The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything… It seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.
Milan Kundera (1929 – 2023) interview on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978)
Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalised.
G. K. Chesterton
Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.
Marianne Williamson
You cannot get from where I was then to where I am now, on purpose.
Ysrael C, Talk at a Young People’s Twelve Step Convention (EURYPAA)
What a wild ride this life is turning out to be!
The hyper-rational paradigm which has now infested almost every aspect of life throughout the world, tells us that we can meet any challenges successfully if only we apply our rational faculties to them in the correct manner. Data, even Big Data, is all that matters. Data is bereft of emotion. It keeps the mental hamster wheel moving 24/7.
Most of us spend the best part of our lives in the state of disembodiment as a result of living full-time in our heads, and in disconnection as a result of our subject-object relationship to the rest of Creation. Disembodiment and disconnection, combined, ensure that we are never truly alive and present.
It is no wonder, therefore, that afflictions such as depression, restlessness, lack of purpose, frustration, addiction, and helplessness are so widespread today, despite the immense material abundance and technological progress of the so-called developed economies here in the northern hemisphere.
If you doubt this assessment, open a newspaper or tune into your local TV station or internet news portal! The ubiquitous violence to be found there is the manifestation of the frustration of a species which has lost its way, the „rage against the machine“, as many perceive it.
First let’s look at the disembodiment.
Ken Robinson, sadly recently diseased, was one of Britain’s most astute witnesses of human behaviour and childhood development, with a special focus on the dysfunction and much-needed reform of our educational system. This is what he had to say on the matter:
„There isn’t an education system on the planet the teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important.
I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to. We all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? You know, did I miss a meeting?
Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waste up, and then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say what’s it for?, public education, I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, you know, who really succeeds by this?, who does everything they should?, who gets all the brownie points?, you know, who are the winners?, I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors, isn’t it?
They’re the people who come out on top, and I used to be one, so there! And I like university professors. But you know we shouldn’t hold them up as the high watermark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life. You know, another form of life.
But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them, but something curious about professors in my experience, not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.“
I would contend that this is true for many doctors, lawyers, and scientists in general. What Ken Robinson does not address here is the possibility that our educational system, itself, is the manifestation of a deeper, underlying issue, that is, the propensity of we humans to leave our bodies and take up full residence in our heads as a survival tactic in early childhood.
That was my solution.
It was not apparent to me until, in my mid twenties, during a session of psychoanalysis, my therapist said: „Herr Little, I think it is time you returned to your body.“
My incredulous response was: „What do you mean?“
„Well,“ he continued, „I believe that at a very early age, perhaps three or four, you left your body, as a form of coping mechanism with the overwhelming adversity you were experiencing at that time. This has the effect of suppressing our feelings. It is the feelings which overwhelm the little child.
Retreating into our heads is a very effective solution for any child who has no way of coping with feelings in a healthy manner, no role models showing how it is done, and insufficient or no support from adult caregivers to help him or her learn this.“
„How do I return to my body?“
„Quite simple,“ he replied, „begin by joining a gym and learn how to work out. Research has show that even ten minutes every day is a very effective way of gradually returning to our bodies and becoming more whole.“
So, the well-behaved client that I was, I took out a subscription to my local gym, which I hated.
Luckily, there I met some cyclists who invited me to join their club, a group of road-racers who trained three times each week in the beautiful rural countryside of our West-Mittel-Franken Heimat.
Leaving the gym behind me, I clocked up 5,000 kilometres in my first season and never looked back. The joy of cycling, which I strongly felt after buying my first racer at the age of fifteen, had returned, and remains with me to this day.
Some years later, I took up an international assignment at a multinational corporation. My task as General Manager of ten training centres spread throughout Europe (East and West) involved so much travel that cycling became an impossibility.
So, out came the runners. I decided to put pay to the narrative of my boyhood, that I was a dud, and never going to be any good at sports. One thing led to another, including meeting very accomplished runners who were willing to train a rookie like me, and I ended up running roughly twenty marathons in the space of the next fifteen years.
Running marathons involves more than simply running. There is so much we can learn about anatomy, nutrition, sleep patterns, discipline, the body’s capacity for stress and recovery, rest, and comradeship, if we are curious enough and open to breaking new ground.
It was good to be fit, very fit, for the first time in my life. I have maintained a daily exercise regime since those days, and an attitude which has helped me become enthusiastic about and engaged in rock climbing, dancing, and many of the somatic modalities available today as components of healing, growth, and the cultivation of Emotional Sobriety.
