Budd, Rothstein
Embodied learning involves learning to act in living.
This cycle of living, acting, observing, changing, and acting again is the process of the dojo - the process of building embodied learning.
... your system of thought hides itself as the author of what you see, think or do.
Another motivation for change can come when you realize you have the potential for learning and action.
With practice, youâll become more competent at generating a mind of freshness and presence.
The most obvious source of âtruthâ comes from our culture.
What are your truths?
Moreover, Minnie showed me the cornerstone of helping someone who was suffering - just listen.
He instinctively knew that we donât just have our stories, we embody them. We are our stories.
Beginning in the 1950s, a number of medical researchers began to formulate what they called behavioural medicine. These scientists and clinicians proposed that the mind and body were not separate, but united in an intimate way. Their research began to show that problems traditionally thought of as mental - anxiety, anger, and depression - produce bodily changes and vice versa.
Self-efficacy and meaning and major health enhances; their absence is a health risk.
... the patterned reactivity of the human body. When Barbara âsawâ a person who looked like an authority figure with control over her - Irving the course leader - she had a tremendous emotional reaction and an asthma attack. She had probably behaved this way thousand of times before, always in the same manner, without any awareness of her role in creating or generating her reaction. Barbara believed the Irvings in her life were causing her to respond this way. She was a victim.
When challenged I go into achievement mode and plow in.
... my physical response occurred before thoughtâŚ
... our very process of breaking apart for the sake of understanding blinds us to a deeper truth about life - its seamlessness, its unity, its total independence.
... the behaviour of living things is not dictated by the environment, but is a reflection of their internal structure activated by the environment.
An external trigger doesnât change the machine, it activates it.
In Maturanaâs terms, the environment triggered the frog to respond; the response was a manifestation of the frogâs altered structure.
... if you want to change yourself, you have to change your structurally determined responses, not alter your environment.
... if your responses are determined by your structure, and if your structure is developed in your past, then at any given moment you are doing only and exactly what your past allows. This gave me a biological basis for compassion and respect for myself and others.
... the biological basis of all learning is structural change.
Cognitive blindness: We simply do not see what we do not see. That is not to say that we donât see shapes, colors, light and dark, etc. But we donât see meaning and context unless living and learning has modified our structures. Maturana calls this structural coupling.
I began to ask myself how my patientsâ structurally determined tendencies shaped their lives, generated their symptoms, and altered the course of their diseases.
She said, âItâs almost as if my parents were wolves. Except they raised me not to hunt, but to think Iâm âstupid.â Iâve lived âstupidâ like the wolf children lived âwolf.
... we could say that learning means developing a new common sense.
I suggested to William that he embodied a historic habit common among people who have suffered persecution and discrimination.
Experience molds the nervous system and the whole body so that their responses to future events or thoughts are altered.
Learning occurs most powerfully when you acknowledge fully what you are at this very moment with truthfulness and authenticity, and also compassion. You are your history, in this special sense. If you accept this, then youâll be able to learn and improve your relationships, your self-expression, and your well-being. If you reject this, youâll spend the rest of your life looking for an imaginary ârightâ world of safety.
In this chapter (chapter 4) I will show rather than describe language, and the various actions that people take in language.
He [Fernando Flores] is now a world-famous business consultant who uses his insights into language to transform companies and people.
In language we build our own identities, our relationships with others, the countries that we live in, the companies we have, and the values that we hold dear. With language we generate life. Without language we are mostly chimpanzees.â - Fernando Flores
You are in language already all of the time.
Iâll show how habitual and unconscious incompetence with language can cause suffering in your life.
...âlive in a house of language,â as the philosopher Martin Heidegger said that humans do.
Pain happens to the body; suffering is a function of language.
We are affected by the bodies of others.
When people become aware of their behaviour in the linguistic domain, they achieve greater effectiveness, greater satisfaction, and a better mood.
Language brings forth the world that you live in. if you want to change, itâs profoundly useful to observe how you language yourself into being and in your relationships.
Trust allows us to live at peace in relationships, and forgiveness allows us to free ourselves from resentments and build life anew.
Assessments are never the truth. They are statements people make that fulfill some concern with their particular standards.
Your historic narratives are assessments of yourself and others - âOthers are smarter than meâ; âYou canât trust menâ; âThe future is hopeless.â These assessments are generally ungrounded, but nonetheless determine what actions you will and will not take.
Pause for a few minutes and examine some of the automatic assessments that shape you. Think about age, money, race, physical appearance, health and sex. What are the ungrounded truths that dominate and influence your life?
Remember that learning involves structural alteration of your body.
