Becoming Human

Osho on relationships (again)

This Osho quote was a new one for me. I can so absolutely identify with this, it is kinda scary 😉

“…Any relationship between man and woman is playing with fire and particularly if you start also being a meditator then you are surrounded by a wild fire because so many changes are going to happen for which you are not prepared and cannot be prepared. You are going to travel in an unknown territory every moment every day, and there will be many times when you will be left behind or your partner will be left behind, and this will be a deep anguish to both. And in the beginning when it will start, the natural inference will be as if our relationship is finished, that we are no more in love. Certainly you are no more in the love you were before, that old love is no more possible, that was animal love. It is good that it is gone. Now a more higher quality, something divine is going to take place, but you have to help each other. These are the real difficult times when one comes to know whether you love your partner or whether your partner loves you. When these great gaps arise between you and you feel going far away from each other, these are the moments crucial of a fire test; that you should try to bring the other person, who is left behind closer to you. You should help the other person to be meditative. The natural idea will be to bring yourself down, so the other is not offended. That’s absolutely a wrong attitude. You are not helping the other, you are hurting yourself. A good opportunity is being lost. When you could have pulled the other towards highs, you have descended yourself. Don’t be worried that the other will be offended. You make every effort to bring the other also to the same space, to the same meditative mind and the other will be grateful, not offended. But these are not the moments, when you should depart from each other. These are the moments when you should keep with every effort the contact with the other with as much compassion as possible. Because if love cannot help the other in transforming the animal energies into higher spiritual energies, then your love is not love, not worth calling love…” Osho

Five Rhythms

I have been dancing the movement practice called “Five Rhythms” on and off for a couple of years now, and am presently in the middle of a series of workshops which are subbranded “Heartbeat”. As far as I can gather from the founder’s website, which is not however very clear on this, this is intended to be the second of five “levels” in the Five Rhythms practice (the subsequent ones are “Cycles”, “Mirrors” and “the Silver Desert” respectively – the site is in Java so there are no hyperlinks to individual pages but look under “The Dancing Path” and “Becoming a Teacher”). (Roth also calls these the “first five levels”; afterwards there is still “Embodiment” and “Expression”). Our teacher says that Heartbeat is “the name for the emotional work in Five Rhythms dance”.

Whilst there is a lot of wisdom in some of what Roth says and has transmitted to other teachers, it is time for a working hypothesis of my own in relation to what this practice is and is not, the claims it makes and the place it might occupy in ones personal development practice portfolio.

I dance Five Rhythms and will probably go on doing so basically because I find it a very good integrative practice, as well as an enjoyable way to practice embodiment and embodied meditation. The wisdom of the body is there to be discovered in the practice. Five Rhythms is very popular in the tantra community for this reason.

However, whilst it does not appear to eschew portraying itself as such, which I find very regrettable, Five Rhythms is not a transformative or complete practice, and certainly not a rapid and/or deep one. In my opinion Roth, like so many others, has succumbed to commercial temptation and erected her system into a clumsy systematic “theology” of branded personal growth which is as unconvincing as it is inoperative and unnecessary. Just as access to the Godhead is mediated through layers of priesthood in the folk practice of the church (not in its mystical tradition), so layers of practice are interpolated between the practitioner and his or her full embodied expression in Roth’s schema, and the more there are, the more profitable it is. This is not a new strategy. It has been the strategy of religion through the ages.

I am not of course saying that there is no role for trajectories in such practices at all. But all they are is practices. They are not paths. Roth loses sight of this by pushing her initially perfectly valid observations and frameworks into overarching metaphors which are presented as a kind of key to unlock the secrets of the heart and of being human, but which are no such thing.

As any theory which is helpful enough in terms of what it is designed to explain, its reckless extension by analogy produces only increasing distorsion. Roth’s pentateuchal fetishism in these successive layers of practice reaches levels which evoke the spirit of Pythagorean mysticism. What is to be discovered is no longer innate but increasingly arcane. This strikes me as a dance of the mind, fully disconnected from reality, ungrounded and hopeless.

Let me illustrate. A (supposedly positive) review of Roth’s autobiographical handbook Sweat your Prayers on amazon.de states that as a result of movement work with Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt therapy), Roth “came to isolate five rhythms related to five archetypes or states of being“. Now, the description of these as “rhythms” is itself strange, as they of course are not; they are something more like “musical moods”. That there are exactly five such “moods” (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness) is hardly a taxonomy which exists naturally and objectively. Rather there is an infinitive variety of musical moods, which fade indistinctly into each other. Thus Roth has at the outset chosen what can only be reasonably considered a metaphor, and goes on to overapply this metaphor to everything that comes within her sight.

