Somatic
Drone Tones
Discovering the Mythopoetic Self
by Jean-Paul Eberle, MA, CMT, RYT-500, LMFT
December 4, 2023
Embodiment-ing
The challenge of endeavoring on the path of embodiment is a great one: lifelong. Why should one embark on this path at all? The body self is replete with rich, fertile, unexplored regions now and always exquisitely perceiving and responding to the surrounding world, a memory of all that has been, now is, and leanings that urge one onward. These vast somatic landscapes, independent of one’s awareness, resemble the medieval maps that marked their heretofore unknown, unexplored territories with “here be dragons.” Hasty, sloppy exploration, with the mind’s meaning-making, is apt to lead one astray with observational biases and expectational tendencies born of the perceptual shapings of life experience (i.e., ego filters, one’s persona, transgenerational influences). Such shapings risk eclipsing opportunities to weave the innate synergetic somatic pearls of wisdom awaiting cultivation and integration. Biases may impulsively and aggressively colonize these fleshy landscapes, furthering disembodiments through their dissociated and oppressive preconceived notions and conceptualizations.
Alternately, when one attends to cultivating a relationship with the already imminent reality of the body, possibility abounds. Yasuo (1987) refers to the importance of such personal cultivation through one’s experiments, explorations, and engagements in relating with the body over time as a source of “true knowledge” that “cannot be obtained simply by means of theoretical thinking” (as cited in Johnson, 2015, p. 5).
Seems obvious.
Yet, somehow, it is not.
A respected vision quest guide once told me, referring to the mythopoetic identity and the experiences harvested from a quest, “the forgetfulness is intense.” (G. Dilworth, personal communication, July 16, 2021). On the somatc journey, it is common to be vulnerable to being led astray, to the meaning-making mind exacting its many impositions, deviations, assumptions, or prejudices on the body. The master cellist does not perform a level of excellence drawing out the sonorous beauty of the cello simply by meeting the cello, but by meeting it again, again and again, in countless ways, through countless challenges overcome. Caldwell (2016) refers to a component of this process of relationship cultivation in recognizing the need for rich witnessing: a capacity to notice, listen, and employ a “rich experience of non-judgmental consciousness, the first source of fuel we need for the healing journey” (p. 252). Such reminders to orient and re-orient to the somatic journey through cultivation and rich witnessing are paramount.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines embodiment as “someone or something that represents an idea or quality exactly” (Cambridge, n.d.). However, this representation is a dynamic process, not a static one. It is a pilgrimage through places and spaces inside. As Ursula Le Guin states, “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new” (Cahill, 2017). The diverse elements and dimensions of the wisdom of the bodily experience express themselves continually through the sensing, moving, breathing, energizing, and de-energizing body; the body erotic, the body in connection to other bodies, the body connected to its deep belonging within the earth that wombs it. This prima materia may be similar in everybody, and each individual is intricately and indelibly their unique “medieval maps.”
Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
As such, embodiment work is a lifelong developmental endeavor, not a still life like an entomologist’s bug pinned on a board to be studied, but one explored in the depths of the forest. It is an “embodiment-ing,” a still-moving lifework that continues ceaselessly, waiting for one’s conscious self to interact and develop, braid into and along with it. As choreographer Alonso King (2020) viscerally demonstrates sans words, “There is no standing still.” A phenomenological experience of standing still, with its many implications, seems to implicate the paranoid and defensive structures of the ego’s attempts to secure both a self-image and its consequent patterned nature of affective experiences (e.g., chronicity of depression, anxiety, set limiting beliefs, neurotic tendencies) on the many levels of somatic experience (Levin, 1984). The concept and metaphor of "drone tones" captures this phenomenon of still or still-moving.
