Brigitte Hansmann was certified as a practitioner of DFA (Dugan-French Approach) Somatic Pattern Recognition in 1988 and as an instructor in DFA practitioner trainings in 1997, the year her first book Con los pies en el suelo – Forma del cuerpo y vision del mundo (With One’s Feet on the Ground – Body Shape and World View), was published by Ediciones Icaria in Barcelona, Spain.

Her second book Respirar con árboles (Breathing with Trees) is about to be published in 2013 by

Ediciones Urano, also in Barcelona. She holds a diploma in Applied Linguistic Sciences from the University of Mainz, FAS Germersheim, and is certified as an Archetypal Pattern Analyst by the Assisi Institute for the Study of Archetypal Pattern Analysis in Brattleboro, VT. Contact: [email protected], www.ermie.net, www.dfa-europa.com.

 

 

Revelations hile I was digesting the keynote speech delivered by Dr. James Oschman at the IASI Symposium in Seattle in 2005 I had a revelation. It took me years of study to put it into words. Ever since I learnt to work with belief systems in the shape of the body during my training as a DFA practitioner, I had wanted to understand how beliefs arise from experience and literally shape our bodies. First of all I looked at the interactive events taking place in the nervous system that lead to selective coordination of complex patterns of interconnectivity between neural groups (Edelman, 1992) and wrote about it in Con los pies en suelo (1997). Gerald Edelman coined the term remembered present (p. 122) to denote the primary consciousness shared by all mammals and many other animals. Think of Pavlov’s dogs that learnt to override pain because it had become associated with gratifying experiences. In the same way, large areas of people’s day-to-day experience are perceived through this filter that shapes the beliefs held in place by repetitive patterns. At the level of this primary consciousness the present is not experienced firsthand, but remembered.

This led me to zone in on the role of myofascial tone in habitual patterns (Hansmann, 2003). We discover early on in life that we can tighten our muscles to interrupt the flow of unwelcome feelings. As tension turns habitual it becomes the resting  tone of the tissue. I came to think of the parts of the brain (basal nuclei and hindbrain) involved in the organization of motor behavior and posture and in regulating basic, vital functions such as the tone of myofascial tissues and rhythms including breathing, heartbeat, and digestion as the dragon, based on McLean’s term the reptilian brain (McLean, 1990). Habitual patterns in motor, cognitive, and emotional functions are the dragon’s territory (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A fgurative representation of the dragon’s territory in the brain, the basal nuclei and hindbrain.

 

It is fascinating to discover, together with my clients, how these patterns have come into being: how clients hold their beliefs about life, the world, and themselves within the limited range of the initial conditions of their lives, and how these beliefs shape their bodies. The selective coordination of complex patterns of interconnectivity between neural groups makes perfect sense for how all this comes about. But, working with the shape of the body in the particular way structural integrators do, it often happens that the tissue is nudged into letting go of the shape it is holding and a flow of information sets in that brings things into awareness that had been held underneath the threshold of consciousness.

These effects encompass a wide range, both physically in the body as well as experientially, and they happen extremely fast. Transmission through complex interconnected neural groups is very fast, but it does take a certain time, while those shifts seem to take place almost instantaneously. I knew there had to be something else. As a matter of fact, years later I learnt that Dr. Oschman called it precognitive consciousness. He wrote:

Connective tissue consciousness is far more rapid and actually precedes neurological consciousness. Connective tissue consciousness arises because the living matrix is an excitable medium, just as nerve cells are excitable. We only become aware of this [precognitive consciousness] /…/ when we become aware of all parts of our body working together and responding with an astonishing speed and coordination, far faster than thought.

