One of the things I especially appreciate about the book is Dacher’s gentle, reassuring voice. His desire to share both his personal wisdom and the wisdom of the ages with us seems to come from a place of genuine care and concern for others, rather than from a sense that his opinions are particularly special or important. In fact, he doesn’t take credit at all for either the integral theoretical framework put forth or for the set of contemplative practices he introduces and describes. Although Dacher is indeed sharing with us a vision of optimal health and human flourishing based in ancient wisdom teachings, he does so in an especially accessible and compelling manner, framing his perspective in terms that make perfect sense in the context of modern healthcare. It’s clear that Dacher strongly believes that a stable sense of profound well-being — regardless of the presence or absence of physical disability or disease — is available to everyone, given the requisite level of commitment. As Dacher states:

As we lay the foundation for a life of human flourishing these are the two well-informed acts of faith we will take — a faith in the vision of human flourishing and a faith in the path that takes us there. [...] The experiment [...] is to test out this vision and roadmap and see for yourself if it will indeed unfold this future for you.

Dacher sums up the integral framework as follows:

The word “integral” means unitary or one. It refers to a far-reaching health and well-being that addresses all of the important aspects of our lives. There are four components of an integral health. They correspond to the four central aspects of our life. The first two are highly personal — our physical and mental well-being. The second two relate to our interaction with others — our interpersonal relationships and our relationship to the larger culture and planetary community. [...] A concern for each of these [interconnected] aspects of life is essential if we are to resist and recover from disease, optimize well-being and reach towards our full human potential.

Dacher’s perspective is distinct from both conventional and CAM (complimentary and alternative) approaches to health in that he focuses on precisely that which has been most ignored in modern healthcare — inner development. From Dacher’s point of view, the process of inner development:

…ultimately relies on a sophisticated series of methodologies whose aim is to understand the nature of the mind, release its habitual and dysfunctional patterns and enable the unfolding of the qualities of human flourishing.

Throughout the book, Dacher introduces us to and coaches us through a series of contemplative practices designed to facilitate a full flowering of inner development, including mindful breathing and loving-kindness meditations, both of which can be practiced as guided meditations using the audio recordings that come with the book (in CD format). Dacher also shows us how to take an inventory of the daily habits and behaviors that either support or undermine the process of inner development. He gives us suggestions on how to apply mindfulness practice to routines in our daily lives. He instructs us on the art of mindful listening, on how to turn afflictive emotions and other experiences of adversity into opportunities for growth, and how to transform our work lives so as to bring optimal health and healing to ourselves and those around us.

Dacher especially shines in his lucid examination of how our habitual tendencies to get entangled with the various aspects of automatic mental activity keep us from realizing the full promise of health and happiness in life. The main practices presented in Aware, Awake, Alive are designed specifically to help us break free of these tendencies that cloud our minds, so that we can at first glimpse and then over time establish stable contact with a depth of clear, peaceful awareness. It is this experience of our deepest, most authentic nature that, according to Dacher and many of the world’s wisdom traditions, forms the basis for a life of wellness and enduring happiness.

Reading this book has inspired me to work through my own integral health program (which includes several of the core practices Dacher describes) with renewed vigor and commitment. Dacher’s vision is powerful and compelling. The path he lays out is promising and time-tested. His voice is humble, trust-worthy, and compassionate. His work is brave, important, and a gift to us all.

The word “integral” means unitary or one. It refers to a far-reaching health and well-being that addresses all of the important aspects of our lives. There are four components of an integral health. They correspond to the four central aspects of our life. The first two are highly personal — our physical and mental well-being. The second two relate to our interaction with others — our interpersonal relationships and our relationship to the larger culture and planetary community. [...] A concern for each of these [interconnected] aspects of life is essential if we are to resist and recover from disease, optimize well-being and reach towards our full human potential.

Dacher points out that conventional medical science does indeed acknowledge the fact — supported by both research and common sense — that multiple factors impact our health. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard folks who embrace some vision of holistic health crow on about how modern medicine is completely ignorant of the well-established connections between physical, psychological and cultural aspects of health and illness. One need only talk to the medical professionals in one’s local area to be disabused of this simplistic notion. Certainly in my experience at least, the vast majority of healthcare professionals are quite aware of the complexities involved in maintaining health and treating illness. The problem, as Dacher describes it, is not the lack of information supporting a multidimensional view of health, but rather “that our singular focus on biology keeps us from implementing this knowledge.”