Drone Tones
One of the unique features of medieval music is that it bears no time signature. Interestingly enough, while there may be notes, there is no rhythm. There is no 1… 2… 3… 4… 1… 2… 3… 4… to clarify where a note begins, sustains, ends or fades into the next. Sung in chorus, participants intuitively flock together around a steady tone, called a “drone tone,” that anchors the performance of synchronous tonal ascent and descent. When I studied medieval music, it was surprising that the drone tone, when held by an individual vocal apparatus—not the medieval instrument of the Hurdy-Gurdy—was the most demanding role in the chorus; incredibly challenging not to be pulled away by the draw of ascending and descending choral accompaniment. The only way to stay the course was to be exquisitely attuned to what the body was doing to stabilize the “drone tone.”
Like the drone tone in medieval music, I feel a particular theme of inquiry beholden to me, one that is an indelible part of my mythopoetic identity and karmic manual in this lifetime: a heart song. It is an inquiry that has been awakening its audible expression through the flocking assemblage of "life notes" that have arisen in sentences of moments, chapters of time, through synchronicity and calling. They have revealed, over time, the drone of a mythopoetic identity, calling, and inner urging. Contrary to the "here be dragons" of medieval maps that forebode the danger of the unknown, exacerbating an avoidant, dissonant relating (i.e., disembodied drone tone), I imagine a deeply embodied drone tone that is more of a call to inscendence and coming home to one's most essential nature (Creutzberg, 2020). The gift of the embodiment-ing process lies in its promise of the opportunity to embrace the already inherent wisdom of the body. Many wisdom and spiritual traditions speak to this in notions of “calling the spirit back,” the mythopoetic self, the Self, and the soul.
I consider the embodied drone tone to be the body's deeply anchored and imminently interactional substrate. One might argue that the body is not a drone tone with its many vicissitudes and wilding edges; however, similar to the crop circle appearing as a maze of wanderings from the ground, from 1,000 feet, one can see the organizing patterns that spell a certain awe and truth at its inspiring form and magnitude. The labyrinth of a modern world, with its constant overstimulation (inc. traumas, adversities), muffles the embodied drone tone of the body, draws one towards other agendas that divest themselves of the organizing principles of the natural cycles: centuries of spell-bound disembodied drones of patriarchy, capitalism, neo-liberal, racist, and other overall schizoid agendas that exploit the natural world, its inhabits (i.e., human and other-than-human), and create further division and disharmony within the world, its relations, and the self.
Who cares? The paradox is that no one cares until they care. Those positioned in marginalized and oppressed identities are often astutely aware that something is remiss in themselves, in their communities, whether words are available to give voice or not. Those, whether by identity or role, who benefit from privilege are also steeped in the same systemic pains, whether inured or sensitive to them. Regardless, pay closer attention to the body; it is there, a longing to heal the self and the world.
A life-long struggle with the disembodied drone tone of depression pervades my own life experience. It eventuates the inner calling and work of re-orienting depression, a disembodied drone tone, to something more profound and larger than depression's seemingly inherent maze-like solipsism. A master's thesis nearly 20 years ago marked the beginning steps of this re-orienting: “Male Depression: How does Body Psychotherapy Inform and Expand the Understanding of the Etiology of Male Depression and Male Trauma?” Today, more or less, this inquiry remains unabated. It continues, however, with previously inconceivable refinements and re-calibrations; questions carry the inquiry process further into unmarked territory. How is the drone tone of depression a calling away from a deeper embodied drone tone? Can it be an invitation towards this embodied drone tone if properly listen to with “rich witnessing”? How is this drone of the body an invitation into nature? How is the drone of the body an invitation into social justice, coming more into right relationship with the global community? How is the drone of the body an invitation into the psyche, in its original meaning of breath, life, soul, essential Self: one’s mythopoetic identity? How might the body’s drones, be they disembodied or embodied, all be an invitation to heal the world in a profoundly eudemonic way in contrast to merely hedonic? Notions of emotional alchemy, spiritual somatics, a meta-psychology of somatics abound. I long to get behind, underneath, and within the study of the somatics of affective experience to uncover and re-discover the body’s deep intelligence and innate wisdom that was already a "me" in its potentiated form.
