Image from Pixabay
In This Article:
- What does it mean to shift from seeing to beholding?
- How does our perception influence healing and connection?
- The role of sensory awareness in cultivating wonder and awe
- Why embodied perception opens us to life’s relational nature
- Practical tips for fostering heart-centered awareness and connection
Beyond Survival: The Therapeutic Role of Connection
by Alex Scrimgeour.
Our senses are receptive to a phenomenal amount of information. It’s estimated that in just one second, we can unconsciously register up to thirteen million bits of information. Of this staggering number, we’re consciously aware of about fifty bits of information, which is still quite a lot if you consider how many colors, sounds, and smells you can pinpoint right now.
But, even though we have this incredibly fine-tuned sensory apparatus, in reality we’re only perceiving the tiniest fraction of the informational richness of the world around us.
The Brain as a Filter
We think of our perception as a truthful account of the world out there, but our brain and senses are more like filters that trim the world around us so we perceive only what’s relevant for living. This is a metaphorical way of describing the extreme complexity of how our brain, body, and environment create perception.
Our eyes are not little HD (high-definition) cameras; our ears are not microphones. The way our brain filters sensual information is instead largely via prediction. When we see or hear anything at all, our brain shapes this information in light of everything we have previously experienced.
It’s only quite recently that we have discovered this about our sense perception—that it relies on what is called predictive processing.
Crucially, our autonomic nervous system changes how these filters shape our perception. When we are stressed, our perception changes to highlight threat and danger. When we are relaxed and socially engaged this opens the scope of our perception so that we are more receptive to nuance and the symbolic nature of the world. We literally see the world in a different way.
Our perception of what we assume to be objective reality changes according to our internal state. When we feel safe and curious, we begin to notice the aliveness of the world around us. We can start to see beneath the surface of things.
From Seeing to Beholding
This can be described as shifting our perception from seeing to beholding. This change in perception presents a world to us beyond the immediate threat of survival. It brings us into closer intimacy with the world, precipitating a sense of belonging and being a part of something wondrous.
Indeed, it’s not only a sense of belonging that is felt but a conjoining as well; a clear-as-day participation with the coming into being of the world. Our perception unshackles itself from the clutch of being a survivor and connects with the unbridled creativity of the world.
This feeds a greater sense of wonder, joy, and appreciation for our lives. In turn, these feelings act as a type of resourcing, strengthening our resilience and buffering us from the sharp edge of life. Wonder bonds us to the world, it opens and connects us to other people. It creates what John Vervaeke calls a reciprocal opening. As we open to the world around us, the world responds in kind. The bonding and opening to life are two-way; the world is savoring its fragrance through relationship.
This dialogue with life breaks the profound, existential loneliness that occurs when we get stuck in a survivalist state. The simple joy and appreciation of being alive and in a living relationship with the world communicates an equally profound sense of knowing—that everything is okay, that we are safe in this present moment.
This implicit message from nature can be thought of as ecological communitas. Being in commune and shared breath with the world gives sustenance to the socially isolated, such as the mountain hermit. It helps feed the need for social community, warding off loneliness and despair. This allows people to remain sane and social through long periods of isolation.
The Therapeutic Value of Connection
The ability to drop into a deep sense of safety and rest is also a primary aspect of self-healing. This is one of the reasons why sleep is so important for our health and well-being. However, there are many social and cultural habits that are also vitally important for our health and for maintaining a sense of reciprocity, friendship, and play within our lives.
For instance, simple chatting and joking, laughing and merrymaking, are potently therapeutic and enrich our lives in ways that can’t be measured. Everyday social activities like sports, exercise, bathing and sauna, cooking and dining, music, dance, ritual, and prayer—these all fulfill our lives and also keep our nervous system in states that are healing and regenerative. All these relational activities cue our nervous systems away from feeling like we’re in a fight for survival. As the saying goes, when we can switch from survival to revival, we lay the groundwork for deep healing.
This is also the first step in many traditions of meditation and contemplative practice—to come to a state of deep rest so that we might revive ourselves. And in both the ancient Indic and Chinese traditions, self-massage was used to help bring us into this state of relaxation, safety, and contentment.
When we practice self-massage, we’re soothing ourselves and cueing our bodies into the healing mode. We can also mindfully bring our senses into retreat, which can deactivate the habit of unconsciously scanning our environment for threat. This can also create a pattern interrupt from addictive technology and the need to always have sensual stimulation. Instead of setting up a situation where we need more and more pleasure to experience joy, we reverse this dynamic so we can experience more and more joy in our simple, everyday lives.
Dropping Into a State of Calm
The greater we can drop into a state of calm and equanimity, the more this temporary fasting of our vision and hearing can be thought of as cleaning, purifying, and refreshing the senses. Returning to the world out there can create the impression of perceiving with more clarity. When we can look at life with fresh eyes, we’re less susceptible to old patterns of attention and more energized toward the invisible.
As long as we can maintain a state of relative relaxation and safety, we can also enter into new ways of engaging and participating with the world around us. Instead of seeing only the surface of things, we behold the subtle resonance that connects everything around us.
If we limit ourselves to what is only superficially apparent, the richness and potentiality of life tends to get flattened, and we end up blinding ourselves to what’s really before us. Forests are reduced to mere acres of timber, animals to kilos of meat, and other people to human resources.
The quantification of life reduces everything into familiar boxes, which has utilitarian value. But it also cuts out all the unknown unknowns, the bewildering possibilities of life. If we can create a reciprocal opening in our perception, we can stay attuned to the greater meaning and potential in life. We can reach a transjective stance, one that stays true to both the objective quantities and subjective qualities of life.
