You Are The Gateway

We’ve all had the experience in growing up of not being met up with, and not only wanting it, but knowing we needed it.

In those moments, no doubt, we were often tapping into the subconscious truth that we are a gateway through which life wants to emerge and expand.

Rumi invited us long ago to reverse the paradigm: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” In suspending our own version of separateness, there is the chance to experience our natural wholeness, with the self as gateway to the ocean. In that truth, the sense that we can be met fully, with both security and freedom in our growth, allows us to expand.

One of the most helpful books on emergence and expansion I have ever read is Presence. In this leadership book, authors Peter Senge, et al., poetically describe the process of organizations, and you, becoming greater – as an emergence wanting to happen through the “field” – by learning to suspend the idea and perception of an isolated striving self:

Since I would pass out giving blood at the American Red Cross, I found less invasive ways of working with health. Eventually my work became that of regaining one’s inner wholeness through embodied movement, touch, and dialogue combined.

It’s not surprising that Senge, as a systems scientist and leadership expert, is supportive of systems of spirituality (ie, Buddhism, Taoism), meditation, and the scientific work of physicist and quantum theorist David Bohm.

Bohm stated, “Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.” Because he shared this view with the likes of the Dalai Lama and radical philosopher J. Krishnamurti, he joined these world leaders in numerous engagements to discuss man’s need to access his/her own inner gateway to this wholeness. In doing so, they knew, one was better positioned to help solve the world’s problems.

In this 2-minute trailer about Bohm’s work and life, Infinite Potential, the Dalai Lama comments on Bohm’s expansive work in the concept of emergence. “Bohm has opened our mind. So grateful.”

But what is it that allows the gateway to open when our ability to conceptualize it is not fully serving us?

In Polyvagal Theory, the research of renegade scientist Dr. Stephen Porges establishes that it is the brainstem that acts as a major gateway to higher brain functions. As so, it is a primary regulator in our capacity to reach higher potentials.

In this short video he describes how to reverse the paradigm by viewing the brain’s hierarchical functions bottom up, as an upside down triangle. As the bottom tip of the triangle, the brainstem acts somewhat like a megaphone transmitting signals upward, reporting the news of the body’s inner states of regulation and arousal.

His groundbreaking findings reveal that defensive freeze state/vagus nerve physiology can hinder even the best of our intentions for creativity and expansion. In The Pocket Guide To The Polyvagal Theory, he emphasizes, “In this defensive state, we can’t engage others and we can’t recruit the wonderful neural circuits that enable us to express the expansive, creative, and benevolent aspects of being human.” As primitive circuitry, the brainstem – in a process he termed “neuroception” – helps establish whether the environment and people in it are safe or dangerous. In this evaluation, it becomes the gateway that involuntarily regulates whether we find ourselves retreating from the environment in subconscious self-protection, or moving forward to connect in confidence and inspire others.

Perhaps my simplest and most meaningful understanding of expansion and emergence came from a Zen meditation master and guide in Sufism. In an “aha” moment, he awakened me to this same great secret of the seed, this time in terms of the crucial relationship between parent and child.

As a client, he was emotionally flexible in his private somatic Nia® dance sessions with me. In our chat about the fears of parenting, he joyfully exclaimed, “The baby is a seed, and will call through the parents that which it needs to expand in this life. You don’t need to worry. The child brings in the all the resources necessary for its own growth, through the parents. That is its nature.”

He was pointing to our natural state of being and living – the Gateway. Sharing that wisdom with most of my parent-clients brings a sigh of relief for them or great gratitude upon hearing it. It is so obvious, yet so completely overlooked by many of us in the midst of working through our pains and past traumas in life.

While deep change is rarely simple or immediate, all conversations that open the door to the ocean within your children, you, and the world, bring access to the resources that are needing – not just wanting – to move though us.

Keep the Gateway Open to Create A More Generous World.

Healing and Trauma Practitioners:
IATM is steeped in science and in rhythmic functions of the body to master our lives and to be in co-mastery with others. Somatic dialogue, movement, touch – as well as narrative and nutrition – are the therapeutic tools of the process. Rhythms in the Craniosacral, Visceral, Fascial,  Polyvagal and 5 Element systems are the foundation. These combined self-defining, self-organizing principles illuminate the higher intelligence within.