Healing, Meaning-Making and Story

Posted on July 27, 2018 by admin

In the last post, I included a link to an article on Non-dual Chinese Medicine and the Chong Mai or thrusting vessel, as there were many aspects raised by the author that intrigued me. One that struck home was his comment on the existential angst ‘fundamental to Western consciousness’. Given the state of the world these days, a certain amount of anxiety is impossible to avoid if you are paying attention. But author Michael Greenberg is referring to something more subtle, and more deeply embedded in the psyche.

Adyashanti, one of my major mentors in the field of awakening has been exploring this Western angst, as he sees it in many of his students (and probably himself earlier on) and has developed a home study course on what he is calling ‘Redemptive Love.’ Adhya gets right to the point: “Unworthiness is the pandemic of Western Culture.” I love this quote as it points to a serious barrier to truly deep awakening. Many years ago I heard of the Dalai Lama responding to a question from a Western student about low self esteem and having no idea what that was. He was puzzled !!! I’m not. I have heard parts of Adya’s course, but now need to really absorb it more deeply as I my own personal angst is demanding attention. This angst can be seen as continually re-occurring disturbances or dissonance in our bio- energy field, so we can make sense of their nature, we may be able to tease out and release many of these patterns.

A common source of this angst/unworthiness are the many unresolved issues of our childhood. Michael Greenberg, cited above, has a book on healing journeys called ‘Braving the Void’, and in the chapter entitled ‘Childhood Terrors’, he states: “While the average adult can control or mask unresolved childhood traumas, as we reach old age these mechanisms can weaken, allowing the hurt of fearful child to reappear. I believe this is why we so often see older people regressing to childhood behaviors and behaving irrationally. It makes sense then to try to come to terms with these fears at a time of life where we have the energy and will to integrate our various contradictory feelings.” My recent PTSD experiences are clearly coming from this dimension.

A more insidious example of childhood trauma is shame. Tara Brach, in her extraordinary book ‘Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of the Buddha” offers this commentary on the same Dalai Lama story I mentioned above. “While all humans feel ashamed of weakness and afraid of rejection, our Western culture is a breeding ground for the kind of shame and self-hatred the Dalai Lama could not comprehend.” This quote comes from the very first chapter, entitled ‘The Trance of Unworthiness”.

From another perspective, this angst can also be fed by a flawed story embedded in the ancestral field through the DNA field our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc. Their belief systems around religion, personal value, cultural values and parenting all impact our personal energy fields in the present moment. In Classical Chinese Medicine, the ‘jing’, one of the three treasures is the carrier of our ancestral karma and learning how to nurture the jing can lead to more healing and transformation.

This involves the epigenetic fields and cell biologist Bruce Lipton is a great source for studies and practices. Epigenetics is where we learn about how changing environments, internally and externally, changes the ways in which the genes and DNA are activated. By healing ourselves, we are also healing our lineage/ancestors ‘now’ through the epigenetic DNA fields, and our planet needs lots of healing. We can also employ active dreaming and shamanic journeying to work with the ancestral karma.

Belief systems also manifest in our movements through what we can call ‘meaning making structures. I first encountered the idea of meaning-making as a self-organizing component of our biology in “How Life Moves” by Kevin Frank and Caryn McHose where they describe four structures that underlie how we move through life, and how life moves through us. These include the physical structure of muscles, bones, connective tissue; the perceptual structure where we store patterns of attention that determine how we perceive the world, inwardly and outwardly; the co-ordinating structure where we store learned patterns of movements, small and large that the body can call upon, and use in combinations, when movement is required; and finally, the meaning making structure, where we create stories/ideas/beliefs about ‘what things mean’, and embody those meaning in patterns of movement and also inhibition, where certain movements are ‘not allowed’.

