Debbi Burch

whale rescue

On a continued professional development workshop this week, there was someone in my small group who was recently with the whales in Hawaii. These are the humpbacks, who sing.

Apparently the Hawaiians believe that the whales are singing to heal the earth.

I kept thinking, over those days, that we are learning the wisdom of whales. We are learning to gather and to sing.

That in becoming responsible for the gap between the experience of vulnerability and our self-defensive reactions, we are slowly returning to the freedom of the children playing, of Ruby, of the whales. But with a hard-won adult form, built from fire and crafted across eons by the serve and return of love.

We are not just singing, we are choosing to sing. We are singing all of ourselves, now we have learned to savour the taste of each delicate note.

Maybe those protective warriors were necessary – deflecting the burning voltage of sensation into narratives about our insufficiency that we fought against, not knowing that they were true.  Not that we were imperfect or unloveable but yes, incomplete in our development as we learned to play these instruments, to sing.

If we had not believed we were each separate and deficient, how would we have learned the difficult F# of loneliness or the whole generous, exquisite octave of longing? Or the minor chords of loss and despair and the enchanting middle C of joy. Or the wolf fifth of rage that howls for love. The deepest, searing b flat of regret.

So as we learn to experience all of our feelings fully, we recognise them as core energy, as essence. As the pre-sensing, or presence of life that drives evolution through the sensing of reptiles to the relating of packs and herds to Descarte’s valiant cry of freedom. Then back down through the relational perspective of the heart, widening that immense canyon to include love of all beings, not just the tribes we had known on the way up.  And as Eros returns to earth, the illumination of insight held safe in her arms we meet, in full regalia, the splendour of completion that can only be known through the slog and then joy of meiosis, bones and song.

We meet again the guts and bones of our ancestors. Did we wonder why we felt the deepest desire to flee in our stomach and bowels? Here we can finally heal the somatic distortions of flight, fight and freeze. As we bring our awareness to the fear and shame under these dense, rigid or collapsed warrior bodies, we release ourselves from the tales of our own insufficiency.  The crashing currents of fear and shame are now just  shining essence, core energy, pure care, from the perspective of the embodied heart. And as we return once more to trusting the whole body sensing that our reptilian and hunter-gatherer ancestors used for survival, emptiness and presence sing their ecstatic reunion and plan their next move through this noble human circuitry.

And as we recognise that core meeting of energy in us as love, surely the gap between our own energy and that of the earth, of life itself, is also bridged.

So the better we get at singing, the better we get at being singing teachers.

And maybe we are teaching singing in a room, face to face, hands held tight as terror is earthed, or maybe we are supporting song across the synapses of the oceanic world wide neural web where whales are also gathering.

But surely, in the simplicity of meeting as the wholeness of our own unique and heartfelt melodies, we too are healing the earth.

Growth within a personal life reiterates the growth of life itself. Life in the world of form can only grow through the tried and tested evolutionary process of growth that life knows to do. Any new feature or capacity that emerges into a personal life does so firstly as an experience. That experience then becomes a feature that one can recognise through the eyes of others, and then it becomes a feature that one can recognise both as an experience and an objective, repeatable skill or capacity. These are first, second and third person perspectives. A child starts their life with only a first person experiential perspective. Just a being. I am. In evolutionary terms, this first person experience relates to the brain stem of reptiles. There is functioning – very sophisticated autonomic functioning – and the recognition of the sensations that cause movement towards food and warmth and away from threat. But there is a limited capacity to recognise emotions or thoughts.  As they begin to grow, they start to realise that others can see them and so they start to see themselves through the eyes of others. In evolutionary terms, this level of functioning relates to the limbic system of the brain as reptiles evolved into animals that depended on the group they lived in for survival. Obviously this is an extraordinary and positive mutation, but animals themselves don’t have the self-reflective capacity of humans, so they dont have pride and shame. So if an animal is excluded from its pack, upon return it might shake, howl, urinate or do whatever it needs to to release the adrenalin. As the adrenalin is released, the animal returns to a relaxed state. What humans do, however, is they make themselves wrong. They split the objective, physical body from the consciousness they have until now been entwined with. Whatever one calls that self that is visibly gone from a dead body, that is the self that children make wrong. Whether you call that energy, love, source, the quantum field, chi, prana, lifeforce, vitality, the holy spirit or a hundred different names, that is the self that we lose some of our connection to when we make this transition from first to second person perspectives. Abraham Maslow called this transition food, shelter and safety to love and belonging. Reptiles need food, shelter and safety. Animals also need love and belonging. They dont need self esteem or actualisation, but they definitely need belonging. In spiral dynamics this transition is from red to blue; culturally, it heralded the emergence of monotheistic religions where the splitting of consciousness was reflected in the notions of self, god and connecting spirit.

