Your Body Knows the Answer

Chapter 11

WE HEAR SO MUCH about the accelerating rate of change in virtually all aspects of life in the twenty-first century. Here’s New York Times columnist Tom Friedman advising President Obama at the beginning of his second term in 2013:

Obama needs to explain to Americans the world in which they’re now living. It’s a world in which the increasing velocity of globalization and the Information Technology revolution are reshaping every job, workplace and industry. As a result, the mantra that if you “just work hard and play by the rules” you should expect a middle-class lifestyle is no longer operable. Today you need to work harder and smarter, learn and relearn faster and longer to be in the middle class.

Along with this external imperative to change that Friedman describes, as individuals we feel an internal imperative of personal change as the key to achieving and sustaining good health, satisfying relationships, and a sense of fulfillment in life. But why this never-ending drumbeat of change, change, change? What’s wrong with staying the same?

The Paradox of Change

From one point of view, nothing at all is wrong with staying the same. Indeed, staying the same is the key to our survival: to go on living, we need to maintain the integrity of our body and its ongoing processes like respiration, circulation, and digestion, which need to keep doing the same things, over and over and over. However, when we look more closely, we see that each of these life processes itself consists of continual change. Breathing is inhaling—changing to exhaling. Circulation is oxygenated blood pumping from the lungs to every part of the body—changing to deoxygenated blood returning through the veins and the heart back to the lungs to expel carbon dioxide and pick up a fresh load of oxygen. Eating is taking in food, chewing, and digesting—changing to absorption of nutrients through the gut and elimination of waste.

Each iteration of breathing, blood circulation, and eating is functionally “the same”—it serves the same basic purpose—and yet no two cycles are identical. Each time, the pattern is subtly changed by the particulars of the moment, both externally and internally. And, of course, all the different body processes are inter-affecting one another. In other words, each life process is a pattern of change that itself is being changed from moment to moment. A rock can just sit there for centuries doing nothing, but a living thing must be continuously changing if it is to survive. As William Butler Yeats wrote in his great poem “Easter 1916”:

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change. . . .

Hence the beautiful paradox of life: living things must change in order to stay the same. Or, more precisely, living things must change in order to stay themselves. Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced the theory of autopoiesis, a Greek-derived term that simply means “self-making.” Life is the ongoing process of self-making. It is that which continuously changes itself in order to continue being itself.

Interaction First

Now let’s go a little deeper, with Eugene Gendlin as our guide. Like Maturana and Varela, Gendlin understands living beings as processes rather than things. A core concept in his Philosophy of the Implicit is what he calls “interaction first.” Any living thing, from a virus to a human, is first and foremost an ongoing interactive process in and with its environment. Although we commonly think of animals and plants as autonomous units that interact with a preexisting environment, Gendlin is saying that the reverse is true. Life is a single, integrated process that generates both the living thing and its environment. This doesn’t mean there is no external environment independent of ourselves—we know that life is only a very recent development in the history of the universe—but it means that the environment as we experience it is a product of our particular kind of life process. Dogs have evolved to hear high-pitched sounds that are inaudible to us; migrating birds navigate by Earth’s magnetic field in ways unavailable to the human organism, and so on.

“Interaction first” also means that in our relationships with others, in some odd way the relationship is “prior” to the individuals having the relationship. How is this possible? Common sense tells us that when we meet a new person, each of us has already been around as ourselves for many years, whereas the relationship is only just beginning. But if we examine our actual experience precisely, we discover that how we show up in any particular relationship is determined—created, really—by what the other person brings out in us. It is like a chemical interaction—hydrogen and oxygen are both invisible gases, yet together they make water, a visible, touchable, tastable liquid that seems to have nothing in common with the two elements that formed it. Human beings are not transformed quite so radically in relationships (though at certain special times it can feel that way), but who and what we are is always a function of who and what we are interacting with. Like it or not, we live by changing / being changed by our ever-unfolding interactions.

Carrying Forward

Our basic needs for oxygen, food, warmth, safety, connectedness, love, and so forth are functions of our nature as living things. But, Gendlin stresses, the ways in which these needs get met are not predetermined. What we call a “need” is better thought of as a particular life process that implies a certain direction of change. The potential ways to move in that direction, the possible next steps available to the organism, are infinite. When something occurs in an organism’s environment that “meets” the implied direction of change, the life process is able to move ahead. In Gendlin’s language, it “carries forward.” If nothing in the environment meets the implied direction, the need remains unmet and is held in the body as a “stopped process.”

We saw earlier that a living thing must continuously change in order to stay the same, to keep being itself. When a process is stopped, it can no longer go through its implied changes and therefore is unable to sustain its integrity, which is to say its health and well-being. Some stoppages are fatal—if we can’t breathe or circulate blood, we die in a matter of minutes. If we can’t find food, the process takes longer but the result will be the same. However, many stoppages are not fatal. They cause some measure of dysfunction, but the organism is able to live on, growing beyond or around the stoppage. Sometimes the dysfunction can be solved by other means. An artificial limb would be an example: a leg that has been lost can’t be restored, but a prosthesis can allow the functional process called walking to resume.

