Repatterning
Focusing into your body sensations is what you do in the deeper experiential transformation practices. Repatterning is how you do it.
Repatterning is more a way of doing something than it is something you do.
It is a very subtle and effective way of getting to the level of experience where experiences are formed (patterned) and then changing those formative patterns. When you change the formative patterns, the outer experiences change without ever working directly with them.
Repatterning is easier and more effective than working with your outer experiences because it operates at the level of cause, and your outer experiences are the effect of that cause.
Where Repatterning Comes From
Very stunning and rapid results have taken place through repatterning in the bodywork field. These practices have the same kind of stunning and rapid results in the fields of personal experiencing and relationships. This is because they are an extension and application of repatterning.
The bodywork methods that are the forerunners of these practices include such "somatic" or "psycho-somatic" practices as The Alexander Technique, The Feldenkrais Method, The Trager Method, Body-Mind Centering, Sensory Awareness, Sensory Integration, Gendlin's Focusing and Ilan Shalif's General Sensate Focusing.
These are some of the main ones that are somewhat well known. Many others could be mentioned also, but this is just to give you an idea of what is being referred to.
A Completely New Approach
None of these methods actually enter into the actual procedures of the most advanced experiential transformation practices. What they contribute is an understanding of a completely new way of approaching human experience.
Instead of approaching experiences in the usual old way as objects to be manipulated for certain effects, repatterning actually interacts dynamically with your actual process of experiencing. It is this underlying process that is the key to getting into the level of cause. Once you are at the level of cause you are playing an entirely different game.
Repatterning emotions, experiences, life and relationships through these practices is an entirely different game than any method not based on repatterning.
"Dynamic Pattern Transcendence"
In my opinion, based on decades of research, experience and experimentation in this field, the practice I developed called Free-Beingness is the only personal growth practice that faithfully and accurately extends the major essential elements of repatterning that were discovered in the field of bodywork, to the whole field of life and relationships. (See below for what these essential elements of repatterning are.) It is therefore the only personal growth practice that has the depth and effectiveness that these disciplines have had in their field. It is possible that other experiential transformation practices are also on this level, but I haven't found any yet. And so I will use Free-Beingness as my example here.
Free-Beingness not only extends repatterning. It takes the principle of repatterning to a new level. Instead of merely repatterning, Free-Beingness has the effect of dynamic pattern transcendence.
This goes beyond re-arranging the elements of experiencing, which is what repatterning does, into creating newness in the elements of experiencing.
With Dynamic Pattern Transcendence the old patterns of experiencing are not moved around, re-arranged or reconfigured. They don't really change at all in this sense. What happens is that they dissolve, fade away, disappear. Something entirely new emerges.
This is similar to having creative breakthroughs in any area of life, where something entirely new and unexpected emerges in an "aha!" moment. InFree-Beingness the creative breakthroughs are on the most basic level of the deepest emotions and feelings that form all your experiences.
How It Works
Dynamic Pattern Transcendence is a principle of nature. What it means is that patterns in any natural system, however fixed and rigid they might appear to be, will go into a freer, more flexible, more flowing condition by themselves without force or effort if given a context that skillfully invites this.
This is what Free-Beingness does in the natural system of emotions and feelings and the experiences that flow from these.
What Makes It Work
There are a few principles that explain what makes dynamic pattern transcendence work. These are the basics of how Free-Beingness is practiced, and they all work together in synergy. For now, briefly, here they are:
1. Ecstasy Transcendence
Expansive pleasurable experiences ease you into a transcendence of old patterns that makes your experiencing more relaxed, flowing and dynamic.
(This is specific to Dynamic Pattern Transcendence. The rest apply to all repatterning methods.)
1.a. Ecstasy Transcendence leads the way. (This means that it eases the way for all the other repatterning principles to work better.)
2. Direct Experiencing
When you approach all you experiences by directily
experiencing them within your own feeling sense of self (i.e. in your
body) rather than treating them like they were external objects -
analyzing them, diagnosing them or treating them as problems,
conditions, or "issues" - then those experiences more
naturally and easily come to open up and spread out into your overall
flow of experiencing, thereby flowing more easily themselves. They
change without effort to make them change and at the same time get more
integrated into your whole feeling sense of self.
Direct experiencing means bodily experiencing, i.e. the bodily sensations in the experience you are focusing on, or the bodily sensations of the feelings in your experience. As explained in the previous section on Focusing, your direct experience of bodily sensations is where deep fundamental change takes place through natural biofeedback without instruments.
3. Indirect Action
Relaxing, comfortable, indirect actions which gently ease you out of old patterns, inviting a flow into spontaneous new actions, work much better than goal-oriented actions or actions that oppose other actions.
