Active Pause

 

See the audio recording below the text.

Today, I am going to describe to you a one-minute practice. Now, when I say one minute, it could be 50 seconds or five minutes. We’re not timing it.

You sit on a bench or a chair, with your feet touching the ground. If you are on a chair, your back is not touching the back of the chair.

Your hands are in front of you.  You touch the fingers to each other so that each finger touches the corresponding fingers on the other hand. You rest your arms on your lap with the fingers facing forward and the thumbs facing up. You close your eyes.

As you gently breathe, you feel the fingers touching each other with gentle pressure. As you feel this gentle pressure, you feel the elbows moving away from each other. You keep gently breathing as you do this.  You notice that, as you gently push the fingers together and move the elbows away from each other, your spine will probably tend to gently straighten up. To gently elongate.

And you may also notice that your shoulders might tend to open up and gently make more room in your chest. As you stay with this, you see the quality of allowing as opposed to forcing.

When it feels right, you stop.

What do you notice?

Often, the kinds of things you notice as you’re doing this, or afterward, are very subtle.

And that’s what a pause does. It’s a slowing down and getting into a different rhythm, which includes noticing things that we would not necessarily see when we’re not in a pause mode.

But we’re also talking about noticing. That quality, together with the allowing, is what makes the pause active. It’s not just an interruption. It’s an active pause.

You can do it once a day. You can do it many times throughout the day. I’m inviting you to play with it, with an attitude of curiosity. And notice what happens, moment by moment, and over time, as you experiment with this practice.

Inspired by Merete Holm Brantbjerg. See other one-minute mindfulness exercises.

Published August 2020.

In this conversation with Merete Holm Brantbjerg, we explore experientially what happens in our body when we get stressed. See PDF transcript of this conversation.

Merete Holm Brantbjerg developed Relational Trauma Therapy, a psychomotor and systems-oriented approach. She is an international trainer, group leader, and therapist based in Denmark. See her website.

See also Merete Holm Brantbjerg about what sustains her. For therapists: See conversation with Merete Holm Brantbjerg on the Relational Implicit podcast.

Published August 2020.

In this conversation, you will learn how a felt sense functions in a Quaker Meeting’s gathering circle. Harbert describes how his work with Gendlin’s philosophy and Quaker practice came about in a Quaker meditation as a felt sense to map Quaker language into Gendlin’s language. He looks at the underlying commonality between Focusing and Quaker meditation.

He also explores the key differences between Focusing and Quaker meetings. As members rise to speak out of the meeting’s silence you can experience the flow of the meeting as a whole. The speaking may rise to a point where the whole meeting experiences a felt shift. Quakers call this experience a ”gathered meeting.” In their monthly meetings for business, Quakers make decisions by arriving at a “sense of the meeting.” Reaching a decision in this way rests on forming a felt sense of a shared meaning, leading meeting members to reach unity in their decisions.

Harbert Rice is a Quaker. His home meeting is the Reno Friends Meeting in Reno, NV, where he served as Clerk of the Meeting. He was a member of the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), which brought AVP workshops into the Nevada State Prison System. He is now retired and lives with his wife Rebecca Mueller on a small farm in Northern New Mexico. He studied Gendlin’s A Process Model with Rob Parker. He also served on the Board of Directors of The International Focusing Institute. A Quaker’s View Of Gendlin’s Philosophy” (2020) is Harbert’s second book on Gendlin’s Philosophy. His first is Language Process Notes (2008). See website.

Published August 2020.

“In this guided meditation, I will share with you how you can experience each breath as a gift from the Divine. The tradition is Shaivism Tantric Yoga, and just my own yoga physical practice. But yes the origins are Yogic. But the awareness of smell etc can be credited to SE. Or Shakti. Maybe it is Shakti, the essence of life embodied.”

Victoria Ramos is an explorer of the human psyche. Professionally Victoria is a psychotherapist trained in a multitude of alternative approaches which are targeted at the revelation of one’s divine nature. Her trainings range from Somatic Experiencing to Yoga teaching to shamanism.

She is also an artist. Her work is focused on midwifing the buried truth of our being-ness as a divine expression of existence, so we can realign with all that is. See website.

Published July, 2020.

The nervous system is where our experience begins. In this conversation, Deb Dana describes how it works and how it affects our daily life. There is a PDF transcript of this conversation.

Deb Dana, LCSW, specializes in treating complex traumatic stress and lectures internationally on the ways Polyvagal Theory informs clinical interactions with trauma survivors. She is the Coordinator of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium in the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and the developer of the Rhythm of Regulation clinical training series. She is trained in Internal Family Systems and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and completed the Certificate Program in Traumatic Stress Studies at the Trauma Center. Deb is the author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy (Norton, 2018), co-editor with Stephen Porges, of Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory (Norton, 2018), and is currently writing Polyvagal Exercises for Therapists and Clients (forthcoming from Norton). To learn more about Deb’s workshops and writing, visit her website.

For therapists: see Deb Dana on the Polyvagal Theory.

Published July  2020.

In these two short conversations, Bruce Nayowith explores his inner experience in 2 situations:

(1) making contact with others while connecting with a young part of himself;

(2) a situation in which an energetic connection was felt at a distance.

