Active Pause

In this 3-minute video, Stephen Porges talks about finding meaning in these difficult times: “Perhaps this challenging period is directing us to what our real goal in life is. And that is to relate to others, to connect.” See PDF transcript – See also 日本語のPDF.

Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D., is Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute. He holds the position of Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He served as president of both the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences and is a former recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development Award.

See also:  Stephen Porges on why and how to connect.

For therapists: See conversations with Stephen Porges on the Relational Implicit podcast.

Published April 2020

During these difficult times, you can help other people, and help yourself, by reaching out. In this 4-minute video, Stephen Porges talks about listening and connecting. See also PDF transcript and 日本語のPDF.

How you can do it

See the short video describing Active Listening.

Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D., is Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute. He holds the position of Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He served as president of both the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences and is a former recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development Award.

For therapists: See conversations with Stephen Porges on the Relational Implicit podcast.

Published April 2020

With the pandemic, people have to avoid unnecessary contact. Social distancing dramatically affects people’s ability to find comfort in connection. We cannot directly give emotional support to all who need it. But we can teach people simple tools they can use to support each other. See what you can do about it below the video.

In this video, Stephen Porges eloquently makes the case of why this makes sense. You can also get a PDF transcript as well as a 日本語のPDF.

As therapists, what can we do to help?

Active Listening is a very simple and effective way to help people hear themselves think and feel. Not to mention communicate better with each other. This is a tool that works in these times of social distancing. People need not be physically together to do it. They can use the phone, Skype, or any other form of videoconferencing.

We do not need to be physically present with people to let them know about it. We can let them know through electronic media, social media, whatever we have at our disposal to communicate.

How you can do it

There is no prescribed way of doing things. You conduct this in a way that feels right for you.

You set up virtual gatherings by phone, Skype, Zoom. You can invite your clients, friends of clients, or members of any community you are connected with. For instance, parents at a school, church members, etc.

You can make each training a one-time thing. Or you can make it a group that meets several times. Either way, virtual gatherings are an opportunity to address questions and help people share their experiences.

If you’d like to have material that people can use to jog their memory, you can refer them to the simple description of Active Listening at activepause.com/active-listening. Or you can make your own.

See other conversations with Stephen Porges.

Published April 2020

In this conversation, we explore the notion of grace. We talk about it from a spiritual perspective: the Christian spiritual tradition which is Greg’s anchor, as well as other spiritual traditions. We also explore down-to-earth experiences, such as being a drummer, interacting with other people, structuring one’s day… In so doing, we map out a sense of grace as a human experience that people can relate to independently from a specific belief system.

Greg Cootsona is a Lecturer in Comparative Religion and Humanities at Chico State University. The conversation with Serge emerged from two key sources: his article in the Huffington Post, “The Unforced Rhythms of Grace,” and his book, Say Yes to No: Using the Power of No to Create the Best in Life, Work, and Love. He wrote the latter out of an experience of being stretched too thin as a Christian minister and young father in New York City. Now in Chico, California, Greg blogs weekly at http://cootsona.blogspot.com. Greg loves drumming—thus the interest in rhythm—as well as cycling reading, writing, drinking good coffee and beer, and especially spending time with his wife, Laura, and their two daughters, Melanie and Elizabeth.

Published April 2020 

Social distancing and separation are a big part of what is needed to deal with the pandemic. In this short conversation, we talk about how to counter their effects: we still need to be sensitive to our nervous system’s need to socially engage and connect. Below the video, you will find a transcript. You can also get the transcript as a PDF.

See also PDFs of translations into German, Italian, Spanish and Turkish.

Transcript of the conversation (with timing of video):

Serge Prengel (00:00): These are really difficult times.

Stephen Porges (00:03): They certainly are. And there’s an irony going on because we have to avoid becoming infected. There’s no question that the Coronavirus is a health risk, especially to those of us who are more mature. It is real. The question is related to the way that we need to behave to reduce that risk through social isolation. And this strategy creates an amazing paradox for our nervous system and our needs to interact with other people because, as humans we have a powerful need is to connect and to co-regulate with others, but now we’re being told that this is not the right thing to do. There are priorities and the top priority is not to get infected, but there’s also a priority of understanding the needs of our nervous system…

Serge Prengel (00:51): So, this is a counterintuitive situation where we cannot trust our instinct, evolutionary instinct, because we have to do something different. Not from coercion, but actually from understanding that social isolation is required at this point.