The same source goes on to say that “Roth claims that even terminally inhibited people can learn to enter these rhythms and sense how it feels to inhabit ‘mother, mistress, madonna, father, son and holy spirit.’ The three feminine archetypes follow a flowing rhythm, according to Roth, while the energy of the masculine archetypes corresponds to a staccato rhythm. Roth discovered that when the masculine and feminine fuse, a rhythm of fertile chaos results, as in acts of artistic creation or love. The resolution of chaos is the lightness and liberation of a lyrical rhythm, while stillness is the most profound rhythm of all.”

This is once again a fully extraordinary statement. Firstly, the identification of the Christian trinity as a trinitarian aspect of the masculine akin to the three feminine aspects embodied in the ancient European triple Goddess representation is to my knowledge unprecedented and very odd. Although there is a superficial similarity (the number three), the feminine trinity represents the three phases of the moon and of adult womanhood; the “masculine trinity” (the Christian one at least) represents no such thing. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of the trinity as such is a late innovation which in no way can be or ever was designed to supplant the cult of the triple goddess. The subjugation of female by male deities had been complete millennia earlier. Thus the two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

The inherent counter-intuitive and speculative nature of the “discovery” of the fusion of masculine and feminine into “chaos” and the rest of the ontogenesis of the Rothian pentateuch (which looks like a discovery of three additional genders) I leave as an exercise to the reader…

In the workshops we have been invited to experience more exotic combinations of the “rhythms”. The “five” emotions (which is Roth’s own and certainly not a canonical list) of fear, anger, sadness, joy and compassion are paired with each of the “rhythms” in a way which is not really obvious, nor consistent with the characterization in Roth’s own book Maps to Ecstasy of some of these rhythms as “masculine” and others “feminine”, and the proposition of a fivefold classification of character (with no theoretical or experimental basis at all) corresponding to each of the five “rhythms”. In my view this is absolutely no reasonable basis for a scientific psychotherapy. It is basically, as another reviewer on Amazon characterized it, “cumbersome and tiresome psychobabble”.

We are then invited to experience one rhythm within another, the rhythm with and without the corresponding emotion, lightness within each of them … an utterly confusing attempt at embodied “visualizations” which sollicited the head far too much for a technique supposed to be centered in the body.

The workshops have primarily involved actual dance, but there have also been some exercises, mostly with no particular power to them compared to what I have found in pretty well every tantra workshop I have attended. I have found that in Five Rhythms it is very easy to avoid contact with the other dancers and this is what most people in fact do – contact is only fleeting and never to the point of discomfort which might prompt psychosomatic response. I see no real reason why the practice, relying as I said on “embodied visualizations”, should reorganize the psychic armoring. In my view this is a secondary phenomenon in the workshops which mainly draws on experiences outside of them. When a psychosomatic response does occur, it is not built upon to the benefit of the group – the workshop leader does nothing with it, certainly at group level.

This is why I characterize the practice as “integrative”. The best experiences I have had dancing Five Rhythms have been when I entered the room with a quantity of open psychic material, as a result of life events or of other workshops. I have felt it has an ability to “sew me back together”. But not to rip me apart. Of course to some degree it might if the very fact of engaging in such a practice is challenging for the practitioner. But this strikes me as a relatively low bar to clear. Most people will be well able to engage in the practice without troubling their resistances.

In short, I still like the practice notwithstanding its quasi-metaphysical psychobabble and I have certainly also drawn benefit from it, some of which I will hopefully describe in future posts. However, I think it would be far purer and more useful in a form freed from the oppression of the omnipresent pentateuchal metaphysic, and less comfortably solipsistic. There is a place, undeniably, for gentle approaches which are accessible to a wider audience, and for restorative methods, not only the deconstruction of defenses; but these approaches should be honest about what they can and cannot achieve.

Calvaire

Returning from my trip to Burgundy, I have been struck by the omnipresence, at the summit of perfectly pleasant hills, of crosses, incorporating or otherwise the crucified representation of the first century Jewish reformer whose cult went on, by a series of disparate embellishments, to become the major religion of the Western world. Indeed, these depictions are so ubiquitous that I was unsure whether “le calvaire” had not become, in French, whether by semantic extension or more innocent semantic regression, simply a term for the unwooded top of a hill (apparently that is not so).

