often felt in our stomachs, chests, throats and eyes, and some of them can be related to different emotions. A clenched stomach may be mad, scared or bad.
Tears welling in our eyes, or a stinging sensation when we’re resisting crying, can be related to any intense emotion, not just sadness.
Emotions are made up of two components: visceral, physical sensations, and our mind’s interpretation of those sensations based on the context. These physical sensations are most often felt in our stomachs, chests, throats and eyes, and some of them can be related to different emotions. A clenched stomach may be mad, scared or bad.
Tears welling in our eyes, or a stinging sensation when we’re resisting crying, can be related to any intense emotion, not just sadness.
Researchers found that the most common emotions trigger strong bodily sensations, and the bodily maps of these sensations were topographically different for different emotions. The sensation patterns were, however, consistent across different West European and East Asian cultures, highlighting that emotions and their corresponding bodily sensation patterns have a biological basis.
Examples of bodily sensations include;
• Contraction and Expansion
• Different frequencies of vibrations
• Hot and Cold
• Pressure
• Lightness and Heaviness
• Hardness and softness
• Itching
• Tingling
• Sharp pains
• Numbness
• And all other sensations we perceive within the body
anxiety, there's nervous anxiety, like right before you have to give a speech or something:
- Shaky hands/voice
- Fast heartbeat
- Okay, I have no idea if this is just me, but do other people need to fart when they're nervous? Lol...
- Tight feeling in stomach or chest
I usually feel all this in waves. I'm guessing that's the adrenaline.
Anger:
- Fast heartbeat
- Clenched muscles, especially the hands and face
- If someone close to you has made you angry, it can be combined with sorrow or betrayal. I feel an aching in my chest
- A need for a physical outlet - you want to punch things
Sadness/Depression:
- Tears
- Sometimes the symptoms of anger, depending on what has happened
- Feeling bored or restless, but not wanting to do anything
- Not enjoying things you usually enjoy
- Change in appetite
- Feeling sleepy or physically exhausted
Guilt:
- Not being able to take your mind off something you just did/ could have prevented
- A tightening in your stomach
- Thinking about the negative emotions of someone else
Anger and fear are closely related and have similar symptoms:
- Intense visual focus on a person or object
- Tight jaw and/or other muscles
- Shortened breathing - hyperventilating to pump oxygen in your system for fight or flight response
- Shaking hands from adrenaline
- Desire to move, but sometimes (paradoxically) inability to move
- As PallasAthena hinted at, the bowels and bladder tend to want to release "excess weight" to facilitate flight (learned about this from reading books on combat psychology).
- Time seems to either speed up or slow down dramatically
Stress:
--a feeling of being tense and taut on the inside. hard to explain, but I'm sure you know what I mean.
-- tumultuous thoughts.
-- An inability to relax facial muscles (I just tried to do it... no luck )
-- The surfacing of a tic. Do you play with your hair? Bit your nails? For me it's both.
-- Your neck or back hurts from being too tense
-- procrastination
Anger:
-- Perhaps some symptoms of stress.
-- Pay attention to your expression. Is your default with scrunched eyebrows and a set chin?
-- Clenching fists
-- Withdrawn
-- sleeplessness
--You are unable to be part of conversation because yo are fuming, and/or you constantly debate back and forth on whether you should say something and reveal your irritation.
Examples of bodily sensations include;
• Contraction and Expansion
• Different frequencies of vibrations
• Hot and Cold
• Pressure
• Lightness and Heaviness
• Hardness and softness
• Itching
• Tingling
• Sharp pains
• Numbness
• And all other sensations we perceive within the body
anxiety, there's nervous anxiety, like right before you have to give a speech or something:
- Shaky hands/voice
- Fast heartbeat
- Okay, I have no idea if this is just me, but do other people need to fart when they're nervous? Lol...
- Tight feeling in stomach or chest
I usually feel all this in waves. I'm guessing that's the adrenaline.
