PracticallyPsychology

Congenital hydrocephalus. Emotional neglect, abuse. A mood altering anaesthetic, aged 13.

Happy wee boy. Difficulty connecting with others. No more happy wee boy. Loss of connection to self and body. Retreat into the mind.

A lifelong journey to dig up my body.

Now in the seventh decade of my life I can look back on this journey from a broader perspective.

I have travelled many a mile, trying to excavate my self, my body. To resurrect that happy wee boy.

The seminal guidebook for me, in hindsight, was Ken Wilbur’s ‘No Boundary’ in broad terms it characterises the self in terms of a number of boundaries – shadow, persona, ego, body, centaur and unity consciousness, from memory.

Persona + Shadow = Ego

The first boundary was my preoccupation in my 20s and 30s. I ended up in my mind and only had a notion of the person I should be (Persona). I was beset with feelings and their correlates which were alien. Wilbur suggests that these ‘symptoms’ needed to be or could be translated back to their original form – for example, fear as projected hostility. So, I spent a lot of time trying to translate my ‘symptoms’ back to there original forms. To realise an accurate Ego.

The next step in Wilbur’s map of the soul was the integration of Ego and Body as the Centaur. But, given my disconnect from myself and others, this was an integration which was inconceivable. More on that later.

So, I skipped a level and went for Unity Consciousness. How hard could it be? The idea that we are not our thoughts, not our emotions and not our body. We have thoughts. We have emotions (I prefer feelings). We have a body. But, we are not our thoughts, we are not our feelings and we are not our bodies. We can observe these things, but they are not the I(Eye) itself. Now, this was appealing to me as feelings were alien and weird. They couldn’t be related to, integrated. Especially not in purely conceptual terms.

“I am the hole in the flute that the breath of God passes though’”.

But, seeing the objects of consciousness essentially divorces you from your Being. No pain. No pleasure. No-thing. The epitome of this perspective was captured by a trial of oral Ketamine – I didn’t care, that I didn’t care!

And so, I returned to the level I had skipped in the Wilbur model of consciousness. The body. My feelings were an enigma to me. They didn’t fit neatly into the little boxes that our culture assigns to them. Mostly negative, Mostly indecipherable. What were these feelings? Why didn’t they comply with the culturally prescribed narrative? I had tried to grasp this terrain with my mind, with thought, to no avail. But, the world of Feelings, my feelings, remained enigmatic. Enter Interoception.

Feelings are largely bodily. Feelings, as culturally defined, are accompanied, comprised of bodily sensations. So, maybe, my road to emotional literacy would be through an archaeology of the body. of bodily sensation. I thought of this as the Goldengate Bridge, thought at one end and bodily sensations at the other, with the cloud of unknowing inundating the middle third.

So, I turned to cartographers of the body – Bubba Free John, Alexander Lowen, Eugene Ghendlin, TCM, Peter Levine – to somatic practices – Bioenergetics, Focussing, Somatic Experiencing (TM), Chi Kung, Sensate Focus, erotic hypnosis and interoceptive practices, more generally.

And, to be honest, that is where I am, still trying to decode the scrambled messages that my body mutters, if at all.

This ‘map’ describes the territory of my soul.

I intend to elaborate upon it. But, short of talking to myself as a half crazed madman, what does this journey speak to in you, in your experience? What experiences have you had? Is there any specific part of the journey that you would like to hear more about? Let me know in the comments and I will do my best to serve your interests.