Deep Freedom Now

In many cultures we are  taught to divide our experience in good and bad, high and low and to disconnect from a whole range of what we are already experiencing.  Certain felt states are desirable, others are shameful and guilt-ridden.  The devastation that we wreak upon external ecologies are simply reflections of the devastation wrought upon the ecology of our own human spirit.  The false dichotomy of “high/low” shatters the world into a forest of splinters that feeds very little.

In indigenous cultures with intact initiatory and wisdom traditions, initiates learn that “high/low” is a false dichotomy.  The warrior learns to weep.   The heights are not divorced from the depths.  The eagle does not fly without the termite surrendering the wood back to the mouths of those who, in turn, feed the eagle.

The premise of every modern political, religious, economic, medical, “therapeutic” racket out there is that “we are going to take you from the low to the high.” i.e. “we’ve got an escape hatch to your current experience.”

When we embrace what we rejected as “low,” we discover that the “high” we have been seeking IS just as alienated as the “low” from what I AM from the beginning; not the self we imagined ourselves to be, innocently, as the defense we developed to survive as babes in disconnective culture.

To discover true, living relationship begins with the courage to sit with our own, personal, EMBODIED textures of self-disconnection.   What is it that you are experiencing that you have been taught, from generation to generation, to NOT experience, to avoid?  What is the cost of actually EXPERIENCING them?  Of Feeling them?  What taboos would you violate to simply welcome, for example, your Fear, Anger, Jealousy and Grief without reflexively acting OUT OF them?  Who taught you NOT to experience them? Why?

“Fear, anger, jealousy, rage,” these are the labels we affix to all that we most willingly act OUT OF, yet refuse to venture INTO. Notice how many cultures have a taboo around EXPERIENCING the texture of a whole panoply of experiences we are already EXPERIENCING. “Fear, anger, jealousy, rage,” these are the names we put on the dimensions of our experience which we so hurriedly, as if in a panic, learn to suppress (by pretending to be “spiritual” and thus “above” these low human emotions, and thus at perpetual “self-war”), repress (by stifling the feeling yet feeling profound shame & guilt for having even felt it momentarily and having to hold it at bay) or express (by generating pain and drama in the lives of those around us, especially the ones closest to us), but dare not simply FEEL, as many of us were taught not to feel these from our very first day.

Would you like the quick path beyond fear? Dare to FEEL it! Because fear FELT isn’t fear. Fear, anger, jealousy, grief  are the resistance to what you’re already feeling, they are the named doorways that shut us out from the HEART of our experience.  You MAY open them!  You may walk through the wall of taboos of every racket in your culture.  Only YOUR permission is needed.  Next time you feel Fear, Anger, Jealousy or Grief arise, WELCOME THEM!  Know that each is a doorway to your FELT, i.e. LIVED experience!

©2009 Olivier Tryba - I welcome your sharing this post in part or in its entirety, with attribution and a link back to this site.  Hit the “SHARE THIS” button below to link it to your social network or share via e-mail.  Thank you.

Tags: Anger, Ant, Eagle, Expression, Fear, Feeling, Grief, Indigenous culture, Jealousy, Repression, Self-Alienation, Suppression, Warrior, Warriors Cry

This is a fascinating, hour-long interview on supporting children AND adults in growing into their full neurological potential and touches upon many of the themes discussed in my previous blog posts. It exposes the listener to a number of the subtleties and complexities of brain development and “MOVING BEYOND THE MIDDLE AGES” (the title of one of Dr. Shanker’s later papers) in our relationship to children, each other and ourselves.

At www.DeepFreedomNow.com, I am committed to clear, scientific appreciation for our human experience along with a perspective that in-forms itself of the wisdom & experience gathered by ways of life that have survived harmonically in human and biological environments over tens of thousands of years.

“Dr. Stuart Shanker is a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at York University and currently serving as Director of the Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative (MEHRI), an initiative whose goal is to build on new knowledge of the brains development, and help set children (including those with developmental disorders) on the path towards emotional and intellectual health.”

We can look in our lives. We can look in the world, listen to our brothers and sisters; human, animal, fish, amphibian, trees. Pain runs deep, doesn’t it? But what is it? Pain is the avoidance of our experience. It’s the illusion that we, as individuals and as a culture, can transform out of the defense mechanisms of the Manufactured Self.

This is like having a rotting house and applying a better coat of paint. It’s like these forests in Colorado that fed the Ute, Shoshoni, Arapahoe and Cheyenne peoples for thousands of years, with a lifestyle that the white man disdained as slothful because the First Peoples weren’t busting ass for some task master from dawn to dusk, trying to survive. The white man came, took the gold and cut the forests to feed the mills, then mono-cropped it. Now that forest is dying. In many places it is 85% dead. And the white man is going to “fix” it again. He’s going to “put it to good use” and replant it, too, just like he did last time, except better, always better, always “improving,” with his solutions generating the next problems.