(Oschman, 2003, p. 56)

Several articles by Dr. Mae Wan Ho had caught my attention (Ho, 1996, 1997, 2004). She described the liquid crystalline quality of water associated with protein and the coherence it conveys to the whole organism, as a ground-laying factor in conscious experience. Under a polarizing light microscope in Dr. Ho’s lab, a fruit fly larva appeared like a liquid crystal display flashing in all the colors of the rainbow. These images could mean only one thing: the molecules inside, including the water molecules which make up 70 percent of body weight, are all aligned with their positive and negative charges pointing in the same directions, and moving in a coordinated way (Ho, 1993, 2006). This web of coherent protein-associated water extends through the whole organism, from gross surface structures into the smallest structures within cell nuclei, in humans as in fruit flies. Information can travel through it almost instantaneously. This seemed to explain what I had felt in my own hands, seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears and heart, when a subtle shift in my clients’ bodies suddenly revealed some unconscious assumption that had kept them from living their lives fully. The new understanding they derive from this experience cannot erase the pattern, but it allows them to develop a relationship with it and gives them tools to work with it.

All this was simmering in me when I listened to Dr. Oschman’s presentation at the Symposium in Seattle. That morning, the understanding that had been dawning from Dr. Ho’s articles came alive. I was vibrating with the excitement of it for weeks, or maybe I still am now, seven years later.

 

Case Study: Is Water the Site of Prenatal Memory?

Rosa, a client who I was working with, had been informed by her mother that she (the mother) had been raped and was not sure whether her husband was my client’s biological father. We had been working for many months to help Rosa metabolize the implications of that revelation, when she physically experienced a violent onslaught of an overwhelming, utterly acid, and convulsive power. She felt as if her body had just extended out from a round into an elongated shape, while she was holding on with all her strength in order to not be carried away by an irresistible force. She said she had been struggling throughout all of her life to keep those sensations at bay. They had always been lurking in the background, overpowering her sporadically. It was the first time that she felt safe enough to let them take their course, while observing and describing them. A round shape extending into an elongated one points to a moment between day ten and 15 of pregnancy, while the disgust and terror her mother must have felt washed through her and threatened to uproot her from her mother’s womb where she had barely been implanted when her mother was raped. Without her mother’s revelation Rosa could never have guessed where those sensations came from. It is highly likely that eventually the energy required to keep them suppressed would have taken a toll on her health.

How could there be a memory of the event in Rosa’s body when there was no nervous system yet? It had to be in the body-wide web of protein-associated water. So far, I had pictured neurotransmitters from sensations that were experienced as threatening, unpleasant, or otherwise undesirable, accumulating around nerve endings and contributing through reentry to the selective coordination of complex patterns of interconnectivity, strengthening some connections while others were being weakened or interrupted altogether. But this could not have been the case here. At day ten or 15, there would have been no nerves or neurotransmitters yet. Dr. Erich Blechschmidt wrote that “young embryos are transparent and, on account of their high water content, appear almost structureless” (1978, p. 23), but what about the structure of water itself?

 

One Head Spinning

The deeper I went into the study of water, the more my head was spinning. Every new aspect I understood opened up another question which led me on to new discoveries, more questions, and more sources. I became a friend of Dr. Ho’s Institute for Science in Society, so I could ask questions and keep up to date on the latest findings.

In order to understand water’s behavior, we have to delve into its subatomic structures and quantum electrodynamics. The liquid crystalline quality displayed by the image of a fruit fly larva discovered by Mae Wan Ho demonstrates the coherent organization of the molecules in its body and gives concrete evidence that living organisms are coherent to a high degree, even quantum coherent (Ho, 1996, 1997, 2006), meaning that even the subatomic particles behave in a coherent manner.

Quantum electrodynamics shows that liquid water appears in two phases, coherence domains (CD) and bulk water (Ho, 2011; Voeikov & Del Giudice, 2012). Water at interfaces with other molecules (interfacial water) tends to organize in a coherent fashion. Thus water in the body can be considered as one giant coherence domain (Ho, 2011a). Water comprises more than 70% of our weight and 99% of the molecules in our body (Del Giudice & Tedeschi, 2009). Mae Wan Ho (2006) found that the high degree of order in the water associated with collagen in connective tissues make them ideal for intercommunication by jump conduction of protons.

