Attuned child, attuned adult
Is psychedelic perception a wound or a superpower? It's both.
photo by Fillipo Andolfato
Many of the people who do something like what I do, whose work in the world rests on a foundation of attunement, share a similar childhood experience.
The child develops a highly attuned radar that picks up the slightest change in the resonant bearing of nearby adults, perhaps especially one of them in particular.
The child learns to modulate her breathing to many different gradations of stillness.
The child learns to feel motion in the periphery and track it while resisting the urge to turn the head or even the eyes.
It’s done under extreme duress, but nonetheless, this child learns the art of poise.
Then, in adult life, the child experiences countless more gradations of perception and feeling than other adults do. At times, it’s almost psychedelic.
This can be either a superpower or a handicap. Often it’s both.
Awareness sometimes needs long training to understand from the inside out that it may know other personalities than hyper-vigilance.
Furthermore, others sometimes suggest that I should discount my own body’s wordless wisdom. “Don’t trust your gut, it will steer you off course.”
If the pathology deepens, a person starts consciously training themselves to do that which their body resists. That feeling of inner conflict is mistranslated as “this is good for me.” In the fitness industry, they say “no pain, no gain.”
Caretakers measure their “goodness” by the weight of self-sacrifice they can endure.
Yet when awareness grows up, it can bloom and reach for the sun.
The child knows all about tension. There is more to it than the way it seems to take over my body against my will. When it becomes familiar, the child learns to work with the tension in different ways. Sometimes with words, sometimes through silence.
Sometimes bouncing my knee obsessively, sometimes commanding that my knee shall not move even a fraction of an inch.
Both the child and adult are doing something that might be called attunement.
The child attunes by necessity much of the time. At other times, when she feels safe, she creates new universes.
The adult, if willing to listen to all that an adult can understand, has the possibility of inheriting the child’s gift and moving through through a world that is magically alive.
Children know that perception is a miracle.
You don’t need to grow up and take psilocybin to talk with a tree.
Why would you NOT talk to a tree?!
How many people are there in your life with whom you feel complete somatic safety?
Are there others with whom you do not feel somatic safety?
If you are an adult, why are those people in your life?
I know that is a confronting question because I had to confront it myself.
Think about your deepest passion in life, that which lights you up inside. What poetic truths of this life-long love affair could you openly give voice to while in the company of someone with whom you did not feel somatically safe?
Then, if somatic safety arrived - what could you say now?
What would you say to the world if you knew the world was hanging on to your every word?
Once we have liberated ourselves from the childlike fear of adult tyrants, our work is not to be tyrants ourselves. When we expel tyranny from dialogue, the tone of all participating bodies becomes more open and resonant.
Unusual ideas can have a hearing. Non-combative expressions of disagreement become valuable to everyone present because they allow the collective to see its own evolving shape. Individuals stop condemning themselves from speaking forbidden thoughts within the privacy of their own minds. Bodies, no longer gripped by anxiety, no longer imagine that the sound of their inner voice can be heard by other bodies.
Yet, it’s odd to even think a thought and feel that one couldn’t say it out loud.
All thinking bodies present here and now are safe - and safety is maintained even at the level of silence. Because we care for each other, we never think a thought that would violate another person’s somatic safety if it were to be spoken out loud.
This world is filled to overflowing with adult children who appear to be handicapped. Yet within them sleeps a potential superpower that does not require nuclear warheads.
How difficult is it really to look at one’s phone, see two warring nations and think the simple thought that innocent people should not die on either side of a line in the sand?
Political polarization is felt by the child first hand when her parents scream at the television. She knows how much larger her parents’ bodies are, how much stronger. She knows the somatic meaning of the resonance of raised voices, why lions roar at their prey. She knows why her body would rather not be in the room.
Maybe the war begins when we raise our voice at our children. Maybe it’s not so much about conflicting cultural narratives dating back to prehistory.
The shape of the body of a highly attuned child defaults to contraction and a held breath whenever total stillness is necessary.
The shape of the body of a highly attuned adult defaults to expansion and a flowing breath whenever pausing to consider what to do next.
Permission to pause is given whenever immediate action or words are not appropriate. Urgency is understood to be an unpersuasive lie.
The attuned adult waits, feels and makes conscious choices about how to make the feelings into words, whether spoken aloud or in silence.
When attuned adults meets in somatic safety, all the colors of childhood return.
The movement of the body is already cause enough for laughter.
Who knew that inhabiting my body could feel this good?
Who knew that this person’s voice could caress my ears so lovingly as to make me wish to sit up taller or perhaps turn into goo and slide off my chair to the floor laughing until I cry?
What if all I ever cared about was the somatic safety of every other body that met mine?
When we meet like this, it’s psychedelic. Violence is not in the least bit attractive. Every moment is an insight. Every touch, every word, every glance, a delight.
When you fall in love with your life, the simple act of perception is already cause for celebration. When you learn to trust the wordless wisdom of your body, you begin to hear how the world is always making music, inviting your body to dance.
When you work with me, we listen together until the quality of your listening fundamentally shifts, the stuck places begin to move again and the lost child reawakens.
Thank you Seth for this. I will be rereading it but right now what stands out for me is 'people ... in your life with whom you feel complete somatic safety' and the concept of 'adult tyranny'. I have close relatives in the medical profession who tend to put me down rapidly for my more 'poetic' approach to the body. I'm trained in sciences also but I have always seen value in 'psychedelic' description (without assistance). So now instead of feeling hurt and contracting, I am going to see if I can (at least within myself and when in company) remember 'expansion and a flowing breath whenever pausing to consider what to do next'. Maybe it will change how I am treated but subtly so.