THERAPEUTIC TIME AND TEMPORAL INTEGRATION
Michael Hamm, superb young teacher, asked me to talk about “how time flows within a session. What’s different about therapeutic time.”
Notes on How Time May Flow within a Session
It is said “time is the great healer.” Can this be even truer than we think?
Can time itself be therapeutic? Of course, “clock” time is just an uninflected chronology of moments and events, “chronos” in Greek – the simple linear sequence of events. “Kairos,” on the other hand, corresponds more to lived experience. From the standpoint of Kairos, time can be seen as circular, mysterious in its trajectory, and sacred.
Some things almost rhyme in time – events that happened in the past seem to get activated so much so that what we call the present is perforated by the past, and thus not exactly “passed.”
The present wouldn’t have any richness without the infinite rivers of influence of the past flowing in.
Only for a redeemed mankind will the past become “citable in all its moments” (Walter Benjamin). If the narrow view of the past prevails, not even the dead will be safe.
Our experience of our body’s sense of space is malleable. Certain places coming to awareness and proprioceptively, whether we are aware or not, take on new experiences of density, length, size, etc. And ideally this results in a more mindful bodily life.
Similarly our experience of our body’s sense of time is malleable. This includes the experience of time stopping (what Don Juan called “stopping the world”). And it relates to Kairos in which time is not a line but is a circle or sphere.
When the past has been freed to fully participate in the present, there is no end to the richness of our experience. Then we can recognize that structural integration is useful but equally useful is “temporal integration.” The repressed moments in one’s past life open up and enrich us, enabling us to resolve “hang-ups.” And, since we are all connected in space as well as time, we can see our issues as not really individual issues. Every issue, every pain, every problem is something that arises from and lives within a community.
The illusion that pain and disease are individual issues overlooks the historical and cultural origin of our problems. Pain and healing are more issues related to community than to immunity. And though we can’t “change” history, we can learn from it. This makes, in the present moment, history to be our teacher. The past is our professor.
So anytime, we interrupt the merciless path of chronos, we invite in therapeutic power of time.
The deepest lessons flow in and ideally flow out again resulting in a world more liberated from the dis-ease processes that have been affecting us.
More specifically we might see at at least three kinds of time.
1. Biographical time – bodymind work can release the stored energy from past moments and events in one’s life that have not been integrated. This gives rise to a greater sum total of energy available in the present.
2. Ancestral time – bodymind work can release the energy that has been stored for generations – ancestral trauma being something that is passed on as long as it is unresolved.
3. Archetypal time – bodywork mind work can liberate the archetypes dwelling in the collective unconscious – some of those being the inner hero, the victim, trickster, caregiver, orphan, explorer, rebel, lover, creator, sage, magician, ruler.
In any case, I hope this discussion helps us see that perhaps more powerful than integrating the various components of our structure and space in the present experience is the integrating of the temporal elements of our experience. The meaningfulness of our lives is more predicated on how we are integrating the vast rivers of influence flowing through us from the recent, distant and ancient past. It is the nourishment, this empowerment inflowing from the past that constitutes the primary content of our lives. Time, like a beating heart, is the source of the grand circulatory system within and through us with treasures both told and untold.
“Therapeutic time” helps liberate us from the merciless tyranny of chronos and restores our capacity to honor the miracle of Kairos.
We are liberated through temporal integration to more fully fulfill our destiny in the “body” of the future.
From something I wrote a few years ago for a ZB Conference entitled, The Future of the Body.”
“The future of the body naturally evokes the question, “What is the body of the future?” How will it glisten? Will the people of the world become like bones with the spaces between them like the joint spaces of the larger world? Will we then move together like a giant dancing body, our coordinated movements articulating the collective dreams of humanity?
The future is always a mystery. We lay awake wondering about the future, our dream. What will our dream be? What will come true? The future’s truth lies ever in dreamtime, like a tender love ever just out of reach.
We can’t touch it but we can prepare the way – as in every miraculous birth. Respect for the future draws us back meaningfully to the present moment. Each touch, each thought, each feeling is the gateway to the bright unknown. And the future rushes toward us – filling us with its inspiring mysteries, infinite promises, and awe. We shall awaken within the dreams we have prepared.
