Category Archive

Here’s a podcast of a recent interview of Ged Sumner for a Minnesota Radio Show.

Wake Up Call 120114

On a recent trip to Vancouver Island I took a ferry from the mainland which sailed through the south gulf islands. Truly one of the most beautiful ferry trips I’ve been on. It was a beautiful day with remarkable low lying clouds hanging over the small islands and as i watched from the upper deck i started to notice how interconnected the whole scene was. The interaction was palpable and what seemed like separate things in the sea, the boat, the sky, the sun, the clouds, the land and the trees slowly started to reveal a hidden relationship. See the pictures below. The clouds hanging over the islands completely confused my analytical mind. How was it that clouds could be so low and not moving, just parked on top of the small islands. Why weren’t they moving? There was definitely wind blowing across the boat, so that made no sense. For the first half an hour i couldn’t work it out then suddenly it just revealed itself. The trees were holding the clouds to the land. What was missing to the eye was the water vapour that stretched like an invisible fog in all directions and bridged the gap from the sea to the clouds. It’s what we never see unless it gets so dense it becomes clouds, fog or mist but it’s always there in dynamic relationship to the sea and the sky. It’s a huge part of the atmosphere and it’s composed of water. Water in the sea, in the vapour, in the clouds and in the trees in a tensile relationship.

The scene suddenly looked like the trees didn’t want to let go of the clouds and maybe the clouds didn’t want to move away from the islands, so they morphed to the shape of the island and sat there almost on the treetops as I passed by on the ferry. Clearly the wind wasn’t strong enough to break the linkage nor was the sun’s rays strong enough to disperse the clouds, so there was a balanced membranous tension that was all about water and its property to attract other water molecules, and I realized that the only way I’d worked it out was to shift away from what I was seeing and feel the scenery through my body and its fluids. And now when I consciously dropped into the fluid volume of my body it totally made sense. The depth of the sea and its dynamic connection with me and all water forms around it, and then the clouds felt like they were an extension of my fluid volume, more like whispy organs than separate objects. The trees were like me, no different, structures with water in the them and now I felt the sunshine pouring through the vapour field into me and scintillating my fluids, exciting the water molecules in my body. Then, for a while, I don’t know how long, I lost my sense of separateness and the interactions became so beguiling and the water molecules almost hummed in constant motion and vibration, and from second to second everything was feeling its way with everything else and that is what we call movement but all it seemed like was a shifting of millions of water molecules finding balanced tensions and maintaining it by altering their positions. The surface of the sea was like a cell membrane with water entering and leaving the body of the ocean constantly and the clouds were doing the same in a huge endless field of vapour. And the sea and the clouds were dense versions of the vapour and the trees were taking in and giving out water too and so was my body, it was an exchange constantly taking place between everything and that’s how we relate. We are in constant flux with our environment, each other and water is the currency. We feel through water. We sense through water. I’ve no idea how we do that but it’s extraordinary.

Here’s my favourite books of the year:

Human Anatomy, Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today – Rifkin, Ackerman, Folkenburg (Thames & Hudson)

One of my favourite books ever. A remarkable collection of anatomy images spanning 500years – basically a history of anatomy and anatomists from Vesalius (1514-1558) arguably the father of anatomy through to Henry Gray (1827-1861) and modern anatomists. It’s also a book about the change in Western culture as anatomy and the study of the body moves from the divine and mystic through to the scientific along with attitudes towards the body and death. An absolute must for all anatomy lovers. Here’s a few images from the book all in the public domain but not easy to get hold of:

The Tell-Tale Brain – VS Ramachandran (Heinemann)

A leader in the neuroscience field and a very charismatic character who has spend his career making huge headway in the understanding of neural communication and consciousness through his study of phantom limbs and neuropathology. He’s not scared to hypothesize and has a good look at the development of language and how introspection evolved. Great sections on empathy and aesthetics. Love the chapter on ‘the neurons that shaped civilization’. Here’s a link to a youtube video of him speaking about this……

http://youtu.be/t0pwKzTRG5E

The Epigenetics Revolution – Nessa Carey (Icon)

There aren’t too many books around on this fascinating subject especially ones that are accessible and easy to fathom. The author elegantly and scientifically explains what epigenetics means and its implications for understanding health and the body. There’s some quite full on biochemistry in some sections but worth persisting to get a good handle on the science. Here’s a wonderful excerpt:

An abusive or neglectful environment when young is clearly a major risk factor for the development of later neuropychiatric disorders. We are so aware of this as a society that sometimes we almost forget to question why this should be the case. It just seems self-evident. But it’s not. Why should events that lasted for two years, for example, still have adverse consequences for that individual several decades later?