This is not simply a poetic way of being in the world. It’s also more advantageous to our growth and survival as people, for it enables us to forge stronger kinships within our social circles. The heart and value of friendship isn’t purely in one another’s utility to each other. Evolution and a spiritual vision of life need not be alien to each other.
Beyond Survival
If we are continually in a state of survival, this influences both our ability to enjoy and savor life, as well as skews the way we interpret the meaning of our human stories. There’s a slide into nihilism, cynicism, and apathy—a reciprocal closing that’s associated with addiction and depression. An important example of this is recorded by Charles Darwin himself, who experienced a profound aesthetic disenchantment in his later years.
I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the work of Milton, Gary, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseates me. I have also lost my taste for pictures or music. . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. . . . The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
It’s interesting that Darwin associated this aesthetic atrophy with our emotional nature. It’s as if the “survival of the fittest” paradigm had become so entrenched in his nervous system that his entire sensitivity to the world had been rewired to perceive only the cold facts. But, the cold facts do not reflect the deep truth.
Data is meaningless without interpretation. And, interpretation is inseparable from imagination. Ironically, instead of interpreting life only through a lens of survival, our actual survival depends on drawing from our full, imaginative capabilities. This means beauty and music are nontrivial—they support healing and growth both personally and collectively.
Iain McGilchrist’s thesis states that the cultural dominance of the left hemisphere’s way of perceiving the world has skewed our collective meaning-making, resulting in the many crises of the modern age. Our collective trauma has placed us firmly in a stance of survival, which means that we blind ourselves to the greater meaning, truth, and significance the world continually presents us with.
We tend to interpret life, both in our literal sensory perception and our overarching meaning-making, through a lens of threat detection. It’s not just our ways of thinking and speaking that reinforce a scarcity and survival mind-set, but our nervous system and embodiment equally color our world in this way.
We must reclaim a more balanced way of framing ourselves, both individually and culturally, within our stories. I describe this as a remembrance of our original face. The left hemisphere, and the very real drive for survival, are, of course, vital to our lives. But the right hemisphere, which opens us to our full embodiment, also opens us to possibility, risk, adaptation, and aesthetic arrest. It allows us to be captured by the wonder of the world.
Changing How We See
We have the power to change how we see, both literally and mythopoetically. This endeavor isn’t undertaken by simply paying attention to the surface of things. The attitude to aesthetics must shift from the default statement of “entertain me” to an active participation that takes us beyond passive observation. As Martin Shaw says, “Curiosity is a discipline of labor.” With repetition and patience, the feeling of curiosity transforms into awe, reverie, and wonder. Repetition familiarizes what is alien, difficult, and uncomfortable.
A golden key to opening ourselves to this kind of captivation involves an embodied sense of connection through our heart. It doesn’t occur by fixating on our sense organs or surface perception. This key is revealed if we look at the Chinese character for listening, which is composed of both the characters for ear and heart.
Keeping connected to the heart means that we continuously activate the downward flow, maintaining both a grounded embodiment and a calm and equanimous presence. This opens the senses to the peripherals—to all that is at the edge of our perception. It shifts us away from the laser-focused particularity of detecting threat and toward the embrace of our relational nature. Being embodied from the heart opens us to feeling embedded in the aesthetic richness of the world.
Khalil Gibran felt this when he wrote, “Beauty is not in the face, beauty is a light in the heart.” In both Buddhist and Daoist understanding there is a subtle anatomy that lies behind the more physical structures of our sense organs and nerves. This anatomy won’t be discovered through dissection but can be felt through direct experience.
Copyright ©2023. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission of the publisher,
Healing Arts Press, an impint of Inner Traditions Intl.
Article Source:
Facial Reflexology for Emotional Well-Being
Facial Reflexology for Emotional Well-Being: Healing and Sensory Self-Care with Dien Chan
by Alex Scrimgeour.
The Vietnamese facial reflexology practice of Dien Chan offers simple touch and massage techniques that engage the reflexology points of the face to help you tap in to the innate healing and regenerative powers of the body. Taking the practice further, master practitioner Alex Scrimgeour shows how to integrate Dien Chan with qigong and Chinese medicine as well as recent developments in neuroscience and cognitive science to treat a variety of emotional issues, from anxiety, addiction, and stress to trauma, dissociation, and PTSD.
Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Alex Scrimgeour is a licensed acupuncturist and massage therapist, with a degree in acupuncture and a diploma in Tui-Na massage from the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine. He has studied Dien Chan (Vietnamese facial reflexology) extensively with Trần Dũng Thắng, Bùi Minh Trí, and other master clinicians at the Việt Y Ðạo Center in Vietnam. He gives treatments and teaches at many of the leading spas and wellness centers around the world and is based in London. Author's Website: SensorySelfCare.com/Article Recap:
This article explores how shifting from "seeing" to "beholding" transforms our perception of the world and enhances healing. It discusses how survival-based perception skews our ability to connect and thrive, highlighting the therapeutic role of reciprocal opening and aesthetic engagement. By embracing wonder and practicing heart-centered awareness, we foster resilience and deepen our connection to life’s relational and symbolic richness. This shift not only enhances personal well-being but also cultivates collective growth and understanding.
#MindfulLiving #HealingThroughConnection #HeartCenteredAwareness #TherapeuticWonder #ReciprocalOpening #AestheticEngagement #BeholdingLife #EmbodiedPerception #AwakenWonder