As Iâve said, communication in language between two people is communication between two biological beings who literally live in different cognitive universes.
When you speak, you are literally joining two worlds.
Listening to another involves listening to what your utterance means to him or her, not to you. When they speak, it means listening to more than just their words, but reaching for the concerns and understandings that underlie the wordsâŚ
The cardinal sin of communication, which compromises all speech and relationship, is assuming that what she said is what was heard. To avoid this you must ask, observe, inquire, discuss, and listen for what the other person understands.
In fact, one aspect of power has to do with the capacity to make powerful requests.
To coordinate successfully, your requests must be precise and detailed. Youâre not insulting the listener if you make detailed requests. Youâre setting up the possibility for mutual satisfaction.
Making such distinctions is not an insult; itâs an act of taking care of another in the search for mutual satisfaction.
Remember, coordinating action in life is like dancing in language.
Committing yourself when you arenât clear about what youâre committing yourself to is foolish.
When you make a promise, youâre committing yourself to a future action and building expectation for that action in the other party.
If you ignore your promise and go on knowingly, youâre consciously betraying your word and not taking care of the other party.
There is no truth to your statements of judgement, just what you say. You can provide evidence for what you say, but that still doesnât make it the truth.
Assessments are grounded; for assertions we must provide evidence.
Even though your judgements arenât the truth, you can make them with rigorous âgroundingâ.
When you make a fantasy affirmation and declaration, you assume that it will happen by itself.
Powerful, intentional people do not indulge in fantasy affirmations and declarations. Their word is an embodied word, and they mobilize their life in pursuit of their goals. This does not mean that they are always guaranteed success, but their intent and direction is at one with their declarations.
People who make assessments without rigor are viewed as flaky and full of opinions that change like the weather.
People who donât make positive affirmations, or who make fantasy ones, live without meaning and purpose. Victor Frankl, a psychologist and philosopher, observed that during his concentration camp experience, people without meaning were vulnerable to the extreme conditions of life in the camps and perished. In contrast, people who had a purpose, generally one outside of survival, were sustained and lived. Part of the state of what we call depression is living a life of no possibility.
... the profound relationship between language and the bodyâs physiology - a placebo changes expectation.
... pain expert Dr Howard Brody says that the meaning of the placebo to the patient, and the interaction between the patient and the placebo giver, are the factors that generate the effects.
First, there must be an understandable and culturally reasonable explanation of the illness⌠Second, the caregiver must demonstrate care and concern⌠And third, the intervention must be delivered with the strong expectation for the control or relief of the symptoms.
... battlefield anesthesia, a situation in which in combat, soldiers may not even recognize or feel a major wound because of their emotional state.
Mood and emotion are a whole-body phenomena that alters the bodyâs physiology and chemistry, as well as how that person feels and acts.
Type A and B styles are not styles of the mind, but habits of the whole body.
Some men when stressed reacted with extreme blood pressure elevations. Alarmingly, those men had permanent narrowing of the blood vessels that feed the brain. They were much more at risk of having a stroke.
Youâll overcome this reaction by letting yourself have it fully, not by running away from it. If you do, it will chase you.
Like Lou said, you must go into your automatic emotions rather than flee from them.
In 1994, David Bohm, a Nobel Prize-winning British quantum physicist at the University of London, published Thoughts as a System, a book inspired by his lifelong work in physics, but whose focus was human life.
First, that thought shows you a world⌠Second, thought fools you into thinking that it reflects the world as it is⌠And third, until you perceive your thought in action, it controls your life. Thought hides itself.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger used the term âreleasementâ to describe this awareness-driven freedom.
And in the very act of attentive witnessing, you can be released from the grip of their automaticity.
Chief among them is finding the courage to tell and accept the truth. At that moment, your stories of blame and victimization about why you suffer fall away.
Awareness is our foundation of freedom and growth.
In order to swim one takes off all oneâs clothes; in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all oneâs inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc. before one is sufficiently naked. - Søren Kierkegaard
Truly listening involves relating to another person not through your internal filter but in a quiet, observant, connected way.
You have within your grasp at all times an exquisite instrument for discovering, experiencing, and managing âyour truthâ, not âthe truth.â Your body doesnât lie.
Awareness of your body allows you to act with dignity and power.
Moments of awareness, when we see our âsystem of thoughtâ at work, when we see our habitual reactions, call for noble gentleness toward ourselves. This is the first step in learning compassion. True compassion means recognizing, without judgement, conditioned tendencies in oneself or in another person.
Taking new actions is important because with recurrence and practice youâll develop an altered structure, a new body, a new mind, and a new set of automatic actions that are more consistent with your current values, with fewer shards from your past.