The main point that Dacher stresses again and again in the book, and the main thing that distinguishes an integral approach to health from both conventional and CAM approaches, is that inner development is both the basis for and the driving force toward the attainment of integral health. Most CAM approaches promote alternative remedies, treatments and therapies, which is fine as far as it diversifies and optimizes the toolkit that healthcare practitioners have at their disposal. However, what characterizes a truly integral approach is:

the turn inward and reliance on our inner capacities, rather than on remedies and therapies. The reliance is on ourselves rather than on practitioners. So [the important distinction is] between a variation on biological medicine, which merely increases our medical tool kit, and an authentic vision of integral health that results from inner development.

This vision of an integral health resulting from a focus on inner development is precisely what is described in detail in both Aware, Alive, Awake and in Dacher’s previous book, Integral Health. I highly recommend both of these books. Perhaps some day soon I’ll actually finish reading Aware, Alive, Awake in its entirety so that I can write a proper review!

I’ve read many, many books about mindfulness and meditation practices, but Dacher has a way of framing and explaining things that I find to be particularly lucid and helpful. Here’s how he explains the process of becoming entangled with mental activity:

As soon as we are enmeshed in mental activity we further elaborate it by superimposing upon it old perspectives and stories stored in memory. In this way we turn simple, unadorned, and brief mental movements into complex mental events which are largely imaginary, and more old than new. What was once a momentary neurological blip appears to assume a life of its own.

I like how Dacher uses the term “mental movement” to talk generally about all aspects of automatic mental activity (thoughts, feelings, mental images, and sensory impressions). This concept fits very nicely with the general theory of Somatics that Thomas Hanna has articulated in the context of his work in neuromuscular re-education (I’ve been long interested in how somatics, psychology, and spirituality can be integrated in a single model of personal transformation). Dacher goes on to explain how enmeshment in mental activity continues to hijack our attention and cloud our minds:

Once we elaborate a mental movement we then add feelings and emotions [...]. That leads to a proliferation of further mental activity which includes fear, anxiety, anger, desire, aversion, and so on. Then, we act out this personalized and imaginary story in the outer world through our speech and actions. A small mental blip, which would naturally come and go, becomes our life, and the life that is actually happening in the moment is lost.

Dacher offers several perspectives and practices that help us to undermine this habit of mental entanglement, and more generally he articulates a vision of optimal health and human flourishing that, while based in ancient wisdom teachings, is also framed in terms that make perfect sense in the context of modern healthcare. For whatever reason, I find Dacher’s vision to be particularly powerful and compelling as I continue to engage with various integral health practices. I’ll dive into all this in much more detail once I finish the book!

The old Zen saying, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the Moon,” is so true! But the finger pointing at the moon may be helpful. If the moon is in the west and we’re looking toward the east, the finger pointing toward the west may get us to turn around, and that certainly increases our chances of seeing the moon. Or we may stare at the finger……

Dr. Tart often uses the term “controlled attention practices” to describe various meditative techniques. If we ever hope to articulate our first-person, phenomenological, inner realities in ways that transcend our cultural and individual idiosyncrasies, we will need to get clear on our terms, and Dr. Tart has done as much as anyone in this regard. Check out the links below for more of Dr. Tart’s perspective on these matters:

That Word “Meditation:” What Does it Mean?
“Mindfulness 101″ with Charles Tart [audio lecture via the Institute of Noetic Sciences]

In the following two-part video, Watts talks about the importance of transforming our attitude toward the natural environment, the art of getting out of one’s own way, and the Taoist concept of wu-wei (literally, non-doing or non-striving). He also discusses the art of the “controlled accident” and how a profound trust in one’s own nature can transform our lives. Enjoy!

It is important not to mistake the distinction between alienation and authenticity as a condemnation of the particular techniques that have supported the success and progress of a scientifically and technologically driven modern world. These techniques are, in-and-of-themselves, of neutral value. It’s the ways in which we integrate various techniques into our lives (the technology) that can either lead us either toward disconnection and diminished awareness or into levels of greater conscious connection and deeper self awareness, and these ways of responding to the challenges of life are shaped very early.

