mind-on/mindoff

I have something that I call “mind-on/mind-off” syndrome.  

I am at full throttle, or I envy the life of a couch potato.  Somewhere between these two poles, I operate

my life with the help and sometimes hindrance of my various sub-part, or, as I like to call them, my lieutenants.

Even as a young child, I was aware of a minority aspect of my character.  This sense of difference first made me feel odd and

Awkward, then that morphed into a bolstering and arrogant voice, then slipped back down into

Inadequacies and critical judgments, and  acting out.  At the moment, I feel balanced but not yet secure. 

Parts of me thought that protecting me was sabotaging my need for calmness and clarity. He meant well.  I was hurt a lot

as a different child, and I wanted to be like the other kids.  

I finally cornered that part of me that was swinging from limb to limb and not very carefully, I might add. I gave him a firm talking-to. 

First, I asked that part of me why he thought he had to be so mean to win, and secondly, why did he think he had to win in the first place?

Or, at least, why did he think he had to win every time? 

He claimed he was protecting me, but I argued. I certainly never felt protected by his actions; if anything, I felt helpless when

he ran out in front of me and burst onto the scene like a bull in a china shop. 

I told him calmly that I knew he had come up from the bottom, and that success was very important to him. 

I let him know that it was his passion in the first place that won

Him his post in my survival militia.  And this is the important part.  I told him I would fire him, I would ban him from entering my inner-landscape 

unless he could behave out of the rules of my moral conduct, not his. Some of my sub-parts took advantage of my generosity and

began to bully me into submission.  Here I was a full-grown Self with no control of my various parts.

I needed to call on my center of courage to take charge of my men, not many of my parts were ladies, most were men, and some were boys.

In the long run, my lieutenant in charge of adequate expectations had screwed up the job I had wanted him to do.  He thought I sent him out to

kill my enemies.  What I wanted him to do was to cut a clear path toward non-violent conflict resolution so that I could feel the connectedness I

longed to feel.  I longed to belong. He tried to kill everything that came close to me in case they had in mind to ridicule me or humilate me.

He did that job well, but it left me lonely for belonging 

He is still one of my protectors, he is still a lieutenant, but he lost his stripes and i demoted his rank.

emotional empathS & long-term analysis of pre-verbal wounds

An empath is a subdivision of developmental narcissism. We might call it a syndrome, a particular condition that has similarities in manifestation with other people who fall into the empathic category. The central focus of this syndrome is the making of The Others’s feelings more important than the feelings of the self. This Unconscious motivation results in perpetual deprivation to the point of the patient’s inability to feel any extended satisfaction. This truama, Lack of Self-Love, perhaps of minor consequence at its moment of conception, becomes the life view, the perspective through which all of life is viewed.

What is Long-Term Psychoanalysis?
A long term therapy or analysis can last over a lifetime and does not have a termination plan. It affords the patient the luxury of having all the time in the world to grapple in the darkness while searching for light.
It is particularly suited to unraveling the mysteries contained in the narcissistic, pre-verbal phase of child development. A word-less truama, as one patient recently referred to her inability to “incorporate who she is into who she is.”
The narcissistic syndrome is neither a neurosis not is it a psychosis. It is a borderline condition (not the casual pejorative use of the word) that sits between pre-verbal consciousness and linguistic acquisition in the developmental sequence.
Long-Term Analysis involves using the strength of the ego to shine “light” on the darker aspects of the human condition. Freud called it–the ego in service of the id.” The goal of the Analysis is to allow for a tolerated regression where new narrative structures are employed to catch the emotional corrective experiences that can be translated to the patient through the transference. Developmental growth is viewed with the use of studying the transference, counter-transference matrix or dynamic.
“Wow, explain that in English,” I have heard.

For example, What we see as narcissism might play itself out in the form of ruminative regrets. A play-back loop that never changes is very bothersome or even disabling, and it can have a terrible outcome when it shows up as a problem in an intimate relationship.

