Google Your Body: The answer to chronic discomfort

The stories you tell yourself and the stories your body tells you should sync but when they conflict, the body wins. Do you crave more ease in your daily body? Where do you start? If you have chronic pain or discomfort, if you’ve tried many modalities but keep bumping up against the same restrictions, consider learning the language of the body to discover how to change its story through the plasticity of your perception.

A body tells stories of comfort, safety, and survival. They are generic and universal. Our bodies go into survival mode when conditions seem life-threatening. On a fundamental level, your body is designed to conserve energy the best way it can. Your body will do what it can to organize you to be upright and not fall down. It’s going to make sure the images from your two eyes create one image in your brain. All these things are body functions that signal comfort, safety, survival, and they are largely unconscious.

The conscious story you tell yourself is one of self-identity, belonging, ancestry. These stories are personal and unique. The brain builds these stories through memories and meaning. When the brain can’t make sense of what happened, when you can’t tolerate or process something in the moment, the experience lives on until you are ready to unpack it. In the meantime, per trauma expert Van der Kolk, the body keeps the score.

These stories together build a narrative that you live in every day. The conversation between your body and your brain are happening whether you pay attention or not. That conversation is accessible to you through your perception. Your brains speaks in words and abstractions, but your body speaks in feelings and sensations.

Sensations are by design adaptive. They are your entry into the plasticity of your brain. Feelings are more complex, so it is easier to work with the building blocks of sensations.

How do you start? Here are two key steps to overcoming conflicting stories within you:

1. Learn to listen to your body from the inside

2. Discover your internal strengths in order to authentically experience your vulnerabilities.

The first step means bringing subtle body cues up into conscious perception. Being able to pay attention to your body signals is a learned skill. In fact, it may work best once your central nervous system is fully matured. We now know that full maturation of the pre-frontal cortex doesn’t happen until the ages of 25-30yrs.

Children speak the body story. You get better at applying the brain story when you have more years of practice digesting or integrating body signals. But the body story cannot be blocked out. Dr. John Sarno was an MD who famously relieved back pain in patients by helping them identify their repressed rage. He became so effective in his approach that people have experienced recovery from back pain by merely reading his book.

We put aside body signals all the time, and we need to in order to get through a normal day. It’s natural. But you need more tools than disconnection from, or dominance over, your body in order to manage the ups and downs of a full life.

Discovering where your brain and body are in conflict doesn’t have to be a dramatic process. We all experience some degree of it. You can try measures here and there as you try to keep stress at bay.

Or you can learn a deeper skill: to dynamically center and empower yourself. When you can experience the deep systemic strength you have within a well-organized physical system, you can untie the knots of conflicting stories within you.

I have been teaching a full body-mind awareness approach that efficiently snaps your attention into the moment. In this approach, I apply a technique to learn the skill of moving from strength to vulnerability. It’s a simple and potent approach.

Join my email list to get more info.

Mastering the optical illusion - spinning dancer

Understanding why an optical illusion works can teach us some aspect of vision. Beating the illusion, however, can be more compelling. The spinning dancer by Nobuyuki Kayahara is one of my favorites. It relies upon incomplete movement and depth cues, forcing your brain to make a choice. Because the light does not illuminate the body in ways to suggest direction of the spin, the image is ambiguous. You might see her spinning in one direction and then suddenly flip. Which way do you see her spinning? If you stay with it for a bit, do you see her flip? Can you make her flip at will? Play with it a bit before moving on to the hints.

Using your capacity to understand a human body in movement through your embodied experience of it and through mirror neurons, try the following:

1. Tilt your head opposite the direction you see the dancer’s head. Wait a few moments. Did if flip? If not…

2. Notice her head is slightly tilted back. Keep your head in the same position and tilt your head slight backward. Flip yet? If not…

3. Keep your head position and add an extended arm, mimicking the direction opposite to what you see.

Now play around until you can flip back and forth at will. Have fun, please share, and leave your comments below.

Embodied perception in the age of the attention economy

Technology is increasingly personal. Do you understand how this impacts you? Feeling more distracted? That’s intentional. Confused by too many options? That’s human. Overwhelmed by information? That’s innate limitation.

First, how did you we get here? More importantly, what can you do about it? In this age of intimate and intentional tech, embodiment promotes the antidote: empathy.

