The benefits of intermediate and longer-term training include the achievement of peak performance global homeostasis, permanence of change, and more complex usage of neural feedback in daily life. This involves recognition of system activity and the ability to self-regulate responses to complex information in real time.
We use our physiological systems to accomplish specific tasks in life -- for example, driving down the road to work, we rely on our reflexes to assist us in avoiding accidents, as well as our muscle tension to steer and brake, our cognitive skills to make traffic judgments, etc. Various tasks require varying physiological strategies. However, we tend to overutilize or underutilize these systems because of habituated patterns of which we are unaware; we tend to "do what we have done before" rather than consciously attempt to match our physiological activity to the needs of the task at hand.
If consciousness is largely mapped to the individual's basic physiology, it would stand to reason that when our systems are chronically active, a certain style of consciousness results. To free up the intuitive, loving, sensitive aspects of ourselves, we need to reduce this chronic innervation.
The process of psychoneurological sensitization is an integral part of biofeedback training, and has important implications that extend far beyond reduction of the presenting complaint. As we develop, we learn through the harshness of the environment to desensitize around many things in order to avoid painful stimulation (learning to "block out" noise in order to get things done; "armoring" ourselves in interpersonal contact to protect ourselves from discomfort).
For example, children are simultaneously vulnerable and sensitive, but throughout childhood repeated exposure to others who do not respond positively to their overtures or abuse them leads them to develop "psychic calluses" that buffer interpersonal experiences. These withdrawal strategies, practiced and reinforced over time, form an "armor" which reduces the capacity to experience life fully and impedes the self-actualization process.
This neurological withdrawal strategy may be responsible for the tendency of people to become "set in their ways" as they grow older, hence making it more uncomfortable to take risks. Such self-protective desensitization may result in the development of ridigity, unwillingness to take risks, and the minimization of creativity. Further, it diminishes our capacity to play, love, and relax.
Sometimes, in an attempt to get back in touch with feelings they once had and have stifled, or to block current painful feelings, people self-medicate. In the case of one popular drug, alcohol, people often say they drink to relax, to reduce stress, or to regain the unselfconscious and spontaneous "good feelings" often left behind in childhood.
Another way of avoiding discomfort is to choose social or professional circumstances that by their very nature provide a level of rigidity that protects the individual from the need to grow or change.
The model of psychophysiological training practiced at BRI facilitates resensitization, getting in touch with such "childlike" characteristics as those listed below:
Resensitization through multi-channel multi-modality biofeedback training re-establishes the individual's capability for subtle psychophysiological changes, and to detect these subtle changes both in himself or herself and in the environment. Extended training can enhance our sensitization beyond what we have ever experienced, even beyond our original genetic design. I suspect that this involves rehabilitating old neural pathways and developing new ones.
In order to make real changes on a large-scale basis, heading for the next developmental and evolutionary stage, we need to explore a range of advanced mind/body training techniques to help us transcend states of consciousness that no longer serve us. Normal evolution takes thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, and it can be argued that we don't have time for this now. It is becoming dangerous for the world to be run by individuals whose psychophysiologies are dominated by inappropriate patterns and who do not understand (because they have had no experience with) more benevolent psychophysiological states that permit gentle, expanded consciousness.
The mind/body training approach is useful not only for reducing or extinguishing presenting complaints, but in leading to much broader changes in people's lives. For this reason, it is on the cutting edge of psychology, providing a direction as it comes to encompass the full humanity of those it serves and studies, rather than limiting itself to the mental or theoretical realm.
From a developmental/evolutionary perspective, our physiological evolutionary programs have their intellectual correlates in the social and economic systems that we create; e.g., capitalism as practiced in western culture might be looked at as an intellectual and behavioral manifestation of the fight-or-flight response, pack animal behavior and other survival programming. These systems perpetuate autonomic consciousness, the physiological programs embodied in human consciousness that at an earlier period in our evolution were necessary to our survival. The western acceptance of such principles as survival of the fittest (as expressed in social Darwinism), produce or perish, etc., may be directly linked to our difficulty in realizing more of our human potential. This is exemplified by the difficulty individuals meet when they attempt to integrate new ways of thinking about themselves and their environment into their daily lives; we live in a culture that actively discourages such awareness, despite cultural institutions that theoretically support it.