As a simple personal example of these four structures, in my ongoing sax education, the physical structures of my whole body have to engage to facilitate new subtle movements in my fingers, wrists, throat, jaws and diaphragm. The co-ordinative structures have to keep evolving when new note combinations and different fingerings are required. The perceptual structures are being challenged by my sax guru Karl to hear nuances in pitch, rhythm, note lengths and chord harmonies. These are relatively straight forward. But when my meaning making structure is dominated by the inner critic embedded in the ‘story of unworthiness’, which probably extends back generations, there is no joy or delight possible when challenged.

If my primary interpretation of a challenging situation is that ‘obviously my being is flawed or ‘I am fundamentally unworthy of being whole’, my cellular capacity to respond from its own deep intelligence is compromised. What fascinates me is that I get the absurdity of this belief system intellectually, but that understanding is not penetrating into the biology. In fact, as I dive more deeply into the cellular/biologically driven sub-conscious and unconscious in my embodied practice, more of these strange energy fields are being released into my conscious awareness. My current ‘meaning-making’ model of the flaw in the core ‘meaning-making’ structure is that I am awakening in the DNA field of my Irish Catholic ancestors (with some English pathology as well) and ancestral healing is being requested.

This idea of inherited story opens lots of portals into fun explorations. First of all, it gets us into Dan Siegel’s work on ‘narrative integration, (see The Mindful Brain), where we need a healthy and ever evolving capacity to tell our ‘self-story’ by organizing all of our personal experiences and integrating them into our behavior. Religion and spirituality, and in fact all aspects of culture are transmitted through story. My mentor Thomas Berry, along with Cosmologist Brian Swimme, co-wrote ‘The Universe Story” as a primary story for all humanity in the 21st century, orienting them to the magnificence of creation as everyone’s personal story. I’ve been studying Vedanta for almost 50 years, and Vedanta is all story based. The Bhagavad Gita, a mini story, is embedded in the 1.8 million word “Mahabharata’ one of the greatest epic stories in human history. The Katha Upanishad tells the tale of a young boy calmly confronting Lord Yama, god of death. Vedanta’s overall perspective is that this angst arises because we ‘forget’ our inherent wholeness, or ‘basic goodness’ and just need to be reminded, through teaching.

The Tao’ists believe that the human at birth is placed in the center of the creation process, providing a link between yin and yang, making them naturally connected and relevant. Like the Vedantans, the Taoist view is that our humanity is always an expression of the whole, the macrocosm, the Universe, but because we inhabit a world of constant change, we need to continually ‘re-tune’ ourselves through practice. going out of tune, experiencing imperfections, confusion and doubt are all par for the human course. We just need to learn some skillful means (upayas) to navigate our lives and fully participate in the unfolding of our soul’s journey here on Mother Earth in the early years of the 21st century. We all have a unique contribution to add to the story of our time and place. Discover it and live it fully.

Fascia, Sitting and the Micro-cosmic Orbit

Posted on July 12, 2018 by admin

A key realization of our somatic explorations, in whatever form they take, is that fascia is both connective tissue and an integrated system facilitating the flow of energy and information throughout the body. The second part sound’s a lot like the definition of mind postulated by Dan Siegel: a self-regulating process that organizes the flow of energy and information,” which is why the Taoist model of Qi flow is directly related to fascia. And remember Taoists work with verbs, processes and wholeness, not nouns, objects and duality. And please check out Jean-Clause Guimberteau’s mind boggling “Strolling under the Skin”, here on YouTube, to see the fluid component of our amazing fascial matrix. Even if you have seen this many times, it is still ….wow!

The fascial system, along with the circulatory and nervous systems are the three anatomical systems, that, in isolation, show the fullness of our 3-D embodiment. If we consider fascia, in addition to being structural, as an organizing and integrating aspect of embodiment, we can begin to deepen our inner sense of its 3-D presence and its crucial role in maintaining the dynamic postural relationship Patanjali calls ‘sthira sukham‘. As we discover in our seated meditation practice, this ongoing balance between stability and mobility in the tissue is directly related to the stability/mobility relationship of the ‘mind’ as a whole. And, as mentioned in the previous post, the fascia also stores trauma in the form of ‘trapped’ energy.

