Active Pause

In this conversation, Bruce Nayowith talks about Subtle Activism at an experiential level.

As Dr David Nicol describes it, Subtle Activism is applying the wisdom of our inner work to the collective dimension, for collective transformation, rather than the personal domain. Another of his quotes: “Subtle activism can be understood as a set of practices that allow us to connect, in the depths of our being, with our love for the world and our longing for it to reflect the highest potentials of human nature.”

Anytime one engages in a personal growth or healing process, it benefits others around them. What distinguishes Subtle Activism is that one is intentionally working with a larger realm than the personal – the collective is the subject of our attention and care, rather than simply a byproduct of it.

If you are interested in Subtle Activism, here are links you may want to explore:

* The Gaiafield Project. Quoting from their website: The Gaiafield Project promotes the study and practice of subtle activism, which affirms the power of consciousness-based approaches like global meditation and prayer events to support social and planetary transformation.* HeartMath Institute has done much research in the connections between heart, brain, others, and the Earth. They sponsor science and research pointing to ways that the Earth’s fields, and human fields, interaffect each other.

Also: Summary and Notes from Subtle Activism Summit Sept 8-10, 2015:

* 5 page Summary of TITLES of the talks that Bruce Nayowith attended:

http://www.serviceoflife.info/planetaryhealing/SAsummary.htm

http://www.serviceoflife.info/planetaryhealing/SASummary.rtf (downloadable)* 39 pages of NOTES from the talks that Bruce Nayowith attended:

http://www.serviceoflife.info/planetaryhealing/SASummitNotes.htm

http://www.serviceoflife.info/planetaryhealing/SASummitFullnotes.rtf (downloadable)

Since 1987, Bruce Nayowith has been Focusing personally, and to explore other processes that encourage the unfolding of individual and systemic potential. These include neurobiology, depth, and developmental psychology, whole-brain education, NonViolent Communication, and emergent group processes such as Dynamic Facilitation, Open Dialogue, and Family Constellations.

Published October 2015

In this conversation, Bruce Nayowith talks about Subtle Activism at an experiential level.

As Dr David Nicol describes it, Subtle Activism is applying the wisdom of our inner work to the collective dimension, for collective transformation, rather than the personal domain. Another of his quotes: “Subtle activism can be understood as a set of practices that allow us to connect, in the depths of our being, with our love for the world and our longing for it to reflect the highest potentials of human nature.”

Anytime one engages in a personal growth or healing process, it benefits others around them. What distinguishes Subtle Activism is that one is intentionally working with a larger realm than the personal – the collective is the subject of our attention and care, rather than simply a byproduct of it.

If you are interested in Subtle Activism, here are links you may want to explore:

* The Gaiafield Project. Quoting from their website:The Gaiafield Project promotes the study and practice of subtle activism, which affirms the power of consciousness-based approaches like global meditation and prayer events to support social and planetary transformation.

* HeartMath Institute has done much research in the connections between heart, brain, others, and the Earth. They sponsor science and research pointing to ways that the Earth’s fields, and human fields, interaffect each other.

Also: Summary and Notes from Subtle Activism Summit Sept 8-10, 2015:

* 5 page Summary of TITLES of the talks that Bruce Nayowith attended:

http://www.serviceoflife.info/planetaryhealing/SAsummary.htm

http://www.serviceoflife.info/planetaryhealing/SASummary.rtf (downloadable)

* 39 pages of NOTES from the talks that Bruce Nayowith attended:

http://www.serviceoflife.info/planetaryhealing/SASummitNotes.htm

http://www.serviceoflife.info/planetaryhealing/SASummitFullnotes.rtf (downloadable)

Since 1987, Bruce Nayowith has been Focusing personally, and to explore other processes that encourage unfolding of individual and systemic potential. These include neurobiology, depth and developmental psychology, whole brain education, NonViolent Communication, and emergent group processes such as Dynamic Facilitation, Open Dialogue, and Family Constellations.

