THE CALL OF THE FOREST

The following passage is from a book called Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body, by Reginald A. Ray. (Chapter 3, in its entirety)

"In the Buddhist past, when questions have arisen about the authenticity of institutionalized, conventionalized Buddhist organizations, politics, beliefs, and practices, practitioners have retired into the "forest" (skt, vana, aranya), the classical terms for the uninhabited jungles of India. The "forest" was regarded as a place beyond the reach of conventional culture and institutionalized Buddhism, a place where the atmosphere was open and unobstructed. The forest was understood as a tractless waste, a place for all those "others" standing outside of conventional culture, such as wild animals, gods and demons, and people beyond the pale. The latter included lunatics, criminals, the terminally ill, the most extreme outcasts, and, most important, those spiritual practitioners who literally walked away from the conventionalized religious systems of India seeking "the origin of all things."

"Within Indian culture, the forest was considered the ideal place for spiritual practice because, in the forest, there are no rules and there are no presiding authorities. The only authority is the chaos of the forest itself. the only rule is what awaits there for each practitioner, uniquely, to discover. Memories of the past and plans for the future, the psychic infrastructure of civilization, do not apply: they have no bearing and they have no footing. The forest is about something else. In the forest, there is only the ever-present possibility of events, encounters, and insights that emerge directly from reality itself, pure and unpolluted by human wants, expectations and attitudes. Uniquely in the forest, the most radical of all human journeys can take place, one which brings us into direct contact with primordial being. Generally, the greatest saints of Buddhist tradition both in India an din larger Asia were products, so to speak, of the forest; fed up with the limitations of the town-and-village culture of institutionalized Buddhism, inspired by those who had gone before, they disappeared into the forest for years, decades, or even for life."


Ray goes on to say how there is no longer any geographical, literal forest for the modern-day practitioners to retire to, and I would add that there is really no easy access to the inner, metaphorical forest either.

"Even the idea of the "forest" has become largely marginalized in modern Buddhism. Every manifestation of Buddhism, it now seems, must immediately demonstrate "social engagement" and "ethical impact. It is not [...] that these are unimportant values. But now, more and more, they have become a litmus test to determine which forms of Buddhism are acceptable and which are not. Thus, the true forest is quickly disappearing, perhaps forever, from our world.

"But there is a new wilderness, a new trackless waste, a new unknown and limitless territory, a new terrain of chaos, that calls us. It is a territory [...] that has not been, and cannot be, colonized and domesticated by human ambition and greed, that in its true extent cannot be mapped by human logic at all. This is the "forest" of the human body. The body is now, I believe, our forest, our jungle, the "outlandish" expanse in which we are invited to let go of everything we think, allow ourselves to be striped down to our most irreducible person, to die in every experiential sense possible and see what, if anything, remains.

"In this, I am speaking not of the body we think we have, the body we conceptualize as part of our "me" or my self-image. Rather, I am talking about the body that we meet when we are willing to descend into it, to surrender into its darkness and its mysteries, and to explore it with our awareness. As we shall see, this true, limitless body cannot even be entered until we are willing to leave our own thinking process behind--on the surface, so to speak. It is similar to the deep-sea diver" while floating on the surface of the sea, he knows little of what lies below, but when he descends into its depths, the limitless worlds of the ocean open to him. It was of this ever unbounded and unknown body that the great siddha Saraha spoke when he said, "There is no pace of pilgrimage as fabulous an open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring."

Somatic psychotherapy leads you to the daunting forest, all the while remembering to help you place crumbs along the path (plenty of helpful markers) so you might find your way back, should you ever panic and feel lost.

The limits of Computational Theory of the Mind (CTM)

Moment by moment, night flickers in the imagination, in eroticism, subverting our strivings for virtue and order, giving an uncanny aura to objects and persons, revealed to us through the eyes of an artist…. Every attraction, every pattern of touch, every orgasm is shaped by psychic shadows.

