RESILIENCE – Through Relaxing the Emotions in the Body
Listen to the LIVECAST WEBINAR RECORDING of Marion Gilbert and Transcend Egypt’s Islam Abokandil:
RECORDED ON SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2020
12:00 P.M. PDT
2 HOURS
Join Marion Gilbert for a Somatic Enneagram Approach teaching. In this webinar, Marion will share:
- What is resilience?
- What is the relationship between emotions and our bodies?
- Learn the Somatic Approach to relaxing the emotions in the body.
Marion has been practicing physical therapy since 1978 and is the owner of a well established physical therapy practice and movement studio in Grass Valley, CA. Marion certified with the Palmer-Daniels Narrative Enneagram Teacher Training in 2005, is a core faculty member with The Narrative Enneagram (TNE), and is a teacher and international presenter, focused on the Enneagram and Somatic Awareness.
What is Our Capacity?
“Capacity” for staying present to what determines how integration can occur through witnessing the enactment of the third force of creation: The reconciling force.
The receptive force of creation (the first force), and reactive force of creation (the second force), are balanced and intrinsically connected by a third force of creation called the reconciling force.
Overall, we are receiving a multitude of impressions per millisecond, yet, we can only perceive a limited number of them in our conscious awareness. There is a hierarchy in the lenses of perception in the brain structure, determining which impressions are given priority. Fortunately, whoever or whatever created us knew what they were doing.
The first impression prioritized by the brain is the need for survival, the somatic or” felt sense” lens of perception is how the impression regarding our safety and state of well-being arrives in the subcortical aspect of our brain and the automatic reaction via the survival reflexes is generated. What this means is that these processes do not actually require our awareness, they are running in the background subconsciously or unconsciously, so to speak.
For instance, it doesn’t require conscious awareness to breathe, for our heart to beat, or for our bodies to regulate our moment-to-moment survival needs. The nervous system can only conduct a limited “charge” before our defense structure, including our adaptive strategies, comes into action, with the aim being to protect the integrity of our physical reality. Our defense structure walls off the charge and keeps it contained to a limited area within our bodies. This occurs in lieu of it being able to continue to run its course fully when it is perceived as overwhelming and as such, something that may short circuit the nervous system.
Why Do We Resist the Hurt?
The obstacles to healing are the same as the obstacles to prayer or contemplation. The body gives us access to the truth of the present state of our physical reality. The body lets us know what is going on, and it does this through a process called, “awareness,” a process that connects us with the felt-sense in the body, which is like tuning in to a particular sensory language.
Often, this kind of awareness process is not congruent with what we tell ourselves and hide fro ourselves as our true state of well-being. Across our years growing up and over time, we learn how to adapt around ourselves and literally bypass all sorts of uncomfortable feelings that attempt to flow through the body, for the sake of survival and functioning. (more…)
The Body is the Resource…
Everything created and manifested contains a blueprint of the primal source of all things. Deeply imbedded in all material substances is the origin and the energetic presence of the unmanifested, unconditioned reality.
How can it (the unconditioned reality) ever be separate and divided, when it is the very raw essence of all things?
Many spiritual disciplines have body-based practices to bring us back home from being attached to a conditioned reality of two opposites profoundly experienced as separate parts and opposing in nature to something much more subtle and profound, easily overlooked and that which takes us into our undivided nature. We say how can you be both? This makes logical sense to anyone who uses their ordinary mind, their mental processes. You are either good or bad, away or present, here or there, sick or healthy, old or young… From a space-time continuum, this is partially true, and beyond time and space reality this all collapses and becomes one into something different from the unifying as the two opposites. Our body has access to these direct experiences through our subtle centers, which are already fully coded with the experience of an unconditioned self. (more…)
When a Life Experience is Not Metabolized…
Any life experience too overwhelming for the capacity in our nervous system will be responded to by containing the charge and walling this charge off from affecting the nervous system as a whole, as a way of preventing it from short circuiting. This is a highly intelligent response, prioritizing survival needs in relationship to secondary needs. We need to survive first before we can reflect and inquire into our lives.
By the time we are adults, many undercover energy pockets have been created in our physical bodies. Even though these can go for a long time unnoticed. These will eventually come to the surface when the cost to maintain them becomes greater, as the pattern requires more and more energy to sustain themselves. Especially over time, when the pattern continues to get reinforced by subsequent experiences. An accumulative effect that adds to the contained charge resulting in each life experience being only partially processed. (more…)
Understanding the Connections
It is apparent to most of us, upon close observation, that everything is interconnected and dependent on one another. Recent neuroscience and epigenetics shows that there is a way that information is translated somehow when there is a need or attention is placed towards a desired function in the physical structure. We are calling this “gene expression.”
This is a secondary element, in addition to the genetic make-up, for a gene to come to full expression. The body is always looking for correcting and balancing, nurturing and eliminating, activating and passifying for an optimally functioning organism. These processes are subcortical in nature and are part of the brainstem, reptilian brain, and partly limbic organization in the hind and midbrain.The human being is born the most vulnerable and dependent of all creatures for the longest time and in need of proper care and nurturing by its primary caregiver, which is usually the mother. The initial connection between caregiver and child is called attachment bonding and is important for the experience of safety and well-being and brain development, all accomplished through what’s called “secure attachment.” (more…)