Time and Its Textures

February 09, 2016 by Liz Allen

“When scientists, philosophers, and other commentators speak of the real world, they’re talking about a myth, a convenient fiction. The world is a construct the brain builds based on the sensory information it’s given, and the information is only a small part of all that’s available.”

— A Natural History of the Senses, 304

Time is comprised of different textures and dimensions. Or as Albert Einstein coined it: the Time Space Continuum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

He put back together what Western thinking separated. (That's another subject.)

When you feel threatened or scared, time slows down, doesn't it? You shift into a richer sensory experience unique from your day-to-day awareness.

My theory is that the "normal" amount of sensory information you perceive greatly expands. Your nervous system opens to perceiving and processing more information as a means to protect yourself.

This expansion also alters your perception of time. It deepens it.

“Sometimes it was as though she had lived three, four years in eleven days. At other times it seemed just minutes ago that Robert Hart stood at her door and uttered the two words — Mrs. Lyons? — that had changed her life. She could not remember time looping in on itself in such a manner before, except perhaps for those two or three days when she had first met Jack Lyons and fallen in love, and life had been measured out in minutes rather than hours. ”

— The Pilot's Wife, 139

According to Stephen Harrod Buehner's book Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, the amount of information our senses feed us, is driven by how much we pay attention to the information we receive. You strengthen your vision or gut sense by using the information.

This is why our intuitive sense grows with our use of it. If we think of Sally, and we either run into Sally or Sally calls us, we can call this coincidence. We can effectively say "No" to our intuitive sense. Intuition is linked to the Enteric nervous system: the million neurons in our abdomen. The Enteric nervous system is a pelvic brain. In the Maya tradition it is our center. The cranial brain is the 1980's computer, processing what the Enteric nervous systems shares with it.

Saying "No" to any information shuts down that information pathway. How could it be any other way?

“In a world where we are simultaneously bombarded with a great deal of stimulation, we learn to focus our attention on important stimuli, while filtering out (gating) less relevant stimuli. Sensory gating (SG) is a way of habituation to repetitious and unimportant stimuli for the brain to reserve its limited resources to focus on important stimuli that need processing. It helps us focus on what we have determined, through experience, schooling, and cultural habituation, to be important. It also protects us from sensory overload.”

— Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm, 32

Some of us naturally rely on a greater degree of sensory information than the average, and are more inclined to pause and filter. In the crudest of generalizations, we tend to be introverts prone to overstimulation. This is why introverts recharge alone, with a journal or meditation practice. Extroverts tend to recharge with people and other stimulation.

IFFY

September 16, 2015 by Liz Allen

On my way back to Montana from Moab recently, I plan to meet up with a friend for a walk at a downtown Salt Lake City park. Spit out of a traffic jam, I arrive early and walk over to find a bathroom.

I meet Christian and his dog. Daisy is a pink pit bull. No kidding. Pink.

It’s late afternoon and the heat feels like a pressure cooker. Daisy snuffles and greets me (without getting up). She pants, her belly in full contact with the grass, stumpy legs frog out behind her. I think out loud: a pig snout is all she needs for a Halloween get-up.

I ask if he has been to Moab.

Nope. He is from Salt Lake. I guess he’s about 18 years old. (Side note: it’s rare when I meet city dwellers that have visited the wild and beautiful Escalante, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, etc.)

He asks me if I like living in Montana. My response is an emphatic Yes, but I can see he doesn’t believe me.

He wrinkles his brow: “Aren’t people iffy there?"

Me: “Iffy as in Ted Kaczynski?”

Christian: “No, you know….”

Me: “Umm… redneck? Shoot at you because of your Obama bumper sticker?”

That’s it. We are gun-happy, nutty conservatives. His view secretly pleases me. It probably keeps people from moving here. But then again, he hasn’t even made it to Moab.

But I can’t let him think that on weekends, the majority of Montanans get their militia on. I can’t do that to my home.

Me: “People think for themselves, in terms of politics. If you ever break down on the road in Montana or need directions, the next person passing you will stop, and help you. It has to do with population density and we measure in deer, and rabbits, and sagebrush.”

I recently moved out of my downtown neighborhood, to the sprawling edge of town. Our house borders a trailer court, cheaper housing, and the mall. It’s an adjustment, but I appreciate this part of town. It’s kind of nice to have neighbors that aren’t all hipsters.

On my first carload moving in, I am greeted by a plainclothes policeman who speed walks up to me, asking if I know where so-and-so lives. It is 9 AM. I doubt my coffee has truly kicked in.

My snarky eyebrows answer: “Who are you?”

