Integrated Awareness®
Move Your Mind / Engage Your Brain
Lansing Barrett Gresham & Dale G. Alexander Ph.D. L.M.T.
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To live in the present moment, engage your brain and move your mind into the past. Your brain has the ability to select for satisfaction and enjoyment, allowing you to create more of what you want to include in your life. Your mind does not!
The mind is a sliver of our human consciousness, only a piece of the pie. It is not your brain, your psyche, soul, spirit, or higher self. Most importantly, the mind does not live in the body.
Our collective human dilemma is that mere survival of our species is no longer our singular objective. The mind did and does serve this end in the short term by assisting us to “fit in” as infants and toddlers. A baby not cared for dies. The mind lives in the future in order to create predictive models and rules related to a broad range of stimuli for which a possible meaning of physical threat has been assigned.
Unfortunately the mind does not distinguish between what is symbolic and what is real. A photograph is not a person. Its models exaggerate and distort the intensity of stimuli such that codes of behavior are elevated to such an intensity that non-compliance with them is interpreted as life threatening. Thus, a scolding by a parent for adventurous behavior may echo into one's adult life as an aversion to risk taking in all venues of life.
The mind is organized to avoid by recognition—of both sensations and images/symbols. Its models, translated as “beliefs” about reality, are absolute, black and white. They are based on a past that no longer exists yet which the mind insists is re-occurring. As a result, all of us to some degree struggle with repeating negative patterns of attitude, behavior, and relationships.
The mind's orientation to prediction and avoidance is what displaces it in time and space. This splinters our capacity for present time, adult congruence between intention and behavior. No wonder we so often feel a lack of connection with one another and ourselves!
The mind makes its rule sets both from information it has gathered and in response to what has been required by our caretakers. All rules are designed to inhibit spontaneity and sadly, thus, creativity. When children are told, “children are to be seen and not heard”, they are less likely to sing or, when repeatedly admonished to be physically still, they are less likely to dance.
The mind’s essential nature excludes the other levels of human consciousness of physical, emotional, energetic and spirit. Its models & rules become a self-stimulating and self-perpetuating labyrinth. It is quite happy to shift between compartments of “ideas about” experience yet it functions to remain aloof from direct experience that includes these additional dimensions of consciousness.
The mind’s inherent limitation is that it distorts present time information that would allow one to update its models because it lives in its prediction of what’s going to happen rather than in the unfolding of moment to moment direct experience. Remember, it’s primary function in our childhood was to assist us to conform so we would be included.
The mind, however, can be trained to notice what has just happened. This is how you move your mind to the past. Such an orientation allows it to review its models and become open to updating its rules in present time. The mind can also be trained to seek out the soul’s urging’s.
However, the mind cannot solve its own conundrum of how to resolve, unite, and include all of humanity because by the very nature its predictive models and rules keep it separate from the fullness of human consciousness. How can we unite humanity when we each are individually so splintered ?
This is where assisting your brain to develop experiential preferences based on present time sensory data that can be anchored in gravity becomes a real avenue of healing transformation.
Integrated Awareness engages all the levels of consciousness. It is an expanding set of learning processes that directly engages your nervous system through movement, touch, and higher perceptual states of consciousness. From these experiences, permission to explore & experiment may begin to flower. New sets of reference points can be created that transform your ability to make conscious choices to include more of who you are, resolve personal conflicts, and participate in the creation of a life and a world which you prefer.
Visit www.inawareness.com for more information.
Published in Massage Today
February, 2006, Volume 06, Issue 02
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