Furthermore, within this culture, we have tended to follow the Cartesian model of attempting to learn about ourselves and our environment through breaking them down into component parts, examining the parts separately, then trying to add them together as we add numbers together to make sums. Such practice reinforces the fragmentation of the human being and further diminishes the significance of interdependence -- among body systems, among individuals, and among forces in the ecosystem.
In western medicine, the tendency is towards an increasingly refined approach directed to discrete problems in the body, such as heart palpitations, headaches, muscle spasms, and gastrointestinal disorders. This focus on specific symptoms and problems tends to eclipse the importance of understanding and achieving peak performance homeostasis between and within systems of the body, while at the same time providing a "quick fix" for those in physical pain, often without really addressing its causes.
Pharmacological treatment of symptoms increasingly involves more and more specific agents to "control" certain conditions, and considerable resources are expended by drug manufacturers to create such agents. Such emphasis on manipulation of increasingly small (yet infinitely divisible) aspects of the total physiology tends to inhibit transformation of the system as a whole. As we focus on the minutiae, we lose sight of the macrocosm that extends beyond the individual cell, the individual physiological system, and ultimately, the individual human being.
When physical symptoms are relieved, the individual is also relieved of a major impetus to deal with psychophysiological issues that may be involved; thus, the direction of western medicine is to maintain the status quo, rather than to examine it and determine if it most optimally meets the needs and potentials of the individual.
Physiological symptoms are in many cases a sign of the self attempting to actualize, to come into being by forcing to the surface psychological issues which in turn cause physiological bracing due to fear of the unknown, and/or fear of the implications of recognizing these issues. It is by recognizing these issues and learning to understand their impact, rather than by obviating the need to address them through eliminating the pain they cause, that individuals expand their psyches and develop greater self-understanding.
Just as individuals have fears of the unknown and desires to perpetuate the status quo, it may be that there are genetic and cultural tendencies in this direction as well. For example, all members of the culture, including the producers, manufacturers, promoters and consumers of drugs may be motivated by an unconscious phenomenological fear of the unknown. Drugs which reduce uncomfortable system activation tend to maintain the status quo because those who take them lose the motivation to address the causes of their symptoms. Change is avoided, and the dominant consciousness state is maintained. Unfortunately, many of the measures that eliminate pain also reduce the opportunity for growth.
Therefore, rather than relying on the development of painful symptoms to indicate the need for transformation, I suggest that we directly facilitate transformation through pleasurable education and psychophysiological feedback systems. I will address this idea in more detail in the following sections.
Another result of the fragmentation that characterizes our culture is that we tend to treat symptoms with the goal of bringing the affected system back to a norm that reflects the mean state of others in the society, and this leads us to believe (mistakenly) that this mean state is most desirable. The pharmacological goal of eliminating symptoms and relieving pain is laudable, and certainly appropriate in many cases, but it is limited in that it discourages discovery of individual potential to exceed the mean in a desirable direction. In contrast, psychophysiological training not only relieves systems, but provides a pathway out of the norm, by showing individuals how to develop self-regulatory skills that can go beyond what others in the population commonly achieve.
This suggests that without psychophysiological training, transcendence of autonomic consciousness will be nearly impossible. Instead, we will become stalled by further fragmenting ourselves through treatment of symptoms and refusal to recognize interrelationships between different systems in one body, different bodies in one culture, different cultures in one world, etc. The understanding that human beings operate on all psychophysiological levels simultaneously empowers those who wish to affect their mind/body systems by providing a variety of approaches to self-regulation, and suggests a transpersonal implication: that the individual is one part of a larger system, working simultaneously with other parts and influencing the whole.