Slowing Down: Joyful Living: The Body/Mind

April 30, May 1,2, 2004
Alexis Johnson, Ph.D.

Where the first rhythms of life were insecure, rather than secure, we are more prone to forcing our bodies to deal with difficult life events rather than using our mental and emotional selves. Our immune systems are weakened. Some of us are homes to every passing respiratory virus. Some of us develop auto-immune diseases. Some of us find ourselves addicted to a substance or an activity level that in some way re-creates the first jarring rhythms of our babyhood. Some of us are totally out of balance around food and exercise. For some of us it is our musculature that carries chronic tensions, so familiar that we don’t even notice. We end up with a sense of self in our body that is too small, too tight, too closed, too defensive.


The consciousness journey involves reaching what the British psychoanalyst, Winnicott called a psyche-soma indwelling, what the American consciousness philosopher, Wilbur calls the Centaur level of existence. We live in our precious bodies. We know that no growth can happen without being in a body. Yet we struggle to find our right relationship with and in the body. Some of us deny that we have a body, while other of us misuse it in a variety of ways. We must learn to hold the paradox: I am my body; my body is not me.


How do we create a container big enough to hold this paradox? By entering the mental and emotional worlds to translate the body stories into word and feeling stories. Feeling and word stories allow space for exploration. I can look at these stories rather than be totally identified with them. Then the sense of self can breathe with the life force, can contract and expand with emotional aliveness. This sense of self is still a container but it is fluid and flexible, able to flow and resonate with joy, excitement, and contentment.


This workshop will be held in a rhythm of both the latest scientific information on various illness from the annoying to the life-threatening and personal process to discover your own healing path.

"For me, the CIL program is the perfect balance of science and spirit... The lectures and exercises nourish heart and mind. The information and insights easily integrate into my work as a family physician." Paula Krauser, M.D. Manalapan, New Jersey