He flashes his badge from under his windbreaker. Welcome to the neighborhood!

Last week on a day off, I notice an alarm going off somewhere in the ‘hood. It begins as a far-off background noise, vague.

Days go by and I start to feel like I’m on an airplane with a colicky baby. On Thursday morning, I knock on a neighbor’s door to see if they hear the alarm. They aren’t bothered by it, and guess the culprit is a rental.

That afternoon, it warps in speed and intensity, and is now the only thing I can hear. I finally call the cops. They come over, sniff out the smoke alarm going off in the newly-vacant home behind us, and dismember it.

I am confounded that my neighbors did nothing about the alarm. It is summer, windows are open. Four days! If anything, Montanans live and let live, more than our militia rap allows.

Where the Crows Swarm

April 29, 2015 by Liz Allen

There’s a neighborhood squall happening in Seattle.

A sweet, young girl is feeding the crows. It started slowly, with little bits of her lunch leftovers, to bigger morsels for her wild pets, over many years.

Since the food is attracting so many birds – as well as rats & raccoons – neighbors are getting pissy about bird shit shellacking their windshields & also unnerving some sensitive people. They live in a never-ending Alfred Hitchcock flick.

The intriguing aspect to me is that the crows are now bringing this girl objects. They are gifting her for her generosity: “Anything shiny and small enough to fit in a crow’s mouth” (http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/neighbors-at-war-over-feeding-of-crows-in-portage-bay/). An earring, a polished rock.

I imagine being a fly on the wall of their crow brains:

“Look it’s the food human again!”

Caw! Caw! Caw!

“We love her!”

“French fries!”

“Banana muffins!”

Caw! Caw! Caw!

I received a gift from a raven once. I was standing outside a chain oil change business, and I looked up to find a black beauty - glassy-obsidian eyed - observing me from the roof eave. I guess he must have sized me up.

As a smoker.

Well, the bird tossed me a lemon-yellow, plastic lighter.

What a clever bird! Where I was standing, was easily a place the bird saw people linger with a cigarette, waiting for their oil change, considering the mountains on the horizon.

The lighter was dead. But since I hadn’t gifted this bird with anything, I felt singled-out special.

The really odd part is that we know ravens and crows learn faces and recognize people. There are myriad stories of these birds repeatedly dive-bombing people who have been cruel or abusive to the birds, or to their nests. Or maybe they just look like another human, that does do those aggressive things.

So, did I look like someone?

Or was it just a generous bird?

Flagler Boulevard

February 27, 2015 by Liz Allen

Taming wild country begins with limitless funds: the kind of wealth that can scaffold civilization. Before Henry Morrison Flagler got dreamy-eyed about Florida, it was an unbroken wetland of cypress trees, long-legged birds and alligators.

In 1867, Flagler had the startup money to invest in his partner John D. Rockefeller’s new company: Standard Oil. The oil refining company was quickly a mad success, and these well-to-do businessmen, and their families, never wanted for anything material, again.

When Flagler built the 55-room Whitehall mansion for his third wife in West Palm, the only other residence was an obscure fisherman’s cabin from Denver. Home to no-name manatees, man-o-wars and hurricane debris, the beachfront was ripe for a developer (hindsight being 20/20).

After the passage of the Sugar Act of 1934, large swaths of the Everglades were converted into farmland. In ten years, the amount of sugar cane production doubled in southern Florida.

Digesting just how rich he was, Flagler poured money into developing Florida. He connected the railway from Jacksonville to Miami. The train brought the tourists he envisioned, and they stayed in his hotels.

Flagler also had a philanthropic side and funded the construction of churches and hospitals, and the public works systems for four towns. Bill and Melinda are a bit more generous, but for the time, Flagler threw quite a bit of money around.

He also financed a rail system connecting Miami with the Florida Keys. An engineering feat for the 20th century, the sweat dried on the backs of thousands of laborers in 1912. The infamous and costly Seven Mile Bridge is part of the railway (the bridge was re-engineered after a hurricane in the 1930’s destroyed it).

Last fall, I visited my parents in Florida, and about all I knew about Palm Beach was Donald Trump’s mansion faces the Atlantic. My family and I peered into the ornate halls, marble columns and gold-flaked decor of the Flagler Museum in Whitehall. I think one reason I became curious about his story was his power.

In 1996, I was a junior in college and a Teton-studded example of money influencing wild landscapes was my lesson. It was my first of three spectacular summers in Grand Teton National Park.