When I was a kid, taken to Catholic services, I always – probably like any other kid – experienced a vivid distaste for this representation. I guess I could buy into the notion of self-sacrifice, the cruelty of the fate imposed to a good man, and even, admittedly in my wildest imagination, the ancient Near Eastern cosmic mythology of the dying and rising god, but it was never evident to me (though it is now) why this lifeless figure impaled on a cross needed to be paraded eternally before my nose.

Certain theological acrobatics endeavor to portray this scene as a moment of victory. Indeed, the success of this exegesis invited its later, equally successful emulation by Napoleon III, in search of a secular messiah in the person of the defeated and ultimately executed Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix, who conveniently (but, it later transpired, inaccurately) declared, according to the account in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, that “La Gaule unie, formant une seule nation, animée d’un même esprit, peut défier l’Univers.”

Statue of Vercingetorix in Alise-Sainte-Reine

Whilst Vercingetorix at least, in Viollet-Le-Duc’s representation, appears proud and almost as a victor, Jesus, on the other hand, appears broken and lifeless, anything but an inspirational figure. This aspect of its postulated deity has presumably been a major weakness in uniting Christendom against the much better organized Muslim conquerors, and indeed one wonders whether Caesar would have triumphed over Vercingetorix if he had been laden down with such a handicap.

The emphasis on suffering and redemption so characteristic of Christianity both historically and culturally appears as surprisingly singular, though Shiism seems to have preserved some similar ideas from its related Zoroastrian substrate, and Judaism has applied the notion to the people in both the Deuteronomic and Zionist traditions, but not to its deity.

That suffering has a redemptive character appears almost axiomatic to many Westerners, even those who would portray themselves as emancipated from the intellectual heritage of Christianity. But we worship our suffering because we have been taught, by the most unnatural of ruses, to do so. To bear suffering without protest, convinced one is thereby serving some higher goal, is, obviously, a desirable attribute, but from one standpoint only: that of those who benefit from our quiescence.

That there is plenty of suffering in the world I do not doubt, but many cultures endure it without losing, and certainly not forever, an underlying gaiety and celebration of life. Christianity is presented to us as a solution to the problem of the existence of suffering (and even more metaphysically of evil) in the world. Yet this “problem” is entirely of its own making. That suffering is a fact does not make it a problem – unless you have devised an abstraction of God as both creator and redeemer in the first place. Our natural instinct is to flee suffering where possible and to heal it through mourning and empathy where not. To dwell on it deliberately, to find it where it does not exist, to elevate it to ubiquitous supremacy, seems a biological aberration.

And yet it is to this counterintuitive quest that the calvaires incite us: to be in the midst of the vibrant, teeming beauty of life and yet not only to find unsuspected morosity in its midst, but to prefer this morosity to celebration. Even the best in Catholic spirituality is rarely more than a lyrical accommodation to this underlying tragic conception of the world. Never does it burst free.

During all of human history and most of its present extent, the natural rhythm of life has been and is satisfactorily mirrored in rituals and cultures which have not needed any such artifice. To crown innocent hilltops with such disfigurations is, I would argue, not to honor any spirit of sacrifice: it is to stand in Pilate’s shoes, not those of his victim, institutionalizing and thereby perpetuating the cycle of persecution.

Summer of Love

In a recent post which seems in the meantime to have disappeared (or maybe I am just no good with computers), Michael Samsel asks the question of why the work of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen achieved a certain popularity in the 60’s and 70’s, and then apparently declined, only, possibly, to resurface very recently.

The question, it seems to me, is just one aspect of the more general question that a lot of us who start to get into some of this thought end up asking: “whatever happened to the ‘Summer of Love’, and the whole hippie/free love movement which expressed values in the 1960s and 70s seemingly so close to those we are striving towards today”?

Samsel seems to suggest that one reason for this “spiritual interlude” is the rise in materialism which characterized the period from the mid-80’s through to the financial crisis which started in 2008. I think the notion of a spiritual interlude is a mischaracterization, but nonetheless he has a point. The baby boomer generation was a teenage rebellion which burnt itself out. Those kids sensed true human values, but had no experience living them, lurched into their rebellion unaware of themselves and of their childhood scars, and made a lot of mistakes in the process. Essentially the movement was authentic, but it was missing a theory of itself and it failed to do much of the groundwork. Humanistic psychology was born, but proved too challenging to an ego that could undisturbedly indulge itself cast adrift in a relativistic world of hedonism. It also took the established order some time to realize what was happening and muster its defenses. Some part was embraced in the mainstream.

