Who am I? Who are you? And what is happening in this world between us?
Article by Jennifer Finch
May 7, 2021
The self-other distinction has long been a secret ingredient for empathy and compassion researchers, and an age-old quest in the field of psychology. We often see other, well, as “other.” We get that distinction, right? You are not me, and I am not you. “Thank goodness,” in some cases. However, we miss seeing ourselves so clearly. Are we truly individual and separate from our past and current relationships? Or do we feel what our partner feels? Sometimes more intensely than they even seem to feel it emotionally? Do we get hooked into others’ emotions? React unnecessarily out of our own inability to process and clearly distinguish what is actually my experience, and what is yours?
It is much harder to examine our own body-mind and make those nuanced distinguishments. We even go to great lengths to avoid it, looking at ourselves, that is.
We see the words, “rugged individualism,” popping up these days, but what does that really mean? With all of this identity expansion, why do we suffer epidemically from loneliness, emptiness and hopelessness? Didn’t we want to be individualistic and have flexibility and freedom from others? Let’s take a quick inventory of self and notice if we are actually prone to hook into someone else’s emotional current.
Does our inner landscape fluctuate on the uncertainties of others? Or are we fully in our adult, best selves, have good acquisition and authority of Self? Mind is clear, stable and practiced with good self-stewardship. Body and outward actions are in our complete awareness, controlled, grounded, centered and established from our core self?
To prompt this contemplation further, here is a recent quote from a training I took with Dr. Anthony Back who says, “Our attention these days is being colonized, surveilled, monetized, and weaponized. We need to reclaim it.”
Does this spark something? Maybe we aren’t as “independent” as we think. Maybe we react quickly and seemingly automatic to others’ behaviors, words, actions, and emotional energies.
As for the space between us, I will leave the granular on that to the metaphysical experts, but what I do know is that it plays a part in our connection and disconnection with others. We can feel this “field,” or contingency space within our relational interactions if we finely attune to it. And just to note, it has its own set of rules and regulations.
Let me break all of this down by going back to the beginning of how we perceive our senses.
Opening Scene: Training in Flexibility or Rigidity
Act 1: Mom picks sippy cup up off the floor and places it back in the quasi clean, smooth, white, plastic highchair tray where baby sits behind it strapped in. Eye glances are exchanged without description. Mom’s lips are flat and linear and routine. Baby is wobbling and wiggling naturally, but fairly devoted to mom’s flat response and mimics empathically.
Act 2: Baby picks up sippy cup with a mighty grip, and proceeds to precariously dangle the looped handle in between five tiny fingers. Baby bangs the cup on the tray a few times. The noise helps baby confirm that the tiny hands are attached to a unified body. Baby stretches the merged hand-fingers-arm out extending the sippy cup beyond the canyon drop, over the ledge, where the baby cannot see over the curved lip of the highchair tray. Baby is practicing the milestone of the release technique (developmentally 6–8 months), and propels the sippy cup into the mystic and looks bright-eyed at mom.
Act 3: Mom sighs. Or was it a huff? Looks tightly at baby with amalgamated eyebrows, and then abruptly breaks off the stilted eye-gaze and walks away, back to her previous absorption (phone, news, checking socials, cleaning, sitting, staring into the middle distance, what have you).
Act 4: Well, this is a Three-Act Play. So, we instinctively end here and loop back to the beginning. Baby initiates the scene all over again. Act 1:….although, for the sheer sake of humor in real life, let’s add in the obligatory clause: expressions, actions, and sounds are subject to change and likely to vary widely. Life is improv. How would you be in this Three-Act structure?
How many times does the scene repeat? Well, it depends on what’s at stake, really. Here are three possible outcomes:
1. If the baby goes over the one-too-many-times quotient then a swift stack-blowing from mom ensues. The baby sits in the highchair with potential energy, and the kinetic energy of Mom’s ill-tempered fuse sets in motion a constricted survival response and monotonous release technique is thwarted. Baby forthwith abandons the plan to keep experiencing and sits jarred, or frozen, or collapsed a tiny bit on the inside. Until next time at least.
2. If Mom keeps her cool, and engages in the developmental learning process, it could go on for quite some time, and imperceivably might be an outright enjoyable moment for both participants. Authentic connection tethers the two nervous systems in a united front of safety, security, and validation. And within the context of experiential learning and growth, the touch, interoception and proprioception senses widen.
3. If baby has been familiarized in this adventurous unmapped territory, and is muted to an overreaction to Mom, then the dropsy routine could repeat out of the beginning titillating felt-senses of “How to Push Mom’s Buttons 101.”