Stephen Porges (01:08): I think that is a really concise way of explaining the paradox through which our nervous system is trying to navigate. And that is, we need to socially isolate. However, our nervous system says, Hey, that’s not the way we evolved, not the way we need to be. We need to co-regulate, so we need to be smart.

(01:31): Now we need to know what the true priorities are. And the top priority of course, is to stay alive. But how can we mitigate that nervous system’s demand, request, and passion, to connect? And we have to find ways to connect! We have to do that through telephone and through video chat. They are really reasonably good, and email is okay, but the value of hearing someone’s voice or seeing someone’s face is a powerful reassuring cue of safety to our nervous system. So we have to reach out. It’s been remarkable over the past few days, because the world turned from a social to an isolated world within in a week.

(02:09): A week ago, I was in New York city, it was elbow to elbow. I was talking at a crowded conference. And my comment was, I’ll give people hugs. I’ll shake their hands this month, but next month I will do something different. And within a few days, the world changed. And we realized that it wasn’t a fear of a virus that was really distal in time. It was here. We need to really take care of ourselves and to really monitor our bodies’ need to connect, to give others a hug, to smile, to be reassuring, to touch them on their shoulders or on their hands, to let them know that we’re here to support them and be with them. What I’ve noticed over the past few days is my very close friends have reached ou...

Active Listening is a simple and effective way to improve the quality of our communications, at work and with friends and family. This 6-minute video provides step-by-step instructions and tips on how to practice Active Listening.

See also PDF of transcript.

Edited transcript:

Active Listening

I will describe an approach called Active Listening. When you first try it, you will likely feel a little awkward. This is normal because it’s different from what you’re accustomed to. After you try it, you will probably appreciate the result. Here are a few pointers on how to do it.

Taking turns

First, you need to keep in mind that the two of you need to take turns, one being the Talker while the other is the Listener. And then you’ll switch.

In ordinary life, we tend to multitask. That is, we prepare our own arguments while we are listening. This might work well enough in everyday conversations, but it is not enough when there is more emotional content. So you need to make a plan. For instance, if you’re going to be talking for half an hour, you decide that one of you is going to be the Talker for the first 15 minutes, and the other will be the Talker for the next 15 minutes. An effortless way to avoid any feelings about who starts is to toss a coin.

Focused on understanding

The second point is that the Listener needs to be focused on trying to understand the Talker. Keep in mind that, if you understand somebody, it does not mean you have to give up your own opinion. As the Listener, you are just trying to understand the Talker’s point of view from their point of view. You don’t have to agree.

Summarizing

The third characteristic of Active Listening is that, as the Listener, you give the Talker a summary of what you’ve heard. You don’t wait until the full 15 or 20 minutes to do that. You do it every couple of minutes. Sometimes it could be just a minute or so. There’s a natural rhythm that the two of you develop over time.

Taking it in

The fourth characteristic is that the Talker pays attention to the summary and takes it in. The Talker either nods in approval, says yes, or amends it by adding something that was not picked up by the Listener.

By the way, it’s quite OK if the Talker adds something to what you, the Listener, have said. Very often, this helps the Talker better understand what it is that was important to them. So, either way: either the Talker keeps nodding to what you’re saying, or it’s an opportunity for them to find something else. In both cases, it’s fine. And you continue this way: talking, listening, summarizing, taking it in, until the end of the allotted time for the Listener. Then, you switch.

Pausing

The fifth characteristic of Active Listening is that it involves pausing. This is not a rapid-fire, yackety yack, type of conversation. Pausing allows the new, the unformed, to come up. This is what this kind of communication is about.

So, as the Listener, you take a pause before giving your summary to the Talker. As the Listener, you don’t jump in every time the Talker pauses. You give them a chance because maybe they’re just waiting to say something more. As a Talker, don’t feel like you have to fill the air with words. It’s OK if you take time without words while you’re trying to sense what comes up next.

