Healing Artistry, Gene Expression and Gene Modulation

 

 

Written Aug. 2014.

 

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The two volume E-book By the Way provides hints and glimpses of Healing Ways used within Laceweb Healer Networks. Holistic mindbody processes are engaged that have transforming occurring at many integrating aspects of the holistic systems of systems – phenomenal experiencing of moving sensing feeling perceiving and sense making, transforming language, story and metaphor, neurochemical information as news of difference that makes difference; pattern interrupt; through to dynamic potential for gene expression and gene modulating for neurogenesis.

 

Ernest Rossi in his book ‘The Psychobiology of Gene Expression: Neuroscience and Neurogenesis in Hypnosis and the Healing Arts‘ explores the theory, research, and practice of optimizing gene expression and neurogenesis to facilitate brain growth and healing via positive, creative experiences in the arts and sciences as well as alternative and complementary medicine, psychotherapy, and therapeutic hypnosis.

 

Rossi writes of creative 4 step processes including:

 

o   Preparing

o   Incubating & Illuminating

o   Co-creating

o   Validating & Ratifying

 

Laceweb Process

 

While Rossi writes of these as a stepwise process, Laceweb way has all of these as simultaneously part of the phenomenal mix as appropriate to context. Evaluating, validating and ratifying are constantly occurring in the moment-to-moment engaging with context. One has an awareness-of-awareness as a normal state of being in the world with others. Attending comes naturally within an open state of surrendering to the moment prepared and ready to ‘catch’ what comes through connexity perceiving and from deeper parts of unconscious processing. Aspects of experience are ‘put aside’ for incubating on a semi regular basis and illuminating insights and observations are coming through for ‘catching’ on a continuing basis. Laceweb processes support engaging with others in this dynamic holistic fluid creative and transforming process.

 

On surrender and catch refer Wolff’s 1976 book titled Surrender and Catch -  Experience and Inquiry Today. In Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. R. S. Cohen and Wartofsky. Boston, D. Reidel Publishing.

 

 

Rossi’s Key Concepts

 

(Adapted from the above book)

Immediate Early Gene Expression  

A special class of genes — called immediate early genes — can respond to psychosocial cues and significant life events in an adaptive manner within minutes.  Immediate early genes have been described as the newly discovered mediators between nature and nurture: they receive signals from the environment to activate the genes that code for the formation of proteins, which then carry out the adaptive functions of the cell in health and illness.  Immediate early genes integrate mind and body; they are key players in psychosomatic medicine, mind-body healing, and the therapeutic arts.

Behavioural State-Related Gene Expression  

Different states of behaviour and consciousness—waking, sleeping, dreaming, emotions, motivation, and stress—are all associated with different patterns of behavioural state-related gene expression.   Behavioural state-related gene expression is a fundamental link between psychology and biology.  It is of essence in exploring the psychobiology of consciousness.  Behavioural state-related gene expression is a genetic source of behaviour that can be modulated with psychosocial cues and cultural rituals to facilitate health, performance, and healing.

Activity-Dependent Gene Expression

Learning to do something new initiates cascades of molecular-genetic processes that are called activity-dependent gene expression.  Activity-dependent gene expression generates the proteins and growth factors that signal stem cells residing in the brain to differentiate into newly functioning neurons with new connections between them. Likewise, stem cells that reside in tissues throughout the body receive psychogenomic signals that enable them to replace injured cells with healthy ones: this is proposed as a basic dynamic of the healing placebo response. 

The Novelty-Numinosum-Neurogenesis Effect

Numinosum refers to the experience of life’s richness being fascinating, mysterious, and tremendous. Combining Numinosum with Novelty - enriching life experiences, and exercise associated with a positive sense of curiosity and wonder can turn on activity-dependent gene expression to construct and reconstruct the physical brain and the way it works throughout our entire lifetime.  This is the psychobiological essence of the relationship between the creative psychological experience, gene expression, and neurogenesis — it is a psychosynthetic process of updating and recreating ourselves in everyday life as well as in the arts, humanities, and sciences.  The novelty-numinosum-neurogenesis effect documents how highly motivated states of consciousness can turn on and focus gene expression, protein synthesis, neurotransmitters, and neurogenesis in our daily creative work of building a better brain. 

