with Michael Picucci
Michael Picucci (MP): I've been around psychotherapeutic
healing and trauma recovery for a good number of years. When I came across your
work, it really felt captivating and revolutionary for me. I don't want to put
you in an awkward position with this question, but I'm curious - Do you get that
kind of reaction often?
Peter Levine (PL): You know, I hadn't even really thought
about it in that way until you asked the question. Yeah, I think I have got that
comment from a number of people. And some people actually even surprise me. You
know, it's the funniest thing. Having developed it over such a period of time,
over 30 years, you're just doing something and you don't really think about the
context so much. When I was doing this work, as you know, there wasn't even a
definition of trauma or PTSD, as we know about it today. That's relatively recent,
only about 20 years old, if that. I think the thing that was most revolutionary
if I think back (but again, to me it made common sense, so I didn't really think
of it as revolutionary) is the idea that animals in the wild are subject to constant
predation and that they... I mean, obviously, if they didn't have mechanisms to
return their nervous systems from threat arousal to equilibrium, they wouldn't
survive in the wild. So, there has to be a deeply innate mechanism that's there
to bring us back from the brink of insanity, the brink of fear and experience
of threat to balance. And if that's the case, and it appears to be the case -
I mean, I basically studied everything that was written on animal behavior related
predator-prey behavior… By the way, can I take a side on this?
MP: Sure.
PL: When I was at UC Berkley in the early 70's, this idea
was really churning in me. I would go to the library, and I would get literally
anything I could find. I would sit in the stacks and just trace books and references.
I remember that as a wonderful time of my life, of living with books. I would
occasionally get an article or book, and I would then have plenty of time with
it. But then it would get recalled, and I would let it go and get the next book.
Then the same thing would happen. Just recently, a couple months ago, in San Diego
I met a woman named Mary Mane. She is probably the preeminent researcher now in
attachment work with animals. She was a student of Mary Ainsworth. A really lovely,
solid woman. We started to talk at breakfast one day, and it turns out that she
was the other person! In order to understand maternal attachment, she was going
over all this ethology literature, as was I. So, we were developing those ideas
at the same time. It was such a wonderful and somehow reassuring experience to
realize that we were both looking at what we think of as strictly human issues,
trauma and attachment, and that we were both driven to study instinctual functions
in animals.
MP: So, back to the original question about 'Do you get
my kind of reaction about you're work being captivating and revolutionary often?'
I think you're answer is 'Yes.'
PL: Yes, and I get all kinds of other responses, too. Although
I must say that in the last few years, it's really quite rare that I get something
that's dismissible or negative in any way… In the beginning, a lot of people including
our publisher said, "Well, this is about animals. How can that apply to humans?"
MP: So, I think you already answered my next question,
which was going to be… Operating in the body-oriented practitioner world, especially
since I've come across you, I hear of people who have known about you for years
and years. So, it makes me ask, when did you get started, and what first inspired
you?
PL: Who's to really say what the inspiration was? There
were two tracks. One was the story of Nancy in the book, which was in 1969. You
know that story.
MP: Yes.
PL: There was another one, which was before that. The
two of them really merged along with the animal research. It must have been about
1965 or 66, and I had just met someone who was in that same class that I was teaching
at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, Judith Weaver. My friend, Jack, dragged
me to San Francisco to go to this one or two day workshop conducted by Charlotte
Selvers. She was one of the first people to bring sensory awareness, body awareness
to the United States; she actually just turned 100. This was an experiential workshop
she was doing. Again, I had just come from the Midwest. There was no such thing
as the growth movement. There was no such thing as bodywork. At the time, there
may have been 4 or 5 rolfers in the known universe. There were no other body-workers.
