[excerpted from, Developing a ‘Global Mind’ ©2023]

Our Big Question: How does culture help to shape individual identity?

Let’s take the premise of our previous chapter a step further, before we return to our quest for a global perspective. It’s not genuine to say “I don’t see culture” as an attempt to erase those barriers between us, any more than it is to say “I don’t see race” or similar. We can’t simply put blinders on, state that we’re a human being and a member of the human family, and act as if cultural differences don’t exist. Yes, becoming a global citizen and developing global mindedness relies on our sense of the interconnectedness of all humanity and our commonalities and shared goals. However, we don’t want to be naïve about our differences – precisely in order that we may better collaborate toward those goals.

Remember when I said, most individuals don’t actually know their own culture intimately – that the fish doesn’t know about water precisely because it’s the only environment the fish knows? Or rather, we know it deeply as our lived experience, but our cultural values and customs have been embedded in us throughout childhood; so, by the time we reach adulthood, we don’t think about it and simply live it instead. Knowing our own culture, then, helps us to recognize our ethnocentrism when it arises; knowing how culture affects our personal identity, even more so.

Identity is made up of two broad layers. In the innermost circle, we have factors such as age (which of course changes continually), biological sex, gender identity or expression, race and ethnicity, physical and mental ability, sexual orientation, and national origin. The outer ring, secondary features but still vitally influential, includes such elements as our family, appearance, language and communication skills, education, religion, political belief, community, socioeconomic class, profession and work experience.

In one of the more well known models of identity formation, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (remember that pyramid shape?), our core identity is formed based on having essential needs met, such as food and shelter, safety and stability, belonging and love, and esteem or respect. Only once these are relatively established as a foundation can we then continue to more nuanced development: cognitive, aesthetic, and self-actualization or personal development – such as the quest to develop one’s global consciousness.

Naturally, this isn’t always a straight or strict progression. Many levels develop simultaneously. It is generally true, however, that if you’re worried about food, shelter, or safety, you aren’t going to be focused on self-development.

Identity is formed in context, then, socially and historically constructed – and thus, heavily influenced by one’s culture. We learn and develop personal identity through interaction with others – our family, peers, community, organizations, institutions. Our social and cultural identity are based on belief and value systems and are linked to power. Media, in all its forms, uses images, words, and characters to transfer – and often, to cultivate – specific ideas and values of a culture and society. (Media literacy, then, to be later addressed, becomes vitally important.)

So, what is ‘cultural identity’?

Of course, this begins as a form of both self-identity and a sense of belonging to a group, which is defined by its values, meanings, customs, and beliefs. While our social identity teaches us how to relate to other members of our own culture, it’s our cultural identity that teaches us how to relate to the world. The group shares historical experiences and cultural codes – a kind of short-hand language that stems from shared experiences and influences, such as media – and can be further molded by our ancestral origin or heritage, our group’s physical or ethnic appearance, and/or common behavioral patterns. Our cultural identity covers our entire lifespan, no matter our global experiences, yet it can be nuanced or even confusing if we grow up in a blend of two or more cultures; think of those whose parents are from different cultures, with the family living in a third country or cultural setting, for example – common among expats from different countries who meet, marry, and raise their children while abroad, and a phenomenon known as TCK – Third-Culture Kids. Cultural identity is also dynamic, constantly evolving as is our culture itself, changing every moment based on the social context – and as such, is also an ever-changing understanding of one’s own identity in relation to others.

Elements of cultural identity are many. This includes both how members of a culture view themselves and how outsiders view them, with enduring as well as changing features. There are affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects – how we feel, think, and act – as well as modes of expression. One’s cultural identity encompasses individual, relational, and communal identities in one, with both content and context aspects of communication. And, cultural identity can be understood along a continuum in terms of others’ perception: how obvious to those of other cultures is your cultural identity? Can you be easily identified, or is your cultural background more subtle and less apparent to others?

There are two ways of understanding our cultural identity. The first is external, and includes social and cultural behaviors. While every culture has a range, and you may even be a nonconformist in your own, we nevertheless can easily recognize these external cues – the proverbial tip of the iceberg. What’s underneath the surface, however, is more challenging to understand and put into words. This ‘hidden’ aspect of cultural identity falls into 3 broad categories: cognitive, or how you perceive yourself, your associated group(s), and your traditions; moral, including your sense of obligation to your heritage and its values; and, emotional, which includes your attachment to your culture and desire to be with people who have similar beliefs, values, and cultural patterns.

