YOU ARE INTERCONNECTIVITY
The I AM is the field of undivided wholeness from which everything, including you, arises. Boundless energy, complete communication, and the sense of an unlimited self, all derive from this field.
Indeed, current day physicists, like David Bohm, have identified fields of interconnected matter that span the universe, an underlying order that is the source of infinite creative potential, or generativity.
But perhaps the ancient poet Rumi simply and beautifully expressed the I AM best, “You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop. Seek the wisdom that will untie your knot. Seek the path that demands your whole being.”
From this essential field of wholeness also derives your life purpose, your own individuated nature. The Medicine is your personal expression in the field. It is how you express yourself uniquely in this lifetime. It is the intelligence of the body, nature, earth. Your body is the clearing house for what moves in the field (the I AM). This body intelligence has the answers on how to accomplish what you came for in this life.
The deepest relationship you will ever have is that which integrates your body with your psyche, mind and heart. It’s from this interconnected field of wholeness and awareness that you can accomplish anything.
I AM The Medicine is the practice of embodying 5 Cycles of the wholeness of nature through your body rhythms. These rhythms link within the body, and to the universal field. Defining, growing and nurturing these connections evolves five aspects of the self crucial to the fulfillment of our life purpose and life direction.
Click for Bio, Mark Kalina, MD
Click for Bio, Gloria Gonzalez
INTERNAL RHYTHMS
When science and spirit meet nature and rhythm, resonance links a generative unfolding of self in new and vibrant ways. Generation of complex neural networks dynamically energizes these new fractal life patterns. What emerges is our connection to self, to others, to the environment, and to the cosmos. What evolves is greater direction of our higher purpose.
Somatic dialogue, movement, touch – as well as narrative and nutrition – are the therapeutic tools of the process. Rhythms in the craniosacral, visceral, fascia, and Chinese medicine systems are the foundation. These combined self-defining, self-organizing principles illuminate the higher intelligence within. IATM is steeped in science and rhythmic functions of the body to master our lives and to be in co-mastery with others.
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF BODY SYSTEMS
We believe interconnectivity is the essential link that heals the perceived chasm between biology and consciousness. Your awareness sits within the horizon between the two. Nervous system awareness, physical and energetic, is a primary focus. We’ll work with the structures of the body in layers, from diaphragms, to bones, fascia, organ, and nerves – linking sympathetic, parasympathetic, and brain structures – and their reflection of consciousness. Here’s a simple guide for the self-organizing principles we use in trainings to shift what’s stuck and heal what’s struggling. These tools bring forward what’s been missing to build creative empowerment for strength, healing, and higher performance:
1 Compassionate Listening
2 Polarities
3 Brains (triune)
4 Diaphragms
5 Elements and Cycles
10-Senses
SELF-REGULATION: 5 CYCLES OF CHANGE
Freeze, Fight, Flight, Friend and Fold
Responsive, creative, capable, alert, relaxed. When your nervous system is self-regulating, this is how you feel.
But sometimes an experience of trauma or persistent stress – fight, flight, freeze – can hold you back for days, weeks, months or even years. This often shows up as a tension, a difficult to access feeling of “Change! Don’t Change!”, a push and pull on you and on the change that’s needed.
That’s why in every training we address these underlying themes of the parts of the nervous system (including vagus nerve exploration) that are designed not just for survival, and not just adaptation, but for helping you to develop your responsiveness to life in entirely new ways. We call these the Self-Protection and Connection Responses.
The ancient wisdom of the East (Chinese Medicine 5 elements) helps explain the relevancy of the Western fight, flight, freeze model to the responsiveness and growth of the psyche/spirit through healing the body. Physicians of ancient days knew that these survival responses were part of seasonal life forces that reflected in both large and small arcs of life.
Current day Polyvagal Theory gives us insight into the “Social Engagement Nervous System” that is at the core of regulating health, growth and restoration.
Stephen Porges’ research has shown that self-regulation and co-regulation are primarily directed by the Vagus Nerve (cranial nerve 10, CN10) along with four additional networked nerves (CN5, 7, 9, and 11) in the face, head and neck. Together, they lend motion, emotion and communication that is not only essential to our relational experience but lends a sense of biological safety through direct nervous system cues that down-regulate stress in the brain, and up-regulate restoration of bodily organs /health.
This is the powerful effect of the Social Engagement Nervous System (SES) as leading the brain and body in enhanced coordination – physically and relationally. When healthy social interactions (ie, healthy SES) are an integrated part of our natural daily life, they re-connect us to our body, ourselves and others, restoring our internal rhythms, our health, our outlook on life, and our social well-being.
Play is just one such daily example. For instance, Geo, my gray tabby cat, used to love to play hide and seek with me. He was a beautiful contemplative and stealthy little tiger, nicknamed “little Buddha.” He would give me “the look” (friend) and we’d begin. I’d chase him and we’d both run (flight). He would scrunch and hide behind corners (fold) and as I would spot him, we’d share a small startle (freeze), then roll around together (fight). Paradoxically, it is often after these movements that we feel a profound sense of safety and happiness, and settle in together, snuggling, alive and peaceful (fold). For sure, Geo was a little buddy extraordinaire. This small personal example of the “play as health” that animals naturally know can even be seen between unlikely animal friends, like a deer and a dog, or bear and a cat, or a tiger and a human, when they meet and bond under certain conditions.
The fundamental neurophysiology of Fight, Fight, Freeze (FFF) re-iterates a pattern within the different contexts of our life stories. The content of our stories can reveal the unhealed wounds of underlying dysregulation of trauma. When you know how to work with FFF as a precise guide to re-discovering rhythm in the nervous system, transformation can be utterly magical.
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