Category Archives: science

Yoga, Mental Health and Complex Systems

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Dan Siegel, pediatric psychiatrist, pioneering interpersonal neurobiologist and all around brilliant guy, has helped revolutionize my understanding of the interconnectedness of yoga/meditation practice and the optimization of mental health. Here, as part of the opening chapter in Healing Trauma, a book he co-edited with Marion Solomon, Dan describes how the human mind, as well as human social groups, can operate as complex systems. (My comments in color.)

“One exciting idea that emerges from the application of complexity theory to mental processes is this: Systems that are able to move toward maximal complexity are healthy systems. They are the most stable, adaptive, and flexible. (Sthira sukham asanam!) What a wonderfully concise definition of well being. Mental health can thus be defined as a self-organizational process that enables the system – be it a person, relationship, family, school, community, or society – to continually move toward maximal complexity.” (Here we see an obvious obstacle for the world community and the US. If more complexity is seen as being too scary, too foreign, there is liable to be a regressing in overall mental health.)

Here Dan articulates seven principles of complexity theory that are relevant to mental health and our yoga practice. Find out in your own practice how these ideas may be helpful. Italics are Dan’s way of zeroing in on the key phrases.

“1. Complex systems have a self-organizational process that emerges out of the nature of the properties of their component parts. (Cells, organs, neurons, blood vessels, bones etc, as well as belief systems, teachings, new ideas.)

2. The flow of states of the system has recursive features, both internal and external, that reinforce flow in a certain direction. (Movement of blood, breath, peristalsis, or the MCAS testing and teaching procedures.)

3. Both internal and external constraints, or features, determine the course of change or trajectory of the system over time. ( How you practice moves the system. Are you opening to more complexity and novelty, just repeating the past, or heading over the cliff (global warming?))

4. Self-organizational processes tend to move the system toward maximal complexity.

5. The ability to create maximally complex states offers the most stable, flexible and adaptive states to emerge. Complexity is a state of the system that flows between sameness, rigidity, order and predictability on the one hand and change, randomness, chaos and unpredicitablity on the other. (tamas, rajas and sattva)

6. Complexity is achieved by the balancing of the two fundamental processes of differentiation and integration. (Can you differentiate your sacrum from the pelvis?, the liver from the heart, the erector spinae muscles from the multifidi?) Can you get them to work together once differentiated? Lots more choices here! .. How about ‘Awareness’ and what arises in awareness?)

7. The inability of the system to move toward complexity can be seen as a form of “stress” to the system. (Check out the current political scene.)

When you begin to recognize the you are inextricably intertwined with the “Whole”, you can draw upon the complexity/intelligence of the both the cosmos and cells to help you heal and thrive.

concentric jellyfish pranayama

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I can’t find any images of concentric jellyfish, so you will have to use your imagination a bit. But, the human diaphragm looks and acts much like one of these guys. Imagine your body being made of several jellyfish nesting together like Russian dolls, one inside another, with a common center. To help differentiate the layers, use the breathing, inhaling to inflate the outer and exhaling to shrink the next one in. then in hale into the inner one and exhale from the third one in, and so on. As the each outer one expands and can sustain its size, the inner ones become easier to feel. Feel the expanding and condensing radially and notice which segments are stuck. If a jellyfish layer has a stuck place, you will often be able to feel both an inability to expand in that segment and a sense of being stuck onto other layers, like layers of clothing that have inadvertently been sewn together somewhere. Keep the top of the jellyfish lifting up and maximize the mobility of the peripheral, circular ‘wings’. You can play with a viloma-like breath where you pause between each segment and you expand and condense the individual layers.

After the diaphragm opens more, you can experiment with the each of the ribs, especially the ones above the diaphragm. These ribs tend to be less mobile, but respond very well to the jellyfish image. Let each rib be a jellyfish and breath rhythmically up and down the ribs. Keep the center lifted at all times by the abdominal pressure  within the lower jellyfish, not by using the spinal muscles.

Find the jellyfish everywhere within. Surprise yourself. Feel the fluid, oceanic freedom and effortlessness of the inner movements as they liberate the outer body from its holding patterns and unnecessary tension. Feel whole, awake and alive!

Culture as a Field Effect

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As we explore the somatic nature of the three bodies of classical yoga, gross, subtle and causal, we might relate them to the three levels of reality in modern physics: matter, energy and fields.  In ‘The Biology of Transcendence, written in 2002, Joseph Chilton Pearce has a lot to say about how culture itself is a field and plays a major role in inhibiting our capacity for spiritual awakening. It also rather clearly, describes the insanity of the modern electoral process. As such, our on-going homework is to remain present to whatever arises moment by moment, keep resting in the infinite spaciousness of the heart, keep awakening, keep nurturing the field of cosmic creativity!

“By the very nature of the human brain we create field effects and are affected by them. In this way, fields become culturally shared and move history accordingly. One of the largest factors in our history, perhaps making that history what it has been, is that culture is itself a field, independent of any of its expressions.”  and…

“A new and all pervasive negative field has been growing among people worldwide, an angst or fear without an object and tinged with rage. The angst or fear is fed by the mass media. Saturating all societies our mass media feed into and feed on, this global angst is a typical bio-cultural process. No one knows where it might lead. Already it is a kind of demonic spirit that blows where it will.

This angst ridden energy is nothing less than our longing for transcendence, which, in light of its enormous evolutionary power, must be derailed or subverted by culture, if culture is to survive.

But is culture real? Or is it, like a Tibetan tulpa, a phantom of the human intellect? Once isolated from the intelligence of the human heart, once entrained with and by culture, we interpret cultural survival as our own survival and respond as …culture. We then are culture, just as we are nature and evolution.

Delivery from this massive and ancient error of the mind has been the intent of every great being in history, was surely the intent of Jesus. Tackling culture was the thrust behind the cross. Jesus demonstrated that our true nature is transcendence itself, and his attempt to awaken us to enculturation and its power strikes me as the most outlandish tilting at windmills in history.”