The world is alive.
Beckons, patiently waiting.
Are you there? Who’s "you"?
Drone Tones...
Birth Origins
& Sub-Themes
Gendlin (1992) highlights the inherent interactional wisdom of our bodies, correlating all bodies, even plants, as part of this deep interactional substrate that is the world embedded within itself:
Plants are in contact with reality. They are interactions, quite without perception. Our own living bodies also are interactions with their environments, and that is not lost just because ours also have perception… Our bodies do our living… Our bodies are interaction in the environment, they interact as bodies, not just through what comes with the five senses. Our bodies don't lurk in isolation behind the five peepholes of perception. (p. 344)
This notion of plants intimately responding to the world surrounding them, our bodies the same, is inspiring. Some have argued how plants emanate a unique “drone tone” (Haigney, 2020). I reflect on what my seedling body experienced before and in the early days of its “perceptual channels” around its embodiment-ing and initial deeply interactional unfurling.
The delicate beginning tendrils of my “drone tone” and some essential aspects and themes of my embodiment-ing journey start to come into expression with my birth story.
… Thessaloniki …
Greece, late 1974… seed strands of DNA twine themselves together … primordial memories passed. My mother speaks of the beauty of the little house on the hill—with an olive orchard in front—which looked out over the waters of the Aegean Sea. I was unaware of the lands I touched before I inquired into this with her, nor aware of my passage around the globe; how I was taking in the many surroundings through sensory channels on loan. A strange and familiar life theme feels resonant even in the very beginnings.
… Wanderer …
Both my mother and father were already in Singapore, in a bungalow in the heart of the city, before I made my presence known three months in; they realized my presence. A few uneventful months later, another decision was afoot: to embark on time-sensitive passage by plane before the pregnancy was too far along for air travel. From Thessaloniki, Greece to Borneo, Singapore to … Houston, Texas: a jarring cultural cocktail. None of these lands bore my parents: a Swiss father who spoke seven languages and a half-Mexican mother who spoke two.
The earth had unique tales to tell mother’s feet each trimester, to tell me.
When the time came for my threshold crossing, it was with minimal struggle. My mother experienced a burst of energy that hot day in July—washing the car and cleaning the house—unaware of how I was orchestrating my entrance. Only after driving herself to a scheduled doctor’s appointment that morning did she find out she was already dilated 4 centimeters. One hour after a hasty trip to the hospital, I arrived resolute. The labor and delivery were uneventful. Curiously, my mom gained 24 more pounds during her pregnancy—a whopping 42 in total—than she did with my older brother born 4 years prior. My father did not have time to make it to the hospital.
As a toddler, I was nicknamed “the Bishop” because I would sit in my highchair or stand at the edge of the crib with hands clasped together and stare off into space as if I was praying or deeply contemplating, observing as life happened around me, independently of me. My mom describes me to this day as, “inquisitive since birth… you haven’t changed!”
My “second birth” was a dark initiation: a barbed narrative of the turbulent dissolution of my parent’s marriage when I was 12 years old just as my body was beginning to transform and birth into adulthood.
It brings me both peace and sadness to revisit my birth story, actual and metaphorical, to remember my origins. The sadness bears satisfying textures, looking anew and witnessing beginning gossamer sub-themes seeming to weave their proto-web. They clarify what I have felt in my embodiment-ing throughout life that I have either fought with or embraced:
- Wanderer
- Belonging
- Bishop self
- Resolute nature
There is a sense of sadness that my father seems distant in these narratives, distant to this day more out of a habituated father-son relational dance than any level of contention. My dad was neither at my birth nor my brother’s due to work. It tracks conspicuously how he has been throughout my life: absent. Despite his better angels to grow and be a better father—traumas and coping patterns— being an orphan himself in post-World War II Switzerland, he managed best as he could to father in a world where he was never really fathered consistently, or at all.
