Somatic education guides us toward differentiation, integration, and transcendence. All these integrated are key to discerning and distinguishing different aspects of oneself, paving the way for deeper self-awareness and understanding.
Today, I'm excited to explore the transformative world of somatic education alongside Lawrence Gold. He takes us through his unique approach, where he integrates somatic principles into psychological states and creative capacities, providing a holistic framework for personal growth and self-discovery.
In this particular episode, Lawrence takes us through:
- His unique perspective on somatic education and its applications.
- Key Stages in his approach: Differentiation, integration, and transcendence.
- How differentiation through discerning and distinguishing different aspects of oneself, paves the way for deeper self-awareness and understanding.
- Integration and how it leads to unexpected outcomes and novel perspectives.
- How transcendence leads to a process of awakening and growth.
- How to explore the uncomfortable space of facing the unknown, the "zone of incomprehensibility."
- Embracing change and growth
And so much more!
Trained in 1990 by the originator of Hanna Somatic Education, Thomas Hanna, Lawrence Gold worked on-staff in the movement rehab department of the Wellness & Rehabilitation Center of Watsonville Community Hospital in California from 1997 - 1999.
He began his discipline of personal development at age 16 when he participated in the human potential movement by attending workshops at Esalen Institute, followed by the practice of yoga, rolfing, the best training, and other developmental influences, training, and coursework.
As a writer in the field of somatics, he integrates multiple disciplines such as healthcare, spiritual development, human development, the social sciences, politics, and other areas of interest, showcased in the blog Full-Spectrum Somatics <https://lawrencegoldsomatics.blogspot.com/>,
and in his YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/Lawrence9Gold).
LISTEN WHILE READING!
A: Every day, there is a forgetting, and every moment, there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world and experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy. Here is where you free your Soma.
A: Hello and welcome to Free Your Soma, Stories of Somatic Awakening, and How to Live from the Inside Out. I'm Amy Tecaia, and today I have a very special guest, Lawrence Gold.
Lawrence Gold is a Hannah Somatic educator trained by Thomas Hannah himself. He is an originator of new applications of somatic education, and he practices within the larger scope of the realm of somatics. He's the developer of something called the Gold Key Release and the Tetra Seed Awakening in Vocations, which we're going to talk about today, along with a lot of other very exciting things.
I have been lucky enough to work with Lawrence personally over the last year and I have to say it has been very life-changing. You have some really special things you're going to share with us today. Thank you. Welcome, Lawrence. Thank you for being here.
L: Thank you, Amy.
A: Maybe how I usually start these interviews is I just invite you to introduce yourself. You can share a little bit about maybe your history or your origin story, whatever part of your timeline you'd like to share. You just orient our listeners to who you are.
L: Okay. Well, I've been taking somatic education in a different direction than most Hannah somatic educators because I've been a student of numerous disciplines, including meditation, belief management, Toltec shamanism, and clinical somatic education. The way the combination of those has affected me differently from other Hannah somatic educators is someone's coming into training as a Hannah somatic educator is concerned with clinical matters, primarily chronic pain.
Because of my background, I've been able to distill and apply the principles of Hannah somatic education into a person's psychological state, their creative capacity, and ultimately, the dissolution of ego fixation. What I mean by ego fixation is the feeling you get when things don't go your way, and you get this up against it feeling. This is the ego complaining.
A: Right. And as you say that, I can almost imagine like a tightening up of our physical body in response to that. Like a resistance, which you often have talked about as that state of resistance.
L: That's exactly it. Hannah somatic educators are not concerned with self-transcendence. It wasn't even in the teaching. In fact, the closest thing it comes to being addressed is in Tom Hannah's final book, Letters from Fred, in which he starts alluding to the transcendental direction of development. And I want to get clear with the listeners about the use of the word transcendental.
Transcendence is not excluding the body or becoming only the mind or other such misguided notions. Transcendence, as I see it, is a product or a process that occurs with integration of our own faculties. Integration of our own capacities of intelligence. And by integration, I mean a process that starts with a basic exposure to a new direction of possible growth, which I call awakening. I'm not trying to be fancy here. It's like your eyes are open to a new direction of development.
I call it awakening. Differentiation is the ability to distinguish things from other things. Now people take that for granted, except that it requires, in order to distinguish anything, it requires a couple of things. One is some contrast between the thing that you're distinguishing anew and everything else you've known.
I'm going to make a little aside comment here. One of the common questions I've gotten from people who ask about Hannah Somatic education, and what do you do? And I say, people come to me to get out of chronic pain. They go, oh, is it like chiropractic? What they're trying to do is liken something they have no knowledge of to something they know. And this is the typical human way. Always to try to make new experience fit into their memories of old experience. People call that knowledge.
