Are Sensations the Secret Bridge Between Body, Mind, and Spirit?

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. We are on episode 69 today. Sixty-nine. And I'm super excited to explore with you. Hi, Brian. Hey, Ani. How are you?

Brian
I'm doing great. And you?

Ani
I'm really good. Body, mind, spirit. I'm all here ready and waiting for our topic today.

Brian
Our topic today. I'm really excited about this. I am, too. Because oftentimes in our podcasts, we have some stuff figured out, and we're presenting our expert knowledge or experience or that stuff.

Ani
We don't have it figured out today?

Brian
No, Well, today is an exploration. I want to talk about exploring the idea as sensations being the intersection between body, mind, and spirit.

Ani
So today's podcast is going to be one day long. I hope you have- It's going to be a whole full day of exploration.

Brian
I'll tell you when this question occurred to me. A few months ago, I was in one of our training programs, and I was teaching a bit about the connective tissue and bioenergy. And one of the students said, Is this the intersection between body, mind, and spirit?

Ani
And you said, eureka.

Brian
I was like, You know what? That's a really great observation. And then it occurred to me that I teach that actually in other trainings. When I travel and teach a lot for rehabilitation professionals, one of the first slides we pull up is the holistic idea of body, mind, and spirit. Then a lot of us laugh about that and we're like, Well, how do you charge for that? How do I document that I'm treating someone's spirit? We laugh and I said, Well, okay, so let's pull this together. We have to understand bioenergy to really understand that's the interface between our non-local intangible and tangible local selves. We're going to talk about that a little bit more. But then it occurred to me, wow, but bioenergy still actually might not really be the true interface. Because if we talk about body, mind, and spirit, bioenergy, well, it does occur in association with the body. It's still not wholly tangible, which the body is. I thought, is there actually a deeper element? And are sensations the actual interface between body, mind, and spirit? This is what I've been noodling on. This is what I've been thinking about.

Ani
Okay, cool. We do have to do these substantial, insubstantial, lay it out thing.

Brian
We have to lay it out. If we talk about how are we going to navigate this conversation, because otherwise, we could just be blathering on about things.

Ani
Yeah. I'm just imagining the listeners. You're really getting a peek into our lives today. What goes on. Just to let you know.

Brian
Whenever I step into some type of thinking process about this and a questioning process, I have to create some structure for myself around it. If we create a structure of understanding body, mind, and spirit, and just defining them a little bit, first of all. We're talking about our sensation is the intersection between these three aspects of ourselves. They're not split apart. They're all aspects of ourselves. Right now, we're living on a physical plane. Right now, we're living on a mental-emotional plane, which is, by the way, how we define mind, mental and emotional, and spirit on a spiritual plane. We're living on all three planes simultaneously.

Ani
Even saying that, it's like, Yeah, but how do we know or how is it defined? Keep going.

Brian
Okay, so body. What is our body aspect? Well, we can think about our body aspect as being what we call local and substantial.

Ani
It's right here. I see it. I can touch it and feel it.

Brian
You can localize it. It's there. It's right there. I can see where it is. I can localize it in space or locate it in space, and I can weigh it or put it in a cup. You know what I mean? It's substantial. There's substance associated with it. That's our body aspect. Now, what about mind? Mind is an interesting thing because when we think about mind as being mental, emotional. Our mind, not think about universal mind right now. That actually would be more like a spirit idea, which we're getting to. But your mind, If I said, Do you have a mind? And I'd say, How do you describe your mind? Most people describe their mind in a way where the mind is local to them. It's local. It's like my mind. If I'm- What am I thinking about right now? If I'm standing over there, my mind is with me over there, and I can feel something. If I walk over there, now my mind is with me over there. So I can still locate it, but it's not substantial. I can't reach in and pull out- You can't feel it. Part of my mind. I couldn't put it in a cup and weigh it.

Brian
So your emotions, they're local to you, but you couldn't hold them in your hand. And same thing with your thoughts. They're local to you, but you can't hold them in your hand. So they're local and insubstantial. Makes sense?