We have this same relationship with our inner wilderness: a constant effort to conquer ourselves, regardless of how we feel, to improve what we profoundly do not know. What I call the journey of the Idiot Hero.

A day comes when we face the pain, we face the rot, we face the reality of our lived experience. A day comes when we notice that we have held the one who shows up in our mirror hostage to our ideas of him - and that she is none of those ideas. He is dying trying to breathe life into those ideas, and dying in a way that feeds little else but the fiction of himself. That is the day that we divest ourselves of our own hype and drop the search for a bigger, gentler, wiser hype. That is emptiness, and it devastates the fantasies a lot of us, of all colors and cultures, are running around in these days. That day is a painful day, and it’s the day that True Healing begins. It’s the day when we’ll learn to live out of something larger than a 1 inch area of our left Temporal-Parietal lobe. Suddenly we notice that there is a body, that there is a heart, gut, genitals, legs, the backside of our bodies, and that they are not just there to be USED, they have their own intelligence, they have been sensing and feeling our lives all along. That can be painful. It is also profoundly enlivening. Our entire civilization is heading toward that day. We know that not only our imagined world, but also our imagined selves will be undone.

There is a Deeper Intelligence inviting us into a Deeper Freedom. Human beings living in cultures of conquest are almost wholly defended from that Deeper Intelligence. Our lives are devoted to making IMAGES of that intelligence so that we can avoid EXPERIENCING it, not only religious images, but scientific images, too. Our culture is based in reducing ourselves and everything else to a mental object. We were taught to worship a so-called God manufactured out of endless narratives of genocide, and some of us discovered that that “God” is dead. Indeed He is. As are all the “Gods” & “Goddesses” that we try to replace him with, in the conviction that divinity is something outside of a “ Manufactured Self” that needs to obey “God” because it is fundamentally “wrong.” What remains for many to discover is that the “Self” that got manufactured in the image of that “God” is just as dead; another mental fiction that devours Life to try to make itself real. A change of clothes doesn’t change the inner reality. It doesn’t matter whether you put on a roman collar, saffron robes, a wizard’s hat or buckskins and beadwork.

There is a Beingness that we are made of and which does not require us to manufacture it. Our very Being is the expression of an intelligence that spontaneously and continuously BIRTHS what we cannot manufacture - and yet we persist in manufacturing part-by-part while we wallow in the toxicity manufactured out of our ignorance of Whole Intelligence. We want to take and get, even though our rapaciousness leaves us with much less than what a simple stopping, noticing, connecting and receiving is offering us continually.

When we can say, as my friend Michael Skye said to me in my last post, “Thank you for your willingness to be with your pain and to love me” then we come to the possibility of true relationship. This is the crux of the matter right now, isn’t it? Because right now, as we ARE, in togetherness there is pain, isn’t there? We love somebody, we want to enjoy their company, offer them the best we can, and then we see all the mechanisms of this disconnective “self” get triggered and engage. We experience how profoundly we resist connection. If we are willing to be with this pain that we carry from a long ways back, that we inherit from many generations, only then can we speak of crossing the threshold of a Loving that might eventually allow us to know each other as “People,” beyond some momentary senti-mentality.

This is a long journey. Maybe we will know each other, some day, as People in whose company we can offer more than momentary “wanting” and then long-winded tolerance. That starts with a new relationship to our own experience. An end to correction and a beginning to connection. It’s like planting seeds in the heart, and not just seeds for ourselves and the people we are with; seeds to human Life and ALL of Life thousands of generations forward. When we are willing to take this journey, not to “get” something, but to make a humble, simple offering to the Beauty of the Life within and without, then we will know how profoundly good it is to be just as we are; and we will offer Life within us a bigger adventure than trying to corral it into our idea of ourselves and the world.

And we can be gentle with this offering, too. Not yanking parts of ourselves out to offer up, but waiting and stopping - maybe a few minutes, hours, days and even years. This offering does not come from our idea of offering, it comes from Life. We don’t “make” it, it comes through us. It is the offering that Life makes to Life through the Life in us. First offer yourself the opportunity to know Life. Then we can set aside our heroism and our mutual tolerance. Maybe that offering requires that you shut the door and offer yourself a little protection, make yourself a sacred place where you can stop and let Life find its harmony again inside of you. Maybe that offering for your people is going to ask you to stop doing all the things you’ve been doing for all those people, all those things you thought made you “good”; a good daughter, son, brother, sister, mother, father, husband, wife, lover, boss, employee, teacher, student, etc. And when you stop, then you’ll FEEL, guaranteed, and your first trained program will be to DO something about what you feel. That’s why this culture doesn’t stop. We’re obsessed with doing because if we stop doing we realize that we’re caught in habits that numb pain but don’t give us joy. My invitation to you is, when you FEEL something inside that you are ashamed of, or want to “spiritualize” away, or want to react and express something to someone about: go back to FEELING, follow the stream of those feelings all the way up to the headwaters of your life, then up the springs of your ancestry and FEEL, just FEEL.

