Monday, April 22, 2013

shifting focus


devotion to reports of the many atrocities and injustices at work in the world furthers the illusion that this knowledge is somehow akin to action and part of diligent citizenship. it takes us away from active participation in our less dramatic personal and local lives, while the outrage it fosters comes to influence everything from our habits in traffic to the general lens we apply to our experiences and thoughts. in short, obsession with the news and accounts of so-considered 'enemy' action takes us out of the grit our of reality and, worst, it obstructs the butterfly effect.

perhaps to constructively influence what's happening in the world, we could shift focus to the good and the true that we can accomplish with our own bodies, developing impulse control and exploring the mystery of our own inner space, working to fully embody our day to day living and patters of consumption, our immediate relationships and conduct in our local community. by changing the resonance within us and moving from spectating to acting, we create a ripple effect that not only touches our proximal perimeters, it creates a chain reaction that will touch every country, every person, every life form on earth. 

a critique of objectification-culture


i've always found the notion that women are the natural carriers of physical beauty or eroticism in the world preposterous. men are no less beautiful or erotic in their many shapes and guises. its a question of how one looks at people. 

women are objectified to maintain the power imbalance of a sexist world that prefers to reduce them to sources of visual and sexual stimulation, rather than human beings to be experienced. this furthers the edict that those of lesser value in society should be seen and not heard. quite unfortunately, the vast majority of women have adapted rather than resisted this persistent distortion, doing everything possible to turn their assignment as exclusive carriers of two-dimensional sex appeal into a virtue, a power and a source of self-esteem. 

in fact, the more sexually evocative and attractive a woman feels, gauged exclusively according to feedback from her environment and her adherence to popular trends, the more she feels buttressed against the inevitable core inadequacies that come when one lives skin deep, the more she is blinded to her own avoidance of deeper self-encounter, and therefore the more controllable she becomes. 

as more and more women prop up their self-concept with acquiescence to a climate of air-brushed objectification-chique, submitting to the politics of male voyeurism, the more such distortions are furthered in the culture of men who profit from this unexamined dynamic of carried-over but now laundered and subtextualized patriarchy.

the possibility of true equality, authentic relationship, and cooperative development rests on the ability of our culture to see objectification not as some playful and harmless trifle or a celebration of feminine charms, but as an insidious devolution which conditions us to ascribe roles to both men and women that no longer serve society or the individual. it has always been possible to create images and art that evoke the beauty and erotic vitalism of both men and women in ways that doesn't demean or trivialize the people being depicted, it is the culture and the culture alone that has demonstrated a disinterest and inappetance for it. 

until women master this possibility for radical change and create space for its development and continued emergence, until we reclaim the integrity of our whole bodies through a reunification of our sexual self-image with our deeper source-grounds, we will continue to lop towards the future, blind to our participation with and furtherance of these artificial roles which don't make us as happy or turned on or satisfied as we like to imagine they do.

perhaps even more important, we won't be able to model a way forward for men, for they too have been emotionally and psychologically crippled by this climate that still too few dare question, which, for purposes of power and profit, associates sexual desire with the need to reduce a woman to an 'it' that can be consumed and discarded at will and as it becomes her lot in life, rather than respected, known and experienced as something completely different but equal.

butterfly effect


devotion to reports of the many atrocities and injustices at work in the world furthers the illusion that this knowledge is somehow akin to action and part of diligent citizenship. it takes us away from active participation in our less dramatic personal and local lives, while the outrage it fosters comes to influence everything from our habits in traffic to the general lens we apply to our experiences and thoughts. in short, obsession with the news and accounts of enemy action takes us out of the grit our of reality and, worst, it obstructs the butterfly effect.

to constructively influence what's happening in the world, focus on the good and the true that we can accomplish with our own bodies, developing impulse control and exploring our own inner space, working to fully embody our day to day living and patters of consumption, our immediate relationships and our conduct in our local community. by changing the resonance within us and moving from spectating to acting, we create a ripple effect that not only touches our proximal perimeters, it creates a chain reaction that will touch every country, every person on earth. 

