The underlying principles of BeActivated simply made sense to me right from Day 1 of level 1; “Whatever’s in the Mind is in the Body…” (the origin of my personal yoga practice) and that there are basic needs that must be met before anything else is allowed to happen.
During this weird, socially-distanced period, I ran some BeActivated workshops via Zoom, taking clients through self-activation. There were different outcomes for everyone and a whole range of levels of learning, as I expected with clients working remotely by themselves and encountering most of this stuff for the first time. But, I’m glad to say everyone reported having had fun and positive outcomes and all are curious to explore more.
One of my clients at the workshop is also a colleague. She’s a psychotherapist with whom I have collaborated to run experiential workshops for various public sector teams (teachers, youth offender support teams, and an adolescent support charity). We often centre these workshops around Resilience and we combine our varied skills and experience in the fields of mind/body connection for which we share a passion.
After the BeActivated workshop, she and I had a follow-up discussion; when we started talking about the work I do at the start of a session to get an idea of the patterns my client is running, she lit up in a way that is very familiar to me having worked with her – (it is very much like the cartoon “light-bulb moment”! ). “It’s so like how we apply Attachment Theory!”…
Attachment Theory says that if a child’s Primary Attachments (usually to parents) are not secure in their early development, then subsequent relationships and the way the person relates to the world are influenced by the fact that they are seeking a way to fulfill that basic need as a priority. This can limit the way relationships develop and result in repeated patterns of behaviour which compromise development and performance in many areas of life.
Finding the pattern is often a key to unlocking what was missing; that’s when the learning can begin to find the “healthy” way to meet the need so that there is the freedom to develop relationships with the world and other people.
This empowers clients to go forward recognising how they compensate (particularly under stress) and to take action to bring them back to the secure origin from which they can live and grow. Sound familiar?
BeActivated starts by looking at how we meet our basic survival needs of Breathing and Hip Flexion. If we do this efficiently ie with the diaphragm and the psoas then we expand and we’re strong and resilient; if not, then at the same time as we’re trying to develop, grow and relate, we are also grasping to meet those needs. We build our compensatory patterns, our defensive shapes, our “cheats” and we are, literally, bent out of shape.
In yoga, when things are working right we have a balance of Sthira and Sukha, sometimes translated as the “strength” and the “good space”, Desikachar describes these as ”alertness without tension” and “relaxation without dullness” and we find this balance when we’re running our 123.
So, in Attachment Theory you have Secure Primary Attachments at the core of your development, in BeActivated we have the 123; in yoga, we have Sthira and the Sukha. It strikes me that when you find a Truth you see its pattern and its parallel everywhere!
We are scratching the surface of the potential of this work and how grateful and privileged I feel to be a tiny part of it. (Not to mention the prospect of loads more fun to be had developing work with my psychotherapist friend!)