When we can make a little room for our pain, then we’ll be able to make a little room for ourselves, and then each other. When we cease to resist our experience of pain, as it arises inside of us, even when we’re all alone with no physical discomfort, we discover that pain actually IS resistance. In that willingness to cease resisting pain, we suddenly discover that pain is like a doorway that keeps us shut out of the core of our experience. When we open the door we label “pain,” what’s behind it is not “pain” but fundamentally vital. Then we discover that Deep Joy is not only possible, it is indigenous (in the genus) to our humanity, when we allow it’s Living Intelligence. Try it. Experience it for yourself. In that willingness to EXPERIENCE our experience, our journey in search of Freedom FROM turns into a Celebration of Freedom FOR our People, all of them, even the hard-nut cases like ourselves!

Dare to FEEL the Reality WITHIN and beyond who you imagine (image-in) your “self” to be, and within and through what you imagine your pain to be. You are an expression of a Living Intelligence that is much Wiser, more Sensual, Intelligent, Generous, Creative and Kind than your idea of your “self.”

©2009 Olivier Tryba
You may share this posting in its entirety, with attribution and with linkbacks to www.DeepFreedomNow.com

Tags: Arapahoe, beetle kill, Cheyenne, cultural healing, deep connection, deep healing, Ego, God, God is dead, gold, Left Temporal Parietal lobe, Manufactured Self, Michael Skye, Olivier Tryba, pain in relationship, pine beetle, Rebirth, Relationship, Self, Shoshoni, True Healing, Ute, white man, Whole Intelligence

This morning I went for my walk.  The lesson for me was about teaching.  Although it may appear that the teacher invites the student, it is really the student who invites the teacher.  Both are teaching, both are learning, but to “be” the teacher in the ceremony is different from “being” the student - for the ceremony of learning and unlearning.  If, to use the Lakota term, we cross ceremonies, then there is no power in the ceremony.  If we’re both the teacher and both the student, then little is taught and less is learned and unlearned.  If the distinction between teacher and student is clear then both can learn, both can teach.  If the student tries to be the teacher, then teaching doesn’t happen.

Of course, we can speak of Learning Circles, which are also powerful.  But that is not what I am speaking of here.  I am talking about one person transmitting to another.  Mentorship.  Guidance.

When Great Teaching happens, it requires a Great Student, someone who has not simply accumulated the hodge-podge of impressions, experiences, methods, aphorisms, and practices that we all gather over a lifetime.  The Great Student realizes the importance of Emptying.  The Great Student doesn’t show up with a cup half-filled with Pepsi, coffee or orange juice when they come to taste the water at the fountain.  The Great Student also realizes it doesn’t matter if the cup is fancy or simple.  What matters is that the cup be simply a cup; clean & empty, ready to receive.

In the United States and in Europe this teacher-student role has lost its sacredness in most instances.  We are conditioned over so many years to “learning” from so-called teachers who never asked our permission to teach us, that when we finally choose someone to learn from, we often continue in the same dynamic of resistance. Because we don’t know our hearts as organs of knowing and connection, our relationship to teaching is mostly mental.  We think about the ideas being presented.  We sift through the ones that appeal to us and the ones that don’t.  Essentially, with this kind of “learning,” nothing changes.  We take away and leave behind everything that reinforces our already-established prejudices.   We want to feel “good.”  We resist feeling our existence deeply.  With this approach, we not only become even further estranged from our own experience, we now have new vocabulary to use to reinforce this estrangement and redecorate it as “knowing something.” There is no real invitation on the part of the student to the teacher.  Because the teacher is seen as an “authority,” in the Western sense, she is also seen as a threat, as someone to be challenged.  There is no sense of creating a sacred relationship.  When we are stuck in a mental approach to life developed under an authority model that operates with threat and withdrawal, our primary approaches to a teacher is to either submit or to challenge them.  Neither of these approaches invites true learning.  And, of course, we have questions.  With time we get a sense that Life is an invitation into mastery, which is why we seek out teachers.

Typically, when we go, we have a sense of what we’d like to “get” from a teacher.  We not only have the “illness,” so to speak, but we also have the “remedy” that we want the teacher to apply.  In essence, we want the teacher to do with what we have accumulated what we have not been able to do with it.  If the teacher shows us that our “illness” is not an illness and that perhaps our “remedy” is the only illness, we often object.  We want the teacher to understand what it is that we want to “get.”  But to get something is very different from receiving.  Getting is very linear and predatory; I want to USE the teacher to fulfill MY need, and I KNOW what it is that I need, although I can’t figure out why I’m still so confused!

True teaching, true learning, and true unlearning is not about getting anything.  It is just like true love:  if you love someone because of what you “get” from them, your love is already doomed from the start.  So the proper relationship to a teacher is what we can GIVE to them.   And the greatest gift that we can bring to a teacher and a relationship is Emptiness.  This giving is what allows us to receive beyond the dimensions of our preconceptions.

