Hanna Somatics site | to End Lingering Pain

The practice of somatic education arrives at a number of “layers” of habituation.

When used as a supportive adjunct to clinical sessions involving pandiculation, somatic education exercises serve to reinforce the changes of that session, which has entailed disappearance of patterns of habituation (or dis-intensification/relaxation of memory). In that case, the way has been cleared ahead of time for that new patterning.

When used by themselves, however, somatic education exercises must accomplish both the disappearance of old patterns and the emrgence or development of new patterns.

In that case, the first patterns to go are those that are obsolete remainders of previous adaptations — injuries that have healed, emotionally traumatic situations that are long past, conditioning from family life or exposure to institutions with a “culture” (e.g., “corporate culture”, “military culture”). All of these, because they are not actively called for and actively used in daily life, are subject to easier release. They are not being reinforcced by use, but only persist by memory’s tendency to persist.

The next patterns to go are those that now surface. Those patterns are patterns we enact in daily life — including our mood and attitude of approach to somatic “clean-up”. Let me make that point more vividly:  The sense of self that is doing “clean-up” comes from a habituated and remembered entire characer that may or may not yet have been subject to exposure and conscious integration.

If not yet integrated, it is “the one” doing the clean-up, and as such, its own pattern is never subject to clean-up; it’s always “behind the scenes”.

So, the person tends first to lose the obsolete remainders and then to reinforce, more and more, the mood and attitude of approach (or remembered way of being in the world’s situations) characteristic of the daily self. That means that there are “areas” of S-MA that are untouched and seemingly untouchable, and actually, we find, of which we are almost entirely unconscious — but which others may recognize.

To get at that next layer of habituations, we need to take another angle of approach.

That approach is, on the basis of attention freed up by releasing obsolete remainders, to notice, to catch ourselves at it, in the patterns we live on a daily basis. Since the second layer consists of all the attitudes and moments of reaction of our daily self, to notice those patterns gives us access to the layer of “self” that is doing the clean-up.

Generally, that layer of self consists of emotional tendencies, attitudes, and self-talk by which we activate ourself in life — rather than merely reflexive after-patterns from injury or long-term stress, which are primitive kinds of reactivity — typically called, S-MA. For that second layer of self, another term is appropriate: A-IA:  attentional-intentional amnesia.

As such, these patterns must be addressed on their own terms and in their own “language” — the language of feeling, the language of “I” and of “I’s” meaningful terms.

It involves not merely a psychological process of analysis, which is but a start; it involves distinguishing those patterns in terms of the four basic facets of somatic existence: attention, imagination, intention, and memory — or attending, imagining, intending, and remembering.

There exist specific procedures that use all four of those four facets at once to develop or recover conscious integration of those daily patterns. I present those in detail, elsewhere, in usable form. Ask.

What happens in integration is that the grip of a “daily pattern” that “has” us suddenly loosens and softens, and as that happens, somatic changes occur that might be interpreted as neuro-muscular or sensory-motor, but which are actualy attentional and intentional; we feel our old postural set and we feel how we could be to feel more “ourselves.” Our memory set changes, and with that change, our personal quality in the world also changes. We experience the world differently and the world experiences us differently. The old “daily pattern” no longer “has” us, no longer automatically springs into action when circumstances might before have triggered it. A freer response allows for a more spontaneously and more finely tuned, even more ingenious, response.

In the process of dissolving the second layer, we touch repeatedly into what is “beneath” or what pervades that second layer (and also, the first, residual layer); that “what is beneath or pervades” is a kind of formless, impartially present, conscious space. It is not seen, in itself, to be of any particular quality — other than a kind of radiant presence — and it’s “felt” radiant, not seen radiant. It could be termed, “self-existing”, since it has no particular quality and there is nothing in evidence to be creating it as an effect of something else. It is continuous with and gives rise to all things particular. It is their substance. They are a play upon or play of it. It is our experience of “now”.

Memory stores the impressions of its shape-shifting and so gives it the sense of duration in time. Attention gets absorbed in it. Imagination anticipates its developments, guided by memory, more or less. And intention reacts to all of that and proels our movement.

Such is the second layer: the deeper layer that persists after somatic education exercises have done what they can in the hands of the “daily self”; and touchings into the intuition of the free, undefined (infinite) condition.

So, the second layer of de-habituation consists of a differently shaped, differently organized, differently responsive self-pattern. But it’s still a habituated self-pattern, a pattern of A-IA, attentional-intentional amnesia. Coming out of it reveals something unexpected.

A third development.

That third development consists of integration of the second layer, “daily self”; what we integrate of ourselves ceases to be an “it” to us; it ceases to have any weight, to us, any mass, or so little as to be negligible. Those patterns, before, unconscious and running the show, have been made conscious, lost their automaticity, lost their sense of grip and become more freely available for spontaneous, more subtly fitting responsiveness without a sense of “hard self”.  They have been both streamlined and freed from internal conflict, so they are “tuned to the harmonic of the formless ground of being” and simultaneously express their responsiveness to conditions and communicate the formless ground from which they emerge and of which they are actually made.