Because a child does have a cortex, as it makes the behavioural changes necessary to suport its belonging needs, its sense of identity also shifts. It doesn’t know it is adapting itself simply to fit in while transiting this developmental stage. If it knew that, it wouldn’t need to do it. So as it adapts itself to the group, it believes its own assumptions about its essential wrongness and in that way moves away from its connection to its essential or energetic self.

As the child, adolescent or adult then moves towards developing a third person perspective, they start to identify with the objectifying capacities of the human cortex, where consciousness starts to see itself as both split and un-split. This can happen despite the wrong view one is carrying of oneself and the consequent weakening of essential energy. But this increase in sophistication of brain functioning doesn’t heal the basic split that has already occurred. A young adult can quite successfully define themselves as having individuated, develop a career and relationships and still hold their inherent sense of insufficiency. Often the only indication that it is there is in their negative perceptions of others.

In cultural terms this heralded the development of scientific thought in the seventeenth to eighteenth century, with a move away from religion into rational analysis of the world of form. In spiral dynamics, the move is from blue to orange. In Maslow’s hierarchy, it is from belonging to self esteem, where the need to differentiate overtakes the need to be included. In Wilber’s quadrants, this is where the upper right quadrant starts to be identified with in relative terms (as a quadrivia), although in absolute terms it is always there, co-arising with the other three quadrants.

Clients often come into therapy around the age of twenty-eight, which in my experience is currently around the time when a fourth person perspective often gets first activated as a potential. In cultural terms this is the pluralism of the sixties, where anything goes and love reigns supreme. In spiral dynamics this is green, in Maslow’s hierarchy it’s actualisation. In terms of brain development it is when the functioning of the cortex is integrated with the limbic system. So thought and feeling are finally less at war (although that has been slow to happen!). During the development of a second person perspective, there is feeling, but feeling based on devotion & inclusion, and in a third person perspective there is thought, but thought based on facts, analysis, cool scientific thought. From this new perspective, there is the capacity to both think and feel and to therefore form a more integrated response. The drawback of this perspective is that because it is newly accepting and represents a differentiation from rational thought alone, it can be difficult to take a position of discrimination or discernment.

There is recently a new perspective that has begun to emerge in humanity, which is a fifth person perspective. This perspective integrates the ‘Being’ capacities of the reptilian brain and gut with the feeling and thinking capacities that have already been integrated at green. So the person becomes a whole again. This stage is Yellow, in Spiral Dynamics terms, In Maslow’s hierarchy it is Transcendence, where the needs of the individual are finally transcended as the need to participate as a whole and functional entity as part of a greater whole are activated. It is a first parse, or sweep of the human activation, from gut to heart to head and back to heart and gut, transcending and including with each step. It is, to my mind, a kind of initialisation of the instruments of a human being. If the function of the big bang was to create life in the world of form and the current result is a species that consciously seeks to participate in its own evolution, then the main aim is surely to be here, as simply an instrument registering what is being experienced, as a thought, emotion or sensation, fully curious, on behalf of whatever extraordinary being or capacity exploded itself into form. The less this instrument is judged, as it is initialised for its true purpose, the more it is free to revel in that primary function – to register and fully experience life.

It is only when we reach this stage of development when the disconnection that happened between being and feeling, or brain stem and limbic system, or red and blue or shelter and belonging, can be healed. Once we reach this stage, it is patently obvious that we are in fact made of the same essential stuff as life itself. We see our wholeness, our loveableness despite our flaws and foibles, our essential nature. But it does take some kind of contemplative practice to reintegrate the energetic component of what we had earlier given up. This is where it becomes clear that the religious and spiritual contemplative practices, the energetic practices of a myriad contemporary therapies as well as all the ‘New Age’ approaches are all right.  It seems we need to invite our energetic self back as we realise that all of our difficulties and prejudices stem from a dislocation from our essential selves. And it also seems that life itself is infinitely eager to accept this invitation. In fact, it seems that after its extraordinary outburst of potential 13. billion years ago, its patience and faith are rewarded and the long wait is over. It does indeed finally have an instrument in the world of form that is sufficiently finely calibrated to be played with infinite tenderness and rapture by that original composer.

My sense is that, as this happens and more and more people come back to their essential nature, the cycle of growth continues through these same perspectives. So this newly refined experiential capacity to see oneself as whole and in service of life itself then becomes a relational capacity, as we see ourselves and others as that through others eyes, and then an objective truth, and so on, each time developing iterative capacities to serve, to be present, to be collaborative and unafraid.