A particularly dramatic instance of a stopped process getting carried forward by novel means shows up in the approach to treating phantom limb syndrome developed by V. S. Ramachandran at the University of California, San Diego. People who have lost a limb often continue to have sensations as if the limb were still present. Ramachandran had one such patient, Philip, who experienced a painful paralysis in his missing left arm, which he had lost in an accident many years earlier. Ramachandran constructed a simple box divided in half by a mirror, open at the top and with armholes in the front on either side of the mirror. As Ramachandran describes it:

I asked Philip to place his right hand on the right side of the mirror in the box and imagine that his left hand (the phantom) was on the left side. “I want you to move your right and left arm simultaneously,” I instructed.

“Oh, I can’t do that,” said Philip. “I can move my right arm, but my left arm is frozen. Every morning when I get up, I try to move my phantom because it’s in this funny position and I feel that moving it might help relieve the pain. But,” he said, looking down at his invisible arm, “I never have been able to generate a flicker of movement in it.”

“Okay, Philip, but try anyway.”

Philip rotated his body, shifting his shoulder, to “insert” his lifeless phantom into the box. Then he put his right hand on the other side of the mirror and attempted to make synchronous movements. As he gazed into the mirror, he gasped and then cried out, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God, doctor! This is unbelievable. It’s mind-boggling!” He was jumping up and down like a kid. “My left arm is plugged in again. It’s as if I’m in the past. All these memories from years ago are flooding back into my mind. I can move my arm again. I can feel my elbow moving, my wrist moving. It’s all moving again.” ¹

The mirror created a perfect illusion that his left arm was moving in the same way that his right arm was, providing feedback to Philip’s brain that unblocked the painful, paralyzed sensation and allowed him to reexperience movement in the arm, together with associated memories and feelings from childhood! Because his whole body process still implied a living left arm, the illusion provided by the mirror allowed Philip’s brain, in effect, to update itself. The frozen neural circuitry, the physiological expression of the stopped process, suddenly released, and the arm came alive again, albeit virtually, in the present.

In this remarkable anecdote, no amount of conscious effort on Philip’s part made any difference; his brain had to be tricked into resetting itself. However, Eugene Gendlin’s great contribution has been to identify an exact but subtle method whereby many kinds of stopped process can be recognized and released through a special kind of conscious effort. Gendlin challenged the received Freudian paradigm of the unconscious as some kind of hidden operating system haunted by psychic monsters. He replaced it with a new paradigm in which all the unseen “drives” that had been relegated to the unconscious are recognized as the living body itself.

The body embodies and is all of the implied directions involved in surviving and thriving as a living organism. For Gendlin, these implied directions are not hidden somewhere else; they are always implicitly present in our moment-to-moment experience. Because they are implicit rather than explicit or manifest, they are not recognizable objects of awareness in the usual sense. But this doesn’t mean that they are completely invisible or unexperienceable. They are present and accessible to experience at a level below the radar of ordinary, conscious awareness.

Philosophically as well as physiologically, all the things that constitute our ordinary awareness of reality—sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions—are virtual creations of our biology. Recent neuroscience is shedding light on this virtualness, or insubstantiality of conscious experience (and confirming much of what Buddhism and other wisdom traditions have taught for thousands of years). Our experience of the world is almost entirely indirect.

Paradoxically, however, the unmanifested, not-yet-patterned, implicit level of lived experience is direct. It is our ongoing life process itself, which, though subtle, can be experienced as the unclear yet palpable felt texture of being alive in any particular moment. In his philosophical work, Gendlin calls this the “direct referent.” Practically speaking, it is synonymous with the felt sense.

Felt-sensing, or Focusing as Gendlin named it, is a learnable ability to bring bodily stopped processes into awareness and interact with them. Note that the word stopped here is positive as well as negative because it refers to a process that, although it is not actually happening, continues to be implied. The right direction for the organism to take is still present as a kind of nonconceptual, not-yet-clear wanting / knowing of the sort of object or behavior that would allow the life process to resume. Any stopped process, although unable to move ahead right now, continues to imply the endless possible ways that it could carry forward, including ways that have never existed before.

Focusing is a technique specifically designed for bringing the implied life direction into awareness, in the (formless) form of the felt sense, so that our higher human capacities for making sense of things can function with its guidance. What makes felt-sensing so powerful, and so important in our continued survival as a species, is its ability to connect evolutionarily different levels of life process. It is a new human capacity, appearing at this very challenging point in history, to get our reptilian, mammalian, and human parts to talk to one another and work in closer alignment.