MASSAGE AND THE INNER REPTILE
Home is where the head is. Or is that how it goes?
"I think, therefore, I am." To which I say, "Oh, yeah?" It seems to me unbelievable that Descartes, who uttered the above quote, was completely serious. For instance, I find the statement, "I feel, therefore, I am." much more appealing and just as true.
How could Western civilization get so far from biological reality as to totally identify thinking with being? Evolution sheds some light. When we were just little bitty reptiles back in the cotton fields so to speak, life was pretty straightforward. The nervous systems of lizards and alligators go for one way response. Kick an alligator in the side and he will bite your foot off. He doesn't choose to do that, he doesn't bear you any particularly ill will - nature just "calls" saying, "He kicked you, bite his foot off." This is the simple down and dirty fast-acting logic of the diencephalon and the autonomic nervous system. As most of us know, at our worst, at home, at work, or waiting in line in some bureaucratic purgatory, we have not so little of the reptile still with us, eh? However, you can choose for example not to murder your husband because he left the toilet seat up and your buns took an unexpected dip at 2:00 a.m. An alligator, however, has no such choice, it will bite his foot off, both his feet off, for instance, for yet smaller misdeeds.
Our Marvelous Self-control
When the lizard decided to try life in the trees, he/she found many more irrelevant stimuli. On the ground you've gotta keep track of everything. But in the trees a lot is going on that doesn't make too much difference, life's a little easier. It doesn't make sense to react to every little thing. As a matter of fact, energy there can be saved, and thus life enhanced, by not reacting to everything. So nature developed a new wrinkle. It created on the tip of the olfactory (smelling) lobe of the brain a little bump whose purpose was to be more selective about which stimuli the lizard would react to. In other words, rather than re-wire the whole reptile brain, it just developed a "governor" which determined which stimuli the reptile would ignore, i.e. remain unconscious of. This worked just great.
Nature, never being one to ignore a good thing, has taken this quite far. Gradually more and more new wrinkles develop in the gray matter of the brain. We learn how to become increasingly selective in our reactions to external and internal stimuli. As humans, we can remain unconscious even of messages originating in our nervous or endocrine systems!
"An example will illustrate this. An early Stone Age Man is squatting beside his precious campfire at night. Suddenly he sees a pair of gleaming eyes just beyond the circle of light, then another pair and then more. He realizes that wolves are prowling around him in the darkness. This sensory perception has been composed out of raw optic messages in his cortex. As it constitutes a threat, it is immediately passed by the lower censorship and conveyed to the diencephalon (the reptile brain) for action.
The diencephalon goes into its normal emergency routine. It raises the pulse-rate, the blood pressure and the blood sugar; it stops hunger and may produce a liquid evacuation of the bowel; it may raise goose flesh and will tense the muscles. This is the normal preparation of the body for flight and the appropriate bodily response to fear. Yet the Stone Age Man is not consciously aware of any panic, nor has he any intention of making a dash for the safety of his cave.
Leisurely, he picks a flaming brand out of the fire and hurls it at the closest pair of eyes. the eerie lights vanish, and he return to the patient chipping of a flint. The new thing that has happened in his brain is that, while the old terror of the wolves is still there, the new censorship at the level of consciousness has screened off the instinct of fear because his artifacts-- in this case the fire--have rendered the natural instinctive reaction unnecessary."
(quote from A.T.W. Simeons, “Man’s Presumptuous Brain”)
So it's provocative to consider whether human being is to be characterized by its rationality and vast stores of knowledge or, on the contrary, by the far vaster realm of which we are unconscious. Nature has freed part of the brain from having to concern itself constantly with everyday detail, "physiological management" so to speak being accomplished by the evolutionarily "older" parts of the brain. The cerebrum (neo-cortex) instead engages in speculations, plans, choices, creative leaps of thought, etc. However, new freedoms do not necessarily guarantee skillful use, oftentimes rather freeing the creature to abuse new opportunities. When is the last time you heard of a dog committing mass murder?
Until recently, the history of civilization has been a history of the parallel growth of knowledge and unconsciousness. The cerebrum is a know-it-all. It believes in its supremacy and the all-powerful nature of rationality. The more we have allowed it to dominate us, the more we have had "progress" with limited regard to the unconscious, with little awareness of our own biological reality and that of the earth around us. Margaret Atwood the author imagining the most striking thing an alien might discover in our civilization said it would be that we put poisons in our food. Concentration camps, strip mining, Hiroshima, drugs wars, arms merchants feeding terrorism - these provoke massive doubt - Hey, if we can murder millions of our own kind, invent weapons capable of destroying all life on earth - how rational are we? There must be something really wrong. We see today righteous academics explain how we cannot afford to send food stores to millions of starving people. On the more individual plane, we sometimes see ourselves "knowing" just what we "ought" to do at work with our spouse or our kids, and yet going ahead and instead doing something rather destructive to ourselves, work mates, or family.
Us rational? Not very.
But the inner reptile is not and should not be an object of scorn or ridicule. For this part of our being is the source of our deepest and most powerful feelings. Associated with the diencephalon in the center of our brain are excitement, fear, sexual desire, anger, and the consuming desires to sleep, drink and eat. And nestled into the amygdala, the associative center of the diencephalon, live all the associations we have for our experiences. At every moment we thread our experience through the amygdala asking it like an oracle - what does this mean, augur? Is it a good thing or bad? The inner reptile is therefore also our deepest advisor in addition to being a nearly infinite well of feelings.