First, in our familiar social and cultural environment, our ‘comfort zone’, we develop our sense of self and our understanding of others. Thereafter, we can expand ever-increasingly into a more global identity, moving step-by-step beyond our comfort zone as we place ourselves in unfamiliar situations – and, we grow. Above all, this is the process of developing oneself as a ‘global citizen’ – we don’t lose or erase our original culture, but enhance it.

In our quest for a global identity, then, we go through 6 stages. The first is one of ‘psychological captivity’: for most of us, we grow up in a monocultural experience that comes with some inherent stereotypes. We then develop to an ethnic or cultural ‘encapsulation’ in which we identify with our culture exclusively in a voluntary separatism from other cultures. From here we get to an identity clarification, in which we gain knowledge and perhaps pride in our heritage, and self-awareness that we have a cultural identity – that is, that not everyone has the same culture that we do.

At the fourth level, and by reading a book such as this I imagine you’re at least at this point already, we begin to develop a metaphoric ‘bi-ethnicity’; we have a strong sense of our own ethnic and cultural identity, and also a general respect for other ethnic and cultural groups. To move from this to the 5th stage of development, our own multiculturalism, we first need to gain knowledge of multiple cultural groups. And in the final stage, our goal of globalism and global competency, we’ve developed our ethnic, national, and global aspects of identity, and have also achieved the necessary knowledge, skills, and attitudes to identify and engage with both our own and other cultures – simultaneously.

This is the global citizen.

In my original cultural context of the US, I never particularly identified with the dominant ‘American’ culture. As I’d spent the majority of my life in New York City, one of the world’s most diverse, I adopted characteristics of multiple groups: Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Puerto Rican, German, Irish, Caribbean, Korean, Indian, and more. My actual heritage is English and Swiss; when I traveled to each of these countries for the first time, already in adulthood, I instantly recognized many of the cultural habits of my family, despite our having been in the US for multiple generations already. In these past 20 years, I’ve lived in a succession of Asian countries and traveled the world; my mannerisms, customs, speech pattern, and other features are now such a blend that I couldn’t easily describe my cultural self – even as I can, in fact, list certain characteristics (directness, independence, positivity, individualism, and self-efficacy, for example) that I know to be rooted in my US upbringing.

So, how does our interaction with other cultures, in our quest for open-mindedness and a global identification, affect our own identity?

Identity, in fact, can be a challenging question for the long-term nomad or expat, while an immigrant is likely to become, after some time, a blend of two cultures – the original and new; living in other cultures and/or engaging with the world in any significant way will always impact our identity in some way, often initially in some form of destabilization.

As we meet others whose worldviews, norms, values, capabilities, practices, and aspirations are markedly different from our own, we must ask ourselves – as a stabilizing factor – who am I? Who am I in this context? And, what can I do in this circumstance – do I make any changes to my own identity, or do I remain essentially the same while respecting the other? We can indeed maintain our own cultural identity and characteristics while developing relationships with those of other cultures; or, we can allow the experience to influence and change us, to the degree of our personal comfort.

Remember: our own personal as well as social and cultural aspects of identity were all forged in relation to others, not in a vacuum – so, our identity will continue to be affected by context. Think of the person who only becomes religious late in life; they will experience a rather profound shift in identity when they may have thought themselves fully formed, their identity rather fixed. The same is very true as we embrace a lifelong quest to become a citizen of the world.

In fact, self-identification through others, or in context – allowing ourselves to be affected, and changed, by our encounters with those of ethnicities, cultures, societies, and nations other than our own – is essential to one’s identification as a global citizen.

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Exercises:

Discussion or Contemplation: What are some elements of my identity – personal, ethnic, social, cultural?

Writing or Recording: What is my cultural identity? Describe in some detail.

Further Reading: Ourselves in the World: Identity Development http://communicationtheory.org/cultural-identity-theory/

[excerpted from, 9 Keys to Ritual for Self-Care: Transpersonal Psychology ©2023]

And now, an old standard updated for personal use: ritual for initiation, rites of passage, and other life events.

