Intuition is an example of bottom-up processing. This is in contrast to the top-down processing reflected in Descartes’ “I think; therefore I am.” Bottom-up processing is more potent than top-down processing in altering our basic perceptions of the world. This potency derives from the fact that we are first and foremost motor creatures. Secondarily, we employ and engage our observing/perceiving/thinking minds. We think because we are, rather than existing because we think. When asked in a pub whether he wanted another beer, Descartes responded, “I think not.” But did he disappear? Descartes’ theorem might be updated to reflect bottom-up processing as follows: “I sense, I act, I feel, I perceive, I reflect, I think and I reason; therefore I know I am.”
It has been implicitly assumed that psychological change occurs, primarily, through the vehicle of insight and understanding or through behavior modification. The study of mental processes has, however, proven to be of only limited value in helping people transform in the aftermath of trauma. Often people are left besieged with distressing symptoms for years. Lasting change, rather than being primarily a psychological, top-down process (i.e., starting from our rational thoughts, perceptions and disciplined behavior choices), occurs principally through bottom-up processing (where we learn to focus on physical/physiological sensations as they continuously evolve into perceptions, cognitions and decisions). Transformation occurs in the mutual relationship between top-down and bottom-up processing. As sentient beings, we own the latent capacity for a vital balance between instinct and reason. From this confluence, aliveness, flow, connection and self-determination come to pass.
Trauma and Disembodiment
Traumatized individuals are disembodied and “disemboweled.” They are either overwhelmed by their bodily sensations or massively shut down against them. In either case, they are unable to differentiate between various sensations, as well as unable to determine appropriate actions. Sensations are constricted and disorganized. When overwhelmed, they cannot discern nuances and generally overreact. When shut down, they are numb and become mired in inertia. With this habitual deadening, they chronically underreact even when actually threatened and are thus likely to be harmed multiple times. In addition, they may actually harm themselves in order to feel something—even if that something is pain. In the poignant 1965 film The Pawnbroker, Rod Steiger plays Sol Nazerman, an emotionally deadened Jewish Holocaust survivor who, despite his prejudice, develops affection for a young black man who works for him. When, in the last scene, the boy is killed, Sol impales his own hand on the sharp memo spindle that holds the bills so that he feels something, anything!§
The constriction of sensation obliterates shades and textures in our feelings. It is the unspoken hell of traumatization. In order to intimately relate to others and to feel that we are vital, alive beings, these subtleties are essential. And sadly, it is not just acutely traumatized individuals who are disembodied; most Westerners share a less dramatic, but still impairing disconnection from their inner sensate compasses. In contrast, various eastern spiritual traditions have acknowledged the “baser instincts” not as something to be eliminated, but rather as a force available for transformation. In one book describing Vipassana meditation, a quote reads that the goal is in “purifying the mind of its baser instincts so that one begins to manifest the truly human spiritual qualities of universal goodwill, kindness, humility, love, equanimity and so on.”134 What I believe the author means is that rather than renouncing the body, spiritual transformation emerges from a “refining” of the instincts. The essence of embodiment is not in repudiation, but in living the instincts fully, while at the same time harnessing their primordial raw energies to promote increasingly subtle qualities of experience. In the book of Job it is said, “For in my flesh I shall see God.”
The degree to which we cannot deeply feel our body’s interior is the degree to which we crave excessive external stimulation. We seek titillation, overexertion, drugs and sensory overload. It is difficult to find a movie these days that is without over-the-top special effects and multiple car crashes. As a culture, we have so negated the capacity to feel the subtlety of the life of the body that we have become habituated to a seemingly endless barrage of violence, horror and explosive, body-vibrating noise. On the wane are films of engaging dialogue and affective nuance. Instead, we are continually bombarded with jumbles of disconnected, incoherent and meaningless images or sentimental mush. There is the paucity of time we have for ourselves to quietly reflect. Rather, these precious free moments we have are spent online, in chat rooms substituting for real human contact, creating avatars in virtual space or watching TV on our cell phones. I’m not against having a good time or unappreciative of our technological strides. It is simply that while the media reflects our sorry state of insensitivity, it is also contributing, in a significant fashion, to our addiction to overstimulation.