In short, the Summer of Love burst into bloom in a soil which was rich, but shallow, and whilst it changed a good part of the political discourse, especially on the left, the seeds it left in the soil of psychology and social organization needed a generation, or even two, to germinate.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are now – 45 years later – much better placed than we were then or have ever been since to realize the utopian agenda of peace and love, life lived according to real human values, if we can seize the moment. We will only get there through brave self-confrontation. But we understand today immensely more than we did in the 1960’s about what makes a human being. Both religion and the creed of materialism are crumbling and people are searching for spirituality. The family and relationships are in crisis. And yet we now possess close to all the answers to these questions. It takes only bravery, but even that is not particularly brave, for there is really no alternative, whether intellectual or existential. I am certain the years ahead of us will rewrite the map of the human heart and leave no discipline untouched. The paradigms we have been brought up to believe in, whether they be economic, social or psychological, will seem, looking back in twenty, thirty or fifty years, crude, barbarous and incomprehensible, much as slavery and racism do today. It is an exciting time to be alive.

Why eschewing religion is a prerequisite of spirituality

It is a glorious spring day in Brussels today, inviting to indulge a certain melancholy over the passage of time and the meaninglessness of existence.

In melancholy we sense, simultaneously, the beauty of both life and death; it may, if we let it, overwhelm us. But usually we are too frightened to let go.

This fear of being our mortal selves and clinging on to our misperception of separateness finds its origin in the survival instinct of animals. But although our biological nature impels us to seek to survive, it does not mandate fear when that survival is not threatened or simply because, ultimately, we all will die. Mortality anxiety takes root in a misformation of the ego.

Consciousness is not life without fear, but it is life without fear of fear. We know fear to be instinctive and survival to be a basic drive, but we also know that whether or not we survive, existence will go on. We know ourselves to be a tiny part of existence and this only now; and yet, if we are aware, a vital part, in a sense, however, which transcends vastly our self-identification.

Such awareness is the goal of spiritual practice; it is embodied spirituality. But our spiritual drive and our mortality anxiety are expertly captured and deviated by religion. Theistic religion promises an absurdity, namely the survival of the soul as a differentiated entity. In order to achieve this absurdity, devotees are ready to accept the most insane of sacrifices. Living is fully subordinate to an illusory survival. Even the Eastern doctrines of karma and reincarnation are not much different. Indeed they are possibly worse, since existence is seen as a chore which colossal efforts are required to escape.

Religion is not only the opium of the people; it is predatory on their enslavement and the sworn enemy of their emancipation. Today, take time to live, to experience one exquisite moment fully. The ecstatic character of life in which we partake is our birthright and the sole immensity there is.

Better food, worse sex?

I have just completed Jared Diamond’s at times fascinating account of how the economic geography of today’s world came into play. Predictably, the major culprit (or hero if you will) is the same agricultural revolution which Ryan and Jethá in Sex at Dawn blame for the human race’s unnatural fate of sexless monogamy, in turn both blamed by Reich for giving rise to endemic neurosis and feted by Freud as a precondition of civilization. This inevitably raises the question of whether it is actually possible for the human race to buck this secular trend and live a natural existence of any sort under by now fundamentally transformed social conditions.

Mystics often float the idea that our species is engaged in a spiritual evolution. It is quite hard for me to buy into this notion. Evolution in any case is not a one-way street: organisms also get simpler to adapt to their environment, not only more complicated. Indeed, both Diamond and Ryan document instances of this happening in our own species. We tend to assume we in the West are smarter than hunter-gatherers, but it turns out that the opposite applies. Intelligence is much more predictive of the chances of passing on ones genes in primitive societies than it is in post-industrial ones, and in keeping with this, the average native of Papua New Guinea is more intelligent than the average Englishman. He also has a larger penis and significantly higher sperm count.

It seems to me that we basically live in a state of alienation which we have some idea now how we got into, but no idea how to get out of. Not only is the Enlightenment myth of constant progress dead, but we perhaps have to get used to the idea that we have regressed instead. And even if we do believe that human societies are getting fairer, less violent and generally less neurotic, then clearly there has at least been a period, presumably until fairly recently, when the contrary was the case. Moreover, Freud’s Faustian bargain might even have been acceptable if it was only about sex. But if the cost of adapting to modern civilization is in fact a large loss of enjoyment in life and atrophy of both body and spirit, then might we not really be better off abandoning much of what we have built and starting over?