Ani
Oh, yeah. Okay.

Brian
And then what about spirit? So spirit, you could think about as being the aspect of ourselves that is non-local, non-substantial. So spirit is being something greater than our local selves. We're connected to something greater than ourselves. So we can think about that as being a universal consciousness or however you define spirit. My guess is it's something that's greater than yourself. You're connected to something other than yourself. And it's also nowhere in particular. It's nowhere in particular. The little phrase I like to hear is that it's everywhere, but nowhere in particular. Our spirit is everywhere, but nowhere in particular. But it's also insubstantial. Yeah, you can't touch it, feel it. You can't touch it, feel it. Well, you can't weigh it. Let's put that. Well, you see, because you can feel it potentially, but you can't weigh it.

Ani
Right. You can feel it. Is that part of your larger hypothesis?

Brian
What do you think about sensations? Okay. Sensations are felt quality. So that's what we're getting to. Our sensation is the intersection between body, mind, and spirit. Our sensation is the commonality between all of those parts of ourselves. Insubstantial means not that you can't not feel it, it means you can't hold it in your hands.

Ani
I've never thought about that before. This is just Yeah, this is really fascinating because we always talk about, I think I've said in the past three weeks, how we put the body, mind, spirit back together. We really are the only people I know who are talking about this sensation-based model like we do, which always makes so much sense to me. That's really fascinating.

Brian
Yeah. When I started thinking about this, I was like, this is pretty cool because we do so much work in our sensation-based work. Okay. We have defined body, mind, and spirit based on local and substantiability. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So what are sensations? What are sensations? What are they actually? What are they actually, Brian? What are they? Well, if you want to get right down to the nut of it, they are electrical and neuro hormonal activity in your body. Sure. You have hormone activity in your body and/or a neural activity in your body that activates sensors in your body. There's all kinds of sensors in your body. There's four basic types of sensors in your body. These four types, there's subtypes to all of these. But we have mechanical sensors. Those sensors pick up information on touch, light, deep touch, sharp, dull, that stuff. Then we have temperature, so that's hot, cold. Then we have a pH, which picks up acid base, whether your pH is above of or below seven. Then we have what we call nociceptive sensors, which are threat sensors. They're going to pick up information that happens in the body that potentially could damage tissue.

Brian
Tissue damage. Tissue damage sensors and relate that information to the brain. Just as a side note, there are no pain sensors in the body. I know we've done some podcasts on that, but I'm also planning one in the very near future, specifically to go deep into some of those concepts. Great. That's coming. There are four types of sensors in the body, and these sensors are being activated, stimulated somehow. Now, you could have what we call peripheral sensors. Those are sensors on your skin that are activating information. I know I'm touching my skin because mechanical sensors are being activated right now. But we also have what we call the interoceptive nervous system, which is nervous system that is internal. Think about our gut, our viscera, our blood vessels, all those kinds of places, too. And there's some deep sensors in the somatic, the muscular system as well, but the more internal, more deeply rooted centers and systems. There's some differences in how they're wired physiologically, too, which is really fascinating. Just where we are right now, we have these four types of sensors, mechanical temperature, chemical, and nociceptive. Now, all sensors are connected to wires

Brian
 that come deeper into the nervous system. In other words, I've got a sensor in my finger, and it picks up mechanical information. It's connected to a wire called an axon that goes all the way up into my spinal cord and then up into my brain so that it's processed. All the information flows inward up into the higher nervous system, the spinal cord and the brain. That information can be coming from your gut and then going up towards the brain for processing or it can be coming from your feet or wherever. Is that making sense? Mm-hmm. Okay. Some of those wires in particular are what we call myelinated or unmyelinated. Now, what that means is myelin is the sheath, the insulator that wraps a wire. Imagine you think about your toaster. We have our toaster at home. When we plug in the toaster, we get electricity runs from the wall to the toaster. Now, could you imagine if the wire connecting the wall to the toaster didn't have that rubber wrapped around it and it was just an exposed wire? That would be dangerous. You'd probably get a what? A shock. A shock from it.