This emptiness is simple like a clean cup.  This is the Grace that the Student bestows to the Teacher. It is the very Essence of Great Teaching, Great Learning & Great Unlearning.  This is the way in which the student teaches the teacher and invites the teacher to be Great and learn and unlearn with the student.  Then something greater than “teacher” and “student” can appear in this Emptiness.

A  Zen Master once told me about his time in Japan:

There was a Japanese woman in her nineties who had devoted her entire life to practicing Zen.  She had studied with two of Japan’s greatest Zen masters and, when her second teacher died, she wanted to find another teacher.  She was very wise, kind and sharp.  She embodied the essence of Zen.  She could have been a Zen master herself.  In Japan at the time, women were not ordained as “Roshi,” the term for Zen masters.  She personified the highest level of awareness.  Any Zen master at the time would have been honored to receive her as a student. To be around her was to be blessed and encouraged.  So the Zen community was very curious as to whom such an esteemed Zen practitioner would pick as her teacher after her late teacher’s death.

Much to everyone’s surprise, she picked one of the youngest and most-recently ordained zen masters and asked to become his student.  This “zen master” could have easily asked to become HER student.  The young Zen Master’s teachings were simple and some people even complained that he lacked an understanding of the finer nuances.  Some Zen students asked the older, very experienced and wise lady how, after so many years under the tutelage of such amazing, fierce, wise and funny teachers as her late Zen masters, she could stand for such simple teaching.  She replied, “The greatest gift that I can bring to this teacher is to receive him fully.  And I desire to receive him fully.”

Indeed, the young Zen Master’s teachings deepened tremendously and with great speed, to the extent that even seasoned Zen Masters began to hear of the power of his teaching and the speed at which it matured.  The Wise Lady also felt rewarded in studying with him.  Eventually he was asked by the community of Zen Masters to lead an important ceremony for other Zen Masters, that usually only very old and seasoned Roshis were asked to lead.  Before it he spoke of those who had initiated him; his Zen Masters.  He honored them, their teachings, and their communities over the years.  Then, to everybody’s surprise, he explained how this elderly lady had been his greatest teacher and that even though she had said very little to him over her years of studying with him, she had taken him to the next level of learning, unlearning and receiving.  He explained how, at first, he was somewhat embarrassed that such an esteemed student would have picked him to study with.  He, too, had studied under her teachers and was well aware of their power, insight, directness and ferocity.  He also knew that he could not imitate them.   He knew that this woman was of the same caliber and temper as his teachers.  He, too, wondered at how such a sage woman could tolerate the simplicity of his teaching.  He explained that although his teachers had led him to Realization, the Wise Woman had shown him how to Make it Real and available for others.

He learned to open to life as fully as she opened to him.   He credited her with teaching him how to ripen into Being Alive WITH everything.

So we can learn the power of not crossing ceremonies.  Learn to “catch” the medicine from where you are at.  If you are a student then YOU are in the position of power.  Know that the greatness of ANY teaching you receive is limited by YOUR Emptiness, YOUR willingness to receive with a simple, clean cup.  The power of Great Teaching rests with you!  The power of Great Teachers rests with you!  Thus, if you have the good fortune of running into someone willing to teach you; have pity on them!  They are at your mercy.  And without your mercy for them, without your emptiness, there is no place for any treasure that they might offer you to be recognized and realized within yourself.

This way of Emptiness is at the heart of all ancient cultures and medicine ways.  The Great Circle of Life is not only whole, it is also Empty.  She who brings the Emptiness invites Life to Flower Anew.

Tags: Circle of Life, Emptiness, Indigenous Wisdom, Invitation, Japanese Zen, Learning, Realization, Roshi, Student, Teacher, True Teaching, Unlearning, Wisdom, Wise Women, Zazen, Zen

All of the crises that loom large on the front pages of the daily paper and the crises that tear our families apart, have driven our cancer rates from 1 out of 4 people in the U.S. getting cancer when I started out in health care twenty years ago to 1 out of 2 today, the environmental crisis, the monetary crisis, political crises, etc. can be broken down to one thing:

A Crisis of False Authority

If you’re like many people, the word “authority” probably makes you cringe.  What does “authority” mean to you?  What is your experience of authority?  What is the nature of “authority” in your culture and society?  Generally, in the Western world, “authority” has a connotation of threat.  We speak of “the authorities,” often associated with people who have weapons strapped to their sides.  We can look at the “authority” of the law, or political systems.  These decisions, whether agreed to by a majority of the electorate, or promoted by a majority of the legislators, are also implemented by force upon those in disagreement.

