The move is intelligent and inspirational. As expected, it offers brilliant insights from familiar names like Vandana Shiva (physicist and activist) and Wangari Maathai (Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement). But more significant for me was the input of people like James Jiler, Program Director of The Greenhouse at Rikers Island Prison Systems. James spoke about a program run at New York City’s main jail that enables inmates to work with the soil. This is hugely healing and those who take part are far less likely to re-offend after release.

Relationship was a key theme through the film. The main reason we’re in an environmental mess is that as a culture we’ve impoverished our relationship with the rest of Earth’s ecology. We’ve somehow got it into our heads that we’re not related to the rest of the ecosystem and that idea is potentially fatal.

I was struck by how clearly a film about ecological relationship echoed my reading on relational approaches to counselling and psychotherapy. Though I was struck by the similarity, I was far from surprised.  Many previous posts are rooted in this same common ground and I’m delighted to report that at least some therapists recognize that our work is part of an ‘unfolding process’ that is much bigger that the encounter between client and therapist (Neville, 2012). We are working with an organismic psychology which “emphasises the indisssolubility of organism and environment” (Tudor and Worrell, 2006). Relationship is the soil from which healing – whether ecological or therapeutic – grows.

• Dirt movie
• References

For some indigenous peoples – and in many myths – forests are liminal places that offer the potential for change. These ancient motifs are widespread in our culture: Shakespeare’s As You Like It it came to my mind today, and serves as a rich example. In the play the Forest of Arden becomes a mysterious place away from the civilized city where dramatic transformation take place. The play is a complex exploration of contrasts and conflicts; forest/city, nature/civilization, masculinity/femininity, child/parent, love/hate. Shakespeare doesn’t provide simple resolutions of these confrontations, but leaves us to make of it what we will – as you like it, indeed.

During my session I came to see the dark forest as the mind which the psychotherapist and the client explore together. Several aspects of the process became clear to me. In our wandering we must accept the reality of the unknown without fearing it. There may well be something frightening in the darkness, but finding it could be transformative. We need to feel our way through the trees, not blast at the darkness with the cold analytic beam of an electric torchlight. And as joint explorers of this forest, we must stay close.

Hopefully the significance for the practice of psychotherapy is clear: The therapist needs to feel safe with the unknown and not try to push it away prematurely with the intellectual light of theory. Instead, the therapist stays close to the experience of their client, helping them feel their way towards change.

• Brains, bodies and places
• References

Focusing is usually done indoors, but it occurred to me that it would be interesting to see what happened if I tried it in nature. It’s an obvious step and  it came as no surprise that other people were already doing it. What did surprise me was how powerful it could be. My first experiments were a revelation:  Focusing in nature quickly softened the perceived barrier between ‘me’ and ‘the world’, enabling a much more intimate relationship to place.

This was amazing! In minutes I could get a deep sense of connection to the natural world. Was it just me? I read about other peoples experiences and did some interviews. Although different people had different experiences, that sense of profound connection came up again and again.

As Deep Ecology has noted, that connection is fundamental to changing our environmental behavior. Herbert Schroeder, an environmental psychologist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service found that Focusing in nature “was a first step toward articulating the ineffable, experiential value that natural environments have for me” (Schroeder, 2012: 141).

There’s much more to be said and done: My article on this subject will be published in the Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies journal this autumn; meanwhile I’ll be facilitating Focusing in Nature sessions from May onwards.

• Eugene Gendlin
• More about Focusing
• Deep Ecology

The venue looks great! It’s The Integral Center in Bolder, Colorado. But perhaps most importantly, the format is very interactive. There will be the usual lecture style sessions but these will serve to introduce workshops. There’s also space for spontaneous events to emerge during the Conference. That’s pretty rare and opens up a potential for exploring embodiment that we wouldn’t get at a more conventional ‘talking heads’ conference.

My session is entitled  ’Beyond the Skin-bag: Where Embodiment becomes Environment’. I’ll be discussing the same kind of questions I explore here: Where is the edge of your self?  Where does ‘you’ end and the and ‘the rest of the world’ begin? My workshop will involve playing  games that expand sensory awareness so that participants can experience more fully how the places where we live, play and work influence behaviour, thinking and well-being.