How can we mark all those events that give our life meaning? And what’s the benefit of doing so in ritual format? (Hint: it’s the meaning-making itself.)

As I write this, I am approaching my 60th birthday. This is often seen as entering one’s ‘third-third’ of life, or Third Act – in my view, letting go of adulthood and entering a more exalted stage, elderhood. (With an eye toward ancestorhood. But more on that later.)

And so, I am ritualizing my transformation – in this, my chrysalis year, with another year thereafter of integration. I’ve devised a series of rituals throughout this lead-up year, focused on processing this transition in a conscious and contemplative way, considering what I want from this third stage and how I’d like to enter it. It’s an adventure, a period of wisdom and self-transcendence, of intensive personal development and mystical experience – and not without its challenges and anxieties. So, I choose to enter it in a sacred way, one that recognizes and honors my transition – as transformation.

Exciting! This is magic: the use of ritual, to acknowledge and intentionally facilitate change.

So, what life passages are we talking about? Those traditionally honored in most cultures include birth, death, marriage, and a rite of passage to maturity. (Today we add ‘graduation’ – at multiple points, it seems.) I think we can do better. In addition to my series of rituals ushering in elderhood, we can use ritual to acknowledge the life passage of divorce, widowhood, retirement, one’s own birth in retrospect, menopause, the children we never had, the new job (or new book) or any achievement – any significant, even life-changing, event.

This is for personal ritual, but we can also extend this to community – any major change or accomplishment of the social group can be honored collectively in ritual. In fact, returning to the theme of rituals for aging, as we age the storytelling and shared experience of rituals can help in facilitating our sense of community and our acceptance of the aging process itself, stage by stage (Nelson-Becker & Sangster, 2019).

We can think of this as initiatory ritual: in each case, we are initiating a new phase as we say farewell to the previous one. In such transition, we step through a doorway, cross a threshold – and for a time, therefore, we’re in liminal space – universally sacred. When we think of the classic use of the term ‘initiation’, it can guide our ritual creation; what are we initiating? How do we want to undergo a ritual of initiation? How do we welcome the new, and say goodbye to the old? And how do we make the most of the liminal space, the rich in-between?

We’ve had a lot of practice, in fact – with every new year, as we usher out the old to make room for the new, that last week and then first week representing the transition. We may not ritualize it per se, but we all acknowledge it nonetheless – in annual ritual of the global community.

But why bother with ritual? Isn’t it just a lot of work, and not a little superstition, for no practical purpose? We do it, and it comes highly recommended for reinstatement where possible, because ritual, however simple, imbues and enhances meaning. It acknowledges major shifts in life, rather than letting them slip by – and that’s a more mindful and conscious way to live. It also reminds us that our very lives are, paradoxically, both insignificant and sacred; the humanist or atheist as well can use ‘sacred’ in this sense, to denote meaning and value.

Perhaps the most profound rites of passage are birth and death, and in each case, we need others to facilitate this ritual on our behalf. Pregnancy and childbirth have been ritualized by women in a number of cultures, often involving prayers and offerings to a goddess of childbirth. We can also create modern, secular rituals of this nature, honoring the coming child and at the same time, calming the anxieties of the mother (Wojtkowiak, 2020).

We do the same in death, conducting rituals to honor the departing loved one and to calm our own death anxieties. Funereal rites can be found in every culture and religion, and of course have changed over time (Mitima-Verloop et al., 2021). How we honor our dead is powerful ritual indeed, as we console ourselves and others who mourn their passing – or celebrate their passing, yet acknowledge our loss. We may also be consoling the dead and helping their souls to pass, if aligned with your belief system. In shamanic funeral rituals I’ve observed, interspersed with lamentations of the living are special rites meant to console the spirit of the dead; these are held again at several intervals during the year (or sometimes three) after death, to help them move fully on to the afterworld and not get ‘trapped’ in this one as a hungry, unfulfilled ghost.