I do not have an answer to this question other than to observe it is not an obvious or even well-defined option. The myth of the Golden Age is omnipresent in our collective memory and wildly opposing views on the quality of prehistoric life pitted philosophers in the iconoclastic, naturalist tradition of Rousseau and later Nietzsche against the likes of Burke, Hobbes and Voltaire. The so called “paleolithic diet” is a controversial attempt to restore an analogous nutritional environment to the one that existed in hunter-gatherer times, and the barefoot movement shares similar aims. But primitivism, it seems, whilst it can be a source of inspiration in trying to uncover some of the ways in which modern life does not serve our health and happiness, can hardly be an agenda.

Myths of forgiveness

In this article I will summarize a recent piece appearing on netzwerkb.org, a german language network for victims of sexualized violence. I understand from the comments that Barbara Rogers, author of the unmissable resource “Screams from Childhood“, intends to publish a full translation so in the meantime these are just highlights (under my own responsibility).

The author argues that it is inappropriate to pursue or encourage, in a therapeutic context, forgiveness of the perpetrator, and identifies in this context three myths.

The first myth is that forgiveness, processing and reconciliation vis-à-vis the perpetrator might have a healing effect on adults who suffered violence in childhood. To do so amounts to taking away the voice of the abused child which it is only in the process of recovering. This is especially dangerous if the perpetrator remains a person with whom the victim is likely to be in contact. Forgiveness may result in a certain feeling of release from the feeling of guilt the victim may feeling as a result of the social pressure to forgive which the victim cannot attain. This ability to process is portrayed as a virtue. However, it is really an act of fear which restores the relationship of power between perpetrator and victim and may well lead to retraumatization.

The second myth is that forgiveness, processing and reconciliation makes the world a better place. This finds its roots in religious traditions, which idealize masochism. Religion needs this myth as a foundation for the existing world order of repression, whereby victims continue to provide resources to political elites. This makes the world a worse, not better place.

The third myth is that forgiveness reduces anger, hatred and the desire for revenge. Forgiveness is identical to repression of these feelings which also the child could not express. Forgiveness doesn’t reduce these feelings but only perpetuates the cycle by shifting them to the next generation.

In the comments, the point is somewhere made that what the author is talking about is not in fact real “forgiveness”. I think that’s in some sense true. When forgiveness equates to compassion it is certainly a final stage of liberation. However, the word is so laden with patriarchal values and power to manipulate through the superego that this is a sense it assumes almost never in practice. Therefore I fully agree with the authors that first we must reconnect with our anger, hatred and sadness and the call to forgive is, in this context, both in a true sense impossible and as a practical matter utterly misguided and inappropriate.

Conscious, embodied anger is one of the most powerful phenomena to observe in a person – it’s beautiful, breathtaking and can be extremely erotic. By contrast, fawned forgiveness elicits in others a natural reaction of repulsion. This is because we know inside that the angry person is right, and is possessed of extraordinary power to change and bring healing. With this we instantly identify. The “forgiving” person, on the other hand, seems to invite us to continue to feel shame about our own burning sense of injustice in order to live a quiet but insipid life. This is really just an extension of the social control which has kept our anger buried and allowed manipulation and abuse to continue. The “forgiving” person is therefore on “their” side; the angry person, ours.

Guru

A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook a query about whether a gentleman called Sadhguru (whose site is here) was or was not an authentic spiritual teacher.

Trying to distinguish true from false teachers is, for reasons I will suggest below, a particular obsession of ours, around which considerable emotion is generated. But really we should be forewarned. If there were true and false teachers, then there would be truth and falsehood, good and bad, and these things there are not. Truth is situated not only beyond good and evil but also beyond truth and falsehood; truth in the non-dual sense does not tolerate or recognize a world in which teachers are true or false, any more than it tolerates or recognizes one in which they are good or bad, right or wrong. This is all a conceit of the mind. Yet we play it, again, and again. This game of the mind closes us to the heart, the only organ with which we can see and understand.

