The restoration of ontological integrity.
“The conflict about who I was, what I know to be true innately and intimately, and what I was taught to believe is the truth about the world, fractured my sense of self … i.e.: my ontological integrity. Instead of remaining secure both in who I was and how to aim myself into my future, I had conflict.”
Today I would argue that the ontological crack is really a separation between accepting direct sensory experience, and how someone has been taught (by choice or coercion). In the process of being taught they learned to think about what they experience other than as they themselves experience it directly.
We are taught to turn sensation into ideation … lived experience into abstractions and the representations we substitute for it.
We learn to “process” our experiences to project meaning onto them, not to have our experiences directly and perceive meaning based on what we experience as it emerges and unfolds before us.
In not knowing how to have the experience of our life in favor of “processing” our experience, we do not just lose touch with the direct sensation of what is happening as we experience it … we lose ourselves as well.
Mistaking ontological longing for existential longing, i.e.: mixing up your desire to know yourself as you are, with the desire to find meaning and purpose in your life, especially in your work, is common when your ontological integrity has been compromised.
Doing what you are doing and accepting it for what it is, and no more than that … i.e.: farming makes you a farmer because you are farming, not because G-d destined you to have a farmer’s soul … provides existential peace.
Today we are taught in every way that we must find our purpose to experience existential relief, substituting what we do for who we are, as the basis of our being. Depending on how you look at it this is either insanity … or what must be a leading cause of it.
A way of talking about being at and operating from your center is, “Bringing the system to rest.” Being “at rest” refers to the entirety of your experience in the world … internally, your body-mind experience, and in relation to the system that you are a part of that simultaneously contains you externally. When you are “at rest,” you are settled and at ease, without conflict, internally and externally … simply resting in a “Ready State.”
In the Ready State you can easily take action … or not … there is no hesitation or urgency to act, both are equal and remain fully available based on circumstance and choice.
The beginning point is somatic integration, becoming aware of what you are experiencing as you are experiencing it, i.e.: awareness that is sensory-based and embodied. This sounds remarkably obvious and simple, and it is once you have learned how to do it. Yet without access to the Ready State being aware of what you are experiencing, as it happens, is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.
At first I bought the theory that experiencing extreme stress as you make “progress” in your life is normal, and I thought I was sane, or at least as sane as anyone else I knew. Then I began waking up and realized I was truly living an insane life within an insane social model. When I sought relief, I found that all the ordinary physical and/or psychological medical references controlled by the insane society I was living in had to offer me were ways to modulate and cope with the “symptoms” of stress I was experiencing.
Like this, I was lost and had no easy or clear way back to sanity on my own. I was caught in the web, but I knew enough to recognize that struggling against it would only ensnare me further. While I did not have a path to freedom yet, I decided that I had to begin to make my moves within the structure of the system without attracting to much undue attention from it. From where I stood it appeared to me that “the only way out was through” … so I dove in, going deeper, becoming fully present to the insanity I was living.
(Excerpts taken from: “Experiencing The Hero’s Journey” by Joseph Riggio, edited 13 April 2019)
Ahhhh. Ontological Integrity is the Ontological Medicine, process or integration that is being craved, needed and requested by the collective existence. I look inside of the space that I get to work in…….inside of the health care space…..
Many physicians, nurses, allied health care professionals would greatly benefit from the Ontological Medicine of Ontological Integrity and would support, leverage more of a relational and direct outcome benefit. Presently there’s a national recognition of doc burnout. Many of the initiatives are wellness based, meaning or returning to meaning, Institutional, cultural and work redesign efforts. All that effort is missing the work and possibility of Ontological Integrity or what I’m enjoying calling the Ontological Medicine.
I think about the Elite level Technical and Scientific level of competency and expertise it takes to be a good to great physician. It also takes the skills of communication, collaboration and continuous learning. Yet, Ontological Integrity is not a requirement or necessary ingredient of training and on-going development. Professional Identity formation is part of the learning process yet it’s largely if not completely cognitive and semantic or at least in the process and methods that faciliitate it. Why not add somatic, embodiment and ontological integrity as part of the critical ground of being a world class doc? It would be the same for being a world class technologist, engineer and even a world class writer.
Thanks for inspiring the Ontological Medicine or Ontological Integrity opportunity in my own experience of life, in health care and beyond.
I find myself resting, ready and aesthetically arrested into a curiosity and future possibility that’s already true just not yet where Ontological Medicine underpins health care organizations, medicine and care.
Yes.
Ontological Flow or Ontological Medicine or Ontological Integrity
T,
Someone asked me, “If you had a large group of people who were at least willing to look at what you’d want to present to them, what would it be?” … my answer was literally this, this post.
We need to return to the ability to first recognize the “signals in the system” about what we are experiencing, i.e.: direct sensory experience, and then in sequence acknowledging those signals as “real” and following that trusting ourselves to follow where the experience of aligning to the world in relation to those signals takes us.
This is almost always in opposition to what the world, or society, or at least our conditioning as social beings, suggests to us to do … “follow the signals.” Yet we can only come home to ourselves, and find ourselves waiting there, when we follow these signals in an uncorrupted and uncompromised way.
At my own core this is both the work I do as simply as I do breathing, and the work I want to be doing as well. My most recent understandings of this work is that the way most people are “trained” … educated at home, in school and in society-at-large … forces them to reject the clarity of direct sensory experience, and to override it with the expectations placed upon them. So, for most people, rather than experiencing the wonder of the world about them, and their own magnificence, they strive to perform and to be accepted within a paradigm of who they have been led to believe they “should” be, rather than finding peace and coming to rest within themselves.