Camille Paglia (1991, p. 4)

I am a somatic psychotherapist currently investigating a meta-model of human sexuality that can explain many components of irrational erotic arousal in terms of evolutionary psychology not yet fully accounted for by the computational theory of the mind (CTM). The proposed sexual model goes beyond the collective instinctual drive for the propagation of the species. It is a model where the development of consciousness is more consistently selected over human survival or personal advantage (see illustration below, regarding the stereotypical sexual coupling between the proverbial Catholic girl and the bad boy.) This hard-wired priority of consciousness development accounts for all manner of sexual attraction and perversion.

My understanding of computational theory of the mind (CTM) is of an organic feedback mechanism that acts to organize perception. My notion is that this mechanism is mediated not only by the mind but by the entire body as a computational vehicle of self-correcting apperception (not to mention a vehicle of self-healing molecular biology) and driven by chemical reinforcers such a dopamine, oxytocin, etc. to recognize and therefore respond (reorganize) to higher-level (transcendent) patterns of organization.

The new contribution of this erotic model of psychic and somatic organization is that it proposes a consciousness theory of arousal that drives evolution through a slightly modified version of the above mechanistic model (CTM). The new factor is akin to a yearning principle, that is, it's the instinctually-driven urge for humans to deeply know and manipulate physiological (somatic), material (environmental), and relational (interpersonal) as well as spiritual (transpersonal) dynamics.

The model posits the development of psychic organization primarily through a somatic gnosis of symbolic representations (chemical/emotional/relational pattern recognition on a visceral-body level) and secondarily through dream mentation (Fosshage), conceptual cognition, and eventually, through the manipulation of limiting linguistic symbols for articulating and propagating knowledge.

The model assumes a dynamic relationship between an individual’s personal reaction to symbols (that is, pre-extant organization matrices to which the individual is predisposed--environmentally, genetically, and personally--to recognize; also called archetypal patterns) and a somatic reaction that can be termed incentive salience (that which lights up reward centers in the brain) but is also recognized as instinct or desire. Ultimately, the model proposes that we are hard-wired for the development of consciousness primarily through the somatic exploration of symbols of transcendence (archetypal patterns), an optimal method for achieving developmental quantum leaps--something that the CTM model, as it now stands, cannot account for.

Steve Pinker writes (So How Does The Mind Work, 2005):

"Evolutionary psychology also helps to explain many instances of error, irrationality, and illusion—why we gamble, eat junk food, fall for visual illusions, obsess over celebrities, and fear snakes and heights more than hair dryers near bathtubs or driving without a seatbelt. The nature of the explanation is that there can be a mismatch between the ancestral environment to which our minds are evolutionarily adapted and the current environment in which we find ourselves."

The meta-theory of sexuality and arousal posits that such irrational desires (and addictions) symbolically point to unmet developmental needs. The resulting yearning, when suppressed, becomes more and more pathological. The underlying need is sought on a literal basis rather than on a higher-level analogical basis. (eg. Grasping for a breast rather than becoming conscious of insufficient nurturing in childhood or infancy –something the body well remembers and still irrationally clamors for, despite slaps in the face—rather than to seek appropriate and effective ways of bridging the as-of-yet-unconscious lacuna.)

A more elaborate illustration of this dynamic is seen in the underlying set of developmental needs expressed through the stereotypical sexual attraction between the proverbial Catholic Girl and Bad Boy. The Girl’s upbringing requires her to repress all tendencies to selfishness, self-interest, aggression, hostility, dishonesty, swearing, lying, cheating, etc… much of which the Bad Boy flaunts with impunity. This Boy, in turn, raised in a rough, gang-infested neighborhood might be risking his life if he dares exhibit tenderness, compassion, generosity, empathy, tearfulness, or any “softness” of emotion, which the good girl nonetheless proudly flaunts with the enviable result that everyone, including this Bad Boy, clamors to protect (or, perversely, attempts to squash in the hope that she can demonstrate how to survive despite her vulnerable attributes!)

Certainly when he rapes her or, optimally, only expresses carefully contrived (i.e., symbolic) roughness through his erotic aggression, he wants to pierce through her innocence to drink in her purity while infusing her with the Bad Boy qualities she lacks. Ideally he holds back sufficiently to not damage or traumatize her. Optimally, he is compelled to push their mutual limits whilst taking care to monitor her responses (to remain relational) in view of affording her a deep visceral pleasure that might embolden her to eventually try out (and validate for herself) her own latent bad-boy capacities -heretofore repressed.

