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Introduction
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of ‘new’ therapies or
‘approaches’ to therapy. The reader would therefore be forgiven
that the use of the definite article in the title of this
article – ‘THE New Therapy’ – suggests a grandiose claim to
present yet another new form of therapy, but one superior to
all. Is not such an article, with its implicit claim, not
immediately suspect in itself? Not if we consider that every
time ‘a’ new form of therapy is named a new terminological
adjective is attached to the noun ‘therapy’. Adjectives such as
‘psychodynamic’, ‘cognitive’, ‘body-oriented’ or ‘somatic’ do of
course serve the obvious purpose of distinguishing and
‘branding’ different forms of therapy, as well as helping to
place them in a particular historic tradition or framework of
thought, whether psychoanalysis or cognitive science. And yet
the very multiplicity of adjectives applied to the noun
‘therapy’ may also prevent us from properly considering the
assumptions on which our understanding of therapy as such
is founded. It is a different matter to compare and contrast two
or more forms of therapy and to ask the more fundamental
question - what is ‘therapy’? All understandable suspicions
notwithstanding, let the reader be in no doubt. This article is
not intended to make grandiose claims for ‘a’ new form of
therapy (and to position it in the ‘market’ of existing
therapies by branding it with a new and exotic name). And yet
through the definite article in its title it does indeed
lay claim to outlining the foundations of an entirely new
understanding of ‘therapy’ as such, one with profound
implications not only for the practice of psycho-therapy
but ‘therapy’ in its most general sense, including medical and
psychiatric ‘therapies’.
1. The Philosophy of The New Therapy
All previous forms of therapy.-
without exception - have rested on some or all of the following,
fundamentally false philosophical assumptions:
-
that the human soul or psyche is a consciousness
bounded by the physical body.
-
that consciousness is something localisable in the
individual body or brain.
-
that the human being is a separate and point-like
‘subject’ or centre of consciousness which focuses on
internal or external objects of consciousness.
-
that ‘mind’, ‘soul’ or ‘psyche’ consists primarily of
objective contents of consciousness or of an hypothetical
‘unconscious’.
-
that contents of consciousness such as emotional states,
can be explained or reduced to other contents such as childhood
events or scientific measurements of brain activity.
-
that knowledge or cognition as such is essentially
consciousness of a localised object, external or internal,
physical or psychical on the part of a localised subject or
centre of consciousness.
-
that other human beings and their feelings can be
understood as mental intellectual objects of cognition.
The New Therapy
is founded on a new phenomenological critique of these
basically false assumptions. ‘Phenomenology’ is founded on the
central insight that we are not self-enclosed consciousnesses
that first receive sensory data or ‘input’ from the world around
and then mysteriously convert this data into a conscious
perception of this world. This accepted scientific model of
perception is circular. First it assumes a world of phenomena
independent of our own self-enclosed consciousness – a world
from which our brain receive 'inputs' in the form of sensory
data. Then it ends up seeing this world – the phenomena which
are supposedly the very source of the sensory input received by
our brains – as nothing more than a phantom visual projection or
output of our brains. Phenomenology challenges this ‘scientific’
model of perception – a model that by its circular nature
explains nothing at. The traditional phenomenology of Husserl
recognising that from the very start, consciousness is
consciousness of the world around us - not a blank sheet
on which ‘impression’ or sensory ‘inputs’ from this world are
‘received’. Radical phenomenology goes further, recognising that
all experienced and perceived phenomena emerge from an immediate
field of awareness that embraces our entire inner and outer
world. The most basic scientific ‘fact’ of all - recognised by
phenomenological science but not by the physical sciences - is
not the ‘objective’ existence of a world of physical phenomena
localised in space and time. Empirically – experientially – the
most basic scientific fact is the field of our immediate
subjective awareness of such a world – something that
cannot be reduced to or explained by any localised phenomena
within that field. ‘Phenomena’ as such are not merely
subjective mental perceptions or representation of the
world, nor are they objects independent of the perceiving
subjects. Instead they are ‘subjective objects’ – taking shape
within fields of awareness of subjectivity. They are also the
external manifestation of ‘objective subjects’, each phenomena
being the expression of an independent consciousness or
‘subject’ with its own unique worldly field of awareness or
subjectivity.
In contrast to
all previous forms of therapy, The New Therapy is founded
on the following field-phenomenological understandings:
-
that the human soul or psyche is a field of
consciousness unbounded by the physical body.
-
that all subjectivity or consciousness has a ‘non-local’
or field character.
-
that all personal ‘subjects’ or centres of consciousness
are localised centres of larger trans-personal fields of
awareness.
-
that all contents of consciousness, inner or
outer, physical or psychical are phenomena emerging within
fields of awareness.
-
that no contents of consciousness, internal or external
can therefore be explained by or reduced to other contents of
consciousness.
-
that knowledge is not cognition of localised objects on
the part of a localised subject but is the experience of
‘phenomena’ - subjective objects emerging within
non-local fields of awareness or subjectivity.
-
that other human beings and their feelings can only be
understood subjectively, through feeling them.
2. The New Phenomenology
The New
Phenomenology is a radical field-phenomenology –
based on recognition of the non-local or field character of
consciousness, subjectivity or awareness. Traditional
phenomenology with its roots in the philosophy of Edmund
Husserl, was based on the principle that consciousness is always
consciousness of something – a phenomenal content or
object of consciousness – on the part of a subject of
consciousness. But if ‘consciousness’, ‘subjectivity’ or
‘awareness’ has a field character it is neither the property of
a localised ‘subject’ nor necessarily focussed on a particular
object.
3. Feelings and Feeling
In
traditional phenomenology and the ‘old’ psychotherapies,
feelings are treated as contents of consciousness and as
objects of mental or intellectual cognition. No distinction is
made between feelings and feeling. In The New
Phenomenology and The New Therapy on the other hand,
feeling is understood as an independent mode of
cognition. Feeling cognition is field-cognition, based on
‘field-awareness’ rather than ‘focal awareness’. Feelings
themselves are not simply mental or psychical contents or
objects of consciousness, present within a field of awareness.
They are the expression of overall field-states of
awareness.
4. Focal and Field Awareness
The New
Therapy recognises no such thing as the ‘unconscious’ or
unconscious ‘feelings’. So-called ‘unconscious’ feelings are
feelings we are not feeling. But the reason we do not feel
feelings is because feeling as such is a mode of
consciousness characterised by field-awareness. Feelings
are only ‘unconscious’ because we identify ‘consciousness’ as
such with focal awareness and its mental-emotional
contents, rather than with field awareness and its
sensual qualities. Like all-pervasive moods however, these
field-qualities of awareness can only be felt and sensed in a
bodily way. Unlike localised thoughts, feelings and sensations,
field-qualities of awareness are not focal objects of
awareness, but non-local field-states of awareness. That
does not mean that they have an amorphous, undifferentiated or
unconscious character however. Instead they have highly
differentiated sensual qualities - comparable to the felt colour
and tones, brightness and darkness, lightness and heaviness of
our moods. Like moods however, they are all-pervasive qualities
that can only be felt and sensed with our body as a whole
and not turned into mental objects of consciousness in the
ordinary sense – focal awareness.