A: Right. Well, that can also lead to basically moving in circles within your own scope of knowledge and not really building something different or new, because you're just circling back to what you know and trying to make everything that comes in front of you relative to your own experience. And that's not necessarily how reality works. It works that that's how our perception works, but that's not all that there is.
L: Exactly. And so this is at the differentiation step that I've arrived at just now. And the ability of the person who cycles back on what they already know and they're already prior experience, not the mystery of what is new and emerging. They haven't learned to differentiate what they're into from everything else because they don't know there isn't anything else. They just are familiar with their own scope. Well, differentiation is the capacity to distinguish one thing from another.
It's the ability to see the parts of a whole. And that leads to the next step, which is integration. Integration is the putting together of the parts of something into a functioning whole that behaves differently from any of the parts that went into it.
So, like, say an automobile engine has a zillion parts, and if they were sitting on the shelf of the parts store, they don't function like an engine, but you put them together, you get something that emerges that is completely new from the parts that went into it. In this case, say the functioning of an engine. So integration involves always the emergence of something new and always unexpected. You can never predict the outcome of an integration. It thrusts us or it surfaces into us something completely new and unexpected.
A: And this can create, I mean, you have, you know, as our listeners will realize when they listen to you for a while is that you really do have, you've developed very specific language to talk about some of these complex, I guess, experiences that we have as human beings. We have both in our, you know, whether we think of them as separate or not in our physical and, you know, intellectual, psychosomatic emotional realms, right? We experience these things, but you've come up with very specific language around it.
And I wanted to ask to go a little bit deeper into this, you know, the idea that integration comes with something that is unknown, right? And the way in which our human condition doesn't like those things that are unknown finds them uncomfortable. You actually have a term for this that we've talked about many times before, which is this zone of incomprehensibility, right?
In this case, of being uncomfortable with not knowing. And yet, that is necessary to our growth. Can you go a little deeper into that idea? This is zone of incomprehensibility.
L: Yes. And I'll do that as I get into the final stage, which is transcendence. OK. Say, once things are integrated, let's look at it in terms of personal terms. When we first learn to walk, we don't have a walking pattern yet. We've been crawling, perhaps, and we've gotten to where we can stand, but we don't have a walking pattern, and a pattern indicates integration of anything, in this case, movement elements of walking.
So you've got the uprightness, you've got balancing, you've got the movements of the shoulders and arms and the pelvis and legs. And when a person learns to walk, this is the first time they go from differentiation of those movement elements that they developed when they were learning to creep and crawl.
The integration of those elements into a new pattern, walking. Not to the infant; walking is completely new. When they first stand up, they don't know what they're getting into. And typically, they fall down on their butt a bunch of times, and eventually, they get where they can stand without sitting down involuntarily.
And as they continue to integrate their movement, patterning, they get better at standing and then walking and then it becomes running, and then it becomes handling things when standing, you know, opening the refrigerator is a new action at one point. And because people are addicted to knowing and it's not inherent in the human condition, it's inherent in this culture and time where knowing has become a status symbol and not knowing a cause for shame.
And so when people experience something new, a new emergent like walking or any other development that involves putting things together in a new way, they're facing something unknown, and because people are addicted to knowing, they're uncomfortable facing the new thing. It's also why guys get nervous asking a woman to dance.
They're facing an unknown, and the integration is of two people in the same into dancing together. So people are averse to being seen not knowing. Fortunately, I don't have that problem.
When I don't know, I just say, I don't know. But it's what happens with the integration process is something new emerges. And in that emergence, they have transcended their previous state of adaptation.
A: Right.
L: And by transcendence, then it means integration and spontaneous transcendence resulting in that instant of integration. And there's a passage through the zone of incomprehensibility, which I like to liken to space travel from planet to planet.
You're at your home planet. Everything is familiar. You know what you're doing.
You know what to expect as much as anybody knows what to expect. And then they launch us into outer space. We're headed for another planet. Let's say Mars. And in the passage between planets, we have no familiar surroundings. That most people have some words. Oh, I'm in outer space, which tells you nothing.
Nothing. If you if you heard William Shatner's words when he was fired into orbit. On a SpaceX rocket, you'll hear him describe something. You know, the where he first saw the black of outer space as they exited the atmosphere as something completely unexpected.
And the astronauts have said something similar. I can't remember which weather it was the guy who founded the Institute of Neolithic Studies. Can't remember Mitchell, Edgar Mitchell, I think it was, who talked about seeing the planet from outside the planet itself as being a revelatory experience.
Revelatory means it wasn't known ahead of time. So we're in that zone of incomprehensibility. And then, when we land, we're on a new planet and then we can start forming familiar associations. So when a person exits their usual state, they always enter the in between the old state and the new state, which is incomprehensible.