Sometimes, as mourners our grief is prolonged and unresolved, especially when death is untimely or particularly tragic. Rituals of healing would be appropriate, yet it’s directly connected to this category for life passages as well. When we find ourselves unable to heal our grief, stuck in place or consumed by emotion, we can create rituals that combine healing of our hearts with that of consoling the dead and helping them to pass on to whatever is next (Wojtkowiak et al., 2021). If unable to do the former as our grief remains unresolved, we can focus on the latter – consolation for the dead – for an indirect healing of our own hearts.

On a related note: as we know, we humans are the only animal with foreknowledge of our mortality – and that can fill us with existential dread, or death anxiety; this typically becomes more exaggerated as we reach old age, of course, and ritual can help (Pandya & Kathuria, 2021). Buddhists meditate on their own death, an intense experience; we can create personal rituals to view our funeral, or to imagine floating in the ether of eternity, or envision the afterlife if we have such belief, or conduct a ritual of letting go of life – in the abstract. The possibilities are endless, the need to move past such anxiety essential to our enjoyment of remaining years; rather than a focus on death, we look it square in the face and let our anxiety go, in order to focus fully on life.

And so, we honor our life passages and significant events, by imbuing them with a deep sense of meaning – through ritual.

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Exercises:

Our process of clarity: in meditation, journaling, mind-mapping, or deep contemplation, ask yourself: is this an upcoming passage? If so, what do I want from and for it? Is it a previous one that wasn’t acknowledged? How can I fill this gap? (We can conduct a ‘coming of age’ ritual in mid-adulthood, for example, if it feels useful.) Do I want to replicate and celebrate my own birth? Acknowledge my entry into elderhood? Rehearse my own death? Or maybe you’re starting a new project, or ending a relationship?

What’s most relevant to you and this passage? What do you anticipate, and hope to embrace or accomplish? What do you need? How can you give that, symbolically, to yourself? What guide(s) do you need? Talk to Grandma, a Wise One, your former or future self?

Design your ritual, prepare as needed, imagine it from start to finish – and afterward, reflect in some way and integrate into your daily life – as always. Consider what method you will use to alter your state of consciousness: breathing, music or other sound, meditation, or–? Develop some form of visualization or guided imagery; if the latter, write your script (or find one you like and modify it to suit you), then record it in your own voice, with a 1-minute lead of silence.

Some suggestions: you can use mental time travel to envision yourself in either past or future as required. You may approach menopause or other later life passage in a manner similar to that of coming-of-age or entering adulthood –as this is another ‘coming-of-age’. By that, a very conscious approach to one’s elder years is essential to aging well. If your own birth or childhood was traumatic or unhealthy in some way, consider rituals of a ‘parallel life’ – one in which you revisit your birth and all goes well; one in which you give yourself as a child all that you needed.

This type of ritual can take forms of celebration, mourning, reframing, accepting, and many others. Consider the purpose of your ritual and how you want to acknowledge this stage or transition, whether it’s occurring now – or in the past, or future.

References:

Mitima-Verloop HB, Mooren TTM, and Boelen PA (2021). Facilitating grief: An exploration of the function of funerals and rituals in relation to grief reactions. Death Studies 45:9, 735-745. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2019.1686090

Nelson-Becker H and Sangster K (2019). Recapturing the power of ritual to enhance community in aging. Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging 31:2, 153-167. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528030.2018.1532858

Pandya AK and Kathuria T (2021). Death Anxiety, Religiosity and Culture: Implications for Therapeutic Process and Future Research. Religions. 12:1:61. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010061

Wojtkowiak J (2020). Ritualizing Pregnancy and Childbirth in Secular Societies: Exploring Embodied Spirituality at the Start of Life. Religions 11:9:458. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11090458

Wojtkowiak J, Lind J, and Smid GE (2021). Ritual in Therapy for Prolonged Grief: A Scoping Review of Ritual Elements in Evidence-Informed Grief Interventions. Frontiers in Psychiatry 11:623835. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.623835

[Excerpted from, 9 Keys to Mystical Experience: Transpersonal Psychology ©2023]

Dreams. We inherently equate them with magic, even as we understand it as our brain’s attempt to defragment and make sense of the day’s input. It may also be that we’re accessing unconscious material, and the unconscious, associated with our primal state or deep and preverbal mind, functions in symbols.

