The Emergence of the Manufactured Self
Posted by otryba | Filed under Uncategorized
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
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Tags: Authenticity, Celebration, Child Development, Children, Connection, Continuum, Developmental Milestones, Ego, Eroticism, Inauthenticity, Manufactured Self, Pseudo-Self
The Human Continuum-The Brilliance of Being Human
Posted by otryba | Filed under Uncategorized
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
Posted by otryba | Filed under Uncategorized
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 & Our Fundamental Relationship to Life
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“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 Read the rest of this entry…
Tags: embodied wisdom, Freedom For, Freedom From, Indigenous culture, Relationship