When they land or when a person who's been, let's say, getting somatic education experiences new ability that they didn't have before. And they never felt that way before. They've gone from the zone of incomprehensibility back to the domain of comprehension, but it's always new. In that sense, they haven't dissociated from the old pattern.
Rather, they've expanded to include it in a larger new perspective. Now, I can feel a psychic echo to my having said that. I think certain people's minds may be reeling at what I've just said here. Don't worry, life will teach you what these words mean if it hasn't already.
A: Well, what you're talking about is very fundamental as well. It's not; it is, you know, as you're speaking about, you know, flying through space, you know, one of the things I thought of is this one, you know, a piece of the each thing. I think it's the third hexagram.
Right. The third hexagram, difficulty in the beginning, which is, you know, and if you can almost imagine like going from maybe something that is contained like a seed, and then the seed has, you know, a shift, there's a change, there's moisture, there's a process that begins. And now that sheet of seed is shooting up through the darkness of the dirt. I don't think that seed knows for sure where it's going, or if it's even going to get to the surface or what is at the surface, right? We could kind of imagine what it might be to be a sprout and not know what's going to happen, right? Or what's even going on? What am I even transforming into? And in that process, we are struggling usually.
There's a flailing because we're, there's an unknown. And so what you're talking about is an experience that I think most people, you know, have had and can totally relate to. But it's also very fundamental to our reality. It's just how change and growth happens in non-suffin entities as well in the structure of this planet. Right.
L: And so the seed in your analogy has transcended being a seed as it became a sprout. What was the integration? Well, for one thing, water and soil with the seed.
When all those integrate, a new function emerges, which is the drive against the pull of gravity up out of the enclosure in soil, penetrating to where there's daylight and moving air, new experience for the seed. Now, it doesn't mean it ceased to be what it was before. It means that it has grown beyond. So there's that multi-stage process, and that happens cyclically.
A: Yeah, I was just thinking that sickle, cyclically, like it's a, there's a pattern here that's, you know, emerging just as we're speaking of, you know, going through this zone of incomprehensibility, and then your mind steps in and starts trying to make sense of it and trying to relate it to things you already know.
And then you would get a point where you realize you don't really know, and you can't really know what's going to happen. And then you enter that zone of incomprehensibility again. And then it comes in cycles. And some of what I've experienced with you and that I've also experienced through somatic education is that it's not that we stop that cycle from occurring. It's not like we enter states of, oh, now I know everything. Now it's easy.
Now I understand how my body works, and it's like stories over. It's never going to be that way. We're always going to cycle back to that space where it's difficult or space where we don't know. But what we can develop is more, I guess, more grace in that cyclical process when we start to understand it and embrace it instead of resist it.
L: I think the resistance is inevitable. If for no other reason than there is what in physicists call inertia, inertia is the tendency of things to stay as they are, unless influenced by an outside force. And a person who's on the verge of learning something new has a certain momentum or a certain inertia for being the way they've been.
And the learning or education process is the outside force and new information that's prompting a person to change in an unexpected way. Even if I, as a somatic educator, have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen in a session, even so, there are unpredictabilities that occur. Probably, as anybody who uses a computer knows, computer misbehavior is legendary.
People are always struggling with their computers. And I think, frankly, artificial intelligence isn't something that's coming. It's something that's been around for ages, but unrecognized as such. And it's also much more primitive. You know, what we're doing now with technology is developing an artificial intelligence that can handle language and do tasks, much higher level of integration. And our culture has barely scratched the surface of what's going to occur for that.
You know, AI, artificial intelligence on the internet for writing purposes or creating images is the bare beginning. And it's coming up with things that are previously unknown. So, the dominant theme of this whole thing is the unknown. So somatic education is a process of pressing into the unknown where what was unknown progressively becomes known. But an unknown simply moves back a little bit to the place where we haven't reached yet. And that's why the cyclical process keeps putting us into the zone of incomprehensibility, with which people are typically uncomfortable until they get some humor about it.
A: Right, right. Well, there's more, you know, I'm reminded of just some of the previous conversations we've had and the, you know, the terms, like I said, that you have come up with not to get stuck on the language or anything, but I feel like they're so precise. And when you have said these ideas to me in the past, they've like, they, the way that you use the words, they sink in somehow, it's like I get it.
And that may not be, you know, true for everyone. But as you're speaking now, I'm thinking that the other term that's coming to mind is what can arise from that space of incomprehensibility is something that you call spontaneous right action or this sudden knowing that is beyond like a planning from some previous information, but emerges kind of out of nothing to behave or to do or to take some kind of action that feels in that moment aligned and correct and doesn't take a lot of, you know, like forethought.