We can also look at people who are “authoritative,” generally meaning that they have earned expertise, often within professional associations, acknowledged by their peers.  Often times the decisions of these “authoritative experts”  are then implemented, legislated or otherwise forced on people who are deemed “inexpert” and thus are divested of their right to make decisions on their own.  Protocols such as childhood vaccination, education, fluoridation of water, taxation, regulation, etc. are all predicated on the fact that somebody’s supposed expertise supersedes other people’s rights and they have armed people to make sure that it stays that way, even when the results aren’t that great.

When we begin to examine this so-called “authority” we begin to see that a lot of our problems are generated by the so-called “solutions” of this model of authority.  We discover our political leaders to be corrupt and elect new leaders with supposedly opposite views, only to see things continue in the same direction we objected to.  We experience a crisis of authority.

In my travels amongst indigenous people I lived among people who had a very different notion of authority.  In many indigenous languages, the word that we translate as “chief” actually means “one who speaks to the heart,” or “one who speaks beautifully,” or “one who speaks to me,” or simply “the speaker.”  But what has been pointed out repeatedly is that chiefs have no authority OVER others.  In the measure that they speak TO the authority that resides in the heart-mind of a person, to that measure they are a chief.  In the Iroquois Confederacy of Six Nations, for example, chiefs could be deposed simply by someone whom they spoke for saying “he does not speak for me.”  And many societies in the Americas functioned this way, built large, complex civilizations with larger cities than in the rest of the world, massive alterations to the landscape that actually increased species rather than diminished them, sophisticated mathematics, architecture, astrology, agriculture and cosmology.

When I point this out to people in the West, they often point out that this is anarchy, or the absence of rulers, and then proceed to equate this with disorder.  But the truth is that it is panarchy, where the experience of individuals within a culture comes from a premise of connectedness.  This is not some utopian heaven, just a departure point that’s far more conducive to the proposal of enjoying life together.   Many of these societies operated with Speakers, not rulers and at levels of harmonic, spontaneous order that is largely inconceivable to us.  We have no experience of human relationships this way.  We have no experience of authority, of positive KNOWING from anywhere except the hundred of opinions voicing themselves in our minds at one time.  We are not raised to act with authority from the place of connection, only to obey an external authority which, if we rebel, we then replace with an internal authority that still treats our being as the object of its will.

When we examine this word “authority,” we discover that it is related to authenticity and to authorship with roots in the Latin auctor, which is “one who causes to grow.”  This is the nature of True Authority:  it fosters growth, it supports life.  It respects the Authorship of every Individual in connection with the totality of Living.

The nature of false authority is “one who can force obedience.”

But to discover True Authority is not simply a philosophical position.  It implies a functioning Brain-Heart-Mind.  The heart, as countless sages have pointed out throughout the millennia, is the organ of KNOWING; of positive, connective KNOWING, the verb, the experience.  In contrast to the brain which, in the part devoted to cognition, serves as a sort of hard drive populated by the thoughts we are exposed to and then reconfigure, the heart is an organ which knows positively, in the Present, while also opening in connection to an experience that it is not confining to an expected outcome.  To put it another way, the heart is willing to know connectively while having the courage to not-know.

Now science is finally catching up with the already-known.  The field of neuro-cardiology is studying the link between the brain and the heart.  This field is being revolutionized by reports from heart transplant patients that they are experiencing memories, cravings, likes & dislikes from their donors’ lives.  We now know that the heart is the organ of intelligence that, when properly connected, modulates the brain intelligence on multiple levels: electrically, electromagnetically, sensing the hormonal levels in the bloodstream, etc.

What keeps us from knowing True Authority is what keeps us from Knowing from our Hearts.  What shuts us out of our hearts is our conditioned refusal to FEEL everything that arises in our experience.  We are conditioned by parents who fear our emotions and our needs and then we internalize this fear.  The nature of this fear is not an idea, it is actually a neural loop.  It’s a pathway in our nervous system that signals alarm each time we feel something that has the felt sense that our parents reacted to with anger, violence, withdrawal or other behaviors that DISCONNECTED us from them.

At a very early age we learn to NOT listen to our hearts due to this disconnection.

We CAN, however reawaken this heart-centered intelligence, which is a felt-intelligence, by embracing the totality of the felt-experience we are having.

Let me know what questions arise for you and what this article reflects back in your experience.

Tags: Authority, Authorship, Brain-Heart-Mind, Crisis, Heart Authority, Heart Intelligence, Heart-Mind, Indigenous Wisdom, Neurocardiology, Panarchy

Mutual parent-child frustration results when a child is raised by parents who are out of sync with her, or their own, emotional and developmental needs.  As a result, the child is repeatedly experiencing her parents’ frustration with her.  Children strive to pursue the normal, integrative, connective relationships that its blossoming awareness and physicality push it toward in the connective, exploratory celebration of life that childhood is.  If the parents are not able to self-regulate and adapt to the child’s developing milestones, the child suddenly has the experience of their mother attacking them, subtly through withdrawal, simple facial gestures, embodied stress or overt aggression.