How can we relate our meditations on the microcosmic orbit with our embodied feel of the fascia? We see on the left the ‘thoraco-lumbar fascia’ circled, and we will come back to this soon. But first notice the yellow connective tissue running from the skull down the length of the spine to the coccyx. Imagine that line as an entry point into more and more interior expressions of the three dimensional fascial web. This is the path of the Governing Vessel, right on the median line. Also notice (or even better, feel in your own body) the large latissimus dorsii and trapezuis muscles that span the same length, and check out the region of overlap.

On the right we have the linea alba, a thick band of connective tissue running up the mid-line of the front body, from the pubis to the xyphoid process of the sternum. The connective tissue continues over the sternum and up the throat to the bottom jaw. Feel this as a tangible entry to your Conception Vessel. Notice all the branches of muscles and tendons coming together at the mid-line. Hard to see in 2 dimensions, but there are connections to three dimensions to be felt here.

Our next leap is to add the Dai Mai, or Girdle Vessel, to the Microcosmic Orbit, to bring in the horizontal plane to our upright posture. The gyroscope gives us a great example of the first four Extraordinary (or Curious) Vessels. The central axis is the Chong Mai or ‘Penetrating Vessel’. This is the ‘blueprint or chakra line of the body and also provides ‘lift’ to the organs. (Here is a fascinating article on the Chong Mai and Non-dual medicine.)

In our gyroscopic metaphor, the Conception and Governing Vessels create the vertical circle. (Below, they meet at the root chakra, but above, they meet at the mouth, not the crown chakra. The horizontal circle is the Girdle Vessel and this stabilizes the vertical axis in gravity (by spinning in a gyroscope.)

In the human body, we have girdling fascia and musculature which converge on the mid-lines of the front and back bodies. Patanjali has another ‘unique’ Girdling Vessel, none other than the Divine Serpent, Adhisheysa. This drawing of Patanjali*, (autographed by BKS), sits above my altar where I do my sitting and I am always fascinated by his lower body support. It’s hard to see the mid line, but you can feel the support of the snake as it surrounds him.

And I have just discovered some new information on the girdling fascia in a wonderful book entitled “Fascia: What it is, and Why it Matters”, by David Lesondak. I’m an esoteric anatomy nerd, and I have a new favorite, the ‘Lumbar Interfascial Triangle’ ak LIFT, as seen in the diagram below, from David’s book, and based on the fascial research by Frank Willard et al. (Frank was one of my favorite presenters at the First Int’l Fascial Conference in Boston in 2007, where ‘Strolling Under the Skin was first presented.)

The LIFT connects the thoracolumbar fascia (see above) with the Transversus Abdominus, the inner most of the abdominal layers running parallel to Adhishesa. This is a fulcrum region, balancing both front and back, vertebral segment by vertebral segment, but also balances the horizontal force of the transversus abdominus with the vertical fibers of the quadratus and erector spinae muscles. Find the LIFT in your practice.

When you find the energetic field in the body that supports the fascia that engages this balance of vertical and horizontal, you begin to feel like a coiled spring. Because we are even more complex, there is actually a right coil and left coil, a spiral right and spiral left the wrap around each other. This is of course symbolized by the caduceus of Hermes, with the bonus of extended wings. We are going to keep our wings into the body for the time being as we return to our sitting practice.

I have been experimenting with my hands and arms behind for extended periods of time me while sitting. Sometimes separate, sometimes interlocked. It seems to work better with my elevated virasana, (all my knees and hips will allow at the moment.) With the slight height to the pelvis, I have more room for my arms. This engages the latissimus and traps and allows me to engage my deep abdominals. With help from the Lumbar Interfacial Triangle, this action widens the spinal column from the inner back body.

