holistic embryology: van der Wal

"Your whole life long it’s a matter of ’taking off coats’. That is the gesture of development. To be born will turn out to be a gesture of ’dying out of…’. The philosopher Mansukh Patel says: 'When we die, we just take off a coat.' Actually we don’t do anything else right through our lives. We shed the body of the baby to step into that of a toddler. Next we put on the body of a child, adolescent, adult and so on. The embryo can teach you a great deal about the real dynamics of growth and development, about dying and being born." [Jaap van der Wal, "Embryo in Motion"]

tenderhearted is tenderized

transversus thoracis
MYO-EMO profile: need and lack fulfillment.

the transversus thoracis armours the heart and important thoracic organs. in contraction it pulls the bony basket of our ribs toward core. emotions easily translate into holding patterns with this muscle, especially when emotional traffic in the body has lots of build but no release.

this is the muscle we need to relate to if we really want to become tenderhearted in the world.

problem with reason is the same problem called god

i find it endlessly fascinating that the times posit such extremes in unreconciled couplets. on the one hand, the fervor of religious fundamentalism which insists on the existence of a dumbed-down dimension, retro precepts, and almighty parochial wardens. on the other, the elitist faith of rational dogmatists who insist that only those models of truth which can be factually constrained by current evidentiary laws are worth the human bother. both points of view must by rights denounce and refute each other, ignoring content and experience which defies both the reductionist maw of thought divorced from spirit and the mandelbrot perpetuity of faith divorced from muscular sense. for human progress to occur, integration of these functions require new models, new explications.

to bring next-level stability to complex systems we must find ways to withdraw unconscious human affect from the theatre of its primitive roleplay needs, and use its conscious-retention-for-the sake-of-integration as the impetus for another flowering in human evolution, both personal and interpersonal. this is the challenge. and should we fail in our task to meet it, we have long records of old results to gird us for the catastrophic losses.