WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION - BETA VERSION, PAGES STILL MISSING!
This work is licensed under
CC BY-SA 4.0
: also see my full Copyright statement.
The conscious / cognitive mind and its attention is the process through which the body-mind understands the meaning of events in the "outside world".
Safety is a basic requirement for normal adaptation. Safety is not a thought of safety, but is defined (for the body-mind) by the way we inhabit our senses and body, by our attitude, feelings, involvement, relationality and attention; and by our movements and capacity for movement.
If there is non-safety in the external world, then the body-mind prepares for - what is the most obvious expectation from an evolutionary point if view - infected bite wounds. Internal healing is de-prioritised, and the emphasis is on bodging-and-fixing and making the best of a bad job until safety allows us to sleep deelply and heal fully.
Adaptations due to chronic retained overwhelm send out messages of non-safety, and if part of the body-mind is adapted for danger, it cannot heal properly. Instead it often either does not heal fully at all, or it appears to heal by encapsulating the insult - for attention at a later date. These encapsulations can be retained for decades, persisting so long as the chronic retained overwhelm persists.
Re-calibration to the relative safety of the present moment has several phases - arriving, recognition, deepening, processing. These are all about communication using conscious attention in a deliberate manner that is congruent with the evolved nervous systems needs. The conscious mind has to slow down to the speed of somatic meaning-making, and play by the rules of the body-mind / somatic intelligence (and not the quick monkey-mind).
This is a simple process - simple because it is inbuilt into your nervous system. Once it starts to work, large layers of retained overwhelm imprint can be released in 5 to 15 minutes. But it is not necessarily an easy process, because the rules of the body-mind are heavily contradicted by the rules of using a body that our culture has generally adopted.