This 4-minute talk suggests a way to approach washing hands for the coronavirus as a mindful practice.

For a transcript, see my article on Medium: Washing hands as a mindful practice.

Published March 2020

This conversation is part of exploring the Somatic Implicit. Karyne Wilner talks about how cell life and neuroplasticity of the brain and body can be enhanced through work with the bioenergetic field.

Dr. Karyne Wilner is a licensed, clinical psychologist who practices in Connecticut and Rhode Island. She is director of the Core Energetics Academy, a training center for professionals who wish to add a bodymind and energy focus to their work. She worked closely with John Pierrakos, MD, the founder of Core Energetics. An adjunct instructor at Salve Regina University, she teaches energy psychology to graduate students in the holistic counseling department. In the past, she was Assistant Director of The Institute of Core Energetics, Associate Director of Core Energetics Australia, and Senior Director of Core Energetics in Brazil. Her current interest is in writing about what the body communicates and its connection to sexuality and love. See her website.

Published March 2020.

We start talking about language. As we speak from the felt sense, it becomes a conversation about incorporating a mindful attitude into a conversation. And an invitation to enrich our lives with mindful conversations.

Marcella Calabi helps people find their voice and live from it. She is an outside-the-box thinker with training in music, negotiation/mediation and teaching/guiding, and a Certified Focusing Professional. She is inspired by the several meanings of voice: our physical voice and the self it expresses, the voice of our personhood manifested in our choices of word and action, and inner voices accessed with Focusing. See her website.

Photo credit Bjorn Bolinder

Published March 2020  

There is an audio version of this article at the bottom of the page.

What happens when we get polarized? How can we avoid polarization to engage in more enriching discussions? I would like to share some thoughts based on an experiential exploration of polarization.

The experience I am drawing upon was not a polarized discussion. It was a collaborative endeavor: Remembering experiences of polarization to better understand them. I will be bringing up a contrast between this collaborative atmosphere and the circumstances under which we get more polarized.

The initial shift

The conversation started as an interview. The roles were clear. I was the interviewer, and Kirk Schneider was the person interviewed. We were going to talk about a topic he has thought about a lot and written a book about: “The Polarized Mind.” We didn’t go very far with the conventional interview portion. Soon after the beginning, we shifted the format of the conversation.

It started with my suggestion that we proceed carefully: We were not discussing a neutral topic, but one which could emotionally touch our audience. I disclosed that I could, at times, have a polarized mind. Kirk suggested that we explore the topic experientially. Effectively, we shifted roles, with him leading me through a process of experiential exploration. Before we went any further into this process, we established some rules for safety. All of this evolved organically.

When an interview takes place, some things are so evident that it is not necessary to state them explicitly. There are specific roles: the interviewer and the interviewee. The manner of the interview may vary, but both parties share the implicit assumptions. They constitute a stable framework for the interchange—I think about it as the Shared Implicit.

Through a process of attunement, we restructured our Shared Implicit. This involved paying attention to implicit clues and resulted in making the space safe and comfortable. This early step set the tone for the possibility of further expansion during the rest of the conversation.

Embodied Experience 

An experiential exploration means paying attention to the experience from inside, as opposed to talking about it as if it were outside. Exploring inner experience involves paying attention to body sensations.

Here is what came up for me as I was recollecting polarized interactions to access my inner experience of them. I noticed the tightening of my shoulders, a shallower breath, a sense of my spine folding in. All of this, subtly, not necessarily visible to an outside observer.

These physical sensations were not random. They were the result of my whole organism reacting to the situation. They were “bottom-up,” implicit reactions, as opposed to “top-down.” Through neuroscience findings, we are keenly aware that much of our functioning is at a “bottom-up,” implicit level. Somatic mindfulness involves being in touch with embodied experience, i.e., the Somatic Implicit.

As we stay present with our experience, a felt sense forms, which is the way we experience the Somatic Implicit. In this case, my felt sense of the experience came down to a simple handle: a sense of rigidity. Conversely, as I shifted away from polarization, the experience was a sense of fluidity.

Interestingly, Kirk had defined the polarized mind as a “fixation on a single point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view.” The bodily sense of rigidity, the opposite of fluidity, made this concept come to life.