The Transformative power of ideas....residential treatment...inquiring empathy

 

 

 

 excerpted from "MOving consciously somatic transformation through Dance, Yoga and Touch/in Radcal Somatics., Hillel Braude, pp. 125-130

Empathy is a key concept in linking the three strands of somatics, phenomenology, and neuroscience. 

 

Philip Jackson and Jean Decety have distinguished three dynamic functional components of empathy: affective sharing; self-other awareness that relies on the cognitive capacity to take the perspective of the other person; and regulatory mechanisms that keep track of the origins of self and other feelings.25 Accord- ing to this neuro-evolutionary perspective, empathy is affective, in the sense of being a cognitive understanding arising on the basis of a prior experiential base of affective resonance or “emotional contagion” whereby one assumes the same or similar emotional feeling of another with whom one is in contact. Addition- ally, empathy is also an affective response that arises from a cognitive appraisal of emotional contagion. In other words, the causal mechanisms of the feeling of empathy can be both cognitive and affective. There is, therefore, a feedback loop occurring in empathy between parts of the brain associated with affect and cognition. Parts of the brain used in the generation of empathy include the cortex (insula, anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex), midbrain (e.g., periaqueductal grey), and brainstem.

 

The radical transformative power of somatics derives from a practitioner’s ability to touch the deep recesses of precognitive cellular states of being—hyletic data emerging from the embodied self. These hyletic data may include sensa- tions, affect, kinesthesia, perception, and any other sensuous data about the self, emerging at the margins of consciousness and brought to conscious atten- tion through phenomenological reflection or introspection. 

The possibility of moving beyond one’s own self-limits, the paradox of becoming more oneself at the moment of self-emptying or self- transcendence, may also occur privately through dancing authentically in the absence of an external witness.

Being alone, within your space, where some parts of the body are carried with the slightest possible tensions, without struggle or resistance to gravity, and reaching your goal in an undeviating direct manner, in which spatial freedom is achieved through flexibility of the body and suddenly affect a change of position in which continuity is sustained for a relatively long period.... THAT IS THE PLACE I WANT TO BE.