 

Published October 2015

How can we capture the shared implicit? Certainly not by analyzing it to death. Poetry and music can help us transmit the experience of the ineffable. We let ourselves experience whatever resonance the melody and words have for us. It touches something in us, and the experience we have of it is very personal.

At a conference, several of us presented a panel. We wanted to communicate experientially what we called “Shared Field”. So we started with a song – Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen.

Now, it is on this web page you’re reading (recording by Bruce Nayowith). As you listen to it, you may remember that we put it there to give you a sense of what we mean by “shared field”. Or you may be carried away by your own associations with the music and the words. Or…

In other words, what happens here is not perfectly clear communication, in the sense that copying a digital file is a way to perfectly transfer information from one support to another. The implicit field where this communication takes place is more nebulous. It is at the same time inefficient in achieving perfect clarity and amazingly enriched by each experience.

Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river,

She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters

And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor,

And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers,

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning,

They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever,

While Suzanne holds the mirror.

And you want to travel with her,

And you want to travel blind,

And you know that you can trust her,

For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

How can we capture the shared implicit? Certainly not by analyzing it to death. Poetry and music can help us transmit the experience of the ineffable. We let ourselves experience whatever resonance the melody and words have for us. It touches something in us, and the experience we have of it is very personal.

At a conference, several of us presented a panel. We wanted to communicate experientially what we called “Shared Field”. So we started with a song – Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen.

Now, it is on this web page you’re reading (recording by Bruce Nayowith). As you listen to it, you may remember that we put it there to give you a sense of what we mean by “shared field”. Or you may be carried away by your own associations with the music and the words. Or…

In other words, what happens here is not perfectly clear communication, in the sense that copying a digital file is a way to perfectly transfer information from one support to another. The implicit field where this communication takes place is more nebulous. It is at the same time inefficient in achieving perfect clarity and amazingly enriched by each experience.

Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river,

She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters

And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor,

And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers,

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning,

They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever,

While Suzanne holds the mirror.

And you want to travel with her,

And you want to travel blind,

And you know that you can trust her,

For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

In this conversation (September 2015), Dirk Marivoet talks about getting an embodied experience of life…a sense of your own rhythm and pulsation….a sense of your orientation in the universe you live in… and an understanding and integration of the lessons that lie in the encounter…thus dreaming and weaving yourself into a life while being dreamt and being the web yourself…

Dirk Marivoet is the director of the Institute for Bodymind Integration in Ghent (Belgium). He studied Core-Energetics under John C. Pierrakos, MD; Postural Integration®, Energetic Integration and Pelvic-Heart Integration under Jack Painter, PhD (and has been a certified trainer/supervisor since 1999). He has also worked extensively with native shamanism both in Europe and North America. Earlier in the 80s and 90s he was adjunct faculty Psychomotor Therapy at Leuven University, where he still teaches.

Published September 2015 

In this conversation (September 2015), Dirk Marivoet talks about getting an embodied experience of life…a sense of your own rhythm and pulsation….a sense of your orientation in the universe you live in… and an understanding and integration of the lessons that lie in the encounter…thus dreaming and weaving yourself into a life while being dreamt and being the web yourself…

Dirk Marivoet is the director of the Institute for Bodymind Integration in Ghent (Belgium). He studied Core-Energetics under John C. Pierrakos, MD; Postural Integration®, Energetic Integration and Pelvic-Heart Integration under Jack Painter, PhD (and has been a certified trainer/supervisor since 1999). He has also worked extensively with native shamanism both in Europe and North America. Earlier in the 80s and 90s he was adjunct faculty Psychomotor Therapy at Leuven University, where he still teaches.

Published September 2015 

Aline LaPierre, PSYD, MFT, is the coauthor of Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship, and she has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed somatic journals. She was on the faculty of the somatic doctoral program at Santa Barbara Graduate Institute for 10 years. A graduate of Pacifica Graduate Institute, she also trained as a psychoanalyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. She is the creator of NeuroAffective Touch™ and Experiential Psychobiology™ workshops supporting the development of embodied awareness for psychotherapists and bodyworkers. In private practice in West Los Angeles, she specializes in the integration of relational psychodynamic and somatic approaches.