Brian
The insulation wraps up that wire so that the impulse that enters into the sensor side can travel uninterrupted and uninfluenced or modulated until it gets all the way to its endpoint. Makes sense? Myelinated structures are newer. They're newer in terms of evolution. Humans, we have a lot of myelinated brain material, which talks about why it's so fast, like how conduction can be so fast. And some myelinated tissue is faster than unmyelinated tissue because that insulate that wraps around, again, allows the information to travel really, really fast through it and uninterrupted. Actually, MS is a disease that... Multiple sclerosis is a disease that eats away at that myelin sheath, which causes energy to leak out and then weakness occurs in the body. That's a disease that happens when myelinated axons are demyelinated by an autonomic immune process. I know this sounds really sciencey, but hang in here with me for a second. The newer nerve pathways are myelinated. Information travels faster along those pathways, and also more specifically. If I poke myself with a pin on my finger, it feels sharp. That sharp information which activates that sensor gets brought more clearly into my nervous system along a myelinated pathway.

Brian
We also have older pathways that are unmyelinated, unmyelinated pathways, which do not conduct as fast, and they do not conduct as specifically. The information that comes through unmyelinated pathways are often more vague and more convoluted. Our interoceptive nervous system, the nervous system that is wired through our gut, our viscera, our soma, where we feel things emotionally, those pathways are dominally unmyelinated. Sure. Which then made me... When I learned that, I was like, Oh, so I wonder if that explains why oftentimes emotions feel very unclear.

Ani
That would make sense.

Brian
Because actually, on an unmyelinated pathway, you could get a sensation stimulated on one end of the pathway, but then there's no myelin on that sheath. Any other neural hormones or electrical activity that are on the sides of that path, we can also influence that information coming up. It could come be very unclear, very cloudy, more murky, oftentimes even in conflict. We experience emotions that feel very conflicting to one another. Does that make sense? It's really interesting. We start to think about just how old our interoceptive nervous system, i.e. Emotional or feeling state nervous system is compared to our cognitive systems. They're just much older. They're more core to our experience of who we are as humans.

Ani
Which is obviously reflected in the brain as well.

Brian
Yeah, Exactly. We started to think about this. It's really interesting how it happens that way. When we start thinking about the body-mind- spirit interface, when I think about sensations and I think about the body, I think it's pretty clear that sensations and the body makes sense together.

Ani
Well, you feel them in the body.

Brian
We feel them in the body.

Ani
They're in the body. Sensors are in the body. I can be feeling something that you're not feeling.

Brian
Sensors are local and they're in the body. When I have something going with my body, I feel something and the sensors get activated. Sure. Does the idea that sensations have an interface into the body make sense?

Ani
Yeah. Yes. Well, yeah, that's It's obvious. That makes sense?

Brian
Sure. Okay. All right, so what about mind? Let's think about mind. If we think about mind as being a mental emotional, what do you think about emotions? Do emotions have a sensory quality to them?

Ani
Well, yeah. I mean, that's the basis of everything we do here with our sensation-based model. There's a feeling associated or a sensation associated with an emotion. Yeah.

Brian
If you look at a lot of the work that Candice Pert did with Molecules of Emotion. So molecules also have a molecular signature or a hormonal signature. We talked about a lot of the sensors, obviously in the interoceptive nervous system, are neurohormonal sensors. Excuse me. When we have experienced certain hormones in our body that will activate those neurohormonal sensors, then we have a felt quality associated with it. I think the interesting thing about the mental part is, well, we do know that mental activity is electrical for sure. Because otherwise... And also has to do with blood flow, for sure, because otherwise, we wouldn't show mental activity on fMRIs, for instance, or on EEGs or those types of things. By that definition, also, thoughts or mental activity are energetic, too. That's why we say bioenergy is actually a part of that also, because blood flow changes, temperature changes, electrical changes all have to do with energy. They're all forms of energy. Our thoughts must be energetic in some way because of that overlap. Are there sensors associated with that? Well, I don't know if there's purely sensors in our brain that pick up that information.