The child is dependent upon her mother for sustenance.  To have her source of sustenance attack her, distance herself from her, or even stress out as she nurses, cuddles or interacts with her has direct repercussions on the infant’s development.  To the extent that the mother experiences the child’s normal developmental expression as “wrong” and in need of “correction,” the child’s natural development is interrupted.

The child, instead of growing out of its inner, connective, erotic, hedonic engagement with the world, now finds itself in the strange position of having to “behave.”  Instead of simply engaging, it now has to modulate its behavior so as to not provoke parents who are easily-triggered and stressed out by even its most developmentally-normal behaviors.  Fear, anger and grief arise spontaneously as the child’s push into its full development is co-opted and stifled in his family dynamic.  We call this “the terrible twos,” “adolescent rebellion,” and a whole host of labels that pathologize or normalize our children’s adaptation to growing up with stressed out, survival oriented humans.  The child promptly learns that his expressions of fear, anger, grief and frustration only add to his parents’ stress as well as his own.  Now even feeling is cut off.  Life becomes an idea.  The turmoil churns below the surface.

What this leads to is what I call the creation of a “Manufactured Self” or False Self.  This is the product of role reversal where, instead of the parent protecting and loving the child unconditionally while stimulating its maximal, connective development and showing him how to integrate his developmental outbursts, the child has to negotiate, even coddle, the parents’ sensibilities so as to become lovable.  The creation of this False Self affords the child protection from her parents’ withdrawal of love and decreases the virulence of the parents’ attacks.  Instead of arising spontaneously the self now becomes a strategy, an artifice.

We become conditioned to inauthenticity, as the authorship of our life no longer resides within us, no longer arises out of our spontaneous expression of billions of years of evolving the human continuum.  We adopt a fear-based adaptation to life amongst alienated humans, where threat arises from those we are closest to.

The natural evolution of humans is hedonic, rooted in the eroticism of life itself.  As humans become increasingly alienated from their natural developmental continuum, the flourishing of the growing, connective self is supplanted by a lesser, restricted, stifled expression.  In the expression of the True Self, nurtured through connection, the relation of the individual to the rest of the world is naturally complex, intelligent, multi-faceted and grows into wisdom.  In the expression of the False Self, the individual becomes increasingly isolated within the shell of their skin and programmed thinking.  The False Self operates out of a hyper-vigilance that truly precludes, while simulating, intimacy.  Connection, rather than being full and joyful, is mediated and negotiated by presenting a manufactured self to society.

The individual is not fulfilled by this pseudo-self and, for that matter, self-alienated. As his skill at adapting to a poorly-adapted way of life increases, he is increasingly driven to “find himself.” The bulk of relationships become rooted in emotional commerce, commercial utility, and restrictive conformity rather than the spontaneous exchanges that are the hallmark of healthy societies.  The search for intimacy is frustrated.

Where the opportunity for spontaneity arises, the individual is so disconnected to true, spontaneous desire and feeling, that efforts at spontaneity are awkward and rapidly provoke negative feedback from peers.

©2009 Olivier “O.T.” Tryba

Feel free to share the link and quotes with attribution and link back to this site.  Thank you!

Tags: Authenticity, Celebration, Child Development, Children, Connection, Continuum, Developmental Milestones, Ego, Eroticism, Inauthenticity, Manufactured Self, Pseudo-Self

The Human Continuum is the biological, environmental, parental, familial and social matrix that optimizes human well-being in ways that are maximally supportive to humans and the environment they inhabit, as developed over hundreds of thousands of years hand-in-hand with the emergence of our species.  Each species has a multiplicity of ways that truly maximize the full development of their offspring into the adventure that each of us represents in the adventure of consciousness.

If an animal gives birth, its continuum in-forms it how to raise its young in a way that optimizes their survival.  A mother fox or bear doesn’t need a so-called expert to tell her how to raise her young or give birth to them, she is in-formed by her continuum.  But in the animal kingdom we see increased confusion about such natural matters in direct proportion to the amount that animals have been domesticated and imprinted by human beings.  In the human species we have even more problems with birth and raising our little ones.

And yet that’s not the norm of human experiences across all cultures.  Discovering this was surprising to me.  With respect to human beings, there are a lot of presumptions that we often make about our species that seem virtually self-evident.  The entirety of our experience within our culture of origin and even in many other cultures does little else but confirm it.  Here are a few examples of such apparently “obvious” things that we believe we “know” about humans:

•    Newborn babies typically cry during many hours of the day and night, waking their parents.  We’ve all know how new parents, mothers and fathers, are easily identified by their look of being sleep-deprived.

•    Young children, say 2-4 year olds, demand constant parental attention and we all know that it is virtually impossible to hold a conversation with parents of children that age if the children are in the same room due to the constant interruption.

•    Good parenting requires consistent guidance & disciplining of children, correcting their errors, guiding their steps and keeping them out of harm’s way.

•    Adolescents want to be around other adolescents and as far away from their parents and other adults as possible.