Dr. Oschman calls this body-wide web the living matrix. “Its fundamental nutrient is information. Every conceivable kind of vibratory information courses through this web, forming ever-branching rivers and streams and trickles. And the smallest trickles are as essential as the major rivers, since they represent vital information flowing back and forth between the whole and its smallest component parts” (Oschman, IASI Symposium, 2005). “Nature uses every available channel to allow its oscillators to talk to each other” (2011, May), he states. He points out that charge transfers like protons and hydroxyls migrating through the hydration shell and electrons being semiconducted through helical proteins are vital to life (2011, March).

 

Beliefs Burnt into Water

Oschman, Ho, Del Giudice, and Voeikov are describing the qualities of water that allow for coherent function in behavior and health. But I wanted to understand what forces interfere with these qualities inherent in our nature, creating habitual patterns in individual and collective behavior that may be outright incoherent and have degenerative effects on the overall physical and psychological health of the individual organism and our collective ability to live together in peace, even though our nervous system attributes survival value to them.

The electromagnetic feld of hypertonic and hypotonic tissues, on the other hand, would appear more static, maintaining the status quo of habitual holding patterns.

In a sense, our somatic experience is displayed on the liquid crystal in our bodies much like a show on a plasma TV and information on computer screens.

The cursor on the computer is always blinking and when there is no other activity, after a while, a screen-saver comes on, because the image may get burnt into the liquid crystal if the things displayed remain still for too long. This would render the screen useless. The body is a field of sensations in continuous fluctuation relating to the processes of living. But beliefs about life, the world, and oneself are held in place by patterns of habitual tension. The fields generated by this tension, or myofascial tone, act on the interfacial water that hydrates all tissues throughout the whole body.

The resonant information in the water tends to remain outside one’s awareness for a number of reasons: first of all, it is subtle; frequently it stems from the preverbal period at the initial  or even prenatal stages of life; and it is often rejected as unpleasant. During early development, individuals create characteristic habitual holding patterns in an attempt to keep experience within the realm of pleasant sensations and stay clear of unwelcome ones. As a mechanism for adaptation to circumstances, it is a means of survival. Due to an individual’s holding pattern, sensations that seem to reflect perceptions of objective qualities of events taking place in the present moment actually reflect the remembered present of beliefs developed under the initial conditions of life. Edelman distinguishes this primary consciousness which humans share with mammals and other animals from the higher- order consciousness of the human animal that is conscious of being conscious (1992). Human higher- order consciousness makes it possible to develop a perspective that can prevent one from being flooded with remembered present, as long as one recognizes the reiterations it brings about as such. It takes constant practice to keep this perspective and avoid falling into the flood. On the other hand, the stronger the holding pattern that  keeps  the flow of feeling at bay in fear of being overcome by it, the greater the intensity of its onslaught from  the unconscious. The high level of energy required to keep those sensations outside one’s conscious experience brings along hypertonic muscles and fascia and an acidic medium, as well as a host of related symptomatic disorders and diseases, or a combination of hyper- and hypotonic muscles and fascia, typical of depression and other disorders.

DFA practitioners frequently observe that when habitual tension relaxes, a flow of sensations sets in that may be unpleasant and sometimes even painful. Holding patterns have often developed in order to keep unwanted sensations outside one’s awareness. But no matter how well the muscle tension fulfills this purpose, what those sensations are informing about is not cancelled out by it, and the electric charges and chemical substances involved do not disappear but are retained in the body. They are the fire that burns ground-laying beliefs arising from experience in the first year(s) of life into the liquid crystal in the body. They create the acid that etches these beliefs into our flesh. To a certain extent these beliefs remain static throughout life and constitute the basic assumptions about the world, about life, and about oneself that tend to remain underneath the threshold of consciousness.

