The Rootstock of Synchronosophy (Part I, Chapter 3/6)

Nutrients for Synchronosophy

When you steal a people's language, you leave their soul bewildered.

〰 John O'Donohue 〰

photo © Zack Reiner on Unsplash

Language as a Tool for Self-Knowledge

»Some words die caged. They are difficult to translate.«

〰 Francisco X. Alarcón 〰

UNCAGED WORDS, photo © Jeff James on Unsplash

Six years before moving to Totnes I earned my MA in Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany). Until adding holistic medicine to my skill repertoire I worked as a freelance translator for a couple of publishing houses in Germany and Switzerland.

In the final year of my homœopathic training I received the first request from a German publisher to translate a new homœopathic book by South African author Jonathan Shore (1943-2023) from English into German. That project kick started a new career as a translator of homœopathic literature.

New homœopathic schools were popping up in Germany, Switzerland and Austria at the time ~ all organising conferences and seminars, and they were looking for simultaneous interpreters. I was working in a tiny niche market, and that niche was exploding.

Before I knew it, I was in demand for gigs as an ‘expert in homœopathic translations’. Sitting in a cabin, ears covered by headphones, talking into a microphone, transmitting the words of some eminent homœopath on stage into the earbuds of eager students in real time.

Having never done simultaneous interpretation before (the training for translators of written materials and simultaneous interpreters of the spoken word are worlds apart!), this wasn’t a steep learning curve ~ it was a rocket launch!

During my first weekend seminar I was so nervous, I could hardly breathe. By the end of that weekend I’d awakened a dormant potential I’d never known I had, and found myself on a new trajectory.

In addition to a life changing discovery of a hidden talent, I learned that there are other ways of learning and graduating than schools and universities. I learned that graduating ‘on the job’ can be a more powerful and effective way to gain a qualification than being fed information and data via books and academic papers, by people with heads full of information and data, hogging their chairs at academic institutions.

The reason I am sharing this part of my career is because my translation skills, and the experience of becoming a simultaneous interpreter practically ‘overnight’ have had a vital influence on the development of Synchronosophy.

(No worries! the synchronosopher’s practice doesn’t involve any foreign language skills. Anyone can do this work in their own language.)

The practice of synchronosophy teaches us to communicate with our inner languages and to interpret everyday experience simultaneously in real life.

Listening to the Felt Sense

»Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness.«

〰 Eugene Gendlin 〰

FELT SENSE photo © Gabriel Benois on Unsplash

Language is not only about talking, or writing, or the ability to say and write words, or to have an impressive vocabulary. Language is just as much about listening, and interpreting meaning, which we call understanding.

During my linguistic studies and training as a literary translator, a good friend and fellow student introduced me to this (at the time) new technique called Focusing. It was developed by Eugene Gendlin (1926 - 2017), a philosopher in Chicago and colleague of Carl Rogers (1902-1987), founder of humanistic psychology.

In the ruling climate of psychotherapy, where therapists were supposed to assume the role of the omniscient healer, tell their clients what was wrong with them and find a magic cure, Rogers was a heretic. He believed that the client knew what was wrong, and that the journey towards healing had to be a joint venture.

Rogers introduced what became known as person-centred psychotherapy. First dismissed as a ‘renegade’, later celebrated as a ‘pioneer’, Carl Rogers was invited to set up a counselling center at the University of Chicago.

Eugene Gendlin signed up for the counselling course, not because he wanted to become a therapist but out of interest in the theory. During this period, and through the inspiring exchange with Rogers, Gendlin developed his method called Focusing.

I’m not going to go into deeper explanations here, you can read all about it (and watch some videos) on the website of the International Focusing Institute. Another brilliant introduction is available for free download here under the title The Power of Focusing. And anyone interested in studying this method further can visit the Gendlin Online Library of the International Focusing Institute, where you can find plenty more free resources.

Gendlin observed patients spontaneously accessing their felt sense during therapy sessions. The Focusing method developed mainly through his perceptive observations with the sharp eye of a philosopher.

Eugene Gendlin’s special expertise within his own discipline is called philosophy of the implicit. He was convinced, based on many case studies, that true healing is only possible when the patient is able to access their felt sense and formulate the implicit meaning. Carl Rogers, sharing this conviction, integrated the method into his therapeutic approach.

In Synchronosophy, we use Focusing and the felt sense as one of the vital and transformative Inner Languages available to all human seekers of self-knowledge. The moment you tap into the true meaning of a negative experience, and find the right word for it, all inner tension spontaneously subsides.

Working with the felt sense can be used as one of the transformative tools of Synchronosophy.

The Inner Language of Emotion

»To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.«

〰 Isadora Duncan 〰

EMOTIONAL BODY, photo © Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

I come from a land where emotions were taboo. The nonemotional population of my homeland developed the belief that emotions were dangerous, or evil, or superfluous, or all three. Therefore they were best eliminated.

WHY?!

