Session #8, Thursday February 23, 2012

This was my week-long wrap up session. My big question was, what are my blind spots? Those areas in my perception of self/others that I am missing. My therapist said I really only had one, and that it was big, and that was my lack of using my emotional core and being in touch with it. In other words I am dissociating too much. The big thing I have to work on is emotional awareness in the body….NOT the head.

I then asked him if there were meditation techniques to help cultivate emotional awareness, and he said there weren’t any really and the closest was probably Vipassana. Although he did warn, extensive prolonged hours of meditation tends to lead to dissociation in most people which really is the opposite of getting in touch with your inner, higher self. Watching your mind (taught in most meditations) is like watching the secondary effects of something. What you want to be watching, increasing awareness of, is your emotional core for that is the primary source of your unique individuality, creativity and essence. It is precisely that which most people in society are sorely disconnected from, and mind meditation while it may have some minor benefits….if it leads to extensive dissociation leads to an almost psychopathy. My therapist had been a therapist for people who had gone through 20 – 40 day meditations and said that these people can turn out really quite disjointed and disconnected from their own emotions, this is regression. I asked my therapist if he were to wager a guess, how many people on the planet were actively trying to increase awareness (emotional) hes aid maybe 1 in a 1000 probably a lot less.

My therapist said meditations 3x a day 10-minutes at a time would be the maximum he would suggest. This is line with meditation guru Herbert Benson’s suggestion as well. The best time to practice internal emotional awareness is when communicating with other people. Cultivating this works best when with others NOT if you put yourself in isolation. It is other people that evoke emotions in us the most. It is through the reflection of others that we learn the most about ourselves. My therapist maintained that we have a highly individualized life experience, we really don’t know what it is like to be another. It is when we use our emotional core to intuitively attempt to understand how other people use their emotional cores different than us, and we are aware of this process, that this is where we as humans stand to grow the most! In his opinion this is pretty much your life’s purpose and I would have to agree with him.

This is why diversity and novelty are probably the most important aspects of life. This is the reason why being at Burning Man felt like it was literally rewiring my brain. My best friend & my gf had the same experience. My therapist went on to tell me the best possible way to increase intelligence was to do as MANY different things as possible. Intelligence in the pre-frontal cortex expands latterly. He said there was a window of age 20-30 where this worked best. He recommended trying everything at least once, especially those things you think you wouldn’t like. Snowboarding, Tennis, Ping-Pong, cooking, Pottery, etc. By doing things so drastically different one from the next you increase the greater use of unique neuron pathways in the brain. This creates foundations for bringing in a greater diversity of creativity to the thing you eventually do decide to solely focus on. I am going to try and make a list of things I haven’t done/tried and make an attempt to try them all at least once. (hmmm this is tough, only things i can think of is skydiving & paragliding…)

Novelty is the key to life. This is exactly the conclusion Terrance McKenna came to as well. My therapist said that I should also pay particular attention to those peoples feelings, who I thought were dumb, stupid, uninteresting, awkward, strange, disgusting, boring, etc. I tend to be judgy of such people, and this is the wrong approach. It is of utmost IMPORTANCE to appreciate differences. Every person has something unique to offer you. He said to use other people to learn about yourself, and to expand your emotional awareness.

To close off I asked my therapist with all his knowledge and experience what his greatest source of confusion was. And he said it comes to him in the form of people that sit where I was sitting. He said it is the most screwed up people the ones who look hopeless, that when they learn about their emotions and find inner emotional peace, it are those who can become immensely powerful. I must be one of his most boring clients! My therapist is one of the most sought after therapists, his clientele include Hollywood stars and billionaires. I have gained a lot from my sessions with him. It has opened a whole new area of my life for development. An area I didn’t even know existed!

Session # 7 , Wednesday February 22, 2012

I believe it was in Taoist china, every village had what was called the village idiot, who was also simultaneously the village wiseman. This person would do everything in the opposite way that people in the village did things. By doing this, he was showing them via difference what it was they were doing. If there is no variation or way to compare what you are doing to something else, you won’t really be aware of what it is you do. “Idiot” actually comes from the Latin word “idios” which means individual, which lends to difference/diversity.

