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Metamorphosis through Conscious Living – A Transpersonal Psychology Perspective
Editor(s):
Lindy McMullin, Regina U. Hess, Marcie Boucouvalas
Contributors:
Martine Garcin-Fradet, Arturo De Luca, Maria Cristina de Barros, Claudio Calcina, More…
Metamorphosis, the theme of this book, derives from the Ancient Greek language and refers to a transformative process that often includes disintegration and reintegration, on the route to conscious living with self, community and the world. This collection proposes that engagement with the sacred is what makes research and practice…
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Press
Article
How Accompanied Inner Communication (AIC) contributes to Metamorphosis
Author : Martine Garcin-Fradet
Martine Garcin-Fradet is an Eurotas certified transpersonal psychotherapist, teacher of “Transpersonal Inner Communication” practitioners. She also conducts systemic constellations and is a certified member of DGfS, (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Systemaufstellung). She created and developed “Accompanied Inner Communication”, as a direct result of her life’s path. Many year in foreign countries, and ten years in Japan, prepared her to constantly enlarge her belief system for the benefit of a vision of the human being that integrates various representations of the world and life. Her meeting with Pierre Weil was a decisive element that nudged her towards the transpersonal dimension of psychotherapeutic care.
Publications:
Quand la main devient messagère du Coeur, 2009 (When the Hand becomes the Heart’s messenger), Et si nos ancêtres parlaient à travers nous, 2008 (What if our ancestors were talking through us?) les Voix de la main, « The voices of the Hand” Dervy, 2012, A path to self, BoD, 2013, Du silence au verbe, le chaînon manquant, Dervy, 2014 (from Silence to the word, the missing link)
ABSTRACT.
This chapter is dedicated to a new Transpersonal approach, Accompanied Inner Communication (AIC), which contributes to metamorphosis and is a vector for transformation on various levels. AIC® has been conceived as much for people deprived of speech, as for those capable of verbal communication. The vision that one has of handicap is transformed through this accompaniment, which allows people deprived of speech to contribute to our own metamorphosis. AIC associates words with touch by means of speaking and supporting the hand of the person accompanied. A type of “disintegration” occurs when the repressed, lower level of the personal unconscious emerges. It includes all the neglected, undeveloped, unacknowledged parts of our personality that for the most part, originate in childhood. The “reintegration process” is permitted thanks to the mediation of the “accompanier”, welcoming without judging, which allows the painful memories to be dissolved and transformed. The Self reveals itself beyond words or rather via the words that emerge from the plenitude of each person’s symbolic expression. The process itself, thanks to the “heart to heart” contact guaranteed by accompanying the impulses of the hand, connects the accompanied person to his or her Essence. People who are unable to communicate verbally, seem to live in the transpersonal field (Jill Bolt Taylor, “My Stroke of Insight”), so they are the ones, who, thanks to accompaniment, participate in changing our references, take us higher and make us grow.
Keywords: Transpersonal field, Transformation, Metamorphosis, Self, Consciousness. Awareness.
Introduction
Accompanied Inner Communication is not well known, but it has proven to be very promising. It is an approach that allows the expression of a part of the self to which we do not ordinarily have access. Accompanied Inner Communication associates words through touch by means of speaking and supporting the hand of the person accompanied. This communication acts as a bridge welcoming, and listening at a deeper level, which allows each person accompanied, to structure and live his or her own life in a better way.. As is the case every time a new potential arises for humanity, inner communication emerges in different places and in different ways. It is even possible that a mother who has an overwhelming need to establish contact with her child who has been deprived of speech, can communicate spontaneously with him thanks to accompanied writing, by supporting his hand, without any prior training.
My own path has been more difficult and three encounters to this approach that was to become my own, were essential ; accompanied Inner Communication was thus 2 tour2 the meeting of three rivers that were quite distinct and yet complementary. Chronologically, the first encounter was with Transpersonal Psychology through Pierre Weil, the French pioneer. . Accompanied Inner Communication was then elaborated within the field of Transpersonal Psychology combining the methods of Facilitated Communication1 and Family Constellations, an approach initiated by Bert Hellinger1.
A Unified Field Approach
This second approach showed how much everything is linked in the heart of a “knowing field”2 . Quantum physics has brought a close link between matter and the psyche to light. As the astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani explains in his book Synchronicity, the relation between physics and psyche from Pauli and Jung to Chopra 3 , everything is there, in the moment of the sitting, that benefits the person we are accompanying.