The Rockefellers were key players in influencing Congress to protect, and ultimately expand the Park. Rockefeller’s private company purchased forests in Jackson Hole as the Snake River Land Company. In 1972, 24,000 acres between Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone were protected and named the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway to celebrate his conservation efforts.

The rich, and sometimes famous, are attracted to the Gallatin Valley, and much of Montana, like bees to a cream-colored yucca bloom. Like Florida, we have golf here too, but Montana’s hook is open space and undeveloped wild lands. Much of this wild country is public land.

Montana’s prairies, badlands, mountains, rivers and forests are our siren songs. The allure is a reckoning to the era of the dusty pioneer. Cormac McCarthy continues to whisper in our ear about the lone cowboy on the plain.

Is our fixation with the pioneer a guise in facing the unknown? Granted, it does take substantially more effort to die of exposure within city limits. Our unrealized dream is a face-off with nature. The dizzying lines on maps are juxtaposed with dirty, bone-crushing work. It’s on paper and in the flesh.

Much like when rainfall snuffs out the campfire, the myth dissipates when the locals build the fences, dig the irrigation system, set up the solar panels, and build the mansion.

I hear McCall, Idaho is pretty, too.

#283

November 10, 2014 by Liz Allen

We spent yesterday wandering in the woods. The temperature was in the mid 60’s in early November, warm air punctuated with elbows of a breeze promising today’s snowstorm.

I have never been to this particular mountain range in Montana. This is somewhat novel since the range is within an hour plus drive from town. We saw no other hikers. The foothills were filled with yucca, prickly pear, juniper and sage. Lichens with considerable girth crowded together on top of purply-grape colored rocks.

Away from dense forests and mountain peaks, it’s easy to forget that the landscape of central Montana can quickly fold into scrub and rock. It is a northern ring of the Great Basin desert. We skirted through sage brush, fir limbs imitating rattlesnakes.

The creek we followed was called Crow. The canyon was homey to us and we felt we could pitch teepees and attempt the old ways. Relics to the late 1800’s mining, stone camp fire rings abandoned decades ago grew bunchgrass and lichen gardens.

Gnarly junipers and Douglas Firs held a precarious balance on the steeper, exposed slopes. Underneath the dirt I envision a network of stones and rocks, tree roots and mycelial mats all participating in the illusion of a stable west-facing hillside.

A rabbit’s body was stashed just off the trail in a cavern of rock. I smelled it's high note of rot, before I could see it.

Our dogs hunted squirrels and we hunted solitude.

“The desert gives an unsettling sense of the largeness of the universe in relation to the self. The desert is a scary place for a human being if you do not want to feel puny and humbled – that is, like a human being in the desert” (The Anthropology of Turquoise, 288)

I only discovered Ellen Meloy’s writing this fall. And then I found out she passed away a short two years after publishing The Anthropology of Turquoise. I bought her book in Moab, UT at Back of the Beyond Books, a store I’ve planned to visit for years.

I started reading it on my solo backpack trip into the Wind Rivers. I had crossed my fingers for the weather to hold. I lucked out. Elk bugled around me every night. Part didgeridoo and part alien, their calls nailed down the season. I might have forgotten it was fall for the sparkling lakes and robin’s egg blue skies.

My first night camping in the backcountry, the coyotes woke me. Their singing translated into a hazy green circle of northern lights; they were my companions, along with my dog and the stars, and Venus.

Desert Solitaire and the Journey Home are sandy staples when I make my spring pilgramage to the desert for a foray in the Utah canyon wilds. Ellen Meloy’s voice added a modern feminist take on the West. Abbey was a curiosity when he waxed eloquently for the wild places he worked in and explored. Meloy added smudges of sage and juniper to the realization that nature needs us to protect her, and we need her to learn something about the world.

Abbey was sure the Earth will finally dust off her gown when our species has reached its climax. I guess until then I will relish the strange rocks that dot the high desert. Keep looking for petrified wood. One of my companions found a piece of obsidian the size of a mouse’s toenail along Crow Creek.

Mullein pioneered the trail in patches and the 400 year-old junipers were painstakingly morphing another ring. The lichens drank droplets of rain that existed in a realm closer to mist than girthy rain. (Cascadian firs wouldn’t even recognize this moisture as raindrop sweat).

And then I found a red tag on the ground, with faintly yellow #283. Attached to it was a piece of wire that looked like it had once been rigged to a barbed-wire fence. A rogue cow that caught itself on a fence gate and managed to pull free, and slip off the physical evidence of domestication. Perhaps in pursuit of lush pasture.