He might be investigating the question of, “How might she respond when I do to her what was done to me, when I was too young/undeveloped to contain such pressure? Can I learn to be like her, or would it still be too dangerous to me?” If she feels safe in fully surrendering to what this exchange offers she might, through practice, learn to internalize his bad-boy behaviors, which have been so direly lacking within her range of responses. She can get unstuck from the good-pole of the good-bad dichotomy, which blocks her from the resolution of her developmental arrest. When the boy sheds a tear or becomes sweetly overwhelmed or deeply ashamed by his feelings, the girl might jump to cheer him and love him all the more. His wound begins to heal when he dares behave vulnerably with her, if she has modeled it for him under his "attacks" that is, if she does not take advantage or use his vulnerability against him.

These visceral lessons assist this dyad in transcending deeply buried psychologically and physically hard-wired traits. The orgasmic surrender allows the physical holding patterns that belie the embodied psychological attitudes to finally become loosed, at least for the post-coitus relaxation. If, however, such lessons are sufficiently repeated as to promote homeostatic shifts in the psychological and physical posturings of these lovers, then eventually much development and consciousness can be permanently gained. If the physical relaxation of old, chronic muscular holding patterns becomes the new norm through their "loosened" stances, then even organic illness (which could have resulted from the reduced flow of oxygen in those chronically tensed parts of the body) might be allayed in the long-term.

The girl’s and boy’s respective physiologies become excited with what their whole bearing recognizes as a potential sexual interaction that offers transcendent possibilities for resolving each of their psychological blocks. This is an archetypal pattern, not one cognitively recognized by the participants nor understood by the social environments that originally caused the psychological and behavioral suppression. Once recognized and exhaustively explored through a multitude of erotic variations, the sexual charge associated with this "Bad-Boy/Good-Girl" theme eventually dissipates. Consciousness can then be further explored within some different archetypal erotic landscape. New erotic fantasies herald the next onion layer of psychic healing/growth. An appetite to pornography is healthy if not abused addictively so as to obstruct the acquisition of consciousness.

Pinker wrote:

“Deriving new accurate beliefs from old ones in pursuit of a goal is not a bad definition of ‘intelligence’, so a principal advantage of the computational theory of mind (CTM) is that it explains how a hunk of matter (a brain or a computer can be intelligent.”

Nowhere in any logical construct, built on limited assumptions, can anyone compute a rational argument from the lover’s vantage of how and why these and more salacious erotic couplings can be psychologically healthy. On the contrary, we are aroused by whatever actually seems most unhealthy, at least from our perspective, because it brings to consciousness what was shameful and buried early in each of us. It arouses, through pattern recognition (archetypal symbols) whatever has held us back from becoming whole. Arousal always raises into consciousness that which was repressed in us during our childhood through shaming or fear. However, everything gleaned through arousal and sexual satisfaction attests to the desirability and wholesomeness of sexually perverse relationships. Admittedly, this holds true only if certain relational conditions are met and maintained: honoring the sexual partner's free will and even helping safeguard it when it is insufficiently upheld, which takes a tremendous amount of presence, insight, and respect.

The capacity for derivative thinking is perhaps not a bad definition of a certain type of intelligence, but the CTM model is as yet inadequate for describing the type of intelligence characterized by creativity. The contention of the proposed new thesis (The Psychic Function of Erotic Arousal) is that the entire body serves as an integrative mechanism that can perceive and organize new, inchoate information by mapping new perception upon itself using analogical pattern recognition to draw new conclusions about higher levels of organization. We have a whole universe of biological mechanisms within us that represent patterns through which our organism functions brilliantly, and of course unconsciously, on higher levels of organization than we can yet cognitively conceive. We are cognitively unaware of more than a tiny fraction of those patterns, although some aspect of our being certainly masters the knowledge of biological mechanisms far beyond the scope of our conscious minds.