In this workshop, we spent hour after hour walking around, being aware of our
walking, being aware of every part of our bodies, picking up a rock, feeling a
rock, feeling the weight and texture, picking up another rock, picking up a piece
of wood, looking at the wood, … This just went on and on and on. Suzuki Roshi
was there, the head Zen monk at Tassajara. I asked one of the monks, 'How are
you doing with this?' I was completely befuddled. The monk said, "I'm getting
a terrible headache." This woman just drove us. And then at the end of the day,
we were asked to lie down on the floor and feel our breath. The most remarkable
thing happened. I became aware of my muscles breathing with my breath. It was
like my whole body was breathing, and I had never had an experience like that
before. I remember feeling different for several days. About a year or two after
that, I was asked to teach a course called Contemporary Natural Science, given
primarily from the Zoology department. There was a laboratory part in which I
was asked to set up a physiological laboratory for monitoring bodily physiological
responses. I thought, 'I wonder if I can actually measure what I had experienced
that year before in Charlotte Selvers workshop.' So, I asked for a volunteer,
and this lovely young, fiery red haired undergraduate student volunteered. She
would come in and I would connect what's called an anemograph, and I was able
to record her breathing and heart rate. I also put electrodes on different muscles.
Obviously muscles couldn't breath, but I wanted to see if there was some tensing
and letting go that was synchronized with the breathing, and therefore felt like
they were breathing. When I first set her up, I could find no such relation. I
was getting frustrated, and so was she. Then one time, I was doing some relaxation
with her, and she flipped into what we now call a trance or an altered state.
And Boom, all of a sudden I started seeing the synchrony between the actual breathing
and the electrical activity in the muscles in the foot and in other parts of the
body. So, I then became interested in what these rhythms reflect in terms of well-being.
Later, after my experience with Nancy, and soon after my doctoral work, I was
asked to be a consultant for NASA. This was for the first space shuttle flight,
which of course hadn't yet gone up. There was a real big problem. When the astronauts
would go into zero gravity, when they go into orbit, they would very frequently
get sick. It's called Zero-G Sickness, or enuresis; they would basically get nauseous
and throw up. It was more than just an unpleasant situation, because it actually
could get dangerous. It could get in the machinery and affect other people. So,
there was a project to somehow monitor when it was about to happen before it happened,
and then train these people to do something. They were trying biofeedback and
different drugs. I noticed that the astronauts that actually were able to do well,
that didn't get sick or were able to stop themselves from getting sick were people
who had a response somewhat similar to the woman who I measured those years earlier.
I had also done some measurements with people I worked with who were traumatized.
When they would resolve the trauma, you could see that their body would go into
this full-body breathing. So, a picture started to really form. There's another
important part that shouldn't be left out. I took a leave of absence when I discovered
the Esalen Institute, and there were people doing things like Charlotte Selvers,
Fritz Brogue, Ida Rolf, and so forth. Also around that time I got into Reichian
therapy. This stuff was just completely mind blowing to me. Burney Gunther had
a book "Sensory Awakening: Going Below your Mind." I was also very much taken
by Reich's work.
MP: As am I.
PL: I think that Wilhelm Reich is a person who has been
tragically lost in most people's awareness.
MP: Yes.
PL: I've asked audiences of body therapists at big conferences,
"How many people know Wilhelm Reich?" To my chagrin, an increasingly smaller and
smaller minority raises their hands. This is a man who's work has really been
important on all of the cutting edge things that are going on in society today.
He's a root of it. Also around the time of Nancy, I started studying with Ida
Rolf. So, I got the privilege to look at bodies and to touch bodies. Now, I didn't
really do rolfing that much afterwards. I did it for a while. But I got two tremendous
gifts for Ida Rolf. First, I started to really see a body as it is. She wouldn't
let you give a theory about what you saw. You'd have to actually see what you
saw. And she was very big on relationships of one part of the body to the other.