I aim at undoing that education, and frankly, the younger the better in every case. The best scenario would be not to begin “educating” our youth in this way at all. The challenge is that society as we know it would collapse if my dreams were reality.
Hey Joseph. Hopefully the dream will be realized some day and it’s worth moving towards it as much as possible.
This seems worthy of one of your Mythoself sheets or webinar to have more narrative, detail and exploration of it.
I had posted a question under your other writing and am still curious to get your response. I’ll modify and adapt the question for this stream of thinking and writing. In the Embodiment Podcast you spoke to the Soma-Semantics of fear and the evolutionary advantage of fear. It was a great podcast by the way. I’ve listened to it multiple times and find myself using some of the narrative in the work that I do.
The new question is with Ontological Integrity I’m where my trauma is not or where the problem is not…….yet the trauma unwinds with not attention…conscious attention on it. The on-line embodiment conference that you were a part of had many embodiment experts and somatics and trauma experts. I would really enjoy hearing how trauma and addressing trauma is not part of what you do, your model or your work……..yet……..trauma is released, unfolded, and one arrives at Ontological Integrity while the contractions continues to let go and loosen implicitly. At the same time those that do you work have the possibility and potential implicitly and explicitly but less so because one doesn’t need to be even more “aesthetically arrested” or ready and rested inside of one’s Ontological Integrity or Ontological Medicine. Let me know your thoughts.
T, I think you may be overcomplicating this a bit, or maybe not and it’s in my reading of the way you put it. In either case let me address what I think you’re asking …
When I first began studying with Roye there was an 800 lb. gorilla of a question that hung over the entire Generative Imprint model: “If this is a ‘natural’ way of being (in the space authored by the Generative Imprint), then why aren’t people already in it all the time?”
Now if you think about this it’s a valid question, especially when we’re telling people, “This is all you have to do … choose to be ‘Like this …’.
Yet, most people we meet are not ‘Like this …’. So what’s up?
Roye would say there are two factors, 1) you had little defense against other folks interrupting your access to the Generative Imprint in many ways, what I think Joseph Campbell meant when he referred to being in your Bliss, and 2) each bump and nudge against you when you were in your Bliss, i.e.: in the space of the Generative Imprint, created a small ‘sensitizing imprint’ that had the effect cumulatively of preventing you from easily accessing this state at will.
So if you think about it, Roye was speaking to a kind of trauma. If we take it further, we can speak of major sensitizing imprints of the kind that most folks immediately associate with trauma, of the kind that will install PTSD for example. These kinds of imprints get wound into the system in an immediate way that resides below the level of consciousness, installed in the pre-representational system of direct sensory response.
When I’m working with people I see this as a vagal-vestibular pattern of interruption. You might recognize this as someone having a sensation of nausea or “butterflies” in their stomach when something is off for them, at a more heightened level of distress it becomes a sensation of vertigo for some. In virtually every case we see a disruption in the enteric system as well as in one’s sense of space and time vis-a-vis feeling like the world is spinning and they can’t quite regain their balance (literally and figuratively).
Now you have the markers I’m working with, and I’ve identified where in the system they are present. To deal with these symptoms you need to recognize them for what they are, accept there is a cause and a purpose in relation to that cause, e.g.: get away from here/avoid this person or situation … , and yet you don’t need to address the cause directly in the MythoSelf Process model, just how it manifests in terms of the soma-semantic structure.
Step one of course is remove them from the experience they are having by eliciting an excitatory state experience where you can do the work they need to process this stimulus differently, with the perspective of possibility and choice.
You’d want to stabilize the soma-semantic structure before doing anything else. Personally I ensure that the system comes to rest on a point that allows for both stability and movement, a kind of dynamic readiness without urgency, a stable intensity.
Next, you can begin to explore the sensitizing imprint to unwind it from the pre-representational system in the narrative that’s held to sustain it, this is the mythological form. So you need to reset the life story of the individual responding to the present stimuli in a way that creates the vagal-vestibular disruption they have been experiencing at the pre-representational, direct sensorial level of experience.
Essentially you build a new autobiographical narrative for them in their past, linking it to future states of experience and response, and winding in the functional aspects of dynamic choice so they can respond adaptively as necessary when the stimuli fires again.
So ultimately you can say I do deal with the trauma, but by deflecting it in favor of an adaptive response that I help them to generalize.
NOTE: Generalizing the adaptive response helps to inoculate against driving the pre-conscious response deeper and having it appear as pathological symptomology in some other way at a later point in time. This would be akin to installing a kind of generalized neurosis, versus generalized adaptability. I see this when practitioners don’t reset the narrative form properly and work primarily in the emotional-limbic system to create a sense of comfort instead of massive dynamic directionality when the stimuli are present.
Thanks so much. I get and got that I started with an ill-formed question. Your answer was very useful and something I was wanting to “get” from a long time ago. I appreciate you taking the time with your response and I’m moving forward with an updated appreciation and embodying of what this means to me and how I interact with others.
It seems like what you communicate here has a huge impact, relevance and redefinition of the starting point of all trauma work. Yet, I know that many of the other bodies of work do start with the problem as a starting point.
I’m so glad I get to orient and continually update my modeling, application and learning and performing in the world from my baseline of operating from my version of aesthetic arrest.
It must be now easily over a decade that I keep reading, digesting, growing from your work. It’s such a life beneficial engagement.
Best,
T
I’ve had some further reflections and would like to get your response. I understand trauma as being “smaller” or “Major” sensitizing imprints and at a deeper settled or arrested level or the fully unwound level is the Generative Imprint.
Would you say that the trauma is still a form of conditioning and that the more truer form or level of imprinting is solely the Generative Imprint?
Thanks,
T