Stories of mystical experience through dreams abound, in every culture and religious tradition. In some, the creation myth includes a deity or other being dreaming the world into existence. Dreaming brings noesis; we learn, experience, and know via our dreams in ways we can’t account for in our waking life.

We remember poignant ones, and some of them repeat. I still vividly and viscerally recall, from half a century ago, a childhood dream in which I was flying with mythical creatures, large fowl with human faces, looking down from above at our home and neighborhood. (I also still recall telling my parents in excitement, only to feel profoundly disappointed in their lack of understanding, when told that it was ‘just a dream’.)

And I’ve two dreams that repeat, each at least once a year for as long as I can recall; in the first, I’m swimming deep in the sea, the water passing through my body, in a state of bliss – and eventually, as the water grows shallow, realizing with a mixture of chagrin and resignation that I must emerge onto the land, and as I begin to do so, the dream ends. In the other, more of a nightmare really, I hear familiar Protestant hymns being sung and am filled with dread that the church of my childhood is grasping me, drawing me back in as if a vacuum, that my ‘escape’ all these years was merely an illusion. Yes, poignant.

Dream interpretation has long been considered a pathway to our unconscious. But how can we utilize the dream state as a key to mystical experience?

In a word: hypnagogia.

Whether you know the term or not, you know the experience: that liminal space between wake and sleep. While it specifically refers to falling asleep, and ‘hypnopompic’ its opposite, the former is more widely used for both. The ‘threshold consciousness’ that this phase represents includes all manner of mental phenomena, from hallucinations to ‘exploding head’ to lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis.

Liminality is sacred in a majority of spiritual traditions – the in-between, the moment of change, the transient and transcendent. This is no different, and we’ll explore lucid dreaming as our key path to the mystical realm. Dreaming brings noesis, that knowledge for which we cannot account in our waking life, sometimes with the added layer of awareness that we’re dreaming (Domhoff, 2023). In lucid dreaming, this is what we seek.

But first: revelatory dreams. Like any other mystical experience, ‘mind-revealing’ in nature, throughout history and across cultures dreams have been conceived as foretelling, the word of some deity or another, or ultimate truth. Supernal dreams come in 4 forms (Irwin, 2020): normative or rational, in which, while they aren’t deeply symbolic or otherwise seem mystical in nature, some truth is nonetheless revealed; mythic or imaginal, such as my childhood flying dream with its mythic creatures; psychic or intuitive, noetic in nature, in which we gain knowledge or insight we didn’t previously know we had; and, the truly mystical or ontological, a spiritual or transcendent experience in which we gain understanding of profound concepts such as the very nature of reality. Naturally, there can be overlap, and they typically occur spontaneously; keeping a dream journal can help us to see patterns and better understand our dream material. But can we engender these revelatory experiences as lucid dreams?

Dream incubation has long been utilized, in various forms. The hypnagogic state has been induced by hypnosis, and by a method very similar to that of lucid dreaming (Ghibellini & Meier, 2023). Lucid dreaming has been studied scientifically just in the past few decades, but the term was coined more than a century ago and its precedent can be found in every major religion, in Hindu scripture dating back more than 2 millennia. Tibetan monks induce it through dream yoga, Christian mystics viewed it as the voice of deity and Augustine identified it more than 1600 years ago as a preview of the afterlife, while Islam considers it the highest form of mystical experience (Mota-Rolim et al., 2020).

Its connection to mystical experience is clear among major religious traditions, and also in the research. In a recent empirical survey study of 471 respondents (Stumbrys, 2021), 95% had experienced lucid dreaming while 65% frequently engaged in same, determined as monthly or more often, and those in the latter category scored higher on several subscales of mystical experience. In a laboratory-based sleep study of lucid dreaming under 4 different conditions (Erlacher & Stumbrys, 2020), a combined wake-up-back-to-bed sleep protocol plus mnemonic technique demonstrated promising results in participants who were not prone to lucid dreaming, the results confirming 4 prior field studies. And in a newly published review of 19 recent studies, Tan and Fan (2023) found consistency across studies, 14 effective methods for induction, and an overall advancement in the research.