Who knows really how the scene would conclude. There are many possible outcomes. One moment in time may never be like the next. In that way, life is much like T.J. Maxx, improvisational.
Of course, this is over-simplified, and over-glorified that the attachment of our learned actions is crafted solely by the mother, and solely within one contextual moment with a sippy cup. But using it in broad strokes, we can get a glimpse into how we start constricting and fragmenting ourselves from very early on in our lives. If you are a mom/parent and have over or under-reacted at some point with your child, don’t fret. We all have. What we are examining here are the habitual patterns that were blue printed in. Or stamped upon in some cases. Think in terms of consistent reactive responses, no matter what they are, positive or negative. Consistency is an operative word; reactions with measured regularity and repeated over time is what gets mainlined into our nervous systems from our caregivers. The harsh and biologically disruptive reactions generally create the patterned-in influences that can develop into constrictions and fragmentation of Self.
From this self-curious advantage, we can examine how many of us remain pseudo-selves. Never fully separating from our caregiver’s nervous systems. We continue to exist on a call and response loop that clearly kept us alive in the familial system we inculcated and inhabited into. To a great degree, we have set-up longevity of codependency. Some of these habitual reactive patterns were imprinted long ago. Perhaps preverbal, or even centuries ago intergenerationally. It’s like they played the Russian long game intending all along to exile us out of our own bodies. And perhaps even still, we capitulate to these patterned reactivities. They confidently continue to hook us into their emotional fields, trapping us in minds full of disorganized attics. Consciously or unconsciously our caregivers hand delivered these messages straight to our sense of self.
Once again, systemic examination is very complex. This is not full comprehension of chaos theory in a day. Our caregivers often were loving and patient and kind, but perhaps born in a warzone, or severe poverty, or with debilitating medical conditions. Or the generational times called for a more firm and rigid ideal which logically would have been acquired in the next generation’s body-mind outlook, and we either went with the program or rebelled against it.
What We Do Know
Biologically, we are born using our caregiver’s nervous system as a surrogate of our own. The nervous system develops from embryonic tissue called the ectoderm and the first signs of it can be seen in about the 16th day of development (Center for Neurotechnology, Univ. of Washington). But it is not fully developed until the first three years of life, and some researchers are now staying even longer, up to 7–9 years.
Dr. Stephen Porges, a world renowned nervous system expert concludes,
“dependence on others parallels with maturation of the autonomic nervous system…. This dependence on other decreases as the infant develops. This decrease in dependence is paralleled by changes in neural regulation of the autonomic nervous system. During development, as higher brain circuits begin to regulate the brainstem nuclei, which control the autonomic nervous system, the infant becomes more independent and is increasingly capable of initiating social interactions with others to regulate physiological state. As these self-regulatory skills develop, the dependence on the caregiver to elicit ingestive-vagal reflexes (i.e., feeding) as a primary strategy of regulation, decreases. Behaviorally, the infant appears to be more socially skilled and better able to spend time alone. This is observed as the infant’s ability to both rapidly calm after disruptive challenges and to remain calm for longer periods, even in the absence of others.” (Infant Child Dev. 2012 Feb obtained on nih.gov).
Did you get all of that? Okay, so let’s go back to my intention of this article, how well are we really doing? Are we rugged individualists? Or are we still largely co-regulating with a surrogate nervous system, seen or unseen? How many children, teenagers, or yes, even adults do you know who are able to spend time alone, and regain a resilient state described as “rapidly calm after disruptive challenges, and remain calm for longer periods, even in the absence of others”?
If you are eye-popping because you are having a momentary lapse of reason, realizing just how infused you still are with your mom’s/care-givers emotions and actions, don’t fret, we are all in this camp. We were all set up to fail. Congratulate yourself, because you are opening yourself up to what has long been avoided, self-inquiry and examination and perhaps this sets sail and you embark on an even deeper journey to uncover why you still suffer unnecessarily, engaging in a respectable quest to “Save the Children.”
So where do we start all of this undoing? Unfolding all of these constrictions, and integrate fragmentations. How do we reclaim our body-mind and truly be, act and think in our differentiated Whole Self? Without influences and emotional contagion of others’ flying us like tumbleweeds across our daily landscape?
Let’s begin with the brain, then we will move to a more reliable medium of somatic embodiment.
What we do know is that babies have so much to learn. And they learn fast. Barbara Tversky teaches us in her newest book, How Action Shapes Thought: Mind in Motion (©2019),
“(babies) brains create millions of synapses, connections between neurons, per second. But their brains also prune synapses. Otherwise, our brains would become tangled messes, everything connected to everything else, a multitude of possibilities but no focused action, no way to strengthen important connections and weaken irrelevant ones, no way to choose among all those possibilities and organize resources to act.”