One term for this is “Wei Wu Wei” or spontaneous right action. Another term is “The Fair State” — although that kind of fairness is not an opinion; it’s an experience of action experienced as “no action” — and if it’s a state, it’s a state of flow. It’s the foot dipping into the pond without a ripple, unless the dipper wants to make a ripple. The conceptual mind cannot grasp that kind of functioning, but that kind of functioning is recognizable in the instant of its happening, by feel. It draws observers into its own state (or drives them off as an insult to their habituation).

Thus, somatic education first dissolves the residues of obsolete memory, then dissolves the current “do-er” of all things, then itself dissolves to reveal the paradox of embodiment: that our lives emerge from and exist in the continuity of all existence, that before, our habituation and all our efforts did obscure.

A T T E N T I O N:

P S Y C H O A C T I V E

 _____________________________
The Vajra Self-Rectifying Processes
ESPECIALLY POTENT WHEN COMBINED WITH THE TONGUE MUDRA


~ The Lightning Bolt ~
(The Hammer of Thor)

~ The Thunderclap ~
(A Rumbling in the Canyon)

The TetraSeed of Every Experience

“Vajra” :  “Thunderbolt” and “Diamond” (Sanscrit)

A word in advance:
This entry contains instructions for procedures that, due to their simplicity, are advanced practices.  Known collectively as, The Vacuum Cleaner for Your Mind, they require sufficient control of your attention muscle to do them.  Without that adequate control, some may find that their thinking-word mind is producing too much noise — noisier even, than The Vacuum Cleaner for Your Mind — impossible for some, for now.

The key for those with “noisy mind” and “weak attention muscle” is practice of The Gold Key Release and The Middle-Way Memory Matrix Ritual.

In this entry, I present two procedures — The Lightning Bolt and The Thunderclap (“Flashing the Unknown Unknown”), that, when combined, provide a quick, nearly-instant way to disarm and dissolve grips seemingly held upon us held by unconscious habits of self-contraction and distress, so they can be sucked out of your mind, right then. Mental quiet ensues.

Click to LISTEN


Gate` Gate` Paragate
Parasamgate
Bodhi! Svaha!

Gone! Gone! Gone beyond.

Gone beyond going beyond.

Awakening Intelligence! Beneficial!

~ The Prajna Paramita (Heart) Sutra ~

Rationale for the Lightening Bolt |
(The Hammer of Thor)

 (Walking Backward)

The Lightning Bolt is a back-door
maneuver for surfacing and dissolving hidden grips that keep us buried
in the momentum of our habitual lives, confused and stuck — but . . . .
. hopeful !!! above all, hopeful !!! Another term for that is “dukkha”. It’s a “one foot on the accelerator, one foot on the brake” situation.

Those
hidden grips show up as patterns tendency for things to go a certain way, of behavior habits and characteristic personal experiences
that are recognizable in a person, that have a  feel to
them that are part of the person’s sense of self, their presence, their way of harmony in life, more or less, their personal quality and the habits by which people recognize
them.

These
hidden grips show up as the chronic issues and ongoing complaints of a
person’s existence; perhaps unexpectedly, they also show up as the
virtues they uphold. They are the programs of a person’s existence, a
body of unfathomably deep-seated, totally unconscious tension sets (on
your mark, get set . . . . . ) maintained perpetually on automatic:  all
kinds of memory conditioning, residual influences, sensations that are
below where attention ordinarily reaches in ourselves, unless flushed up enough to be recognized. 

When flushed up, are
seen to major distortions in oneself in the form of, “How it the
world did I get that way??”  But before that, it is generally something
unrecognized that we do and experience again and again, and again.

Such an experience, as and however remembered, can be “blitzed” by The Lightning Bolt or shattered by The Hammer of Thor
— to dissolve away the part or aspect of that behavior pattern that we
confuse with the basic reality of life and so believe is unavoidable.

We may artfully use The Lightning Bolt and The Gold Key Release, alternately, to good effect; one does “clean-up” after the other. 

We
confuse conditional reality with our fundamental sense of
ever-hereness, which IS reality; we confuse (mentally fuse) conditional
reality with Eternal EVER-HERENESS — and the sign of this confusion is
the feeling that things will never change (which is how it feels,
whatever we may think). This confusion of EVER-HERENESS with memory
gives memory an air of permanence, even while it’s temporary.

BACKGROUND:  Ever-Here-ness and Conditional Reality
EVER-HERENESS
doesn’t change — and it ain’t nuthin’ in particular. It “always
already IS”.  However, for these words to make sense, you must have
awakened to the intuition of, “that which has been the same all my life”
— which is not an object of attention (inner or outer), nor anything that can be intended, remembered or imagined.