L: Yeah. About spontaneous right action. I think this is a term out of the Zen tradition. It requires a very clear field of attention. What does that mean? Field of attention. The field of attention is how we receive our experience of the world. Attention is how we locate what experiences are happening around us or in us. Attention is the locator, but locating is not enough. You need to be able to apprehend what you're locating.
Otherwise, you face experience that the Indians of Mesoamerica faced when the Spaniard ships showed up on the horizon, and they'd never seen anything like it. They had no clue what was it they were in for. And it was something for which they had no memory. Right.
In order to make sense of experience, we need memory and we need memories that are close enough to the experience that we can see a similarity between what we remember and what we're at this moment experiencing. And this is what's happening when a person says about Hanosomatic education. Oh, that is that, like chiropractic. They have a memory, however vague, of chiropractic.
And they're trying to imagine that Hanosomatic education is somehow similar to chiropractic. And I just now touched on the next expression of the tetra seed, which is imagination. Imagination always presents us with something unknown. If imagination presents us with something known, it's memory.
If it's unknown, it's back to that zone of incomprehensibility. Imagination always presents something new. Now, Walt Disney was one of the great teachers of imagination, the term that he liked and that he used.
And one can hear him talk about that. And Disneyland was the first of its kind. It was imagined. So it has frontier land and tomorrow land and all the different segments. And nobody knew what those amounted to until they got onto the grounds of Disneyland and started experiencing. So Disneyland came out of imagination, and through acts of intention, the fourth tetra seed expression, what was imagined was made into something tangible. And with that, a whole new domain of experience opened up for people. The typical experience of people in life. However, the content of Disneyland has become familiar to us. So Donald Duck, although a completely imaginary character is familiar to people. Right, right.
But wasn't originally. OK, so there are four expressions of the tetra seed. Attention, intention, memory and imagination. And all four work as a singularity. That means they work as an integrated whole, bringing into existence, moment to moment, new forms of experience through a process that involves the dissolution of the old frame of reference, considering, let's say, the automobile engine again, a person who's never seen an automobile engine sees a pile of parts if they're brought into a factory.
They don't know what the heck that is or what it can do. And people assemble it and they see something put together they've never seen before. And that putting together is an intentional act based on a memory of the pattern that was imagined is then located by attention and held in attention long enough to create design plans and the manufacturing process. You see, all four work simultaneously. And I call these the muscles of intelligence, attention, intention, memory and imagination.
A: It's interesting because I think that this process, as you're describing it, is it's essential to anything to be made or developed in this world. And I think that when you watch children, you know, small children who, as you said before in the example of walking, they have no context.
They have no memory of this. You know, it's part of why allowing children free play, for example, to just explore their like material world is so important because you and I might go into the kitchen and see, oh, that's a skillet, and those are spatulas and we know what all of those things are for. But a child goes into that space, you know, maybe they're one and a half, two years old.
They don't know what any of that stuff is. And so they can start to play and imagine and create something new, some new way of utilizing those materials that has not necessarily been thought of before. And so, you know, as you're speaking here, I think about just my own my own experience with alternative education.
I guess I could say versus the educational system that has been developed and created in our modern culture, where a lot of it's about memorizing things, you know, memorizing things and times, versus an educational model that is about exploration and imagination and going through this in a way, this tetra seed awakening process that you're speaking of, these four elements are present in a more holistic, I would say, educational model for people to actually create something new or develop something different that has not been done before, right? Something innovative.
L: And I think that the Waldorf School and Montessori embody those principles of exploration rather than a dictated curriculum. Yes. Dictated curriculum teaches people to look back on what they already know. It doesn't confront people with a deliberate exploration of the unknown. It's provided to them by their teachers. Here's the here's our curriculum for today. So it isn't based on exploration and imagination. It's based upon being force-fed into memory. Yes.
A: And the other thing here is that it can be very polarizing in the sense that children get told that their idea is right or wrong or good or bad. And instead of something that can be explored, you know, or that someone has an idea and it's either true or false or right or wrong, it fits into this dichotomy instead of something that is a little more. I guess you would say. like true in the sense of our subjective experience, right?
L: Yeah, the people get invalidated for their explorations. By the way, we haven't left spontaneous right action in the dust. I've been laying groundwork for explaining it. Yeah, let's go for it. So I've now outlined the four, you said elements, or I say expressions of the tetra seed. And I've talked about how spontaneous action or spontaneous right action requires a kind of clarity. Well, what does that really mean, clarity?
What's the noise of which clarity is the opposite? It's memories. So people are always entangling new experience with memories, and they're trying to imagine that their new experience matches a memory they already have.