The relationship with the Analyst, in the Transference, changes with the development of the patient’s growth. One patient lamented that it would take two years to study each year of his fucked-up past. But in reality the nature driven speed of an analysis can not be rushed by the patient, the analyst, or even the insurance company. Mental health deserves deliberate intent. This means a patient, honest research of the human condition.

This type of therapy is not for everybody. It takes a person who has experienced much frustration and deprivation to be able to tolerate the frustrations and deprivations of a regression.
It is also costly, but if the analyst makes concessions in terms of affordability individually, the results are lasting and become the new perspective that gradually changes the patient’s responses to life on its terms.

Thou Shall Not

Thou Shall Not: 

Thoughts While Reading Adam Phillips

July 1st, 2017

Toward the end of the 20th century, Joyce McDougall wrote her now-famous psychoanalytic thesis that began her understanding of psychosomatic issues.  She continued in the tradition of the previous generation of analytic writers to review and study the applications of the mind to the concerns of the body.  Her book was aptly titled, A Plea for a Measure of Abnormality.  

The progression of psychosomatic study by psychoanalytic researchers and clinicians began at the end of the previous century when Freud wrote about his project for scientific investigation.  The Mind/Body Matrix, as it has often been referred to, attempts to make clinical observations that eventually added up to a rather convincing argument that the arbitrary division between sanity and physical health is more arbitrary than we might suspect.  Nonetheless, they lead us in the direction of discovery.

It has long been thought that there is a genius of some sort that wires our internal connection.  Though looking at the neurotransmitters of the human brain one would not think of a grid-like circuitry of a computer, or the streets of New York; rather, one could think that the brain developed more like a jungle. (Edelman, 1992)  Branches from one connection accidentally entwine themselves with connections from another region.  Indeed we know today that a stroke victim, for example, can grow connections around lesions deadened by a stroke that will eventually allow the patient to get nearly full control of his body through the growth of new connections.

It is difficult to think of the human as a “one-thing” thing.  It seems easier to think of the human experience as being the experiences of the body, and as another thing, the experiences of the mind.

The science of psychosomatic medicine is no longer in doubt for most of the academic world.  The God is Dead controversy helped mankind and science to evolve toward a more perfect union.  No longer being the result of a whim of a bored prime mover, we are more inclined to look at the human experience from just that—experience.

The subjective content of our 21st-century passions co-exists nicely with the technical advances of the information era.  From nomadic to agrarian, to industrial, and to the recent information age; mankind is passing from a kind of childhood stage of civilization to a more adolescent stage of development.  We are beginning to understand that Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud each contributed to an evolved world view that includes the eventuality of death of everything.  This death of everything—following the death of god, has created an intellectual atmosphere, or arena that displays the earth, the sun, the galaxies, and maybe even the universe as being contained by time, and developed by adding on to what we know, as we go, i.e., evolution.

Milton’s Paradise is indeed lost, as is Dante’s inferno.  No longer being cradles from birth to life, to eternity, we are free to examine the codes of ethics that have grown from the position of being watched by a judge.  The only judge that we have comes from our subjective experience as it bumps and grows and falls among the experiences of other humans (contained by time) on our whirling ball of gases and metals.

We have become free to pay greater attention to the instincts of the body than when we were contained only by reason which had descended on tablets from the top of a mountain where a burning bush had inscribed the Word of God with a set of city ordinances that began with the phrase, Thou Shall Not.

With no one holding our feet to the fire, the study of human experience through the study of human subjectivity can take on a less constrained direction.  With the human experience currently in a race to destroy itself through nuclear fusion and climate change, time appears as the judge that replaced the mountain of evidence that had tortured the minds of men like Spinoza, Kant, and Henry the VIII.

Mankind was not going to suffer any less than it always has, it just would suffer at the hand of a different judge.  The accumulation of gold and power has become the calf that Moses warned about in the Old Testament.  If there is anything on this planet to be afraid of it is Mankind and his and her ever corrupting need for greed and envy.  Man has killed god and become satan at the same time.