I recall now the resonant words of Linda Hogan in her poem “When the Body,” struck by them. “Reach into the night and pull back the rapture of this growing root” (Hogan, 2016). The drone tone of the rapture of my growing root gives me hope; the drone tone of my depression, when not met with rich witnessing, creates a formidable force of self-abandonment. The more I arrive in this body, the more I can feel this growing root, and the more I can find myself in the earth where I belong. The more I cultivate a rich relationship with this body, the more I can make sense of and come to peace with my parents, with the imprints both personal and transpersonal, with humanity, and the more I can give inner expression to what has always been reaching back for me to be born as I have longed for and reached for it, me.
Here is a sound scape that moves me, playing off this notion that plants themselves are dynamically responding to their surround, the same way my seedling self was and is interacting from its very earliest of origins.
Press play. Read on. What arises in your experience?
Drones Tones. Exploring… seeking… reaching… something… perhaps something precious, something breath-taking, something awe-inspiring…
To listen from the heart. To feel from the heart, or intentionally from any locus in the body. How to go deeper into the nature of the drone tone in our body, connect to the drone tones of nature, society, the exchange that our bodies continually have with our surrounds? In many ways, the modern world eschews the body, commodifies it, puts it on display, and reinforces a kind of “somanoia” and implicit distrust in it. What are the potential disorganizing and organizing—entropic and negentropic—incoherent and coherent drone tones we may come to embody on the journey that create stagnation or flourishing? How to explore the sacred exchange of the drone tones of two bodies, uniquely theirs and their unique braiding together? What do you feel, notice?
Further. Exploring… seeking… reaching… something precious… perhaps something awakening, breath-taking, awe-inspiring… a breath in the heart…
The metaphor of medieval music expands and delves into developmental psychology (e.g. – with nods to body-mind centering and cellular breathing), pre and peri-natal psychology, interpersonal neurobiology, and ecopsychology. How can polyvagal theory support a deeper understanding of this Odyssean journey to come back home to body after having gone so far away? I am curious to explore a line of inquiry into how our neural networks are not just about being primed for social engagement with people but our capacity to be primed for engagement with all our relations, nature, ancestors, other-than-human relatives. This curiosity implores a deeper dive into the potential of Polyvagal as the new animism that reveals a world alive to be loved and encountered.
The same goes for the universe. Does it sound strange that the universe is alive with it's own "drone tone"?
Spirit is alive
Beckons, patiently waiting
Eminence unfurls
Furthering Inquiries. Exploring… seeking… reaching… something unending… something’s place in the greater mystery …
Pontifications on this silent encounter. Reflections on mysticism: unwinding the phenomenology of the body to explore scientist as mystic, somatic psychotherapist as mystic, mysticism and existentialism. So much to be explored… perhaps a part of the nature of my depression throughout my life was not having this exploration cultivated and honored, at the right times, and in the right ways. What is risked by not talking about spirit and spirituality? The universe is out there, though also here, not light years away.