Now, personally, when I am trying to figure out whether a teacher has really “got it” and is saying and teaching something of general value to the human race (and not only to themselves, which is not my concern), I have a golden rule – what they say about sex. Mostly they ignore it, which is not a great sign. However, in this video, Sadhguru is asked a question and in his reply he portrays the sexual instinct, not as bad, but as essentially unimportant and a distraction.

This is objectively not the case. Whatever realms sexuality may or may not open us to – and many of us instinctively sense its relationship to the divine – it is in any case the locus of mankind’s fundamental neuroses. It cannot be worked around or ignored – it needs to be healed. That is, it perhaps can be worked around, but this is no shortcut, it is a very, very long detour. One can well imagine how Osho would have answered; but perhaps even more tellingly one cannot imagine that, in Rajneeshpuram, this question would ever have been asked. It was clear to Osho and I believe it was clear in practice that human sexuality should be unleashed, and that whatever mess one might make of it (provided it did not lead to unwanted pregnancies or disease) was in any case better, and resulted in more learning and personal growth, than the alternative.

Several of the others on the discussion thread, in tending to defend Sadhguru, displayed, to my mind, two fundamental mistakes. Firstly, they used their mind to try to assess whether what Sadhguru was saying was or was not, or could or could not be construed as, compatible with other teachings, such as those of Osho, with which they were familiar and tended to identify. To me this question is entirely unimportant and not very informative. What I say is very compatible, I believe at least, with what Osho said; I feel I know his mind and it is as if we are one mind. And yet, people are not queueing up to follow me, nor I think should they (yet 😉 ). Osho has simply realized, embodied, things that I have not, and these things are transmitted from heart to heart; what he says is just background music to this language of the heart. The relevance of what he says is a sign of his connectedness to the universe, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient, and it could deceive. Secondly, and this underlines the folly of the approach via the mind, my companions seemed unduly concerned to be inclusive; not to exclude Sadhguru, or anyone else, from the circle of qualified teachers, always to give them the benefit of the doubt, to avoid choosing. This should show us that the mind is not the neutral arbiter we imagine it to be. It is at least as concerned to avoid disrupting the ego as it is to uncover truth.

So my very rapid working hypothesis on Sadhguru is that, whilst he may be worth listening to and may have many qualities, he is not pushing his followers on the issues they need to be pushed on and they are not getting the answers they look for and need.

But how do I feel, making this judgement? If I am honest, it provides a certain gratification, but, though I stand by it, it is not very pleasant to really become aware of. In it I find shades at least of anger and destruction, triumphalism and revenge. And yet he seems like a nice guy whom I might well find good company and could in the worst case simply ignore. Perhaps he is indeed a con artist. But it is not my protestations or any views of mine at all which are going to determine whether or not people seek him out or how they feel about what they find.

My joy in judgment and the sense of victory it gives me are primal emotions which serve primal survival needs. These needs, however, are objectively absent here. I find myself hating that he may be loved, admired, respected and resenting my own, uninvited feeling of inferiority. By labelling him a false teacher I foreclose the possibility I might learn anything from him, which gives me nothing. Ultimately, I condemn him for not fulfilling a role he has never asked to play: that of a father figure in whose hands my childish insecurities would dissolve into boundless love and reassurance; and I envy him for having access to love which seems denied to me.

Seen in this light, the sense of victory masks a profound inner defeat. I have essentially said to him, as I have said to my father, “Fuck you, I can stand on my own two feet.” This attitude of defiance, this unresolved Oedipus complex, while it may have been necessary for ego-survival, has become so etched into my behavior patterns that it forecloses ever receiving that which my inner child and my soul desire. And that is very sad, and very lonely.

It is exactly the same thing I do on a daily basis when I foreclose possibilities which come across my path to learn and love, out of a misplaced fear of displacement and manipulation. Even if those I encounter may not come into consideration as gurus. This is because I approach no-one as myself a whole being. Onto each and everyone I project a paternal role, hoping desperately they may meet some unmet childhood need of mine, and being eternally disappointed. Disappointment becomes a lifestyle; it even becomes a solace.

Humankind’s search for a guru is always a search to meet unmet childish needs. This is why, in the search for guru, we are always disappointed. There is no guru unless and until we are guru ourselves; and then all is guru. Thus the quality of the other, their state of enlightenment, is in reality irrelevant. What we call enlightenment is only a quality of awareness, not the essence of being, and it is with the essence of being that we must first come into contact. It may help to be in contact with someone who is aware of that essence of being within themselves; I do not deny it. Yet the surrender we need is a surrender only to ourselves. The false guru is the one who will allow you to believe he (or she) is true; that he or she really corresponds to your childish impulses. In such a relationship, as in any relationship founded on such a presupposition, you will become trapped. If a teacher is desirous to help you, he will never allow you to believe that he is “true”.