Creative Replay and Re-synthesis is the Essence of Psychotherapy

Replaying the 4-stage creative process for the re-synthesis of experience is the fundamental dynamic of psychotherapy and the healing arts (refer alternative holistic Laceweb Process way above).  Our emerging models of creativity, optimal performance, stress, and healing engage Darwinian variation and conscious selection on all levels from mind to gene in the natural ultradian flow of human experiencing.  Immediate early genes, behavioural state-related, and activity-dependent gene expression are bridges between body, brain, and mind that can be accessed to facilitate the creative replays of therapeutic hypnosis, psychotherapy, and the holistic healing arts.   

Individual Response-Ability and Ethical Self-Realization

Although it is generally recognized that we are all 99.9% alike in our genetic legacy, it is still not generally understood that there are at least three million small variations in our genes — called single nucleotide polymorphisms — that are expressed in our individuality.  This implies that we all have a profoundly unique psychogenomic entitlement for the personal perceptions, potentials, and problems that we alone can recognize and realize as our ultimate response-ability.  Of necessity, each person is responsible for the facilitation his or her unique psychogenomic endowment.  Parents and teachers may help us find paths, but ultimately only we alone can know when we are really okay in our quests for ethical self-realization — the mindful integration of our personal psychogenomic potentials with those of society and culture.

Social and Cultural Response-Ability

The ultimate gifts of art, music, dance, and the humanities are their evocative effects on gene expression, neurogenesis, and healing in the co-evolution of consciousness and culture.  Play, imagination, fantasy, and dreams are all natural exploratory efforts in the creative replay and re-synthesis of life experiences on all levels.  Gaia, gene, individual, and society co-create each other in the self-reflective replays of the ever-emergent dynamics of becoming.  The ultimate response-ability of leadership on all levels is to facilitate this natural evolution of the goals, philosophies, and ethics of life.  

Positive Psychology and the New Decade of Behaviour

Experiences of creativity, happiness, humour, uplifting surprise, awe, and that special spiritual sense of the numinousum—fascination, mysteriousness, and the tremendous—are all associated with immediate early, behavioural state-related, and activity-dependent gene expression, neurogenesis, healing, and self-realization.  The ethical challenge is to discover new research methods for the deepening exploration and the practical implementation of these insights for the rediscovery and recreation of human nature.  Let’s all go for it!

Some Micro-process Options for Holistic Functional Integrating:

For details on using these refer:

o   Healing Ways Encyclopaedia

o   Laceweb Concepts and Frames

o   Natural Living Processes Lexicon

Also refer the literature on the work of Dr Milton Erickson, with Hanlon’s 1987 book Taproots: Underlying Principles of Milton Erickson's Therapy and Hypnosis being a good place to start.

o   Ambiguity

o   Apposition of opposites

o   Casual, Happy, Playful Attitude and Approach

o   Fail-Safe Alternatives Covering All Possibilities of Response

o   Hitchhiking Suggestions onto Ongoing Behaviour

o   Humour

o   Ideodynamic Hand, Finger and Head Signalling

o   Metaphor

o   Open-Ended Questions that the consciousness cannot easily answer

o   Private Inner Work

o   Recall, Replay, Reframe, and Re-Synthesize

o   Therapeutic Double Binds

o   Therapeutic Dissociations

o   Time-Binding and Incomplete Sentences – Wisdom Fragments

o   Two or More Levels of Functioning

o   ‘Um-humm’ in Many Ways

o   Uncompleted Sentence Stems and Dangling Phrases ‘…until…’ to build time-binding expectation

o   Yo-Yoing Consciousness

o   Experience Inducing Anecdotes, Humour, Questions, Secrets, Whispers, and Ambiguity

o   Courage to Explore and Stay with the Process

o   Creative Edge Between Voluntary and Involuntary

o   Dissociated Behaviour

o   Creative Uncertainty of Therapist and Patient

o   Incubation for Facilitating Natural Variation and Selection 

o   Metaphorical Questions

o   Metaphorical Sensory-Perceptual-Movement Wisdom of the Implicate Body

o   Not knowing Questions

o   Novelty-Numinosum-Neurogenesis Healing Path

o   Playful Games about Not Knowing

o   Privacy and creative choice

o   Questions Evoking Experience and Activity-dependent Exploring

o   Segmentalized Trance

o   Swearing Humorously With (Not At!)

o   Symptom Scaling 

o   Ultradian Mindbody Sensitivity and Messages

o   Utilizing the Patient’s own Words and Worldview

o   Weird, Unusual, Odd, Strange, Bizarre, Scary, but Interesting Experiences

For examples of using these micro-processes refer Coming to One’s Senses – By the Way.

Also refer:

Flexibility and Habit

Healing Ways Encyclopaedia

 

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