5. Field and Unit Identity
The most basic
assumption of the old therapies is that human psychical
awareness is bounded by the physical body. This assumption in
turn, is founded on an unquestioned metaphysical framework bound
by the old Aristotelian logic of identity. This
metaphysical framework permeates all the sciences, based as it
is on the idea that the universe is a step-by-step evolution or
construction of separable elements, units or
‘identities’. Applied to human psychology, the individual is
seen as a structured set of separable biological or psychical
elements, and the group as a larger set of such individual sets
(Diagram 1). This is a dominant scientific ‘mindset’ in the most
literal sense – constituting as it does a set-theoretic
concept of identity as a composite of sets and sub-sets of
separable elements unified only through more or less complex
structures.
Diagram 1. The Set-Theoretic Model of Identity
The basic principle of
the field-theoretic model of identity is that each bounded
unit identity is an internal boundary of its own
external field as well as an external boundary
enclosing its own internal field. What I term The New
Thinking is a fundamental challenge to the set-theoretic
model of identity – this being a centuries-long metaphysical
concept of reality as a construction of self-identical units
separated from one another in physical or psychical space. In
contrast, The New Thinking is a field-theoretic
model of identity - one which understands every element or
identity within a set as the emergent expression of its
surrounding field – which is not an empty space but the field
dimension of identity as such. Crucial to the set-theoretic
understanding of identity is the identification of any
individual unit or identity with its internal
sub-elements. But just as these sub-elements are expressions of
their surrounding field (the inner field identity of the unit),
so is the unit itself an expression of its surrounding field of
emergence (its outer field identity). Identities as such,
-represented by the circles in the diagram, are not separable
identities but field-boundaries of identity - each of
which is just as much defined by its ‘background’ or surrounding
field (German Umfeld ) as by its internal field (Innenfeld).
Diagram 2 represents a field-theoretic model of identity
in which each sub-element of a ‘set’ is seen as an expression of
its surrounding field (grey-shaded) and the set itself as an
internal field-boundary of a yet larger field. Instead of a
model of identity based on unit identities arranged or
structured in nesting sets, we have a model which recognises
unit identity as an expression of field-identity.
Diagram 2. The Field-Theoretic Model of Identity
The field-theoretic
model of identity upon which The New Thinking is founded
makes it impossible to see the human identity as something
externally or even internally bounded. Identity, including human
identity is not externally bounded because even the
external physical boundaries of the human being are but internal
boundaries of its own external physical, psychical and social
field. Identity, including human identity is not internally
bounded either. For since every unit identity emerging
within a common source field is an emergent expression of that
field, its very inwardness also leads back into that
source field. Its inwardness is therefore an unbounded
inwardness - one that links it, through the common source field
- to the inwardness of every other unit within that field.
6. ‘Self’ and ‘Soul’
Only a
field-theoretic model of identity allows us to articulate a
precise distinction between what we call the ‘self’ and what we
call the ‘soul’ or psyche. ‘Soul’ is quite simply the
field-dimension of both awareness and identity. It is
field-awareness and field-identity. Put in
other terms: any ‘soul’ is an unbounded field-self. Any
‘self’ on the other hand is a bounded soul-unit.
‘Selfhood’ however, is bounded unit awareness
and unit identity. The fundamental, threefold flaw of both
psychology and psychotherapy, based as they are on the
set-theoretic model of identity, is to:
1.
ignore the field dimension of both awareness and
identity
2.
identify the ‘self’ or unit identity of the
individual human being only with their ‘insideness’ - their internal field of
awareness and its contents.
3.
see both the identity of the human being and their
awareness or ‘psychicality’ as
something externally bounded by their physical
body.
7. ‘Self’ and ‘Ego’
Field-theoretic psychology understands the ‘ego’ as something
quite distinct from the soul or self, comparable to a locus of
awareness at the apex of a pyramid or cone. The ego is that ‘I’
or ‘eye’ whose cone of vision transforms the circular
field-boundary of awareness into a fixed boundary
of identity dividing Self and Other, and treating everything
within that boundary as ‘me’ (the objectified self) and
everything outside it as ‘not-me’ (the objectified other).
Diagram 3. Ego as
localised subject or ‘I’, turning Self into object or
‘Me’
Diagram 3. shows
the ego as such a localised centre or ‘subject’ of
awareness, objectifying the individual’s own non-local field of
awareness and identity and turning both Self and Other into
objects of focal awareness (‘me’ and ‘not-me’). The black
centre of the circle at the base of the cone represents the
inner counterpart of the ego – the ‘inner self’ or ‘inner ego’.
The (outer) ego functions principally as the outer ‘I’ and outer
‘eye’ of the inner self, using focal awareness to identify and
objectify phenomena in the self’s outer, environmental field.
The inner self, on the other hand is the inner ‘I’ and inner
‘eye’ of the outer ego, looking inwards into the those unbounded
inner dimension of awareness that links it with the
inwardness of every being and every thing in its outer
field.
8. Identity and Relationality
Seen from
a conventional set-theoretic perspective or ‘holistic’, a whole
is the unity of its parts. Seen from a field-theoretic
perspective however, each part or unit identity can also be seen
as the unity of all the wholes or ‘sets’ of which it forms a
part or unit. That is because all unit identities – selves and
sub-selves emerge from the multiple overlapping fields of
larger units. Diagram 4. shows a single unit identity not
simply as a common member of three overlapping set but as a unit
emerging from the overlapping inner fields of those sets.
Diagram 4. Unit Identities as the Expression of Multiple
Identity Fields
Diagram 5. shows
how, from a field-theoretic perspective we do not need to
postulate any processes of ‘introjection’ or ‘internalisation’
to understand how the overlapping field-identity or ‘bi-personal
field’ of two individuals, A and B, automatically gives birth to
twin sub-units or sub-selves. These are the A aspect of B or
A(B) – for example the John-aspect or Johnness of Jill - and the
B-aspect of A or B(A) – for example the Jill-aspect of Jill-ness
of John.
Diagram 5. The Bi-personal or Dyadic Field and its Unit
Expressions
Self Other
After any
interaction with another individual we are left with a residual
field sense of the other person’s presence. If we attend
to this residual sense of the other in their absence, it can
take shape as a new sense of ourselves – allowing the aspect or
sub-self of ourselves most in resonance with another
individual to take shape as a new sub-self or unit identity
within our own field identity. So-called psychological
‘projection’ is simply a failure of field-resonance in
which, instead of ‘owning’ that sub-self as an aspect or unit of
our own field-identity we continue to identify it with
the other – experiencing all aspects of the bi-personal field as
aspects of the other and not of self and other. This
dis-identification from the bi-personal or dyadic field is a
depletion and diminishment of our own field identity, preventing
us from identifying – and identifying with – those
aspects of ourselves in resonance with others.