Then when I started to palpate muscles, I found that some muscles were like rock
iron tight… more like a car tire. If you push a car tire, it pushes your finger
right out. Other muscles were like mush, or were woody. They didn't respond at
all. I later met a woman, Lilla Moore Johnson, who had devised a whole theory
on that. And then the body-dynamics people later incorporated that in a different
way. I then came back to the stuff that I had observed with animals, and I said,
"Oh my God- This is what happens when an animal is being chased full out." Its
muscles are going at the maximum amount that they can, and then in a fraction
of a second the animal collapses. So, you have a mixture of muscles that are frozen
in stiff terror, braced in fear, and other muscles that have collapsed in sheer
terror. So, all these pictures started come together, a kaleidoscope. The picture
just got bigger and bigger and more complex, of course. The remarkable thing,
I think, is that even with this complexity, I found certain very basic principles
to hold true. The first one, which I mentioned at the beginning, is that as animals
ourselves, human beings have this innate ability to rebound from extreme experiences
and threat given appropriate guidance.
MP: Yes.
PL: And that this could be learned relatively easily and
quickly. People can get from being very debilitated, dysfunctional, sick, whatever
term you're using, to not only get rid of their symptoms, but to really come alive.
MP: Can we take all of that, and let me ask the next question.
I think this begins to bring it all together in a new way. Here's a quote from
your book: "As we begin the healing process, we use what is known as the felt
sense, or internal body sensations. These sensations serve as a portal through
which we find the symptoms, or reflections, of trauma. In directing our attention
to these internal body sensations, attacking the trauma head on, we can unbind
and free the energies that have been held in check."
PL: Did I say "attacking the trauma head on?"
MP: Actually, you did. I was a little surprised at the
wording.
PL: You're kidding! My God, I contradicted myself there.
I can't believe it. So, in other words, we're not doing it head on really, we're
doing it through the felt sense. That's the difference. Thank you! That has to
be changed for the next version. That's humorous.
MP: So, taking the theory into account, how do you come
to that awareness that you could engage it in that way?
PL: Yes, that goes back to all the things I've been talking
to you about. I started then to say, "What is this?" What is it that let's you
know that you feel better? I became very interested in what was called motor learning
at that time, and emotion theory, which went back into the early 1800's. How is
it that you know what you know when you say "I feel good about this" or "I feel
bad about this?" or "I'm scared?" How the heck do you know that? I actually coined
the term around that time as "registered experience." There's Eugene Gendlin's
book "Focusing," which again is a book that everyone should read. He actually
had been working on this in a philosophical way and had written some really fabulous
stuff. I think his really great stuff were things that were written in papers,
and I gradually got some of his papers. This really confirmed for me that I was
on the right track here. But I'm not sure exactly how I made that connection between
what animals go through without apparent awareness, in the sense that humans have
it. Although I do believe animals are sentient. This is kind of the vehicle that
allows us to do what animals do instinctually. This refined sense is the tool
that allows us to be able to do what animals do. You see, I think our minds have
gotten in the way of this happening naturally - our over-socialized, over-developed,
over-frontalized mind. It's the felt sense that allows the mind to work in concert
with the instincts. So, it's our link between our "highest" and "lowest," that
is to say between our most elaborate function and our most instinctual function.
As I started to work more methodically with asking questions about people's inner
experience, I started to learn about that landscape, and particularly about that
landscape, when it had to do with responses to overwhelm, to threat, to trauma.
And gradually I started to develop a lexicon, because… How do you ask people questions
about that, that doesn't get them out of the experience? That was really one of
the most difficult parts, thinking of how to ask them this kind of question.
MP: And you have developed a beautiful lexicon. But going
back, speaking of lexicon and use of words, so where you had said, "Attacking
the trauma head-on," you would probably have wanted to say or would change that
today to something like what?
PL: Embracing, contacting…
MP: Engaging at the periphery…
PL: Engaging at the periphery, contacting it, joining with
it in a titrated way.
MP: You also articulate how frozen energy in the body,
in the central nervous system, is renegotiated in the body moving one from activation
to resilience. It dawned on me that another way of saying what you are saying
is that, "We are using the power of love or spirit to transform." When you talk
about resource energy in somatic experiencing, it seems we are also talking about
the energy of love or spirit. Would you care to comment on that at all?
