I really appreciated how this balanced your personal experience with the model building. I like the model a lot more than a model that arrives seemingly ex nihilo. (On no, this is why self help books are written this way isn’t it? I’m also just now realizing that the biggest thing I dislike about most self help books is that the author does this pattern but usually exclusively with other people’s problems and not their own).
Samskara theory from classical yoga traditions is (partially) the idea that by default people spend a lot of extra effort reacting to a mashup of the present and the salient bits of the past that are trying to do transfer learning but in practice winds up with a traffic jam of competing constraints. One of the big ideas is that digesting experiences fully is a skill that can be trained like any other and that with such training you eventually hit an inflection point where you process things faster than they come in and will eventually hit what’s being referred to here as emotional inbox zero. The constraints idea is also why you wind up with this limit where tangles get exponentially worse when added together. The wicked tangles paralyze you along exactly the degrees of freedom you need for processing.
Also from Yoga we have the idea that a lot of this processing can be done purely physically/somatically, which can be dramatically less tangled than engaging with all the mental contents. I’ve taken to calling the endless therapy loop as the Integration Trap, and liken it to whack a mole. If you aren’t improving your digestion skill then you are constantly firefighting rather than actually decreasing the rate of new moles popping up.
Yeah I know the somatic stuff works well for some people I know. I haven’t currently gotten much out of it when I’ve tried it. (I resonated with Scott Alexander’ recent “are woo-nonresponders defective?”, where, like, it’s totally a plausible hypothesis that I do have some kind of hangups that prevent me from getting value out of somatic stuff that I’d ideally overcome. But, also maybe people just vary?)
Traditional yoga again has arguing takes about this, with some schools claiming that it should work for everyone if you just ‘do it right’ or ‘just punch harder’ etc, and other schools claiming that such practices are basically...not useless per se, but unlikely to do much dramatic for people who haven’t had certain prerequisite experiences (and for some people this seems to be never).
FWIW I think a lot of “somatic stuff” that’s around is either poor quality or comes with very poor pedagogy. In my model there are also subtle and (even for many teachers) commonly illegible prerequisites. Also filtration processes on students and schools, people writing books, etc.
Also, my take on ACT therapy is that a significant part of the functional juice there is around untangling skills in general (shame at not having them/gained them at the ‘correct’ developmental age and context, paralysis at certain situations, etc.) after which you have a meta-tool for everything else. I think this is super relevant b/c I claim public school is giving most people some skill acquisition related trauma.
On the topic of meta tangles more generally, I think one of the reasons these sorts of things are so perennially difficult is that on the margin noticing certain things serve as an infohazard for your current way of life (imagine yourself in the same situation of needing months to years but having children and a strained marriage). The system, on some level, notices this and shuts things down because they are too mission critical to have a code refactoring done on them in production.
Hatha or whatever is fine, it’s just a focus on training the nervous system rather than muscular strength. Going slowly and paying attention to the breath and heart beat are very helpful. Trauma releasing exercises might also work but I don’t have experience with them.
I really appreciated how this balanced your personal experience with the model building. I like the model a lot more than a model that arrives seemingly ex nihilo. (On no, this is why self help books are written this way isn’t it? I’m also just now realizing that the biggest thing I dislike about most self help books is that the author does this pattern but usually exclusively with other people’s problems and not their own).
Samskara theory from classical yoga traditions is (partially) the idea that by default people spend a lot of extra effort reacting to a mashup of the present and the salient bits of the past that are trying to do transfer learning but in practice winds up with a traffic jam of competing constraints. One of the big ideas is that digesting experiences fully is a skill that can be trained like any other and that with such training you eventually hit an inflection point where you process things faster than they come in and will eventually hit what’s being referred to here as emotional inbox zero. The constraints idea is also why you wind up with this limit where tangles get exponentially worse when added together. The wicked tangles paralyze you along exactly the degrees of freedom you need for processing.
Also from Yoga we have the idea that a lot of this processing can be done purely physically/somatically, which can be dramatically less tangled than engaging with all the mental contents. I’ve taken to calling the endless therapy loop as the Integration Trap, and liken it to whack a mole. If you aren’t improving your digestion skill then you are constantly firefighting rather than actually decreasing the rate of new moles popping up.
Yeah I know the somatic stuff works well for some people I know. I haven’t currently gotten much out of it when I’ve tried it. (I resonated with Scott Alexander’ recent “are woo-nonresponders defective?”, where, like, it’s totally a plausible hypothesis that I do have some kind of hangups that prevent me from getting value out of somatic stuff that I’d ideally overcome. But, also maybe people just vary?)
Traditional yoga again has arguing takes about this, with some schools claiming that it should work for everyone if you just ‘do it right’ or ‘just punch harder’ etc, and other schools claiming that such practices are basically...not useless per se, but unlikely to do much dramatic for people who haven’t had certain prerequisite experiences (and for some people this seems to be never).
FWIW I think a lot of “somatic stuff” that’s around is either poor quality or comes with very poor pedagogy. In my model there are also subtle and (even for many teachers) commonly illegible prerequisites. Also filtration processes on students and schools, people writing books, etc.
Also, my take on ACT therapy is that a significant part of the functional juice there is around untangling skills in general (shame at not having them/gained them at the ‘correct’ developmental age and context, paralysis at certain situations, etc.) after which you have a meta-tool for everything else. I think this is super relevant b/c I claim public school is giving most people some skill acquisition related trauma.
On the topic of meta tangles more generally, I think one of the reasons these sorts of things are so perennially difficult is that on the margin noticing certain things serve as an infohazard for your current way of life (imagine yourself in the same situation of needing months to years but having children and a strained marriage). The system, on some level, notices this and shuts things down because they are too mission critical to have a code refactoring done on them in production.
Do you have recommendations on what types/names of yoga to try out for this?
I would expect that it’s more important to have a quality teacher than the specific label that’s used.
If you want to look for labels “Somatic Yoga” might be one.
Hatha or whatever is fine, it’s just a focus on training the nervous system rather than muscular strength. Going slowly and paying attention to the breath and heart beat are very helpful. Trauma releasing exercises might also work but I don’t have experience with them.