It’s what The
Buddha called, “a tacit intuition”.

Practice of The Gold Key Release
dissolves the sense of “something-ness”, so that we may intuit our
formless presence, which, in that moment of intuition, we recognize as
having always been.

When we catch that we are
considering “EVER-HERENESS” to be “something we can identify”, WE
RECOGNIZE THE FALLACY OF IT because EVER-HERENESS is not a product of
mind or an object of mind. It is of an order completely other than mind;
it is “formless feeling”, a kind of feeling that dissolves attention so we come to rest in a natural way as “consciousness without an object”.  At that moment of recognition,
we may release what we have mis-identified as EVER-HERENESS,” and intuit
the field of radiant awareness that underlies everything and pervades
us, ourselves.

Contrary to everything we have thought or have heard, Reality is unknown by us, unknown to us — not a form of knowledge, at all, but ineffable experience that cannot be reduced to comprehension.  Reality cannot be defined.

The reason The Lightening Bolt
works is that our habitual states are always forms of definition or
limited conditioning, whereas Reality is inherently formless.  When we
let go of our sense of Reality, we are not letting go of Reality, but of conditioning mis-identified as Reality, but which we have held onto as if it were Reality.

Said, again, when we do the release-step of The Lightening Bolt (The Hammer of Thor),
we may think we are releasing the effort to intuit, identify, or locate
Reality (our Here-ness), when what we are really releasing an effort
that keeps us stuck in our conditioning, which, as I said, we confuse
with “Here-ness”.  When we release the effort to intuit “Here-ness”
(or “Now-ness”, or “Reality”), we release the force of our conditioning
along with it. What’s left is the intuition of formless Reality.

Most strictly speaking, “Here-ness” is always already the case and always already our present condition.  We are always, already Here — so anything we may do to intuit “Here-ness” is in addition to Here-ness and can only obscure our intuition of “Here-ness” as our already condition.  The release that occurs in The Lightening Bolt only clears that way for that intuition.

The
way to intuit Reality, or Here-ness, or “The Now”, is to let go of it
and any effort to intuit it.  Then, something entirely unexpected
flashes forward or the way clears into it. Beyond these words, nothing
useful may be said.

So, strike The Lightening Bold a few times in a row.  Notice the result.  It gets interesting.

The Lightning Bolt

Thus:

1. In your memory, fully experience whatever
   experience you would like to dissolve, whether a negative condition, an
   ideal that you recognize compulsively limits you, or any arbitrary thing
   you might like to change.

   The steps are:

   1. Feel its existence. [advanced:] Intend its existence. (one breath)
   2. Feel its persistence. [advanced:] Remember its persistence. (one breath)
   3. Feel its location. [advanced:] Attend to its location, as felt or experienced. (one breath)
   4. Feel its direction (where it’s going). [advanced:] Imagine its direction. It’s a kind of opening-to (one breath)

   Do not think, ruminate about, or analyze it; that’s not experiencing. Steady your attention on each step long enough for it to stabilize; you’ll get an experience.

   You do the advanced forms once you easily remember the basic steps.

2. Feel it all as a single intensity.
3. Notice what is not that. Feel until your
   attention steadies a bit.  Relax into it. Let yourself lose track of that shape.

   (If
   you can’t let yourself lose track and feel outside the shape, notice
   what constrains you — some tension or holding on. Feel that and continue.)

4. Now, switch to noticing your sense of “Here-ness” — that which has always been the same, all your life.

   ALTERNATELY: Feel your whole body as the shape of a sensation.

5. Notice what you do to locate, “Here-ness”.
   The action feels like “centering”. It’s the target of the lightening-strike.

   ALTERNATELY: Hold the sensation, draw and release three breaths.

6. Recognize that sensation as a temporary, stressful effort.  Stop holding onto it.  Let it go.  Lose track of it.

You will feel tensions dissipate, yourself reshape, and probably sigh spontaneously as the experience dissolves partially or completely.

You
have felt the experience as it is, diffused your attention as much as
you can, and then located and struck at the center of your sense of “persistent reality” and then dissolved it — hence the name, The Lightning Bolt. Imagine a little puff of smoke where your sense of reality used to be. Just kidding.

The Hammer of Thor
The Hammer of Thor uses the power of intention to undo the effects of conditioning. It reveals how our own intention, running on automatic, keeps that conditioning in existence, and relieves us of that condition either in big chunks or, in the case of extremely dense conditioning, layer by layer.

The structure of The Hammer of Thor is as follows:

Locate and identify the feeling of the condition or conditioning you want to pulverize and dissipate. This step is similar to the equivalent steps in the other procedures presented on this page. You may use variations of this step found in other procedures. Use what works well, for you.