And that shows what imagination, one of imagination's functions. And that is to correlate or to show the similarity of some experience to what a person already knows. It provides a frame of reference. It provides a familiarity that a person can use to get further into that new experience. So what happens, though, is that it's a noise factor. You don't get a clear perception if you're busy knowing what you know ahead of time. That knowing is noise. It prevents a true, clear experience of the moment.
It provides that best an approximate experience or approximate understanding of the moment. Because frankly, people don't even know their next thought. People are not fundamentally knowers. We are fundamentally ignorant with islands of knowledge.
So we live in an ocean of mystery within which there are islands of familiar experience and passing from one island to another involves a passage into and through the zone of incomprehensibility again and again and again. Now the thing about spontaneous right action is it always proceeds on the basis of raw feeling. The spontaneity means it's not prepared by mental processing. It isn't rehearsed. It's new, spontaneous. And imagination is the gateway to spontaneous right action.
Imagination has no form. It's like the mouth of the body into which new experience goes, or it's like a cornucopia, the horn of plenty out of which incessant newness comes. What happens after that is it gets swallowed in effect, taken in, and stored in the stomach of mind that we call memory. Memory is like the stomach. Imagination is like the mouth. Goes in the mouth, lands in the stomach, goes in through the imagination channel.
A: Right, because as soon as we've imagined something it now becomes memory. And now it becomes something that is in now what we know. It's part of that island of what we know now. And so as you're saying in this analogy, kind of what we're taking in, we're constantly taking in the unknown and turning it into memory, turning it into our own knowledge base, right?
L: Yeah, and integrating it with all of our memories, the newness is being integrated instant by instant. That's why language works. Because we have a base of language memory and then something that somebody is saying to us may be a new formulation expressed in language, but it rides upon a previous knowledge of language, and imagination seeks to make sense of that new thing by using memory as reference points.
But ultimately clarity depends on direct personal experience, not thinking. And so the spontaneous right action that comes from cleaning the slate using tetra seed procedures, for example, and there are others that work. Byron Katie's work is one that involves clearing the slate so that something new can emerge. And there are many such similar teachings. And I wrote a piece once called The Likeness of the Gold Key Release and Better Well-known Transformational Disciplines.
And then I talk about Byron Katie, and I talk about Ken Wilbur and I talk about Carlos Castaneda and Adida and other teachings that have that quality, the quality of confrontation with the unknown and transformation by transcending the old pattern. So we remain capable of what we were capable of before, but in transcending it, we become capable of something more that was unexpected. So spontaneous right action is what happens when we clear out the noise, quiet the noise of mind, and our attention becomes silent, imageless and attentive, silent, imageless and attentive.
It's not silent, it's memory noisy. So you see, I can feel we're getting to the point where that point is finally getting through. That transcendence is not some weird otherworldly thing. It's the day-to-day moment-to-moment process that everybody is going through to lesser or greater degrees, depending on how hooked people are on being knowers. So we remain capable of everything knowledge granted us, but we have exceeded it. We become more capable of it. And our actions, if they're not encumbered by errant memories and memories that don't really apply that well, we become spontaneously responsive to the moments of life in ways that are appropriate.
That's right action. And this is what happens when we unveil and dissolve our previous life conditioning. It doesn't mean we lose it. It means it ceases to control everything. We cease to have an iron grip on experience through memory, or we cease trying to run away from experience based on memory. And instead, we face an experience moment-to-moment as the emerging of an unknown chain of experiences. Okay, people who are did to operating as the mind are very uncomfortable with this process. They also feel it's totally beyond them.
And I've just said, not only is it not beyond you, it's your present moment-to-moment experience. Except that you've got islands of memory, all of your previous conditioning about relationships and money, and all manner of learning that we adhere to with tenacity and that prevents the emergence of something new. The noise of memory prevents the emergence of imagination. The noise of memory prevents transcendence.
A: Yeah, and I mean, I'm thinking about this, because you just mentioned a number of interesting ways that we can come into this experience that you're talking about. And Hanismatic education provides a really interesting way in because it's working beyond our mind because it's having us access our body in an entirely new way for most people.
It's accessing your body in a fundamentally new way compared to what most people have experienced their bodies are capable of. Especially if they've been living in their pain body, if they've been living with a lot of chronic tension and pain that is the hallmark, perhaps, of their daily experience, they just wake up expecting that their back is going to hurt or that they're going to have neck pain at some point during the day, that that's just gonna happen.
And then they start to realize that not only is their body in direct response to the mental, emotional, and like, I guess you could say energetic happenings of their environment, not only their external environment, but their internal environment, the internal environment of those memories that we've talked about, right? Their responses and their reactions, and their resistances to the things that they're perceiving is all impacting how much tension their body is holding. So there's that realization that people go through of the connection between this thing that's just been, their everyday experience of being in pain, and the things that are happening that they go, oh, these are in direct response to each other.