For Adam Phillips, Sanity is to the mind what health is to the body, but unless we are fooled by the simplicity of that statement, Phillips drops us into a tortured world of the ins and outs of everything from lust to death.  He has an uncanny knack for crafting a sentence that turns the mind’s intellectual attention, on the proverbial dime.  Sanity a word that he tells us is used once in all of Shakespeare is juxtaposed against the word madness which the bard used no less than 287 times.

What is our interest in madness?  Why is our madness more interesting to us than our sanity which appears as a bland tasteless fruit compared to the rich apple of madness that tantalizes our appetites.  In previous works, Phillips takes on the nature of satisfaction, in the two works we are looking at today we are looking at evolution and sanity in a new light.  Darwin and Freud are revisited using the lens of psychoanalysis and literature.  All writing for Phillips is the study of humankind as a linguistic being conducted by evolution.  The study of writing, he claims, is the study man.

The notes from which this essay is written come from the simultaneous reading of two of Adam Phillips works: Darwin’s Worm, (2000) and Going Sane (2005). 

In the long run, human nature is unpredictable, no less or no more so than the rest of nature of which we are a part, but nonetheless, unpredictable.  You can not really take any part of your past and predict a future.  Evolution does not work like that.  We grow, somewhat where and how we are planted.  But we grow out of this earth much like all else has grown out of the earth.

Man is an animal, Phillips says, somewhere in one of his many books and authorships, Phillips suggests that man is the animal who is always trying to master what he has already been mastered. Nature complicates our morality as much as God did before he was proclaimed dead by the likes of Time Magazine and Spinoza.

In a practical way, psychoanalysis is here to fill in some of the rhetoric and narrative that has to happen between the ‘God-fearing’ and the ‘God is Dead’ world.  In many ways, it has become an open field of discourse, unless, of course, it devolves into politics and ownership.  But, as a conversation starter, psychoanalysis can become a platform for certain kinds of corrective emotional experiences.  Both doing it and learning about it—from either side of the couch, is a beneficial endeavor.

For example, desire is an aspect of instinct; neither Freud nor Darwin left us with a ‘how-to’ guide.  They left us with some transformational literature, and Phillips appears to be a great guide to interpreting the words and wishes of these two big 19th century giants of philosophy.  For the ‘how-to’ guide we can turn, I think, to psychoanalysis as a critique of human nature in the midst of changing and shifting paradigms in evolution.

A conversation

THE CONVERSATION IS THE OBJECT OF STUDY

Mindfulness in Psychoanalysis is a community-based practice that emphasizes the value of intimacy and conversation. Group gatherings and individual conversations are the backbone of the endeavor, With a nod to professional ethics, & confidentially, Mindfulness in Psychoanalysis offers a safe place to evaluate and reevaluate the thoughts & feelings involved in the decisions we make all our lives.

Psycho-Analysis is not an aspect of psychology. It is a more convenient fit with philosophy and literature and medicine.  It practices the art and science of conversation and intimacy. Words, turns-of-a-phrase, metaphors and punctuation, free-association and resistances, and the layers unconscious, these are the tools for progressive conversation.

In modern psychoanalysis, we aim for authentic encounters, from which we can research the data– words and the collection of words used to describe and understand each other. The conversation is the object of study.

Our methods are not traditional diagnoses like would be found in the Diagnostic Manuals of Mental Disorders. Our aim is to discover what developmental sequences might be uncovered by listening for patterns in the free-association. The models discovered often are a metaphor for the resistance to better health that unconsciously prevents the patient from not being able to get out of their own way.

As a trained practitioner of psychoanalysis, my job is to facilitate conversation based on the contact that the client makes with me. Emotional communication is primarily a method of response to the patient that involves acknowledging the patients feeling and mood, but NOT confronting the defense; rather, mildly acknowledging the defense in a manner that might get the patient interested in the new information.

I want my patients to become very interested in themselves and to share with me what they are finding.  Judgment suspended, the negative energy escapes, leaving room for desires and satisfactions to take on a mental shape.  It is using the energy of the dysfunction to throw light upon awakenings that are stirred and stimulated in the deep, meta-language process used through psychoanalysis and other forms of mental, emotional and spiritual growth.