This approach, when used as a psychotherapeutic aid, has revealed a dimension of consciousness which is not usually explored. The process can be summarized in a few words: By supporting the palm of the hand over a computer keyboard, an expression of the inner voice can emerge. The facilitator accompanies a weak, but tangible, impulse that he/she perceive from the accompanied person’s arm, allowing access to the keys on the computer keyboard. From an Asian viewpoint, the palm of the hand is another center representing the heart. We can interpret supporting the hand as a gesture connecting heart to heart ; the accompanying and the accompanied persons are connected at a deeper Transpersonal level. This accompaniment permits a progressive liberation from the sensation of fragmentation, which stems from repressed wounds, allowing one to f a feeling of unity consciously. It is an approach that is aligned with the consciousness of one’s heart – as an extension of the French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto’s and C.G. Jung’s discoveries4.
Accompanied inner Communication® has been conceived just as much, for people deprived of speech, as it has been for those capable of verbal communication. The vision that one has of handicap is transformed through this accompaniment. The texts that have been collected show that no matter what the difficulties are, preventing someone from communicating with words, an intact consciousness is deployed at a level of thought, different from one’s cognitive and sensorial system in itself.
Accompanied Inner Communication is related to a transpersonal type of communication; there is an expansion of consciousness during the session. The process itself, thanks to heart to heart contact guaranteed by accompanying the impulses of the hand, connects the accompanied person to his or her Essence. The accompaniment permits a progressive liberation from the sensation of fragmentation, which stems from repressed wounds, allowing one to find a feeling of unity consciously. Painful memories emerge from the unconscious and are integrated into a consciousness that grows with each session.
Disintegration and Integration of the Dissociated Aspects of the Psyche
To become the being that we truly are, implies integrating all of the aspects of our personality little by little, which were until the present moment dissociated from the unifying center or center of truth, leading their own existence. However, we must first be aware of these hidden and repressed aspects of the personality.
A “disintegration” occurs when these repressed, lower levels of the personal unconscious emerge. It includes all the neglected, undeveloped, unacknowledged parts of our personality that for the most part originate in childhood.
During an AIC sitting, expression that is concerned with the repressed aspects in the psyche are immediately reintegrated. Accompanying helps to establish contact with what I refer to as the « center of truth » and from this center, the accompanied person welcomes and integrates all of the hidden or sometimes dissociated aspects of his or her personality. The goal is to allow a unifying process of one’s being and an expansion of consciousness through the recognition and acceptance of all aspects of being, thus reconciling oppositions. In fact, this approach allows for reintegration to take place because the therapist is in alignment with consciousness in the heart, while problems stem from the past, that were created at a lower level of consciousness. As Einstein stressed, a problem can only be solved from a higher level of awareness than the level that created it5 .
The “reintegration process” is also permitted thanks to the mediation of the “accompanier”, welcoming without judging, which allows the painful memories to be dissolved and transformed. In the same session, buried pain and hidden resources of the unconscious can be expressed and the AIC text acts as the unifying center of these polarities. The process is very similar to what can be experienced during Jungian psychotherapy. What Radmila Moacanim writes in her book, “The Essence of Jung’s Psychology and Tibetan Buddhism”, also applies to the process of Accompanied Inner Communication6 . AIC opens this communication between the conscious mind and its unconscious counterpart. As Radmila Moacanim also mentions, symbols contribute to the communication between the conscious mind and its unconscious counterpart7 . The words which emerge with inner communication have a symbolic value and contribute to the transformation which takes place during a sitting. Based upon the psychology of depths initiated by Carl Gustav Jung, a symbol contains a great amount of energy that man can transform by amplifying it, sublimating it, and giving it a new orientation. A major function of the symbol is to allow a transformation of the psyche to take place. In general the person facilitated can easily decipher the symbol. A client in her first sitting, announced “I am not well, but I have received so little love in my life”. After a time of exchange and centering, I said, “We are going to ask your hand to conduct us to the key word for today’s sitting”. The key word was the word “Elderberry”, which led her immediately to say “ Ah yes, Elderberry preserves”. Then, after a few minutes, these words were written: “man with the Elderberry loved me”. Immediately the person exclaims, “Ah yes, my grandfather made Elderberry preserves, we were very close and I loved him so much, he died when I was barely ten years old”.