Andromeda Galaxy:
over 100,000,000 stars
Universal Drone Tones
Our scientific instruments of perception continue to become exponentially more sensitive at engaging the far reaches of the universe “out there.” Scientists are discovering even the universe presents with its signature tone. Astoundingly, evidenced by the NANOGrav research collaboration, a cosmic thrum of gravitational waves surmised to emanate from the collective echo of thousands of pairs of supermassive blackholes, some as massive as a billions suns, signals the early universe, its birth origins (Miller, 2023). Yet, as humanity reaches out there with its sophisticated instruments, Fox (2009) reminds us to take into account the deep interconnectivity and sensitivity that is here innate in this earth’s fertile womb:
trees are like “cosmic antennae” and radiation from supernovas — the gigantic explosions marking the death of a star — has been shown to influence tree growth. Scientists studying a 807-year-old juniper tree in Tajikistan found that the tree’s annual rings showed a definite slowing down of tree growth with each known date of three supernovas. Thus we can say, ‘every star that dies in our galaxy is perceived by trees’. (p. 21)
It begs pause to reflect on the incredibly delicate and intricate interwoven relation of one’s body to the body of the nature within this body of the universe out there. “Cosmos is not an abstraction; cosmos is the very matrix, the placenta, for our earthly existence.” (Fox, 2009, p. 15). I often have used the analogy of rings of a tree in workshops I teach to depict an aspect of somatic psychology—which as a field is so soundly rooted in development—thereby nervous system and brain growth: the brain grows from the bottom up and the inside out, much like the rings of a tree. In the rings of a tree, signatures of past droughts, forest fires, and climate conditions, historical relics and influences on the tree’s development, can easily be evidenced and traced (Flatow, 2012). Farmers, too, know the timing of developmental stage-specific resource, scarcity, or adversity of a corn crop become evident in varying identified growth anomalies yielded in an ear of corn (Thomison, Lohnes, Geyer, & Thomison, 2015). One’s brain and nervous system exist in this similar way as the interacting interface that shapes one’s capacity to process, to organize the manner of making sense of the outside world and perception of the “ways things are;” evidencing the “way things have been”: like the thrum of gravitational waves, the rings of trees, ears of corn.
Madeleine L’Engle (1984), a children’s author I avidly read when I was young, wrote in her book, A Circle of Quiet:
I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. … This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages… the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide; my past is part of what makes the present Madeleine and must not be denied or rejected or forgotten. (pp. 199-200)
The question arises how far back and out are we willing to acknowledge our body’s connectedness: what our body tell us; what we are capable of consciously integrating into our world view. This seems to be shaped by centripetal cosmologies that pervade the collective conscious driven by capitalism, individualism, and other Western solipsistic interests that have spread themselves; a long unnoticed somatopsychic pandemic—existing in this hall of mirrors post-modern reality—that reinforces its own disembodied drone tones. Each infected mind and body is shaped through wide-scale subtle and gross cultural and societal practices that re-capitulate a vampiric resistance to their obsolescence as the world is brought to the brink of ruin. Is the dawn of A.I., yet another idol of modern allure and promise, simply the swan song of what is to come? As Fox (2009) highlights, “What happens when cosmology is replaced by psychology? When cosmic connections are displaced by shopping malls?” (p. 3). Time is pressing. Each phase of development can be either an invitation and compass point to furthering embodiment-ing and increasing relations, or the siren call to disembodiment-ing and strife which can no longer be denied as sole individual concerns in our globalized climates.
The Language of ... Silence
Adeafening language of silence—at least, one beyond the level of current uncultivated perceptual human capacities—abounds and presses on across the millennia. While each body is an individual reflection of cosmic and evolutionary currents, each body is shaped by generational, societal, cultural, and social currents. Somehow the more this inquiry deepens beyond “male depression” and follows its drone tone to its embodied origins, I find myself duty-bound to what Johnson (2023) speaks of cultivating:
transpersonal aspects of body practices… transpersonal in the sense of those effects of body practices that lead to … qualities like compassion, tolerance for difference, learning how to regulate anger and resentment and learn how to discern where it belongs … all of those qualities of body practices that not just make me a better person … but helped me to work with you … (15:50)
One might also include in the frame of the “better person” being a steward of the earth and its other-than-human inhabitants. Practices are needed, desperately, not just self-pleasuring ideas left to echo chambers and academic spheres. Healing re-orientations are desperately needed. Caldwell (2016) recalls the sage words of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh who, “once said that all views are wrong views, but since it is in our nature to have views, we might as well relax and get them as accurate as possible” (p. 252). There is room to acknowledge disembodied drones (e.g. depression) as potential messages of right response to an unwell world, not simply as something to resolve individually for ego-syntonic relief only to re-enter the same unwell world that furthers practices of disembodiment. McLaren (2010) captures this brilliantly, with her characteristic deep empathy, when she acknowledges that all who suffer are, “living shrines to those dark regions—as soul warriors still fighting in the trenches of resistance and suffering” (p. 390). I am struck by this idea and any that encourages the cultivation of an anchored reach from the sensing and the felt-sensing body to nudge one closer to a collectively liberating reality of a still-moving existence (Gendlin, 1992; King, 2020). How does one disengage with the pull of disembodiment? I am certainly not the first to address this. I can only humbly attempt to explore such a question in relation to my own personal disembodiments. Perhaps, I am and always have been both the embodied drone tone, the disembodied drone tones, and the choral accompaniments.
