by Renee Lindstrom, founder of the Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning
Identifying balance in the two streams of consciousness & there are available doable living patterns. It is a choice.
Ā In the above post, Renee, founder of Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning, explains the origins of the seed intention at the core of the lifestyle learning programs. Since 1990, she has actively pursued clarity on the duality she was witnessing in people’s behaviour with themselves and others, and the influences of it in the environment and community. This behaviour has crossed all hierarchies and social conditioning. It expressed itself equally through opposing forces, for example, advocacy for environmental causes. The force of aggression was equal in the entitlement displayed on both sides of the table.
A choice to respond to life through the somatic sensory awareness while balancing thoughtful and mindful attention
In the personal post linked above, she shares a personal journey resulting from a year of transitioning through losses that triggered an activation in her stream of consciousness focus. Prior to that year of losses, there had been a heartbreak event called broken-heartedness in the Buddhist Teachings of the Shambhala Center. There is a heart opening in this state of being that is tender and soft. Combined with the shift into heightened levels of somatic sensory awareness and perception, there was an experience of expanded consciousness beyond the limitations of a socially conditioned and educated left-brain experience. She eventually identified this experience as the state of mindfulness one finds in a committed sitting meditation. The difference is that it was an active living experience, and not an organized practice of achievement. It was an obvious experience that could be defined as different than those around her. The shift into this somatic led state felt like spontaneous combustion was a four-year transitional period of little combustions leading up to the major eruption. The fifth year was dedicated to stepping back to fully immerse in the potential for understanding and finding answers. The answers didn’t come in a year, and it took years of commitment to tap into and explore patterns that could cultivate the awareness that was being sought out. This even meant entering educational programs where the mentors described themselves as having achieved what she was longing to learn, only to somatically discover they had not yet achieved it. The choice was always based upon the model of doable patterns that was being taught and integrated from someone else’s innovative teaching origins. The balance between the left brain and right brain had not been achieved yet, and they themselves didn’t know it. Why? They hadn’t experienced it yet. You can only know something when you have experienced it. This meant they were never offering their own system. It was only borrowed patterns where they assumed authority over with a sense of ownership. Even with many of these programs focused on somatic awareness and mindfulness, they did not recognize anything outside their closed perspectives. The only way she could know this is that for two years, she was in this creative connected state of being without any loss of her developed left-brain experience. The difference was that the left brain did not dominate in this experience and instead, collaborated.
They say all things happen for a reason, and now in hindsight, it may be fortunate that she experienced a mother’s emotional and mental absence, or abandonment, as a child. The basic physical needs were met, yet it lacked loving kindness. For her, it resulted in a continued state of early somatic learning that wasn’t corrupted by a shift in focus that didn’t encourage the same somatic awareness through the five senses. By corrupted, Renee is suggesting this means attention shifted to critical thinking and institutionalized learning.
Insight & recognition of the value in somatic sensory led mindfulness awareness for the aging process
Those early challenges now provide insight and recognition of their value. The clarity is a benefit for understanding the differences in socially conditioned behaviours. As a somatic empath experiencing the maturing students and their aged logical and analytical processors now, Renee finds they have difficult transitions into retirement and old age. They have long lost their connection to early somatic senses and continue trying to navigate through their focus of attention placed on outside strategies to fix their physical, mental and emotional functional losses. In their disconnection from engaging with their felt senses, she recognizes the loss in their abilities, mentally, emotionally and physically, for supporting themselves. They lack trust in their mental and physical abilities to support themselves. Without a connection to their five senses, they do not trust themselves and are fearful of their own bodies. As a practitioner who engages them in learning to connect through their five senses, Renee observes a shift in their levels of confidence and fear where their trust in themselves increases.
Learning gap in education is creating inner combat between critical thinking consciousness & felt sense consciousness
When a child enters into an adult-generated learning model, it becomes the dominant educational conditioning pattern, and the loss of connection to the five senses begins. The aging process lacks the conscious awareness of the five senses. At some point in early learning, the child is redirected from their inherent spontaneous early learning patterns using the five senses and into a focused structure of organized learning. Renee stresses that this is a significant challenge in the aging process. It also shows up as a challenge in processing emotions and throughout childhood development. If a lifetime is lived with no self-directed learning choices in behaviour, reactions will be childlike with no logic. When acting out it will be through the trigger of the somatic senses without control of it. The gap in learning from the adult-designed educational patterns is eliminating the maturation that comes from processing through the five senses and understanding how to process them. Instead of processing them through the stream of consciousness that is activated, those children are being spoken at from another stream of consciousness. effectively forcing the felt senses to be stymied and judged from a perspective of right and wrong thinking. Imagine for a moment having one stream of consciousness in conflict with the other within one’s operating system. Our education is setting individuals up to do battle within themselves, critical thinking versus somatic felt senses. Incredible!
Anger tantrums at 55, 65, 75, 85, 92……
Imagine being sixty-five and still reacting from the age of five somatically while in reaction. Imagine feeling so out of control at 65 and not being able to differentiate feeling reactions. This is serious at sixty-five, as one is considerably stronger physically than at five. If not outer aggression, consider the inner fear, panic and anger. By sixty five the smallest event will trigger survival. Remember, the logical left brain doesn’t feel emotions, and it is not spontaneous.
Perceiving through the five senses and using the left brain with more efficiency for cultivating mindfulness & awareness in the present moment
From a living experience and a focus as a somatic functional integration practitioner, Renee considers how a baby is born with the ability to learn somatically through the five senses and no verbal input. A baby has all the tools they need to begin shifting their weight to physically roll over, get up and function through walking, thinking and talking. There is a name in Buddhist Meditation that is called “Beginners mind.” This name is a pattern of someone starting a mindfulness meditation. This meditation is for engaging somatically in the environment while focusing the left brain abilities to calm down and become quiet enough to follow the somatic sensing. This pattern is not maintained by Western culture, and the pattern is reversed. The mind controls the somatic experience
Summary
Renee has recognized two streams of consciousness. She once differentiated it as left-brain and right-brain dominance. Expanding her programs to include the somatic five senses has increased her willingness to begin to articulate the two streams of confidence she observes. This ability to engage from the origins of the five senses first, as in early childhood, while harnessing cognitive function to follow the sensory input, versus leading from socially conditioned learned patterns, has been a game-changer in student abilities. This suggests increased mindfulness and empathic states of being are valuable qualities for supporting students through physical, mental and emotional constraints that are limiting. These limiting experiences often translate into pain, anger, sadness and an inability to support themselves. The student will have to choose which side of the fence they are going to lead with. There are three choices, believe it or not.
- Perceive through socially conditioned critical thinking.
- Perceive through the five senses, sight, sound, taste, smell and touch, in the filter of power and control of critical thinking.
- Perceive through the five senses, sight, sound, taste, smell and touch and harness the thinking function beyond trained critical thinking, for balance and collaboration that creates living mindfulness.
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