These are in direct relationship to each other. And beyond that, in the Hannah-Semitic approach, we are actually undoing the discomfort. We're changing the way that the muscle functions, which is also really kind of mind blowing to people. They very quickly enter that realm of that zone of incomprehensibility, where they've never expected that their body could suddenly have this mobility that it hasn't had, or maybe that they can move in a way that maybe they've never moved their entire life. Maybe since they were an infant, their body has had a specific movement pattern, and we're now breaking outside of that into an entirely new way of moving their body.
L: Right. The Hannah-Semitic education is what I like to call a handy doorway to what is way beyond it. It's a good entry point. And as I said earlier, it's feeling-based, not thinking-based. So, as a Hannah-Semitic educator in session with somebody, we give them instructions to take a certain position and move a certain way. First thing that has to happen, they have to imagine what our words mean in order to be able to do what we're asking.
Once they have imagined it and they're in position, we have them do some actions intentionally with attention on the sensation and that changes their movement memory. So there we are. See, Hannah-Semitic education has the four facets or aspects of the tetra seed. And people do, as you pointed out, enter the zone of incomprehensibility very quickly, complete with thoughts like, am I doing this right? I think I might be doing it wrong. I'm not sure I understand what you said and all similar expressions.
A: Or disbelief about this possibly work. This can't possibly be helping me. I mean, I had that for a long time, and I even have students who are working with me for half a year and are experiencing their bodies moving and operating in an entirely new way. They're not. They're able to get down on their hands and knees and garden and pull weeds and do things that they simply could not do for the last maybe five, 10 years of their life.
And yet the mind is telling them that these tiny, simple movements can't be actually doing that because it's so incomprehensible to them based on their previous knowledge and understanding of their body.
L: Yeah. So, as I said, it's everybody's common experience, matter of degree, that's all, that's the only difference. Some people are really log-janned in their old pattern, and when through skillful means, such as Hanosomatic Education or using the Tentraseed procedures, the experience changes as something they never knew was even possible. It's totally new to them.
And the notion of disbelief about that is basically because they have no memory to hook it to. Beliefs always involve memory. And anything that's emerging from the imagination must be captured, at least in short-term memory, before you can even perceive it. Before you can even put your attention on it, you have to have something to put your attention on. And the thing that guides how we place our attention is memory.
What makes the intention stick on something is intention. And the channel through which new experience comes when we put our attention on something is the imagination channel. It's the unknown emerging into being known. So all these highfalutin terms really just have to do with precision of language is something that people have not generally talked about.
And certainly not as an integrated for some. So, spontaneous right action is the emergence of something new in the face of experience. And the way you tell it's happening is if you've done some cleanup work in yourself, in your psyche, and you've dissolved some binding conditioning patterns, memories, and you face that familiar situation again, you notice, wow, I never handled this situation like that before. And it didn't involve grinding, figuring out. It was a visceral or automatic organic response.
Spontaneous. And because the noise factor is greatly diminished, it tends to be right action. And the more cleanup one has done, the larger the changes one can tolerate.
The larger the changes one values. The more creativity works, the more new things can be brought into existence through that person who's done cleanup. So the Tetris seed came not from me, but to me. I'd done decades of cleanup in myself. And one day, I was out taking the nature walk in the high desert where I lived at the time in Santa Fe. And I had been pondering those four faculties of intelligence because I had seen one or two in many of the different teachings to which I'd been exposed.
But I hadn't recognized that they were a foursome that worked as a singularity at that point. I just knew that some teachings emphasized memory. Some teachings emphasized alertness, that's, attention.
Some involved following through to the end, starting something, the hardest step, following it through all the way to the end. That's an act of intention. And that combination sets the stage for something new to emerge through the imagination channel. So, nobody experiences their imagination directly. If they try, what they do is a kind of strain to get a feeling for what the imagination is; who would do it this way? Imagine imagining, what does that leave you with? That leaves you with a, hey, there's nothing there.
A: Or just memories of things you've previously imagined or what your brain comes up with is, you know, the concept of imagination, like coming up with a weird, you know, dragon, unicorn creature or something. You know, you mentioned something earlier that I feel like kind of fits into some of this that you're speaking of now. You talked about belief management. And I thought that that was an interesting term because, you know, there's a lot out there about sort of repatterning our beliefs.
And if I could kind of like get a visual model here of what I imagine at this moment, a belief to kind of be like is, it's not just one memory. It's a conglomeration. It's like layers of memory over time that reinforce a core belief that we have about ourselves or about our reality. You know, and so there are these compounded things that we don't necessarily extract completely. We extract them perhaps by in layers, you know, with a certain amount of persistence over time as well. So they're not something that we just like, it's just gone, you know, unless we're talking about like an aneurysm or something, right?