The point is that new information rarely computes correctly within a set field of knowledge. The entire human body is part of a higher order processing mechanism than the computational model gives it (the body) credit for managing. The body's apperceptive faculties are not limited to the mind in the way the CTM understands it. The body utilizes an analogical model of pattern recognition (arousal) for gleaning a higher organizational structure about the irrational, that is, about "what the mind doesn't know we don't know," but about what the body has a veritable clue through the "universe within itself."

Pinker:

“Finally, mental life—internal representations and processes—appears to be more lawful and universal than overt behavior, which can vary with circumstances.”

In healthy sexuality the opposite is true, as illustrated in the above example. Furthermore, overt behavior in sex is usually a more muted version of an individual’s erotic fantasy, and for good reason.

Guggenbuhl-Craig observed that, “in psychoanalytic practice it happens again and again that the more differentiated, and not the weaker a person is, the more we find the so-called sexual aberrations” (2001, p. 90).

Jung’s notion of the transcendent function was to psychology the equivalent of what the quantum leap was to physics. No cognitive construct will uncover the way to new consciousness, although once a new awareness is gleaned, CTM might map an effective model that explains it. Creative intelligence is a visceral drive that expresses itself through arousal (libido, life energy, enthusiasm, joy, pleasure) that is best explored through sex, art, and only then consolidated through cognitive awareness. Let science not imagine it can forge the way to new knowledge when it so emphatically and persistently dismisses the value of the irrational and incoherent! Until this stance is changed to integrate "intuition" and "gut response," science can only confirm and articulate new ideas through hindsight postulation of imagined--not derived--models. Science can never dictate the limits of art or judge the veracity of creative expression without hindering the expansion of consciousness.

Presence, through Somatic Psychotherapy


“Healing requires a unity of mind and heart, and generally it is the mind that needs to be adjusted to our feelings, which too often we have not honored in the daily choices we have made.”

Carolyn Myss, in Anatomy of the Spirit

Integrative Body Psychotherapy (IBP) aims at reconciling the discrepancies between what we feel and what we think. We often think we should follow a certain course, yet really feel like doing altogether something else. This creates a huge gap between who we are and what we do! How can we bring these two parts of ourselves into alignment, and peacefully find the natural path, the one right for us?

One of the most effective ways is through increasing consciousness and presence, specifically through body-centered awareness practices. Allowing yourself to become aware of your every body-perception provides access to a deep inner knowing, which the fearful mind (ego) often tries to overrule.

First, it is useful to get acquainted with your fears (including anxiety, anger, sadness…) and their origins. A certain defensive reactivity to your fears is programmed right into your body, into your very cellular memory. Any difficult childhood experiences you have not properly processed remain unconscious within you, repressed not only psychologically but actually physically, in your very flesh.

Somatic psychotherapy helps you locate the physiological mechanisms that hold the awareness of these wounds tightly bound within your musculature. Why do massages feel so good? It’s because you temporarily allow yourself to release this holding and enjoy they pleasurable sensations! Sometimes the physical release from a massage brings up a lot of emotion and even the urge to talk about your problems. But with time, you inevitably stiffen back up again, unless you learn how to work with what has arisen for you.

What arises when you experience fear is a physical stiffening of certain areas of your body. This occurs as a defensive reaction to restrict the flow of oxygen—and feeling!—to those parts of your body that sense the discomfort. Certain chakra areas will respond to different emotional issues, so the area of your body that stiffens is always related to the nature your issue!

During IBP therapy, the therapist helps you discover which areas repeatedly block for you, and teaches you how to self-release. Through projective exercises, you will also discover the precise emotional content and the mental thoughts that keep your habitual blocks in place. You will discover how and when they came to lodge there.

The last step then, is to become sufficiently familiar with those set of circumstances that throw you into reactivity so that when anxiety grips you physically, you can consciously bear the sensation, having learned that it’s more a past memory than a current reality. And even if it happens to be a current reality—which is more rare than you think—you will have trained yourself not to react defensively, like a child. Instead, you will deliberately dismiss/release the sensation, in order to deal with it with greater presence like the adult that you are, with the true and tried capacities that you have acquired throughout your life. In other words, stress will no longer make you lose your wits!

IBP helps you learn how to identify and dismiss the mental experience that grips you when you’re stressed. It trains you to self-release—physically—and regain immediate composure with the effectiveness to respond! That is the recipe for presence.

