Please excuse any innacuracies. The information here is filtered through my limited comprehension and/or inability to express my thoughts.
I took a two-day seminar this weekend with Dan Siegel, an interpersonal neurobiologist and Jack Kornfield, a leading buddhist teacher and founder of Spirit Rock. It was a conversation between these two men looking at the union between Eastern, Buddhist, thought, and modern scientific study. Much was discussed. Much was questioned. Experiences were had. It was amazing. It was quite somatic :)
I was most moved by Jack, who with an open heart, referenced thousands of years old Buddhist texts, told stories/jokes and guided us through meditation to help connect with deep places of healing within ourselves. I appreciated the way he acknowledged humor as a pedagogical method. “Get them to laugh and when their mouth is open, drop in a bit of wisdom”
Dan Siegel on the other hand inspired my western pedantic training and while Jack was thumbing through poetry books for passages by Mary Oliver and Rilke, Dan would cite study upon study that is our burgeoning body of knowledge for mindfulness practices.
He talked about mystery. The mysteries that have held back modern scientific pursuit. The fallacious mind body split that leads to division rather than unification, to rigidity rather than fluidity. The mystery of what exactly is a healthy mind? What exactly is a mind? What is Attention and from there, how do we use attention to help bring someone to a healthy state. From a healthy individual, how do we create healthy culture and society?
We talked about parenting, attachment disorders and how certain developmental failures can lead someone towards developing PTSD in response to trauma. We talked about resource states and helping someone recovering from trauma learn to expand what Dan referred to as their ‘window of receptivity’ meaning how do you get someone to slowly acknowledge the trauma they’ve experienced and let it heal without retraumatizing them?
We talked about organisms as energy and information. We all are descendants of the big bang, right? The brain then, is simply a system that helps organize the flow of energy and information. We can use attention to bring conscious awareness to areas that are stuck or chaotic (Rigidity and chaos being the telltale signs of dis-ease). With modern imaging capabilities, studies are showing that as we become mindful, our brains start working in a more integrated fashion. The parts of our brain that are responsible for and require integration; the limbic system and the corpus callosum for example, repair themselves through mindfulness/somatic techniques. Therefore, it was proposed that a healthy state is an integrated state: a state of wholeness. This is by no means a new idea. This is the oldest idea out there, but how exciting to see Doctors and Academics starting to look at and study this soft t truth.
Also, if we are made up of energy and information then to understand the processes and happenings in our system we need to have an understanding of quantum physics because Newtonian physics stop working at the subatomic level. Dr. Siegel proposed that to understand the workings of the brain; we need to be thinking of probabilities. It works something like this; a healthy mind fluctuates between a state of neutral (rest) and a state of excitability (action or thought). Our past experiences prime us towards certain spikes in action. With trauma, the plateaus or primed states keep us from getting back to a neutral position and predispose us to reliable/limiting patterns of thought and action.
I imagine that moving forward, this will be linked with posture. For what else is posture than a state of probability, or a primed action? I’ve learned to see stuck emotional states, dysfunction, held injuries in chests, shoulders hips and knees that have been held so long the person doesn’t even realize they’re still holding. I suspect and hope that there is room in this new field to look at these connections.
Walking in with a dubious, critical mind, I was disarmed again and again the way both Dan and Jack wisely linked all the necessary parts, answering questions with compassion and a decent serving of humility. There was much talk about a need for language that discharges limiting notions of spirituality and religion. There was also a great deal of time spent showing how studies from across the academic plane are in confluence and therefore strengthen their individual findings. I closed my eyes and could hear Thomas Hanna up on stage talking about Somas and human empowerment. Why did he use the word Soma? Because body, mind, soul are limited/deconstructed/disintegrated. But on the other hand, if you want to reach people, you need to use words that they understand so how about mindfulness, attention training?
I got to share my experience with some beautiful people on the front line in various ways. But shit, who isn’t on the front line? If you live in this world and you interact with people, you’re on the front line, whether you’re a clerk at a gas station, a first grade teacher or leading a squadron of marines into combat. We all benefit from understanding ourselves and operating from a place of centeredness and health.
It was all immensely healing for myself and exciting to see that this is not a resistance or an alternative theory, but rather the natural progression of slow scientific progress. In that sense, there was necessity but not urgency. Whether we want to or not, this transformation of thought and clarity of understanding is happening and will continue to have profound and unexpected results.
