"Pendulation" - the Core of Somatic Practices

     “As you release tension in (successive parts of your body during somatic meditation), you are softening the boundary between the darkness of your body and the brightness of your conscious mind, between the limitless unconscious and the bounded conscious mind; in so doing, in a most gentle and natural way, you are also softening the barrier against feelings and experiences you may have been avoiding, denying, or repressing. 
     So it is that you may find various feelings, images, or memories coming up – if so, just welcome them. If they become a little too much, then relax and let the practice go for a while or for today; there is no rush. Assimilate what you need to and then, when you feel ready, return to the practice. 
     In Ten Points practice it is quite rare to run into anything that feels overwhelming, but it can happen. Accessing our larger, as-yet-undiscovered feeling life through the body is the safest of all ways to do it, but you do have to go gently and follow the guidance of your body; it will let you know how much is enough and how much is too much. 
     In fact, much trauma therapy is based on this very principle (Peter Levine's "pendulation"), of helping folks access difficult feeling through the body but in a gentle, step-by-step, gradual manner, moving a little forward into sensation, stepping a little back as needed, giving their conscious awareness plenty of time to become familiar with, assimilate, and integrate unconscious material.”

       Reginald A. Ray. "The Awakening Body. Somatic Meditation for Discovering Our Deepest Life." Shambhala, 2016.

What was once rigidly frozen can thaw, soften & ...

Alleviating vs Curing Suffering

     "in certain Buddhist circles ... debate about the ultimate usefulness of assuaging temporal suffering is making the rounds. The topic is timely, given the commercialization of spirituality and the spread of the mindfulness movement. Most of us agree that the Buddha meant his paths to be curative rather than palliative. Shouldn't we be shooting for (enlightenment) rather than, say, 'stress reduction'?

     Although it can't magically wake us all up, Great Compassion can intervene by making our various situations just livable enough that we can shift our focus from pain, emotional overload, and warped coping strategies to the self-evident truths of the dharma: goodness, selflessness, and understanding lead to happiness; aggression, selfishness, and ignorance lead to suffering."

       Pamela Gayle White. "Alleviating Suffering. Can Working to Treat Pain Help Us Tackle the Fundamental Causes of Human Distress?" Tricycle, Spring 2015.                                www.tricycle.com

Gaudi Blues

Mindfulness-based Therapies Require Skillful, Experienced Facilitators

     "It is to be expected that serious psychological transformation involves some level of discomfort and difficulty. Indeed, learning how to tolerate exposure to discomfort and gaining the ability to confront and overcome difficulty has a lot to do with what makes a person grow in new ways. The knack is to know how much of this is healthy, even if painful, and at what point it may become unhealthy. ...

     It is useful to distinguish between mindfulness as a mental state on one hand and the unskillful pursuit of this state on the other. Consider the case of a person plunging into the jungle, in search of a beautiful and healing flower, he gets torn up by thorns and battered by branches in the process. The problem is not that the flower itself is harmful; what is harmful is only the means of pursuing it. A similar confusion exists when researchers (or media reports of research) say 'Mindfulness can be harmful' when what they really mean is something like 'Going into prolonged situations of silence and isolation, with unrealistic or uninformed expectations, under the inadequate guidance of an unsuitable teacher, when one has a history of psychological fragility, can be harmful.' ”

       Andrew Olendzki PhD. "The Mindfulness Solution" Tricycle, Spring 2015.                     www.tricycle.com

Monet's garden, Giverny

Spirituality OR Science ???

     On Aug 9, 2012, the New York Times published an interesting article: "Merging Spirituality and Clinical Psychology at Columbia" by Sharon Otterman. Critics of the program stated: 
     “From my perspective, psychology must remain neutral. ... With the assumption that we are inherently spiritual beings, I worry that therapists who come out of such a program are going to be approaching their clients with this expectation that they have to contact their spirituality, and I don’t know where that is going to leave some clients." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/education/columbia-program-merges-therapy-and-spirituality.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&emc=eta1 

     A major difficulty is that many scientists - and patients - have minimal understanding of spirituality, and may well have personal biases against it - ignorance & bias cause train wrecks, not advances in quality of life. Difficult yet important areas like spirituality need intelligent, unbiased, high-level inquiry.
     Sharon Daloz Parks is Associate Director and Faculty at the Whidbey Institute, and formerly associate professor at the Harvard Divinity School and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. She's also served in faculty and research positions at the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. Here's her take on 'faith' - but you could equally refer to it as 'spirituality': 

     “… faith must be emancipated from its too-easy equation with belief & religion, and reconnected with … matters of truth, reality, and ultimate importance. … personal, affective, visceral, and passional dimensions of being and knowing.
If faith ( meaning-making in its broadest sense ) is discounted, the human landscape becomes arid, and hope and commitment wither; the human spirit grows parched, and not much more than a prickly cynicism can be sustained.
      Faith understood as static, fixed, & inextricably bound to a particular language or world-view, must be discarded as obsolete, if the integrity of intellect & soul is to be maintained in a dynamic world.
      Cynicism functions as a kind of armor against disappointment & despair. Skepticism combines the power to question with an openness to being convinced. Skepticism can be a healthy form of doubt, or it may reflect the loss of a once-shared trust in a universe of meaning, however that was defined. It may also function as a thin veneer of public sophistication, glossing over a private, lonely void that neither the rational mind nor economic success can fill. (intellectual bypassing)
      In our time, we have become at once scientifically informed, philosophically relativistic, and disappointed and disillusioned in many quarters. Yet ironically (meaning) can come alive in an engagement with radical uncertainty.”
        Parks SD. "Big questions, worthy dreams. Mentoring young adults in their search for meaning, purpose, and faith." John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, 2000.

Photo: Amanda Mack   www.smithsonianmag.com

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