To the degree that we are not embodied, our basic instincts—survival and sexuality—become distorted. Distortion of self-survival leaves us fearful, angry and anxious. Disembodied sexuality and a lack of the capacity for self-regulation produce the starkly barren landscape of pornography, as well as such disorders as anorexia and bulimia. Notwithstanding the complex psychodynamic, social and media factors (with its airbrushed barrage of models with “ideal” bodies), disembodiment promotes and fosters many of the eating disorders. Just like pornography, these disorders have their existential origins in alienation from the living-sensing-feeling body. For disembodied men, images of the female body become titillating, rather than experienced as joyful. They evoke a craven drive, rather than inviting playful flirtation, enjoyment, surrender and deep appreciation. In this way, disembodied men (who tend, by their nature, to be visual) contribute to women’s anorexia because of their disembodied pseudo-need for the “idealized” female body. Hence, women’s bodies become objectified both in the eyes of the other and in their own eyes. Young woman who have exchanged their bodily sense for body image are susceptible to seeking breast implants that sever sensation or super “slimness” as in anorexia. In the latter case, they are drawn to identify with grotesque, culturally reinforced, Biafra-like body images, rendering them barely able to sustain life or procreate instead of feeling body sensations. The compulsions of binging and purging (as in bulimia) are a futile attempt to control their body sensations—which are either chaotic and overwhelming or shutdown and numb. Some bulimics report that sex makes them want to vomit and vomiting, for them, is like having an orgasm. In addition, bulimia is an ineffective attempt to rid the body of something that is not-body; something that was forced onto or into the person’s body. For men, it is pornography that fills the void of disembodiment, alienating men from their own sexuality.
There are plentiful other disembodying methods, other compulsions. These include the addictions to overwork, sex, drugs, drinking or compulsive eating. All are ways to suppress, numb or control the body—or are, ironically, misdirected attempts to feel it. However, without embracing bodily experience, we are left with an empty shell, a narcissistic image of who we think we are. We are unable to really feel the fullness of ourselves, a fullness formed from a continuous flux of experience. Pornography and eating disorders are two sides of the same coin—disembodiment and objectification. The less the body is experienced as a living entity, the more it becomes an object. The less it is owned, the further it is divorced from anything having to do with one’s core sense of self.
A visit to the gym reveals a similar story. Lines of people are robotically pumping iron in an attempt to buff their bodies, but with little internal feeling or awareness of their actions. There is a great deal to be said about the clear benefits of cardiovascular fitness and challenging the power function of muscles. However, there is something beyond endurance and body mechanics. It is the kinesthetic sense, which can be awakened and developed in any movements we make and in the very sensations that prefigure any movement. This is the difference between willing a movement and being the movement.<
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On returning to my local YMCA from a trip abroad, I was startled to see that in front of virtually every work-out station there was a brand-new flat-screen TV! It’s as though these individuals had temporarily parked their bodies, only to pick them up like the dry cleaning, after they had been exercised by the machines. In this regard, there is a distinction made in the German language between the word Körper, meaning a physical body, and Leib, which translates to English as the “lived (or living) body.” The term Leib reveals a much deeper generative meaning compared with the purely physical/anatomical Körper (not unlike “corpse”).
As a society, we have largely abandoned our living, sensing, knowing bodies in the search for rationality and stories about ourselves. Much of what we do in our lives is based on this preoccupation. We certainly wouldn’t have computers or airplanes, cell phones or video games—not to mention even bicycles or clocks—without the vast power of our rational minds. However, like Narcissus, who fell in love with his reflection in a pond, we have become enamored by our own thoughts, self-importance and idealized self-images. Have we fallen in love with a pale reflection of ourselves? In gazing adoringly at his reflection, Narcissus lost his place in nature. Without access to the sentient body, nature becomes something out there to be controlled and dominated. Disembodied, we are not a part of nature, graciously finding our humble place within its embrace. After Darwin, Freud was one of the first thinkers in modern (psychological) times to insist that we are part of nature, that nature—in the form of instincts and drives—lies within us. “The mind may have forgotten,” Freud says, “but the body has not—thankfully.” The explosion of people now attending yoga and dance classes, or receiving bodywork, are clues of our attempts at reviving a deep, unmet yearning. Could it be we are finally trying to “re-member” and listen to the unspoken voice of our bodies?
Ripped from the enlivening womb of interior experience, we then see the body as a thing, as an objective biochemical assemblage. However, in his lovely essay “What Is Life?” the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger concluded that life cannot be explained through reduction to its chemical elements. The human organism is not like a watch that can be made to function by putting together the components, springs, gears, stems and so on. Paradoxically, while not violating the laws of physics, life, he says, goes beyond them. Schrodinger speculated how this might happen and prefigured the field of what would later be called “self-organizing” systems. However, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize—winning physicist’s explanation to recognize that when we see innocent children joyfully playing together, or when we gaze upon a bead of morning dew gracing a blade of grass, that life is not just the sum total of its chemistry and physics. But how do we know that? We know it because we feel it. We feel what it is like to be alive and real in a vital, sensing, streaming, knowing body. We know ourselves as living organisms.
Most people, if asked the question, “How do you know that you’re alive?” would speculate with something like, “Well, because …” But that just isn’t the answer; it can’t be. The way we know we’re alive is rooted in our capacity to feel, to our depths, the physical reality of aliveness embedded within our bodily sensations—through direct experience. This, in short, is embodiment.
Awareness
The precursor and twin sister of embodiment, awareness, is the 800-pound gorilla perched quietly on a solitary rock that is difficult to overlook yet unwittingly ignored. As with many mercurial archetypes, the presence of this primal diva is confounding—enormous yet elusive. Lady awareness sits in wait, yet slips away, when we attempt to grasp for her.