This brain-pruning quickly adapts humans to respond to the world and the specific life in which they are being born. So, in the quick scene that started us out, three different responses were mentioned: 1. An increasingly irritated and agitated mom; 2. A mom who plays along and smiles and rejoices at the baby’s explorations to the environment; 3. A mom who doesn’t set boundaries or have follow through on said boundaries, and baby learns to keep pushing.
This is a hacker’s way of saying, the baby is responding to the world that mom is staging. Again, we are looking for consistency, over time in our reactions. Everyone is going to go off the rails from time to time. We are examining the patterning in, because we know that the baby relies on mom’s nervous system as a surrogate to their own for several years. And if we adopt that mom’s nervous system was reliable and nurturing, then with or without her we carry it within us. We can healthily separate from her neurobiology, and live independently because we have culminated an experience of an “inner mother.”
“Since the normal child carries a reliable inner mother, he does not fear that the attainment of a separate self will cast him adrift in a chaotic, alien world. The symbiotic psychotic child, on the other hand, has been unable to make effective use of the mother as a beacon of orientation” (Louise Kaplan, Oneness and Separateness: From Infant to Individual 1978 ).
The fragmented pieces of mom we end up with and carry within us are unreliable. This often appears as a functional freeze response, unable to constructively engage in the world in the way we were intended to. It can feel like a full gas pedal and a full brake pedal on at the same time. We can show up looking stuck, or still, or indecisive, or controlled by perfectionism. We look unproductive, but inside our engine is revving and burning us out. Interestingly, we are discovering in the research the correlation of this bodily process with autoimmune and other syndromal conditions. We have not quite separated into full adulthood, we remain pseudo-selves.
How have we been constricted?
We independently learn to catch falling heirlooms made of Ming Dynasty China; we don’t leap to catch a hot potato. Our brain naturally crafts the sense of importance in such matters, truly a magnificent machine. However, what we increasingly learn outside of our independent discoveries (i.e. of hot verses fragile), is how to survive the environment we are being raised in. Brain mapping is an innate skill that we all have, and we all use. We see into Mom. We experience her mind. (Again, Mom is synonymous with any primary caregiver). This tactical combat skill has helped us survive. How will Mom react? If I can logically predict that, then I can reorganize myself to stay safe.
Our brain, however, has become entirely too efficient in many cases and often misreads events in a blink. Is that a snake or a rope? It often leaves out important cues, signals, and context and solely relies on past experience. Not present day, now, experiences, which are subject to change. You are currently not with Mom. Those harsh, critical eyes you might be perceiving in a now moment are not attached to your mother’s face. Life is improv remember. We have to be nimble and agilely peel our brain out of past facial recognition programming.
How our brain projects threat, life-threat or safety depends on how our brain has been pruned. Have we been wired for threat? Was playing dropsy with a sippy cup coupled with a severe and disproportionate response from a caregiver consistently, over time?
Barbara Tversky, tells us that our actions unite our senses and create a vigorous pathway to our behaviors. “Unifying the senses depends on acting: doing and seeing and feeling, sensing the feedback from the doing at the same time.” We learn to “calibrate perception through action.” And as we know in the decades of literature on neuroplasticity, what fires together, wires together.
Touch is the first perception we have. It comes before language, speech, cognitive reasoning, understanding. We actually have more than 20 senses, but sometimes we feel our senses operate independently. We see. We hear. We smell. But in actuality all our senses are integrated and “color all modes of perception” (Touch is Really Strange, Steve Haines 2021). Steve Haines states that the senses blend together to serve the goals of the brain. He synthesizes research from (Linden 2015; Smith 2018; Fulkerson 2020), that illuminates how touch or any other sense is not a pure experience of our world. When we perceive touch, the input initiates plans for action, expectations, and a “healthy dose of emotion.” We are inherently multi-sensory beings. In order to understand our perceptions and appraisals coming from our cognitions, seems to “require active exploratory movements, and has a close connection to agency.”
Direct touch, through our body, experienced just as touch, under our biases, prejudices, cognitions, and past is the closest way to “touch” into our actual reality, exactly how it is. Not how we want it to be, and often not how we “see” it.
Acting staples together with perception. Tversky recounts myriad studies that not surprisingly lead us to conclusive results that acting changes the brain. We get better and better at whatever it is that we are acting out. Irritation? Anger? Frustration? Impatience? Hiding, making ourselves smaller, or invisible? Muting ourselves or not speaking up? Or the converse, making ourselves bigger and “badder”. More seen, more heard, demanding of attention or respect? Could we instead fire and wire together softness, openness, understanding, curiosity, engagement, connection, compassion? How many of us truly got delivered that nervous system from our family system?