PL: Usually in the past I've kind of tried to stay out
of here, but now at my advancing age into 60… If you think about how traumatized
people are, not just in terms of shock trauma but in terms of their whole development,
and what percentage of the human race has been deeply traumatized, I think just
looking at sexual attacks alone in childhood, I believe the conservative estimates
are something like one out of four people in the world. And it doesn't seem to
really vary that much with socio-economic status. So, when we look at how things
are going on in the world, you can say, "My god, how crappy it is." But at the
same time or on the other hand you say, "God, it's a miracle that we're doing
as well as we're doing given the amount of traumatization, neglect, poor parenting,
inadequate parenting that most all of us have received."
MP: So, the energy of spirit or love…
PL: Yes, the energy of spirit or love - getting back to
that. Empirically, when I work with people, most people come to that. I don't
say anything about it. If they have that belief, I am glad of that, because that's
going to be a resource for them generally. This is one of the things that really
caught my attention as I started to work with many, many more clients is how consistently
people would experience something that we would talk about as spirituality. I
mean, it could be more in a Tao or Zen sense of their being in the now and the
now being eternal. Or it could be that they felt held by a golden light or in
the arms of Christ. If they're Jewish they have some kind of a Jewish thing. Although,
I actually found many people would have experiences from other religions as much
as from their own religion. This is the thing that I think Stan Grof also started
to notice in the psychedelic experiences.
MP: So, you don't necessarily talk about the energy of
spirit or love being a resource or in the resource, but one could notice that
themselves. As I do…
PL: Yes, that's right. I mean, I don't think it's my role
to… Sometimes I'll ask a person, especially somebody who's really struggling in
a very difficult situation. I ask them what their beliefs are about spirituality
or religion or God or if they have any particular beliefs about that. I also preface
that with 'If I'm not prying;' 'I don't want you to even answer this question
unless feels like you want to answer this question.' Of course, at the same time,
for some people religion actually has turned out to be almost the opposite of
resource.
When you work with trauma in this way, it's almost universal,
it's certainly more yes than nay, that people do report these kinds of experiences
and that they are deeply resourcing. Then sometimes if you ask the person, "Here
you are now. If you would have been here before this particular trauma…" (because
usually people come after a particular breakdown to see me at least) "…and your
life was just going to go on, or what happened, happened and here you are now.
Would you have chosen to have the accident happen or the event happen? Or would
you have chosen to not have it?" Almost one hundred percent of the people say
they would have chosen it to happen, because of the richness of what's happened
in their emotional and personal and spiritual life. So, it's almost ridiculous
to deny it. It's certainly counter-therapeutic to deny it.
MP: If we could just shift for a minute to something we
were discussing just prior to the interview, the addiction field. It appears to
me, Peter, that both you and I are of the same philosophy that addictions are
self-medication for residual trauma and distress in the body. Do you agree that
with the current abilities we have to address trauma calls for a re-education
and transformation of the way we treat people with addictions?
PL: Absolutely, yes. Certainly people that are in distress
tend to gravitate towards certain substances. A lot of times people actually pick
a substance, and they're in the right category. So, if they are anxiety driven,
they will tend to go for alcohol or for narcotics. If it's depression, they'll
tend to go for stimulants. Of course, unfortunately, these are not good medications
for either. So, I am really struck by how people tend to self-medicate themselves,
try to self-medicate themselves and how, of course, it makes things worse. Also,
about how reliant our culture has become on medication, whether it's addictive
or whether it's called substance abuse or whether it's prescribed medication.
You know, I was very much caught by the irony. There was a program on the drug
that a lot of young people are using…
MP: Ecstasy.
PL: Ecstasy, which is MDMA from a long, long time ago.
They were interviewing these kids on why they took this drug, what they got out
of it. They mostly said that they could talk to people easier, they felt better
about themselves, and they weren't shy and inhibited. Some of them spoke about
feeling love, but by and large people reported what is called "social anxiety."
It alleviated that. This is the irony: After that program, or as part of that
program, the commercial break was… Guess what for.