Diagram 6: ‘Projection’ as dis-identification from the Dyadic
Field
Self
Other
9. The New Psychology
Traditional psychologies and psychotherapies are all
essentially ‘ego-psychologies’ in the most literal sense,
stemming as they do from an essentially ego-centric view
of the human being as a bounded unit identity, reducing
the soul or psyche to the interiority of this unit identity, and
employing only the focal awareness of the therapist –
used to localise and objectifying psychic contents
independently of their field of emergence. Recognising and
relying only on focal awareness and not on field-awareness,
the latter is mistaken for a bounded personal or impersonal
‘unconscious’ and its analysable contents. This ‘unconscious’ is
then seen as a realm into which we can ‘introject’ or
‘internalise’ others – rather than as a realm of
trans-personal consciousness and field-identity
– a field-self overlapping and linking us in resonance
with the self-fields of others. The result of such
misconceptions is effectively whole variety of soul-less
‘psychologies’ and ‘psychotherapies’ – all of which treat the
‘soul’ or ‘psyche’ as a bounded unit of awareness or
identity rather than as the field dimension of both
awareness and identity. Constant attempts are made to reduce the
soul or psyche to some unit or structure of units –
whether biological cells and neurones, libidinal ‘drives’ and
dream ‘contents’ (Freud), unconscious imaginal ‘archetypes’
(Jung), ‘internal objects’ (Klein), or a pattern of social
relations incorporated by ‘the self’. Selfhood as such -
unit identity and its structures - is not seen as
an expression of the soul or psyche – of
field-awareness and its patterns. Instead ‘the soul’ is
reduced to a unit identity or to a social structure or ‘system’
of unit selves. In The New Thinking unit identities are
not seen as mere building blocks, elements or units which form
themselves into group structures or ‘sets’. Instead, every self
or unit identity is the emergent self-manifestation or
selving of a group field. In the old psychotherapies
there is talk of the ‘subject’, ‘ego’, and/or ‘self’ but no
concept of the soul or psyche as such. Even Jung
identified the depths of the psyche with a world of
images belonging to ‘collective unconscious’ rather than with
the collective field of consciousness from which such
images arise. The New Thinking and the The New
Phenomenology combined as The New Psychology - a
genuine science of the soul or psyche which does not
reduce the latter to body or brain, ego or subject, persona or
self - or to part of a ‘systemic’ structure - but understands it
as the field-identity and field-body of the individual.
10. The Physical Body and the Felt
Body
The ego
as an abstract ‘subject’ of awareness finds expression in
language every time we use the word ‘I’ as the subject of a verb
and its objects or complements. For every thought or utterance
of the form ‘I feel X’ or ‘I do Y’ implies an ‘I-identity’ that
has no determinate qualities of its own, and that remain
untouched, unaltered or ‘immune’ from all ‘it’ feels or does,
experiences or perceives. The ego is experienced as a
disembodied mental or intellectual centre of ‘subjectivity’
or ‘selfhood’ – one that bears no relation to our actual
subjective self-experience, for that has to do with our
ever-changing bodily sense of self. For no sooner does
our felt bodily sense of self alter in any way, than we seek to
immunise ourselves from this change by objectifying it through
ego-awareness - transforming our felt and field
awareness of self into a focal object – ‘a feeling’.
Feeling ourselves as ‘tired’ or ‘energetic’ for example, we
transform this altered bodily sense of self into the
private property of an unchanging mental ego or ‘I’ that
‘has’ or ‘possesses’ a feeling of tiredness. The
word ‘I’ represents that mental ‘ego’ or ‘subject’ of awareness
that objectifies all elements of our direct subjective
experiencing of self and other. The function of this mental ego
or ‘I’ is to prevent what we feel or do from in any way
altering our felt bodily sense of self - of who
this ‘I’ is. All considerations of the role of ‘the body’ in
psychopathology and psychotherapy however, have consistently
confused the physical body of the human being with the
subjectively felt body. The physical body is a phenomenon
appearing within an individual’s field of awareness. The felt
body of an individual is the felt bodily shape and tone
taken by their own subjective field of awareness. The felt body
is a field-body unbounded by the physical body – for its
only boundaries are the field-boundaries of an
individual’s awareness.
11. ‘Mind’, ‘Body’ and the ‘Embodied
Mind’
The soul or
psyche is not reducible to the mind, nor is it a product
of the physical body or brain. Instead it is the field-self
and field-body of the individual. Consequently,
The New Therapy recognises that ‘mental’ health is
intimately connected with the body – not the physical
body or brain of the individual but their felt body. All
forms of so-called ‘mental’ illness have to do with deficits in
the individual’s felt bodily sense of self and
felt bodily sense of connectedness to others. The aim of The New
Therapy is to heal or make whole the individual’s felt bodily
sense of self and to deepen their felt bodily sense of
connectedness to others. This means cultivating their capacity
both to feel their own soul and that of others in a
bodily way and to actively embody the way they feel
themselves and others. Yet our beliefs about the body can
seriously limit our direct experience of our own bodyhood and
that of others. What can be termed the ‘embodied mind’ is the
mental boundary we place on the field of our bodily
awareness. If we believe that we are self-enclosed
consciousnesses bounded by our physical bodies, then that is how
we will experience ourselves and others. The mental belief
itself limits the field of our bodily awareness to the
boundaries of our physical body, and prevents us from
enlarging that field to embrace the entire space around us
and every other body within it. If a therapist believes their
consciousness to be bounded by their own physical body, it
cannot expand to embrace, surround and feel the body of
the client. Instead the therapeutic relationship is seen and
felt as a relationship between two self-enclosed consciousnesses
and identities, each with their internal thoughts and
‘feelings’. If the ‘embodied mind’ of the therapist is
structured in this way it makes no essential difference in what
way they see the client – as an unruly unconscious or a ‘case’
of some neurotic or psychotic disorder, as a personified set of
genetic traits or as a ‘whole person’, as a body ‘and’ mind, a
‘bodymind’ or as an ‘embodied mind’. For whatever issues or
‘feelings’ the therapist chooses to ‘focus’ upon their awareness
will remain a purely focal awareness bounded by their own
body, limiting their field awareness of the client’s body, and
in this way preventing them from directly feeling the
client in a bodily way. The therapist’s own bodily field
awareness will not extend sufficiently into the
therapeutic space to sense the most important thing of all – not
any problems that the client ‘presents’ with but the client’s
own embodied presence – or lack of it. In contrast, The New
Therapy is founded on the understanding that all ‘presenting
problems’ give expression to the client’s own bodily sense of
self and relatedness to others, the boundaries they have become
used to place on their own bodily field awareness –
misconceived as their ‘unconscious’. It understands ‘the
embodied mind’ of both therapist and client as the felt bodily
shape and boundary of their own respective fields of awareness.
Diagram 7. shows the model of the therapeutic space and the
relationship as experienced by any therapist whose own ‘embodied
mind’ limits their own field of awareness to the boundaries of
their own physical body, and perceives the consciousness of the
client as something also contained within the boundaries of
their physical body.