With that feeling-attention, follow these steps:

Think to yourself, with intent to experience it:

1. Intending
2. Intending
3. Intending intending
4. Intending [the condition or conditioning].
5. Feel for and release your intention about it.

Repeat to a satisfactory result (dissolution of the item).

The Thunderclap / (a-Rumblin’ in the Canyon)

Rationale

The things we experience, presently,
have a certain momentum to them, maintained by our memories of them.
 Those memories occupy the space in which we would like to put a new
experience, so we have to remove them to make space.

The Thunderclap consists of two parts.

1. By
   alternating between remembering our current experience and imagining our desired experience,
   we loosen the grip and dissolve the density of the current experience.
    That action is the part of the “Thunderclap” that creates the needed space.
2. In the space created, we attend to and intend our desired experience.
   That “attending” and “intending” is a new reverberation in the world.

Once you’ve created space and set up a new reverberation, persons and conditions around you that can resonate with your intention begin to do so and, as they show up, you will perceive in them a possibility of fulfilling your intention.

You may use The Thunderclap to fulfill desires or to transform conditions — to go beyond and then to go beyond going beyond.

The Thunderclap is thus:

1. Identify an experience you would like to have.
2. Call up whatever you may remember about it.
3. Imagine the possibility.
4. Return to your memory of it.
   You will notice that your memories color your sense of possibility.

Now, when the space is noticeably clearer:

1. Imagine how it all might change.
2. Remember how it all might change.
3. Imagine how it all might change.

Now, when your perception of how it all might change is vivid:

Apply your intention to what you have just imagined, one last time, to the degree you are able, and do The Lightning Bolt on it.

Repeat to a satisfactory result. Each cycle through will be different.  The closer your imagining gets to your felt ideal, the easier it will be to apply your intention (the push to have things change) to it.

Thus:

1. Identify
2. Remember
3. Imagine
4. Remember
5. Imagine 
6. Remember
7. Imagine
8. Intend.

Repeat to a satisfactory result.

Stages 2-4 and 5-7 are forms of reverberation and Step 8, like the ongoing rumbling of thunder.

You will feel your imagination contact results that are more and more in line with your intention, with each repetition.

If you have difficulty reaching a satisfactory result, do The Lightning Bolt and then return to The Thunderclap.

Transcendental Pervasion
All experience arises within and from the Unknown Unknown. We arise from and within the Unknown Unknown.

The Unknown Unknown may be intuited by noticing the totality of

• what we see in this moment — and what is beyond it
• what we hear in this moment — and the silence beyond it
• what we feel in this moment — and what is beyond all that

This is not a thinking process (other than to get us started); it’s a sensing process (possible only when your ability to pay attention to something is stronger than your attraction to thinking).

A verse by Lao Tzu, found in The Tao Teh Ching, “points to” the Unknown Unknown:

That which we look for, beyond seeing,

and call the unseen,

listen for, beyond hearing,

and call the unheard,

reach for, beyond grasping,

and call the withheld

merge beyond understanding in a Oneness

that does not merely rise and give light

set and leave darkness

but forever sends forth a succession of living things

as mysterious as the unbegotten existence to which they return.

That is why men have called them empty phenomena

with no face to meet, no back to follow.

Yet one who is anciently aware of existence

is master of every moment,

feels no break, since time-beyond-time

in the way life flows.

This procedure depends upon your having sufficient mastery of your attention/intention/memory/imagination to remain free of the attraction of thought and in direct experience. It goes as follows:

1. Identify your “item” (conditioning).
2. Feel its location in you, its shape and intensity.
3. Switch: Feel it and all what is beyond it (radiationally outwardly) toward the space that contains it all.
4. You cannot feel that space because it’s the Unknown Unknown; what you can feel is your inability to locate it.
5. Return to your item in the intuition of “inability to locate it”. Bring that intuition toward your item.

   At first, you may not be able to locate your item, same as you couldn’t locate the Unknown Unknown.

   When your item reappears to your noticing, notice that it is a location of density within the Unknown Unknown, which pervades it.

6. Feel the contrast between the density of your item and the lack of density of the Unknown Unknown.
7. Stay with it until your item starts to lose its cohesiveness, to dissolve and dissipate.

The actual doing of the procedure is much simpler than the words used to describe it. The first time is the most difficult. After that (if you have adequate control of your own mind), the process is readily available.

other TetraSeed Transformation procedures 

• The Gold Key Release
• The Middle-Way Memory Matrix Ritual
• The Wish-Fulfilling Gem
• The Spell-Maker/Breaker
• The “Vajra” Self-Rectifying Process
• Esoteric Somatics and Tibetan Buddhism

http://lawrencegoldsomatics.blogspot.com/2015/01/tetraseed-modulations-vajra-self.html

The Gold Key Release
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copyright 2017 Lawrence Gold