Dr. Voeikov and Dr. Del Giudice (2009) point out: “…when the assembly of molecules becomes dense enough, the electromagnetic field produced by the molecule fluctuation becomes large enough to keep the molecules oscillating and transform the phenomenon from a transient to a stationary state” (p. 67). Something that was experienced a certain way in a specific situation at a given moment in time becomes a filter to perception. From then on, everything is perceived through this prism.

 

Fresh Views from the Water’s Edge – My Hypothesis

Dr. Oschman suggested that I listen to Dr. Gerald Pollack’s (2009) faculty lecture at the University of Washington entitled Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views from the Water’s Edge. Apart from settling several of the questions that had made my head spin, it gave me words to formulate my hypothesis.

Dr. Pollack’s research team found that the layers of water immediately adjacent to hydrophilic surfaces, such as protein, tend to keep a negative charge, as do the proteins themselves (2011, 2012). Some of the protons, which carry a positive charge, migrate away from the surface and accumulate at a certain distance. This creates a charge gradient as in a battery. When water receives additional protons, it becomes more acid. Protons being the carrier of positive charge, the higher the proton count the more acid the water becomes and the higher its positive electric charge. Subjective experience reported by numerous clients also correlates hypertonic myofascial tissues with a sense of acidity and electric charge.

I propose that, based on the rotational velocity of their subatomic particles, muscles and fascia with a tonicity that allows for healthy function would show dynamic fluctuations according to the organism’s activities and development. The electromagnetic field (EMF) of hypertonic and hypotonic tissues, on the other hand, would appear more static, maintaining the status quo of habitual holding patterns. As I listened to Dr. Pollack’s  speech and contemplated his illustration of the charge gradient, which I used to make Figure 2, I began to understand what brings about the constant buzzing sensation so many hypertonic clients experience, once the tone of their tissues starts to mellow out enough for them  to be able to feel themselves. It became clear to me that hypertonic myofascial tissues must generate a stronger separation of charges and fuel a static field which may lie at the root of the buzzing. In hypotonic tissues, on the other hand, the separation of charges may be too weak to keep up a healthy level of activity. In this way the resonant frequencies of water molecules in and next to hypertonic and hypotonic tissues seem to play a role in keeping habitual patterns in soma and psyche static.

Vladimir L. Voeikov and Emilio Del Giudice (2009) found that due to the fact that molecules  able to oscillate at the same frequency are mutually attracted within coherent water domains (CD), “the output energy of each chemical reaction is received by the CD and modifies its frequency of oscillation that in turn modifies the molecule species able to interact. In this way the surface of CDs becomes the site of an electromagnetically assisted catalysis able to evolve with time as a product of its past history” (p. 73).

Catalysis may speed a chemical transformation or slow it down or inhibit it. Sensations that are similar to others experienced in the past that have not been metabolized into conscious experience, but are kept underneath the threshold of consciousness by habitual tension, inform as well as reflect the beliefs we have about life, the world, and ourselves. Their output energy is received by the highly ordered water, and modifies its frequency of oscillation and the species of molecules able to interact. With time it may speed a reaction, slow it down, or inhibit it more and more. For example, we might become so sensitive towards specific sensory information that we react to it extremely fast, before we are even aware of having received any information of any kind. At a given point in time, this speed may save lives, but is equally able to create disruptive behaviors and disproportional bursts of affect. On the other hand, it is also possible to train this sensitivity and responsiveness for creative purposes.

The system can grow so used to destructive input that its ability to adequately defend itself grows slower and slower. On the other hand, we can also deliberately slow down our habitual reactions to gain some time and evaluate the present situation to discern the extent of its apparent resemblance to the initial conditions under which the habitual pattern was established, so that we can develop a response that is more adequate to the actual situation at hand. People who are traumatized and those who cannot tolerate the guilt of something they have done tend to inhibit the flow of sensations that might bring the trauma or guilt into their awareness altogether. Of course, the information contained in those sensations does not go anywhere. It will manifest in one way or another in the person’s life.