Beginning with the ways parents hold and touch their children, infants are learning how “to be” physically in the world. As they learn to mimic adults’ behavior, children are further educated on how to move and how not to move. Despite the potential for differences in this early upbringing, most young children are energetic, highly mobile, flexible, and authentically expressive beings. As children enter school, however, these tendencies are actively shaped like never before. As most of us have been schooled, children are typically made to sit in rigid desks for long periods of time. They must learn to ignore their natural inclinations as to how to move their bodies physically and express themselves verbally, expressing themselves only when some authority deems it acceptable and only in ways that are deemed acceptable. A child’s experience of fatigue, hunger, and excitement are brought into alignment with the pre-determined structure of the school day. Even during set periods for “free” expression, children are taught the “right way” to do everything, from throwing a ball to drawing a picture. Since kids’ developing sense of self-esteem is so wedded to the positive reinforcement they get for doing things “right,” expressing oneself in idiosyncratic ways is often met with discouragement from authority and ridicule from peers.

While peer groups exert relentless pressure to conform to the status quo, in the classroom bad grades are meted out to those who fail to do things “correctly,” and sometimes even physical punishment awaits those who allow their restlessness and bodily tensions to sneak out into their behavior. This training prepares children for life after school, where the organic rhythms of the body are regulated to fit the needs of the typical work situation. Food is eaten during a set lunch hour, one goes to the bathroom during scheduled breaks, and the range of overall body movement conforms to the prescribed limits of the given work setting. Johnson, in his book Body, summarizes this whole pattern of body-shaping as follows:

From infancy through old age we are taught to conform our bodies to external shapes. We learn to perform physical activities in specifically prescribed ways. We are rewarded for keeping quiet and controlling our bodily impulses. The implied meaning of these recurrent nonverbal messages is consistent with the explicit teachings: our bodies, with their feelings, impulses, and perceptions, are not to be trusted, and must be subjected to external controls to keep them from leading us astray. They must be trained to support the status quo.

The technology of alienation encourages individuals to exist in a state of continual repression, a dissociated state which truncates one’s depth of awareness as well as one’s range of responsiveness. This state of disembodiment manifests not only in a diminished and deadened sense of self, but also necessarily disembodies one’s relationships to others. Since we experience all situations in our lives with, through, and as bodily beings, to be dulled to our own bodily senses and feelings is to be dulled to the feelingful aspects of any relationship or situation we find ourselves in.

The dimension of consciousness that an alienated individual loses touch with is what humanistic psychologist Sidney Jourard called “somatic perception.” Jourard pointed out that people respond to all situations on a bodily-felt level, and that by perceiving subtle changes in the state of one’s bodily being, one can sense when a situation either enhances or diminishes the quality of one’s life. It’s on this embodied level that a little girl can tell which of the smiling adults in a room actually doesn’t like her; that we just “know” something is troubling a loved one, no matter how hard they try to hide it; that we simply get good or bad “vibes” about a particular situation. As a person loses the capacity to discern how situations affect him or her as an embodied being, it becomes all too easy to continue ways of living and relating that are not in one’s best interests. As Jourard put it:

When we repress the experience of our bodies, we not only reduce our experience of being alive, but, in order to protect ourselves from threatening pleasure and pain, we actually create circumstances by which we become stupid, that is, uninformed, in a peculiar, somatic way.

Thus, to the degree one lacks embodiment, one is ignorant of how to live situations in an authentic way.

As Johnson reminds us, authenticity is a word of Greek origin that originally meant “to do something oneself, to have a sense that one’s actions and feelings are one’s own.” When a person has a well-developed capacity for somatic perception, one is better suited to be one’s own authority on how to live in growth enhancing ways. This “sensual authority,” as Johnson calls it, comes directly from one’s sense of embodiment, and is precisely what is stripped away via the technology of alienation. When access to somatic perception is dulled, people progressively lose the necessary depth of awareness to possess a clear sense of how to be and what to do in life. As Johnson describes it:

The technology of alienation accustoms us to sense a void between ‘I’ and my flesh, and between ‘I’ and ‘you’. Because we are led to feel that we are not in immediate contact with the palpable world, we sense that we need experts who understand that world enough to tell us what to do.

Alienated from our embodied experience of self and world, we give doctors authority over our bodies, psychologists authority over our minds, outside mediators authority over our interpersonal disputes, governments authority over our environmental policies and actions, and religious leaders authority over our spirits. The shift from alienation to authenticity requires that individuals develop their impoverished self-sensing capacities and that they learn to check the dictates of outside authorities against this growing base of awareness.

bringing gentle, mindful awareness to a subtle level of bodily experiencing known as the “felt sense.” Felt senses, which lie somewhere between physical sensations and emotional feelings, represent a distinct kind of experience.