The nature of lucid dreaming in accessing noetic experience defines the very term ‘transpersonal’ (Bogzaran, 2020; Irwin, 2020; Stumbrys, 2018) and as such, each has a great deal to contribute to the other. Transpersonal psychology, with its underpinnings in Jungian theory, has been focused on dream interpretation from the field’s inception, especially supernal though not always the lucid dreaming approach. Lucid dreaming is generally seen as an alternate state of consciousness and means of accessing both personal and collective unconscious; it also aligns with both meditation and mindfulness, with the latter taking a passive approach of nonattachment while lucid dreaming is more actively directed (Stumbrys, 2018).

Bogzaran (2020) in particular, a scholar of consciousness studies and expert in the science of dreaming, identifies transpersonal experiences in lucid dreaming as ‘hyperspace lucidity’, which she describes as transpersonal in nature, nondual and nonrepresentational, beyond time and space, and experienced as both extraordinary and impactful – surely also mystical. In her words: “…lucid dreaming can be a threshold to multidimensional aspects of the mind…. The exploration of the depths of the mind through consciousness in sleep is limitless.” (p.67.)

So, how do we use lucid dreaming for achieving mystical experience?

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Exercises:

We are dreaming in this case not to solve problems or for fun, but for accessing the mystical realm; make that your singular focus prior to sleep, and be as specific as possible.

Setting an alarm to wake yourself in the middle of the night is one especially productive method (if sleep disturbance is acceptable and you don’t have to rise early the next morning!); there are then two approaches: staying awake at least 30 minutes before returning to sleep (as it alters your sleep pattern) – or, saying aloud “I will be aware of my dreams” over and over as you return to sleep.

For lucid dreaming: take a nap. No, seriously. A simple yet effective approach is to engage first in either contemplative meditation or journal-writing on the general topic of mystical experience, or the specific type of experience you wish to have. You can alternately engage in a brainstorming activity of the mind-mapping style, in which you write ‘mystical experience’ in the center of a blank sheet of paper and quickly fill the page with as many associations as possible, drawing lines among them to denote relationships.

Once you’ve focused strongly on your topic, lie down (in the same location; don’t engage in any other activity between your focusing and your napping) and take a nap for 20-30 minutes. Be sure to keep your journal, a notebook, or a note app in your phone nearby, and set an alarm; immediately on waking, sit up and write notes about your dreaming. First write as many keywords as possible, ‘catching’ as much dream detail as you can in this way before it fades; in follow-up you can enhance your keyword list, adding detail, reflecting, interpreting.

Engage in this lucid dreaming exercise at least monthly, but ideally on a weekly basis, as it will continually refine your ability not only to direct your dream to the topic of mystical experience, but to enter the experience itself.

Be sure to maintain a regular practice of meditation. The more often you meditate, and train your brain in this way, the more likely you will be able to achieve lucid dreaming.

It’s also useful to select a particular body part (hands are best) that you focus on strongly as you’re falling asleep; in dreams, try to notice your hands, and you’ll become aware that you’re dreaming by this preset cue.

Keep a dream journal – the more you try to recall and record, the more aware of your dreams you’ll become.

Test throughout the day that you’re perceiving reality and not dream, by noticing details – as this will program your brain to better understand when you’re ‘witnessing’ a dream. Mindfulness practice, of noticing the details around us, is helpful.

References:

Bogzaran F (2020). Methods of Exploring Transpersonal Lucid Dreams: Ineffability and Creative Consciousness. Integral Transpersonal Journal 15, 53-70.

Domhoff GW (2023). The relationship between dreaming and autonoetic consciousness: The neurocognitive theory of dreaming gains in explanatory power by drawing upon the multistate hierarchical model of consciousness. Dreaming 33:1, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000233

Erlacher D and Stumbrys T (2020). Wake Up, Work on Dreams, Back to Bed and Lucid Dream: A Sleep Laboratory Study. Frontiers in Psychology 11:1383. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01383

Ghibellini R and Meier B (2023). The hypnagogic state: A brief update. Journal of Sleep Research 32:1:e13719. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.13719

Irwin L (2020). Supernal Dreaming: On Myth and Metaphysics. Religions 11:11:552. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11110552

Mota-Rolim SA, Bulkeley K, Campanelli S et al. (2020). The Dream of God: How Do Religion and Science See Lucid Dreaming and Other Conscious States During Sleep? Frontiers in Psychology 11:555731. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.555731

Stumbrys T (2018). Bridging lucid dream research and transpersonal psychology: Toward transpersonal studies of lucid dreams. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 50:2.