MP: Prozac.
PL: Paxil. They showed the same situation of an adult being
at a party and being uncomfortable and not being able to talk to somebody and
then says, "Here, take this."
MP: Yes, incredible contradictions.
PL: And I'm sure that the people that did this had no
idea that they… or maybe they did and just laughed at it. This is the dilemma.
But don't get me wrong - I am not against medications. I, quite frankly, think
that medications have made a tremendous contribution. I mean, almost miraculously
to the degree that antibiotics did. But like antibiotics, they can wind up causing
more problems if you don't really use them in the right way, or in an ecological
way. I think that's been the case with these medications. They've been used to
cure people of their trauma or their depression or their anxiety, and of course
it doesn't do that. Maybe a medicine will come that will do that. I mean, people
should keep trying.
But really, the way things are right now is that most of these
medications suppress or, in some way, support the person so that there's the possibility
that their therapy can be much more effective. Some people really need that support.
So, think of it as a resource, but as a temporary one. It's not a long-term solution.
I've heard some group has the expression, "Pills without skills don't do anything."
It may even be an addiction or recovery community. But it's a good saying. I think
as a culture we are so overly dependent. I've seen advertisements that say, "Your
wife left you six months ago, your still feeling blue. Do we have the pill for
you!" That was Prozac. Nothing like, "Maybe you're stuck there. Maybe you need
some help to work this through. And maybe this isn't just your wife. Maybe this
is a pattern that goes back into your childhood that we could productively work
on together."
MP: Shifting back to Somatic Experiencing for a minute.
As you know, I'm enrolled in your New York City training, and I'm actually impressed
that I signed up for a three-year training program at fifty-five years old. I've
been around and done a lot already. But more than that, I was surprised when I
went to the training and there were so many other seasoned practitioners in the
room. Normally training programs attract the inexperienced practitioner that's
just getting started in profession. At least in NY, you are attracting old-timers
that have been through and seen it all.
PL: Actually. That's true, that's something that I've noticed
much more in the last 5 or 10 years. Certainly the last 5 years. Both in the states,
in Europe and other countries, that we're getting much more people who are the
seasoned clinicians. I'm very glad about that. And people who grew up in kind
of a similar mold that I did in some ways. That's been really kind of fun and
amusing.
MP: Yeah, it was very exciting for me to be sitting with
and doing exercises with practitioners who had been through the 80's and had studied
character structure, had done the "child within and younger self" kind of work,
all the experiential therapies, the cathartic work and the body work. It's like,
we've all done it all, and we find ourselves in this room studying this now, and
are all quite taken with it actually. Is there any way that you can account for
that appeal?
PL: Part of it is just a maturing. And then books and articles
that I or other people have written. Then just gradually, evolution… I mean, generally
things don't start at the conservative center. They start by people who are more
out, as it were, in the so-called 'fringe,' which in a way is too bad, but that
is how it is. Those are people who are more likely to go for something, anything!
So, they would come to take the S.E. class, but they would also take all kinds
of stuff to me that would be more or less nonsense. However, when many of these
people then would work with other people or who were therapists, and the therapist
would say, "Wow, what is this you're doing? I've been able to move through something
that I didn't even know was here!" So, gradually it emerges. Another thing, quite
frankly, is I think there is a cultural zeitgeist in the world. There is this
movement now about the body being central in the therapy of trauma, and the body
being central in psychotherapy, even, that really has turned a corner. Also what
I think has been a really important thing is EMDR. EMDR, because of several different
things… All of a sudden they made tens of thousands of psychologists aware that
there was a body, and that there were other ways to work with trauma then not
working with it or tying people down to a chair and making these poor Vietnam
vets watch 'Platoon.' Then spokes people like Bessel van der Kolk speaking to
large numbers of people. So, I think many of these of these things have really
converged to where now many people … I mean, I think it's just an evolutionary
time. It takes that time for it to get out and …
MP: Which actually leads me into the next question I was
thinking of. On the website, we quote an NIH Director, Esther Sternburg. She's
an MD, and has a new book called "The Balance Within." It's an excellent book.