This approach not only works better but it also skirts the pain and discomfort that can cause closing-down types of reactions (sometimes mistakenly called "resistances" and "defenses.")
3.a. (This follows from #'s 1 and 3): Focusing into pleasurable experiences works much better than going into pain or painful experiences.
4. The Power Of Gentleness
At the formative pattern level gentleness and subtlety work best, but force and intensity don't work and may even be harmful
5. Differentiation
Fine differentiation of the elements of experiencing spontaneously leads to greater fluidity and flexibility in your experiencing.
(This is because where there is more differentiation there are more possibilities for movement. Example: Compare how differentiated your hands are compared to your feet, and how much more movement you have in your hands.)
6. Spontaneous Generalization
Repatterning in one area or level of experiencing spontaneously generalizes to other areas and levels.
(This is useful to know for all experiences, but it is especially important in dealing with painful experiences.
Because repatterning spontaneously generalizes, it is always completely unecessary to go into painful experiences. The repatterning into newness that takes place through gentle, pleasurable indirect actions spontaneously spreads to the painful experiences without your ever going directly into those painful experiences.)
Putting This To Good Use
These principles of dynamic pattern transcendence are about as different from the standard ways of working with emotions, psychology and relationships (in counseling, therapy and conflict resolution methods) as day is from night. This is why Free-Beingness has such remarkable results.
These principles make for an entirely new and unique way of working with the entire range of experiencing. As in the bodywork field where they originated, their synergy easily creates far-reaching results that were previously thought to be very difficult to achieve or even impossible.
Putting this way of working together with the essential factor that makes for all real experiential change (i.e. focusing into your bodily sensations, as explained in the previous section), is what makesFree-Beingness unique and uniquely effective.
Dynamic Emotional Pattern Transcendence
When you approach your emotions as patterns of movement (e-motions) within your body - motions of your bodily sensations - just like the patterns of outward bodily movement that bodywork repatterning works with, then deep emotional change becomes easy.
When you don't dramatize your emotions or make stories, problems or "issues" out of them (as in counseling, therapy or conflict resolution) you can work with them just like bodywork works with body movement. You do this, as described in the previous section on Focusing, by putting your attention on your bodily sensations. And you also do it, in the way described above, in the manner of dynamic repatterning.
Simplicity Itself
When you relate to your emotions and feelings as patterns of action rather than as problems to be worked on, dramatic personal stories to tell, or "issues" to be worked through, everything about your experiencing changes. Instead of emotions being something that you suffer, experience or endure, they are something that you are doing. Instead of your experiences being events that happen to you, that kick you around, you become the creator of your experiences just the way you want them to be.
Like any action, when you know what you are doing you can easily change it. The only reason you can't seem to change old patterns of action is that you don't really know what you are doing in that action.
The trick is in knowing what you are doing. With your emotions, most of the time you really don't know what you are doing - much more so than with all other actions. This is because you think of them and relate to them as something that is happening to you, something that you are suffering through. (The whole culture of psychotherapy and psychological counseling is based on this false and unnecessary idea, and ecourages it. This is not helpful. And the whole of Western society in contaminated with this harmful "pathology" notion.)
What It Takes
What it takes to change your whole perspective, so that you are in a position to easily REPATTERN your basic patterns of action, is just a little self knowledge. Focusing on the bodily sensations of your emotions and feelings, as explained in the Focusing section, does this for you. It gives you the kind of self knowledge that makes your actions conscious to you as actions, and thereby easily changeable by repatterning.
Once you are conscious of the actions of your emotions, through their bodily sensations, then dynamically repatterning those actions rather than dramatizing them, is the key to getting the same kind of dynamic pattern transcendence in the field of your experiences that bodywork gets in the field of body movement.
You can easily do this when you focus on the bodily sensations of your emotions and feelings and apply the principles of dynamic pattern transcendence explained in this section.
Stunning Breakthroughs
This gives you the same kind of stunning breakthroughs in yourself and in your relationships that bodywork repatterning has had with body movement.
This is why even the seemingly deepest emotional and relational pain, such as long-standing anxiety, panic, depression, grief, traumatization, rage, violence and long-standing conflicts are easily and quickly ended using Free-Beingness.
You don't have to put yourself or others you care about into more emotional suffering (as in counseling, therapy, etc.) to end your suffering. Just the easy, pleasurable process of repatterning is all it takes.
Dynamic pattern transcendence spontaneously leads to undreamed-of creative breakthroughs into newness of experience in all areas of life. What was once believed to be difficult or impossible is now being demonstrated to be easy. The next section tells you more about this.
If you want to learn more, continue now with the section on Breakthroughs.