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deliberate intent

Deliberate Intent

The allusive search for “joy” begins with a stirring in the soul that something is missing.  The stirring in the soul is experienced as discomfort, or depression, perhaps some anxiety, or a generalized feeling that the well-being is missing.  This emotionally painful state, this debilitating state seems to manifest as a massive depletion of energy.

The question we are asking here has to do with this energy.  Is it missing, is it occupied, or is it there but dormant and waiting for some signal from the organism to awaken it?  How do we locate the portal, the doorway that leads to gratification?

The experience of awakening energy in ourselves ought to be a fairly simple concept to recognize.  We have all felt it as adults and as children…suddenly, a burst of enthusiasm will erupt from within, brought about by a thought that is exciting:

A warm summer morning, the sun is already burning and it is only 9:00 a.m.  You are sitting in front of a television watching some mindless re-run of whatever.  The phone rings in the kitchen and you hear your mother answer it.  “Yes,” she says, “of course, we will be ready.”

Then from the same kitchen, “Butch,” that was your aunt Alice do you want to go to the beach with your cousin Barbara?”

Immediately, my insides are jumping for joy.  I have a purpose, I can see the desired horizon.  I do not feel alone and bored and lethargic.  A feeling of “YIPPIE….” stirs inside and I am up and fetching my few favorite beach toys, and my bathing suit.  I sit at the counter and watch as Mom prepares the lunch that we will be taking to the beach.

The example of going from bad to good, from negative to positive, from sad to glad, or from any depleted state to a state of abundance, is a phenomenal experience and we can dig into our past and find examples of this transition.

But, what if we do not have an Aunt Alice, or what if we can not locate anything outside of us that will give us the lift that we need to proceed?  What happens to the question of accessing “JOY” if we find ourselves alone with our feelings so overwhelmingly lonely that we try not to even open our eyes, or we find we have to stay in bed just to not hurt so badly?

The Universe, the Higher Consciousness, God, Buddha, the Wind, and the Breeze, are the raw materials of joy.  But like any raw material, finding the quartz in a stone of granite may be easier than it is to extract the smokey brown quartz from where it has been nestled for a multitude of lifetimes.

The raw material is “Joy,” but the product that we will need to extract the joy from the granite stone is “Love”.

Loving something–deliberately, finding something to love is the route that we must take to move from a negative state to a positive state.  Now, some who hear this will immediately respond with something like, “well, if I was in love of course I would feel different.”

What I am talking about is finding something in your immediate environment that you can point to and say, “I love that old chair, I love that coffee cup.  I love to sit alone with my first cup of coffee or my first cup of tea in the morning.”  The way this is accomplished is by the process of deliberate intent.  The horizon has to contain something that we want.

Desire is the centerpiece of human love and is therefore the route to joy.  Joy is nothing less than our purpose on earth. The multitude of things, good or bad, that can happen to a human is exponential with age.  As we move through life it becomes more and more important to know what and how we Love.

Love is an action word.  The infinitive verb, “to love” is an active verb.  It is not a noun–it is not a person place or thing, Love is an action that we take, the results of which are the internal contentments that we can name “Joy”.

The default position of the human ego is sultry even stifling.  The ego is the manifestation of the brain that is charged with the accumulation of intellect.  No amount of accumulated intellect will provide joy.  If a smile comes slightly across your face when you think of something–pursue that thing, you will be following love right to the doorway of Joy.

The smallest manifestations count toward assimilating this idea.  I love to swim in the lake, becomes an act of I am going down to the water for a swim.  The act of loving the coffee cup that I have had for the past 30 years brings me a slight smile when I find it among the other twenty or so cups…the rest are cups.  This cup I love..knowing that I love it, stopping to acknowledge that I love it will lead to the feeling of joy creeping into my spirit.

This is not hard philosophy or hard science.  This is common sense, applied psychoanalysis, applied Buddhism if you wish.  It is not something that only some of us know, or only some of us have; it is a universal law that works with each individual mind that applies itself to the idea of deliberate intent.  I want to feel better.  I want to laugh.  I want to find my favorite coffee cup, I want to call my friend, I want to visit my family, I want to swim, I want to enjoy my life…these statements of purpose all lead to joy, full-filled by acknowledging that we love something.