If we leave the mind as our sole participant of reasoning for change, we effectively have cut off any direct contact with reality. The mind has, well a mind of its own. And up to 60–70% of the time it is not even here, in this exact moment with us (Research from Univ. of California — Irvine).
For example, the neurological disorder known as Alien Hand Syndrome which I recently learned about from my daily weird science calendar, can cause the afflicted individual to be completely unaware of the activities of one of their hands. Hard to believe right? Ragesh Panikkath, MD, Deepa Panikkath. MD, and Kenneth Nugent, MD, from Baylor University Medical Center, published July 2014 in www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, “The Alien Hand Syndrome.” What they discovered is both creepy and fascinating. They describe that individuals with this rare condition have seemingly no control of their hand, until the sensations begin to “awaken.” This on again off again appendage has a mind of its own. And often while sleeping, this syndromal symptomatic occurring will awaken them to actions against their will. Their hand is doing things as if the appendage belongs to someone else entirely.
That is an extreme example of constriction. And I am curious if they have ever worked with any underlying trauma responses. How did their caregivers look at them?
Another, maybe more relatable example of relying on our biased mind without incorporating the body comes from an actual experience I had almost a decade or so ago. I was in a week-long meditation retreat where we were specifically working with posturing to improve our “performance.” It was based on the work of Frederick Alexander and his popular, Alexander Technique. We worked all week on aligning our spine, head and neck along with our lumbar vertebrae. With such acute interoceptive awareness in all day meditation sittings, I could begin to detect if my head was tilted ever so slightly upward, which indicates a threat response. My awareness both within me and outside of me became refined to a small degree of detecting if I was straight, or one percent slouched. If I was tilting a tiny fraction to relieve nightshades of arthritic nodules beginning to formulate in my hip sockets. It was an illuminating week, and also tremendously boring and still. I felt like I was cultivating synesthesia; paint was drying and I could hear it.
Back to my point, about mid-week we worked with a long upright mirror. So that we could visualize our discoveries in real time. One woman, middle aged, attending for chronic pain issues, was up next for the mirror work. She sat in front of her reflection and to the thirty plus others, including me, she was clearly leaning to the left. It wasn’t subtle. It was as if she was deliberately tilted as one would to pull a sweater out from under her right butt cheek. But she was motionless. Remarkable. Is she not seeing this in her reflection? For days we had been working on straightening. Where had she been sitting and I hadn’t noticed this? It would have been a welcomed intriguing study verses watching a pot boil.
The teacher worked gently and respectfully with this woman. She absolutely could not see her own full tilt. Her brain was blind-spotting her. Tremendous force cognitive dissonance has! She exclaimed to all live witnesses in the room that she was indeed sitting up straight. Interesting. Maybe the week would rid my boredom after all.
After countless minutes of the instructor manipulating her skeletal structuring, millimeter by millimeter, she got her to sit up straight. Or what to all of us appeared straight. And the woman, now most likely embarrassed, in the hot seat for way too long, became outwardly frustrated and declared, “Now I am leaning way over to the right!”
Our brain believes what it believes, it sees what it sees. It shapes our perception and we have to begin to understand that it is not always accurate. Even though it feels true. It can be so convincing. We are looking through a lens of what Dr. Paul Ekman calls, “a refractory period.” This is a psychological term that refers to a period of time during which a response to a second stimulus is significantly slowed because a first stimulus is still being processed. Essentially stuck in a functional freeze response from a first stimulus perhaps long ago that our mind-body ingested as “too much, too fast, too soon.” Our body-brain froze a moment in time, when our actions and reactions became stuck and began to fertilize a feedback loop. The brain registers this as truth, because going against this “knowledge” would cause: fear, shame, pain, internal conflict confusion, embarrassment, a need to fall on our sword, etc.
If we walk around with beer goggles on, or rose-colored glasses, we begin to train our brain to see the world through that lens. It perceives that that is a “normal” vision of the world, and there is no other way to see it. It becomes truth. Even though everyone else in the vicinity clearly knows you have beer goggles on. We force ourselves to see positivity even when the shear reality of things is not so pretty. “Everything is fine!” forced through a larynx, tight jaw and pursed lips.
Who is right, or seeing reality clearly of course is hard to prove, because in essence we all have a shade of beer goggles (distorted glasses) on. So, who is right? Or, more right?