• Living Embodiment Conference
• Don Hanlon Johnson
• Paul Linden

I’ve done this same walk at various times of the year, but this particular Imbolc there was something in the woods and fields that felt particularly powerful. I was walking across a barren muddy field patterned with the stubble of dead stalks. A cold wind was blowing and the Sun sat low in the sky.

Suddenly I felt a tingling as a wave of energy flowed up my body from the land. As I looked at the dark earth, I had a mental image of the virile stems of the growing crop I’d seen in that very spot last Summer. In fact it was much more than an  mental image; it was a powerful felt sense of the fecundity of the land. The fullness of the ripe crop in Summer and the dark quietude of the sleeping land in Winter were simultaneously present the quickening of Imbolc : it was if I could sense the whole cycle of the seasons in one moment.

• Eugene Gendlin
• Liminal space
• References

Transplanting a hand is not only surgically challenging; it is also psychologically risky. The world’s first hand transplant failed. The recipient, Clint Hallam, had it amputated in 2001, saying it felt like “a dead man’s hand”. Clint had lived with his new hand since the operation in 1998 but ended up begging his doctors to remove it, saying he felt “mentally detached” from the hand. He told the BBC that his body and mind had said “enough is enough” (BBC, February 2001).

Clint Hallam with his new hand (© BBC)

In a sense Hallam was right; it was a dead man’s hand. But in another sense it was, at least potentially, his own hand. This odd situation sheds light on the nature of our embodiment. Our bodies are not simply tools that a disembodied Cartesian self uses to carry out its projects in the world. Merleau-Ponty is much closer to the truth when he wrote that “the body is much more than instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements … help shape our perception of things” (Merleau-Ponty, 2007: 285).

No surprise then, that surgeons considering a hand transplant consider the psychological aspects. “The hand has a ‘psychology’ that involves issues of one’s body-image and sense of identity” (Hand Transplantation and Psychiatric Issues). Losing a hand is both physically and psychologically traumatic and can “affect one’s self-image”; adjusting to the loss of a hand entails mourning, coming to terms with a new body-image and a changed sense of self (ibid.).

Two key factors differentiate Mark from Clint. First, Mark’s existing hand was still attached, even though it was useless to him, whilst Clint had lost his in an accident over a decade before the transplant. Had Clint’s adaptation to not having a hand make it harder to accept his new one? Second, Mark has had a lot of counselling “because the biggest thing is afterwards, whether I would accept it as mine” (The Telegraph, January 2012).

As Merleau-Ponty shows “the body gives our general medium of having a world” (Merleau-Ponty, 2007; 169), but furthermore it is through our being-in-the-world that we know ourselves (ibid., 2007: xii). Within that context, we can see that there is something very special about our hands: not only are they highly visible to us, but they are literally how we grasp our world. We touch ourselves and others, reach out, hold and make things happen with our hands. If all this is done with the hand that was for decades part of another person’s life, and they are now dead, how might that feel? How might that impact on your sense of self? Psychologists have found that hand transplant patients sometimes feel a loss of identity and may experience issues with intimacy (Psychological Risks). Psychological impairments can include “social withdrawal, embarrassment, reduced self-esteem, and a depressive coping style” (Kumnig et al.)

I suspect that there is much more we can can learn about embodiment by studying hand transplant patients. Merleau-Ponty described the way that our hands give us a kind of “double sensation”: If I touch my left hand with my right, I both touch and am touched. It seems that we can’t have both sensations at once: I either focus on touching or being touched. When I am more aware of touching, the touched left hand become like an object; conversely, if I focus on the sensation of being touched, the right hand recedes from my awareness (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 133). How would that experience be for Mark or Clint before he had the “dead hand” removed?

• Merleau-Ponty
• References

Park time

I had left human clock time and was held in a slower, seasonal pulse. Herbert W. Schroeder of the USDA Forest Service describes a similar experience:

In contrast to the externally imposed clock-time time that normally structures my daily activities, my sense of time in natural settings unfolds through the movements and sounds of the environment, such as the rhythmic swaying of tree limbs in the wind, the breaking of waves against rocks on the lakeshore, or the steady progress of clouds across the sky.

