Gestalt Awareness

Maira Kountanni
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Self-organization means “I organize myself”
Self-organization means “I organize myself” 0 0 alex.spctrm

Many people ask me what is self-organization?And I can answer them!Here is the written version of my answer!Through the eyes of an internationalist anarchist and gestalt therapist!

So what is the so-called self-organization at the social level?

This is a structure usually proposed by anarchist philosophers and practitioners. Very well.

What is it though?

Every person is part of a community and many communities together ake what we call society. So society is a sum of all the people in the world practically. Self-organization happens when the parts of the society, each community and each person, talk, communicate, decide and act together taking each other’s needs, resources, talents, and abilities in consideration.

Each community has its own needs and resources. Those are the needs and abilities of all the beings that are part of this society. Taken into consideration all of them and the given environment, people can decide together and act together in favour of the whole at the maximum possible.

This is the meaning of self-organization on a communal level. Of course, it is not easy to satisfy all the needs at the same time, and many people will say ‘oh there will be a chaos’.

Though, I would ask is it really that complicated or does it sound harder than it is?
And what is the comparison we have?

Is it really easier to follow orders of people who have never visited our community rather than decide for ourselves?

Is it preferable to be frustrated because my need will not be covered but my neighbours will have their need covered after the last self-organized decision, or is it better that no one has his need satisfied since the decisions are made from a central government that has no idea about anyone’s needs anyway?

Also, more often than we think, the common good is more obvious than complicated.

Plus, we all use self-organization in our everyday social life, or else our lives would be way too difficult.

Yes, there are several authoritarian characters and behaviours in our society, but hardly is someone 24-7 in this mode. For example, having a flatshare is a form of self-organization. Having an intimate relationship, a friendship, a parenthood is a form of self-organization.

And the more is being treated as such the more functional it gets!

Meaning, the more we engage consciously everyone in the process of accomplishments and sharing tasks, the easier it gets!

So it is easier to self-organize my everyday life with my kid by explaining to it naturally, that we need to accomplish several tasks every day to maintain our house clean and so on. Are you with me?

Can u take the task to tide up your room, yourself and eat your food on your own?

Depending on the age, we can share different tasks with our kids. It is important to transmit to human beings in an early age the awareness that they are a part of a totality and they are useful and important to keep it running!

My point here is that the so-called self-organization that many people in a political talk will answer to me ‘oh, this can’t work’, ‘we need someone to govern us or it will be a chaos’ and so on, these people maybe are already using self-organization in small scale, or they can see the benefits of it by starting practising today in their relationship with themselves and close others.

Also, I want to develop a bit more my claim that self-organization is a natural basic function of any society.

 

For example, when I call someone and he cannot answer the phone at this moment, he will probably call me back when he is available. Τhis is a small self-organization in practice that makes our lives easier. Αlso, when I invite friends for dinner, I am happy when someone will wash the dishes, respecting my invitation and my cooking time, or when I want to see a friend that lives far, we try to find the middle way to meet so we cover half distance each.

Self-organization makes our lives easier and simpler

 

Yes, it demands our presence in the process and awareness that are not always there. though our lives get happier when we manage to bring these qualities in every moment of our lives.

So, in a larger social level, me and my neighbours we are expert in the needs of our area, not the central government. So, it makes more sense that we take action based on our needs rather than follow a general rule that is not connected with our real needs. For example, we know better if we need another mall or parking or a green area with a playground.

Equally, we know better if we want to drill and frack our forests rather than the company that will come in our area, take the ground resources and then live, leaving us there to breath all the toxic atmosphere and grow food in a polluted destroyed ground.

And we shall act accordingly since we live in this area we need to be the ones to decide considering the effects in our health, everyday life, and the next generations.

Equally, the way I learn to treat myself in the inner scale will affect the way humanity develops in the future. We have thousands of years of practised violence to wash out. So practising an inner self-organized assembly to decide how to live my life is an antidote to all these years of violence.

Peace, reflection, acceptance, respect, love, and freedom are the base of self-organization.

