Somatics - Tumblr Posts
The revolution that starts from within:
the importance of understanding our own anatomy. The body is self reproducing, self organizing and self healing. The human body does all of this, but not without self-awareness. If animals are able to renegotiate many forms of even quite dramatic trauma that occur in a natural environment, shouldn’t the same be true for us? Wouldn’t a large part of that necessary somatic self-awareness simply…
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Title:The Anatomy of Self Awareness
An Anatomical Description of Trauma Response: Three Bones Theory and the Sensory Stations of the Deep core. Biography: Jim Freda is a structural bodyworker and somatic social theorist focusing on the historical and cultural determinants of anatomy. Abstract: The human body is self-reproducing, self-organizing, and self-healing, but not without self-awareness. My argument is that there is a…
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You exist in your body. It is difficult to feel sometimes because it is beyond our capacity to tolerate such great wonder and beauty. Take a moment and feel yourself. Feeling sexy or feeling your body is not as rich and exciting as feeling your self. The difference lies in the great diversity, depth and quality of sensation and the structures that organize and contain it. It is a pursuit of enlightenment. Biomechanical Enlightenment.
Muscle Salon with Muscle Monk.
90 minutes of gentle movement meditation once a month. A healing, sensual, and playful excursion into the world of biomechanical enlightenment. A sacred setting with honor and safety, the Muscle Salon is meant to be a place for sensitive reconnection with our bodies. We will be exploring our deepest core anatomy and developing new inner resources. As a Musclemonk, the Muscle Salon is part of my…
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Touch, the absence of touch, and trauma. Reflections on the recent 2023 USABP Annual Meeting.
I just returned from a conference of body psychologists, where I presented but also attended a panel seminar on touch. For 90 minutes I listened to these people talk on and on about how wonderful touch is and how careful they must be and how to use touch and how to get permission for touch, and they acted as though they were dealing with nitroglycerin instead of just a soft animal. It was…
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There is no guilt. There is no shame.
Musclemonk has something to say.
There is no guilt. There is no shame. There is no fear either. There is only self-awareness. That is, if you hold on long enough to your own breath. The challenges to be able to hold on long enough and this is what biomechanical enlightenment is about. Simple, friendly, mechanical, anatomical tools of structural centration that you can use to balance and ground yourself and find length and lift…
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This is an introduction to a theory of coordination dynamics as a form of embodiment, and I hope that you enjoy listening to it. Please forgive the frank and intimate nature of the video, the sometimes poor quality of the sound, but this is a genuine expression of a great deal of profound thinking and research.
I
A handful of bones
A handful of bones A handful of bones just about all that we can hold in our mind as we go through the process of our complex daily full body movements. A handful of bones is enough to coordinate and balance the system in almost any position. Perhaps in our mundane daily movement of the body only a few at a time need to occupy our immediate attention. These are the most consistently…
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I am working on resting tone but also enjoying a bit of a pump.
Biomechanical enlightenment is not arcane and esoteric.
Biomechanical enlightenment is not arcane and esoteric. Thinking about coordination dynamics the question we must consider is whether the several major coordinative centers of the body, complex multilevel bony systems, each produce a characteristic voice, an identity, a sense of the whole greater than the sum of its parts–one that is predictable and understandable. We suppose that this might be…
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The solution has to be something very gentle and healing.
I am inside this enormous obscene thing.
Join me July 15 2:30pm PDT (GMT-7)
Join me! Have a deep meditative and healing visit with your big toe! It is the central and coordinative bone of the foot and directly connected upstream to the deep core anatomy. We will take a little journey into our inner self together. Please join us!
July 15 2:30pm PDT (GMT-7)
https://calendar.app.google/nukaA7V6cqDGVTC46
Armpit as Metastability
Biomechanical enlightenment should be both sexy and fun.
Armpit as Metastability The armpit a major locus of biomechanical metastability. The armpit is the heavily meaning laden and sensual body part that is also the coordinative center for the arm. It is deep, dark, and reaches deep within. And yet biomechanically it is by far more interesting than the superficial and blunt shoulder. This fact is important because of the tremendous amount of…
Embodying Prosociality
Prosocial Embodiment Circle: Workshop 6
Monday August 26 2024 @ 3-4:30pm PDT
RSVP: [https://calendar.app.google/BLMHayRFr89WVhRe6](https://calendar.app.google/BLMHayRFr89WVhRe6)
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Evolution happens in the body and at Prosocial Embodiment we deal with it in the body.
How do we embody Prosociality? It is a simple but profound question.
What does it mean to embody something?
What does it mean to embody something as profound as prosociality?
Does it mean that we should try to behave in a certain way—that we should be kind, fair, friendly and equitable?
Is this enough for the evolutionary shift that we are seeking?
Are a new economic system and a host of sage policy recommendations for climate action, including the core design principles for community governance, enough? Or do we need to look within with a great deal more sincerity and scientific rigor? We certainly need many things, but in the end change happens from within.
Are we confident that a new intelligentsia is enough to lead us into the deep social change that we envision? This is the age-old problem of praxis and at Prosocial Embodiment we believe that change begins not only from the top down and outside in but also from the bottom up and the inside out.
The problem with every revolution has been that a new elite in the end just replaces the old elite. Top down solutions create new top down control systems. This will not achieve the kind of profound integration and cooperation required for prosociality.
The answers we seek exist within life itself. We base our exploration not only on intuition and spiritual impulse but on cutting edge fascial anatomy and a wealth of new research on topics like embodied cognition, somatics and interoception, coordination dynamics and neurophysics.
We look deep within the body to sense into a new form of somatic awareness and a consilient or holistic and integrative form of emergent perception and cognition. We are seeking the wisdom of the body and the earth that we are part of.
Please Join Us!
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Join us in exploring the anatomy of our own deep core, the postural system of the body, our primal and self aware axial line. It is our interoceptive sensory motor system and a rich source of preverbal, natural wisdom and somatic resilience.
Together we will explore ways that we can embody prosociality + heal deep personal and social trauma starting deep within our own miraculous bodies.