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MORNING GLORY SUITE
The Golden Flesh
Do we actively value our psychic well-being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?
Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.
When psychic energy is dammed up it manifests in unconscious or destructive ways, such as tension, withdrawl, alienation, anxiety, compulsions, depression, addictions, somatization, and suicidal tendencies. Some people learn early, even in the womb, that their world is not a safe place. Social patterns become maladaptive when an organism’s true needs are not met in a tangible, congruent way.
A confused person can react with pain, fear, hopelessness, cognitive dissonance, disturbed biorhythms, approach/avoidance, passive aggression, codependence, apathy, or self-defeating behavior patterns. Our biology and minds become confused. Fed enough negative self-talk the body will react with authentic symptoms, self-induced illness. This does not mean that all disease is self-inflicted nor that we are necessarily to blame for our ailments, in some version of “new age guilt”.
Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.
To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of mental and physical well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.
Soma Sophia
Sometimes we have to address the external realities of a situation and sometimes its spirit or essential nature. The same is true for our bodies and souls. Significance is extracted from the experiential responses of our whole being – soma significance, the felt-sense wisdom of the bodymind, which we can personify as Soma Sophia.
We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the gold, whether we call that essence health, art, flow, or inspiration. Psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.
That Source is the source of psychic energy, our libido, which becomes available for negentropic or entropic expression. Its tangible root lies within our very energy/matter as the plenum that science calls the vacuum fluctuation or zero-point energy, the groundstate of existence. It is a bit of the cosmos, of the universe that lies within our bodies, which are composed of elements cooked within the stars.
The body itself is the Hermetic vessel for the transformation of instinctual drives. That creative process can take place through trance, art, or meditation, or any combination of them. There are many techniques which help us process pain, stress, trauma, or depression. Often therapies address higher levels of organization, often at the conceptual level, rather than reordering the physical core of distress which inhibits our well-being.
A dynamic combination of focus, concentration and flow undergirds our conscious existence and how we relate to others and the world. In meditations such as biofeedback, Tai Chi or Yoga, we intentionally create dynamic changes in our psychophysiology. We temporarily drop our identification with the body only to reinhabit it with even more awareness or mindfulness. This is the artful life; creative fulfillment of our collective destiny.
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This is one of my favorite images
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This is one of my favorite images
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This is one of my favorite images
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This is one of my favorite images
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This is one of my favorite images
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