Stumbrys T (2021). The Luminous Night of the Soul: The Relationship between Lucid Dreaming and Spirituality. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 40:2:6.

Tan S and Fan J (2023). A systematic review of new empirical data on lucid dream induction techniques. Journal of Sleep Research 32:3, e13786. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.13786

[Excerpted from, 9 Keys to Meaning-Making: Transpersonal Psychology ©2023]

Our 3^rd key is body knowledge: accessing personal meaning through the body, in our mind-body relationship. Everyone knows: the body knows.

We’ve all had those gut feelings, instinct and intuition. We all know the experience of emotion held in the body, how getting a massage may make us break into tears. The idea of body wisdom isn’t new to us – and now science has begun to support the anecdotal evidence: the solar plexus as the ‘body-brain’, gut intelligence as it holds sway over our health, cellular memory, memory in connective tissue, and more.

Accessing our cognition, or even our unconscious, isn’t enough; a whole-body approach includes soma as well as psyche. This somatic wisdom can be attained in a variety of ways, broadly in categories of body awareness and movement.

In Asian traditional medical systems, psyche and soma were never separated (Xie et al., 2022), as dualism is a European philosophy; the idea of treating mind and body separately is thus uniquely ‘western’. In fact, a profound disruption between body and mind results in what psychologists term, dissociative disorders (Goldberg, 2020).

The recent work of Monti et al. (2022) demonstrates that the development and maintenance of one’s sense of self or self-concept is closely related to interoceptive influences of the respiratory, cardiac, and gastric systems, certainly internal but not especially mental. This also means, as the researchers posit, that compromises in these bodily systems can lead to disruptions in self-concept – and, it could be further supposed, to one’s presence of meaning.

Trauma and the resultant constellation of stress symptoms provides us with a good example of why cognitive wisdom alone is insufficient. Physical or sexual trauma is a profound insult to the body itself, and the body remembers, in patterns of somatic response well known (Copley & Carney, 2020). Depression can also become an embodied syndrome, which responds well to mind-body therapies (Orphanidou et al., 2023). The psychological manual of disorders refers to this as somatization or conversion disorder, when the psychological issue becomes a very real physical problem – but without a physically treatable cause (Ezra et al., 2019).

I had a longstanding clinical practice in New York that I named, Center for Integrative Health Care. In addition to my psychology degrees, I’d also been trained and licensed in acupuncture, massage therapies, and nutritional counselling, and held certificates in a dozen or so body therapies as well as meditation training. I’ve now lived and worked around the world for 20 years, primarily in NE Asia – and I deeply understand the power of an integrative approach, one which considers psyche, soma, and spirit.

Utilizing somatic therapies in psychology is on the rise as awareness increases among professionals (Kassis & Papps, 2020), and the body’s ability to hold emotion becomes better understood (Greenberg, 2021). The somatic approach has also been applied to both spirituality and psychosocial health (Bhuiyan et al., 2022); a mind-body orientation can lead to greater prosocial engagement and global consciousness as well (Loy et al., 2022).

Somatic psychology includes not only body manipulation and energy therapies but also movement disciplines (Mijaries, 2022), such as Feldenkrais (Allen, 2019), yoga (Bringmann et al., 2021), ballet (Kim & Choo, 2022), or taekwondo (Kim et al., 2015). Energy psychology, too,  following on electromagnetic or ‘qi’ practices of acupuncture and kinesiology with methodologies such as Thought Field Therapy and Emotional Freedom Technique, facilitates the somatic source of knowledge and meaning.

While its emergence in traditional psychological approaches is recent, somatic psychology has been a feature of the transpersonal field since its inception more than 5 decades ago (Friedman, 2014). Therapeutic application has been one focus, while another has been that of the physical body as a primary source of knowledge and meaning.

Anderson (2006) developed the Body Intelligence Scale, by which inherent intelligence of the body can be measured; Winton-Henry (2020) and others developed InterPlay, a creative, playful approach whereby adults can access bodily wisdom. Dess (2021) argues that even the phrase ‘mind-body relationship’ does us a disservice, as we are fully embodied humans without hierarchy of mind over body.