 

Beliefs Acquire an Imaginary Mass

The beliefs we have about life, ourselves, and the world arise from sensations we felt compelled to keep underneath the threshold of conscious experience. They feel totally real and tangible, so much so that we take them to reflect direct experience of the present. Edelman speaks about the remembered present in the context of experiences organized by patterns of interconnectivity between neural groups. In 1985, Becker suggested that in all multicellular animals today a crystalline molecular lattice and the nervous system together form a Figure 2.

Hypertonicity seems to generate a greater charge gradient that “engraves” or “burns” sensations into the liquid crystal. This is the ground that beliefs arise from. hybrid system for transmission of information. The nervous system seems to have evolved within the older crystalline lattice for handling more complex information. According to quantum field theory, energy from the vacuum field seems to interact with matter in the form of photons. The photon of an electromagnetic field trapped in a water CD acquires an imaginary mass and is therefore unable to leave the CD (Del Guidice, 2010; Ho, 2011a). In other words, the light energy involved in those sensations that make up the emotional background tone of our lives is trapped in the coherently ordered water hydrating our tissues because it acquires an imaginary mass. So the sensations it encodes seem to reflect present experience, while actually they are nothing but reflections of what was true when we started to use the physical tension of our muscles to interrupt the flow of feeling. Those photons can then no longer leave the coherent water domain. A transient process has become stationary. This description of a process taking place on the subatomic level can accurately be applied to what goes on in the life of a person, when an unconscious belief system embedded in an archetypal field is activated by circumstances that resonate with it.

Most beliefs arise from perceptions that have actually been accurate within a specific set of circumstances at a certain point in time. Mario (age 45) came to see me because he was suffering from stress at work. We found out that he felt small and insignificant, whereas everybody else seemed big and much more important than him (Hansmann, 2013). He grew up in a small family business. On any regular day, ten to twelve adults moved around the house, busy with tasks that seemed more important and significant than Mario’s games. This might not have left as deep a trace as it did leave, if it hadn’t been for an earlier experience it resonates with: feeling incapable of participating in the life taking place on the other side of the walls, when he was left on his own in a room tied in a cradle, because there was no one available to be with him. The sensation was intolerable. Mario used his muscles to stop the flow of the feeling. As he grew up he struggled to be top notch in everything he tried, and actually achieved pretty good results. Nonetheless, far into his adult life he kept feeling small and seeing everybody else as big, busy with a life he felt incapable of participating in. Mario’s muscles had settled into a hypertonic holding pattern in an effort to leave no space for the unwelcome sensations his system remembers. The oscillatory frequency of the subatomic particles making up the fascia and muscle cells loads energy into the coherent domains of the interfacial water and keeps the remembered sensation present throughout his body, organizing his experience according to the belief system embedded in the archetypal field of the initial conditions of his life.

Jungian analysts in general would speak of a complex. Dr. Kaufman and Dr. Conforti define a complex as quanta of energy organized around a theme. “When activated, a complex disrupts usual modes of functioning and [… creates] maladaptive behaviors and disproportional bursts of affect” (Conforti, 2008, p. 58). When Mario’s belief system gets activated, he falls into an undifferentiated state of mind typical of the first year of life with all the feelings his system remembers from that period of his life. Although his pattern allows him to keep up appearances, it keeps him from enjoying life, the results of his work, and relationships with people who in fact do appreciate him for who he is. The pattern was a mechanism of adaptation to the circumstances at the beginning of his life.

It holds his beliefs about the world (it is a place where everybody is busy with something he cannot partake in), life (it goes on beyond the walls around him; he cannot reach it), and himself (he is small, insignificant, unable to do what it takes) in place and keeps them static. The electromagnetic energy created by the myofascial tension necessary to keep up the pattern engraved the belief system into the interfacial water, so that the beliefs act as a filter for perception. He does not perceive things as they are, but through the filter of the beliefs established under the initial conditions of his life.