Intimate tech

With the introduction of tactile interface, the hardware of our digital devices is self-adjacent and the software is immediately responsive. These two points have changed our relationship with technology. Touch is a sense that can signal safety and familiarity. For you to touch something in a manner that is nonviolently interactive implies to your nervous system that you trust this thing enough to engage with it in your peripersonal space. Smart phones have made interaction as easy as a swipe - no fine motor skills required. The proximity of the screen draws our eyes towards each other, at the near point, into the position of an intimate gaze. The light from the background of the screen pours directly into our eyes, as the retinal cells gorge on light in an abnormal way. They are used to light coming from overhead or otherwise scattered as it reflects on surfaces and enters our eyes at different angles. As it continues to become more personal and proximal, the natural evolution of intimate tech is for it to become embedded in you or an extension of your physicality.

Intentional behavior

Software becomes smarter every day: it has troves of information and its processes are self-learning and generative. Artificial intelligence has reached a point where it is not transparent, even to the developers who designed it. Big data and deep learning are upending what psychologist Daniel Kahneman terms ‘slow thinking’. Artificial intelligence (AI) has made the slow deliberation of cognitive analysis a fast but disembodied process. With no need to consult and check gut instinct, AI can process data more consistently and more rapidly than human capacity.

As a data point, you are identified, profiled, and targeted in ways previous generations have never seen. In order to persuade you, understanding motivational psychology for manipulation through technology has become a dedicated school of academic study. In many respects, tech is exhibiting a type of intentional behavior.

In the information age, what is the limited resource? Information is free-flowing and easily accessible. Your attention, however, is something that you have in limited amounts. The intention for many tech companies is to capture your attention and accumulate your data for precise targeting. The perfect product in this age is not what they sell to you, but the vehicle with which you give your resource to them. In exchange for searching a free library of information or a free way to share your personal stories, in the attention economy you have become the product. Tech is consuming your attention, tracking your activities and movements, profiling your purchasing patterns, driving you to more extreme sources of information, and manipulating your vulnerabilities.

Empathy through embodiment

In this context of intimate, intentional tech that is changing how we perceive and interact, it makes sense to educate yourself on what creates your experience of the world: what is universal, what is specific to my family, what is specific to my culture, what is unique to me? If you investigate what creates your deepest experience of the world in terms of your own universally human functions, you’ll start to understand what others experience as well. This is the basis for empathy.

Cultivating empathy starts by tuning into yourself. Intimate and intentional tech has revealed what is largely unconscious in our daily action. It is a wake-up call to expand skills of perception and to elevate intentional behavior. Social psychologist Sherry Turkle puts forth conversation as a key way to learn the social dance of accommodating to another person. The back and forth that she describes is grounded in mirror neurons, receptive listening, and sensing into the felt impact of words. Literacy researcher Maryanne Wolf studies the generative power of reading to spark imagination and an expanded experience of self. Perception in this case is happening in your mind. Can you allow yourself to get swept up into the story and characters? Good writing helps take you there, but reading for deep experiential impact is a skill that requires practice.

Both of these avenues of empathy-building can be amplified when you understand yourself from a bottom-up approach. That means you examine the very nature of your sensory experience. Do you understand how you relate to the experiences of gravity, sound, and light? It’s something you can learn with guidance and intention, over time, but you can start right now by understanding the characteristics of these forces.

Gravity is a force that is constant and present at all times. It is steady, reliable, and powerful. Working with gravity through posture, walking, and physical challenge, you develop an internal experience of support and power.

Sound is essentially tactile. It is vibration of the eardrum, of the bones, of the skin. Sound perception lays down the emotional foundation for communication and is the core of social engagement. Perceiving sound well organizes your posture for receptive listening.

Light is processed through your visual system on multiple levels, but ultimately interpreting light to form visual input that is meaningful is an experiential and constructed process.

Steady, emotional, constructive. These phenomenal experiences of gravity, sound, and light integrate within you as a scaffold for the more complex skills of social interaction. The complexity of the world that is revealed by intimate and intentional tech is what we have yet to examine deeply within ourselves. The most fundamental dynamic of our human experience is understood through the deepest layers of embodied perception.

Our embodied life through filters of perception

Embodiment is a way to use your body for greater insight into your mind. To understand how you perceive is to understand how you create meaning. The more embodied this process, the more clarity you can have in your self observations. The more complete your understanding of the perceptual process, the more compassionate you can be with yourself and consequently with others.

Your understanding of the world starts with your experience of it, and it is full of sensory impressions. You navigate the sensory forces in your life through the filters of your interpretation. To understand how that works, you have to go back to the womb, where sensory systems begin to develop.

Inside the womb, you are held within a pressurized, fluid environment that gives you all you need. Light, sound, scents, and microgravity reach you and begin to shape your sensory perception. In fact, your auditory system, sense of deep touch, and sense of movement are well-formed before you emerge from the womb. The Tomatis™ Method is a sound therapy program developed by a French Ear Nose and Throat doctor who recognized this before the rest of the medical community did.