One of the things she's saying is that "we must focus on the minute connection
between each part, and at the same time looking outward to the emotions and beyond."
Now, she's writing this book to physicians with a lot of good, grounded research.
PL: Wow.
MP: Now, you of course are already doing this work. There's
also a fast growing discipline of psychoneuroimmunology. And this website that
we're interviewing for is all about reducing human suffering through felt senses
of the body. So, it seems a new paradigm of healing from the inside out is coming
of age. And this is an NIH Director that I quoted from.
PL: Really?
MP: Do you perceive yourself or us as shape-shifters in
some larger evolutionary process? Do you think in those ways at all?
PL: I think that, as you said and as I said before, there's
a wave that's crashing on the shore here. Some of us have been on that wave for
a few decades, and some have just got on the wave. But it's the wave that's happening.
I think these things are irreversible at this time. They're helped on by all kinds
of things. I think one of the things that may actually be one of the greatest
helpers is the HMOs.
ML: Yes.
PL: Because medical care has gotten so poor overall with
this. It hasn't solved the problems. And it couldn't have even if it was the best
system of free enterprise and democracy, because it's still not dealing with the
root problems. I think because it's taken things to such an absurd extreme that
people are now more and more open. And in a sense they themselves are, because
they need something that's dealing with all the chronic symptoms, the things that
could have been prevented. In order to survive they have to look at prevention.
There's a study that recently came out of CDC by Filletti. Basically, they show
that the main healthcare burdens that we have are either directly caused by trauma,
the effects of trauma - like suicide, depression, anxiety, self-destructive behaviors,
alcoholism and so forth… I mean, the correlations are vast. They are as high as
20 times the non-traumatized population. Even the main killers of what are considered
to be strictly medical diseases like diabetes, cancer and heart disease. That's
what really makes things change. I think so many of these things are conspiring
in this wave that has crashed upon the shores of change.
MP: In all of that, you founded or originated The Foundation
for Human Enrichment.
PL: Yes, that was basically to be a structure for training
people and professionals. But also for getting the work out to a larger population,
because people have to become empowered. That's one of the principals of Somatic
Experiencing. You get the client empowered as quickly as you can so they're not
overly dependent on you. You also want information out to as many people as you
can so that they can help prevent traumatization in themselves, in their family,
in their children, in other people by knowing what to do. A lot of people have
studied Red Cross first-aid. We need just as many people to study this kind of
emotional first-aid. That's one of the reasons that I've really been devoting
a lot of my time and efforts and energies to getting material out through the
media. That's why I did the tape series, the Sounds True six-tape series, "Healing
Trauma." And I just released less than a month ago a two-tape series called "It
Won't Hurt Forever: Guiding a Child Through Trauma."
MP: I remember when you first told me about that, I heard
great excitement in your voice. What is the enthusiasm about?
PL: I'm still enthusiastic about it, and that's a miracle
for me. If I'm still enthusiastic after I've put something out, that's really
gone beyond the pale. Usually, at best, I don't even want to hear it. I still
feel very strongly about it, and I've gotten all kinds of feedback from people.
I recommended it to the group I was teaching in Washington DC at the Networker
conference, and I said, "Now, this is not for seriously traumatized, sexually
abused children' and so forth and so on. This is for the more ordinary trauma
that parents can help their children with." And this woman got up and she said,
"I'm sorry, I disagree. I've just used it with one of my deeply sexually traumatized
children, and I've had just miraculous results." Of course, that's in the hand
of a therapist. This is one of the things that I've also been saying for thirty
years, again not using the word 'trauma'- that it's not just sexual abuse, it's
not only molestation or sexual attacks that traumatize people. That's probably
a significant but not even the major proportion of ways people get traumatized.
They get traumatized by getting in accidents, automobile accidents and other accidents.
