Beginner's Mind - October 3rd, 2008
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
[The Secular Spirit]
[trauma treatment]
[Xllibris]
[Trauma Research]
[Epitaph For Marxism]
[Body Mind Community]
|
09:03 am
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/78825365/5950467) [Link] |
Inner Body Sensing
The Original Imprint
We started our workshops at the Center for Kinesthetic Education in October 2007, and through those workshops I came to recognize the central importance of “the original imprint”.
The theory behind the original imprint is merely the Alice Miller finding (that “normal” child-rearing practices can be routinely traumatizing) carried out to its logical conclusion: there has to be a first time that our survival mechanisms were overwhelmed. Once such an overwhelm first occurs, all subsequent overwhelms “nest” in the pattern of energy blockage that the original imprint creates. In later life, when therapy gets access to the whole complex of frozenness that has accumulated over the years, the body has an instinct to go for the foundation of it all: the original imprint. And, once the body unlocks the original imprint, the whole complex of frozenness built on it loses its foundation, weakens, and gradually dissipates with very little outside help.
However, getting to the original imprint requires certain specific skills that have to be learned by actually using them. The theory is not enough.
I had a theory, but I had not tested it in experience very much. So, there was a gap between mind and body. I noticed certain things happening, but I was very slow in reacting to them . I was not alert enough or quick enough to respond appropriately. Another way of putting it is that I was not relaxed enough. Still another way of putting it is that I violated one of the cardinal rules of the work, "Lord, save us from being in a hurry." Not being relaxed equals having a certain amount of tension. This “low-level” tension, not easily noticed in our ordinary state of awareness. Low-level tension amounts to a state of "mini-panic". A state of mini-panic causes one to respond to the surface stimulus, not get the whole picture. I recall this most vividly in conversing with Sue. When she mentioned something "behind the eyes", I gave a quick and clever verbal response, but I did not let her comment sink in, was not relaxed enough to read her condition with full somatic awareness, and so did not pick up the fact that "behind the eyes" is just the presenting symptom of a bodily state that had to include sensations throughout the body, tension in fact, and that calling attention to THAT is what is necessary. Missing the whole picture results in having moments of opportunity pass by.
So, theory is essential, but success in practice requires timing and experience. I'm working on it.
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
michaeldee's journal