Find something to Love.

Psychoanalysis as Art

Psychoanalysis as an Art

There are times in psychoanalysts where the immersion in science begins to over-state the objective, deductive, projective and submissive adherence to the rules of conduct prescribed by the founders of our profession.  There are times when the clues to unblocking a resistance, comes to us not empirically, but wildly and subjectively.  It is at these times that I like to think about practicing the art of psychoanalysis.

Any science can be practiced artfully; but, psychoanalysis is greatly enhanced by useful, tasteful and invigorating creativity that allows for full use of both hemispheres of the brain.  Or to say it another way psychoanalysis is best taught when the design of the divided mind is recognized and encouraged as a foundation for an analysis or for a counseling therapy.

The knowledge that we acquire over time allows for the strictest rules of psychoanalysis to be an opportunity for challenging the status quo.  It is not as if we do not know ideas and thoughts come from the strangest places.  Certainly, the concept of a primitive unconscious lining the bottom of our minds and the vision of an ego, shaped much like an egg, sitting in a pool of this primeval ooze with a strange out-growth on the top acting like an angry CEO of a large corporation, is in itself an artfully designed concept.

The metaphor of mind acting like a mapping of the brain is, once again, an artfully designed concept.  There is a flow to psychoanalysis that is calmly down-stream.  Let the patient express everything and the flow of progressive information tends to emerge in the order that it needs to be dealt with.  The artful expression of an analysis is its way of following a patient rather than leading a patient.  By allowing what is inherently inside to express itself, the semi-permeable boundaries of the mind open and widen permitting what is sacredly kept behind a curtain to emerge into the world as a new thought, a new idea.  This newness is the meat and potatoes of creativity.  Any new thought is by definition a synthesis of previously acquired knowledge and information.  Psychoanalysis promotes creativity by demonstrating to the patient that to know one’s drive is the key to unleashing the energy of achievement.

Creativity and psychoanalysis go together like a horse and carriage.  The analyst needs to be creative to facilitate the creative drive in the patient.  Casting a wide net, any exp loration of newness is pretty close to the  characteristic of art, and very close to the process of an analysis.

Although creativity is an expression of drive, it is energy that is uniquely experienced in our minds. Our perception of what it feels like to be creatively expressive is a sensation that distinguishes this energy from other drive derivatives.  It is not exactly a third drive, but in many ways, it does challenge, if not rival, the sexual and aggressive drives that conduct the living organism toward either an anabolic or catabolic direction.

Perhaps creativity is a fusion of the primary drives, somewhat of a hybrid, like when we mix red and blue to obtain purple. The harnessing of the primary energy in the use of manifesting new materials, new thoughts, is key to the mind’s ability to create a self-imposed reality that then expresses the uniqueness of our desires.  The spiritual foundation of drive theory is in the application of desire toward acquiring what we want:  “Ask what ye will and it shall be done.”

In the process of assisting a patient toward the understanding that the divided mind is not a conflict, it is a reality of evolution; the patient can begin to get comfortable with the notion that a mind must be operated, not left to its own devices to conduct the organism.  Imagine, for a moment that you had no control over your hand. The trouble instore could have some rather dire consequences.  The mind, like the hand, needs to be harness and used in furthering the goals of the individual organism.  The use of our fused drives permits for a modicum of control that permits creativity to emerge.  The newness is a form of art, the art of psychoanalysis informed by both the objective and the subjective.

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more on satisfaction

…there is something about satisfactrion

If You Meet Yoga on the Road, Do Not Kill It

If You Meet Yoga on the Road do not Kill It.

I think of another jaunt on the pond in the canoe, but I am lazy. The little bit of yoga that I allowed myself to practice has seemed sufficient.  The wind through the trees and a bird that looks pre-historic in size and appearance, hover and flow over the cottage at Sanctuary Road.  There have been occasional sounds of brass bowls, and also of a gong that vibrates at the guttural region of the body, the pelvic Charka.