Published September 2015. See printable PDF transcript.

This recording is very different from the rest of this series. Instead of an actual, spontaneous conversation, this 7-minute recording is a staged reading of the beginning of an article that Mary Hendricks Gendlin wrote. We did this as a memorial to Mary.

In the article, she was explaining what she meant by “The Revolutionary Pause,” using a personal situation that many people can relate to in order to make this concept come to life. This brings out in a very dramatic way how pausing makes it possible for us to notice the dynamics of power and control, and find our own way.

Five of us did this recording, Bruce Gibbs, Jocelyn Jacks Khan, Susan Rudnick, Catherine Torpey and Serge Prengel. We hope it inspires you to “pause for peace” – – inner peace as well as interpersonal and societal peace.

Mary Hendricks Gendlin was the Executive Director of the Focusing Institute. She was in so many ways the heart and soul of the Institute, alongside her husband Gene.

The following are the opening paragraphs of Mary Hendricks Gendlin’s speech about ‘Focusing as a Force for Peace: The Revolutionary Pause’:

“Focusing is a force for peace because it frees people from being manipulated by external authority, cultural roles, ideologies and the internal oppression of self-attacking and shame. This freeing has to do with an ability to pause the on-going situation and create a space in which a felt sense can form.

“When we know how to focus we refuse to take ourselves or any other person as merely an instance of a culturally defined category or group. We don’t say, ‘I am good, you are bad.’ Or, ‘I am a wife and mother’ as though this defined the total of who I am. Or ‘You are the doctor, I am the patient’ as though our interaction would then be governed only by the meanings of those roles. Or ‘I am a Christian or a Moslem’ as though the ritual forms would then exhaustively define my spiritual life. We know there is always a rich detailed intricacy, a ‘more’ in each person’s experience.”

Published August 2015

This conversation is about sustaining as much as it is about emerging.  It reflects an ongoing internal conversation about declaring my place in the world and negotiating, how much space I have within to take this world in, to live in it, to dip and swim in the river of life. It invited several years of exploration of that place of the in-between, the “threshold point”.  Between an inhale and an exhale, between two cycles of breath, between one thought and the one that follows it, in that place where one thing has ended and the next thing has yet to begin.

Keren Ohayon is a somatic oriented speech language therapist living and working in NYC. Born and raised in Jerusalem Israel, NYC has been home for her for almost 20 years. She completed her BA in Behavioral Sciences in Ben Gurion University, Israel and her MA in Speech Pathology at Lehman College, The City University of New York. Keren has extensive experience working with young children and families in a variety of settings, including Early Intervention, preschools, and private practice. Her focus has been supporting children and their parents as they construct the building blocks of relationship, interaction and communication. She approaches therapy from a mind-body perspective and incorporates somatic practices that address children and families more holistically. Keren has been a clinical educator at the Lehman College Speech and Hearing Center for the past 7 years.

Published July 2015. 

Marti Glenn, PhD, Co-Director, Quest Institute, offering intensive retreats for healing early trauma. She is founding President of Santa Barbara Graduate Institute with graduate degrees in somatic psychology, prenatal-perinatal psychology and clinical psychology. A pioneering psychotherapist and trainer for three decades, she was also professor of clinical psychology, integrating body psychotherapy with affective neuroscience, attachment, and trauma. Dr. Glenn serves on several non-profit boards and has chaired numerous professional conferences, including APPPAH and Neurons to Neighborhoods: Preventing and Healing Trauma. She co-produced the broadcast quality documentary, Trauma, Brain, and Relationship and has appeared in such documentary films as What Babies Want; What Babies Know; Reducing Infant Mortality and Improving the Health of Babies. She continues to train mental health professionals with a focus on relationship and the experienced body, weaving neuroscience, polyvagal theory, epigenetics, trauma and attachment into clinical practices. She is a frequent speaker at conferences world-wide. See website.

Published July 2015. See printable PDF transcript.