 

Releasing the Charge of Trauma

Under traumatic circumstances, the organism chooses from among three options: fight, flight, or freeze. If none of the three fulfill their goal to protect the person against the impact of whatever trauma threatens to overwhelm them, a fourth option is to collapse (Levine, 1999, 2010). All these have survival value and, once the traumatic situation is over, require a series of steps to restore inner balance. For instance, electric and chemical charges may need to diminish through trembling, crying, shaking, or completion of movements that could not be carried out under the traumatic circumstance, and through talking about what happened to gain an understanding of a complex situation that happened too fast to really capture with the conscious mind. Often these steps are not taken out of fear of the sensations involved in the traumatic experience.

If fight or flight does the job of getting one out of harm’s reach, they can be metabolized with relative ease. After all, one’s action was effective. But in the case of freeze or collapse, the tensions or lack thereof keep the organism in a state of permanent alert or overwhelm in view of a terrible threat of something about to happen. The myofascial tone maintains the energy level that engraves the experience in interfacial water, keeping the oscillation of the hydrogen nuclei within a specific frequency.

The myofascial tone maintains the energy level that engraves the experience in interfacial water. Developing a relationship with the parts of one’s structural, physiological, and psychological make-up that make themselves felt through pain or destructive behaviors offers the opportunity to discover and understand what is needed and to provide those aspects of oneself with adequate care. Sensations are messengers informing about something. When the message has been delivered, received, and adequately responded to, the messenger can rest. The pattern remains but, once it is known both on the cognitive and sensory level, human higher-order consciousness can recognize the remembered present it holds in place as such and look beyond to see what is actually going on at present.

 

The Preferred Spin Axis

Magnetic resonance is present when two magnetic fields, one steady and one pulsating, come together (Becker, 1985). The role played by the background of low-frequency EMF is to provide a resonant alternating magnetic field in order to load energy into the water CDs. In higher organisms, such as humans, the researchers suggest it is produced by the nervous system (Ho, 2011b; Montagnier et al., 2007), specifically, I would add, the parts in charge of regulating tonicity. Mae Wan Ho (2011c) explains: “Depending on the local chemical environment, different protons in a molecule resonate at slightly different frequencies. Both this frequency shift and the fundamental resonant frequency are directly proportional to the strength of the magnetic field” (n.p.).

Hydrogen nuclei consist of just one proton that spins around a slightly wobbly axis. I believe the spin axis of a significant amount of hydrogen nuclei in the body to be aligned with the earth’s magnetic field as the steady primary field. I have not found any reference to that effect anywhere, but the water researchers I asked during the seventh Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of Water in 2012 in Vermont, where I presented a poster on the subject of this article (Hansmann 2012), all agreed that it was highly likely. After all, we have evolved within this field. In a resonant magnetic field, like those generated by hypertonic tissues, the spin axis tilts and precesses, realigning itself with this secondary field. This phenomenon is used in magnetic resonance imaging with greatly enhanced magnetic fields. When the secondary field is switched off, the spin axis returns to its preferred alignment within the steady field and gives off a radio signal as it does so. This radio signal creates the image obtained through MRI. A similar effect occurs when hypertonic tissues soften and acquire a more balanced tone. In the moment the tissue softens, beliefs held underneath the threshold of consciousness come to awareness. It is as if, with the hydrogen nuclei in their preferred alignment, the surface of the water recovers its capacity to reflect the images of our past experience, so they can be seen and distinguished from the actual present. You have to be willing to feel what is there, of course, and to allow time for the meaning you have associated with the sensations belonging to that experience to become clear, so it can be voiced.