One explanation that is often given is that the chidren are ‘pyschologically damaged’ by their early experiences. Whilst true, this isn’t that helpful a statement. The reason why it’s not helpful is that the phrase ‘psychologically damaged’ sin’t really an explanation at all – it’s a description. It sounds qutie convincing but on certain levels it doesn’t really tell us anything.

Any scientist addressing this problem will want to take this description and probe it at another level. What are the molecular events that underlie this psychological damage? What happens in the brains of the abused or neglected children, that leaves them so prone to mental health problems as adults?

There is sometimes resistance to this approach from other disciplines, which work within different conceptual frameworks. This seems rather puzzling. If we don’t accept there is a molecular basis to a biological effect, what are we left with? A religious person may prefer to invoke the soul, just as a Freudian therapist may invoke the psyche. Both of these refer to a theoretical construct that has no defined physical basis. Moving into such a model system, where it is impossible to develop the testable hypotheses that are the cornerstones of scientific enquiry, is deeply unattractive to most scientists. We can probe for a mechanism that has a physical foundation, rather than defaulting to a scenario in which there is something which is assumed, somehow, to be a part of us, without having any physical evidence……..

The human brain possesses sufficient flexibility to generate different adult outcomes in response to similar childhood experiences. Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells. Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s a quadrillion. It’s hard to imagine this so let’s visualize each connection as a disc that’s 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion disks on top of each other and they will reach to the sun and back, three times over.

Thats a lot of connections, so it’s perfectly possible to imagine that our brains have a lot of flexibility. But the connections are not random. There are networks of cells within the giant grid which are more likely to link to each other than to anywhere else. it’s this combination of huge flexibility, but constrained within certain groupings, that is compatible with a system that is mechanistic but not entirely deterministic.

The Hidden Reality – Brian Greene (Alfred A. Knopf)

Amazing physicist with an ability to convey maths and physics in a very clear and exciting way. He’s deeply interested in the string theory and the idea of multi-dimensions and multi-universes. Whether you agree with it or not, it’s definitely a useful mind expanding process. He explains it really well on the embedded video:

http://youtu.be/YtdE662eY_M

Here’s some of my favourite quotations from news reports on the results of the research at CERN in Switzerland on the Higgs boson.:

The Higgs boson is a “fundamental” particle; one of the basic building blocks of the Universe. It is also the last missing piece in the leading theory of particle physics – known as the Standard Model – which describes how particles and forces interact.

The Higgs explains why other particles have mass. As the Universe cooled after the Big Bang, an invisible force known as the Higgs field formed together with its associated boson particle.

It is this field (and not the boson) that imparts mass to the fundamental particles that make up atoms. Without it, these particles would zip through the cosmos at the speed of light.

If our ideas about the Higgs boson turn out to be correct, then everything we see is a kind of window dressing based on an underlying fabric of reality in which we shouldn’t exist. The particles that make us up – which bind together to form protons, neutrons, nuclei and ultimately atoms – have mass. Without the Higgs, these particles would be massless, like photons.

As successful as the Standard Model has been, it still doesn’t encompass gravity. Nor does it provide a reason for why there was an excess of matter over anti-matter after the Big Bang, allowing the Universe to come into being. And the theory accounts for the behaviour of just 4% of the Universe – its normal matter. The rest, in the form of dark matter and dark energy, remains to be explained.

Here’s one of my favourite webpages on the internet. When im feeling confused by life i just click on the link and it always makes me feel better – puts things in perspective. The page looks at a huge variety of objects in the universe and compares them all in terms of length. The list is an amazing mix. The length of a London bus (the old Routemaster), next to the Large Megallanic Cloud, next to the width of a quark, next to a golf ball makes me laugh. The universe is so mad. O yeah the size of a human being is in there too. My favourite though is Quantum Foam. What’s that i hear you ask?……..

Quantum foam, also referred to as spacetime foam, is a concept in quantum mechanics, devised by John Wheeler in 1955. The foam is supposed to be the foundations of the fabric of the universe[1].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)

All perceptual fields exist at the same time. They are equipresent and part of the fabric of reality. However, the nature of our sensory system is to be more interested in particular perceptual fields over others. Overall there’s a common relationship to the narrower fields of perception as most of our daily life exists within it. Going to work, interacting with people, doing your tax returns all needs a narrower field. After all, going around connecting to the the ecosystem you are just a part of, isn’t necessarily something that is possible in the everydayness of our lives. Nevertheless these fields exist and we reside in them whether we are conscious of them or not. In fact the wider the field the more sustaining it is for our health and order and it’s often a lack of relationship to these that creates disease and depression.