But it's something that we manage. And so I thought that was an interesting term to use for it because it feels more accurate than simply just like letting go of beliefs that no longer serve me. How can I manage the beliefs that I have? Because some of them, you know, maybe tied to my survival instinct. And I don't want to erase them completely because I want to remember, you know, what danger feels like in my body, you know, so I wouldn't want to get rid of that completely. But I want to take off some layers so that I'm not so afraid of public speaking or I'm not so afraid of something in my environment, right?
L: Yeah, and that's what I've been alluding to when I talk about spontaneous right action. What's the opposite of spontaneous? You could say labored or formulaic, which produces more of the same, not something new. But when a person has dissolved the binding force of memories in the beginning, it's of individual memories until a person can intuitively sense, pardon my mouth here, intuitively sense the feeling of memory or remembering itself. Watch, I'm going to say something, watch what happens in you. Remember remembering. Did you get a little sensation in yourself as you remembered remembering? A little effort?
A: I mean, I just, I remembered what I remember about the cognitive process of remembering. It was this like little meta thing.
L: Okay, but notice that there wasn't a lot of meat to it. See, and that's what happens when we remember it. Remembering, we get a little sense of intention to remember, but there ain't nothing there yet.
A: Yeah, well, then you want to fill in the blank. It's like you remember remembering blank. Your brain wants to put in like your childhood or your, you know, your first dog. Like it's like you just put something in there. Your brain's waiting to fill in blank, right?
L: And it happened so quickly that most people have no control of it. When we get a little further along in the cleanup process, we can feel that stress pattern building the one of filling in the blank. It's a search of kind.
It's a search of the kind. And it's so automatic in human beings that people have no space between the being triggered and the release. And let me say it better because that didn't really say what I wanted to say. There's the moment of an event happening, and the reaction to it is so close for people that they get triggered, and they have no control over being triggered. But as a person does cleanup, they recognize what's being, they recognize the impulse to fill in the blanks and to react automatically.
Yeah. It's almost like a survival instinct, although it isn't about mortal life and death. It's more about the survival of the ego and self-image. As we get further along, we notice at the moment when something happens, we can feel the instant where we might get triggered. And if we catch it early enough, we can reframe from that reaction.
A: Right. And there's a thing is that Victor Frankel says there's a space between stimulus and response. And in that space, we have choice where we start to develop an ability to choose how we're going to respond versus react to something. And this is a practice because you could say our pre-programmed response is going to be what you just said.
It's going to be in protection of what we already know and in protection of our current framework of reality, our current ego state. And to break through that is a practice of developing that bit of space. And I think that, again, Hanna-Somatics provides a really fundamental framework for this because we only can feel that space or the building of a response real-time in our bodies. It's a feeling, not a mental thing, because our mind is probably already on the next subject or not even noticing the small signals that your body is giving you. I'm thinking about other kinds of intelligence that other creatures have that we have as well, but that we don't access.
The ability for birds or other animals to sense when it's going to rain, that they perhaps can sense just by the smell of the air or the way the clouds are moving or the winds. They might even be, who knows, maybe they can even tell the day before the event happens. But as human beings who are very mental, we are so busy in our own head with whatever we're doing or whatever we're thinking that our capacity to actually absorb all of that information through our entire human body is been limited by the fact that our brains are so busy thinking and memorizing and regurgitating.
But as we start to open up our capacity to experience things, it's probably what the yogis referred to as these psychic abilities that we develop where we actually can see things coming before they happen in this sense of we notice the energy changing in the room or we notice the shift in the person's body language or we notice a tingling sensation in our skin or a feeling in our stomach. And then we can kind of notice that something is arising and we can be aware of the changing and shifting, not just blindsided by it or triggered by it when it happens.
L: Yeah, so let me push that line of consideration a little further, the word synchronicity. Typically, the synchronicities that people experience, they've had a precognition of something. A little song went through their mind, and then the next day or that day, they were listening to the radio, and that song, which never comes on, comes on. These things happen when the noise factor of memory is reigned in, or it's not really reigned in because that implies an ongoing effort. It's dissolved and there's a natural receptive openness, not a matter of special effort.
It's simply the absence of all the noise that people carry around as their identity and their survival program. So when a person cleans themselves up, these programs go from being subjective and unconscious to objective and observable. And then what Victor Frankel said applies. There is a space between the stimulus and the response. And at the level of psyche, that is, mind, emotion, intuition, the tetra seed procedures are relevant. In terms of movement, as in hantosomatic education, the spontaneous right action is the grace that occurs or develops as a person.