Diagram 7
Here the therapeutic
relationship is seen as an interaction between two self-enclosed
identities whose consciousness is contained within and bounded
by their physical bodies - represented as circles. The
therapeutic ‘space’ is experienced only as the (empty) physical
space between and around the physical bodies of both therapist
and client – not as the larger bodily field of their
subjective awareness. In contrast,
Diagram 8
Diagram
8. shows the field-boundary of the therapist’s bodily awareness
extended to embrace and surround the physical body of the
client, thereby enabling the therapist to also feel the unique
shape of the client’s own ‘embodied mind’ – the boundary, more
or less contracted or expanded, rigid or flexible, closed or
open - of the client’s own bodily awareness field. Diagram 9.
offers a schematic representation of the relation between the
physical body of the individual and their felt body, showing
‘the embodied mind’ in three ways:
1.
as a spatial field-boundary of
awareness expanded beyond the spatial boundary of the physical
body
2. as a spatial field-boundary of
awareness contracted or ‘shrunk’ within the spatial boundary of
the
physical body
3.
as any number of bounded fields
or ‘pockets’ of awareness experienced within the spatial
boundaries of the physical body (for example a person’s mental
space experienced as a enclosed ‘head space’, but one separated
and sealed off from a space of emotional awareness in their
chest or of ‘gut feeling’ in their belly and abdomen).
The felt body is constituted by such internal
or external field-boundaries of awareness, all or any of which
can be experienced as psychic envelope or ‘skin’ which is more
or less porous or impermeable, motile or rigid, tight or loose,
shrunk or expanded, full or empty, light or dark.
Diagram 9
12. Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication
Emotional
feelings ‘about’ ourselves or ‘towards’ others can stand in the
way of directly feeling ourselves and others in a bodily
way. How we feel ourselves and others is something
automatically felt by others – it communicates automatically and
‘non-verbally’, whether or not it is also expressed in words and
verbal communication. By simply feeling themselves and
their client in a bodily way, the therapist is already
responding to and communicating with the client. But by fully
embodying the way they feel themselves and the client, a
state of bodily field-resonance with the client is
established in the ‘bi-personal field’. It is this field-
resonance which then amplifies the client’s own capacity to
fully feel themselves and others in a bodily way. It is
difficult for someone who has not been in psychotherapy to
understand what it is all about or learn to practice it. Lacking
a direct felt experience of being in therapy or giving therapy
they can only imagine what it is like, get an indirect sense of
it through the verbal reports of others, or begin to get a feel
of it through training exercises. This same principle applies
also to practicing therapists seeking to understand new forms of
psychotherapy different from those they already practice. It
applies also to new therapies and to The New Therapy. In
the case of The New Therapy however, what both the
trainee or practising therapist (of whatever orientation) is
being asked to imagine and feel is something fundamentally
different from all old and new forms of therapy - whether ‘talk’
or ‘touch’ therapies, verbal or ‘bodywork’ therapies - namely
how psychotherapy could be practiced without either talk
or touch. That is not to say that the methods of The
New Therapy dispense with either talk or touch, verbal
insight or forms of bodywork. But its essential medium is
neither – for it is a mode of wordless feeling cognition and
communication that requires neither talk nor physical
contact to transform the client’s felt bodily sense of self and
connectedness to others.
13. Practical Principles of The New
Therapy
The basic
practical principles of The New Therapy are not just
important in the training of and practice of therapists but are
principles that are also explicitly spelled out to the client -
both to create a clear contract with the client at the
commencement of therapy and to provide the client with a clear
understanding of its aims. These principles can be summarised as
follows:
1.
We can only feel our own self as a whole (our
field-identity or ‘soul’) to the extent to which we are able to
feel our own body as a whole.
2.
We can only understand the self of another as a whole –
their ‘soul’ – by attending to and feeling their body as a whole
with our own.
3.
Feelings are something we ‘have’. Feeling
is something we do – our most basic way of knowing
ourselves and others.
4.
The aim of therapy is not to learn about feelings but to
learn to feel – to fully feel ourselves and feel others with our
bodies.
5.
We feel with our bodies, not with our mind, brain
or intellect.
6.
There is nothing we need do with feelings except
to feel them in a bodily way and find ways to communicate
them in a bodily way.
7.
All feelings, without exception, have good
reasons. Only by feeling our feelings (and not simply
expressing or repressing them) can we come to understand and
communicate why we feel the way we do.
8.
Reacting emotionally, ‘abreacting’ or ‘letting out’
emotional feelings, or acting them out through our verbal or
bodily behaviour, are all defences against feeling those
feelings in a bodily way.
9.
No amount of intellectual insight into one’s own or other
people’s feelings can substitute for feeling those
feelings – for feeling oneself and others with one’s body.
Indeed ‘insight’ into feelings can serve as a defence against
feeling.
10.
Feeling the feelings triggered in us by other people is
not the same thing as feeling their feelings. Reacting
from the feelings triggered in us by other people is not the
same things as responding to their feelings.
11.
Without the capacity to feel one’s own feelings in a bodily way
we cannot feel the feelings of others in a bodily way.
12.
Without the capacity to feel our own feelings in a bodily way we
cannot communicate those feelings with our bodies.
13.
Without the capacity to feel our own feelings in a bodily way we
cannot feel and take in the feelings that others communicate
through their bodies.
14.
The basis of all communication is not self-expression but
receptivity to the other. To communicate fully means to fully
receive and be fully received by another.
15.
We cannot ‘get through’ to another without first of all
receiving them fully. Only through an unconditional receptivity
to others do others become receptive to us.
16.
We cannot change another person’s behaviour by communication
unless we first receive what the other is trying to communicate
through that behaviour.
17.
Feelings give expression to our bodily sense of self. If felt
and followed with our bodies, feelings transform our own bodily
sense of self.
18.
What and how we feel transforms our felt bodily
sense of who we are.
19.
True therapeutic change is not simply a change in what
or how we feel but in who we feel ourselves to be, a
transformation of our bodily sense of self.
20.
Transformations in our bodily sense of self alter our bodily
sense of others and allow us to relate to them in new ways.
14. Principle Practices of The New
Therapy
The
practical principles of The New Therapy are embodied in
its principle practices. These are meditational practices aimed
at cultivating the therapist’s capacity for silent, whole-body
receptivity and resonance in the therapeutic relationship. These
serve not only as methods of therapy training but as practices
which their clients themselves can employ to cultivate their own
whole-body awareness and receptivity to others. It is a basic ethical principle of
The New Therapy that its
practitioners should not treat its practical principles and
principle practices as their private professional property, but
share them with their clients as therapeutic life
principles and practices. The meditational practices take the
form of what I term The New Yoga - not a
traditional yoga of the physical body but a yoga of the field-body and of
field-awareness. Its foundation is
a set of exercises which cultivate awareness of the spatial
dimension of the therapist’s own inwardly felt body and that
of their clients. Whether employed in therapy training,
supervision or practice the purpose of the exercises to give the
individual trainee, therapist or client a direct bodily
experience of their own psychical awareness.
1.
as a singular inner field of spatial awareness
uniting their inner ‘head space’ with the sensed inner space of
their chest and abdomen.