The deep abdominals do not contract in isolation, but maintain a vibrant and integrating tone through the pelvic floor and into the lower back fascia, and hopefully throughout the whole body. The LIFT is very helpful here. The pose is a bit more ‘yang’ than with the arms and hands forward and the pelvis elevated, but because there is an engagement of the front body ‘yin’ through the lift, the yang stays internal, is integrated and not distracting.

If you feel your way around inside you may find the coils easier to find down below and more challenging in the area just below the sternum, right at the middle burner and kidneys. Use your imagination to fill in the field of coiling expanding energy so the whole abdominal/pelvic area, from the diaphragm to the pelvic floor, feels balanced in energy and tone.

Up inside the upper ribs and the sternum are the transversus thoracis muscles. They continue analogous to the transversus abdominals, and then begin to veer diagonally. Use them to lift and open the sternal area by engaging them opposite to the t.a., that is away from the midline. This will help keep the the kidney region of the back body relaxed and dropping, along with the inner shoulder blades. We habitually use the kidney area to hold ourselves upright, leading to a blockage in the Governing Vessel and tension in the spine, so this is a good antidote. Now feel how the diaphragm has more room to move, especially the center dome rising up to lift the heart.

On the outside of the sternum you can fine the continuation of the rectus abdominus fascia travelling up to the back of the skull, as shown as part of Tom Myer’s ‘Superficial Front Line’. Here, the back of the skull can release up as the kidneys drop down. Feel the sternum bone floating between the fascial tissues in front and behind and connect the tail of the sternum, the xyphoid process, with tail of the spine, the coccyx, in both directions. This will open and stabilize the connection between CV-1, the seat of the yin, and GV-1.

Release the open coiling feeling up through the neck/throat to the base of the skull, relax the skull bones and soften the crown chakra. When I sit in sukhasana, my other pose of choice, my pelvis is lower and there is not the same feeling, but as I go back and forth, each position informs the other. And in the deep background, the ever-present ‘Awareness’, your drashtuh svarupe, awaits your surrender. As the body stabilizes in an effortless (relatively) vibrancy, just enjoy the Being’ and stabilize your presence there.

And all of this carries over into all of your poses, all of your postures, all of your movements, all of your life. Enjoy the ride. Not always fun, but always moving into deeper and deeper clarity and awakening.

Trauma, Neuroscience and the Microcosmic Orbit

Posted on July 3, 2018 by admin

The microcosmic orbit encompasses two of the eight extraordinary vessels recognized in Chinese Medicine; the yin Ren Mai or Conception Vessel, and the yang Du Mai or Governing Vessel. These two complete a balanced circuit linking both front and back, and inner and outer bodies, and also hold energy in support of the traditional twelve organ channels commonly used in acupuncture. (These include the six yin organ channels: lungs, spleen, heart, kidneys, liver, and heart protector (pericardium); and the six yang channels; large intestine, stomach, small intestine, bladder, triple heater (sanjiao) and gall bladder.)

The microcosmic orbit meditation awakens the flow of Qi in the two vessels, but can also point out blockages in the circuit. And these circuits and blockages have layers and levels. One of my first awakenings when I began exploring this was the amount of glue I felt along the back or Governing Vessel. Using the clock image below, my key areas of tension are around 2 o’clock behind my heart, and around 4 o’clock, or the region of my kidneys.

To no surprise, this tension is manifesting as an elevation of my blood pressure. And there are similar regions of tension on my front, along the Conception Vessel, between 8 and 10, up into the 5th chakra.

When my PTSD was activated in January, after the fire, the primary locus was on the front, near CV-12, the center of centers, (nine o’clock above). My yin blocked up and the yang tightened even more, preventing me from sleeping normally and doing a number on my nervous system (yang) and psyche. It took about a month, with lots of help from friends and various therapies, for my sleep pattern to settle back to some sort of equilibrium. It has been re-triggered twice since then, once in May and then again last week, and on both occasions, the initiating factor was acupuncture needling at CV-12.