Our memories are fallible. Our brains are fickle. We all have been constricted and imprinted on, intergenerationally mainlined beliefs, and our brains have been pruned. We all have shaped and molded biases and prejudices. But knowing that you do, and that we all do, already could change things in a more benevolent direction of how we see each other. This knowing cuts under our perceived sense of righteousness. Do you have to be right? Maybe try looking how you sit in front of a mirror with 40 people in the room.
It is really, really hard to change our brain. And our way of seeing our reality. But it is possible. And neuroplasticity makes it achievable and hopeful that we can all take responsibility for what our brain is doing.
But our brain is often the toughest to convince to change. The slightest bump up against “unknowing” scratches at something primal underneath. We grasp at keeping the ground under our feet, and our brain, full of ego, and good training, makes us believe it is the expert in the flooring department. Providing good ground construction is the main purpose of the brain. Its only job is to keep you safe. Unfortunately, it doesn’t care if you are right, or causing harm to yourself or others by trying to be right.
Notice how hard it is for someone else to change our mind. Who’s brain is more stabilized and clear, looking out to reality with a polished lens? If your mind is based in agitation, anxiety, and anger, and that is what you have fired and wired together, chances are it is driving through a blizzard. And, for wild responsibility’s sake perhaps take ownership of the driver behind the driver.
Polish our Lens and Train at a Level of Physiology.
Have you ever tried to get someone else to see their reality? Have you ever felt you were knocking your head against a wall when dealing with certain friends or relatives who you keep trying to help? Over and over again you suggest changes that could improve their circumstances, and they say they understand but very soon are again repeating the same agitating story. Well, examine above, how hard it is for you to take advice from others and change your opinion.
Worthy to note is this unclear seeing is not necessarily stubbornness as a character trait. It is patterned in. And it cemented out of a concerned need of survival. Our brain’s sentinel mode of operation is to help us survive. It doesn’t give a lick about our happiness. Below our conscious awareness, many, many moons ago, and even beyond that our brain pruned as a good keeper and protector of our safety. It guarded us by brain mapping others. Mostly our direct caregivers. But in its highly sufficient manner, if it catches the slightest fragrance of “familiar” it will snap on past appraisals, out of context and right in the midst of a present moment. Innocent people are getting caught and entangled in a watchman who is on the lookout for harsh, critical eyes, that it recognizes and knows from the past.
If experiences are known and practiced, and predictable, then the brain knows what to do to keep you safe. And it does a tremendous job. I mean you’re here today right? But too many times it operates out of an over-confidence effect and a negativity bias. If your spouse uses a mannerism that is similar to a caregiver of yours, pause and let your brain know you are in a present, new, different, and now moment.
If you really want to understand why you do things, try examining your grandparents, or even their grandparents. Louise Kaplan in her classic, Oneness and Separatness, (1978) states,“The origins of our attachment are found in the infant’s earliest attachment to his/her mother — the mother was home base from which to explore the world as soon as the aliveness of his muscles gird him to creep away from the safety of lapdom into ever-widening circles of the unknown.”
Was it safe to venture away from your mother? Or is enmeshment still causing infused emotions to be entangled? Or did you so desperately flee from your mother that you left hastily rear-view mirror style, but yet you still don’t know why you are suffering or over-reacting? Outside of our familial systems, to take some of the pressure off of our immediate caregivers, other systemic influences have shaped our minds and the correlating body correspondence. Our schools, teachers, music selections, books, philosophers we felt understood us, movies, news media, friends, or friends disguised as friends, our communities, rural or urban, our jobs, bosses, spiritual beliefs, etc.
For a good reference to expand upon a systems understanding of Self, start with Dr. Murray Bowen’s work. It changed my life. And I use his genogram, and systemic approach daily in my work with my clients. It takes away the shame and guilt that everything is up to us. Everything is up to us, but there is also a bigger us, collective influences, so we don’t need to worry too much about it.
I am going to transition here in a closing segment on the importance of including our body. With our body’s data being including with our brain, we can begin to better understand our reality. We have clearer vision of ourselves, our relationships and the space between our interpersonal exchanges. Under the brain, and below the neck is a whole other world that we can access to help us see our actuality without any conceptual overlays. To help us finally become independent thinkers, break out of our pseudo suits and become agents of our true individual selves.
A Quick Word on the Neuroscience of Embodiment…Just to Open a Door to Another Way of “Thinking,” “Knowing,” and “Seeing.”
Our body is also intelligent and a watchman for our safety. In fact, it has been estimated that out of every million parts of information received and processed by our body, we humans only admit 13 parts into our conscious awareness. That means we only allow ourselves to be conscious of .000013 percent of data, of experience, known to our body (Reginald Ray). It knows a lot. And in this context, the body plays Jeopardy, while the brain plays Wheel of Fortune.