This means that another’s discernment can never substitute for your own. So much confusion stems from lack of awareness of this fundamental law! I may be right about Sadhguru, or I may be wrong, but you should not listen to me, or to anyone else, because it is not possible, even for an enlightened person, to answer this question other than directly to your heart, and by inviting you to examine yourself what you would have liked him to advise you on. Essentially, either I do not know, or I can not tell. Whether I am right does not help you to be right; not unless I can become you and this I cannot do through the mind. You must remain open to the essence of being wherever you find it, and you find it everywhere, accepting that the unmet childish needs will always remain unmet, but also understanding that there is no need any longer to meet them, and therefore remaining vulnerable, never judging with the ego-backlash of the mind which hates all, but weighing wisdom with the heart, which loves all. Then you will no longer seek guru, but it will have come to you.

Changes to the blog

I am just back from a very enjoyable Five Rhythms weekend in the south of Belgium (more here), and amongst a few other little practical changes in my life it has prompted me to make a few changes to the blog. I have realized for a while that the focus on substantive original articles has meant that I could not use the blog to share a lot of material that I nonetheless want to share with the community, including those of you who are not on (or do not regularly consult) Facebook, especially since I have integrated my personal blog with the information on the tantra and personal growth network which I facilitate.

I have therefore dropped the old blog categories and created just three new ones – “articles” which are intended to be of enduring interest to anyone interested in the themes of the blog, “shares” which consists in material produced by others that nonetheless spoke to me sufficiently that I wanted to share it with my readers (sometimes in my own translation), and finally “news and reviews”. Hopefully these three categories will allow me to organize the material better and to use Facebook less as the primary channel for publishing material in the second and third categories. I am not sure there is any way, unfortunately, to subscribe to the blog by category, but I hope the additional stream of material is more welcome than unwelcome. Of course I welcome any feedback on the new organization.

I also made the “about” page into the home page, I think it is more friendly like this 🙂

Trauma releasing exercises

I am just back from the three-day introductory training in David Berceli‘s Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE). These exercises and Berceli’s work are well worth knowing. Surprisingly enough, there is no Wikipedia article on Berceli and his work. The article on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) does not mention it either, nor somatic approaches to PTSD at all, even though these have been about for a long time and must in any case be more effective than the “recognized” approaches, CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and medication.

Berceli (as far as I can see) takes his basic model of the somatic effects of trauma from the work of Peter Levine; in any case the models are very similar. To summarize, the basic idea is that the human animal has (for some reason; we shall come onto this) suppressed a natural response to coping with stress, which needs to be reactivated for healing to occur. However, the two differ considerably in terms of methodology. Levine’s approach, known as Somatic Experiencing (SE), which is quite widely practised in Europe (though not a lot in Belgium), requires exploration of the trauma and the felt sense of the body in response to it. As such, it borrows from Gendlin’s ideas on Focusing and more generally is, it seems to me, within the intellectual tradition of Gestalt therapy. By way of contrast, Berceli’s approach, like most somatic psychotherapy, is more purely process-oriented. As such, it does not require or even directly encourage exploration of the traumatizing events, and particularly not by the therapist; rather, the focus is on what the body is doing in the here and now and on the ways in which the body’s natural attempts to self-regulate are hindered or can be supported. The independence of method from the client’s personal history offers some considerable advantages, since it makes possible group work and relies less on the skills of the therapist.

Berceli’s therapeutic method borrows from Bioenergetics (I may update this article when I have read his books, so check back), rather in the tradition of Alexander Lowen. Its aim is therefore to produce involuntary trembling in the body. Unlike Lowen, there is no element of talk therapy within the method, though Berceli does say that his method can be integrated within others, so leaves the door open to syncretic approaches. Significantly, however, the trembling is reinterpreted compared to the Reichian tradition, to which Lowen remained loyal. Rather than being glossed as the release of sexual/life energy held in stasis by the body, it is interpreted as the reactivation of the post-freezing response of animals described by Levine: “When it is out of danger, the animal will literally ‘shake off’ the residual effects of the immobility response and gain full control of its body. It will then return to its normal life as if nothing had happened“.[1]