Now, to most Westerners and increasingly around the world, these observations are so commonplace as to become truisms.  To suggest that in many cultures infants, young children and adolescents or their parents DON’T behave this way seems pretty far-fetched.  To suggest that we can just adopt somebody else’s culture is even more far-fetched and not the point.  And yet there is something to learn, not just from other people, but daring to open and expand our relationship to our experience.

Imagine my surprise, while spending time in Zapotec and Balinese communities, with lots of children around, in discovering infants that weren’t crying hours a day, young children sat quietly with their parents while they talked with friends (even two-year-olds), parents and entire cultures that don’t say “no” to children or interfere much with what they’re doing, and adolescents love being around their parents and routinely bring their friends home to spend time with their parents, laugh, talk and enjoy each other’s company.  I spent time with people who showed no alarm when 18 month-olds played with sharp, adult machetes poking in live fires, for example, and saw toddlers confidently and competently using sharp tools in ways that caused me to become alarmed, until I calmed down, observed, and discovered surprisingly “precocious” abilities to be the norm when children aren’t continually interfered with.

When I share this with Westerners, some people get defensive or protective of the way we do things.  I am not bringing this up to criticize anybody.  That is not the point.  The point is that we adapt to and accentuate the environment we grow up in.  What is apparent and backed by research is that there is a level of stress, of neurosis, of inter-generational alienation, loneliness and mental illness in the West that is surprising to people in other parts of the world. If you, on the other hand, are feeling some of the general uneasiness in your society and in your life, the invitation here is in discovering some of the ways that it arises and our options for being more comfortable.

The hallmark of the developmental requirements of newborns and of human beings in general, whatever their age, is one of CONNECTION.  Consider for a moment that much of our existence as Homo sapiens has occurred in natural environments with predators.  When a child is born, the natural expectation is that as soon as it is born it will land immediately upon his mother’s abdomen, hear his mother’s heartbeat, nurse and bond visually with the person whom he has known from within her very being for the previous nine months.  Any other experience signals to the newborn that something is radically disrupted in his connection to Source, in this case his mother.  The umbilical cord should not be cut until it stops pulsating, given the fact that a significant amount of the newborn’s blood supply is still in the cord and get shunted to his body gradually.  To cut the cord prematurely stresses the newborn with oxygen deprivation, potentiating all kinds of development problems in the future.  Spanking a newborn, putting eyedrops in its eyes, or circumcising it are forms of violence that prevent the stress hormones that circulate in the newborn’s body after birth from coming down and actually causing them to increase.  It has now been demonstrated that the newborn’s experience in the first hour of life after birth leads to profound developmental choices in that child’s life: they will either gear up to thrive in connection or to survive in a fight-or-flight world, a world where mothers are not present even at birth to ensure connection during the first hour of life.

Why would we care?  Because the difference between a continuum-appropriate birth and a violent, interventionist medical birth is one of profound delays in neurological development and determines whether certain developmental milestones will be achieved, whether they’ll be delayed, incomplete or unattained for a lifetime.  One such example is that, if you read the typical medical literature, it is stated that the infant’s capacity to recognize her mother’s face and smile takes about 10 weeks to develop.  But such capacities have been documented on the day of birth with natural homebirths.  So here we are talking about a child achieving the connections within their nervous system prompted by connection with their mother, family and world the first day of their life, or whether this will take two and a half months to be accomplished.  If the child’s mother is not able to respond appropriately to the child’s needs, delays simply get compounded.

That entire societies could show such generalized delays and evolve cultures built around retarded neurological and social development has already been amply noted by the work of numerous neuro-anatomists, child development psychologists, and educators.  Jane Healey, author of the book entitled Endangered Minds, documents the kind of developmental retardation that is now common in the United States and spreading world-wide.  What is surprising is that cultures where developmental delays proliferate aren’t necessarily aware that this is the case.  Almost every individual is obliged to adapt and to internalize the culture, regardless of how much of a threat it is to the biology of the individual adapting or the world he lives in.
In a disrupted continuum, expectations are placed on newborns, infants, children and adolescents that are totally inappropriate to their developmental stage and adaptive capacities.  For example, the other day I was in the library and there was a young mother with a small infant, accompanied by her friend.  The infant was crying, the young mother was at the computer rocking her child’s baby carrier/car seat absent-mindedly with her foot and her friend said to her, “It looks like he needs some attention.” The mother said to her friend, “Oh no, I want to get him trained early.”
This is misguided parenting yet the mother is innocent of it.  If she delivered her child in one of the many hospitals where I have worked, she may have even been told by a nurse of obstetrician to “let the child cry.  It’s good for them to cry and helps develop their lungs.”  This is the kind of nonsense that is propounded by medical “experts” in our society and goes contrary to a mother’s natural instinct to cuddle and nurse a crying baby.  But anyone who has gone through the many years of alienated schooling typical of our society has been well conditioned to ignore their natural instincts and desires and to surrender to an external authority, especially to people with initials after their name, uniforms or white coats signaling their belonging to a certain priesthood of “experts.”