A long-time meditator, Rome describes how Focusing can be a complimentary contemplative practice. Whereas meditation cultivates an awareness and acceptance of experience “as it is” in any given moment, Focusing involves directly engaging specific issues and problems in life and discovering uniquely appropriate solutions. Although I myself have practiced both meditation and Focusing, I haven’t thought much about how the two methods relate to one another, and I found Rome’s perspective on this to be fascinating. For those interested in more about Focusing, below are some notes of my own:

Eugene Gendlin developed the Focusing technique at the University of Chicago, where he and his colleagues conducted research in which they found that the single most important factor in psychotherapy affecting positive outcome was the client’s ability to contact and work with his or her bodily-felt sense. It was not enough, argued Gendlin, to have a rational understanding of one’s psychological issues. Many clients with exquisite theoretical and conceptual psychological understandings often continue to remain stuck in the same stultifying patterns. According to this line of research, the key to healing lies in developing one’s awareness of the bodily-felt dimensions of experience.

Gendlin was a colleague of Carl Rogers, one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology. Rogers had long suggested that an attentiveness toward bodily-felt dimensions of experiencing was a key element of successful psychotherapy. What Gendlin did was develop this suggestion into a concrete methodology that has since been successfully taught to many people, both in and outside of a therapy setting. Gendlin’s perspective is founded on the notion that, in all situations and at any given time, there is an ongoing psychophysiological flow of experiencing that can be attended to in such a way as to concretely transform the way we live a particular situation. Not simply sensations of the “body”, this felt-sense is holistic, in that it implicitly contains one’s sense of the “whole thing” of a particular situation, including what one has learned conceptually. As Gendlin puts it (in his book Focusing):

The felt-sense is in the body, yet it has meanings. It has all the meanings one is already living with because one lives in situations with one’s body. A felt-sense is body and mind before they are split apart.

In other words, the felt-sense is of the integrated bodymind. It is experienced as both sensual and meaningful. To get a flavor of the felt-sense, let’s look at the familiar “tip of the tongue” experience. You know the name of that movie starring your favorite actor, but you just can’t access that knowledge at the moment. There’s absolutely no doubt that the knowledge is within you somewhere — it’s right on the tip of your tongue. Although you can’t name the movie, you can sense what the name is in an unclear way. This hazy place that feels meaningful yet not fully known is a felt-sense. It is sensed in the body as a vital, sensual flow of experiencing that contains meanings in an implicit way. When the implicit meaning is revealed, there is an unmistakable shift in the way we relate to the given concern, a shift that is experienced as a feeling or inner bodily movement that releases the sought after knowledge. This can also be described as an “a-ha” experience.

This felt-shift or sense of a-ha is also an experience on the level of the integrated bodymind — not just a sensation in our “bodies” nor merely an idea or concept popping up in our “minds”. Other familiar examples of the shifting felt-sense include having someone else successfully complete a sentence for us while we struggle to find the right word, and the “I know I forgot something but I just can’t figure out what it is” scenario. In each of these situations, meaningful knowledge is arrived at only when there is the right “fit” between a particular concept and one’s bodily-felt experience of the situation. If you are experiencing the felt-sense that you forgot to bring something (which turns out to be your camera) to the airport, then only a conceptual scheme having to do with your camera comes with the release of the felt-shift. Even if, while rifling through your memory, you realize that you also forgot your tooth-brush, you can “just tell” that your sense of concern had to do with something else, since the tooth-brush revelation brought no shift in the felt-sense. These familiar examples of the felt-sense are illustrative, in a very basic way, of the level of inquiry that characterizes Gendlin’s technique of experiential Focusing.

Focusing can be looked at as a process of being with one’s felt experience as it unfolds in relation to an issue, problem, or a situation. Most situations, of course, are not nearly as clear-cut as the above, everyday scenarios. When something is on the tip of our tongues, we already know a lot about the particular type of knowledge we’re looking for — perhaps a movie title or someone’s name. When the concern, issue, or situation is more complex, the associated felt-sense is experienced as much more unclear, fuzzy, and unrecognizable. However, while the felt-sense is always initially experienced as unclear and unknown, it is also always distinct, in that it feels ripe with potential meanings in relation to a particular situation or concern. I can choose to focus on any aspect of my experiencing — my mother, my job, this blog post, my physical health — that is potentially meaningful for me, and each associated felt-sense will feel uniquely unclear initially.