For decades, I have struggled to understand this. I needed to figure out the deeper reasons because I didn’t fit the profile of the ideal nonemotional native in nonemotion-land. I couldn’t help it. I was hyperemotional. I assumed I was born that way.

What on earth is the problem with emotions? I wish I’d asked my parents.

Such a question alone would have been off limits.

What’s your problem with emotions? My parents might have replied.

Although it is difficult to say this with certainty, because I have no scientious* memory of it, I am sure my mother did her best to ‘kill off’ all emotions in her children. I do have evidence though, because that’s what she recommended when I had my babies. (*see definition of scientious here)

“You have to let them cry,” she would declare. “Eventually they will stop.”

How can you let a baby cry and not go and see what they might want or need? I ignored my mother’s incomprehensible advice.

It would have broken my heart to treat my own children like those poor orphans in Romania that you sometimes read about in some terrible reports of horrendous child abuse.

I was not an abused child. Far from it. So why am I telling my story in the context of trauma?

Because in my early adulting years I was showing signs which looked very similar to what would now be diagnosed as ‘symptoms of complex PTSD from ACE’ (= post traumatic stress disorder from adverse childhood experience). I was behaving as if I had experienced some form of childhood abuse, which was entirely inexplicable.

I was brought up in a sheltered and supportive family home. All our needs were met. We had good, healthy, organic food, high quality clothes and toys, a good education by private tutors, a well stocked library of children’s books. We learned to play instruments. We had music, art, and craft lessons. Our creativity and minds were well nurtured.

Only at the emotional level we were starved. We were not overtly neglected. We were not even explicitly taught to not show any emotions. We just knew that we were expected to mimic the nonemotional behaviour of our elders, who had learned it from their elders, and so on.

It has taken me the best part of my adult life to figure out ‘what was wrong with me’. All the way through adolescing I was convinced that it was my fault. Whatever went wrong or felt wrong was always my fault. There was a fault line running through my inner landscape, which could only be corrected by trying harder.

My mother was always perfect. She even earned an Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her tireless charitable work. In my father’s eyes she could do no wrong. There was never an argument between my parents. They knew how to dance with each other without treading on each other’s toes.

Some psychological theories suggest that ‘perfectionism in parental role models can set children up for failure’. From what I can gather, this still seems to be a valid ‘diagnosis’ now, in 2024, and for ages I was convinced that this was ‘my problem’.

Now I know, I was barking up the wrong goal post! What I’d taken for my ‘family tree’ ~ because perfectionism runs through my clan left, right, centre, and in all directions ~ turned out to be a telegraph pole set up by the global network of psychological theories.

Now I know that there was a dark and traumatic connection with the eugenics program of the Nazis, which was top-secret. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people were murdered in so-called ‘mercy killings’.

Emotional sensitivity was considered a ‘mental weakness’. Keeping one’s emotions under a tight lid was a survival strategy. Nobody was able to talk about this. Nobody dared to even touch upon this sensitive subject.

The fear of emotions in my parents had been a trauma response all along. The best way to deal with this life threatening expression of oneself was to shut the whole topic out altogether ~ keep those emotional monsters in the inner dungeon and hope they would starve to death.

Invisible trauma is hard to detect and impossible to transform ~ until it reveals itself. Trauma is often judged by the degree of violence and abuse a person has been exposed to. And of course there is a lot of validity in that. Sexual abuse and violence in childhood, or during any other period of life, is a horrendous experience! Nobody can deny this.

At the same time, it is also true that the degree of the experience of trauma is dependent on age, disposition and sensitivity of the victim. A newborn baby can have a serious trauma response to relatively ‘harmless’ events.

“Children can be traumatised not just by something terrible happening to them but by not having their needs met, by not being seen, not being heard, not being held, those are wounding for a child,” says Gabor Maté, medical doctor, trauma researcher, and author of the bestselling book The Myth of Normal.

Trauma is not a competition. Suffering is subjective and personal. The experience cannot be measured by the events that happened or didn’t happen to a person, objectively.

Trauma is a subjective experience. Our emotional reactions can lead us through the inner jungle, along the hidden and overgrown path of repressed family memories, to the original source, where revelations are buried in a secret cave.

Emotions don’t die. Unprocessed trauma doesn’t vanish when a person dies. Our ancestors pass their unfinished business on to us, the next generation. We don’t only inherit physical features, and disposition for certain diseases, and perhaps some family heirlooms. The emotional suffering of our elders is passed on to us as well.

“Babies cry the tears of their parents,” says Franz Renggli, a Swiss researcher and therapist for prenatal and perinatal trauma.

The Language of Emotions is one of the vital inner languages in the practice of Synchronosophy. We think of it as the language of healing, because it plays a crucial part to help identify our personal trauma pattern and heal the ‘emotional body’, no matter how much time has passed since the original wounding.

Synchronosophers use the inner Language of Emotions to identify personal trauma patterns and heal the emotional body.

Missed the earlier chapters? Click the links

Chapter 1, Chapter 2