 

Working with Beliefs Reflected in Liquid

Crystal

Simultaneous work on three interwoven levels makes it possible to recognize belief systems that shape the body: physical intervention, education, and emotional process, as combined by Annie Duggan and Janie French in DFA Somatic Pattern Recognition.

 

The Physical Intervention

Although the physical DFA intervention is quite different from that used in most other approaches to structural integration, numerous goals are common.

The wave-like motion of the DFA intervention aims at balancing the body within the gravitational field of Earth, at freeing the motions of breath, the archetypal motion of life, at restoring connections in the nervous system that have been interrupted, and at creating new connections. It focuses on relationship rather than on trying to fix or improve anything considered wrong. With this hands-on intervention, DFA practitioners follow the direction of the muscular pull and go into the shape formed by the pattern of habitual holding, even slightly beyond the shape of the pattern. In this way, the practitioner takes over the holding, thus taking the effort out of whatever it is the client is doing with this contraction of his or her tissues. This lowers the noise produced by the tension so that the client is in a better position to perceive what it is he or she is doing in that shape. It goes along with what is taking place in the body and so does not confront the person with anything they would need to defend against. In this way a perturbation is introduced into the singular trajectory of the holding pattern. Comparable to sonar, the wavelike motion brings hypertonic and hypotonic tissues into profile and opens pathways for sensory perception and cognition of previously unconscious information. It balances tonicity at a more functional level and enhances the fluid quality of movement and experience.

 

Pattern Recognition and Education

The coordinates of the gravitational field offer a frame of reference for pattern recognition in physical structure and movement and support for orientation towards a more generative alignment. Archetypal fields make it possible to orient one’s behavior and sensory experience and recognize patterns in relation to essential aspects of life: what is inherent in being a mother, a father, a daughter, a son, a teacher, a service provider, a health attendant, a grown-up, a child, a student, a politician, a citizen; what dynamics are part and parcel of specific stages in life. The same as gravitational and electromagnetic fields, archetypal fields also have poles that define all the ways in which a human activity can be embodied. On the positive end would be all those properties that are generative for the development of life or of the specific function, on the negative end those that are detrimental.

As objective frames of reference for subjective experience, the concept of archetypal fields makes it possible to be highly specific in identifying the patterns that keep a person’s life in a negative alignment and in reorienting towards a more generative one. As one learns to be with the flow of sensations in the body, instead of being stuck in the habitual pattern of struggling to overcome them or maintain them outside one’s awareness, they can be perceived within a wider context than within the narrow range of present personal experience. Sensations that are out of place in an adult life can make all the sense in the world when seen within the context of an earlier archetypal stage of development. With a wider perspective one may discover that these sensations are not necessarily a reflection of what is really happening, but of what one believes is taking place. Instead of pertaining to a perception in the present, it turns out that they belong to the remembered present of belief. When the adult and understanding aspect of the person keeps these sensations in perspective as coming from parts of their experience that are trapped in a pattern, charges are separated, as in a battery with a positive and a negative pole. If one puts a battery into an appliance the right way, it will power the device. If one puts it in the wrong way, it will not work, and over time it will even damage the device. In the same way, as long as one struggles against those undesired sensations, not only is one stuck in a rut, but the ongoing conflict depletes one’s resources and will end up damaging one’s health.

But as one learns to embrace these sensations, no matter how unpleasant they may be, energy can flow between the poles and provide the necessary power for the process of reorientation. In any case, what is most important about these sensations from the remembered present are the aspects of the person that are trapped in them and need attention to continue their development. Apart from the physical intervention, somatic pattern recognition requires a space with specific coordinates where this process can take place and adequate orientation for it to unfold.

 

The Emotional Process

The third aspect of somatic pattern recognition aims at providing space for completion of the interrupted flow of feeling and gaining awareness and understanding of the circumstances under which it got stuck, so that developmental processes can get back on course and be completed. Attention to the bipersonal field created through the interaction between practitioner and client is primordial, since the client’s life patterns are reflected in the interaction taking place within the defined coordinates of this field. As soon as a client makes contact to set up an appointment, his or her personal field interacts with the practitioner’s and the field of the therapeutic relationship.