Brian
But there are synaptic activity in the brain, for sure. There are routing centers between sensory and motor phenomenon in our brain, for sure. There is electrical activity going on that is being modulated by interfacing with sensation coming from the body.

Ani
One of the things I think is interesting about what you're talking about, about mind, is this idea that the mental and the emotional or both a part of it. I know what I would say, but why are you putting those in the same bucket?

Brian
Mental emotional? Yeah. In mind? Just because it's a way to define mind. Because I don't think you can... Well, if we come at this from a Chinese medicine perspective, let's say- That's what I thought you were going to say. That the heart mind, the shin is the center, we call the middle dantian, that's associated with our mental emotional selfs.

Ani
Right. Ancient peoples knew that mind wasn't just purely thinking. I think that a part also of what you're talking about that makes sense to me is this idea that as humans, we're not just thinkers. We're not just cortex. I think from a spiritual perspective, if we talk about what's the spiritual purpose of humans, I think being human and having emotions is a human experience. To think that in terms of mind, we can have mind and have that be just a mental activity that has nothing to do with this vessel that we're in. Well, first of all, just as I say that mind, what information, mind, intelligence, information, would we be gathering from our experience without the senses? We wouldn't. We gather information with our intellect mind, whatever word you want, information in via our senses from the external world. Again, as a human being, not just a spiritual being that doesn't have a body, but a human, we interact with the external world, and we do that via senses.

Brian
Sure. We interact with our internal world via senses as well. It sounds like so far we've talked about, does the body... Do sensations and the body interface? I think we clearly said yes on that one. Sure. Does the mind and sensations interface? I think we can pretty clearly say yes with that one. Okay, so that leaves spirit. When I got here, I was like, how are we going to approach this one, Brian? Because we're talking about something that is non-local and non-substantial. Okay, so I did a little bit of research. I looked at some writings by William James. He's one of the forefathers of a lot of this work around psychotherapeutics and embodiment and that stuff. But I came across a really interesting paper by a character by the name of Douglas Schrader, who is a professor at a SUNY school. He wrote a paper called The Seven Characteristics of Mystical Experiences. Because I was curious. I was like, Well, what are the characteristics of a spiritual experience? Oh, okay. That's what I searched. I came up with a bunch of stuff. William James is on the list. This guy wrote a paper based William James research and Hathold's research.

Ani
It's interesting. He's from a SUNY school.

Brian
Yeah, and his own experience, too. This guy had a mystical experience in his early life that he actually couldn't understand. He was trying to process and that stuff. Good luck with that. He researched a lot of other research, excuse me, and studies and wrote a paper about the seven characteristics. I was like, Why? I wonder what those are. Here they are. According to Douglas Schrader, here are the seven characteristics of mystical experiences. The first one is that they are ineffable. Unexplainable. Unexplainable.

Ani
That's one of my favorite words. It's so much fun to say.

Brian
They're difficult to articulate. They're difficult to articulate or explain to, talk about to someone. When I heard that, I was like, Okay, That must mean then that spiritual experiences in some way disable cognitive processes.

Ani
Right. If you can't explain it, that's not an interesting thing.

Brian
Because if you can't explain it, If you don't have the verbal capacity to connect what it is that you experienced in word- Yeah, your higher centers aren't- Then something with your cognitive capacity must in some way be... I'm not saying disabled in a bad way, but I'm saying... Maybe disabled in a good way. Yeah, disabled in a good way or something. Okay, so they're ineffable. As important as language is, and you think about this, too, language is a very new skill compared to... And language uses a lot of those myelinated pathways versus unmyelinated pathways, which is the older, more foundational, ancient pathways within ourselves. I just thought that was interesting. Okay, so another one is that there's a notic quality to them. Noetic. Noetic. Noetic. Which means that the notion that the mystical experience reveal an otherwise hidden or inaccessible knowledge.

