Mindfulness and Other Nonsense, the Twin Sister of Psychoanalysis

I was thinking about some of the new fads such as Mindfulness and wondering what would be the most succinct way to describe what is wrong with it.  Oh, I know, it leaves out  a little thing called evolution.  If we understand evolution we know that the awareness brain came along last, millions of years after the earlier brains. That brain can disconnect from those early brains and take on a life of its own.  It is never the curative brain.  Why? Because we now know that traumas very early in our lives are embedded deep down in the brain and leave a trace.   They are located far from the brain that is aware, so does mindfulness help you get well?  Of course not; it is a shallow shell.  It rides above the lower brains and usually does not know anything is down there; certainly not aware of feelings churning away below.  So if it is not aware of deep roiling how can awareness improve consciousness, which is the sine qua non of cure.  Awareness is a non-depth event and is meant to be the enemy of consciousness.  It is the essence of blocking full consciousness of suppressing those forces sequestered below which must be relived; not just understood.  Reliving is no longer just my notion but now has a widespread scientific base, acknowledged as the  essence of cure.  There is no fooling with that, no jiggering or tweaking it; it is unchangeable and unrelenting and uncompromising.   To make any real change there must be reliving, and it has to be exactly as the trauma was set down; so who knows that?  The patient and only him because when the time is right that imprint will arise in its full glory with all of its feelings to be absorbed and integrated at last.    It is those forces that make us very sick and also mentally ill.

It has waited a very long time to breathe the air, to become conscious where all three brains coalesce to make us conscious.  Its unceasing roiling below has exhausted it and us and worn down the biologic system.  The system is designed not to permanently hide feelings but to bring them up when the system can take it and integrate it.   To see the faces of those who have reversed the imprint is to see a face of great relief, openness and joy.  Some call it , “getting that monkey off the back” which means unloading Pain.  No awareness can accomplish that because it cannot lift the Primal load, cannot unburden us and liberate us from our Primal Chains.  Awareness was never meant to plunge to the depths; that is only the role of consciousness.  Consciousness means reaching the deepest levels of the brain where the greatest terror and pain reside.  We cannot get well with only half a brain at work.   We cannot get well when half of our evolution is neglected and not considered part of us.  But until we are fully ready, awareness can help mask our pain as we go through the motions of getting better which will forever be an elusive  target.  We cannot get there from here.  Cannot get well looking at the brain from on top and believing we are treating the whole person, whereas we are treating the person’s later life, the slim slice of life that came along after many of the imprints were laid down.

Don’t think psychotherapy, insight therapy and psychoanalysis can escape; they suffer from the same rationales and beliefs and the same superficial defects in their therapy.  When someone bestows our private truths on us through the prism of their apperceptive mass, failure must follow.  They are essentially treating themselves.  To think that we can even guess what lies deeply buried in us is a delusion.

Consciousness means connection; it means fluid attachment to lower brain levels; it means access to our feeling base so we have feelings as part of our armamentarium, so we are guided by our feelings and not just our top level neocortical awareness.  It means seeing in depth the pain and feelings of others; our children, spouses and friends. It means we are passionate and empathic.   We can live the feeling life.

If we are not connected to what is driving us and making us act the way we do, we only access to ideas and beliefs and not what truly makes us human.  Awareness keeps us disconnected, yet is the darling of intellectual therapists.  Because it rides above and beyond feelings.  Therapy then becomes some kind of game or exercise lauded by those who live in that upper zone, those instantly attracted each new phase of enhanced awareness.  Hey, there is a large world down there that exists even when we cannot easily see it.   Fortunately and unfortunately we can never see it till we feel it and we cannot do that until we can access our feelings.  And we can never do that until we realize finally, that there is a world deep down that is the source of so much of us, our behavior and afflictions.

How to convince unfeeling people that there are feelings?  It seems to be true that when they suffer and are close to feelings they rush to us for answers; and we have them:  feelings.   Evolution of our prefrontal cortex was preceded long before we had reason by a non verbal brain.  Now that we have it, let’s steer it in the right direction and liberate ourselves.

Awareness is a late-comer to this enterprise; let us not evade the feelings that can free us.  We cannot be anxious and conscious.  Consciousness is the end of anxiety because we are finally in touch with its source. No one can do better than that.