As we just noticed with the term “Elderberry”, the content which a simple word may comprise goes well beyond its usual meaning. For this client the word “Elderberry” was a symbol for love and she alone could decipher the sentence she had written. Being in contact with the love received from her grandfather as a child allowed her to enter the desintegration process. It was time for the forgotten wounds to unveil themselves and become integrated. The keyword “Elderberry” and the love which this symbol meant opened the door to a possible transformation. In such a situation, the word can be seen as a sphere which covers a vast content.
Sometimes I feel almost like a “juggler” in that several words can come to mind while only one suits what needs to be expressed. It has to do with rooting out the essence that may be found in one word and then as the spring becomes a river, the sacred dimension of the text can be respected as it emerges from its source.
The transformation of what comes to light begins in the course of the sitting and the inner work continues its action for several days. Those aspects of the personality which could not be accepted consciously, slowly emerges bit by bit and changes word after word. An adult thus recalls his childhood in AIC :
“Feelings of abandonment, sadness hidden in me, mother in accusation, boundaries crossed, mother betrayed, I feel rejected, humiliation concerning mother, coat of sadness on my shoulders” And, during the same sitting, expresses this: “I take off the leaden covering which annihilated me, I uproot from my center the heavy weight of sadness. The child heals in me, the path of reconciliation with myself liberates creative power. The interior sun brings to blossom, the rose of the heart.”
Based upon my experience, the forgotten wounds which unveil themselves through the texts only emerge at the time when the person is ready to accept them. The text, like a mirror, sends back to the accompanied person the image of a painful experience. But it allows him also to get in touch with his interior force and to construct a socle on which the unification of his ego can take place. Thus this client who has great difficulties in putting himself forward, can find the force which he needs to get in touch again with his inner power in himself. He is discreet, the position he holds does not correspond to his competencies and, what is more, he tires easily, as though deprived of energy. From the very start of the first sitting he recalls in his text his intra-uterine life: « Coldness placed in stomach sack (he explains to me that his mother wore a girdle during her pregnancy), all my energy intake blocked. Utter fear of leaving the soft nest of swimming. I perceive life as a storm to be weathered. ». And a little farther: « Joy to have the wind of peace blow on unrestrained swimming. In me the seed of confidence in life and in me is insinuated.» Swimming refers here to the fact that the baby was in the mother’s womb. At a following sitting, after he had asked his mother what happened while she was pregnant, he explains me the meaning of the word “storm” in his text. A part of the family house went on fire during his mother’s pregnancy and she had to leave the house in a hurry. He also mentions about the great liberation he had felt after the previous sitting.
How people deprived of speech contribute to our metamorphosis
The content of texts emerging from people deprived of the use of speech will draw my attention very rapidly to a dominant characteristic : these beings feel in themselves that which is experienced well beyond their own individuality. The long silence that these people have experienced probably opens a path to the unconscious that we, who live in noise, no longer know how to take. People deprived of the use of speech accede not only to their own personal unconscious, but also to the collective and transpersonal unconscious. So they are the ones, who, thanks to accompaniment, participate in changing our references, taking us higher and making us grow. A young woman who suffers from autism, shows me how much, in some ways, I am the one with the handicap. I do not always understand what she means. When I tell her this, she answers me:
“Don’t try to understand. I’m talking to you about the world within. The world that can’t be seen with the eyes and that the background of the eye knows in transparency. The negative of the photo of life. Hassel to find a term to name the unnamable because what I feel in me I cannot say otherwise. Find the time line, walk between the words and chose the one that goes out on the ribbon.”
Here again, what this young woman evokes, shows us that before being a tool for dialogue, AIC gives the floor. It’s not so much about communication in the sense of an exchange, but rather about communication with oneself. Here thought and the inner feelings of this person can finally be given free course. She needs to say, for herself, what she is experiencing. She describes her world but doesn’t really expect that I should understand. And when I try to understand, here is what she answers:
“You, you are still a caterpillar, stuck in the ruts, closed in by the rings of matter. I see things differently. I look from up-high, like the butterfly which has left its cocoon and flies away, there high in the sky. The butterfly flies away and leaves its envelope down below, balanced on a blade of grass.”