They get traumatized by medical procedures, surgeries and other invasive medical
procedures. Natural disasters. It's really the significant majority of people
who are in someway under the spell of trauma. And they're limited in some way
from living fully, because of these traumas. They may not have the clinical symptoms
of PTSD as of the DSM manual, but they are traumatized. Their lives have been
in some ways restricted or limited, and they're more vulnerable to later traumatization.
So, getting this information out and trying to get it into hospitals so that they
don't unnecessarily traumatize children, infants, and adults as well. Because
just the knowledge itself can prevent a lot of trauma.
MP: Yes. I know the foundation is doing trainings, and
you are doing a lot of talks around the world. Is there anything else on the horizon
in terms of the foundation getting the word out or sharing?
PL: We're actually doing a big project in the hospitals
in the Denver/Boulder area in May. I'm doing it with a neurologist who has been
very closely associated with SE and just published a book called "The Body Bears
the Burden" about these people that for me was the majority of my practice. They
have an automobile accident, and sometimes it's like a 10 or 15 miles an hour
fender bender. And they're lives come apart. You know, their doctors, of course,
don't know what to do. They're frustrated. And the insurance companies think that
they're just trying to collect on their insurance. It's very unfortunate what
happens. But these people, the majority of them anyway, are very very traumatized
by these events. Of course, many of them have had histories. Still, all of sudden
people just fall apart and have all of these bodily symptoms, and nobody knows
what is the cause of it. So, we want to get information like that out to not only
change the treatment, but hopefully to change the whole insurance and legal system
so it doesn't have to be adversarial.
MP: Yes.
PL: So, these people can get the treatment that they need
- and then that will, of course, save billions of dollars in the long and short
run. But there's the fear… if we say people have PTSD, we don't want them to have
another thing that they can file a disability claim for. You know?
MP: I do know.
PL: So, we have a lot of education. That's what we're trying
to do.
MP: So, you've had some heady experiences in this time
of doing this work - between NASA, working with the space shuttle people and teaching
trauma around the world. Have these been among your most rewarding experiences?
Or is there anything else that you'd like to share with us when thinking of a
real rewarding experience being involved in this process?
PL: Well, thank you. I think that some of the most rewarding
are just being with people, clients that I work with and seeing them transform.
Nothing can really beat that. There's another interest that I didn't mention.
After I started to develop this method, I said, "Wait a minute… pain, injury,
suffering, misfortune… that's been around since the beginning of recorded history."
It's on the cave paintings, the early literature, and god knows where else - massively
by the time of Greek civilization. I thought, 'Well, people have had to deal with
this forever! They must have discovered some of the similar things that I've discovered."
So, I became very interested in what certain native healers, sometimes called
'shaman healers,' do throughout the world to deal with what might be similar things
based on the organism's intrinsic ability to right itself. For several years,
I had an opportunity to work with the Hopi Guidance Center in Arizona, and then
to be with other indigenous people in different parts of the world - South America,
and a little bit in Northern Scandinavia, in Lapland. At first, my search was
to corroborate that they saw things in similar ways - part in curiosity, part
egoistic. I think what I learned is… Well, that's true - they do see things similarly.
People in the remote areas of the Amazon have heard the term 'trauma.' I mean,
they use their own word. In South America, the term 'sistus' is used, which means
fright paralysis. That's trauma. They've heard the English word, they know the
Spanish or Portuguese word. They know trauma, and many of them talk about treating
trauma by their different models. Instead of "dissociated" parts, they're going
to try to find the parts of the soul that had severed and induce them back into
the body of their patient. The other thing that came strongly to me was that by
and large these people don't see it in terms of an individual. They see it in
terms of the group. So, if an individual is traumatized, the group is traumatized.