When you operate from your best self, how do you stand? What are your body, jaw, tongue, neck, eyes, feet doing? How are they positioned? Are they constricted or gripping?
Now in converse of that, take a mental note if you are operating from your very unskillful, unmindful self, essentially far from your best self. I am sure we don’t have to travel too far back in our life experience to recall a moment of going off the rails a bit. How is your body different? If we can start to understand what happens in our sensing and feeling and how we are holding ourselves, then we have more places to intervene and start to cultivate change. This is not about what you are thinking, nor are we trying to reenact a Tom Cruise maneuver to get through the Above Top Secret Security Clearance and change the way you think from the main server.
It is what happens in your body that is automatically correlated to your thinking. It is much easier to access habitual change, because we can reposition ourselves at any moment. No problem. The other way, trying to think and talk out, to change our thinking…not so much. We can deconstruct habits from here. Subterranean.
There are key pieces of data we can decipher and dismantle how our past shaped us. If we can identify these connections, these habitual patterns with a refined granularity of investigation, we can see how the actions are instantly triggered and then play out over and over in our body. They underpin the obvious “automatic” reactions that are causing our continued suffering, over or under reacting, or blocking our view of reality.
Quick Disclaimer:
There is a lot of junk science out right now about somatic, and body-oriented canons. Partly due to our current state of science in this vector is emerging in an explosive manner. We are on a new frontier entering into a revolution of change with our neurobiological understanding. We do not have a long history of skillfully applied and efficacy-based research on our biologic machinery being examined as a united organism and in direct relationship with our neurology. Body and mind are not separate. We are indeed one life form. We quote science that has for centuries looked at body and mind as separate entities. In 2021 this is inconceivable and blind.
The research I am pulling from here rests in a certain amount of credibility that suits my level of conviction, but don’t take it as set-in stone. It is likely to change, or be updated as soon as tomorrow, which is common in this field. What matters is your felt-sense of experience. Does it feel true, without having to take anyone’s word on it. Principally we are learning to make up our own minds, but by using the added yardstick of our body, so we can see ourselves and our relationships more accurately. Not from layers and layers of constriction over time planted like chips into our brains and bodies by influencers.
Interpersonal Neurobiology 101
(compiled research from: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stanford, Northeastern University, Harvard, Dr. Stephen Porges, Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Gabor Mate and numerous other somatic experts I follow avidly)
The first concept to note in somatic work, is that our brain is not singularly located between our two temples and above our throat. Anatomically, sure, the 3–5 pound universe, we understand as our brain, is saliently located within our head. Broadening our understanding, our brain is actually distributed throughout our entire body. Our gut thinks and has a brain, for example. Dr. Porges coined the term, “neuroception” as a way to communicate to the medical world that our body takes in information from our environment, including energies and emotions from people we are interacting with, below our conscious awareness. Much like our brain’s sentinel job, our body is also actively working to keep us safe, and functioning in our daily lives. Constructed marvelously like a natural radar detector it is receiving signals all of the time and processing them out categorically as safe, not safe, life threat.
This understanding is a hidden aspect of our intelligence and it will forcibly respond to our situation if it is in any life danger. It will make choices beyond our brain’s capacity, and dive into survival mode as needed, and then ask for permission later. We can thank it for this Jack Bauer training and guidance. This is where that freeze response becomes really remarkable and NOT shameful. So, if a politician or a prosecutor unknowingly says, “Why didn’t you run? Why didn’t you fight? Why didn’t you respond at ALL?” You can say, “I am sorry for your ignorance, but my body chose FOR me and ultimately decided that freezing was the best possible sequelae of survival. Corollary to the exact life-threatening moment I was in, my body, below my brain, chose my response for me to remain alive. And I thank it every day.”
Plucking this apart even further.
Distinguishing between conceptual self-awareness and embodied self-awareness can be helpful. We have two types of input modes of intelligence. There are more actually, but for the sake of a simplistic article let’s work with these two. Conceptual meaning brain-based intelligence. And Embodied meaning somatic or body-oriented intelligence. They are different processes in our neurobiology and neuromuscular systems. Both involve body and brain. We cannot separate it out as we are one organism.
There is no basis for separation of any mind or body system scientifically as we now have concluded. There are no separate systems. The nervous system is the immune system, the hormonal framework, the cardiovascular system and the emotional system. They are all integral portions of the same supersystem. Within the last two decades the scientific discoveries, under the trailblazing branch called psycho-neuro-immunology studies the interconnectedness and the unity of the emotional system, the immune system, the hormones and the nervous system as one unified organism. Chaos theory and the butterfly effect within our body-mind.
