My practice of embodied mindfulness has been a life-long journey through what seemed like – from the outside, at least – contradictory disciplines. The journey bridged the worlds of science, spirituality, psychology and epistemology to generate a system with the capacity to help others radically transform at their most fundamental level.

 

My own realization of the infinitely self-sensing, self-organizing and self-renewing world of Somatic Intelligence within each of us began with a traumatic injury to my reproductive system.  I had internal bleeding that adhered my organs, causing extreme pain that immobilized me. The surgeon warned me that I would lose several organs, never have children, and probably be in pain for the rest of my life … even after successful radical surgery.  But I said no… I felt there had to be another way  … the urgency of this life threatening illness caused an awakening .

 

During this time, I applied what I learned prior to my injury, while working at the LightHouse in New York City teaching painting and sculpture to the blind, I spent many hours blindfolded to better understand how my students perceived their world. Many had been blind since birth.

 

Gradually I began to sense beyond vision, memory and imagination, transcending what I had previously experienced as self.  Once I shifted my awareness, I learned to understand pain as a portal - rather than a barrier – into my body’s deep, subtle movements, freeing me from the suffering I had endured for so long and allowing me to move in entirely new ways.

 

Awakening to a different way of sensing into my experience as unfolding movement… led me to discover that the there was a natural intelligence of the bodymind that not only ended my pain, but all healed me.  The internal bleeding stopped. Adhesions dissolved. And my organs regenerated.  Several years later, I naturally conceived and joyously birthed my daughter, who is now a beautiful 19 year old young woman.

 

That was the beginning of Somatic Learning.  Since then there’s been a growing body of scientific research that provides evidence for the capacity of the bodymind to heal itself from the inside out.

 

 

 

For instance, research has shown that the more a person is aware of their own body, the more a part of the brain called the insular lights up in an MRI.  The more active the insula, the more empathetic a person is.  So the very thing that someone must do to transform their own pain and trauma creates the foundation for loving compassion and kindness.  This has the potential for a collective healing for humanity.  We use mindfulness to change the actual brain in a way that inclines it increasingly toward happiness.

 

These changes are not just short-term effects.  In the famous words of Canadian psychologist Donald Hemp says, “neurons that are wired together fire together.”  So when you stimulate neural networks of positive states, you actually strengthen them. The brain changes permanently and further inclines to states of well-being and joy.

 

 In the last three decades I taught the evidence-based methodology I developed for awakening Somatic Intelligence to thousands of people worldwide.  People suffering from many different ailments, have successfully used these practices to transform, pain, stress and trauma … and to prevent or reverse the deteriorating effects that we have come to associate with aging.  While at the same time enhancing joy, freedom and aliveness.

 

By creating an inversion in how we typically know ourselves from an outside-in, an image/object-bound experience, to an inside-out non-dual perspective, we dispel our incoherent, self-limiting, and chronically damaging modes of both physical and psychological functioning.

 

This inversion represents no less than a Copernican revolution in consciousness, as awareness of our own Somatic Intelligence allows us to live more fully embodied, here now, all at once.

 

Current research in neuroplasticity supports the fact that by accessing our Somatic Intelligence, we can transform not only our bodies, but also our minds.  This work has helped literally thousands of individuals suffering from a myriad of ailments.

 

 

 

- Risa Kaparo, PhD, Director, Inquiry of AIWP