EMOTIONS, MUSCLES, AND THE CORTEX: A PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR REPRESSION
I wrote this paper in 1983 during my 3rd year undergraduate honors degree in psychology. It represents my initial (and still valid) attempt to understand and translate the emotionally cathartic experiences I saw people undergoing in sacred movement and meditation classes (being conducted by the Earth-bound angel I met and married in 1986, Darlene Tataryn Phd) into the rigorous behavioral and physiological constructs I was learning in psychology.
I’m leaving it in its original format to help the reader appreciate the age and times it was written in. The ideas in this paper eventually became the Muscular Interference Theory of Repression, which eventually led to the development of the Bio-Emotive Framework.
WE ARE ALL ALEXITHYMIC
A transcript of a nine minute talk presented at the symposium Working With Feelings: Affect and the Practice of Everyday Life, St. John’s College, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (March 12, 2010).
EVOLVING BRAINS IN QUADRANTS: THE THREE DIMENSIONAL MODEL OF AQAL
This was written shortly after meeting Ken Wilber and spending the afternoon with him in his Colorado loft. It was then presented at the 2010 Integral Theory Conference. Since it assumes people already have a deep understanding of Ken’s All-Quadrants, All Lines, All Levels (AQAL) theory it may be a bit dense of light reading, but it is quite an innovative and useful way of understanding some very important aspect of life and the human condition.
Abstract
Wilber’s AQAL theory organizes all of the world’s knowledge structures into five essential dimensions necessary to obtain a full and complete understanding the nature of the human condition and its evolution. (Wilber, 2001). The five AQAL dimensions themselves however (i.e., the four Quadrants of existence, Lines of Development, Levels of Development, States of Consciousness, and Types of individuals) have no explicit underlying framework clarifying their relationships to each other. Evolving rains in Quadrants (EBIQ) is an attempt to provide an underlying structure of how each of the five dimensions of AQAL Integral theory is related to the other. EBIQ proposes that the triune brain complex, composed of the physical, emotional, and intellectual brains, when followed over evolutionary time and examined within the context of the four quadrants, gives rise to a three dimensional model of AQAL. This paper goes into detail on how EBIQ generates Spiral Dynamic Integral (SDi). It also briefly summarizes how the other three AQAL dimensions are generated by the model and how EBIQ provides important insights into other integral constructs.