Ani
Oh, I love that. That's so definitely true.

Brian
Yes.

Ani
Like signs and patterns.

Brian
How often, as a segue, how often when we're working with clients, doing our somatic coaching practices with them, and we're resourcing information at the soma level is something revealed to them that had been hidden.

Ani
Or comes up after the session. Yeah, exactly. It is that revealing type quality. That light bulb, aha, enlightenment moment.

Brian
Yeah, something has been hidden that's now been revealed.

Ani
Yeah, that's like a predictable effect that we see all the time with the sensation based work.

Brian
It happens a lot, that noteic quality. A lot. Anyway, so I thought that was interesting.

Ani
Yeah, that's interesting.

Brian
Okay, so transiency. The fact that the mystical experience lasts for a relatively brief period of time.

Ani
Yeah, thank goodness.

Brian
Yeah. It can be pretty… It can be intense. It can be pretty… It can be intense. It happens.

Ani
We think we want to live like that forever. Then when you have some of these things, you experience them, they can just be really intense.

Brian
Yeah, it can be really, really intense. Sometimes they are longer, shorter than others or something like that. But there seems to be a transient experience associated with it. The interesting thing with that, too, is we can oftentimes be in that experience or in the wake of the experience and think that everything is going to be changed forever. Then all of a sudden, we wake the next day and we're like, Wait, I'm like, I still have to wake up and eat food, get my kids to school. Yeah. And I've got the same old issues that are showing up. There's that saying that before enlightenment,

Ani
Chop wood, carry water.

Brian
And after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Yeah. Sort of thing. But we do it in a little bit different way. It's the idea. Okay, so let's keep going. This is where it starts to get interesting.

Ani
But that was already interesting.

Brian
Okay, so the next one is passivity. The sense that mystical experiences happen to someone. They are somehow beyond the range of human volition and control.

Ani
Oh, like I'm not in charge.

Brian
Right. They're happening to me.

Ani
That reminds me of our soul's agenda process.

Brian
Okay.

Ani
Because we call this soul's agenda because it feels like the universe / spirit /God has an agenda for me. Right.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah, that's neat. Interesting. What I highlighted in this part of the statement, though, was passivity when he talks about defining that is a sense.

Ani
So much of spiritual- 

Brian
A sense is like a sense. A sense that the mystical experience. Okay, let's keep going. Check this out.

Ani
The sixth sense. The sixth sense or whatever.

Brian
That's just funny. The next one is unity of opposites. Unity of opposites. Oh, get out of here. A sense of oneness, wholeness, or completeness. I would say in the mystical spiritual experiences that I've had in my life, that is 100% true, a sense of wholeness or oneness or completeness.

Ani
I think that's reflected in what our students and graduates see and their clients experience as well and our clients experience.

Brian
And it's a sense.

Ani
It is. I mean, if I think about what is happening- It feels like something.

Brian
It feels like something. It feels like something.

Ani
Yeah. All of a sudden, it's like, it feels like something.

Brian
Yeah, it feels like something, right? We identified, and we can't explain what it feels like, but it feels like something. Okay.

Ani
Are we having a mystical experience right now? Right now, we're hearing that.

Brian
Okay. Timelessness. Timelessness. A sense that the mystical experiences transcend time.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Okay, so it's a sense of timelessness with it. Then this one actually starts off with, ready? It's not even in the definition. It's not even in 'How do you define the thing I just said?' It's actually the thing he's saying himself is that a feeling, a feeling that one has somehow encountered the true self. A sense that mystical experiences reveal the true nature... Reveal the nature of our true cosmic self. One is that beyond life and death, beyond difference in duality, and beyond ego and selfishness.

Ani
It's experience as a feeling.

Brian
It's a feeling. Because how would you know if it wasn't experienced as a Exactly. My point. Exactly. How would you know if it wasn't experienced as a feeling?