The sun is moving to the left each evening, and is setting thirties degrees to the south east, I think.  I have no sense of nautical miles and very little consciousness ofinnate directions; but I am sure of this:  I am facing the sun as I write this piece, and the air is crystal pure over the lake which glistens as a streak of gold and eventually becomes a kind of  robin-egg blue as the light moves away from its epicenter.  Did I mention, It is beautiful.

I am on vacation at Sanctuary Road.  This respite provides an opportunity to contemplate life and consciousness as an object of study. I have no responsibility or obligation to anything or anyone outside of my immediate orbit.

 

I love checking out and then spending time in a solitary state.  It is a meditative state where “The Breeze and I” breath through the atmosphere and take in the summer air with an engulfing and refreshing shot of energy.

The crown of my head—No, not the crown on my head, the crown of my head seems to reach up.  The sun has an heliotropic effect on me.  It feels energizing.

I am attributing my recent surge in energy as related to, if not cause by, my studying Yoga both as a theory of survival and evolutionary significance, and as a practice in deliberate movement and consciousness of breath.

Let me start at a beginning so I can illustrate the progression of a condition as well as the significance of both psychoanalysis and yoga as they became a remedy to injuries sustained after my first and I hope my only, “old-age-“ fall.

I arrived, tripping and falling into my 70’s.
We, my partner and I, had been visiting St. Augustine.  We have a house there and the town’s Cathedral was celebrating its 450th anniversary. There were re-enactments and music and galleries, food, and the most elegant bridge of Lions was decorated, and used as a seating arena for the stage shows over the four days of the event.  All of this is bay-side where the inter-coastal and the St. John River merge.

On the way into town walking over to one of these events, I tripped and belly-flopped on my chest, breaking ribs, smashing my face on the concrete, fracturing a finger and causing a concussion.  The initial X-ray showed “nothing” to whom ever it was that read the digital image.  With pills for the pain, I tolerated the injury, but was not looking forward to driving
back to New England feeling so hurt & broken.

After a week, I stopped the meds so I could drive back home.  In effect, over the three day drive back, I detoxed while navigating the New York Thruway, an experience in itself to even a seasoned driver.  At my home-town doctor I discovered the next x-ray showed what the first one did not.  I actually was injured.

Eventually an orthopedics man offered me a few physical therapy sessions. I did them, and enjoyed them, but nothing appeared to change.  Shortly after I developed bronchitis that never really went away until it was concluded that I probably had pneumonia.  I used steroids and an anti-biotic. It was now
winter and the original fall was at the beginning of September.

Needless to say it was an internally miserable winter where I
wrote pieces that invoked the Elizabethans and Camus.  The Son of York was not rising, glorious. It was a long days journey into night as Celine describes it.

A friend introduced me to a Yoga instructor that had settled right here in the little, sleepy town of Charlestown, Rhode Island.  Quonny Yoga it is called. Since I lived in Watchaug the next ‘settlement’ up from Quonny, it was convenient and I needed any self-help to be at least convenient since motivation and energy were at a premium.

Miracle, describes not the practice, but the feeling that came from experiencing relief from a condition that was being considered as Rheumatoid Arthritis or maybe Lime Disease. Since my fall the previous autumn, I knew I was internally and externally misaligned.
When I became injured in such a way as to not heal, I became accustomed to a body that was failing me at a very rapid rate.  I
could imagine that I was old and decaying.  I could sense that my immune system was in over-drive and that all my energy was being used. I was always exhausted.

It wasn’t an entirely dreadful thought, as I had contemplated
this sense of impermanence before. I live with it in nature, and had concluded for some time that I was an animal with a verbal consciousness; and as such I would perish and a new horde would come up after me to inhabit these woods over the next eons.  It was understandable that the trees come alive each spring, and the leaves are entirely new each year. I identified with the leaves and saw that my decay was inevitable.
But, I hated how much I hated the process. I understood
that Larzirus never did come back to explain his voyage.