Let's go of the holding patterns. As the sensory-motor amnesia is dispelled, the noise in them decreases in their nervous system. The muscles are no longer held tense. And what they got is spontaneous grace. Right action could be expressed as grace. Grace is obviously right action.
But I don't use the word grace that way because it's a loaded term with religious connotations. And it's got so much noise associated with it that I choose my own language. And a moment's consideration is sufficient for people to understand it.
A: I've noticed that I think there's a deliberation about, you're very specific. You're very specific with the language that you choose and working with you as a bodyworker. I feel like you're handling and the things that you guide someone through are specific as well.
It's the best of your ability. And you said something to me early on, which I think is, especially for our listeners here who maybe are being introduced to you and some of these concepts for the first time or revisiting them, is that you're not like a, even though these topics and the way that we're speaking and your specificity and your intelligence is obviously very sharp, you're not an intellectual type. That's not the type of human that you are. And I thought that was a peculiar thing for you to kind of like key me in on when we started working together was that that's not actually how you are, although people perceive you that way because of the intellect that you carry.
L: Right. And the intellect is able to do that because it's free of encumbrance by all the mental noise that people run subconsciously from moment to moment. So I'm cleaned up to the point where I tell people I'm actually a very simple person. Despite the complexity of the concepts I can put across, I'm very, very, very simple.
I perceive moment to moment on the basis of feeling. The mind serves that it doesn't get me there. Figuring does not figure into it. Instead, the intuition of something, how something is, is so palpable to me that language rises to fit the intuition so I can express it. But it isn't from being, it's not from figuring things out. It doesn't come from me. It comes to me because of the space that has been opened through my decades of practice. I'm actually unbelievably so, but I am very simple. I'm actually more innocent by a long shot than most people, for what it's worth.
A: Right. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's a new territory for some people because when they come into relationship with a teacher, they may expect a sense of the teacher putting something, giving something to them or putting something out there for them to be either taken in by or overwhelmed by or the teaching is going to fall on them.
They're going to experience this. And certainly, there are ways in which I have experienced revelation in our work together, but it's not because you are putting something out there for me to understand. It's actually almost like you're subtracting things or something. There's an openness that like simplifies things in your field that allows for the learning to come not from my grappling and writing things down and all of that traditional educational stuff that we do. So, it's an interesting way to experience learning as one of your students. I think it's innovative. Kind of.
L: That's so innovative is actually this Socratic method. There you go. Yeah. Socrates worked by questioning and getting people to discover in themselves the answers just by little guided skillful questioning. And that's basically how I operate. My work is to evoke in people self-insight, not to give them the insight, but to guide them so that it emerges in them.
A: Right. Yeah. Well, it's been an absolute trip, absolute amazing ride to begin working with you in the last year. If you know we're running out of time today, I'd love to have you come back and get deeper into some of these topics maybe later on this season. But now, can you tell people where they could learn more about the things that we've mentioned here, the gold key release, the Tetra seed awakening invocations, and generally, if they want to reach out to you and learn more about what you do?
L: The reaching out is the easy way. My website is somatics.com. What a coincidence. And every page on that site has a clickable email link that looks like a letter going into an envelope. You just open communication with me. Tell me what you're interested in and I can point you to the resources I've developed in that area. So that's the easy way that enables you to get a taste of what I'm teaching and a way to get more.
A: Cool.
L: Now, if you were to do a Google search for Tetra seed awakening invocations, you have to put it in quotation marks, and it will bring up pages of mine about that topic.
A: You also have a YouTube channel, right? Do you attend to that very frequently? A lot.
L: There are over a thousand entries in that, and you can get to that. My channel is Lawrence, numeral nine, Gold. No spaces. Just Lawrence9Gold, and that will give you access, and there's a search box, and you can put in a word or a term and have a pull-up. Well, typically a whole bunch of stuff, most of which is. We know how good searches, how well they go these days, but it will give you access to my information. And if you want a conversation.
A: Excellent. Thank you. Well, everyone make sure to check out Lawrence's website and his YouTube channel. Look up some of these things because they're very, very fascinating and life-changing, especially, you know, if you kind of dive in and just go into that zone of incomprehensibility and go, I don't really know what this is, and I don't really get it yet and just start exploring and see what you discover. It's been really fruitful for me. So, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing some of these ideas and giving people a sense of this.
L: Yeah, thanks for the chance to expose people to this stuff.
A: Yeah, absolutely. All right, we'll talk again soon, Lawrence.
L: Okay, bye-bye.
A: You've been listening to the Free Your Soma podcast. To find out more information about today's guest, check the show notes. And to find out more information about me, Aimee Takaya, and the radiance program, visit www.freeyoursoma.com.