In ancient and still-vibrant ways of life, such as those of my Indonesian and Zapotec friends, babies are never left alone and are always ON somebody’s body:  their mother’s, their father’s, grand-parents, aunts and uncles and siblings together care for newborns and infants and let them know that they connected to themselves and to their loved ones continually.  This is the feedback appropriate for an infant during the first six months of life and beyond and supports the maximal expression of that child’s potential.

In the upcoming Deep Freedom, Deep Connection course, we not only explore our own personal journeys on the Human Continuum, but learn how to enrich our internal and external connections in a way that affirms our capacity for connected, vital, abundant living from the core of our experience.

©2009 Olivier Tryba

Tags: Adolescence, alienation, Bali, Childhood, Connection, Endangered Minds, Human Continuum, Human Development, Indonesian, Jane Healey, mental illness, natural birth, Parenting, schooling, terrible twos, umbilical cord, Well-Being, Zapotec

Our challenge with Freedom today is that we think of freedom as an idea, perhaps an ethic, an ideal, a morality, a philosophy. Listen to what people say about freedom today: almost as soon as they speak of it, they speak of confining it. They affirm freedom – but with fences – and they want to reassure you that they are not advocating freedom without fences. Oh no! “We are ALL agreed that we don’t mean THAT kind of Freedom!”

Our challenge with Freedom in the modern world is that genuine Freedom is not an idea, philosophy or ethic, regardless of how many books have been written on the topic.

Freedom is a neurology. Freedom is a state of unconditional trust in our Beingness. It is a way that the defensive & vigilant structures of the brain grow into connection with the right-now knowing of the heart when we are welcomed at birth, into the arms & skin & breasts of our mothers and the trust of our people. They grow to warn us of true danger and to invite us into the delight of true connection, rather than growing to alert us perpetually that we are a danger to ourselves, which is what happens in the West. Please reread this last sentence, and then TASTE it experientially.

Freedom is the neural link between the Heart that Knows and the Brain that Thinks. This heart-brain-mind neural link, established in our first hours, day & months after birth, is that which will determine whether we live Life in the Freedom to Know from the Heart, or if we live Life trapped in the beliefs our Brains get filled with.

©2009 Olivier “O” Tryba

Tags: Freedom, Freedom For, Heart Knowing

“Freedom!” When you hear the word, what are the feelings that come up for you?  I think that for a lot of us in the West, when we think of Freedom, we relate to Freedom-From before we connect to Freedom-For which is a deep reflection of how, ultimately we relate to our existence.

Consider for a moment that

In Your Life, There is Only One Relationship That You Will Ever Have:

That is Your Relationship to Your Experience

Let’s take this back to Freedom.

The quality of Freedom in your Life reflects the quality of Relationship that you have to your Experience.

As we take a look at this, we’re going to discover a dimension of Freedom that rarely gets talked about, much less EXPERIENCED, in our culture, and

This is the Freedom-FOR YOUR Experience.

When I say “Your Experience,” I am talking about the experience you are having right now, in other words the one that you may have been trying to get away FROM.

Are you with me?

Have you heard or said, “As humans we are all basically the same?”  Well, yes, there are certain things that human beings ALL have in common; we eat, drink, sleep, seek warmth and connection, that’s true.

In my travels around the world, growing up, living, and  traveling in a number of Western cultures, and in my experiences with indigenous friends in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala and Indonesia, I’ve discovered that humans are fundamentally different in their Foundational Relationship to Life.   By this I mean our sense of Human Life as a fundamentally welcoming experience or one where we have to continually strive for our desired experience.

We are used to looking at this from cultural, linguistic, religious, environmental or philosophical standpoints.  My Invitation to You, as a sojourner in Deep Freedom Now, is to examine it from an EMBODIED Perspective, from YOUR Experience of Your Life.

Researchers in neuro-anatomy & neuro-cardiology are discovering that different Ways of Life activate, suppress, and express the development of various parts of our capacity for awareness, connection, wisdom and intelligence in very differing ways.   This leads to fundamental differences between  Ways of Life and determines whether a Way of Life will lead to societal collapse and the decimation of the land after just a few centuries, or whether a people will be able to joyfully inhabit their place for thousands and tens of thousand of years, with human activity actually increasing the life and well-being of other species.

A simple way to look at this is in light of our relationship to Freedom, in other words our relationship to the experience we are having right now:

Do we embody Freedom For this experience or are we seeking Freedom From this experience?

Our embodied experience of our Life as an expression of Freedom From or Freedom For also determines what our relationship to the people around us will be, starting with newborns from the day they come into our world.

Look at your own life.  Tell me what you experience.

©2009 Olivier “O” Tryba Continue Reading »

Tags: embodied wisdom, Freedom For, Freedom From, Indigenous culture, Relationship