2.
as a singular outer field of spatial awareness
that extends beyond the boundaries of their physical body to
embrace the entire space around them - and every other body in
it.
3.
as a spatial field-boundary of awareness through
which they can literally breathe in and absorb their awareness
of the whole bodily outwardness of another human being – and in
this way begin to feel the inwardly felt body of the other with
and within their own felt body.
It is of
the utmost importance therefore that trainees in The New Therapy
understand from the start that therapeutic listening is about
fully feeling and taking in a client as ‘some-body’ - not just a
talking head – and that this can only be achieved through a
sustained attention to and field awareness of one’s own
body as a whole and that of the client.
15. Language and ‘Psychology’
The modern term
‘psychology’ is understood to imply scientific knowledge of the
psyche. The root meaning of the Greek word psyche
is ‘breath’. Does this mean that modern ‘psychology’ understands
itself as a science of the breath? Far from it. Instead it
identifies the soul or psyche with the human ‘mind’, and
knowledge of the psyche with insight into the functional
workings of this ‘mind’. This concept of ‘psychology’ is the
result of a long historic identification of knowledge with
having a proper ‘idea’ of things – with seeing them
correctly. Indeed the very word ‘idea’ comes from the Greek idein (‘to see’) and like the Latin
videre (uidere)
and the modern term video is related to the Sanskrit word
for knowledge (vidya) – a word which also has the root
meaning of ‘seeing’ (vid). Yet the identification of
knowledge with seeing contrasts with an ancient wisdom, Eastern
and Western, in which knowledge in the form of ‘seeing’ and
intellectual ‘ideas’ was understood not as the starting point
but as the end-result of the cognitive process – a
process that was understood as beginning not with seeing but
with breathing.
16. Seeing and Breathing
In the West,
‘theory’ and theoretical disciplines are still thought of as the
foundation of ‘practice’ – of practical disciplines and applied
knowledge. In the East, on the other hand, those practical
disciplines known collectively as yoga were understood to
be the very foundation of all theoretical ‘ideas’ and
‘insight’. At the heart of yoga was an understanding of
the bodily foundations of all intellectual knowledge. Together
with this went an understanding of the human body as a breathing body and not merely one equipped with sense organs
such as eyes. That which was blindingly obvious to all – the
fact that the human body could survive without seeing but
not without breathing - was taken as a vital clue to the essence
of the human being. Indeed it was taken as a clue to the essence
of reality, truth or ‘being’ as such. The ‘old psychology’,
which existed long before the term ‘psychology’ was coined, was
one in which the word psyche still retained its root
meaning of ‘breath’. The New Therapy restores this older
‘psychology’ by once again understanding the psyche as a
type of ‘breath’ and psychical processes as a type of breathing
– a breathing not simply of air but of awareness as such. Behind
this lies the recognition of the field-spatiality of
awareness - which fills and flows in the spaces around and
within our bodies in the same way that air does.
17. The New Therapy and The New Yoga
Knowledge based
on visual perception is one example of knowledge based on
localised bodily senses. Traditional phenomenology remained
stuck with a concept of a localised centre or subject of
awareness comparable to the focal point of the retina – thus
retaining a model of knowledge based on visual perception and
seeing rather than on feeling and breathing – both of which are
whole-body activities not reducible to the functioning of
specific bodily organs. The New Phenomenology on the
other hand, understands proprioceptive feeling (field
awareness) rather than visual perception (focal
awareness) as our most basic medium of knowledge or cognition.
The New Therapy is not simply psychological ‘in-sight’
therapy based on the traditional visual model of knowledge and
perception but ‘in-spirational’ therapy based on The New Yoga
– for it is based on the capacity to ‘breathe in’ our proprioceptive
feeling awareness of other people. The New Yoga is an integral part of
The New Therapy
because it is the means by which proprioceptive feeling
awareness or ‘field awareness’ is cultivated. The New Yoga
offers a sequenced and graded progression of meditational
practices which begin with the cultivation of field-awareness
and culminate in a capacity for identification with the inwardly
felt body and self of the other. The sequence can be summarised
as follows:
·
exercises which enhance and expand our bodily
sense of the spaces of awareness between and around thoughts and
emotions.
·
exercises which sensitise us to field-states and
field-qualities of awareness.
·
exercises which enlarge the field-spatiality of
one’s inner bodily awareness.
·
exercises which expand the field-spatiality of
one’s outer sensory awareness
·
exercises which restore whole-body awareness
through ‘grounding’ in lower body awareness and ‘centering’ of
awareness and breathing in the abdomen.
·
exercises in altering not only one’s focus
of awareness but its locus – moving it between different
centres of awareness in the spaces of one’s felt body.
·
exercises in feeling one’s entire body surface as
an open and porous field-boundary of awareness through
which one can breathe in and absorb one’s awareness of the body
of the other.
·
exercises in feeling the unique sensual
field-qualities of another person’s awareness within the inner
spaces of one’s own felt body e.g. feeling the sensual
field-qualities of their inner ‘head space’, ‘chest space’
or abdominal space with and within one’s own head, chest and
abdomen.
·
exercises that cultivate ‘embodied presence’ and
enable one to make fully embodied contact with others
through whole-body awareness.
·
exercises that cultivate the ability to actively
embody, emanate and directly communicate or ‘transfer’ different
field-qualities of awareness to another.
·
exercises in altering the field-qualities of one’s
own awareness and thereby transforming one’s own bodily sense of
self.
·
exercises in ‘transformative resonance’ -
transforming another person’s bodily sense of self through
amplificatory resonance with the field-qualities of their
awareness and direct field-transference of new and different
qualities.
18. Starting Points of The New
Therapy
A
fundamental way of distinguishing different forms of
psychotherapy is to consider the types of questions therapists
ask themselves in response to the questions presented by their
clients. In The New Therapy the most important questions
the therapist asks themselves are not questions that demand answers but questions that develop
awareness. These
are questions intimately connected with the central aim of The New Therapy – the aim of sensing, restoring and
transforming the client’s bodily sense of self and connectedness
to others through interaction in the bi-personal field. What
follows is a brief formulation of the types of question
that constitute not only a basic starting point of The New
Therapy but are its enduring foundation.
The
questions are presented below in three distinct ways - firstly
as questions that both therapist and client need to put to themselves , secondly as questions that the therapist may
put directly to a client, and thirdly as questions that
the therapist can ask themselves about a client. By their
very nature however, none of the questions are questions of the
sort that can be answered intellectually or even ‘intuitively’.
Although they are presented as verbal questions they can only be
answered through wordless, feeling awareness. Their value
lies in helping to both cultivate and give tangible form to our
bodily, feeling awareness of self and other – the essence of field awareness as opposed to focal awareness.
1. Types
of questions a therapist can put to themselves and to the
client
How much of
your body are you aware of right now?
Which
regions of your body are you generally most aware of?
Which
regions of your body are you generally unaware of?
Where in
your body do you feel yourself most strongly?
How much
space do you feel you take up in this room?
How much
bigger or smaller do you feel than your physical size?