“Here, it seemed to me, ecofeminist theory gained meaning in the field. Treating nature as a pet or a therapist ends up little better than treating it as a slave. Kinship demands reciprocity. Every nature girl and boy should be prepared to defend the places they love. Otherwise we have not earned them. When we march in from the starry nights and dazzling rivers, we must argue on their behalf, pressure politicians and other moronic invertebrates to wean themselves from their unsightly addiction to corporate blubber and for once act in favor of things that matter, like air to breathe, water to drink, and space to roam” (The Anthropology of Turquoise, 159)

Anaconda

September 16, 2014 by Liz Allen

A friend of mine is seeing snakes these sunny September afternoons. Climbing out of the creek at Drinking Horse the other day she asks me:

What's snake's medicine?

Two subjects immediately come to mind: transformation. Shamanism.

We are moving into the new moon, where more is simply possible. It's a dream-like time/space, and if you are conscious of it, you assemble the scaffolds of your next project. What are you drawing to you? Or sending your intention toward?

Or do you whisper your fears closer in? Like a knife at your side.

Montana's late nineteenth century politics

Last night, I listened to Ivan Doig. He appears an impeccable Montanan: leather work boots and denim, and a snowy handlebar mustache. His voice syrupy, the audience questions elicit prose-like thoughts, like a lady of the house offering a tour of her home.

I can tell you this: I have always appreciated Doig's writing. He is on par with all my favorite naturalist authors: Ed Abbey, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez.

And now, I like Doig because he embodies the frank and humble human, that seem to populate this lovely state. I say this with the caveat that I live in Montana, because of Montanans. I have sought their genuineness for a long time.

Doig reads from his novel Sweet Thunder. It's set in the mining town of Butte, and events and people that only happen in Montana (Like Evel KnieveI.)

As a bodyworker, I geek out on this random image.

Doig told us that writing is a performance.

Like the dead hare laying across the trail that my dog sniffs over, almost without interest. Dead, the hare is a conundrum: frozen in time, removed from the forest. A sliver of the whole. If the hare was found peeking out from a juniper, it's pink nose twitching, heartbeat soaring, my dog would chase it for miles over the sage benches. Likely, the bunny would elude Zoe.

This is percolating in my mind.

I think it's Doig's intuitive writing skills that claim ownership of this personal revelation (with his 100 audience members.) It's a gift to turn over in your mind, to let settle (His confidence was compelling.)

I open the window, near the begonia, and a soft rain taps on chokecherry leaves. A guitar melody softly carries over from a neighbor.

Fall is potent for transformation, it's audible.

Second looks at the foundation

March 20, 2014 by Liz Allen

Are there truths in your life that you have no empirical data for, but that you don’t second guess?

When I was a junior in college I spent a winter quarter in Ecuador. Our student group stayed in the Cofan village of Zabalo in the Amazon. I walked in the forest with a tribal member who showed me medicinal plants, including “vision vine” (one plant used in the brewing of ayahuasca).

This trip introduced me to many esoteric practices that I now breathe daily.

One is my interest in shamanism. As a kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I over-qualified as a forest-dwelling elf. Daily you could find me inhaling the duff, pressing myself against the skin of our backyard cedar and running my hand over the silky, apricot-colored skin of the madrone.

The Northern Rockies Bioneers (www.bioneers.org) introduced me to Jeremy Narby. His anthropological work in the Peruvian Amazon is the basis for his book the Cosmic Serpent. His years in Peru taught him to really hear the indigenous knowledge of these forest dwellers. Their stories are to be taken literally.

Doesn’t that remind you of being a kid? Your parents, Aunt Margaret, and teachers all emphasized not to take what they said literally. Among the books I first read, I did harbor a special love for Amelia Bedelia.

Narby’s achievement is a deviation from the classic anthropological trap. To study and learn about another culture means your world view doesn’t trump their voices and customs. “The Tukano Indians of the Colombian Amazon call this snuff viho. According to their tribal legends, the Tukano first received viho from the Sun’s daughter…. To the Tukano, viho is the semen of the Sun” (258, Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice).

In order for us to truly think freely — to engage what Zen Buddhists call beginner’s mind — first we must acknowledge our cultural immersion. It’s not evil, but it can be a veil. Our culture and education can hold us back from ideas that are foreign from our exposure. Like creation myths.

In the Cosmic Serpent, Narby highlights how all first peoples have a creation myth that includes a ladder, a twisting vine or a bridge extending into the sky.

Narby’s hypothesis is that DNA — the molecule of life — originated in the cosmos. A likely vehicle to shuttle DNA to Earth was the meteorite or asteroid. A cursory glance at Earth’s fossil record gap between single-celled life in Earth’s primordial seas, and the explosion in the staggering diversity of animals is otherwise a bit much to fathom.

Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was suggesting that the molecule of life was of extraterrestrial origin — in the same way the the ‘animist’ peoples claimed that the vital principle was a serpent from the cosmos. I had never heard of Crick’s hypothesis, called ‘directed panspermia’ but I knew that I had just found a new correspondence between science and the complex formed by shamanism and mythology (74, The Cosmic Serpent).

Another potentially awkward concept for a Westerner, is that Amazonian shamans receive all of their plant medicinal knowledge, from direct communication with the plants themselves. In the ayahuasca ceremony, an hallucinogenic experience, the plants and shamans dialogue through song and visions, their properties.

DNA is the source of their astonishing botanical and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized and ‘nonrational’ states of consciousness, though its results are empirically verifiable. The myths of these cultures are filled with biological imagery. And the shaman’s metaphoric explanations correspond quite precisely to the descriptions that biologists are starting to provide (117, The Cosmic Serpent).

DNA transmits information when it emits electromagnetic radiation. The use of quartz crystal in watches and electronics is widespread as the atomic structure of quartz makes them amplifiers. Narby points out that DNA is a crystal. Science has labeled a full third of the genome as junk DNA, because the sequences of proteins is exactly the same. In it’s predictability, this is where DNA becomes periodic and may pick up as many photons as it emits.

Narby’s pioneering hypthesis connects DNA’s information sharing system, via electromagnetic waves for shamans, in the hallucinogenic state. DNA transcription, cell to cell communication and even multi-celled algae or bacteria communication occurs through these photon shares.

My hypothesis is based on the idea that DNA in particular and nature in general are minded. This contravenes the founding principle of the molecular biology that is the current orthodoxy (145, The Cosmic Serpent).

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a British telepathy scientist, discusses the ten dogmas of science http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2PX7KKSG4 and blows holes in much of the bedrock. 1) Nature is mechanical. 2) Matter is unconscious. 3) The amount of matter and energy is always the same. 4) The laws of nature are fixed (the speed of light, gravity, etc.) 5) Nature is purposelessness — all is blind chance. 6) Biologic inheritance is material. 7) Memories are stored inside the brain. 8) The mind is inside the skull. 9) Psychic phenomena is illusory. 10) Mechanistic medicine is the only recognized medical system.

Number 4 is a good one to start with. Dr. Sheldrake points out that between 1928 and 1945 measurements of the speed of light taken around the globe show a deviation in it’s constant. When Sheldrake interviewed a scientist about this discrepancy, he was told that he had discovered one of the embarrassments of science. He didn’t have an explanation as to why the constant didn’t seem to be a constant.

In mechanistic science, inanimate objects do not have consciousness, nor do animals or plants. According to science, only the human brain, in all of the world, has consciousness. It’s really tricky since all matter is unconscious — plants, horses, dogs and even human bodies are only machines — and begs the question: how does consciousness emerge from unconsciousness?

Sheldrake’s hypothesis is that all matter is conscious. As an example, he suggests that the sun exhibits consciousness. The definition of consciousness is choosing between possible actions. The sun exhibits extremely complex patterns of electromagnetic radiation occurring in 11-year cycles. The massive solar storms in 2012 are one qualifier of sun consciousness or action. It is indeed much more interesting to ponder that the sun has a personality: periods of sun spots and times of solar storms. Sometimes the sun belches electromagnetic radiation and sometimes it is in a relatively quiet spell.

To embrace that all of our world exhibits consciousness, we have to pull our heads out of a human-centered world view. It’s possible to feel different energies in the outdoors, too. Why do the Grand Tetons feel so uplifting and powerful? Is the energy of forests and mountains in the Yellowstone caldera a unique consciousness? Maybe.

I propose we keep company with ferns, dogs, camels, and fungi. Grappling with the problem of consciousness and it’s origins goes on, and we must allow science to evolve and be updated, as well.

So you want to be a memory champion.....?

March 20, 2014 by Liz Allen

…or it’s possible you haven’t considered the idea yet. It seems like people believe they either have a good memory or a poor one, it’s not often you hear someone saying they have an average memory.

Please indulge in Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein, the Art and Science of Remembering Everything. This book is a chronicle of the human capacity to remember, from U.S. and international memory championships to the nitty gritty of how and why we remember.

One of Foer’s discoveries is literally anyone can challenge their memories to the maximum, and even take the ultimate test by competing in a memory championship.