I have a pre-Columbian view of evolution.  At some point you just fall over the edge of eternity.  It is not a happy conclusion, but it at least coincides to my perception of reality, the reality from which I register my narratives about
my consciousness. I am, after all, a single-case study.  My profession uses this some-what scientific method of study.  I find it a most useful method of research on the human condition.
Psychoanalysis offers this method as an integral part of clinical consultation, and I use it as a means of observing life, my own and others.
Cure is not a word that we use in psychoanalysis. Healing and adapting are more likely terms. Understanding and working with unconscious data is important. It is what we collect as we practice our healing art.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that therapeutic yoga fell into this classification of the healing arts that used its history to come to an additional understanding of the human conditions.

In modern psychoanalysis we use a motto, “just say everything”. In yoga I hear, “Just Breath differently”. I find a very comprehensive theory of healing through listening by combining both practices.
I arrived to Yoga in a rather sad state. I had developed a severe cough and I had one leg that was not moving very well on its own. I felt exhausted from the moment I woke up in the morning. A restless night of semi-sleep was the best I was accomplishing.

During the first yoga class that I attended, I became humiliated during a pose that was asking of me that I open my lungs and breath deeply into my arm pit. It was a simple spinal twist with chest expansion. I started to cough and breath up mucous. The instructor reassured me quietly. What was happening was a good thing and this process was letting out toxins that had been jammed stuck since the Fall.

I was back for another class in a few days. I was truly surprised at how much well-being I felt. What impressed me most was my physical body’s response to this form of moving meditation.

Deep, diaphragmatic breathing was connecting me to feelings and sensations that were physical. It occurred to me as the instructor talked about the two components that are brought into alignment with yoga, that the physical self and the energy self lined up nicely with the conscious and unconscious concepts of the mind/body theories that I was entirely familiar with through psychoanalysis.

The physical and the energy bodies matched up as the unconscious body and the conscious mind.

I was accessing the unconscious through the body. I could not help but think that the body was not only a reasonable location for the unconscious to sit in, It well may be the Unconscious.

This nebulous, language-less region of the body communicates nicely to my self, as the unconscious spoke not english to me, but spoke in physical sensations. Many of the same physical sensations that I had had to ignore in order to “conduct” my life were right there as physical resistance to moving forward.

The sensations emitted into the body that yoga attempts to make conscious is a reasonable place from which the unconscious speaks to us. Locating the Unc. in the mind is a confusing concept as the mind is language based. In yoga theory, the sensations are to remain as language-less. The working through in Yoga is not a verbal working through by saying everything, rather it is a physical working through at the level of bodily sensations. One tolerates the sensation in much the say way that that mentations are tolerated in the avoidance of acting-out.

We might say the sensations of the body that accompany a yoga pose and breath are a form of the body acting-out the pain and toxins that are not emitted without deliberate intention.

The narrative that we build to understand our more primitive drives are in and of the body.  This makes common sense out of a very complicated and convoluted theory of the Unc.

The location in the body from which sensation occurs does not need words to express itself. The pain or pleasure that is felt can be subjectively understood.  Words can later be used to discuss the sensation, but the feeling of sensation itself is the non-speaking unconscious.

In psychoanalysis we ask ourselves what this is all about and how it came to be. In yoga we ask ourselves to feel the sensation while breathing into it as a means of adapting or adjusting and eventually understanding what fear motivates our narcissistic defense—the defense of self-destruction, by making The Other more important than the self.

I am new to the theory of yoga and very adept at a theory of psychoanalysis. Looking forward to survival and well-being, I am glad that when I met yoga on the road, I did not kill it with embedded resistances.

With deliberate intention as the task, and healing as the passion
“we do what we can and the rest is the madness of art.”
(henry james)

A.L. Dussault,
Charlestown, Rhode Island

 

How are we to make use of this psychodynamic fact of life?

Living in two centuries, it is natural to long for the centuries of antiquity. The 20th century, with the folks still alive who remember the later half of the 19th century is a nostalgia that coincides with being young and wide-eyed. It was the world where happiness was 99% anticipation. Too young for regrets, the world laid endlessly ahead like a blank canvas stretched clear to the horizon.