How much
overall ‘space’ do you feel you have inside yourself?
Where in
your body do you feel the space(s) of your own consciousness?
How many
separate self-contained spaces are you aware of?
How big or small, full or empty do you feel those spaces?
How aware are you of your body surface as a whole?
How open do you feel to sensing the space around you?
How aware are you of the space around you and between us.
How aware are you of the space between and around your thoughts
and emotions?
2. Types of questions a therapist can ask themselves about a
client
How present and ‘there’ do you feel the client is in a
bodily way?
How aware do you feel the client is of their own body as a
whole?
Which regions of their body do you feel the client is most aware
of?
Which regions of their body do you feel the client is unaware
of?
Where do you feel the client’s sense of self is localised or
centred in their body?
How present do you feel the client is in a bodily way?
How aware do you feel the client is of the space around their
body?
How aware do you feel the client is of their sensory
environment?
How far do you feel the client’s awareness extending into that
space?
How big or small does the client feel in relation to their
physical size?
How much space do you sense they feel within themselves?
How aware do you sense the client is of their body surface?
How receptive do you feel the client’s surface boundary of
awareness is?
How aware do you feel the client is of the spaces of awareness
in and from which their own thoughts and emotions arise?
Answering Type 2 questions can be helped with questions
of the following sort:
When working with a client, how difficult or easy is it to
sustain awareness of your body as a whole?
When working with a client, what parts of your body do you feel
most strongly or tend to lose awareness of?
When working with this client, where do you feel your own
awareness drawn or concentrated - in the space in or around your
own body?
When working with a client how do you feel the space between you
and the client in a bodily way – as full or empty, charged or
flat, light or heavy?
When working with a client, how attentive and receptive do you
feel the client is to your own body and bodily communication?
19. ‘Soma-Psychology’ and
‘Soma-Sensitivity’
When the
mentally disturbed or distressed turn to mental health
professionals, they are not just seeking medical diagnosis and
treatment and/or emotional empathy and support. They are looking
for someone capable of fully receiving them as ‘some-body’. By
this I mean someone somatically sensitive enough to resonate
with those felt bodily dimensions of their lived experience that
are so difficult to communicate in words. Not finding
professionals with sufficient soma-sensitivity to
‘resonate’ with an individual’s inwardly sensed body, the client
may feel no choice but to continue to communicate their felt dis-ease
or pathos through their own psychiatric, somatic or
social ‘pathology’. The New Psychology can be understood
as a form of soma-psychology and The New Therapy
as a therapy based on the practice of soma-sensitivity –
whole-body sensing and identification with the client.
20. From “Felt Sense” to the Felt
Body and Felt Self
The New Therapy
offers a relational model of psychopathology and
psychotherapy in line with recent trends in ‘Relational
Psychoanalysis’. The ‘primary relation’ addressed however, is not
the Oedipal relation but the individual’s relation to their own
inwardly felt body and bodily sense of self. Different psychological
symptoms are seen neither as ‘mental’ illnesses, ‘mood disorders’ or
expressions of physical brain dysfunctions or deficits. Instead they
are recognised as distortions in the individual’s relation to their
own felt body and as deficits in their capacity to feel
themselves and others in a bodily way. In contrast to existing
‘cognitive’ therapies, feeling is affirmed as an independent
mode of cognition more fundamental than mental cognition. In
many current forms of mental health treatment the meaning of
a client’s pathology is sought in a hypothetical ‘cause’ or
represented in the concepts, categories and constructs of a specific
cognitive, energetic or psychodynamic model. The New Therapy
switches the whole focus of psychotherapy from the client’s
cognitive or emotional experience of psychological dis-ease to their
immediate somatic and sensual experience of different
mental-emotional states, inter-personal relationships or social
situations. In this way it follows Eugene Gendlin in acknowledging
that meaning or sense is something that can be directly felt in a wordless, bodily way, and that “bodily sensing” or
“felt sense” (Gendlin) provides a deeper foundation for therapy than
any pre-established ‘body’ of theoretical concepts or diagnostic
categories. The New Therapy also complements and deepens
Gendlin’s psychology of “felt sense” by (a) understanding it as a
form of field-sensitivity or awareness in contrast to focal
awareness, and (b) by showing the relation between “felt
sense” on the one hand and the felt body and felt self
of the individual on the other - these being understood as a field-body and
field-self quite distinct from the
physical body and focus personality.
21. The New Therapy and ‘Bodywork’
Therapies
The New Therapy
differentiates itself from other forms of body-oriented
psychotherapy or ‘bodywork therapy’ by clearly distinguishing
the individual’s physical body from their own subjectively felt
or subjectively sensed body, recognising the latter as an
independent ‘inner body’ in its own right. It can therefore be
regarded as a form of ‘inner bodywork’ or ‘inner-body therapy’
in the most literal sense – the use of the therapist’s own
inwardly felt body to sense, resonate with and transform a
client’s own inwardly felt body and self.
In
contrast to most forms of bodywork therapy, the ‘inner body’ is
not seen as an objective ‘energy body’ but as an awareness
body – made up not of ‘subtle’ qualities, patterns and
currents of energy, but of sensual qualities, patterns
and currents of subjective awareness as such. Understood as an
awareness body rather than an ‘energy’ body the ‘inner
body’ is:
1.
our inwardly
felt body.
2. our body of
pre-reflective feeling awareness.
3. our
feeling body – the body with which we feel
ourselves, feel others and feel the world around us.
4.
a phantom body - the body with which we feel phantom
limbs and sensations, bearing within the phantom form of
every-body we have been or been with.
5. our
field body - the felt bodily shape taken by
the larger field or feeld of our feeling awareness.
6. our bodily
field-boundary of awareness and
identity, dividing what we feel as ‘self’ from that which we
feel as ‘not-self’.
7. our
foreknowing body – the body with which which
we ‘know’ what we wish to say or do before saying or doing it.
8. our pre-physical body – the body with which we
pre-enact possible actions and words before physically enacting
them.
9. a
trans-physical body unbounded by flesh -
enabling us to embrace the world in the larger feeld of
our feeling awareness.
10. a phonic body - made up of inner tones of feelings
that are phonically shaped in the same way as vocal tones.
11. a formative body – the body with which we give
physical form to inner feeling tones - embodying them as
cell and organ tone, muscle and voice tone.
12. a morphic body – made up of “morphic fields” (Rupert
Sheldrake). These are not energy fields but field-patterns of
awareness, each of which configures its own perceptual world
or patterned field of awareness.
13.
a shape-shifting or metamorphic body, capable of
shifting shape and tone in resonance with the bodies of others.
14.
a metaphoric body – the body referred to by such
apparently metaphorical phrases as ‘thick-skinned’ or
‘thin-skinned’, ‘warm-hearted’ or ‘cold-blooded’, ‘bright’ or
‘dull’, ‘close’ or ‘distant’ etc.
Such phrases are not merely verbal metaphors of psychical states
and relationships but describe actual characteristics of our
inner psychical body - the psyche-soma (Winnicott) or
‘somatic psyche’.
22.
