When you know it’s killing you?
The body is prosocial. This does not just mean that it is, in its fundamental evolutionary function and sttructure, complex and interdependent, harmonious, cooperative and metastable. It also means that it needs many things from others and from the environment. These are necessary and not optional.
Is your ecosystem providing all these inputs that you need? Someone to talk to? Someone to help care about you? Do you think that somehow because of the size of our intellects we don’t need these things anymore? How about the unfolding complex beauty of nature? Do you have enough? Are there infinite opportunities for rich animal function in your world? Do you think these are just ideas to talk about at our desks?
We don’t get out of our chairs because we are broken and our world is broken. Allow me to explain. It is simple and natural. Everything you need is already at hand. Children and animals do it without education or language. It isn’t something that is difficult to do. It is natural and intuitive. But it is a huge breakthrough. It is the most meaningful breakthrough because it is the most personal and intimate. It is change from within, somatic.
But the thing is it requires both you and me. Both of us and more. We have to help each other. No matter how hard you try within the system it will never be enough. You have to directly care about people and yourself. Even over Zoom. We have to do it together, in the Commons that we are creating. It is required by theory and by common sense. Please join us.
There is a name for this larger idea, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is called coordination dynamics. This is a high theoretical concept from neurophysics that refers to the universal laws that govern the movements of complex living systems as well as complex inanimate systems, like optics and thermodynamics.
Within complex living systems we must remind ourselves that there is not only a reductionist and objectifying approach or perspective that we can take, called science. Somatic and experiential insight into our own bodies is also important and there has always been a somatic pursuit of knowledge, truth, and beauty. We are clearly meant to know ourselves both from without and from within and we have always been doing both throughout history, including modern history. This somatic position is powerful and is coming to maturity today. All it needs is you.
The big difference is the rediscovery of fascia, our organ of interoception. Interoception is already a rich, inbuilt and vital operative system of our bodies. We already do it and know how to do it—subconsciously, that is. Making it conscious is the breakthrough fascia provides us.
It is not abstract. It is embodied but we must take time to shift gears into this new and also old form of perception. We may look silly trying sometimes, but I propose that this is what we do together in the safe context of the Prosocial Embodiment Workshops at Prosocial Commons. W
ill you join us?
The study of motor control and with it the relationship of the brain and the body has been the focus of neuroscience since the 19th century. Neurologists like Hughlings Jackson and Charles Beevor, Nikolai Bernstein, Vladimir Janda are some of the greats in this tradition. In their study of the laws governing the movements of living bodies they were somatic in perspective. This is visible in their appreciation of complexity and respect for the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The Prague School did the most to return subjectivity and interoception to our understanding of our body including rehabilitative activities for correcting motor patterns. The focus in this tradition has always been on the sensory motor system. But they did not understand it as fully as we do, with the rediscovery of fascia, the organ of interoception, and of the deep core, the new body part that is our axial line.
This structure includes the spinal cord and literally has a mind of its own. It is the locus of our animal intelligence. The deep core is a new body part, one with a high degree of metastability and self awareness. As our postural core it functions automatically and is self organizing and self healing. It is the most important myofascial synergy in the human body and constitutes our axial line, running from tongue to toe, down the front of the spine and through the pelvis to the feet. It is our highly sensitive animal identity.
It is already your most intimate friend. Why not take some time and get to know it?
This is only the beginning, but it is a necessary and wonderful place to start—from within ourselves. Let us come together to support each other in the safe, gentle, embodied and somatic practice of the new level of self discovery and collective vitality we are capable of today. This revolutionary anatomy is our simple guide to our complex self. Conscious evolution implies the restoration of our animal intelligence. This is the rediscovery of fascia. This is prosocial embodiment.
We can expect there to emerge from within the evolutionary processes of our body an adaptive response or impulse to what has been called the Great Mismatch or the “Meta Crisis”. Because we share so many similar environmental stressors in modern society, these individual impulses would form a powerful and global movement of diverse, collective adaptation. A somatic revolution. A revolution from within. Prosocial Embodiment.
The chronic and long-term effect of evolutionary mismatch and modernity upon our body is immobilization, lack of movement. Whether we see it as a maladaptive response to trauma, or stressors, or sedentarism, the end result in our body is immobilization and a resulting loss of muscular tone. We are all confronted by largely uniform forces in the built environment that restrict our movement, and so we respond similarly. From the perspective of our biomechanics and the needs of our connective tissue, fascia, our bodies are compelled towards freedom of movement. It is a physiological imperative. We can see this in what has been called the movement movement, a cultural, spiritual and healing phenomenon expressed in a million different forms of dance and expression and groups and theories across the globe. Janda theorized this in the first real structural anatomical attempt to do so.
The response comes from within, from our deep postural core. It is simply asking us to get out of our seats together. It is conscious evolution for the good of all. It is our animal intelligence. It is the somatic revolution, the revolution from within.
Please join us at Prosocial Embodiment for a simple, natural, and ground breaking exploration of the deep core, our animal intelligence.
We can’t do it alone.
We will meet June 17 2:30 PM PST online at Prosocial Commons, via Zoom.
Please respond here or join our Facebook group, Prosocial Embodiment:
https://www.facebook.com/share/YwxZDHjcbnhVBUxa/?mibextid=K35XfP
Three Bones Theory 
Leave a Reply