In this session I asked my therapist mostly about his history. He said he really got into Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness and Awareness around his high school years due to his more “intelligent” friends getting him to read all these books they thought were really cool. My therapist subsequently moved to a commune where this Russian Master dude had a cult like following of people all trying to raise their awareness. There also was some brilliant Russian Mathematician there as well. I’ll have to get the names. Anyways my therapist was interested in awareness and how it relates to human evolvement.

Awareness is a somewhat ambiguous term. Awareness of what? Primarily awareness of self. This gets sortav into Buddhist/Taoism now. My therapist explained that most people are quite unconscious being a patterned product of their environment. People do the things their nervous system was conditioned to do since a very young age. The key is to become aware of the conditioning the neural, nervous system conditioning (he is talking body sense conditioning here not Mind conditioning all though it includes that as well) and once you are aware of it you can change it! Somatic-therapy is a technique in how to change basic programming on a very core emotional level. He said you can batter people with logic all day long and change their “mind” but if you don’t change their emotional core programming nothing really changes and said person resorts back to their neural body conditioning. In order to change, awareness is key, thus awareness of self and emotions and what they are, how they work, what they’re saying, is fundamental to evolvement. So the chief goal is to become more fully aware more present chiefly of your frontal emotional center, and to avoid dissociation which is the opposite to presence. This is how you change yourself and evolve spiritually.

This is how you step out of the unconscious conditioning that the masses find themselves, and grow. Plus he said all things in the mind come first from the neural intelligence of the emotional nervous/neural network, and that this is scientifically proven. Thus the human biological brain really is a secondary interpreter/ image creator from impulses and intelligence arising from the enteric/limbic primal nervous system. It’s that system he believes is key in order to unlock human potential. Which is really cool!!!

He said he really doesn’t care what people think, or what goes on in their head. He said it really doesn’t matter. What he cares about is what people feel deep in their core, and how well aware they are of that deeper mostly ignored feeling/intuitive intelligence.

There is a really strong connection between this core frontal body emotional intelligence and psychic abilities. This is where I believe the power of precognition comes from, telepathy, intuitive knowing, intuitions, etc. Somatic-therapy provides perhaps one of the best frameworks at developing this intuitive type of intelligence.

Keeping in line with awareness, curiosity is paramount. You have to be curious about yourself in order to bring awareness to those inner core feelings and intelligence. He told me a story of how this Noble prize winning chemist at Harvard insisted on teaching the Intro Chem classes. He would drop in on students in labs and ask them what they thought was going on in their experiments. He wasn’t looking to see if they were doing it right though, what the was interested in was how people thought. He could care less about their conclusions, he was using his students to learn about how they learn, how they are self aware, and how they develop intelligence. He then used this knowledge to improve himself. For this is where he saw true intelligence lay, and that is in integrating as many different ways that people learn so he himself could learn and operate better.

My therapist said he can very quickly tell how intelligent someone is. If he comes across a person who thinks they know everything and isn’t interested in how HE thinks then he knows they are not very intelligent for they have very little capability of true intelligent growth. However when he does come across a person interested in “how” HE thinks he realizes he has met an intelligent person. It is the differences among us that lead to a self reflective process which increases personal self centered awareness.

This is why diversity of thought, intelligence is so important. It gives rise to greater awareness, creativity and evolvement/ spiritual growth. This was another very profound “mind blown” session. This is really cool stuff. Oh yea my therapist went to Harvard for some 10 years, but only was enrolled for 4. He spent 6 years bumming around talking to students finding out about good instructors and then dropping in on classes for free. He was there in the early 1970’s at the time that BF skinner was there (famous behaviour psychologist), Herbert Benson (famous mediation guy who studied Tibetan Buddhist monks) as well as the guy who was making LSD, and many others. He knew a lot of these gentlemen.