Diving beneath Woundology:
The Embodied Drone Tone's Promise
“Woundology,” a term coined by the medical intuitive, Caroline Myss (1997) describes how one may become overly identified with emotional wounds. Coming into relationship—cultivating a relationship—with the body invites a return from the consequent disembodiment dance of the wounding process to an embodiment dance, hopefully, without villainizing disembodiment; distinguishing both terms beyond the buzzwords they are vulnerable to becoming. This process echoes Richard Neibuhr’s interlocal notion of being a pilgrim on the path—versus a missionary—and acknowledge the salience of a body’s place and movement in the world as pivotal; the pilgrim mindset is able to develop sensitivity to place, honor the uniqueness of one’s individual journey through geographic traversals (Neibuhr, 1984, as cited in Johnson, 2012).
Einstein (Sullivan, 1972) once famously said in a letter consoling a rabbi who lost his young daughter:
A human being… experiences himself… as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison … Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. (p. 20, para. 8, col. 6)
Abram (1988) speaks to the problem, “Our civilized distrust of the senses and of the body engenders a metaphysical detachment from the sensible world. … fosters the illusion that we ourselves are not a part of the world that we study” (pp. 3-4). What will snap one out of a fragmented, disjointed, and disembodied drone tone positionalities that eventuate further insensitivities, violences, disharmonies, inequities on our fellow human and other-than-human companions? What will assist in diving beneath the surface chop? I end with a couple inspirational words of past thinkers that come to mind, light the way forward, and seem to center in the heart which also happens to be a key theme in my mythopoetic identity:
· The “Indians of South America… have a saying: ‘To be human one must make room in one’s heart for the wonders of the universe’” (Fox, 2009, p. 3)
· The “goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature” (Campbell, 1995, p. 148)
· The “heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” (Pascal, 1670, p. 121)
Ongoing Queries & Sections
Ongoing queries unpack further the concepts of embodiment and disembodiment, especially as related to the medieval metaphor of drone tones. What am I really talking about? Is there a tendency to fall short on somatics concepts? What are the barriers (i.e. risk factors) to the wisdom of the body, the wisdom that inherently connects to all creation and situates the Self squarely within the matrix of existence (i.e. amongst nature, other-than-human companions, social justice)? What are the protective factors?
Adapted from my dubiously trusty OG, sections and sub-sections of a potential dissertation project which I was surprised by and am yet inspired to explore and dabble in further:
1) Personal and Mythopoetic Identity: Absence of time signature; Chorus and drone tones; Difficulty of holding the drone tone
2) Medieval Music as Metaphor: Karmic manuals; Heart songs; Inner urgings
3) The Body as a Drone Tone: Organizing patterns of the body; Loss of the body’s drone tone; Impact of modern world’s agendas
4) Embodied Symptoms of both Privilege and Oppression as disembodied drones: marginalized and oppressed identities; privileged identities; systemic pain; healing self and the world
5) Depression and Inner Work: Depression’s struggle; Depression’s solipsism; Healing and transformation in general
6) The Drone of the Body as Invitation: Invitation into the psyche; Invitation into social justice; Invitation into nature; Bridging the non-verbal to verbal gap: The embodied drone
7) The Eudemonic Perspective Embraces the Labyrinth: The eudemonic approach; Healing the realms
8) Emotional Alchemy and Somatics: Meta-psychology of somatics; Somatic archeology; Touching somatic mysticism and spiritual somatics
A little flowering plant growing quietly from the sandstone.