No one has been able to demonstrate an independent, fixed or unitary self. The philosopher David Hume wrote that “when I enter most intimately into what I call ‘myself,’ I always stumble on some particular perception or another; heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch ‘myself’ without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception.”135 The existential philosopher Sartre seems also to have thrown his hands in the air with his musing that “we are condemned to a belief in the self,” even if it is a fallacy of (mis-) perception. Paradoxically, the only way that we can know ourselves is in learning to be mindfully aware of the moment-to-moment goings-on of our body and mind as they exist through various situations occurring in time. We have no experience of anything that is permanent and independent of this. Thus there is no ego or self, just a counterfeit construction. While counterintuitive to most of us, this is common “knowledge” to highly experienced meditators.
Awareness (like consciousness) is a relative concept. An animal may, for example, be partially aware, may be subconsciously aware or may be acutely aware of an event. Many biological and psychological scientists, however, are uncomfortable with ascribing awareness to animals and choose to differentiate between awareness and self-awareness, the latter being attributed only to humans. Self-awareness is the explicit understanding that one exists, and that one exists as an individual (separate from other people) with her own private feelings and thoughts. However, recent investigations have demonstrated something akin to self-awareness in chimps and even in elephants. I have elected, along with others, to view awareness as occurring along a continuum, with so-called self-awareness at the upper end.
Awareness, whether in mankind or in the animal kingdom, may emanate from an internal state, such as a visceral feeling, or through external events by way of sensory perception. Awareness provides the raw material from which animals (including humans) develop qualia or subjective meanings about their experience.
Awareness of our internal milieu lets us know when we are hungry or horny, thirsty or tired, happy or sad, distressed or at peace; and this awareness facilitates what we do to address these internal states. With awareness of discomforts or imbalances, and with determination and will, we can set out to meet these needs. For example, when we experience hunger pangs, we set out to find food. When the rain starts to drench us, we seek shelter; and when we are sexually primed, we seek out a mate, court and procreate. Awareness, most simply stated, derives from the moment-to-moment sensing of internal and external environments in the service of satisfying organismic needs and reestablishing “self-regulation.”
Unfortunately, most all of us have misplaced the capacity for awareness for a multitude of reasons. Tuning out begins at the earliest stages of life. As infants, all of our basic needs must be met by the ministrations of a caregiver—when we get fed, held, rocked and soothed; when our uncomfortable diapers are changed and when we are too hot or cold. All of these primitive needs must be met by “the other.” When they are not, we protest, escalating to a cacophony of screaming, wailing and the flailing of our limbs. Moreover, when our needs are repeatedly not met in a timely and consistent fashion, the sensations of distress become so intense and unbearable that shutting down is the final option for the infant. This is the only semblance of agency left to the baby. As we grow and mature, we learn to actively suppress our instinctual impulses, needs and emotions in fear of retribution from our parents. Implicitly, we can sense their subtle disapproval and discomfort, turning away from this invalidation and further shutting down nascent awareness. In immediately offering to buy a new “replacement” puppy to extinguish a child’s shock, grief, horror and rage at witnessing his beloved pet getting run over, the parent teaches the child not only that his emotions do not matter but also, essentially, that they don’t even exist. Is it any surprise that as adults our capacity for awareness is so blunted and diminished?
Awareness and Introspection
Though frequently used interchangeably, awareness and introspection are two very different creatures. Stated simply: awareness is the spontaneous, and creatively neutral, experiencing of whatever arises in the present moment—whether sensation, feeling, perception, thought or action. In contrast, introspection is a directing of our attention in a deliberate, evaluating, controlling and, not infrequently, judgmental way. Introspection, while of
ten valuable (and the essence of many talk therapies) can in itself become interfering, taking us far away from the here and now. The unexamined life, according to Thoreau, may not be worth living. However, introspective examination can become pathological, contributing to increased rumination, inhibition, self-consciousness and excessive self-criticism.
Awareness might be likened to seeing a glowing ember emanating the light of its own internal combustion. Introspection, on the other hand, is like viewing an object illuminated by an external light source, such as a flashlight. With awareness one directly experiences one’s life energy as it pulsates and glows. In introspection, one sees only a reflection of the contents of one’s life. Confusing thought and awareness, of equating them, is at the root of so much unnecessary human suffering.136 Insight, while important, has rarely cured a neurosis or healed a trauma. In fact, it often makes matters worse. After all, knowing why one reacts to a person, place or thing is not, in itself, helpful. Indeed, it is potentially harmful. For example, breaking out in a cold sweat when your lover touches you is distressing enough. Yet, having this same reaction, over and over, even after understanding why it occurs, can be further demoralizing. Comprehending that what happened was merely triggered by an earlier event, while repeatedly having to endure its uninvited intrusion, can add crippling feelings of failure, shame and helplessness.
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