Tag: Psychology

The body and the mind

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Increasingly research is showing how the mind plays a significant part in how our body feels. This is of interest to us who are working with stress. It also helps us understand how mediatation, simply sitting and observing the mind, can be an effective way of working with difficult emotions and events.

For example, research has shown that the body responds to abstract thoughts as if they were real. Work done at the University of Aberdeen found that when participants were asked to recall the past or imagine the future, their bodies acted out the metaphors contained in the words. So when asked to remember, they leaned slightly backward; when imagining the future, their bodies moved forwards. Though these shifts amounted to just a few millimeters, the results were consistent enough for researchers to conclude that they could ‘take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.’

Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam observes: “How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body. We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.” This is consistent with the way stress manifests itself in the body as headaches or heart conditions. It can also be seen when we have had a difficult encounter and we go around with a knot in the stomach. It supports the approach of Mindfulness meditation in its focus on the mind as a part of a whole body response to life’s stresses.

See more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html/

The unconscious must out

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The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict…

Carl Jung, “Christ, A Symbol of the Self”,

Sometimes we can see repeating patterns in our own lives or in the lives of others. We find ourselves in similar situations to before, or saying the same, self-defeating words, often based on deep-seated, limited, views of our own capacities. For example, some people say “I always end up in rotten relationships”, or even “life has it in for me”. Despite the painful nature of such experiences, these people do not gain the insight that would help them understand, for example, why they always end up in relationships that end badly. They continue to make choices based on patterns laid down in their own early relationships, which can end up running the show despite their best efforts. One way of dealing with this is to blame life or the other person and put the responsibility onto them.

However, the quote from Jung seems to suggest that the person needs to look inside themself for the real solution to this problem. He suggests that this can be due to unconscious parts of the self, the individual remaining unaware of his or her unconscious patterns and attitudes. He suggests that what we do not face inside ourselves will come into our lives from the outside, as “fate”. Unconsciously we will attract the parts of us that we deep down, unconsciously, know that we need. In other words, life will bring us into situations where we are asked to look at our unconscious or shadow side and bring it out into the open, in order to grow to our full potential.

He further seems to suggest that when we come to an important period in our life for growth, this new potential inside us does not always simply go from the unconscious to consciousness. Rather, it comes to full consciousness through outside circumstances or with the help of another person who comes into our life. This can then mean going in new directions in work or relationships, as we move from old patterns and things that once seemed important.

Thus, a person who spent a significant part of their life investing their energies into their work or their family may find that they neglected other aspects of themselves in the process. Jung suggests that they will be brought face to face with these unlived parts and given the possibilitiy of integrating them. He suggests that to be fully happy we need to bring to light those parts of ourselves that have been repressed or neglected.

Being Seen

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

In some of the tribes in Natal, in South Africa, the words used for saying hello, for greeting, are sawu bona, which means “I see you”. The other person responds by saying sikkhona “I am here”. As a greeting it affirms the real presence of the other, by letting them know that they are seen, and allows them to be fully present.

I know that, at a deep level, one of my needs is to be seen and acknowledged. I – like everyone, I suppose – want to have the freedom to reveal my true self, to relax, and not to be worried about the other’s response. “Seeing” does not mean cognitive recognition; rather it is rooted in the heart and is the awareness of my deepest self and my deepest needs are felt by another person. I need someone who has the space to see me and who is able to hold what they see.

This process begins when we are babies. The young baby needs to be seen and acknowledged by its parents, and when this does not happen it can cause great distress. We are born with a need for mirroring – for having what is happening in us seen and mirrored back to us. The English Psychologist Winnicott wrote that the parent needs to have enough space – and not be caught up in their own needs – so that this mirroring reflects back to the child an accurate picture of what the child is feeling inside. This allows the child feels that its needs are being taken care of and gives the child enough trust in the safety of the world to want to see more of it. In this way the child can minimize any anxiety about the threat of the world and develop independence in exploring it:

It is only under these conditions that the infant can have an experience that feels real. A large number of such experiences form the basis for a life that has reality in it rather than futility. The individual who has discovered the capacity to be alone is constantly able to rediscover the personal impulse and the personal inpulse is not wasted because the state of being alone is something which always implies…. that someone else is there
The Capacity to be Alone

However, when the child does not feel its needs being seen and reflected back, or that the caregiver is not attuned, it learns to become more cautious in order to protect itself from the inconsistency of the carer. The child can learn then that it is dangerous to let its true self be seen and that it should to keep its needs hidden. The capacity to be alone is not as strongly developed and this can lead in later life to an dependence on external activities, such as work, or to an instability in relationships. There may be links here with the practice of meditation. If it develops the capacity to be alone with ourselves it has the potential to heal some of these early life experiences.

Many babies, however, do have to have a long experience of not getting getting back what they are giving. They look and they do not see themselves…The baby gets settled in to the idea that when he or she looks, what is seen is the mother’s face. The mother’s face is not then a mirror.
Play and Reality

It would seem from this that real listening, real mirroring, is one of the greatest gifts we can offer to another person. If we can attune to what is really going on inside them, and not let our needs and our internal chatter predominate, then we allow them to be fully themselves and they can grow.

Mindfulness and attachment

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

There are interesting possible links between the practice of meditation and the healing of attachment patterns which are at the basis of all our relationships. Our early relationships with our primary caregivers laid down a pattern or paradigm which can be activated in later relationships. This paradigm can be very deeply ingrained in our unconscious and in the neural patterns of the brain. Luckily, like all neural patterns they can be changed, even if this takes a lot of time. One possible effect of meditation is that it allows the healing of excessive needs in relation to others by developing a greater contentment and balance with ourselves. This seems to be supported by the following quotation from Daniel Siegel on the brain and how it functions. Although it comes from a neurological point of view it seems to me to agree with the more Buddhist view of the mind’s natural wakefulness which I referred to in the previous post.

Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. As the mind goes through alternating phases of needing connection and needing solitude, the states of mind are cyclically influenced by combinations of external and internal processes. We can propose that such a shifting of focus allows the mind to achieve a balanced self-organizational flow in the states of mind across time. Respecting the need for solitude allows the mind to “heal” itself – which in essence can be seen as releasing the natural self-organizational tendencies of the mind to create a balanced flow of states. Solitude permits the self to reflect on engrained patterns and intentionally alter reflexive responses to external events that have been maintaining the dyadic dysfunction.

Daniel J. Siegal, The Developing Mind p., 235