A little flowering plant growing quietly from the sandstone.
References
Abram, D. (1988). Merleau-Ponty and the voice of the earth. Environmental ethics, 10, 101-120.
Caldwell, C. (2016). The moving cycle: A second generation dance/movement therapy form. American Journal of Dance Therapy, 38(2), 245-258.
Cambridge. (n.d.). Embodiment. In Cambridge.com dictionary. Retrieved November 24, 2023, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/embodiment
Campbell, J. (1995). A Joseph Campbell companion: Reflections on the art of living. Harper Perennial.
Cahill, A. (2017, August 31). Love doesn’t just sit there. Medium. https://medium.com/@thewonderdome/love-doesnt-just-sit-there-9c923d3dfb59
Creutzberg, G. M. K. (2020, January). Inscendence and Re-awakening to the Ecological Self with Thomas Berry. Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338986886_Inscendence_and_Re-awakening_to_the_Ecological_Self_with_Thomas_Berry
Flatow, I. (2012, August 24). Tree rings tell tales of ancient fires and climate. [Radio broadcast transcript]. NPR KQED. https://www.npr.org/2012/08/24/159998662/tree-rings-tell-tales-of-ancient-fires-and-climate
Fox, M. (2009). The hidden spirituality of men: Ten metaphors to awaken the sacred masculine. New World Library.
Gendlin, E. T. (1992). The primacy of the body, not the primacy of perception. Man and World, 25(3-4), 341-353.
Haigney, S. (2020, February 21). The lessons to be learned from forcing plants to play music. NPR Music. https://www.npr.org/2020/02/21/807821340/the-lessons-to-be-learned-from-forcing-plants-to-play-music
Hogan, L. (2016, April). When the body. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/88743/when-the-body
Johnson, D. H. (2023a). Intercorporeity [Video]. https://ciis.instructure.com/courses/19195/pages/intercorp-video
Johnson, D. H. (2023b). The wilds of the body and the earth [Instructor Handout Notes].
Johnson, D. H. (2015). Moving in the vastness. In A. Williamson, G. Batson, S. Whatley & R. Weber (Eds.), Somatics, dance, and spirituality: Contemporary sacred narratives. Intellect Ltd.
Johnson, D. H. (2012). Transformative body practices and social change: The intersection between spirituality and activism. Integral Review.
King, A. (2020, June 17). There is no standing still, Part II [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/0jmAa-bKIxo?si=1EJc-6ZwoySLOlLi
L’Engle, M. (1984). A circle of quiet: The crosswicks journal. HarperOne.
Levin, D. M. (1984). Logos and psyche: A hermeneutic of breathing. Research in Phenomenology, 14, 121-147.
McLaren, K. (2010). The language of emotions: What your feelings are trying to tell you. Sounds True.
Miller, K. (2023, June 28). The cosmos is thrumming with gravitational waves, Astronomers find. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/science/astronomy-gravitational-waves-nanograv.html
Myss, C. (1997). Why people don’t heal and how they can. Random House.
Pascal, B. (1670). Pensées. https://archive.org
Sullivan, W. (1972, March 29). The Einstein papers. A man of many parts. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/03/29/archives/the-einstein-papers-a-man-of-many-parts-the-einstein-papers-man-of.html
Thomison, P., Lohnes, D., Geyer, A., Thomison, M. (2015, April 28). Troubleshooting abnormal corn ears. The Ohio State University. http://u.osu.edu/mastercorn/
Transformation... once was something else...
White-lined Spinx Moth
Hyles lineata
Yucca Moth
Tegeticula spp.
Black Witch Moth
Ascalapha odorata
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