You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2010.
In the book we explore the ideas that socialisation and dealing with gravity were some of the selective pressures that helped trigger an increase in the size of the brain. It is a useful question if we add the ideas that ‘junk in equals junk out’ and a big brain is essential to becoming conscious. The brain is an information processing device that needs good input to function. So understanding that certain inputs were critical to the development of the brain, both in evolution and in growing up, helps us choose pathways to stimulate those inputs to improve the functioning of the brain in the adult.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/28/colin-blakemore-how-human-brains-got-bigger
The above article dismisses the idea that there was gradual development in the brain due to selective pressures. The argument that stimulating pathways that deal with gravity and socialisation helps improve the brain function in the adult does not necessarily need an evolutionary basis for it to be valid, but I have always liked it as an explanation. If Blakemore is correct I will have to let go of that. Hey ho.
The diaphragm is formed form a number of composite parts in the embryo. The most important is the septum transversum. Understanding the history of the formation of the diaphragm explains why the heart, lungs, liver, gut tube, neck and fascia all resonate strongly with the diaphragm. Clinical points that arise from the embryology are summarised at the end.
The septum transversum is a thick mass of cranial mesenchyme that gives rise to parts of the thoracic diaphragm and the anterior mesentery of the foregut in the adult. After its descent, discussed below, the septum transversum merges with mesoderm surrounding the oesophagus, the growing pleura and peritoneum (‘pleuroperitoneal folds’) and the growing muscles of the abdominal wall.
As the body moves into a relationship with its wider unfoldments, the physiology is powerfully affected. Movement towards a wider perceptual framework creates a slowing of heart rate and breath that in Long Tide state becomes very slow and even stops for moments or for a minute and sometimes for many minutes when the state is fully accessed. It’s as if the body no longer needs to meet its energetic demands through secondary respiration because it has full access to primary respiration in its purest form. The Long Tide sustains the body. There are many stories of yogis going into the breathless state for days and keeping their body alive through direct access to prana, the life force. Yogis also report the heart stopping in deepest meditation as the body lets go of its need to create prana through physiological effort. All of these phenomena particularly occur when the primal midline is accessed and the body orients to the forces present during early embryological formation. The embryonic fields and midline arise before the body is formed so no wonder the physiology lets go of the body processes. You can follow this yourself by accessing the embryonic fields that are still pat of your system and inviting the emergence of the primal midline. Here’s an mp3 audio file that will talk you through it.
relational field exercise – embryonic fields live
http://www.healthandyoga.com/html/sutras/pt_yogasutras65.asp
We have finally decided on the book cover, see the image on the side bar. After lots of debate we are really happy with it. We feel it is a strong image and an attractive cover. The designers initially came up with two colour schemes – a fabulously retro brown and orange version with a skull on and the blue and green version with the spine. We really struggled to find a representative image for the work we do, the spine is still a compromise but it speaks of the midline and takes the focus away from just the cranium, we also find we both orient to the spine a huge amount in practice.
One of the difficulties being human is coping with the huge amount of neural activity from an enormous brain. The human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe. And the brain is destined it seems to keep on growing and turning us into Martian look-alikes. We like having animals around us to regulate our brains and remind us of a less cerebral way of living. It’s not easy to live with a big brain. We have become complex in our ways of life, our society, our thinking and abilities to conceptualise and interact, and sometimes it feels like we are being run by our brains. The brain is incessant about its need for biological information both the internal and external environments but also for information about other people and the complex needs of the brain around social interaction, and of course the brain has become an ideas machine. Western society worships creative thinking so much so that we are educated to be unique and creative so we spend our life thinking and ideating furiously, wearing the brain down to the bone. No wonder there is an increase in mental disorders, depression and anxiety. The brain is out of control and needs help – fortunately help is literally at hand. Just next to the brain is the solution, the fluid medium of the central nervous system offers a state of relief that can take the brain into new states of balance and ease.
Steve Haines
Ged Sumner