Do you have a bad memory? I think we remember things that are interesting to us. If you don’t have any reason or need to remember a fact or a name, you probably won’t.

Tony Buzan, a British memory entrepreneur, boasts of a system of note taking he coined Mind Mapping. Using visuals — color, drawing, etc — elicits an increased capacity for memory. The memory takes on dimensions and it is these multiple layers that make memories more likely to “stick.” As a student, Buzan was greatly impressed by his first English teacher in college. During roll call the professor listed off absent students information — parents names, date of birth, etc.

….the mental athletes said they were consciously converting information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial journeys (40, Moonwalking With Einstein).

Buzan pressed him for his technique and eventually he got on the track to study the antiquated techniques from before mass production of books and other writings were available to the masses. One of these texts is the Ad Herrenium.

It goes without saying that intelligence is much, much more than mere memory (there are savants who remember much but understand little, just as surely there are forgetful old professors who remember little but understand much), but memory and intelligence do seem to go hand in hand, like a muscular frame and an athletic disposition. There’s a feedback loop between the two. The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it (209, Moonwalking With Einstein).

One of Foer’s pivotal discoveries is the distinct connection between creativity and memory. The better your capacity to remember details or ideas, the more likely you can make connections amongst disparate information.

In our gross misunderstanding of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus. The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory (203, Moonwalking With Einstein).

In my previous blog post Second Looks at the Foundation, I referenced an interview of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2PX7KKSG4. As a PhD telepathy researcher, he challenges many of the basic assumptions of science. He critiques the notion of science being built on mathematical formulas that are constants. One of these is the force of gravity. Science says these are measurements that never waiver. While reading Moonwalking with Einstein, I thought about the perception of time.

Being a subjective experience, any discussion of the perception of time is a slight tangent from the hypothesis that the natural world is only explained by constants. Just for fun, I would argue that the quizzical mind would probably enjoy the perspective that time is in fact a dynamic and fluid experience.

A relatively common experience is time in a slowed-down version, or alternately, as a fast-forwarded experience.

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time. Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives (76-77, Moonwalking With Einstein).

When you visit a foreign country, you experience difficulty in figuring out transportation, communication, exposure to different religion, cultural norms, etc — time expands. One day can feel much more like a week. When we are challenged to accomplish the simplest things, we sense time passing in a different way.

Foer describes an experiment in deprivation in which Michel Siffre, a French scientist, challenged himself to be alone and without distraction — he lived in a cave — for 60 days. He began to lose track of time without a clock to affix time as passing. He began to fall down a rabbit hole of his comprehension of himself. It turns out the brain does interesting things when we are deprived of human interaction or any other stimuli. Siffre’s downward spiral encompassed spells of hyperactivity of 19 hours or more followed by sleeping sessions of abnormal lengths of time. He kept a journal and believed he was only a fraction through the experiment time, when in fact the two month experiment had lapsed.

Foer accomplished amazing feats in one year: he pumped up his memory muscles to memorize decks of cards in minutes and recalled tens of faces and names that he saw for just an instant.

What all of this tells me is that our ability to remember, is far greater than we actually ever ask our brains to perform.

I have a pelvic brain?

March 20, 2014 by Liz Allen

Yes, you do.

And, intriguingly, the traffic from pelvic brain to cranial brain is at a much higher frequency than cranial information to the gut.

The medical community is starting to talk about depression beginning in the gut. Stress, a food allergy, strong emotions all affect digestion. If you cannot absorb the proper nutrition from the food you eat, it’s no giant leap to ascertain that this can cause a person to be depressed. This is life at it’s most basic need.

Western culture affirms that the only intelligence we have comes from our cranial brain. While older cultures, including the Maya in Mesoamerica and the Japanese, understood that the seat of intelligence is in the gut. We live in an age when we are rediscovering this truth. The enteric nervous system — the 100 million neurons in our gastrointestinal tract — was discovered as early as the 19th century. Why isn’t this information common knowledge?

This is where gut instinct and intuition come from. If you are used to centering yourself in your pelvic brain…. let’s say you do yoga regularly or receive abdominal massage…. you are likely to ascribe to the advice: Don’t believe everything you think (that is one of my favorite bumper stickers). You are grounded, emotionally even-keeled, in touch with your creativity. You may be an actor, a writer, a yogi.

What I love is the synchronicity this information has played in my life. I went to a Maya abdominal workshop in May this year, taught by the Arvigo Institute. I had the most recent issue of the The Sun magazine, http://philipshepherd.com/the-sun/ and read a Philip Shepherd interview about the pelvic brain on my drive to Portland.

