spontaneity, inhibition

[Connie Miller]

As we laugh we surely take in more oxygen! From my new book as one goes through the final door of Inpsiration-the gift being transformation.


"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear ... as it is, infinite."-- William Blake

The Challenge of Door Seven InspirationGift: TransformationUQ Where are You?This is the final doorway where you will learn to live in the moment, acknowledge with grace that you are co creators with God and that transformation may come with laughter. Here you know what you believe in and what motivates you. You are back to the child like state of being in the here and now but with purpose and not impulsivity. Now we can live in the present ever increasing our spontaneity and creativity. Our mind body and soul are in balance. We feel connected and related to the whole.We have incorporated the gifts of all three intelligences and gone through the challenges of the previous six doors.Door seven is the door of integration of all three intelligences as well as the gifts that come with the challenges of the doorways. Integration may be regarded as a balancing of intellect, emotions and intuition. This is known as integrative knowing that results in a universal intelligence or what I like to call a UQ. Each of the doorways have led us through the transitional space leading to transpersonal consciousness where we can see clearly now who we really are.Csikszentmihalyi also has found evidence of a range of experiences in which people?s identities seem to merge with something else where there is a loss of self awareness. These are all states of being.?What slips below the threshold of awareness,? he says, ?is the concept of self, the information we use to represent to ourselves who we are? (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. xi). You can call these experiences as being in the flow a joyous and creative total involvement with life. His research has shown that these experiences occur to people in the course of many surprisingly commonplace activities: working, dancing, climbing a mountain, gardening. For some people, inner anxiety and self-consciousness disappear when they become deeply engaged in such pursuits. 
How do we know when we are in the flow? Well, to take this further, Csikszentmihalyi has broken down the eight components of the experience of being in the flow:1. engagement in a challenge for which the person has the necessary skill to excel.2. absorption in which one?s awareness merges with one?s actions.3. setting of clear goals that are unambiguous even though they may be complex.4. presence of feedback that the goals are being reached.5. attenuation of one?s usual concerns while one is absorbed in the challenge.6. opportunity to exercise control, to be proactively involved.7. loss of self-awareness which involves the sense of individuality melting away . Accompanied by an identification or merging with one?s environment.8. freedom from the uniform ordering of time, with hours passing by unnoticed.Each of the states discussed lead to transpersonal consciousness. Gerald May (Chirban (2000) quotes), talks about unitive experience as a state in which no self-defining activities take place: ?[During the unitive experience] all the activities that serve to define oneself are suspended, yet awareness remains open, clear and vibrant. For the duration of such experiences there is no self-consciousness, no self/other distinction, no trying-to-do or not-to-do, no aspiration, labeling, judgment, or differentiation.?Connie












Connie Miller TEP, LPC. NCC 
http://www.souldrama.com/ 
The International Institute of Souldrama 
620 Shore Rd 
Spring Lake Heights 
NJ 07762 USA 

1-800-821-9919 



-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Blatner [mailto:ablatner at verizon.net]
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009 03:07 PM
To: 'Bud Weiss', 'HV Psychodrama'
Cc: list at grouptalkweb.org
Subject: spontaneity, inhibition

Hi all, Thanks Rebecca, for bringing this research up, and Bud, for broadening the discussion! 

Dan Goleman in 1995 wrote about Emotional Intelligence, in which he noted the idea that in states of emotional arousal, the limbic system takes over, there is a general inhibition of the flow of neural impulses from the more reflective, rational, and also creatively inspired frontal lobes (plus other sources), and as the research Rebecca notes, there is a retreat to fight flight, or in a milder sense, a re-running of well-worn habits of thinking, familiar beliefs are clung to more strongly, and so forth. Yes, I agree that this translates to low spontaneity. 

 Bud's allusion to other approaches to reducing stress and conflict speaks to a host of approaches that express the gradual penetration of psychology into mainstream culture. I'm a little intrigued by "energy parenting" and wonder how it differs from Dreikurs' classic, Children, the Challenge, published sixty or more years ago by the major exponent of Adlerian psychology in America. (He was also sympathetic to psychodrama and encouraged Adaline Starr in her work. Raymond J. Corsini was a part of ASGPP back then and also promoted an integration of Adlerian and psychodramatic ideas.) 