In the context of personal transformation, where one’s intent is to change the way one lives in relation to some aspect of experience, the first step of the focusing process is to bring attention to the bodily-felt experience of a particular concern, identifying the felt-sense as the somewhat hazy, hard to discern global sense that surrounds it. As one stays focused on this unclear sense, one can become more and more clear about what it is they’re feeling, allowing various shades of meaning to emerge by the skillful use of open ended questions. (David Rome summarizes some specific steps to Focusing HERE.)

In Focusing, intellectual analysis of feelings and immediate mental answers to questions are identified and gently turned away in favor of responses which are experienced as emerging from the felt-sense itself. For instance, I can ask myself “is there anything keeping me from being happy and full of life right now?”, and then immediately try to mentally answer the question with things that I rationally already identify as problem areas of my life. I might say to myself, “I hate my boss, I’m not getting enough sex, and I’m fighting a cold”. This question-answer session, however, is not Focusing. This manner of questioning is, in a way, rhetorical — the response consisting of things I already know. Nothing new is discovered, there is no felt-shift to indicate a movement or change on the level of bodymind. In Focusing, one asks a question of themselves and then attends to the unclear yet distinct bodily-felt sense that feels meaningful in relation to that question. One asks and then waits for a response to bubble up from the felt-sense, focusing on it until some aspect of it becomes clear. To my question as to what might be blocking full-living, images having to do with my mother might unexpectedly come up. As I say the words “it may have something to do with Mom”, a unmistakable shift in the felt sense — the sense of a-ha — would indicate that I might benefit from focusing further on whatever issues might be related to my mother. Further open-ended questions, such as “What is it about my Mom that feels unresolved?”, or “Exactly what am I am feeling, right now, in relation to Mom?”, might allow the feeling of stuckness or blockedness to loosen its grip on me and rest at a place of greater resolution.

The bodily felt shift in response to an open ended question is the concrete experience of bodymind connection that is the hallmark of experientially-oriented approaches to psychotherapy. Thoughts and concepts are continually checked against the felt sense in the process of Focusing, giving the focuser access to a wider store of wisdom than the thinking mind alone.

For the next three and a half years I would have the great privilege of observing Larry’s masterful therapy work at least one evening per week. It was like going to graduate school for free, and I consider my time on the Island of Misfit Toys to be one of the most profound learning experiences of my life. When I heard Larry had written a book, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. It’s a collection of short essays and personal stories called Tell Me How You Feel About That: Things I think I know about therapy and life, and it’s an absolute gem. Here’s what he has to say after describing the “28 Word Life Story” assignment:

There are rooms hidden deep inside you. Rooms that you have long since kept locked and dark. It takes an ingrown eye to find this place. And more than a few sheets of paper.

Like the stories that stay out of his trash can, Larry wastes not a word as he reflects on his life and life’s work. He writes in a smooth, conversational style that is totally unencumbered by pretense. Simple, straightforward prose that is also amazingly good writing. Whether or not you’re an aspiring therapist, you will find yourself at turns nodding your head, smiling, tearing up, and laughing out loud. On a personal level, Larry offers us the best of himself in this book. He’s explored many a deep, dark room — in his own life and while guiding others. Using his considerable gifts as a communicator, he’s sharing his most profound discoveries. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t relate to, connect with, and/or feel moved by something in each of these intimate reflections.

For those of us who are in the helping professions or aspire to be, this book is simply a “must-read”, because it gives us what text books and/or graduate school, in and of themselves, could never deliver — that intangible, messy, mysterious, in-context, human element of therapy that makes it (at least) as much an art form as it is an application of learned technique. The dynamics of human relationships are notoriously hard to pin down. Understanding them and working with them to help others (and ourselves) requires an attitude of openminded, open-hearted curiosity — an attitude that Larry embodies in his work and in this book. This is what I appreciate most about Tell Me How You Feel About That: It’s not merely about the value of deep, authentic, from-the-heart self-exploration and expression — it is also a living, breathing example of it.

This is also what I appreciate most about Larry. Check out his book. You’ll love it!