I decided I need to read New Self, New World, by Philip Shepherd to get more of the dirt on this subject. He quotes Byron Robinson:

In the cranial brain resides the consciousness of right and wrong. Here is the seat of all progress, mental and moral, and in it lies the instinct to protect life and the fear of death. However, in the abdomen there exists a brain of wonderful power maintaining eternal, restless vigilance over its viscera…. The abdominal brain is not a mere agent of the brain and cord; it receives and generates nerve forces itself; it presides over nutrition…. It is the automatic, vegetative, the subconscious brain of physical existence. It is the center of life itself (69).

The Maya had the best representation of the pelvic brain. They obviously understood their physiology in a deep way. They saw the pelvic bowl as a cranium, connected to the cranial brain via a snake. I love this imagery!

“The two skulls are sacred, and ritually important because they are seen to contain the essence of a person” (81).

Have you contemplated where your intellect comes from? The more your resonate with the gut, the more it resonates with you.

Thoughts on the gut

March 20, 2014 by Liz Allen

I am watching the TV show Scandal on Netflix. If you haven’t watched it, it’s a White House drama about a bad-ass lawyer who always wins.

As a kid, my Mom and I watched Perry Mason and I must’ve gotten hooked on the formula. Who did it? What was their motivation? I anticipated the court room scenes, the attorneys playing their hand to the jury. I thought about becoming a lawyer at one point, so I think I crave their intimacy with fitting all of the pieces together.

Scandal’s main character is a woman, and an African-American. Her beauty and power are only enhanced by her incredible political savvy.

One of her quirks is that she checks in with her gut when she needs to know something. I love this!

It’s the perfect segue to authenticate our pelvic intelligence in the mainstream consciousness.

I have a client right now who is suffering from lumbar nerve damage from a lower back surgery. His attitude is very much of a know-it-all, and I say that with affection for him and compassion to his chronic burning nerve pain. He is the founder and head of an investment firm, used to dictating the course for many employees, a leader. Leaders don’t have it all easy, I know. My point is that he is the kind of guy that has never questioned alternative medicine’s power — breath work, cranial sacral therapy, trusting your body’s path to, above all things, heal itself. Since he is in pain, I think it’s easier for him to imagine his body is out to sabotage him.

I see him once a week and he also does Physical Therapy. He’s an avid fly fisherman, so he wades the rivers for miles, several times a week.

After a lot of pain flare ups and finding relief in our work together, he asks me: Do you think this is doing something medically for me, or does it just feel good?

It’s not an invalid question. But it did give me pause, because I immediately felt an incongruity in the question. Well, what does his gut say?

And I wondered: how could something that feels good, not help medically? But alternative medicine doesn’t measure its effects with straight-edged rulers, like Western medicine. The difference between the two models might be similar to the peculiarities between the right brain and the left brain. The left hemisphere of our brain is known for its ability to measure and deduce, to think linearly and analyze. The right hemisphere is connected to the spiritual, is creative, sees patterns, and is musical.

Cranial sacral therapy and massage therapy provide alternate sensory input to the cranial brain, and the whole body. Pain is an output of the brain. Change the input, and your body reconnects to its desired state: homeostasis. Blood cortisol decreases giving the adrenals a break, dopamine is released enhancing feelings of being whole and renewed, etc.

Our gut bacteria also play a role in the manufacture of substances like neurotransmitters (including serotonin); enzymes and vitamins (notably Bs and K) and other essential nutrients (including important amino acid and short-chain fatty acids); and a suite of other signaling molecules that talk to, and influence, the immune and the metabolic systems. Some of these compounds may play a role in regulating our stress levels and even temperament: when gut microbes from easygoing, adventurous mice are transplanted into the guts of anxious and timid mice, they become more adventurous. The expression “thinking with your gut” may contain a larger kernel of truth than we thought.

Some of my best friends are germs, by Michael Pollan

Bone up on your heart skills

March 20, 2014 by Liz Allen

From then on, the boy understood his heart. He asked it, please, to never stop speaking to him. He asked that, when he wandered far from his dreams, his heart press him and sound the alarm. The boy swore that, every time he heard the alarm, he would heed its message (Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, 138-39.)

So, imagine that your heart is your biggest sensory organ.

Your cranial brain isn’t helping you now. Just your heart.

Engage your heart perception toward a stranger in the grocery store. What information do they send? Foot tapping and rapid glances at the checkout may imply impatience. And your heart? Does it have anything to add?

Well, if you are used to noticing and watching people, its not such an odd experiment. The human animal is interested in itself, after all!