This young woman is the one, who, thanks to accompaniment, participates in changing our own references, taking us higher and making us grow. Most people in situations of handicap allow us to make progress, by obliging us to look at ourselves and the world from a different angle. Their wounds, through their writings, invite us to look at our own wounds as trampolines towards the actualization of our potential.
Conclusion
Experience has shown how much each difficulty weathered is in fact a bearing indicating a way to actualization. The force which exists potentially in each person is often one side of a coin, of which the other is the sufferances met. Each obstacle thus contains its own solution implicity and once the solution has been found, the obstacle can become an advantage. As a consequence of the metamorphosis which takes place through accompaniment in Inner Communication, the path of buried pain becomes the road to consciousness for the accompanied person, and thus, to awareness for the “accompanier”.
Accompanied Inner Communication is still only at its beginning and many doors remain to be opened. All is consciousness and the only restrictions to communication are those that our own limitations impose upon us. As Massimo Teodorani says in his book « Synchronicity: the Relationship between Physics and the Psyche from Pauli and Jung to Chopra », psychism and matter are not separated8 .
The process of inner communication engages one’s body in a space of unity in which the accompanied person and the one accompanying meet during the time allotted to the sitting. A method such as this raises important questions and encourages metaphysical considerations about our origin and our destiny as human beings. Such an approach shows how much everything is linked in the heart of the Information Field surrounding us.
What emerges with AIC also shows how much our exterior experience is the mirror of what is taking place within us. Which means that my interior universe determines the exterior universe in which I live. The conflicts that I experience on the exterior are in fact a barometer of my interior conflicts. Realizing that everyone is responsible for their lives allows us to leave behind the position of victim in order to take our future development in hand.
Notes
1 Crossley R. (1994) “An assistive communication technique in which the primary message receiver makes physical contact
2 Translation of the term used in German : wissende Feld, to designate an information field which opens up in relation to the request of the person come to consult.
3 Teodorani M. (2010) “The psyche is the tool which allows us at any moment to remember who we are and to what we belong, and through a strange process, it seems to coincide with matter in its most elementary forms, as the world of quantics bears witness”, p. 5.
4 Walter P.F. (2010) “Dolto’s psychoanalytic approach focuses on language and is based upon the power of the spoken word.”, p.11.
5 Einstein, A. "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.”.
6 Moacanin, R. (2003 ).“The transformation of personality takes place between the ego and the unconscious out of which a new unified being emerges. It is a new being, yet not entirely new, for it was already there, but dormant and hidden in the chaos of the unconscious” p 34.
7 Moacanin, R. (2003). “The process requires an open communication between the conscious mind and its unconscious counterpart, a sensitivity to the signal of the unconscious, which speaks the language of symbols.”, p 34.
8 Teodorani M. (2010) “Psychism is not separated from the world of matter. Matter, that is to say the nature of the creation as a whole, is only the lowest level of the collective unconscious. The objective reality of the universe is thus the result of an amalgamated synchrony between mind (or the psychism) and matter, of which the collective unconscious represents the common substrate. (…) One may without a doubt consider these events as an empiric proof – even if it cannot yet be tested from a scientific point of view – of the existence of an indissoluble unity which underlies psychism and matter.» p 27- 28.
References
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Einstein, A. « Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.”. Source to be verified
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Garcin-Fradet, M. (2013). A path to Self. Hambourg: Books on Demand 2013
Garcin-Fradet, M. (2013). Die Hand, Bote des Herzens. Hambourg: Books on Demand 2013
Garcin-Fradet, M. (2009). Quand la main devient messagère du cœur. Aubagne: Quintessence 2009
Garcin-Fradet, M. (2012). Les Voix de la main, faire de ses blessures le levier de sa réalisation. Paris: Dervy
Moacanin, R. (2003). The Essence of Jung’Psychologie and Tibetan Buddhism. Boston : Wisdom Publication
Teodorani M. (2010). Synchronicité, Le rapport entre physique et psyche de Pauli et Jung à Chopra, Cesena Italy, Macro editions. P.5 (Synchronicity, the relation between physique and psyche from Pauli and Jung to Chopra)
Walter, P. F. (2010). Françoise Dolto and language, Book, Review, Quotes and Comments. Newark: Sirius C Media Galaxy LLC.