Although fulfilling peak experiences are the fruit of the integrated bodymind, they are not the only variety. Intense experiences of the lived-body can often be of intense fear, hurt, and other “bad stuff.” Human beings, equipped as we are with our fine-tuned conceptual capacities, will understandably draw on those capacities in response to pain or fear that is experienced as threatening or overwhelming in some way. When a fully embodied life gets too frightening, or hurts too much, a person can put some safe distance between themselves and their experience by centering awareness on conceptual processes. In this way, the basic I-it stance of sensual alienation rests partly on a habituated repressive response to pain and fear. It’s interesting to note that, ultimately, bodymind dissociation may be rooted in that most pervasive of fears — the fear of death.

In other words, to fundamentally identify with the body is to confront one’s own mortality. Whereas the biological world of the lived body is one of continual flux and flow, of continual birth, death, decay and renewal, the world of thought gives the illusion of persistence and permanence. The concept “me,” for instance, is persistent and basically stable over time. “Me” today is the same “me” as I was ten years ago, and will presumably be the same “me” ten years from now. Yet the actual me-in-the-flesh is born, continually changes throughout life on all levels, and eventually dies. Thoroughly wrapped up in and identified with the stable self-concept “me,” I can bask in the illusion that I’ve stepped off the train of continual change, the train ride that will eventually reduce “my” body to something along the lines of fertilizer or worm-food. Thus, it’s the sheer gravity of imminent death that may, at least partly, underly people’s tendency to dissociate from the world of the lived body.

Psychologically, a threat to any value that an individual holds essential to his or her existence as a self — be it a threat to physical life, the love of a cherished person, economic status, athletic prowess — can trigger a repressive response. If one identifies with being an active caretaker, for instance, then having kids “leave the nest” can feel overwhelmingly threatening to one’s sense of self. Repression in this scenario might range from an out-right denial that one’s kids are growing up, to an unyielding stance of treating one’s adult children as if they were still little kids. The main point is that human beings, when we feel that our fundamental sense of self is threatened in some way, can turn our attention away from whatever aspects of our immediate situation elicit fear or anxiety. Although the initial response of repression can often be a creative use of one’s capacities to get through the rough times of life, the habitual tendency toward dissociation and self-alienation leaves our bodymind in a continual state of contraction across situations, creating a condition of perpetual distress. We have noted how this distress is rooted in the individual’s own repressive capacities; now we can move to a discussion of how the tendency to be habitually dissociated is reinforced by the processes of socialization.

Although on an individual level, a person may tend to distance oneself from sensual levels of experience in response to a directly perceived threat of some kind, one typically moves toward a habituated stance of sensual alienation in response to a cultural situation that continually encourages and demands dissociation. From the time of Plato right up through the Cartesian foundations of modern science, the notion that the human being is fundamentally divided into mind and body, spirit and flesh, has been so basic to the Western worldview that, like water to a fish, it is largely taken for granted. Of course, few intelligent and sensitive people are likely to profess explicit views and philosophies that support a strict separation of mental and bodily-felt realms of experience. In fact, many are perhaps inclined to claim that their lives are unaffected by such “metaphysical” concerns — “I feel like I’m plenty embodied, thank you very much.” Nonetheless, the doctrine of mind-body dualism shapes people’s experience because it is inexorably tied to our social institutions, which were indeed founded on views of reality that did, explicitly or implicitly, embrace the separation of objective thinking from subjective feeling. Cultural institutions are usually slow to change, so regardless of the current shift in outlook, most Westerners continue to be born into and bred on a world of sharp dualisms. These dualisms can insidiously convince us of the unreliability of our own perceptions, encouraging a dependency on the judgments of publicly designated “experts.” The result is a belief system that encourages conformity and is designed to maintain the status quo. These doctrines are anchored into people’s living bodies via a myriad of implicit teachings — a nonverbal system of indoctrination that trains people to instinctively look outside their directly felt experience for direction. A teacher of mine, Don Hanlon Johnson, calls this entire project — i.e. the many ways in which we learn to integrate these beliefs and techniques of dissociation into our lives — the “technology of alienation.”

In the next installment I’ll explore this “technology of alienation” in more detail, and then point to ways that we can move away from this alienation toward levels of greater conscious connection and deeper self awareness.