Saturday, April 20, 2013

on the importance of touch


(first published in The Glowing Hive Spring 2013)

Human beings are unique among animals for our long period of utter dependency after birth. No other animal is as vulnerable and reliant on parental care as the human infant. Given our relatively narrow pelvis, our babies need be born before the brain case takes its full size. A longer inter-uterine period would otherwise be ideal, but an older prenatal baby would never be able to make it's way out the womb portal. For this reason we must birth our young after nine months and give them our complete care and attention until several years later when they become ambulatory and aware enough to navigate their environment and make tentative choices.

Of course much has been written about this delicate period in human development and of the many conditions and features of this time is the sheer survival necessity of touch and bodily, particularly facial, interactions. Baby thrives when caregivers offer a tangible physical presence, when baby can feel that mother or father are an extension of their own fleshy business. The security of this connection allows the baby to develop somatic-mind, to inhabit the whole body of self, and to apply the true unfettered potential of how that body can interact with the space and circumstances it finds itself in. Spatial learning comes more easily, as does command and development of head and spine, rolling, crawling, walking, falling down and getting up, and so on.

On the emotional level, baby learns to express itself through first encountering the palette of behaviours and moods brought to bear on the environment. What baby experiences also becomes hardwired as presets, and like holes in a sieve, shape and limit how emotional contents will come to be expressed.

Ruminating on such factors attending our earliest experiences, the ones which give shape to our on-going development and unfolding, but which also reflect the areas of learning our individuality is seeking, I began to consider some of the most important features of intimate relationships. 

We very rarely think to examine, for example, the quality of our touch. The patterns of daily living obfuscate subtle distinguishing in a familiar topography of hugs, kisses, and hand-holding, and while these tend to become rote after a time, there still remains much that we could bring awareness to as portals for going deeper into intimacy and authenticity.

The hands and arms, embryologically, develop from the same cell bud as the heart, and in a very real sense they remain connected to this immense power point in the body. Not only do we use our arms to bring closer what is dear to us, we also find that orchestra conductors, who use their arms in large, sweeping, heartfelt gestures to lead an orchestra, are the longest living professionals as reported by American cardiologist, Stephen Sinatra, MD. Expressing ourselves from the heart center out through the arms and hands, in what they hold and touch and how, remains very programmatic, either serving to assist the free-flow of feeling from the heart out into life, or the unconscious obstruction of authentic connectivity to a world we don't really wish to grab hold of. 

The hands also carry in them the end point of a vast neural network that connects its sensate, tactile surface to the deepest reaches of inner space, to the organs vital for life and emblematic of the different emotional seats in the body, from the liver and anger, to the lungs and grief, to the kidneys and fear, the colon and loss and release, the small intestine with growth and learning, and so on. It is perhaps why we feel such a strong containment and closeness to the one we hold hands with and how this has so naturally become a human practice which gives much pleasure and security.

Quality of touch, then, becomes a matter of paramount importance. A playful slap or a thoughtless grab goes right into the tissues, and even if our rational minds put the kinetic event in context, the messages can accumulate, especially where there is an existing history. In this way we can both draw out of others and ourselves patterns of touch that have been imprinted from earliest life. Bringing more attention to the ways in which we put hands on each other then becomes an opportunity to unlearn old habits while exploring new, more effective ways to touch and be touched. The slightest interaction becomes a rich occasion to not slip into somatic unconsciousness, to take advantage of this sensual body that co-creates our inner conversations and outer points of view, bringing new dimension to all relationships.

on skepticism

skepticism is not only completely at odds with the spirit of science, its become a petri dish for the incubation of jingoism and reckless a priori assumptions about what can be known or worth knowing. it shucks and trades not with open-minded investigation, or confident reliance on the sufficiency of the scientific method, but with doubt (which is itself an assertion, not a question) and ad hominem attacks on either the query or the querent, both designed to poison waters and delimit the scope of true inquiry.