Emerging from this enclosed environment, your entire world is transformed with an explosion of light, high frequency sounds, strong scents, and increased gravitational force.  All of these forces are no longer mediated through amniotic fluid, and the pressure systems internal to you reorganize. Your lungs begin to breathe on their own; the expanding pressure of your viscera distends your belly.

Now you begin to create your own filters of perception, your own independent amniotic sac of sorts, to help you organize the overwhelm of sensations.

The first filter is emotional. Dr. Stanley Greenspan describes the process of how you have learned to use emotions as shorthand guidance for survival behaviors. Emotions are collections of sensations identified with meaning. The process of decoupling sensation from meaning is a process for a mature nervous system. It is a nervous system in self-observation.

The second filter is developmental (learning to be upright in the gravitational field, to nourish and comfort yourself for independent survival, find your boundaries, share, speak your needs, etc.). It is tightly encoded with the lessons you learn within the context of your family. Your culture becomes another filter of understanding as you learn what it means to belong to a larger tribe or community.

The context of the generation into which you were born, or the historical era of your life, is yet another filter through which you process phenomenon such as gravity, light, sound, scents.

To understand personal experience, we can look at the level of the filter. Psychotherapy often works with the filter of development, delving into family history and personal narrative. Immigrants can maintain a sense of belonging by maintaining their cultural filter in their adopted homeland. As a society, we grapple with the implications of the era of information and the implications of addictive, manipulative media on the generation we call digital natives.

But what if instead of focusing on the filters, we identified with the phenomenon of what we experience through our senses:  light, sound, scents, pressure, gravity? The commonality of our collective human experience is there - something to which we all belong, regardless of the filters of our perception. Learning to experience phenomena with more precision, with more clarity, is a way to anchor into universal forces that are not colored by filters.

Can you embody the force of gravity very clearly through your bones, evenly through your joints, in a way that allows the force of gravity to move through you? It's an act of surrender from the normal 'doing' mode of cognitively-driven tasks. But it is also an engagement with the environment in a way that is driven by refined perception. In some traditions they call this using 'life force' and it feels like a sort of non-doing. There is a sense of action, but it is deeply supported instead combative. Like surfing, you are hooking into a force that is larger than yourself, allowing you to surrender and enjoy the ride. Learning to do this is a skill for a lifetime.

Creative living, coherent body

What is your artform?

The acquisition of a technique that frees the soul is the gift of an artform. You learn how to interact with the medium with enough ease to let you get drawn into the meditation of your process. For the visual artist that medium may be paint or charcoal to bring out the emotion of color or negative space; for the poet that medium is words that create a visceral experience of rhythm and pauses. Ultimately, your medium is merely the material through which you can richly communicate that which is deeply felt. But that skill takes time to cultivate.

Likewise, your own body is your artform. In developing a coherent body, you develop the ultimate sounding board of your mind. With me, you will learn to skillfully employ techniques that anchor the whole of your being into coordination, greater ease. It takes time and attention to the experience within yourself, but being embodied in the moment is allowing opportunities for satisfying insights. This is the purpose and mission of Coherent Body - to develop the art of knowing yourself through the portal of your body.

Body as an information process

There is a constant information exchange happening in your being. From your nervous system, to your digestive system, to your hormonal system, to your immune system, your felt sense of "self" is rooted in biochemical, electromagnetic, thermal, and pressure dynamics.

To understand this is to take a new approach to working with your body. Instead of a mechanistic view of your body as something to maintain in a contrived or artificial way, you can use your body to evolve your understanding of yourself and your potential. The body (and your uniquely personal experience of it) is the portal into a deeper self-knowing. To reference it is to complete a feedback loop of the dynamic, present moment.

What the hell does that mean?! Let me give you an application of that broader perspective in a very mundane example. Hip pain is often treated by strengthening and stretching muscles around the joint. But frankly, the body doesn't understand anatomical names of specific muscles or planes of movement. Technical words can certainly help us understand what we are experiencing by giving us more concrete and neutral language. But your body's understanding of its own hip is this: it is a major point of information convergence.

At a deep level, your body understands when it is aligned in a way that can direct the force of the weight it needs to support itself into the ground. If it cannot support the weight well, it might grip to stabilize itself. How does a body know if the hip joint can support well? There is feedback from the joint itself called proprioception and an overall sense of stability in the vestibular system. Some people will experience improved hip stability as a hip that moves smoothly, is painless, or feels open.

When you look at hip pain from that perspective, there are many implications to how you can resolve dysfunction. Is the midfoot moving well? Do the bones in the lower leg articulate well? Does weight transfer through the sacrum occur in the gait? This is a very different approach, and I welcome you to contact me to gain a different perspective on your particular issue.