Being locked in narrow fields of perception includes a whole way of understanding the world that is partial and out of touch with our true nature. The BCST practitioner brings a huge possibility through a relational touch. It’s an ability to relate to the unconscious perceptual layers of our system. So it’s no surprise that most clients are unable to feel or perceive all of what takes place in a treatment. It takes some training to be able to relate to the them. The sophisticated practitioner is able to be in relationship to all perceptual fields simultaneously. This allows the relational field to be truly relational and not partial. How the client’s system takes this up is interesting. Most people’s systems have particular tendencies to certain perceptual fields. You can feel this when you touch them. This is why holistic shift can be such an important mechanism for the client’s system as it opens up options to other perceptual states that are not consciously experienced. One of the great benefits of this therapy is to open up the client’s conscious awareness to other perceptual states. The client then goes through profound changes as the body and mind are effected by the qualities and states within the perceptual field. One of the most remarkable experiences as a practitioner is watching the client’s system drop into dynamic stillness or long tide and observing their response across many levels. And of course, watching how this unfolds in their lives. This is the biggest effect of all. That’s the transforming nature of the therapy, to open up new perceptual fields for people. This is much more powerful than helping resolve trauma and illness.

Babies are formed in the wide perceptual field and young children move in it. That’s why we like them so much. Part of growing up is to narrow our field of perception to deal with the realities of physical life. Socialization and the modern world hasn’t helped with this shift. It’s only intensified the orientation to the physical and the material world. Lost are the wider perceptions of life. The modern world has lost much, the subtle world, feeling part of the universe and simplicity of life. Instead there’s a subjective mind that is full of ego and skepticism about anything that is not physically evident.

The BCST practitioner opens up to these perceptual layers that are in the background of our lives and guess what happens? The body loves it. It’s what the body has been missing. A connection to the matrix that we were formed in as embryos and fetuses. Suddenly the body starts becoming fluid and less structured. The material world melts and we drop into a volume of fluid reminiscent of the uterus and the fetus and experience a state of floating and freedom. Then the body wants more, it wants to dissolve back to its components into the subtle wide field that creates a feeling of being connected to all life and the body becomes air and feels like one node in a huge interconnecting web. The body is happy beyond belief now. It’s what it’s been waiting for all its life and missing. The big picture.

And to the practitioner this is normal. This is our residing state of aliveness. It comes with a wash of vitality and potency and a sense of the hugeness that is right next to us and within us all the time. It’s been there waiting in the background. It’s funny in a way because we are so blind to it. Once you know it, you see it everywhere. You are transformed to it. It’s in your daily life. It’s in the coffee shop, it’s on the train and the plane and it’s at your workplace. You feel it all the time. Humming in the background, there’s no escape from it now. All these years it’s been ignored and misunderstood but now it’s flowing into your mind and body and you are walking around feeling vast and spacious in a majestic state. And the stress and strains of life are not so serious after all. Hey, you’ve gained a perspective on things at last. And now you know you aren’t just a physical body you are a fluid being, you are a relational field being. The part you thought you were is but a small bit of who you are. And this has all happened through being touched by someone with a perception of these fields and the interweaving of them through your whole system, and that’s just like a painting – there’s a foreground and there’s a background. And the foreground is what’s eclipsing the background. There’s not even a window to see the background and the landscape never mind the horizon. But you know it’s there, you feel it. And within no time at all the background is becoming stronger. This is in the first session.

And the other fields are starting to reveal themselves and the foreground is now a mix of fields not just the narrow one and suddenly there’s the backdrop of reality coming into the room and the body, there’s an horizon in the picture now and the person’s body is diffusing into it because its not separate from us, it’s what we are made of. We have coalesced out of it. The body is a coalescence out of an energy field matrix. The same way the sun is just a part of it’s huge gravity field that effects all planets around it and responds to the rest of the galaxy through dark matter and if only we could see with other eyes the universe would light up with streams of relational lines that reveal how preposterous it is that we think we are separate.

Meanwhile the body is feeling bliss from surrendering into a state of union or is that a state or relationship to its environment? The mind might be freaking out a bit but the body is in heaven and at last it’s found what it’s been missing and now physical conditions and states of mind are but miniscule things next to a health that is everywhere, in your every atom that you’ve somehow insanely missed. That’s the mystery, how we miss it. How we have civilized our way into such separateness. And the practitioner is sat there once again being mesmerized by the phenomenon of life. That life will show itself and the body will naturally reorganize itself in response to this alignment with the whole because the mind, the modern mind, can’t except it and it looks like a miracle but actually it’s just the most natural thing in the universe happening. That’s what’s so funny and that’s what’s so important about the evolution of this work – it’s getting simpler because its recognizing the simple truth that we need to relate to the whole system that we are a part of. That’s all it needs for health and happiness and emancipation and enlightenment and I suspect that’s all that every wise man in the history of wisdom has ever really been saying and now we can make a difference through the most powerful thing in the world – touch.