It turns out that the nervous system actually wires them all together like a “giant electrical grid” (Dr. Gabor Mate). The nervous system connects the bone marrow to the brain, the white blood cells, the red blood cells; the whole gamut.
In fact, the nervous system is the Queen’s Gambit in understanding illness, medical conditions and all psychological ailments.
It is eternally sending messages up from the expansive vectors of the body, even the very discrete corners, to the brain. Eighty percent of the messages received go from body to brain. Only twenty percent from brain back down to body. Who would you trust to get accurate information from?
The heart itself is even thought to have a nervous system and acts like a second brain. The heart has certain predictive capacities, especially for negative things, and if you have ever said, “I just knew it in my heart,” then you would understand this. Our gut is also a super nervous system/brain secreting biochemical messages into our whole circulatory self.
Our immune cells also have the capacity to manufacture every hormone that our brain manufactures. The immune system is always talking to the brain and vice versa. In fact, the immune system is known as “the floating brain.” It reacts to memory just like the brain does and is hard wiring in reactive responses just like baby learned to adapt to survive mom’s Frau Farbissina eyebrows.
The most research we have to date is within the gut-brain connectivity. When we absolutely know something within our gut, it is a calm knowing of truth. If you think you know something in your gut, but it is fused and riddled with anxiety, fear or any heightened energy, it is most likely a strong emotion you are experiencing and being magnified at a cognitive level. It can be hard to discern the discrete differences between a gut feeling and an emotion. But we are learning. Imagine if we had better training in this. This really is exciting stuff that will propel our human race forward compassionately. This branch of science might just hand us the secret decoder ring and teach us how to preventatively treat regret. No more spontaneous outbursts where we put our own selves on the time out chair. Our gut sent the message loud and clear this time, because we trained to listen to it, versus our brain.
Your body is getting the whole picture. Your cognition, and your perceived sense of knowing is only processing a small part. And that entire brain apparatus is mostly evaluating your present reality from past appraisals of experiences that are known from the card catalogue.
In a refined way, the brain or rather, mind, is everywhere, so our conceptual self-awareness exists everywhere along far-reaching neural pathways. Embodied self-awareness also involves body and brain but adheres to a very different set of neural pathways. So, one brings the chips and the other brings the dips.
Conceptual self-awareness contains the librarian whose desk is largely stationed in the hippocampus. Much like Melville Dewey, the librarian organizes our past stories, narratives, and historical timeline of our life. The librarian also leads us to the fiction section that holds capacity for dreams, ideas, and our visions for our future. As a good librarian would, it opens worlds that expand our conceptual understanding and can take us anywhere in time at any given moment. We can gravitate toward the history section and think about the past. We can time travel with Carl Sagan and think about and even envision and imagine our future, or worlds that may or may not even exist. The librarian also operates the micro neuro-musculature of the head, face, neck and attunes to our speech and language centers of our brain. If you can think it, see it within your mind’s vision, or have experienced it from a past memory of time, this is your conceptual self-awareness at work.
Interestingly, the embodied self-awareness is talented more like a photojournalist, less like a librarian. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson it is masterful in interacting with our humanist experience in real time. It captures like a good street photographer, the right now, in this specific decisive moment. It holds the metadata of how you feel in space right now, without having to look up anything in a card catalogue. There is no recall. It is just now, and now, and now. Capturing screen shots of our life in action.
Proprioception, interoception and neuroception are its strong suits. We know ourselves through this felt-sense experience. We can feel ourselves in space without needing to look and touch from the outside in. It is inside out felt and lived experience. We can superbly feel into our left shoulder and know where it is in relation to our right knee. You don’t need to look or even touch. It is something that we feel and sense into, from within the inside of us. This sensory self-awareness exists only right here in present moment time. Because there is no other moment that we can experience sensation. This entire intelligence functions along remarkably different neural networks than our conceptual self-awareness. It allows us to abide to pain or discomfort from within the inside of us. It allows us to feel ourselves inside our fingers and toes.
This is a lesser-known awareness, and we haven’t trained in it with any properness. We learn things largely in rote and rudimentary forms of taught intelligence, not experienced intelligence. We have highly trained conceptual self-awareness in our western culture. This is an apple. We see an apple. We experience an apple. Now we know an apple. You don’t have to see it to “see” it actually to know it, because we can recall it. Unless you absolutely have never interacted even on a two-dimensional page, with an apple before.