Why is this response suppressed in humans? For this, Berceli seems to have no deeper or more convincing answer than does Levine: “Most human cultures tend to judge this instinctive surrender in the face of overwhelming threat as a weakness tantamount to cowardice. However, underneath this judgment lies a deep human fear of immobility. We avoid it because it is a state very similar to death. This avoidance is understandable, but we pay dearly for it.“[1] In other words, the response is suppressed by the ego under the weight of social stigma attached to it. Neither Levine, nor Berceli, as far as I can see, has (or even looks for) any evidence of this claimed stigmatization. Many bodily functions may be disrupted by trauma, but this does not mean that those functions themselves are necessarily stigmatized. Thus this appears to me not very convincing, and basically it eschews a psychoanalytic explanation of ego defenses and their role in the developmental process. There are lots of criticisms which can be easily leveled not only at the model, but also at how the practice relates to it. Most basically, the question arises as to why the practice does not endeavor to, nor succeeds, in simply reestablishing this response and allowing it subsequently to play whatever role it needs to play in the individual’s further experience. Rather it is recommended to continue the practice on an ongoing basis. It therefore does not constitute a “cure” for PTSD, but a door into another dimension of experience. Berceli explicitly encourages such an understanding, and views his work as transformative on a global scale. This is laudable and I thoroughly support it because I believe he is on to something; but it is not convincing theoretically.

The great advantage of Berceli’s exercises over classical bioenergetics (and over Reich’s simplified anatomical model of the biological basis of character formation) is that it is more anatomically informed, and results in exercises which are shorter and easier to carry out. This makes it more suitable for the problem it is intended to address, since persons suffering the physical developmental impact of childhood trauma are often limited in their range of motion. These exercises should absolutely be considered for use in all those contexts where people currently employ Lowen’s exercises (though not his whole framework of Bioenergetic Analysis, which he himself acknowledged did not have the clinical success he hoped for) and its derivates, such as Osho’s active meditations. Because Berceli’s exercises directly solicit and progressively release tensions in the hip adductors, iliopsoas and muscles of the pelvic floor, that is, in all of the major muscles primarily involved in the orgastic response, and they are more easily taught and experienced than existing alternatives, they seem to me the basis for a more effective practice which clients will better be able to follow and stick to (they of course do not substitute for other exercises used in group therapy the purpose of which is rather to generate than to release tensions, which will then be released in other ways).

The other great advantage is that the method can be employed in a very wide range of contexts, from schools to palliative care, contexts in which bioenergetics or anything else “explicitly” psychotherapeutic would have no chance of penetrating. It does not need and does not really have a unifying discourse, which minimizes resistance. People are willing to try it out who would never go near (or for that matter be able to afford) a psychotherapist, and stick with it because, after all, it is only their body doing what it wants to do, and it is hard to be against that.

On the other hand it would at least seem not to be a complete system for spiritual liberation in the sense we derive ultimately from Reich. Berceli applies his technique way beyond the boundaries of PTSD, presumably because people have reported positive effects in those contexts, and has some awareness of the endemic and embedded nature of societal trauma, but the need for wide appeal seems to prevent him from going deeply into underlying societal issues in the radical tradition of much psychoanalytic thought. I am not saying this is a bad choice. Perhaps it is an excellent one. But ultimately, personally and at societal level, one does need to go there. Refusing to do so will always limit the benefits that can be attained.

What Berceli’s discourse seems to me to lack is an understanding that the disruption of the trauma response is ultimately due to the fact that social experience, being so far from the natural state of man, continually regenerates trauma. On top of distorting ego development, social experience also acts in the present. Our shared cognitive models of the world and the human need for relationship continually pull us back to a depressed, unhealthy state, and would do so even if all “residues” of specific trauma were somehow dissolved. We touch here on the manner in which Berceli’s approach is most fundamentally incomplete. It is essentially solipsistic, and presupposes, ultimately as a matter of ideology, the ability of the individual body to regenerate in the absence of regeneration of the collective body and the social tissues, which although they are just as ossified as the somatic tissues, are not directly brought into vibration by the practice. This cannot work. An interpersonal dimension of therapy and practice is absolutely indispensable if we are to begin to reprogram the social mechanisms which propagate and perpetuate trauma.

So I guess that makes me a big fan and a big critic at the same time. However I will do and use the exercises and I recommend them to you to.

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[1] See http://www.traumahealing.com/somatic-experiencing/art_chapter1.html