Ani
It has to be experienced as a feeling, or you don't know.

Brian
Or you don't know.

Ani
It doesn't feel real.

Brian
Exactly. I had a really interesting experience that I'd just like to share really quick to wrap this together. Is this true? Is it true that- I'm buying it. Is it true that sensations are the interface between body, mind, and spirit? I remember several, this is a couple of decades ago now, after I moved back east here from living out West for a while. I had a neighbor on our road. His name was Frank, and he was really good at fixing engines, that motor engine, motor boats and that stuff. We live out here on the lake, so we had a motor boat at the time. I'm terrible at that. I was going to say it's good for you. We were good friends. Frank would bring my engine to him and he'd get us opened up in the spring and winterized in the winter and that stuff. We got to be close. Then Frank got lung cancer. Of course, I'm in the health and wellness field. We spent a lot of time talking and working on his diet and giving him some practices to do and making sure he had really good water to drink, all those kinds of things.

Brian
I was doing stuff. We met regularly for the year before he passed away, and we got to be pretty close friends. Something, a relationship I really cherished with him. I remember I was meditating. We moved him off our road because it's remote down here and hard to get in and out of. When he was starting to get a little sick towards the end, we moved him into town. His girlfriend was staying with him at the time just to take care of him. I remember I was meditating one morning. As I was meditating, I had this overwhelming, overwhelming sense of relief came over me. You felt it? Oh, my God, it was so powerful. This overwhelming sense of relief and opening. I can't even say it was relief. It was just absolute relief. I caught this vision of Frank floating. I was like, Oh, my God, I think Frank just died. And literally 10 minutes later, I got a call from his girlfriend that he had passed away. I consider that a mystical or spiritual experience. That was not local to me. I was experiencing it locally, but it was something that was happening somewhere else.

Brian
I couldn't put it in a cup or put it on a scale. I couldn't weigh it. To this day, when I think I was trying to recall this experience as I was prepping for this podcast. Honestly, Ani, as I was recalling it, I remember what it feels like. I don't remember exactly what I visualized. I remember I vaguely remember Frank was a part of it. I was trying to think, What did I actually see? Because I had an overwhelming sense of relief, and I saw Frank enough to realize it had to do something with Frank. If I hadn't seen him visually, I probably wouldn't have known why I had the overwhelming sense of relief until I got the call. But to this day, I don't really remember necessarily what I saw in my visual capacities, but I remember exactly what I felt. It was this absolute just release and relief from pain, suffering, whatever he was experiencing, and this reentering into just a loving embrace. I still remember that feeling. You remember the feeling? For me, I felt that in my body, I must have had some type of neural hormonal changes in my body in order for me to actually feel that.

Brian
If I didn't have changes in my body, I wouldn't have felt that. Something was happening internally in terms of hormone and nervous system changes that I could actually experience that thing fully. There still must be some pathways associated with it now for me to be able to re-experience the feeling that I had of that. Anyway, what that's worth, that's my little anecdotal experiment around our sensations, the interface between body, mind, and spirit.

Ani
It reminds me, I've done a bunch of work with hospice throughout the course of my career, and it reminds me that when people get close to death, the thing that really matters the most is actually feeling, feeling their relationships, getting in touch with that felt quality. It's not what did I think about my life. It's about feeling the connection with other human beings. And they would describe that very often as a spiritual experience. Well, Brian, I think that you're really onto something. I'll look forward to your book.

Brian
Thanks. Coming soon after a long list of other books.

Ani
Of other things to do.

Brian
Exactly. So thanks so much for joining us today. I hope that you found this, if not enlightening, entertaining, anyway, entertaining to get inside- get inside our world and how we think and process about things. But I'm really excited about these connections that are potentially coming together, and I would love to be doing some more work with these.

Ani
I think it makes a lot of sense. Thanks for joining us, everybody.

Brian
We'll see you next time. See you next time. Bye.