I once gave a massage to a pilot who was from out of town. I got a bad feeling from him, and throughout the session I was completely on guard and tense. I realized later I was ready to physically defend myself. My sympathetic nervous system was working. He verbalized almost nothing, leaving my senses to pick up on everything he didn’t say.

This was early in my massage career. At the end of the massage, he did request something highly inappropriate, making my heart read: dead on. I had been in fight or flight, adrenaline flowed. My muscles ached the following day. With a cushion of reflection, I was insulted that he violated the trust of the therapeutic relationship.

If you check in more often with your heart and let it perceive, I guarantee an outcome that may surprise and delight you. For example, doing a sitting mediation for 5 minutes a day. Simply tune into your heart’s energy and your brain will entrain to it. Your heart will lead your brain in it’s electrical patterning and the information it receives.

Normally, when our consciousness is phase-locked with the brain, the other biological oscillators in the body begin entraining with it. The result is much less coherent, because we seem biologically designed to let the heart, the most powerful oscillator, be the primary systems to which the others normally entrain. This coherent heart rhythm immediately begins to affect physiological functions, including respiration, somatomotor systems, and cortical activity… The three branches of the autonomic nervous system — sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric (GI tract) — also begin to synchronize with this more coherent heart rhythm or wave pattern (Stephen Buehner, The Secret Teachings of Plants in the Direct Perception of Nature, 101.)

Is it too wacky to consider that information is conveyed through the electromagnetic field emitted by our hearts? This is the subtle information that is helpful to you, the you that is beyond your brain and it’s dominant mode of information organizing.

The heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field of the body, and this field becomes more coherent as consciousness shifts from the brain to the heart. This coherence significantly contributes to the informational exchange that occurs during contact between different electromagnetic fields. The more coherent the field, the more potent the informational exchange (The Secret Teachings of Plants In the Direct Perception of Nature, 108.)

This post might ruffle your feathers if you imagine your science teacher picking a bone with me. You may simply notice this information is absent from the mainstream. Well, then.

You’re right. It’s not mainstream. But only for the last several hundred years in western culture. For thousands of years, native people hunted and survived on the kill that fed themselves and their family. A life in tune with the wild and with so many less distractions than ours, native people had and have, a closer relationship with their hearts.

It might be easy to question our heart’s information because culture’s lowest common denominator is a product of institution/school. Are you catching my drift?

When I need an answer to a question, I keep my heart open to an answer, but usually I go outside. Sitting at the computer and forcing myself to come up with it usually doesn’t work. Like Einstein, when you are in the shower or brushing your teeth — something you do on autopilot — are when the moments of insight seem to come. When you are open, but not coercing a solution.

In The Science Delusion, author Dr. Rupert Sheldrake asks if minds are confined to brains? With his extensive psychic research, Sheldrake has penned a hypothesis called morphic resonance. Thoughts are waves, and these waves are encoded with information. Sheldrake’s theory is in contrast to mainstream materialist theory, and concludes that minds are not confined to the physical boundary of the brain. Check out my earlier post referencing Sheldrake: http://hospicemassage.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/second-looks-at-the-foundation/.

A married heart and mind invoke calm, reflection, and strength.

Your excitement with a new idea, or anger with your son’s behavior, is encoded in your electromagnetic fields; your closest people receive information. We directly and indirectly affect our world. Check out Sheldrake’s stuff, I find his ideas natural and yes, they resonate. http://www.sheldrake.org

I strongly believe we are our own authorities with our bodies. I honor my body’s wisdom and my client’s. I injured my left knee (the ACL) about 10 years ago. One orthopedic surgeon wanted to do surgery — he was the first doctor I could see. He was partnered with another doctor I wanted to consult. Intuitively, I knew clearly that surgery wasn’t right for me, then. This feeling took me by surprise. I wondered how I could know I don’t need it? Was I in denial?

I rested, stretched my quads and hamstrings at the hot springs, strengthened my legs at the gym, and waited to see how it felt. I let my body tell me. I finally got in to the doctor that was my first choice. He read me well enough when he asked me how it felt to me? Did I think I needed surgery? The answer was no. I continue to ski, practice yoga, and ride my mountain bike, and I feel good. The injured side does feel weaker than the right side, but it is also my non-dominant leg.

Scientists have engaged in a particular form of imperialism. They have stolen from all of us the historical recognition of the heart as an organ of perception and substituted instead a mechanical heart and the belief that the brain is the only organ capable of thought. This colonization of the soul has had profound repercussions (The Secret Teachings of Plants in the Direct Perception of Nature, 118.)