I’m savoring an excellent book right now: Aware, Awake, Alive by Elliot Dacher. Dacher’s previous book, Integral Health, outlines and describes one of the main models of Integral Health that has inspired my work on this site. I will do a proper review of Aware, Awake, Alive once I’ve had time to read and process it all. For now I’d just like to share my enthusiasm for the book, and to post a snippet for discussion.
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!