That human beings become increasing able to think as they mature into adulthood obviously endows the developing person with greater potential and possibility in life. Contrary to the popularized personal growth motto of “lose your mind and come back to your senses,” any holistic inquiry into personal health and healing realizes the value of cognitive development. But there is a difference between adding a layer of depth in human awareness (moving from a vibrant, feeling-centered being to a being who also has a well developed capacity to think — a “bodymind” if you will), and losing touch with basic levels of awareness (becoming a thinking-centered being who has lost much of their capacity to express themselves from a sensually-grounded awareness). The latter is a pathological state of affairs that, unfortunately, is built in to the very fabric of modern society, shaping the lives of individuals in ways that distort and deny the fullness of experience.

Phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke calls the tendency to distance ourselves from our own bodily lives the “I-it structure of experience,” which often manifests in our culture as the unshakable sense that our perceiving selves are situated somewhere “in our heads.” From this I-it perspective, my legs are perceived as “down there” as opposed to me being “up here.” When I feel pain in my back or head I say that “it” hurts. My sense is that I have experiences or that experiences happen to me. An emotion, for instance, might be perceived as if it were some “thing” that was temporarily affecting me in some way.

This mode of bodily experiencing, undoubtedly the norm for most of us most of the time, has to do with our sense of identity or who we take ourselves to be. While bodily impulses and feelings may be perceived, they are experienced as outside of one’s essential identity. Philosopher Ken Wilber (in his book No Boundary) has described this way of experiencing as one in which an artificial boundary is perceived in regard to one’s total organism, such that the entire bodily-felt realm is projected outward as not-self. Thus, a typical Westerner is likely to claim that they are their mind while they simply have a body. In the mature, well-adjusted, normal adult, this bodymind fragmentation doesn’t mean that one would fail to notice being on fire. It does mean, however, that one operates from a “locus of identity” that is situated on the ego side of an ego-flesh perceptual boundary. An individual centered on the mind or egoic side of this boundary may be aware of bodily experience, but only as an object of awareness. As psychologist R.D. Laing (in his book The Divided Self) describes this “unembodied” self: “The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being.” In this subtle yet telling way, mind and body are dissociated in awareness, and perception of self and world is thereby distorted to fit that dissociation.

It is fairly clear that this level of bodymind dissociation is considered normal and healthy in our culture. Many of us certainly live as if we were essentially minds at the helm of our bodies—keeping them healthy and satisfied for as long as we find ourselves in them. When we experience back pain, the typical response is to go to a specialist to get it fixed or adjusted, just as we do our cars. Anxiety, especially when not consciously linked to obvious circumstances, is often treated as a “thing,” a symptom to be vanquished by medication or positive thinking.

The difference between the dissociated and embodied modes of experience may sound trivial in the abstract, but we’ve all experienced the contrast keenly in our daily lives. It is the difference between merely recognizing you are sad, and feeling that sadness in the full release of crying. It is the difference between merely believing you love someone, and actually being in love with that person, feeling the intensity of connection in the moment. Anyone who’s ever “lost themselves” in a sunset, or in a musical jam-session, or in the tender embrace of a loved one, can recognize this shift toward full-bodied perception. Actually, one’s “self” is not at all lost in this manner of experiencing. What’s lost is only one’s tendency to keep their attention confined to the thought-centered processes of the total psychophysical organism.

In contemporary society, our capacity to deeply enter into the sensual flow of experience is typically utilized less and less as we adapt to an increasingly mind-centered lifestyle, and it becomes atrophied and left poorly developed. This relative disembodiment places unnecessary limits on people’s personal health and growth. Thus, a person may recognize that they’re sad, anxious, or depressed, perceiving these feeling states well enough to talk about them in quite sophisticated ways, yet nonetheless remain stuck in the same familiar patterns. Consciously unable (and unconsciously unwilling) to engage personal issues in their sensual fullness, we necessarily struggle to get through and beyond the inner conflicts and issues that hold us back in life.

The I-it mode of experiencing is certainly not, in-and-of-itself, a bad thing. Problems can and do arise, however, when an I-it mode of perceiving and responding becomes so habituated that, without realizing it, human beings gradually lose their capacity to experience life in any other way. Instead of a mode of perceiving and responding consciously utilized in an appropriate situation, I-it objectivity becomes the unconscious way one approaches nearly all situations. As we shall see, the dis-identification with our sensual existence that characterizes the I-it mode of being, when operating in a habitual and unconscious fashion, can keep people stuck in unhealthy and unfulfilling ruts, distorting people’s experience in ways that interfere with the process of personal transformation. When you approach the world with only a hammer, so to speak, everything starts to look like a nail. And if this illusion becomes too convincing, things start to get all bent out of shape.