Language and Bodyhood
The physical body is no mere source of linguistic metaphors – it
is a living biological language of our inwardly
felt body. Similarly, somatic symptoms are living biological
metaphors of inner body states. The inner body is a
‘metaphoric body’ because it is the body with which we ‘bear
across’ (metaphorein) and metaphorically embody these states. For what
body is it with which we feel
‘warmer’ or ‘cooler’, ‘closer’ or more ‘distant’ to someone –
independently of our physical temperature and physical distance
from them? What body are we referring to when we speak of
being ‘touched’ by someone without any physical contact, of
moving ‘closer’ to them or ‘distancing’ ourselves from them, of
feeling ‘uplifted’ or ‘carried away’? Are these phrases merely
emotional metaphors derived from motions in physical space, or
are the emotions themselves expressions of basic motions
of awareness belonging to an inner body of awareness – that
‘soul body’ which Winnicott referred to as the psyche-soma,
and Jung as the ‘subtle body’? What body regions, states or
organs are we referring to when we speak of someone being
‘warm-hearted’ or ‘heartless’, ‘thick-skinned’ or
‘thin-skinned’, ‘stable’ or ‘unstable’, ‘balanced’ or
‘imbalanced’, ‘solid’ or ‘mercurial’, ‘stable’ or ‘volatile’?
Are we simply using organic or bodily ‘metaphors’ to describe
disembodied mental or emotional states? Or are we describing
states of our inwardly felt body or psychical organism
that offer us an entirely new understanding of somatic
symptoms and ‘organic’ disease.
23. The New Psychology as Qualia
Psychology
Subjective
awareness is not a blank screen on which we receive sensory
impressions of the world. Instead awareness has its own innate
sensual qualities or qualia – for example the felt
lightness or darkness, levity or gravity, tone and colour of a
person’s mood, their felt warmth or coolness of soul, their felt
closeness or distance to others, the felt solidity or fluidity,
density or diffuseness, wholeness or fragmentation of their
awareness. Sensory qualities are the sensory expression of these
psychical qualia - those sensual field-qualities
of awareness which shape and pattern, tone and colour our entire
experience of self, other and world. Subjective awareness not
only has its own innate sensual qualities or qualia. It
also has its own innate bodily shape, tone and texture. What we
call the ‘psyche’ therefore, is nothing disembodied,
extrasensory or suprasensuous. It is the pre-reflective,
pre-perceptual and pre-physical embodiment of the human
being - the sensual shape, tone and texture taken their own
larger field of awareness or subjectivity. Subjective awareness
and its innate sensual field-qualities are experienced through
the felt body or ‘field-body’ of the human being. This inwardly
felt body is not the objective, physical body of the human being
as felt from within. It is their subjective or lived body, an
awareness body - made up of sensual field-qualities of awareness
– of qualia.
24. Psychotherapy and Somatic
Medicine
In what relation do
today’s psychotherapists and ‘mental health’ professionals in
general stand to the medical model of illness, and in particular
to the medical treatment of somatic symptoms? The question is a
politically charged one because the professional boundary
between somatic medicine and psychotherapy is one closely
guarded by the medical establishment. At the same time many
mental health professionals still defer to medical authority and
the medical model, at least when it comes to ‘somatic’ or
‘organic’ illness. This is something of a paradox given that:
1.
the majority of patients present to their local physicians with
problems seen as ‘psychosomatic’ by the medical profession
itself.
2.
most physicians completely lack the professional training and
skills to sense and resonate with the psychological dimensions
of somatic disease (e.g. the ‘loss of heart’ that may be
experienced and expressed through physical heart symptoms).
Psychotherapists and counsellors tend not to be sought out by
patients who see their symptoms as purely somatic, and their
‘illness’ as something purely physical. As soma-psychology,
The New Psychology recognises not only a hidden psychological
dimension to somatic symptoms and physical illness but a hidden
somatic dimension to so-called psychological symptoms and
‘mental’ illness. Many people recognise that the division
between psychotherapy and somatic medicine, mental and physical
health, is an artificial one, maintained only by their
institutionalised separation. Until now however, there has
existed no framework of thought that truly transcends the
artificial separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, psyche and soma – not only in theory but in therapeutic practice. The
New Psychology and The New Therapy provide such a framework,
acknowledging as they both do that the ‘soul’ or ‘psyche’ has
its own independent bodily dimension and exists as an
independent inner body in its own right – the somatic psyche
or psyche-soma.
25. The New Therapy as The New
Medicine
It belongs to the very essence of The New Therapy
therefore, that it is not simply a new form of
‘psychotherapy’ but a new understanding of therapy as
such – one that transcends the division between psychotherapy
and somatic medicine, and is no less applicable to the
understanding and treatment of ‘somatic’ symptoms and ‘physical’
health problems than it is to the treatment of so-called
‘psychological’ symptoms and ‘mental’ health problems. In
contrast to so-called ‘psychosomatic’ medicine, The New
Therapy questions the very use of the term ‘psychosomatic’,
implying as it does that psyche and soma are two
separate entities whose exact relationship then needs to be
explored. Instead it is based on the understanding that psyche
has its own intrinsic somatic shape and its own intrinsic
somatic functions – the perceptual patterning, respiration,
digestion and metabolism of the individuals awareness of
themselves, the world and other people. Somatic illness is not
‘psychosomatic’ in the accepted sense – a somatic ‘effect’ or
‘expression’ of some disembodied psychical dis-ease. Instead it
is the embodiment of disturbed functions of our psychical
organism as such – the soma-psyche – the ‘inner body’ through
which we exercise our capacity to breathe in, digest and
metabolise awareness. The New Psychology and
The New Therapy are therefore also the foundation for a
fundamentally new approach to medicine - The New Medicine.
Dis-ease of any form with a subjective sense of ‘not feeling
ourselves’ i.e. not feeling our self as a whole and
therefore not feeling healthy or whole. Hence the basic healing principle of
The New Therapy - the more we
feel our own body as a whole, the more we feel our self
as a whole – our psyche or soul - and the more we will
therefore once again ‘feel ourselves’ in a way that is healthy
and whole.
26. ‘Psyche’ and ‘Soma’
In Greek
culture the word soma originally referred simply to a
lifeless corpse devoid of psyche or ‘life-breath’. Only
later did the word soma come to refer to the living body
of the human being, and the word psyche to its sensed
interiority or ‘soul-space’. Today the very term psychology
has become a contradiction in terms, referring to a
‘science’ in which soul or psyche has no place, or in
which it is identified with the mind or brain. Its connection
with the individual’s inwardly sensed body is completely
ignored. Only in the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott
do we find a recognition that mental health has to do with the
psyche-soma as opposed to the mind-psyche — our
capacity to dwell and feel at home not just in the mind-space of
our heads but in the inner ‘soul space’ of our bodies
27. ‘Psyche’ and ‘Pneuma’
As the
Japanese philosopher Sato Tsuji has pointed out: “It is the
great error of Western philosophers that they always regard the
human body intellectually, from the outside, as though it were
not indissolubly a part of the active self.” Viewed from the
outside, self and body are both seen as something bounded by our
own skins, and separated from others by an empty space filled
only by air. But there is a deep reason why the root meaning of
the Greek word psyche and pneuma meant ‘breath’,
‘air’ and ‘wind’, and why the words ‘spirit’ and ‘respiration’
have a common derivation from the Latin spirare – to
breathe. For in what manner and at what point does the air we
breathe in become a part of ‘us’ and ‘our’ body? And at what
point or in what manner does the air we breathe out cease to be
part of ‘us’ and ‘our’ body? The question cannot be answered
except by suspending our ordinary notion of self and bodyhood.
