THE MEANING OF MAP.

.................by Stanley

.....At our first meeting of (MAP) MindBody & Personality Sir Ken Robinson, whose portrait adorns our logo above, spoke in the video on education. Funny and entertaining as he was, he made a serious point. It was that our present system of education is a terrible waste of human potential. Today, it is not enough to train our young people to learn and regurgitate facts. He said, “dancing, for example, should be given equal status to literacy. We all dance, don’t we? We all have bodies – or did I miss something?”
.....That is precisely the point of our new group. We have all missed something – particularly so in psychology. In MAP we are making an emphatic statement. It is that psychology is not just about what we call ‘the mind’ – we include ‘the body’ – or rather, we don’t regard it as separate in the first place. The single word: mindbody says it clearly. It means that the human person is a seamless, whole entity.
.....A person is a mindbody!
.....The problem is that we have missed something. We have been educated out of our instinctive knowing and taught only how to head-trip. And because we have been educated to stay in our heads we now have to begin to consciously pay attention to our body in a new way.
....Focusing is a practical expression of that endeavour.
....But let us be clear what we mean by ‘paying attention to the body’. We don’t just mean noticing it as a diagnostic indicator, the body as giving signals or signs about what is going on in the mind. This is to misunderstand the concept of mindbody. This mistake is still based on the split between mind and body and treating the body as a junior partner or servo-mechanism to the mind. If we treat this ghost called ‘the mind’ as the basic substance, it then has the full responsibility for changing itself – an impossible task.
.....But there can be some misunderstanding in all this. Focusing is not a psychological modality like counselling, gestalt, Jungian dreamwork etc. What we are saying is that any psychological modality must pay attention to the body side of the equation, it must do so either deliberately or implicitly, otherwise it is dealing with only half the person.
.....For about 30 % of people this focusing element of body attention and awareness is quite natural; such people are in touch with a certain depth within themselves. They will not name the body specifically as the source of their insightfulness. They will tell you that feelings, images and new ideas ‘just come to me’. This is because they are all-of-a-piece already. When they say ‘me’ they are referring to mindbody. Simple good communication works on them like a charm. They don’t have to deliberately focus.
.....However, most of us are somewhat effected by the tendency to live in our heads. For us, it is useful to consciously pay attention to the body. This conscious act is focusing proper. There are precise steps that show a person how to do this to begin with. The important thing is to know how to access oneself.
.....By focusing we mean giving the body its full partnership in one’s personality. This means listening respectfully to what, in its own way, it wants, feels, knows and perceives. For some lucky ones this is so natural that they have never considered anything else possible; others will say that their body doesn’t feel anything they don’t already know. Most people are somewhere in the middle: that is, somewhat neglectful of this deeper aspect of themselves.
.....Since its beginning depth psychology has always been fascinated by the so-called ‘unconscious’. It’s as though we’ve always known something was there and some very elaborate theories have been developed about it. What we have been looking for is a direct opening into it. It turns out that it is as close as it can possibly be – so close that we easily neglect it.
.....The meaning and purpose of MAP is to flesh out that neglect for the sake of a better life, no matter what our individual path and however we name it.