Annie Duggan and Janie French had observed  the phenomenon in their private practice and found explanations for it in Dr. Robert Langs’s work. He recommends a steady setting that “should offer a maternal-like hold to enable the therapist to serve as a sound container for the patient’s pathology” (1979). Along the same lines, Duggan and French speak about providing a safe space where a new life can gestate for the person seeking help. This secure space is an indispensable requirement for the unfolding of developmental processes that have been interrupted and for restoring the flow of emotions related to them. The coordinates of the setting where this encounter takes place have millenary roots, adapted to the specific relationship between practitioners and their clients: set time, set place, set fee, confidentiality, anonymity, and clear boundaries in the therapeutic relationship.

Beyond the aspects of their conscious experience which clients communicate, the interactive order within this therapeutic frame creates the field where the unconscious dynamics that drive people’s lives become manifest and can be brought to awareness. A professional trained to translate these manifestations of the objective psyche and distinguish them from the person’s subjective communications can help to understand the dynamics in the context within which they first arose and where they manifest in present life and to make it possible to introduce new options that change the trajectory along which they tend to gravitate.

Dr. Michael Conforti (2008) points  out  that the highly patterned dynamics of these fields “structure events so that core issues in clients’, and often even in therapists’, lives are re-enacted in the therapeutic setting with remarkable fidelity to the archetypal field within which each is embedded” (p. 170). He recommends early intervention, i.e., naming the pattern as soon as possible in order to avoid entrainment into synchronized patterns taking place in the interactive field. For this reason, practitioners should be as cognizant as possible of archetypal dynamics as well as of the personal factors they bring into the field within the coordinates of  the therapeutic relationship. In general, a strong resonance entrains a weaker one. Alignment with the coordinates of the gravitational field and the archetypal field of therapeutic relationships makes it possible to identify entrainment with a client’s field. In cases of abuse victims, for example, it happens frequently that there are deviations from  the ground rules of the therapeutic contract; in cases of abandonment, something may happen that makes it impossible for the practitioner to be available for the client at the established time. When the professional recognizes these attempts of psyche to constellate the situation that needs to be attended to, they can be named and show the way towards healing.

 

Conclusion

According to Chinese folklore, dragons administrate water. Regulating tissue tone, breathing, and other rhythms, the older parts of the nervous system I refer to as the dragon, administrate water in the body. As long as our beliefs about life, ourselves, and the world remain unconscious, they constitute the emotional background tone of our lives, comparable to the canned music in a supermarket, an airport, or a hotel lobby that you can barely hear, but it insidiously colors your state of mind. When the tissues that habitually hold these beliefs underneath the threshold of consciousness acquire a more balanced tone in alignment with the greater force fields of the earth, through sensory experience, received, processed, and translated into images, symbols, or analogies by the right hemisphere of the brain, they can be recognized as what they are: mere beliefs grown out of the knowledge of an inexperienced child. Through a cooperative venture of both hemispheres, each with its own specific linguistic skills, they can then be put into words, so that they can subsequently be analyzed within the context of our known history by the left hemisphere. In  this way it becomes possible to distinguish to what degree present experience is tainted by reflections from the past or is in accordance with what is really going on here and now.

Recognition of beliefs about life, the world, and oneself that arose out of the experience in the initial stages of life levels a path towards growth and development beyond the continual reiteration of patterns created under those early conditions, towards the joy of experiencing life in its fullness, and towards the possibility of resolving conflicts in peace and with respect. Gratitude seems to have the power to mellow the hold of hypertonic tissues and set a new tone. So thank you very much, water, for all you do for me! And thanks to you for your attention!

 

References

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[:]Working with Beliefs Reflected in Liquid Crystal