La Niña In Queensland
Just a little update for those who have checked in with us about the weather lately. Where we live we had approximately 650 mm of rain in December and 750 mm of rain in January. That’s a total of 1400 mm or 56 inches. Our ducks liked it. The devastation this caused in other parts of south east Queensland was massive and experiences like these are traumatic for all involved. It does bring out the best in people though. Friends of ours – Jon & Judy Durand from Beech Mountain Pottery – filled their van with the water purifiers they make, drove to the worst affected valley and started handing them out to people. Awesome. Now cyclone Yasi is bearing down on northern Queensland – a catagory 4 cyclone (5 is the highest) and the system is HUGE. Wind gusts are anticipated to be up to 240 klm or 150 miles an hour. Preparations are underway. It is well north of us on its current trajectory.
So this month’s Body Harmony® update has four items:
1. A reminder about New Orleans in May. People are enrolling now to receive the discount applicable to registrations prior to February 5. Call me if you are interested, +61 (0)7 5485 3099 and check out the post at https://healthinperspective.org/general/neworleans2011/
2. Body Harmony – the Gold Coast Feb 15 – late afternoon/evening information session and private sessions with Duncan Hogg. Contact Scott Quilliam for details.
3. Bringing the principals of Body Harmony to your area, office, group etc If you are interested in hosting an educational event contact Duncan to discuss the options.
4. A short article of interest. I recently watched a very interesting program on SBS Mind Over Money that looked at emotional factors affecting financial decision-making. It certainly spiked my attention. Behavior is paramount in my mind. Understanding and appreciating the processes that underpin human functioning through behavioral choice is key to success. Posture – or more correctly posturing – refers to the way you organize the internal relationships of your physical body to meet incoming information or situations. This article looks at how decision-making is influenced by your posture. It draws on some of the revelations of Harvard trained social psychologist Karen S Lerner, whose research was sited in Mind Over Money along with my 25 years of studying posture, body language and bodywork through practicing Body Harmony®.
May I begin with this quote from the article The Emotional Decision Maker by Peter Zimmerman and Jennifer S. Lerner, Harvard University.
“To begin with, most human cognition is unconscious – that is, we lack awareness of our mental processes. We absorb millions of bits of data per second through our senses; we compress, screen, and process this data automatically through various shortcuts in the brain. What emerges in our conscious awareness are the snap judgments, instant recognition, the sense of certainty and the intuitions that we can’t fully explain. Though wondrously efficient, these processes generate cognitive biases and errors.”
For many people, the link between posture and behavior is not obviously apparent. This is beyond the popular ideology of ‘good posture – bad posture’. This is recognition that we have multiple postures – much like personalities. These organizational patterns – which are what postures are by definition – when engaged appear to have a one-to-one relationship to behavior. The postures themselves appear to be considered necessary tools used to engage our world – although this is happening outside of our awareness.
The details are all important here. In a posture all sorts of internal adaptations can be made that determine the patterns of use (or disuse) of areas of our bodies. This is all about how you do what you do. For example how you do your posture of frustration, or your posture of rebellion, or happiness and so forth. One element is how you do it, and another element is when – under what circumstances. What circumstances arouse a particular postural response from within you?
A posture may be evaluated by recognition of its impact within you and there are basically two criteria here. Does it unify you or does it fragment you. Does it bring ease of function or does it restrict your freedom of movement. Dr Don McFarland, the founder of Body Harmony®, speaks of the internal dynamics of various postures, where the competing agendas appear to cause actual tearing in the tissue by virtue of being attracted and wanting to avoid something simultaneously, – a literal push/pull expressed in the mixed messages being played out in the fibers of your body.
In the article previously referenced by Zimmerman & Lerner a distinction is made as to two different kinds of emotion affecting decision-making. Integral emotion refers to the legitimate emotional considerations generated by the decision at hand. An example being you want to go swimming but the large waves and strong current generate a realistic fear that the conditions are not safe. This apprehension is an integral emotion.
The second type of emotion is called incidental emotions, – and these “arise from past events and carry over to influence subsequent judgments or choices”. Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence writes informatively on the neuronal and physiological aspects of the influence of incidental emotions. The most striking aspect of this kind of processing is that irrelevant information is brought to bear on current circumstances without awareness! Once again, to quote the Zimmerman & Lerner article,
“countless studies conducted in the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory reveal that incidental emotions affect us all, whether or not we are aware of them.”
Incidental emotions seem most closely associated with fragmenting postures, or postures that compromise the flow of energy and information throughout our bodies. And under these circumstances very little of what is a person’s environment is being perceived. More accurately, and as is the case with our brains at times, we fill in our gaps of perception with our expectations, – we simply make things up to fill in the picture. Under such conditions our responses are not well matched to our circumstances. This represents a tremendous growth opportunity.
It is precisely in these gray areas of perception that Body Harmony® allows a new possibility to flourish. Artistically applied, Body Harmony® provides a transformational context for healing. Given the support of one’s personal intention, an opportunity becomes available to choose consciously a pathway of behavior that aligns one’s posture, perception and intentions. Your body, if you choose to pay attention to it, can become an ally in your travels. I am reminded of that simple piece of wisdom that states “Do what you always do, get what you always get.” Sometimes the most striking of experiences is realizing a choice or an option exists where assumption had taken the throne.
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If you would like to join the next main event for Body Harmony®, Dr Don McFarland, myself and a host of other teachers are participating in an International Event in New Orleans May 8 – 21. Discount tuition applies to registrations processed before February 5.
Web References
New Orleans Conference https://healthinperspective.org/general/neworleans2011/ Jennifer Lerner’s papers http://content.ksg.harvard.edu/lernerlab/papers/
Thank you for your involvement!