And for the individual to heal, the group has to heal. In our society, there's
so much fragmentation and everybody's autonomous. Everybody has his or her own
car. Being in Southern California right now, it just amazes me! I'm on the highway,
and there's almost not a single car that has more than one person in it. So, we're
so atomized, so split off from each another. When someone's traumatized, we're
OK… Send them to a doctor, but we're not really able to stay patient and supportive
very long. I think one of the things these people have taught me is that to heal
trauma, we have to re-establish community. In reestablishing community, our whole
models of healing will change. Our whole existence will change. There have certainly
been great advantages to being individualistic, but there's been a tremendous
downside to that as well. So, I'm very much inspired by how some of these native
people truly live that… walk that talk. They don't judge people. They support
people. They hold the space for them to participate in some of the rituals so
that they can heal. It's because they don't distinguish them. They don't say 'Well,
you're the sick one. We're the well ones. We'll tolerate you're being here." They
don't really have that barrier.
MP: Having said that, I'll make my last question off of
it before you make your closing comments. This is also sharing with you the sentence
in your book that I love the most, and there were a lot of them. But the one that
I loved the most that jumped out at me was the sentence that said, "Transformation
is the process of changing something in relation to its polar opposite." That
is such a clear and succinct sentence about a word that many of us don't really
understand - transformation. It makes me think back to what you were just saying
about the community healing versus the individuality. Do you have any thoughts
about polar opposites there and the possible transformation, as we're moving along?
PL: That really humorous, because that was sort of one
thing that I wanted still to add.
MP: Oh, great.
PL: Yeah, it's actually pendulation. You asked me of the
things that I've discovered that have really made a difference in people's lives,
and certainly the concept of pendulation is one. It's related, as you know, to
the two-vortex system and so forth. Obviously, this is nothing new. This has got
to be as ancient as can be, which again is a relief. If something works, you can
expect it to have been around a long time. When I was able to track people's inner
experience, I found that no matter where they were if they could then really be
aware of the sensations, then the sensations would move them ahead in time. They
would get unstuck. Basically, trauma is about being stuck. And when they found
that even how bad they felt, that they would go to an opposite experience… and
it's not that they felt bad, and now they're feeling good. No matter what they're
feeling, this will change. It's not just that you go to an opposite experience,
but you're always going to an opposite experience. You're either coming or going
to or from an opposite experience. That experience of being able to pendulate
I think gives people… (and this is one of the ways we have the spiritual entrance,
and I'll speak about the other one) is that you now know that 'this too shall
pass.' That's what impermanence, I think, is all about, the Buddhist or Taoist
idea of impermanence. It' not that you can't take your possessions with you when
you die, so you might as well give them to somebody, you know? But that literally
what we're experiencing is only transitory no matter what it is. There's this
basic polarity, which is the same thing that allows the animals I'm convinced
to not be traumatized. It's this going back and forth that gives us this feeling
of freedom. Because in not being bound to either of them…
MP: So, going back and forth between the opposites without
judgment.
PL: That's right. Simply observing the experience. This
is, I think, somewhat similar to what Wilhelm Reich talked about with expansion
and contraction - being the basic pulsation of life from the ameba to the human
being.
MP: Yes.
PL: But again, we tend to sometimes not see the allusive
obvious. The one other thing, to go back to the spiritual heart of this, is that
the energy of trauma… and it is an energy. It's the energy that allows a gazelle
to escape from a cheetah at 65 miles an hour. It's the energy that allows a 100-pound
woman to lift the car off of her child, and pull the child out from underneath
the car. That's the energy that's there to defend and protect us, to save our
lives. That energy is also the energy that is spoken of in the east as the Kundalini
energy, the energy that many of these spiritual practices set out to raise. The
thing is, if you've been traumatized, that energy has already been tapped. You
don't have to do a meditation or breathing techniques to raise it. You simply
then have to complete the process.
MP: Would I be correct in saying that it's already been
tapped and frozen?
PL: And frozen - that's right. But it's there!
MP: Yes.
PL: It's there, and it's always been there.
MP: And it's accessible. PL: And it's accessible. I think
that has something to do with really understanding the spiritual part of it.
MP: That's great. Is there anything else you wanted to
say?
PL: Nope.
MP: Thank you for being our first interviewed guest on
theinstitute.org.
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