Rather than a mere object for diagnosis and treatment, the body holds a ‘central role’ in both meaning-making and identity, according to Orphanidou et al. (2023), and thus, illness can be profoundly disruptive to one’s sense of self and the world. There’s a well-established connection between presence of meaning and physical health, in fact, and Haugan and Dezutter (2022) argue that healthcare professionals should fully support people’s sense of life meaning.

So how can we access what our body knows – its inherent wisdom and intelligence?

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Exercises:

In a meditative state, quieting the mind by reducing distractions and focusing on your breathing, conduct a slow and methodical body scan. This is not the body-scan found in mindfulness meditation, however, as we seek knowledge. Focus first on your feet, and after establishing strong focus, ask this area of your body for its wisdom; see what, if anything, floats into your mind (e.g., your fundamental support? the direction of your life?). After a short while, shift your awareness to your legs, then hips and pelvis, and so on, up the body. Focus on your torso anterior and posterior separately (i.e., spine and back musculature distinct from abdomen and chest, the latter areas also individually). Be especially aware of areas specifically related to consciousness, such as the sternum, solar plexus, or below the navel. Include shoulders and arms, neck, face, head, crown. Let yourself feel gratitude to your body and its wisdom, before you return to an alert state; in follow-up, engage in some form of reflection (e.g., journaling or contemplation), and ask yourself: how does this newfound knowledge relate to my life’s meaning and purpose?

If physically able, engage in moving meditation. This can be any form of repetitive movement (e.g., jogging, walking, dancing, swimming, rocking, swaying) with a quiet mind, focusing on creativity, innovation or ideas, novelty, new wisdom. Reflect thereafter, on the meaning that creativity and creative thinking bring to your life.

Engage in a guided-imagery meditative session with a focus on body wisdom. While you can find all manner of such online, as previously mentioned the unconscious responds far better to our own voice – so find a script you like, or write your own, and then record it in a slow, soft, hypnotic rhythm. Include a minute of silent lead time at the beginning, to allow you to begin playing your recording and then shift into a quiet-mind, breathing-focused meditative state before your voice recording begins. Afterward, reflect on the details of the experience; did this accessing of your body’s wisdom reveal new sources of meaning, deeper layers of existing or known sources – or more?

Engage in a visualization of personal expansion. Get into a meditative state, with a quiet mind and a focus on slow breathing, distractions minimized; begin by imagining your personhood, the self, your knowledge and awareness, as a walnut-sized sphere of light in your deep mind. When this image is strong, encourage its gradual expansion; first, let the light expand so that it fills your whole brain and cranium. Then, feel it expand into your face, your ears, your throat and neck. Continue on, ever larger, as your sense of self now includes your chest; feel your selfhood as you take each deep breath, in the beat of your heart. Continue, one area at a time, until you feel the full expansion of self throughout your body. Then: sense the knowledge of your body, in its fullness, infused with your selfhood, as one integrated being. Afterward, reflect on how this expansion of selfhood into the full physical body enhances or informs your presence of meaning. [Note: if maintaining your focus in this type of slow and progressive visualization is challenging, you can also make a recording beforehand, guiding yourself in the process as in the previous exercise, and use it as guided imagery rather than visualization. As before: your own voice is the most effective for reaching your unconscious.]

Use your breath. There are many ‘breathwork’ disciplines for using the breath therapeutically. You can also devise your own, for this purpose of accessing somatic knowledge. Again, first get into a meditative state, including a focus on slow, deep breathing. Then, make your focus on breath more specific: focus on the new air traveling down your trachea, expanding your lungs, stretching your diaphragm, enriching the blood that flows into the heart, and the oxygen that is carried by the blood to all tissues, to every cell in your body. When you have a felt sense of this – your awareness fully in and throughout your body, following your breath and the oxygen it delivers – then begin to sense the knowledge, awareness, and memory of all those millions of cells, each one a tiny, primal brain in its own right, breathing with you. Stay with this sense of infused intelligence for a while, and after you gradually emerge from your meditative state, take a few closing deep breaths – and reflect. How does the infusion of breath enhance your sense of cellular wisdom, and how does accessing this infused wisdom affect your presence of meaning?

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References:

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