PTSD activation is a very unpleasant experience filled with fear-based, chaotic energies disrupting my moment to moment experience. Fortunately, my process is mutating, the energy is finally moving, and my overall capacity to make sense of the process and hold it in open awareness is evolving. I am grateful for the Somatic Experiencing work I did years ago with Caryn McHose. This therapy, first articulated by Peter Levine, requires building strong ‘resources’, or regions of somatic strength and stability, that can anchor you during the release of the trauma. Other key principles in SE include not releasing more trauma than you can handle with your resources, and finding the support and guidance of an SE practitioner who can hold the space of open awareness and presence, help you track the sensations, and recognize that they are memories from the past that you are feeling in the present with some spaciousness.

I’ve been my own SE support this time around, which is challenging, but there is progress and it is my on-going sitting meditation practice that is my primary resource. Resting in Pure Awareness, even as the mind/body are doing their dance, requires a lot of trust, because most of the ‘time’, the practice doesn’t seem very ‘silent’. The mind field is a busy place. But the silence is ever -present, independent of what is arising, and this trust/faith that you are being held by the Divine, called shraddha by Patanjali (sutra I-20), is your most important strong resource. As a meditator, this begins as a ‘non-judgmental witnessing consciousness’

As Swami Dayananda taught me years ago, our moment to moment experience, observed formally in meditation, has two components. The first is Awareness, aka Pure Awareness, Purusha, Ground of Being, Luminous Emptiness, Stillness, or Witnessing, etc. The second is ‘What is arising in Awareness’. This includes all the transitory phenomena of sensation, perception, action and thought, or what we call ‘reality’. If we can sustain some dimension of the witnessing, then what arises doesn’t fully take over the mind field, but can be held and examined by the intelligence, known as buddhi in Sanskrit.

‘What arises’ has layers and levels and this is where the suffering and/or liberation takes place. Awareness is always free and unbounded. The first level of ‘what is arising’ is pure sensation, a triggering of the sensory nervous system by an impulse of energy. At the reflexive level of the nervous system, this sensation may immediately trigger an an action, as when a doctor taps your knee to check on your ‘mono-synaptic’ response. The knee-jerk tells the doctor your spinal nerves are working.

A fun piece of trivia I’ve retained from my MIT biology days is that frogs have a neuron in the retina that only fires when a black dot moves horizontally across the visual field. If triggered, a muscle at the root of the tongue fires and the tongue extends out to ‘capture’ the dot. No interpretation or deliberation is required. More primitive creatures have mostly reflexive nervous systems. Not a lot of thinking or analyzing goes on in the lower brain.

As evolution expanded the brain, a new type of brain cell, the inter-neuron, appeared, allowing the possibility of pausing, deliberating and/or analyzing the sensation before acting. This allows learning, and more and more nuanced responses to take place. Humans have lots of inter-neurons, and this scientific reality is what allows us to get lost inside our own heads. Our attention is drawn to the various loops of non-stop thoughts, beliefs and confusion flowing through neurons not directly connected to our moment to moment experience and this inner dialogue become our day-to day reality. This is the monkey-mind noticed by mediators. What is actually arising moment to moment is totally missed. When the PTSD kicks in, the mind reels in desperate attempts to escape, and the practice is to just notice the actual sensations, in the moment, however, wherever. The body wants to process and return to balance, but staying present to its information allows the body to reveal its innate intelligence

Any mindfulness practice will help develop the capacity to stay present so matter what by directing the attention to the sensations of the body as they arise, before interpretation kicks in. B. K. S. Iyengar did his best to teach me this. His constant lesson to me: Stop thinking about what was supposed to be happening in a yoga pose, or how it felt yesterday. Start actually feeling the sensations and tracking them and let them dictate the action of the pose. That did not happen over night for me! (A full articulation of his teaching on this is included in the 2 part ‘Samyama in Asana’ posting. Part1 and Part 2.)