Anger:
- Fast heartbeat
- Clenched muscles, especially the hands and face
- If someone close to you has made you angry, it can be combined with sorrow or betrayal. I feel an aching in my chest
- A need for a physical outlet - you want to punch things
Sadness/Depression:
- Tears
- Sometimes the symptoms of anger, depending on what has happened
- Feeling bored or restless, but not wanting to do anything
- Not enjoying things you usually enjoy
- Change in appetite
- Feeling sleepy or physically exhausted
Guilt:
- Not being able to take your mind off something you just did/ could have prevented
- A tightening in your stomach
- Thinking about the negative emotions of someone else
Anger and fear are closely related and have similar symptoms:
- Intense visual focus on a person or object
- Tight jaw and/or other muscles
- Shortened breathing - hyperventilating to pump oxygen in your system for fight or flight response
- Shaking hands from adrenaline
- Desire to move, but sometimes (paradoxically) inability to move
- As PallasAthena hinted at, the bowels and bladder tend to want to release "excess weight" to facilitate flight (learned about this from reading books on combat psychology).
- Time seems to either speed up or slow down dramatically
Stress:
--a feeling of being tense and taut on the inside. hard to explain, but I'm sure you know what I mean.
-- tumultuous thoughts.
-- An inability to relax facial muscles (I just tried to do it... no luck )
-- The surfacing of a tic. Do you play with your hair? Bit your nails? For me it's both.
-- Your neck or back hurts from being too tense
-- procrastination
Anger:
-- Perhaps some symptoms of stress.
-- Pay attention to your expression. Is your default with scrunched eyebrows and a set chin?
-- Clenching fists
-- Withdrawn
-- sleeplessness
--You are unable to be part of conversation because yo are fuming, and/or you constantly debate back and forth on whether you should say something and reveal your irritation.
frustrated, irritated, impatient, resentful, enraged, peed off, fury, insulted
Urge to attack
Assume the worst,
Problem is enormous,
Others are unfair
Adrenaline response:
Anxiety
nervous, on edge, apprehensive, frightened, panicky, terrified, scared, petrified
Urge to escape or avoid
Threat:
Overestimate danger
Underestimate ability to cope
Adrenaline response:
Depression
sad, down, despairing, hopeless, gloomy, miserable, sorrowful, grief stricken, unhappy, dismayed
Urge to withdraw
Negative focus. Themes of loss, view of self, hopelessness
Slowed down or agitated
Urge to attack
Assume the worst,
Problem is enormous,
Others are unfair
- I've been disrespected, treated unfairly, used
- It's not fair!
- I've been let down
- I won't stand for it
Adrenaline response:
- Tense
- Fired up
- Energised
- Breathing and heart rate quicken
- Difficulty concentrating
- Fight
- Argue
- Shout
- Slam, smash
- Sulk
- Snap
- Swear
- Confront
Anxiety
nervous, on edge, apprehensive, frightened, panicky, terrified, scared, petrified
Urge to escape or avoid
Threat:
Overestimate danger
Underestimate ability to cope
- I’m in great danger right now
- The worst possible thing is going to happen
- I won’t be able to cope with it
Adrenaline response:
- Tense, shaky, sweaty, hot,
- Energized, breathing and heart rate increase
- Difficulty concentrating
- Avoid people or places (in order to avoid feeling anxious)
- Fidget
- Escape / run away
- Coping or safety behaviors
Depression
sad, down, despairing, hopeless, gloomy, miserable, sorrowful, grief stricken, unhappy, dismayed
Urge to withdraw
Negative focus. Themes of loss, view of self, hopelessness
- I’m worthless
- Nothing can change
- I've lost.....