Being fully in the body means having a break from the relentless stream of thoughts which usually govern our waking hours. The trouble with being in the head is that we are either in the past (wounds, regrets, memories, idealisation…) or in the future (anxiety, attachment to certain outcomes, possible calamities, etc.).
The cast of characters in our mental drama is made up of Saboteurs, all fear-based drivers designed and created in early life, initially to ensure our survival. The main protagonist is the Judge, assisted by others such as the Avoider, Controller, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Rational, Hyper-Vigilant, Pleaser, Restless, Stickler, and Victim. Most of us have two are three prominent secondary saboteurs who work with the Judge. Each of us has a unique combination of saboteurs of various strengths.
It is only in the present moment that we have access to our true being, that we become aware of our connection to the Source of all of Creation, the Source of Infinite Abundance. Thus, we need to find a way of intercepting our saboteurs and turning down the volume of their chatter.
The Positive Intelligence (PQ)* modality of Mental Fitness, which I practice each day and which I teach many of my clients, is focused precisely on this. The training revolves around strengthening the Mental Muscles responsible for intercepting our Saboteurs, regulating our autonomous nervous system by means of short bursts of body-based exercises, and shifting to the Sage Powers of Compassion, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate.
Our Mental Fitness is manifested in the growing awareness of and gradual expansion of the gap between stimulus and response. „In this gap,“ said Viktor Frankl, „lies our liberation and our freedom.“
Let’s now look at the topic of disconnection from Creation, of which, of course, we are an integral part.
Language gives us important clues here. The word „environment“ comes from the Middle French word environnement, meaning „the action of surrounding,“ which is derived from the verb environner („to surround“) and the noun suffix-ment. The English word was formed in two ways: first, as a direct borrowing from the French, and second, through re-formation within English using the French-derived verb „environ“ and the native suffix „-ment“.
This term implies a subject-object relationship. Who is surrounded? By what? Are they not one and the same? The word „Umwelt“ in German conveys the same illusion of a subject-object relationship. It would be better replaced by „Mitwelt“, to convey the sense of oneness, or non-separation.
It is precisely this subject-object error that has led humanity down the path of perdition of attempting to subjugate „Mother Nature“ to our needs, our greed, our whims, and our desires.
Instead of the humility of recognising that we are „a part of“ we have chosen to be „apart from“. The consequences are readily visible to all who are prepared to look. Climate change, the ramifications of destroying the natural biodiversity and poisoning the soil to grow what become Ultra-Processed Foods (UPF), the consequences of an UPF diet, a medical system which is better at generating customers than providing cures, an economic order we are called upon to serve rather than one that serves the real needs of humanity, etc.
A very different approach can be found in the Indigenous Cultures throughout the world. We could reasonably ask if not all culture were originally indigenous? If so, we are not searching for something new but rather re-membering what we already know.
In any case, Robin Wall Kimmerer provides deep, moving insights into these indigenous possibilities in her beautiful book: „Braiding Sweetgrass“.
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings — asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass — offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.
On my morning walks these days, I consider the river my older sister and the trees my older brothers. Why older? Because these were here on earth long before the emergence of Homo Sapiens. As with all older siblings, there is an innate opportunity in such a world view to learn from them, if we so wish.
In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, Kimmerer circles toward her central argument that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world, animate and inanimate.
For it is only when we open our hearts to hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, which sustains all of us, every day, with no exception, and learn to give our own gifts in return. We will then have experienced the shift from the economy of scarcity to that of abundance.
Today, we are at war with Nature. It is an all-out war, and we know, deep down inside, that this war cannot be won.
Yet we persist, perhaps because the lobbyists and PR machinery of the short-sighted vested interests have succeeded in persuading us that we have already crossed the point of return. I do not believe we may allow this argument to stand. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to realign ourselves, individually and as a species, in a constellation where we take our rightful and humble place as one among many in the overall scheme of things.
Re-embodiment and reconnection with Creation are two keys to the recovery process of our species. Just as every individual addict has the possibility of discovering and applying available tried-and-tested solutions, we collectively have the same possibility. It is the privilege and challenge of my generation and those younger to grasp the opportunity of this turning point.
Just at this point, when our knees are hitting the floor, a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence is gradually emerging.
Our time has now come.
*For a more detailed description of PQ, see the separate tab on this website.