Somatic Psychotherapy. What is it? How does it work?

The premise underlying body psychotherapy is that your physical condition is a perfect manifestation of your psychic attitudes. If you don't buy that, you may as well stop reading here and look into other forms of therapy.

What body psychotherapy does is help you make connections between muscular "holding" (tension) and the memories that are being "blocked" or kept from consciousness. If you release the tension and surrender to the feelings and actually bear them, then they can go away forever. Easier said than done though. We all hold back from facing the full impact of our fearful memories, simply because it's terrifying to us to revisit and re-experience something that we couldn't process in the first place. These memories originate from childhood events for which we had no support. Mom was either unavailable, or simply unable to help us cope with some major hurt so it promptly went “underground” into the deep recesses of our unconscious.

Once that connection is made, “re-membered,” you immediately feel a lost part of you has been re-integrated into your wholeness. You realize that the old memory is just that, a memory, not a present reality about which you are powerless. You may ask, then, “How do I make those connections? And, once they are made, how do I release the memory, the pain, the knee-jerk reactivity I have to certain situations?”

Here's how it looks in a session. You can even try it by yourself, but it works better with a witness who can validate whatever emerges. Validation is truly healing. You could experience a little bit of it right now, if your inner witness is well developed. Take ten or twenty quick breaths, through your mouth into your chest. What happens to you when you do that? You get out of sorts, right? It’s not comfortable. You might get dizzy or split off; you might tear up, or choke up a bit; you might simply not take in that much air into your chest; or, perhaps some part of your body will get rigid, like your diaphragm if you find yourself forcing air out with a strenuous exhale…

Many things happen when you take rapid “charging” breaths: you take in a lot of oxygen, and your body begins to feel an aliveness that, unfortunately for you, needs putting a stop to, because you can’t bear the emotional tension. So, some muscle kicks in and blocks further breathing: “I can’t take-in any more air,” your body seems to say.

Why not? You can easily take in that much air when you’re running, exercising, or having sex, right? So why can’t you take that much air just sitting down without going into discomfort? It’s because you begin to feel too much, and your body isn’t used to bearing that much feeling, that much excitement. It’s a speed limit that your body has: you feel overwhelmed. Your heart begins to beat faster, your skin might feel damp… all of the makings of a panic attack, right? So where does your mind immediately then go? It goes to the place it always goes. Where is that for you? It’s different for everybody.

Body psychotherapy helps you become conscious of your own personal, habitual “go-to” places—psychologically speaking—when you’re overwhelmed. It’s always the same one or several places. It’s a place of early childhood, or sometimes even of infancy. Do you recognize it? Do you become like an irrational child when your “buttons” are pushed and you are “shoved beyond your limits of tolerance” in certain situations? What do you know about yourself then? Certainly not much! You are in a trance, a near-unconscious place… recognize that dynamic? It happens to all of us.

You don’t have to get triggered to that extent in order to recall your body memories, or to learn about how they are held, trapped through tense musculature. Body psychotherapy helps you go slowly. Through gentle exercises, you begin to reconnect your emotions with the physical body sensations that arise in you through charge breathing. You learn to inhabit your body and interpret what it feels and what it wants in tense situations. You probably already know what you want when there isn’t much to be upset about, and most of the time what you want then is quite reasonable. However, you also probably split off into an irrational child when the stress exceeds your speed limit.

The child in you often demands what you reluctantly recognize as ineffective: “I want the world around me to change.” Been there, right? Wouldn’t you like to learn how to handle this child-this reactivity-and effectively manage your inner child’s emotions? Wouldn’t you like to see this inner child grow up, once and for all? It’s doable, and it’s as easy as breathing—conscious breathing, of course.

Your body is a lot smarter than your mind. It knows things in a fraction of the time it takes your mind to figure things out. Body psychotherapy helps you access that lightning-speed gut intelligence: once you free yourself from your own personal brand of chronic “holding” (tension) in your body. A side benefit from this, is that when you release the physical tensions that prevent the free-flow of oxygen and other chemical goodies, you automatically help heal whatever physical ailments that have been plaguing you from so much tense holding!