The cooperation principle in OI’s protocol means that the therapist is always looking for what the client is doing — consciously or unconsciously — that reflects a better balance between doing and being, between effort and surrender, between holding on and letting go. Indeed, the integrative value of strategic effortlessness has mounting evidence in its favor from studies in mindfulness, brain studies of the brain’s resting ‘default mode’, and a resurgence of interest in hemispheric differences in processing styles. I have spoken in OI Blog of trauma’s priming the attention to look for What’s Wrong, which then implies a next step to do something about it. Instead, a more neutral and oriented approach is an integrating and integrative experience, and would only be interrupted with volitional effort (such as ‘paying attention’, cognition, etc.).
If I would have failed to reflect this integrative state in my previous case example, my client’s more accustomed ‘something’s wrong’ belief would have stolen the moment away from him. Instead, with coaching, he understood the state well enough to surrender into it and harvest the value of the experience — somatically, cognitively and emotionally. And indeed, it is that direct experience — without doing or thinking — that can become a coherent baseline nervous system condition.
And then it becomes another really great answer to the question, “How do you experience that sound?”
Steve Hoskinson, MA, MAT, is Founder and CCO (Chief Compassion Officer) of Organic Intelligence and Organic Intelligence Outreach Institute [a 501(c)(3)]. Steve developed the Human Empowerment Resiliency Training: OI HEARTraining® (a positive psychology, fractal method known for implicit exposure approach in trauma) based on his foundational experiences in psychology, theology, Somatic Experiencing®, Milton Erickson’s generative change work, mindfulness meditation and more.