The central theme of my writings involves the study of duality as it presents itself in the form of mental conflict. It is important to keep in mind that mental conflict bears little resemblance to neurosis or any other illness-based model of the mind.

The brain/body matrix manifests the mind, and that mind can not be reduced to a singularity. The human mind is experientially and subjectively a duality that is inherently in conflict. Nothing reduces to one. Anything can be split in two. The idea of oneness is both an illusion and a delusion. It is an illusion because our perspective is a projection of our own perceived oneness. We tend to look out into the universe from the singular perspective of “I”. It is a delusion because we want the comfort of unity, and we are prone to accept reality only after we have washed it with the suds of our perspective.

Both the perspective of “I” and the perspective of our deeper awarenesses co-exist with little to no consciousness of each other. The acknowledgement of duality is only experienced when the more profound nature is deliberately called up from consciousness by the ego we call, “I”.

We wander between and among perspectives against a backdrop. Awareness of our duality is barely noticed, a deliberate command can access the deeper perspective; however, long before we come to understand our nature of duality we have been subject to its massive potential for internal conflict.

Issues of morality and issues with authority plagued us long before we became conscious of our unconscious mind. Becoming conscious of the unconscious provides us with further information than we would have with consciousness alone. The idea that all behavior is purposeful and guides our decisions our thoughts, and feelings is a result of the academic study of duality. Beginning with Freud and Jung as the fathers of psychoanalysis we have moved through over a century of deciphering meaning from words and symbols.

Whether our mind is a burning cauldron of creation or an empty vessel waiting to be filled with knowledge, there is no denying the conflict that arises as a simple and crucial aspect of living. All of our thoughts and sensations have a meaning. This fact we have inherited through the scientific and literary history of civilizations.

How are we to make use of this psychodynamic fact of life?

The meaning of conflict and our growing academic understanding of conflict as a question begs for an answer. It is equal in scope to what previous generations asked about the nature of pain in a world created by an all-good God. Conflict stands out from a backdrop of comfort and alerts us to an internal or external condition that requires our attention. Conflict can appear in the form of anxiety or depression, and is registered as a sensation or feeling that erupts into consciousness. Because it does not necessarily rush into consciousness with words what we experience is a sense of urgency and to make it worst, it is an urgency that provides no direction.

Because urgency is experienced as an intrusion, it is in our human nature to want to destroy it. It is the classic killing of the messenger. Whatever meaning was intended is lost in the battle that ensues between perspectives of the mind. The unconscious knowledge is not wanted because it threatens to disturb the sleep of our world. (Freud) We ignore or deny the knowledge of the deeper consciousness to protect the singularity of the ego. The ego does not want to be wrong and does not wish to be caught in a less than perfect light. Since the ego is the position of the “I”, it carries a great deal of weight toward preventing knowledge from the body to impact the singularity of the self-ego.

The resolution of conflict becomes what life is about. Resolving questions that arise from conflict promotes success and effectiveness. Recognizing the conflict within and applying resolution is the process of adult developmental psychology. The living life is the perpetual resolution of conflict. It is deliberate and is never over until life is over.

Our task is not only to live; it is to live well within the parameters created by needing to resolve all the aspects of organic life. It is through the resolution of perpetual conflict–(when we are taking a breath, we need to automatically resolve taking the next breath), that this successful application becomes the source of joy and enthusiasm that permits us to look for truth and beauty.

To access the depths that within require a conscious contact, a deliberate attempt to find the source of the body knowledge that holds the DNA of our antiquities. It may seem a contradiction to invite in a perspective that may cause a conflict, but it is the resolution, not the denial of conflict that creates room for joy and contentment and happiness to thrive.

Living well is only difficult when we insist on our singularity. When we become comfortable with conflict as an aspect of the mind that will not go away, we can begin to understand the requirements necessary to govern ourselves. It is this understanding that psychoanalysis aims for. Having arrived at concluding a wave of peace with inner conflict, we will have achieved a level of adult development that we call maturity.