A resting human heart pulses at round 70 beats per minute; the seasonal pulse of tree sap is somewhat slower. In the pause between beats, leaves fall and life slows with the cold. Then, as sap rises and buds form, life surges again. Next time you’re in a park, take a moment to breathe more slowly and try to sense the gentle pulse of park time.

• The sit spot
• References

A few birds were still singing when I first arrived. As time passed, a few became two and then fell to a single song high in the tree opposite. It was a complex and beautiful song. Perhaps birdsong always is like that but becomes revealed when framed by silence. And then the song stopped.

That silence felt powerful, but I couldn’t work out why. Was the end of the song a metaphor for the end of the Summer or even of death? Both have been in my consciousness recently. Somehow I knew it wasn’t simply a resonant metaphor, but I still couldn’t understand why that place at that moment felt so significant.

I was back there at dusk today and again heard the last bird song. This time I got it; it was a moment of transition that a created a liminal space.

Cave mouths and mountain tops are liminal spaces, as is the seashore, especially where the waves claim the land and then recede. The Celts call them ‘thin places’, places where boundaries meet. Permaculture emphasises the importance of places where two eco-systems meet. Such boundaries,which it calls ‘edges’ are especially abundant and diverse.

Liminal space emerges from time too. The Pagan wheel of the year is marked by festivals that celebrate liminal moments: Samhain, Winter Solstice and Beltane to name a few. What is it about liminal space that is so powerful? That question remains vitally alive: Although Victor Turner discussed the role of the the liminal in ritual he didn’t explain it. I have a feeling it’s related to the uncanny, but that simply makes it all the more mysterious!

• The sit spot
• References

In 1989 Twyford Down was the most protected landscape in southern England, yet in just 2 years it was to change from a beautiful piece of historic land into a busy dual carriageway.  The new road destroyed two Sites of Special Scientific Interest, two Scheduled Ancient Monuments & an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) intervened with non-violent direct action, but were forced to back off by the threat of massive legal costs. But while FoE camped on the threatened water meadows, a group of local young people were living on St. Catherines Hill in the ‘bender’ dwellings which became standard quarters at every protest site. They were the Donga tribe.

Twyford Down protest

The fact that the Donga Tribe were named after the Iron Age track ways on the Down illustrates their “very strong self identification with the land” (Plows, 1998).  The Tribe practised a “very earthy” Paganism that saw “[e]veryday nature … as magical” (Plows, 2005).

Those that were there have powerful memories of the Down. Lauren, whom I interviewed for my PhD research, used to visit and felt the power of the place.

“Twyford was such a wonderful piece of land”, she said. “As you stepped onto it you just thought, ‘What’s happening to me?’”

The spiritual power of Twyford Down is at least partly due to the ‘wilderness effect’. I have discussed this in depth elsewhere (The power of place: Protest site pagans), but briefly, spending extended periods in the ‘wilderness’ has a profound impact on the psyche.

The activist group Earth First! are inspired by  Deep Ecology, “the spiritual and visceral recognition of the intrinsic, sacred value of every living thing” (Earth First! Worldwide, 2007). Deep Ecology – a movement as much as an identifiable philosophy – emphasizes that human beings are only part of the ecology of the planet and that only by realising our ecological interconnectedness can we become fully human (Naess, 1989). But understanding Deep Ecology as a philosophy will get you nowhere: your understanding must be embodied. It was an embodied knowing that the land is sacred that inspired Twyford campaigners like me twenty years ago. That deep ecological knowing is essential to us all if we are to survive as a species.

• The power of place: Protest site pagans
• A history of the Twyford Down protests
• Twentieth Anniversary at Twyford Down
• Sacred Ecology
• References

An Integration Training workshop. © IT

The training is highly effective but it’s not easy to explain how and why it works, so Mark asked me to write a breif overview of embodiment theory. Given the breadth of the subject, it’s quite a tall order to sum it up in one blog post, so I’ve split it into two parts. Part one - Being Embodied – introduces the key ideas, notably embodied knowing and thinking. Being Embodied is a lot longer than the posts I write here, so I’ve been able to go into more detail. Check it out and let me know what you think.

• Integration Training