What we don’t teach readily and are less familiar with in our understanding is experiential learning. This is heartbreak. This is torment, or sadness. Why? Because it is more aligned with our actual reality, and we will do anything to avoid the often painful and heart crushing truth it reveals. And teaching this not only feels uncomfortable to the receiver of the information, but also to the teacher. We are really not that good at feeling our actual experiences. Unless they are pleasurable. We have quite an addiction to positivity in this culture. But even pleasurable experiences can be hidden in shame. So, we don’t tend to go there. Which is actually what exactly is shameful.
This experiential intelligence of body self-awareness activates a different part of our human capacity. It is authentic, honest and aligned with real time. It staples us to our present-moment and we have to feel whatever our life is doling out, without escaping or avoiding it.
The aim is to use both of these sources at the same time. This is what gives us a great advantage. It is exactly what helps us distinguish what is exactly mine, and what is exactly yours, and what belongs to the space in between us. We can tap into both of these parts of ourselves simultaneously. When your thinking is on the lam, what is your gut sensing? What are your feet and hands doing? How do you sense the position of your body in space? How are you holding your neck and throat? This is normally outside of our daily conscious awareness. It happens in the background. By bringing it more to the foreground it gives us a great polished lens of awareness, and usually promotes more accuracy with reading and interpreting our lives.
How our feet already move or angle when we sense into to pleasure or pain is quite telling of how we were imprinted upon. If your brain was pruned more towards threat than safety, are you more inclined to feel angry or do you want to disappear. Fight or flight. Are your arms and fists tightening, or perhaps are your feet numb and offline? Is your whole body moving toward or away from? When we feel a tinge of overwhelm and our brain convinces us that “we deserve a break,” is one hand already on the wine bottle and the other reaching for the corkscrew?
Wrapping this up.
These are the basics of embodiment work. How our actions automatically inform us of how we are digesting the world. Can we make it more body conscious? It takes practice. Plenty of practice. But it provides an efficient way to disrupt harmful habitual patterns that beats the years of trying to convince a brain.
If you are trapped in a habit of behavior, tilt your chin ever so slightly downward and pull it back in toward your neck, and see if it makes sense biologically why it was tilted upward in a perceived threat response to begin with.
Embodiment opens a world of possibility allowing people to achieve flexibility and freedom that were previously being tortured by the looping, not in present moment, brain. The brain keeps thoughts ruminating, and likes our detachment from our body, because out of defiance and a massive ego, it feels confident in this velvet ditch. It does not like the unknown. And life is improv. It is all unknown. The present moment being the most unknown. So, the brain does what it does to absolutely avoid the uncertainty of most all of life.
The body nails us to the present moment. Frame by frame it pays attention. It notably has kept you alive countless times without needing any praise or recognition. A silent, unknown hero. So, isn’t it about time we give it some validation and make it feel seen and heard? It is incredibly adaptive and knowledgeable. When a level of indecision arises, don’t skip over the body awareness. Tune in with a fierce focus, it might actually give you an internal dose of wisdom to move or stay or go with the flow right on the spot. Are we going to practice going to war and add to the aggression? Or are we going to practice patience and peace? How does your body feel about it? If you uncouple it from your brain, below your thoughts, will it change the story? Was the story already patterned in a long, long time ago? And do we need to reclaim our true self?
It is our greatest strength to actually operate from our core embodied selves. Nothing is really what we thought in our minds.
When the stakes are high, the rubber meets the road, and pressure is looming over us, frequent your body to access your best and most understood self. Most of what you are intaking, like an open fire hydrant, is not even yours. Someone just tossed you a hot potato and even your brain knows not to catch that.
Honor your sovereignty.
To close up in a brief phrase, honor your sovereignty. Sit with your emotions, and let others sit in theirs. Be with all of that space in between in wholeness, with all of your presence without having to react out of it. You are not an extension of your caregivers or influencers that didn’t have your best interests at heart. Not anymore. You don’t need to adopt and absorb their feelings and emotions because they are theirs, and not yours. Thank goodness, and what a relief. In an instant you can drop all in which you carry.
Now that you are on your way to becoming a fully differentiated individual, in another article at another time, I will talk about how we need to go back to oneness, a collective oneness. In the meantime, the password is: interdependence.
As the Flaming Lips so brilliantly revealed to the world at their most recent concert during Covid in the year 2021,
we can be unified in an experience, stay completely connected to everyone and ALL of the spaces between, AND remain in our own bubbles. This is the true teaching.
This is nothing other than our life. Live it well. And responsibly.
Jennifer Finch
For more on embodiment practices and to engage in experiences, check out groups and workshops and other offerings at: www.beherenowmindfulness.com
For a new look at “self-other distinguished” somatic-based compassion training, follow along in real-time as I develop a curriculum at: www.anatomyofcompassion.org