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Science Says Silence Is Much More Important To Our Brains Than We Think
Science Says Silence Is Much More Important To Our Brains Than We Think 450 616 alex.spctrm

Finland may be on to something very big. You could be seeing the very beginnings of using silence as a selling point as silence may be becoming more and more attractive. As the world around becomes increasingly loud and cluttered you may find yourself seeking out the reprieve that silent places and silence have to offer. This may be a wise move as studies are showing that silence is much more important to your brains than you might think.
Regenerated brain cells may be just a matter of silence.

A 2013 study on mice published in the journal Brain, Structure and Function used differed types of noise and silence and monitored the effect the sound and silence had on the brains of the mice. The silence was intended to be the control in the study but what they found was surprising. The scientists discovered that when the mice were exposed to two hours of silence per day they developed new cells in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a region of the brain associated with memory, emotion and learning.

The growth of new cells in the brain does not necessarily translate to tangible health benefits. However, in this instance, researcher Imke Kirste says that the cells appeared to become functioning neurons.

“We saw that silence is really helping the new generated cells to differentiate into neurons, and integrate into the system.”

In this sense silence can quite literally grow your brain.

The brain is actively internalizing and evaluating information during silence

 

A 2001 study defined a “default mode” of brain function that showed that even when the brain was “resting” it was perpetually active internalizing and evaluating information.

 

Follow-up research found that the default mode is also used during the process of self-reflection. In 2013, in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Joseph Moran et al. wrote, the brain’s default mode network “is observed most closely during the psychological task of reflecting on one’s personalities and characteristics (self-reflection), rather than during self-recognition, thinking of the self-concept, or thinking about self-esteem, for example.”

When the brain rests it is able to integrate internal and external information into “a conscious workspace,” said Moran and colleagues.

When you are not distracted by noise or goal-orientated tasks, there appears to be a quiet time that allows your conscious workspace to process things. During these periods of silence,

 your brain has the freedom it needs to discover its place in your internal and external world.

The default mode helps you think about profound things in an imaginative way.

As Herman Melville once wrote, “All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by silence.”

Silence relieves stress and tension.

It has been found that noise can have a pronounced physical effect on our brains resulting in elevated levels of stress hormones. The sound waves reach the brain as electrical signals via the ear. The body reacts to these signals even if it is sleeping. It is thought that the amygdalae (located in the temporal lobes of the brain) which is associated with memory formation and emotion is activated and this causes a release of stress hormones. If you live in a consistently noisy environment that you are likely to experience chronically elevated levels of stress hormones.

A study that was published in 2002 in Psychological Science (Vol. 13, No. 9) examined the effects that the relocation of Munich’s airport had on children’s health and cognition. Gary W. Evans, a professor of human ecology at Cornell University notes that children who are exposed to noise develop a stress response that causes them to ignore the noise. What is of interest is that these children not only ignored harmful stimuli they also ignored stimuli that they should be paying attention to such as speech.

“This study is among the strongest, probably the most definitive proof that noise – even at levels that do not produce any hearing damage – causes stress and is harmful to humans,” Evans says.

Silence seems to have the opposite effect of the brain to noise. While noise may cause stress and tension silence releases tension in the brain and body. A study published in the journal Heart discovered that two minutes of silence can prove to be even more relaxing than listening to “relaxing” music. They based these findings of changes they noticed in blood pressure and blood circulation in the brain.

Silence replenishes our cognitive resources.


The effect that noise pollution can have on cognitive task performance has been extensively studied. It has been found that noise harms task performance at work and school. It can also be the cause of decreased motivation and an increase in error making. The cognitive functions most strongly affected by noise are reading attention, memory and problem solving.

Studies have also concluded that children exposed to households or classrooms near airplane flight paths, railways or highways have lower reading scores and are slower in their development of cognitive and language skills.

But it is not all bad news. It is possible for the brain to restore its finite cognitive resources. According to the attention restoration theory when you are in an environment with lower levels of sensory input the brain can ‘recover’ some of its cognitive abilities. In silence the brain is able to let down its sensory guard and restore some of what has been ‘lost’ through excess noise.