Slowed down or agitated
- Tired, lethargic
- Constipated
- Memory & concentration problems
- Appetite & sleep changes
- Loss of interest: hobbies, sex
- Restlessness
- Do less
- Talk less
- Eat less or more
- Sleep less or more
- Isolate and withdraw
- Ruminate on negative thoughts
But when children or teens face adversity and especially unpredictable stressors, they are left with deeper, longer‑lasting scars. When the young brain is thrust into stressful situations over and over again without warning, and stress hormones are repeatedly ramped up, small chemical markers, known as methyl groups, adhere to specific genes that regulate the activity of stress‑hormone receptors in the brain. These epigenetic changes hamper the body’s ability to turn off the stress response. In ideal circumstances, a child learns to respond to stress, and recover from it, learning resilience. But kids who’ve faced chronic, unpredictable stress undergo biological changes that cause their inflammatory stress response to stay activated.
Joan Kaufman, director of the Child and Adolescent Research and Education (CARE) programme at the Yale School of Medicine, recently analysed DNA in the saliva of happy, healthy children, and of children who had been taken from abusive or neglectful parents. The children who’d experienced chronic childhood stress showed epigenetic changes in almost 3,000 sites on their DNA, and on all 23 chromosomes – altering how appropriately they would be able to respond to and rebound from future stressors.
kids who’ve had early adversity have a drip of fight-or-flight hormones turned on every day – it’s as if there is no off switch
Likewise, Seth Pollak, professor of psychology and director of the Child Emotion Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, uncovered startling genetic changes in children with a history of adversity and trauma. Pollak identified damage to a gene responsible for calming the stress response. This particular gene wasn’t working properly; the kids’ bodies weren’t able to reign in their heightened stress response. ‘A crucial set of brakes are off,’ says Pollak.
Experiencing stress in childhood changes your set point of wellbeing for decades to come. In people such as Laura and John, the endocrine and immune systems are churning out a damaging and inflammatory cocktail of stress neurochemicals in response to even small stressors – an unexpected bill, a disagreement with their spouse, a car that swerves in front of them on the highway, a creak on the staircase – for the rest of their lives. They might find themselves overreacting to, and less able to recover from, the inevitable stressors of life. They’re always responding. And all the while, they’re unwittingly marinating in inflammatory chemicals, which sets the stage for full-throttle disease down the road, in the form of autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumours, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, migraines and asthma.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-bad-experiences-in-childhood-lead-to-adult-illness
Joan Kaufman, director of the Child and Adolescent Research and Education (CARE) programme at the Yale School of Medicine, recently analysed DNA in the saliva of happy, healthy children, and of children who had been taken from abusive or neglectful parents. The children who’d experienced chronic childhood stress showed epigenetic changes in almost 3,000 sites on their DNA, and on all 23 chromosomes – altering how appropriately they would be able to respond to and rebound from future stressors.
kids who’ve had early adversity have a drip of fight-or-flight hormones turned on every day – it’s as if there is no off switch
Likewise, Seth Pollak, professor of psychology and director of the Child Emotion Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, uncovered startling genetic changes in children with a history of adversity and trauma. Pollak identified damage to a gene responsible for calming the stress response. This particular gene wasn’t working properly; the kids’ bodies weren’t able to reign in their heightened stress response. ‘A crucial set of brakes are off,’ says Pollak.
Experiencing stress in childhood changes your set point of wellbeing for decades to come. In people such as Laura and John, the endocrine and immune systems are churning out a damaging and inflammatory cocktail of stress neurochemicals in response to even small stressors – an unexpected bill, a disagreement with their spouse, a car that swerves in front of them on the highway, a creak on the staircase – for the rest of their lives. They might find themselves overreacting to, and less able to recover from, the inevitable stressors of life. They’re always responding. And all the while, they’re unwittingly marinating in inflammatory chemicals, which sets the stage for full-throttle disease down the road, in the form of autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, fibroid tumours, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, migraines and asthma.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-bad-experiences-in-childhood-lead-to-adult-illness
(c)2015-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
iona_m@yahoo.com
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iona_m@yahoo.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
