Getting Our Bodies Back by Christine Caldwell

Author:Christine Caldwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

Part Two

Reembodying Recovery

Specific Strategies of the Moving Cycle

5

Awareness as the Ground

Attention or conscious concentration on almost any part of the body produces some direct physical effect on it.

—CHARLES DARWIN

Awareness is a focusing of attention, a commitment to being in the present moment, an alertness. Our bodies house nervous systems that do the job of receiving stimuli, interpreting them, and organizing meaningful responses. Our nervous systems are divided into two categories: autonomic and volitional. The autonomic nervous system responds automatically, predictably, and habitually to recurring events. Because of it, we don’t have to think consciously about breathing, digesting, or reflexive actions. If we had to think about all those actions we simply wouldn’t have time for anything else. Our volitional nervous system is designed to respond to new, unpredictable, and ever-changing events. By not behaving in a fixed way we can problem-solve, adapt quickly, and be creative. As we go up the evolutionary scale, we could say that creatures progress from having almost no volitional nervous system (like slugs) to those who have a tremendous capacity for spontaneous action and reflection, like humans. It is accurate to say, though, that we all need both fixed programs and spontaneous ones.

Our life is comprised of a constant dance between habit and impulse. All creatures inherit a certain amount of fixed programming as part of their genetic heritage. The further we go up the evolutionary scale, though, the less fixed programming is genetically inherited and the more it is learned and imprinted through early childhood experience. Most animals are born fearing fire. Humans must learn to fear it. This human capacity to use direct experience to know something is what makes us so adaptable and creative. It also underlines the tremendous influence our early upbringing has on our behavior. Our early experiences can influence not only what we habituate to, but also the amount of habituation with which we operate. Some of us habitually limit our awareness, passing flowers and beautiful sunsets by, while others of us luxuriate in the sensory experience, merely for the sake of doing it.

Awareness is one of the first and most primal mechanisms that are shaped during our early years. We are born with sensory systems—eyes, ears, noses, skin, tongues—that have certain perceptual limits (we can see better than sharks, for example, but not as well as eagles). Furthermore, we have a biological survival need to sort out what is important at any one moment from what is extraneous. This mechanism is called the figure/ground relationship. It is our propensity to make certain perceptions move into the foreground and others into the background. If a snarling tiger is in front of us, we will give all our attention to that and not pay attention to the smell of jasmine on the breeze. If a lover strokes our arm, we will feel that and not the pressure of our bottom against the chair. We can only pay attention to one thing at a time, even though many things are going on.

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