Summation
Traveling to Finland may just well be on your list of things to do. There you may find the silence you need to help your brain. Or, if Finland is a bit out of reach for now, you could simply take a quiet walk in a peaceful place in your neighborhood. This might prove to do you and your brain a world of good.

Source: Life Hack
Featured photo credit: Mind Bodyvia beautifulnow.is

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Organism and ecological awareness
Organism and ecological awareness 974 731 alex.spctrm

This hopefully brings the realization that we are all in interdependency with one another. And this breaks down the rhetoric of individualism that this System is trying to sell us for so many years:

‘take care only about yourself and your own needs, regardless of the others.’ This is what I name non-ecological awareness.

We can see many disaffects of this behavior humans have followed in recent years. I will give just one significant example: the massive cultivation of the land and the tons of chemicals used for more stable productivity has ended up killing microbes and bacteria that used to live in the ground and kept our intestines safe. Now, as a result, our intestines lack good bacteria, with the unpleasant consequence of chemical unbalance in the human organism and body and mind symptoms ( bad digestion, depression, anxiety ). This is a non-ecological interaction among the human, the ground and the plant that produces its food. This relationship was dominated by human need and there was no respect and active listening to mother earth; on the contrary, there was violence that backfired to the human itself.

Was that excessive focus on the organismic need worth it?

What was gained and what was lost? Open for (self-)reflections…

So, is it possible for the organism to apply ecological awareness?

Let’s find out!

As organisms in an environment, if we want to cover our needs, we need to be active and aware of them at every moment and flexible enough to be able to do the best we can according to our abilities combined with what we have in the given moment ( needs of our organism and environment provided to satisfy them) . An organism that is really aware and active can practice meaningful awareness of itself in the world, in dialogue with the world, and with awareness of the other and the surrounding. It is not an inwardly focused organism caring only about its needs and separated from the environment (introspection).

Awareness is accompanied by owning, that is, the process of knowing one’s control over, choice of, and responsibility for one’s own thoughts, behavior, feelings, and actions. This is what I call ecological awareness.

ecological awareness

Our lives can really flourish when we apply this to our environment and we take care of the ground, the plants, the water and the air that feed us.

Also, our lives are deeply meaningful when we apply this to our relationships with other humans. To dive into this, I will mention again the indoctrinated concept of individualism, which we can feel polluting more and more human relationships. So, when we arrive in the contact boundary with the only purpose to cover our organismic need, since anyway, this System gives us the right to be individualist, we might end up using any mean to arrive at our purpose ( lying, manipulating, violating ), with the unpleasant result for the other; hurting and mistreating the being that covered our need.

Of course, in Gestalt, we talk a lot about the response-ability of any person for the events of its life. Though here we talk also about the other side of the spectrum. For sure we cannot talk about earth’s responsibility for being poisoned. She still does her best to feed us. Equally, it is worth it to investigate the behavior of the person who acts towards the other.

Every person is in charge of the moral choice he makes. Gestalt therapy can help the person to understand what can be considered moral and what not. Gestalt therapy gives the person an opportunity to choose and value.

So here the moral I present is ecological awareness and behavior.

The person who is aware knows what they do, how they do it, that they have alternatives and that they choose to be as they are. So non-ecological actions are not forced, but a choice among others.

Deeply practiced awareness is ecological awareness. The tendency of the organism towards awareness is natural, and every person is part of nature. Awareness of the evidence, the awareness continuum, is an instrument for the person to use intentionally to direct this natural drive for the healthy condition.

A high healthy level of the human organism can be succeeded among other healthy organisms since we all interact with each other for our organismic needs. So, the healthier the environment the healthier the organism.

This is true considering the ecological behavior towards the earth, and also towards other humans. We can interact in a more satisfying way with humans that feel respected, heard, appreciated for who they are and loved rather than the opposite. We can build ecological relationships based on love and freedom for all, not only for our individual self. This will come back to us from the environment in the form of love and freedom.

Equally, the food we eat can be our cure when we respect the earth and its resources.

Let’s take a deep breath with this awareness.

Everything is one. We are one. Everything is connected.

Awareness at all levels is the key.

Breathe in and out and practice love and freedom here and now.

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