From Skepticism to Mechanism

 It’s time to explore why people charge $500 for a wish, a prayer, and a melting experience. We undervalue the helping professions. This is the domain largely of womens work. Women with their bodies made stretchy by estrogen. Women do in-fact gravitate to helping positions and thankfully so, because we need them.  The idea that helping positions are inferior is disconnected from reality at best, and that is obvious as long as one has two eyes and a clear head on their shoulders.  Bodywork currently exists in a paradigm where the full bulk cost falls on the consumer, the patient. We may decry the bodyworker’s shirking of their ethical responsibility to acknowledge and act in accordance with the evidence. We would not be wrong in doing this as they undermine their own results.  When bodyworkers abandon reality for fantasy their own practices suffer. Yet a bodyworker can maintain a hearty living on peoples unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and on their idea that this is the...

 Listen. ITS FINE TO BE WEIRD. You don’t have to change. You don’t have to bend over backwards trying to underthink. You think: think well. You need to touch things and not touch things to balance out your nervous system, central and peripheral. You cry out to others because you need someone there in your heart. Witness yourself. You are not in fact weird, you are always in good company.  And sure you may not dance the most poetic dance that we are all supposed to know. That isn’t your failure.  But if you see that you are out of sync you are not wrong. You correctly assess yourself. If you want to change it so you can dance with others, know that this is possible.  Finding rhythm starts with restoring the internal rhythm. We find the internal rhythm and then we match it to the external rhythm and that is how we flow along with others, freed of the burden of ourselves lumbering along alone.  Your coping tactics are not your enemy. You are not your enemy. Your bo...

 My fellow same-sex attracted people can possibly testify to this or not… Being gay is weird. It’s something that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. One thing you know you are normal and you life trajectory is as generic as sliced bread or ketchup. You’re going to be happy with a man and have a child some day just as they say.  But then you begin to notice that who actually enthralls you happens to be female. Something about their softness, their depth of humanity calls to you as if they are some oasis in a desert. It’s a song that you hear and you know it’s for you.  But only after you are left singing does the reality begin to set in. Somehow this is… not quite right. Something about it just strikes most people as a little odd. And this story you expect to live up to… well it’s not quite how things seem to pan out in your situation. It’s the forbidden fruit but the fruit is a vegetable and the vegetable is the most amazing tomato you have ever tasted.  The ...

And, I would add, unifying things that are in fact separate  

(under development) To a former therapist, and dear friend of mine: The gender stuff has ultimately become a window for me into understanding what religious thinking is and exactly where is the line between it (illogic) and logical analysis. As you know well, I have struggled in my personal life with the line between reality and not-reality. But finally due to the influence of some amazing thinkers and scientists, I have found my own footing firmly in reality. To borrow the framework of one of them: Not in the trichotomy of soul/mind-body-spirit, nor in the dichotomy of soul/mind-body, but in the monochotomy of… body! Our subjective sense that there is a trichotomy or dichotomy is a result of our biological circumstance… that is having brains that evolved under certain conditions to have certain mechanisms. Mechanisms which we can never escape, and which we are not “greater than” or separate from. Truly, we are biological creatures. Truly, we exist in a material wo...

What follows is a comprehensive debunking of the bodywork modality that I spent over $10,000 to train in in hopes that it will 1) offer genuine help to others, and 2) become a good lifestyle for me https://www.painscience.com/articles/craniosacral-therapy.php https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/alas-poor-craniosacral/  In trying to find the silver lining of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, we must ask several questions: What is *actually* happening when we touch people in this way? What is the maximum benefit we can offer within the structure of this practice? Here is what I've come up with: 1) Co-regulation. A lot of people are all tied up and frozen and stiff and frankly do not get neutral safe touch in their lives. They may have trouble relaxing around other people due to lack of subjective feeling of safety or mal-adaptive thought-patterns. Or perhaps they just never learned how to be in healthy relationship (healthy attachment). The #1 most common effect people have is relaxa...

 Here are the main residual things I am working with. The goal is to discover what is the best cure. The recent discovery is the part behaviorism has to play. For context I have an ADHD presentation, but have not received a thorough differential diagnosis.  CW: I'm going to talk about unpleasant habits I have here, usually I'm too ashamed to be open about them but in the interest of honesty, accuracy, and transparency about my process, I will put the stigma aside. If you don't want to read about this, miss the localized fixations subheading.   1) Localized fixations. I have historically had a strong presence of various BFRBs (body-focused repetitive behaviors). One major one I developed around age 10 or so, nail biting, to which I added cuticle picking after an ill-advised suggestion by a relative that focusing on that would make my nails look better. The main pattern i am noticing is a pattern of hyper-fixation. Maybe it is on a chapped lip, a cyst on my scalp, maybe it ...

It is easy to get disheartened when you are one person who, alone, deigns to explore your understanding of a vastly complex topic. Even more so when you do this by turning loose the fire-hose of the internet directly onto your unprotected face.  Yet we must all have some sort of standards in this life, and this happens to be one of mine. If our thesis is good, we will successfully defend it until the last trickle. If we have grasped reality, we can expect to wake up each morning and not find it radically changed. Then again, if our thesis is bad but our obstinacy is strong we will also defend it to the last trickle. Not by withstanding the deluge, but coolly stepping to the side. Ultimately, the only person we are truly accountable to to inform us what group we may be in at any given point is ourselves. The more times I experience a breakdown in my model of understanding, the more amenable I become to the process itself. If you've stood on a glacier while the entire thing transmute...