Years ago, before getting into bodywork, I ran a bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. I did it in transitioning from a career as a composer to I wasn't quite sure what. The store was called the “Whole Earth Center”. It was a fantastic place. We had comfy chairs and couches, poetry readings, concerts. We had people every day using the store, our help, and the books to help palpably change their lives. In time I became the manager and went to various conferences on book selling, particularly the yearly American Booksellers' Association Convention.
One year, I believe it was 1977, the convention was held in Atlanta. Arriving, I settled into the convention's ambiance. Miles of concrete floor, basement filled with hawkers, shouters, snobs and gawkers. The atmosphere for a "bookie" was festive, the booths, free books, free posters, and star appearances (yes, Sly Stallone really is shorter than you’d think!). Running a specialty store I networked especially with the small press and alternative publishers, the makers of mandala posters and hip greeting cards. I was especially delighted to meet the originators of the Dharmaseals, the two main people at Illuminations, their company name, Krishna and Miribai Bush. However, after eight hours of walking on the bare concrete, I had hobnobbed, seen thousands of booths, was overloaded with samples and had had my fill of literary capitalism.
Came the second day and it had all the romance of trudging through a snowstorm on a infinite parking lot. My associations had turned the corner - the miles of concrete, the cardboard booths, the frenetic activity, all seemed meaningless. I didn't know hardly anyone nor they me. I fell into a very lonely and familiar despair. Traipsing down aisle after aisle, not knowing what else to do, I hoped for something from within or without that would help the blackness lift.
As I passed the Dharmaseal booth I glanced at Miribai and caught her eye. I wanted to talk with her. I paused. But she was talking with a customer and signaled, frustrated, that she couldn’t talk right then. She reached out though, around the customer, and touched me on the shoulder. It felt caring. I walked on. Suddenly the blackness started to lift. I thought what's going on? Like the sudden birthing of a sunflower I felt something golden, something sunny being born inside me. And the feeling grew larger and stronger and more complete. Until I was not walking, but was propelled down the aisle as if by a ray of sunlight. The inner joy I felt was so strong and so sudden, so different from what I had been feeling that I was filled with wonder, awe, surprise, amusement. I felt such an unusual abundance of energy and love that my sense of what my life was and could be just cracked open. In its place, I knew yet dimly, was this world in which transformation was at any moment only a shoulder touch away. What a gift she gave me with that one touch!
Propelled by that touch, I roared through that day and many thereafter, filled with the knowledge of how much joy touch can bring. Like matter out from the big bang, I didn't go back to Miribai, it didn't occur to me. Partly, I think I was too humbled and mystified by the experience. Also it somehow didn't seem appropriate or necessary - like a ray of sun simply goes on illuminating, that's it's nature. It doesn't have to thank its lucky star for giving it birth.
But I do want now to formally and publicly thank Miribai. And perhaps to touch you on your shoulder.
Inside us lives a wide world of animal and human feeling, much of it unconscious and yet powerfully influencing all that we do. We know this. We feel or least sense surfacing the waves of anger, love, sadness, envy, embarrassment, fear, curiosity, compassion, courage. A life without these feelings is meaningless.
The central problem of our lives and of humanity seems to be this: How can we allow enough space for all our feelings, think clearly about them, and act then in ways that truly serve ourselves and others? The tendency grossly enforced by our education is to separate feeling and thought, leaving out the body almost entirely, teach thinking skills only, and give virtually no information about actions - as ethics is considered too private a matter to discuss.
As a result of this difficult, generally unsupported integration, we and our clients walk through our lives often with a diminished sense of meaning and higher than necessary levels of personal pain, both physical and emotional. The general and personal levels of discomfort of living in the modern world are what massage therapy has grown astonishingly well and fast and large to address.
Just one touch can change a world. Just one ray of sunlight gives rise to new life. As Milton Trager said, in effect, if you want to change, you have to have a new experience. Words refer to new experience. But touch is new experience.
When a touch from someone who is skilled and who has cultivated inspiration reaches your inner self, you can feel it. The world of your associations is filled with something new. Just this one touch reveals the old world not to make the fullest sense. It begins to shake, quiver and crack. With just one touch we can feel the birth of a new world as the old one cracks open, just like an egg or the earth's surface to a new plant.
The joining of the animal and the human - the conscious evolution and harmonizing of these two is the central challenge of humankind. It is this which makes us god-like. We get to create consciously this new species which can have all the passion, ferocity and beauty of bird, horse and mountain lion. We can even feel, I'm happy to say for my five year old Jake's sake, inside us all the raging glory of Tyrannosaurus Rex. At the same time, we have the grace of thought, the creative and contemplative powers, the transformative decisions, the enlightening actions that mark the lives of great artists and thinkers of this world - Beethoven, Saint Teresa, Buddha, Gandhi, Isadora Duncan, Sappho, Shakespeare, Rumi.
Let us open to this touch of inspiration. That cracks our life open and reveals the inner sunlight that in its turn reveals our deep inner capacity to reconcile plant and animal and human and angel in a world which we can barely imagine, but which we know, as practitioners of touch, we are helping to create.
Art by Sam Hurt (used with permission)