Memory, Mystery & Meaning
Each Study Hub lesson explores a gate from the Movement Medicine Mandala. The Hub's monthly lesson structure is made of weekly practices available for members every Monday. You're welcome to join the Hub anytime and no prior Movement Medicine experience is required. All live content is recorded and available for your convenience.
In this lesson with Susannah, we will learn about the mysterious process of memory. We will learn about how much we don't remember and how memories can change their tone as we remember them, about how they are part of the present. And we will take an embodied exploration together to look into the realm of our past to find meaning, transformation and more ground for our lives now. We seek to becoming a witness to our memories and to learn how to actively cultivating helpful perspectives for life and, as we get to know a little better how we are "wired" we may be able to use our instrument more skilfully to play our part in the orchestra of life.
In the Keynote, we'll take a look at:
- How much we lose really fast from our short term memories that our inner operating systems do not deem to be important.
- How do we select what is important to remember? (Clue - emotional significance).
- Memory is not like a book which one opens and then puts away again unchanged. Each opening and re-visiting of a memory (or a story) colours it with the current reality within which we do the remembering. This is one of the reasons that psychotherapeutic processes can work when the holder of the space is attuned.
- Memory exists in the present, affects the present and is part of the present in a malleable way.
- We tend to remember experiences which confirm our current perspective.
- We know from neuroscience (and possibly you also recognise this from personal experience) that scary or negative memories are more easily and quickly committed into our neural networks than positive or pleasant ones. This 'negative bias' has evolutionary sense (its more important in terms of survival to remember a snake trying to bite us than seeing a beautiful flower) but can impede our growth and capacity to learn in the modern world.
- Remembering aspects of our life, whether positive or negative, functions as an incantation, whether for our empowerment or the opposite.
- It's impossible to STOP ourselves thinking about something, but we can 'load the dice' in favour of cultivating supportive and meaningful memories which provide an enriching context for our understanding of ourselves and our lives now. That's what this month's Live Class and Mini Embodiment practice focus on.
- Meaning evolves throughout life. Finding meaning in previous challenging experiences is one way way we bring a redemptive perspective to them.