Since 1987, Bruce Nayowith has been Focusing and exploring other processes that encourage the unfolding of individual and systemic potential. These include neurobiology, depth, and developmental psychology, whole-brain education, NVC, and emergent group processes such as Dynamic Facilitation, Open Dialogue, Family Constellations, The Pocket Project, and Stephen Busby’s work. Some earlier explorations can be found here serviceoflife.info  And some of his more recent ones at everydaymystery.com/emergence

Published July 2020

Five years after the original conversation we had about what sustains her, Judyth Weaver follows in 2020.

Judyth O. Weaver was awarded the USABP Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. As a modern dancer she went to Japan in 1965 to study Kabuki and Noh and then entered a Zen Buddhist monastery.  Back in the U.S. in 1968 she studied T’ai Chi Ch’uan and Sensory Awareness, becoming certified to teach both.  She earned her Ph.D. in Reichian Therapy in 1979. She is also certified as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, and in Prenatal and Birth Therapy. She is a Rosen Method practitioner and senior teacher. Judyth was a professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies for 25 years; she is co-founder of Santa Barbara Graduate Institute and creator of its Somatic Psychology doctoral program; she has developed her own integrated manner of working which she calls ‘Somatic Reclaiming.’ She has a private practice in Seattle, Washington, and teaches internationally. See: JudythWeaver.com

Recorded in 2020 – Published June 2020

Judyth Weaver talks about her life force (2015). See also 2020 follow-up conversation.

Judyth O. Weaver was awarded the USABP Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. As a modern dancer she went to Japan in 1965 to study Kabuki and Noh and then entered a Zen Buddhist monastery. Back in the U.S. in 1968 she studied T’ai Chi Ch’uan and Sensory Awareness, becoming certified to teach both. She earned her Ph.D. in Reichian Therapy in 1979. She is also certified as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, and in Prenatal and Birth Therapy. She is a Rosen Method practitioner and senior teacher. Judyth was a professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies for 25 years; she is co-founder of Santa Barbara Graduate Institute and creator of its Somatic Psychology doctoral program; she has developed her own integrated manner of working which she calls ‘Somatic Reclaiming.’ She has a private practice in Seattle, Washington, and teaches internationally. See: JudythWeaver.com

Recorded in 2015 – Published June 2020

Here, I am not talking about faith in God or in religious beliefs. I am talking about the human capacity for the experience of faith. See audio recording at the bottom of the page.

When you hear the word faith, you probably think about religious belief. Or maybe, faith in God, not necessarily to a given religion. Instead, I will be talking about the human capacity for the experience of faith, which has nothing to do with any specific belief system.

This perspective is different from the conception in which faith entails some mystical connection to the transpersonal, to something beyond us.

Instead, I have a more down-to-earth perspective. I want to use the word “faith” in a much more limited sense, in the same way as we would use the word “trust.”

Let’s say, for instance, that you have a car that you have been using during a frigid winter. On a given day, as the weather forecast predicts a freezing day, you feel confident that your car will work. It doesn’t even occur to you that it might not. You have faith in the car.

Trust and faith result from repeated experience

As something has repeatedly worked for you in the past, you trust that it will again. If friends have been there for you when things were hard, you probably assume that they will be there for you when things go wrong in the future. If you have generally had luck under challenging circumstances, you are likely to have faith that you will be lucky in the future.

Let’s go even further back in the past, back to your childhood. If your parents were reliable support for you, you are more likely to feel that you live in a benevolent universe. If not, you might be more predisposed to seeing the world as harsh and unpredictable.

I am talking about how our various life experiences constitute a database of knowledge from which we implicitly project how we perceive the world.

It is impossible for you, or me, or any human being, to discount the emotional impact that our previous experiences play in how we see the future. Human beings are amazingly good at learning. We learn from experience, and this is what colors our perception of the present and the future.

How does this help in a practical way?

It’s good to keep in mind that our tendency to trust in the future (or not) correlates with the experiences we have had in the past. When we remember this, we can consciously address our unconscious biases.

For one thing, it does not make sense to say: “I should have faith.” You cannot force yourself to change whether or not you have faith because it reflects your experience. So it works better to accept, as a starting point, that having faith (or not) is a given.

It is liberating to accept this instead of forcing yourself to be something you cannot be. You cannot change the past, but you can try to change your experiences in the present and the future.

What is it like in practice? Under challenging circumstances, you find yourself noticing your lack of faith in the future. Then you remember that it makes sense for you not to have faith given the database of experience that you’ve had in your life. Having acknowledged that, you can then be on the lookout for other facts. Other perspectives may then open up. You may see the current situation in a fresh way, not colored by baggage from the past.

Blind faith vs. building trust

We are not talking about trying to have blind faith in the future. We are talking about the possibility of building trust. When we talk about building trust, it’s something that happens in everyday life. In big things as well as in small things, you don’t have to trust everybody blindly. That might be a pretty lousy life strategy - better concentrate on exploring whether it is possible to build trust.

To do this, you need to focus on what might be a foundation on which y...

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