The study of human nature may be thought of as an art
with many tools at its disposal, an art closely related
to all the other arts, and relevant to them all.
In literature and poetry, particularly, this is especially significant.
Its primary aim must be to broaden our knowledge of human beings,
that is to say, it must enable us all to become
better, fuller, and finer people.
--Alfred Adler
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul
For that call’d Body is a portion of Soul
Discern’d by the five Senses,
the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
-- William Blake
- Your body is a profoundly intelligent, biologically programmed miracle of nature that can translate the thoughts of your mind into reality.
- Your body has the capacity to feel an infinite spectrum of sensations and emotions.
- Your body has the wisdom and ability to let you know when you are in danger, to tell you when you have met a kindred spirit, to tell you when it needs nourishment, to let you know when it is time to rest.
- Your body comes equipped with the instinct to bond, the ability to love. It offers you the chance to experience love and pleasure exquisitely intertwined in the mysterious, erotic domain of sensation.
This is the message of the Somatic approach to conscious awareness. Robert K. Hall, one of the founders of Somatics
writes in his forward to my book Senses Wide Open: The Art and Practice of Living in Your Body:
The past century has been a time of great upheaval in the world, in which the most appalling cruelty known by the human species has been perpetrated on ourselves, and our home planet. Aggression, violence and destructive behavior have reached breathtaking magnitude. World wars, caused by the unbridled release of dark forces out of the human psyche, were fought with weapons of such massive power that one can only wonder at the miracle of our survival into a new millennium. There were times in our recent past when the total destruction of ourselves and our planet seemed a likely possibility. That danger is still very much with us.
Simultaneously, the past century has witnessed the emergence of an amazing upwelling of interest in self-awareness. As a species, we are currently being touched by a rising tide of curiosity and investigation into the nature of our own being. We have become seriously interested in discovering what “makes us tick.”
The search for the true self is becoming a legitimate task for ordinary intelligent people, no longer relegated just to the religious recluse or the isolated artist. Self-awareness training has found its way into the offices of large corporations, the halls of government, our churches, and into the lives of millions of citizens.
One aspect of this search for self-knowledge has been a growing interest in the ways we relate to our own living bodies. The human body is the vehicle for all our experience, personal and transpersonal. The life of the body is also the life of our collective society.
A wonderful outcome of our emerging interest in self-knowledge has been the gradual appearance, during the past 30 years, of a field called Somatics. This is a discipline that involves training the attention and focusing awareness on the actual experience of being an embodied organism. It is a systematic study of the life of the human body in present time, from the inside. It incorporates learning a number of methods for gaining direct awareness of bodily life that can lead to profound insight, and yet are essentially simple and available to anyone willing to make a commitment to practice them.
With expanded awareness of the body comes greater skill in living, working, and loving. Somatics offers the prospect of people becoming ever more compassionate toward each other and more adept at managing the hardships and mysteries of life as a human being.
Somatics teaches that at your most complete, you are a living, breathing, fully dimensional being, inhabiting your body with awareness thought, emotion and sensation integrated and appropriately expressed through your body. This is the natural embodiment that is your birthright. But if you are like most people today, you habitually reference only one or at best two narrow segments of your multidimensional self.
These unconscious habitual filters limit what somatic educators call natural instinctive responsiveness. Mirroring the insights of the Enneagram system, the somatic approach illustrates how some of us get caught in the negative portion of the mental realm, fearful and tentative, rationalizing the world into making some sort of sense, while others live primarily in the negative portion of the emotional realm, sinking into a swamp of despair or suddenly flying high, dramatizing each event in order to begin to feel, while still others get caught in the negative portion of the physical realm, angry, confused, lashing out, unable to separate sensation from memory and emotion. This supports the Enneagram’s description of the head, heart and belly types, as well as, the three centers of perception.
If we’re lucky, the discomfort created by these imbalances eventually gets us interested in change. Systems such as Somatics and the Enneagram provide a useful map that directs us out of our limitations and toward a more honest and open approach to life. When we learn how to be more embodied or centered, our whole being radiates the essence states the Enneagram system so brilliantly describes.
This painting below, entitled The Last Judgment by Fra Angelico illustrates this point. Notice how the souls, who are condemned to hell, live in bodies distorted by torturous states such as gluttony, pride and cowardess, while those, invited into heaven, live in bodies that are alive with love, joy and pleasure. My interpretation of this painting considers the notion: We don’t have to die in order to go to heaven or hell. Life on earth is hell, when we are in the grip of our Enneagram fixation, like heaven, when we are resting in the arms of love.
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