Our felt body has no physical boundaries but is an awareness
that, like the air we inhale and exhale, also flows between
us and the world. The deep connection between
awareness and breathing was well recognised in the spiritual
traditions of the East, where meditation meant centering both
awareness and breathing in the abdomen rather than the chest. In
our increasingly globalised Western culture, on the other hand,
individuals tend to identify themselves almost entirely with
their head and upper body awareness. Not being grounded
in lower body awareness, individuals lack a sense of abdominal
centeredness and ‘umbilical’ inner connectedness
with others. For both their breathing and awareness are
disconnected from the abdomen, that abode of the soul which in
Japanese culture has always been understood as both the physical
and spiritual centre of gravity of the human being.
28. ‘Soma-sensitivity’ and ‘somatic
resonance’
The
practice of both The New Therapy and The New Medicine
are dependent on the practitioner’s own soma-sensitivity
and their capacity for somatic resonance. This is the
capacity to identify with another person’s mental-emotional
states and ‘feelings’ in a bodily way, as felt states and
motions of their inner bodily self-awareness. Again it must be
emphasised that when we speak of someone feeling ‘fragmented’,
‘frozen’ in panic, ‘hollow’ or ‘empty’ inside, walled in ‘up to
the neck’, ‘volatile’ or about to ‘burst’ etc. these are not
simply emotional metaphors but literal expressions of felt inner
body states. These felt states are also field states of
awareness which can be sensed as states of our own inner bodies
through somatic field resonance. When we see someone
hunched up or laid back, smiling or frowning, laughing or
crying, then their posture or facial and voice expression not
only gives outer form to an inner tone of feeling, it
also induces a similar feeling tone in us through somatic field
resonance. Somatic field resonance is a resonance of outward
form (morphe) and inner feeling tone. In this sense it is
the essence of what biologist Rupert Sheldrake has called
‘morphic resonance’. The whole art of the soma-psychologist lies
in their ability to use their outward sensitivity to the body of
the patient to resonate with their inner body – with the felt
tone and texture, shape and substantiality, lightness and
darkness, density or diffuseness, spaciousness or narrowness of
another person’s own inwardly sensed body. Inner body states may
be conveyed not only by the body language of the other
but by the inner resonances of their verbal language. In
particular, it is of great importance for the soma-psychologist to listen for significant
somatic
metaphors used by a patient, and to then sense and resonate
with the inner body states that may constitute the literal inner
sense of these metaphors.
29. The Resonant Healing Cycle
At the
heart of both The New Therapy and The New Medicine
is an understanding of the therapeutic process as a resonant
healing cycle leading from soma-sensitivity to both
the words and body language of the patient to somatic field
resonance with their inner body. Somatic field resonance in
turn is what facilitates a transformative response on the
part of the practitioner.
The
resonant healing cycle:
1.
Soma-sensitivity (whole-body sensing)
2. Somatic resonance (whole-body identification)
3.
Somatic response (whole-body communication)
The practitioner for example, may find themselves outwardly
sensing a quality of ‘frozen immobility’ in the felt body of the
patient. Only by actively identifying or resonating with
this sense of ‘frozen immobility’ (feeling it in their own
inner body) can the therapist begin to respond to it in a
healing way – for example by gradually transforming their
own inner body state from one of ‘frozen immobility’ to one of
‘warm fluidity’ or ‘fluid warmth’. The key word is ‘gradual’.
For it is only through establishing and staying in
resonance with the patient’s initial state that the practitioner
can (a) use their own inner body to exert a resonant healing
effect on the client’s dis-ease (b) sense the degree to
which their own transformative response is exerting such an
effect. If it is not having sufficient effect then the resonant
healing cycle must be either renewed or intensified at one or
the other stage, for example by renewing somatic resonance
with the patient’s felt dis-ease, or gaining a more accurate
somatic sense of it. Central to this art of healing
resonation is the practitioner’s awareness of the
bi-personal or ‘dyadic’ field between practitioner and patient.
If the practitioner is successful in resonating with the
patient’s felt dis-ease this resonance will be
experienced by both patient and practitioner as a shift in the
felt quality of this field. For the therapist’s resonance
with a particular quality of the client’s felt body and felt dis-ease
will both automatically amplify the patient’s own
awareness of it and intensify the field-resonance between
therapist and client in a way that is tangibly felt by both.
30. Training in The New Therapy
The New
Psychology,
The New Yoga and The New Therapy
do not just
provide an independent foundation for the training of
‘therapists’ in the broadest sense (including practitioners of
The New Medicine). They also offer practising
psychotherapists, mental health professionals and physicians a
new form of Continued Professional Development
based on
the cultivation of soma-sensitivity and their capacity to
engage in healing somatic resonance and response.
31. The History and Roots of The New
Therapy
The New Therapy
has its most recent roots in the ‘dialectic phenomenology’ of
Michael Kosok, in the phenomenological psychology of ‘bodily
sensing’ and ‘felt sense’ articulated by Eugene Gendlin, and in
the phenomenological understanding of bodyhood presented by the
20th century German thinker Martin Heidegger to
physicians and psychiatrists in his ‘Zollikon Seminars’. The
deeper historic roots of The New Therapy lie in ‘tantric’
philosophy – in particular those treatises or tantras
derived from the 10th century adepts of Shaivist tantra. For their metaphysical principles and
meditational practices were both based on a profound experience
of both the sensual and field character of
awareness. The New Yoga, like The New Therapy, The New Medicine and the
The New Psychology constitute a rebirth of this spiritual tradition in the form of
what I call The New Science – a unified field-theory of
the sciences based on The New Phenomenology of
field-awareness and its innate sensual qualities or ‘qualia’.
32. Postscript
The New Thinking
underlying The New Phenomenology and The New Therapy
is one that transcends all previous notions of reality as a
structured set of identity units, recognising the field
character not only of awareness or subjectivity but of identity
as such. At the heart of The New Therapy therefore, is the
understanding that ultimately “There are no boundaries to the
Self” (Seth, just as there are no boundaries to subjectivity as a
field of awareness. For every experience of ourselves within
this field is always and at the same time an experience of
something or someone other-than-self, and vice versa. Just as
‘I’ cannot experience myself tasting an apple without
experiencing the apple as apple (i.e. experiencing
something other-than self), nor can I experience the
apple without it altering my experience of the self or ‘I’ that
is tasting it. ‘Tasting’ as such - like all experiencing - is
an activity or ‘verb’ that alters both its subject and
object. |