 I'm all for sociatry as a grand idea, but think it should be expanded to include all forms of modern education, social action, and even recreation that have as a side-effect if not the primary goal the development of consciousness, imagination, spontaneity, communications, etc. 

 The neat thing about spontaneity and creative thinking and types of research that relate to them is that it penetrates almost everything in psychology; and in turn, it is affected by all manner of psychopathological and sociopathological dynamics (including cultural oppression). A recent insight I had regarding the nature of play (in warming up to revising my book, The Art of Play) is that there's no such thing as play. One plays at this or that subject-matter, it's the manner of doing, the style of lubrication. But play itself doesn't exist. (In that sense, there are other constructs in psychology that operate near the archetypal level, requiring certain contents, subject matter, cultural forms, in order to be manifest.)

 Spontaneity itself doesn't exist, I suspect. One can approach dance, or art, conversation, or even meditation with more or less spontaneity.
 what do you think of this? It's still baby-new so be gentle. Warmly, Adam
----- Original Message ----- 
From:Bud Weiss
To:HV Psychodrama
Cc:list at grouptalkweb.org
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009 10:49 AM
Subject: Re: Some thoughts




One of the main mechanisms for this deterioration is the fact that as everyone is more and more stressed, their breathing becomes worse with greater and greater overbreathing. Adrenals become exhausted, and often, the body will steal the progesterone, the calming hormone, to make more cortisol and finally crashes.. Thyroid is exhausted causing less production of CO2 as well as many other serious effects. 
Overbreathing actually causes lessoxygen to be available to the cells and tissues especially the brain as per the Verigo Bohr Curve. Oxygen is uptaken in direct proportion to the amount of CO2 available in a balance between the aviolae and the blood. When we breath too much, we kick out too much CO2 which causes smooth muscle tissue like arteries, bronchia, sinuses, and intestines to constrict. The brain gets less of a supply of Oxygen and can't work as efficiently. Remember what an immediate relief for someone having a panic attack is...breath into a paper bag. Guess what is happening then. They are rebreathing their CO2 and getting more O2 distributed as a consequence. The brain uses 60% of the available O2 so they begin to calm down. 


People also become sleep deprived etc. This leads to the crisis intensifying and breakdown increases more and more extruding the most vulnerable to mental instiitutions and prisons where they are drugged. Even many special education programs insist on medications that have been shown to be both over presribed and highly suspect in terms of their real effects. 

Finally, Schools especially public schools are basically control mechanisms training students to go along to get along not to think independently despite some very fine teachers who work at delivering the students from that trap. The movement of the Nurtured Heart Approach see www.difficultchild.com andwww.energyparenting.com which is in well over 10,000 classrooms now in the US is basically getting at that control trap. Many teachers are stressed out themselves especially in inner city schools and the consequence is that Special education is the tail that is wagging the dog. When Nurtured Heart is introduced, teacher attrition goes down dramatically, students academic progress increases along with their independent thinking and the system is slowly evolving into a much more creative and human element. If you read John Gatto's work,http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ you will see the history of public education and how it is doing precisely what it was supposed to do. THe thing is that it has moved so far towards it's purpose that now it is producing, in the poorest schools a gateway to the prisons which are privatizing more and more and have created a huge slave market that is constantly renewing itself. ONe of the awful ironies is that much of the furniture in public schools is made in prisons bringing profits to those corporations and assisting in renewing the cycle of slavery. 
Teachers without meaning to are assisting this process as they continue to attempt to control students rather than learn to work with their energies in ways that benefit everyone. That is the revolution that Nurtured Heart is creating. Psychodrama could be a great assist in this as well as sociometry since nurtured heart students become more and more open to exploring the social contract between each other and the school staff as well. 
Blessings, best from Bud

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 9:44 AM, HV Psychodrama <hvpi at hvc.rr.com> wrote:
There is an interesting article in the NYTimes about how chronic stress creates what is essentially a total lack of spontaneity. It is interesting to translate the current finding on the way the brain works into Morenospeak...

"Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating."

Wasn't this what Moreno was talking about in who shall survive...how people will become robots and lose their ability to respond with spontaneity? 

In addition, with No Child Left Behind, schools are focusing on student's ability to regurgitate facts and pre digested opinions rather than develop spontaneity and higher level thinking. Many educators are writing in opposition to NCLB, and some of their reasoning can also be understood through the Cannon of Creativity.


Hudson Valley Psychodrama Institute
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