Our use of the micro-cosmic orbit is a great way to organize and train our attentional field to lock into the flow of energy (qi or prana) and track it in and through regions of the human energy field. This practice builds stability of the mind (abhyassa) and frees up the organic field to improve not only health, but spiritual sensitivity through cosmic resonance with the life forms and energy field of Mother Earth and the celestial realms of the sun moon, stars and galaxies. To the Taoists, the micro-cosmic field is an immediate and conscious expression of the macro-cosmic field including all layers and levels of creation.

What other resources can we find within the micro-cosmic orbit? In previous posts we have explored the whole circuit, with the lower dantien as the root of our practice. We want to continue to deepen the connection to the lower dantien by breathing with the 4 points on the diagram below, CV-1, GV-4, CV-12 and CV-6, as if this is a small circle, and then expand into a dynamic sphere. Feel your tail and lower limbs being embraced by this to strengthen the grounding. You can do this as a meditation or breathing practice, or even add it to any asana you may be exploring. We are working with 3 dimensional volumes here!

Next, join the lower dantien with the middle dantien in your breathing practice. You can do this in two sections like this: inhale lower 1-2-3, upper 4-5; exhale lower 1-2-3, upper 4-5. Feel the diaphragm softening as it is supported above and below. Try other combinations until you find something that feels right for you. Upper dantien stays quiet, like in any breathing practice.

A more challenging, but fascinating option is to have three sections/parts, like Viloma Pranayama. Section 1 is the lower burner, or the bottom 2/3rds of the lower dantien; section 2 is the middle burner which is the liver/stomach/spleen/pancreas, or the abdominal organs inside the lower ribs. Section three is the area of the chest above the diaphragm, heart and lungs etc. Keep the primary in the lower. Inhale lower 1-2-3, pause middle 4-5, pause upper 6; exhale lower 1-2-3, pause, middle 4-5, pause upper 6. Or something like that. Like the shape of a snowman, only no head, three torso sections.

Working in Segments:
Another option is to use the circuit to look more closely at various segments or arcs to see the where obstructions manifest in our embodied energy field. If we imagine the circle as a clock face, we can use the numbers to define some of these regions. Looking from the left side as above, 9 is the front and 3, its complement at the back, passing right through the third chakra, or more specifically, CV-12, the ‘center of centers’ directly connecting with the middle burner. What has worked best for me is to by-pass CV-12. When I can link GV-9 to GV-4 and GV-1 ( not shown but at the tip of the coccyx) and through to CV-1, my back softens and opens somewhat. As a down the back inhalation, I can feel the kidneys grasping the qi as GV-4 and GV-9 work together to ground the breath at the root.

Similarly, if I can link CV-17 with CV-6 and CV-1 in a down the front action and link this to GV-1, I can feel a stabilizing of my front body to help support the softening back body. This ‘abdominal tone’ that arises from this circuit gives a presence to your sitting posture that is yin (internal and front body) which helps allow the witness to rest in stillness. Too much use of the back muscles keeps a yang inner state, a bit less conducive to quietness.

And please add any and all of these suggestions, plus your own that arise when you practice, to any pose, any time, when on the mat, sitting at your computer typing, in your car, walking about. Make it part of your moment to moment awareness. This is the neuro-plasticity that really is the core of the practice we do as awakening humans embedded in the cultural, relational fields. We can change how are brains are wired and this changes the field of the whole, as we are the field.

And, a question for all to ponder, How can we continue to speak-out and protest the stupidity, ignorance and violence being perpetuated by our government and segments of society without demonizing anyone??? This is no simple answer to this, but we have to use our intelligence and spiritual insight to find other options. The demonization of others is the primary problem of our times and the cause of all the suffering. We have political leadership that uses this ‘demonization of others’ to rally its base. As long as ‘liberals’ get sucked into the same insanity by ‘demonizing the demonizers’, there is zero chance of moving into a more progressive society. The first principle of Taoism, and Buddhism, and Vedanta is wholeness. There is no other;ther is only us. And we, the collective are seriously out of balance. The wisdom of the body knows this, and that is why embodied spiritual practice is so crucial to our times.

Keep practicing !!!!!