Hearts At Play: How to Escape Your Headspace
It seems to me that the New or Unknown is dangerous territory that is rife with traumatic memories and unsafe feelings. These often are memories of past unsafe situations where we felt overwhelmed or were in actual or imagined danger for our life or our well being. Safety is something our consciousness seeks to retain. The role of various parts of the mind is to keep or maintain this sense of safety. However, in our narrative-driven mind we also want to achieve progress or growth.
— Vijay Ramanathan
The story of our lives can be neatly arranged intellectually in theory as a narrative we tell ourselves or explain to others, refined to the point where there’s no contact with how it is lived in the body. There’s one thing to package the experience in a safe way that makes it approachable, but it’s a whole other story to live that story. While I feel like re-framing our stories away from the natural victim, woe-is-me mentality, is the challenge but on a deeper level we need to connect with our actual story as it is experienced and then restructure our cognitive narrative around that experience. This back and forth is expressed by Heller when he talks about the top-down and bottom-up approach to experiences. He writes “The term top-down refers to how cognitive structures of the brain impact the emotional and instinctive systems of the body. The term bottom-up refers to how regulation in the nervous system impacts cognition” (Heller, 2012, p. 16). By allowing space for this communication between body and brain we foster a growth mindset.
What comes up for me is the ability to distinguish between a cognitive space and a mindful space. It feels like a mindful space is a connected space, whereas a cognitive space exists in theory, disconnected from the experienced reality. A lot of what we hear and learn is theory. Even reading about the theories in these books is about the idea of the idea of connection. The takeaway here is to connect with the lived experience and with the knowledge of other people’s experiences, move the energy. Consciousness, that exists as energy, is, according to the Hakomi world view, self-healing. To move the energy is to achieve a flow-state where we allow the energy’s inherent ‘knowing’ to guide us where a cognitive, thinking mind is slower than the intuitive energy that flows through us.
This is a gentle, nonviolent way to move the energy’s flow as stated when Kurtz writes, “Some part of [us] already knows this truth, knows the holding back and the longing to move on. Because we have witnessed and spoken that truth, from a loving place, the client’s way of dealing with [the presenting issue] can be transformed. The client may have been dealing with this truth by hiding it from everyone, including himself. In theory, it becomes evolution. Energies once invested in limiting the self are set free to animate the new” (Kurtz, 2015, p. 7). The same thinking that created the problem clearly cannot solve the problem, in order to disappear the problem we need to see and enter the ‘new’, or the ‘unknown’.
It seems to me that the New or Unknown is dangerous territory that is rife with traumatic memories and unsafe feelings. These often are memories of past unsafe situations where we felt overwhelmed or were in actual or imagined danger for our life or our well being. Safety is something our consciousness seeks to retain. The role of various parts of the mind is to keep or maintain this sense of safety. However, in our narrative-driven mind we also want to achieve progress or growth. In this mind-set we have problems we want to solve and more times than not they require a growth mindset that pushes us past the comfort zone that is safe, deep into unsafe or dangerous territory in order to gain certain gifts or powers that otherwise would be withheld from us.
With Internal Family Systems, we see that the mind has roles it delegates to the various parts or energetic centers in consciousness that maintain an equilibrium or homeostasis according to Gestalt terminology. It was interesting to me to see that Schwartz talks about this adventure of the mind into these challenging arenas as “play” (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2019, p. 23) and talks about it in terms of returning to this playful spirit. It seems apropos that the mind role-plays all these varied parts to enact a kind of “psychodrama” that the authors feel is most directly accessible to the child or adolescent in play therapy (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2019, p. 97).
I believe the IFS model is compelling because it analogously relates itself to chemistry. The science of the behavior of particular chemicals and their interactions when placed tougher is natural and in accordance with natural law that does not require a lengthy explanation or thesis statement. They write at one point: “we assume that parts are constrained by systemic resources (the Self) to release them and harmonize the inner system. Since IFS views the relationship between the client’s Self and the client’s parts as the primary healing force, the therapist’s main job is to help the client access enough Self” to solve the presenting issue (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2019, p. 81). It seems trust and faith come into play here that the thinking, cerebral mind, which more often than not is actually an introject of something we learned as a child that is a falsehood or a misrepresentation of the truth, can be overcome if we move away from cognitive, thinking spaces to more embodied, bottom-up modalities that regulate our nervous systems and allow the various parts to combust in a natural way that will facilitate our own healing.
Mindfulness seems to be a place where the brain and the body can coexist together in a happy medium and chemically combust the varied parts of the mind that play different roles to maintain safety and allow for a bit of controlled entry into the unknown with the help of a therapist. That’s ultimately the role of the therapist: to play the chemist in the equation and safely bring the client to a place where they can do controlled “experiments” to borrow the Gestalt phrase, with their own components and allow for nature to do its thing. This is truly embodying the play of the universe and can be fun and enjoyable as the Life Force of our bodies takes its rightful place in the healing process.
Heller, L. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the ... capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.
Kurtz, R. (2015). Body-centered psychotherapy: The hakomi method: The integrated use of mindfulness, nonviolence, and the body. LifeRhythm.
Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2019). Internal Family Systems therapy, Second edition. Guilford Publications.
