Michael Bernet

"Get out of your head and into your body,” gurus of the 1960s and 1970s urged. “Get in touch with your feelings,” urged others. Attaining those goals was said to bring inner repose, centered wisdom, enhanced inter-personal skills, and a blissful state of enlightenment.

There were a few problems with those suggestions and those outcomes: no one could define the meaning of getting out of your head and into your body, nor what getting in touch was all about. How do you do it? When do you know you have it? How could you tell that it’s changed your life for the better?

And yet, those who intuitively discovered the mysterious paths felt more relaxed, more confident, more alert, and more healthy. They were happier, related better with friends and family, became more creative; many enjoyed better health, straighter backs and improved athletic stamina; friends and associates commented on the changes.

In 1969, then a programming writer for IBM in Yorktown Heights, I discovered the human potential movement: humanistic psychology, dance therapy, art therapy, meditation, psychodrama, gestalt therapy, guided imagery, a whole world of experiences totally contrary to my intellectualizing lifestyle. Within weeks, the subtle changes became more and more pronounced. I tendered my resignation, cashed in my shares, and for the next year devoted myself to learning everything I could about this magical new way of living.

On the last day of 1970, I arrived in Israel with my wife and sons and, within two weeks, we had set up “Tivyon,” a workshop center to teach and to study this new approach to life. Friends and colleagues, visting from the USA, Britain, South Africa, and South America joined us for an evening here, a weekend there, a series of week-long workshops over there. Every teacher was a student; every teacher learned from every student. I reciprocated, taking lengthy trips to the USA to conduct workshops, to teach, and above all to keep on learning.

But all the time I was nagged by the questions: Does it work? Why does it work? Many Israeli psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists participated in our workshops; many joined our staff, and they all asked the same questions. Eventually, the “establishment” got worried: the police came to check out reports that we were “practicing medicine without a license”; then a new law defining psychology and therapy threatened to put “Tivyon” out of business. Sadly, we packed our bags in the summer of 1977. I returned to the United States determined to prove how and why this New Age magic worked, and equally determined to earn a doctorate in psychology so that my credentials would never again be challenged.

It wasn’t easy. Many academic psychologists hold that psychology should be a “hard” science, and feeling good, or getting in touch with one’s feelings, didn’t qualify as hard science. When I could get no funding for tuition or for research, I maxed out my cards. Though I had more hindrance than help from faculty, I recruited over the years two thousand subjects to participate in my research.

Logic and published research suggested that emotional awareness comes in two kinds: you either have it or you don’t; feelings and emotions matter, or you lock them away with some intellectual sleight of hand. I reasoned from experience a third and substantial group that was trying to figure out what they should and might be feeling through others’ eyes and souls; this suggested a fourth group, those preoccupied in ruminating about their own thoughts and feelings.

I developed a pencil-and-paper scale to measure people’s ability to effortlessly pick up clues from inside the body, the likelihood that they preferred to rely on reasoning and logic, their need to understand themselves by contemplating the thoughts and attitudes of others, or their constant rumination on thoughts and feelings. The results from my first batch of four hundred subjects showed there was little difference between the third and fourth groups. This reduced my research to just three groups: BB’s whose self-assessment was Based on Body, EE’s, whose self-assessment Emphasizes Evaluation, and LL’s who are Looking to Logic to understand themselves.

I was helped by a thousand subjects as the scale went through revisions and fine-tunings, then over a thousand new subjects completed the final test. To check on the scale’s validity (how accurately does it measure what I want to measure?), I coupled the questionnaire with thirty other scales and factors (each subject was faced by less than a dozen). Some tests were sets of “self evident” questions that I designed with input from colleagues, inviting subjects to reveal the importance they attached to intellect compared with emotion, how aware they claimed to be of subtle cues from their bodies, how much they depended on the assumed input or viewpoints of others to establish their own attitudes and emotions. I coupled this with “harder” science, using segments of long-established personality tests to measure anxiety, contentment, and warmth; the capacity for creativity and for experiencing emotions; self-consciousness, impulsiveness, vulnerability, and depression. Then to top it off, I asked those who were willing, to let their therapist (past or present) evaluate them (anonymously) in yet another questionnaire.

There was a remarkably high correlation between BB (“body”) scores and items like happiness, creativity, emotional warmth, and freedom from anxiety; an equally high correlation between LL (“logic”), and emphasis on intellect with rejection of emotions, warmth, and fantasy; and between EE (“evaluation”) and anxiety, depression, and self consciousness. EE was highly prevalent in youth and decreased rapidly with age. Those who had been exposed to “therapies” (of mind, body or spirit), gained in BB as they matured; those who had not, gained in LL.

I asked my subjects the importance that various learning processes had had on their lives. Experience in psychotherapies of all kinds, in physical modalities (such as tai-chi, Alexander training and dance therapy), and in spiritual modalities (such as meditation and psychedelics), all appeared to contribute substantially to raised BB scores. Those who had had exposure to all three types scored on the average fifty percent higher in BB than those who had had no exposure to any “modality,” and forty percent higher than those who had experienced only psychotherapies. Among the various therapies, I discovered, the greater the emphasis on body awareness and spirituality, the greater the effect in raising BB scores.

High scores on the BB scale indicate skills in "emotional excellence" [technically known as Somat Awareness]. Despite similarities, "emotional excellence," or skill in rapidly and correctly understanding the changing emotions, and utilizing this ability to enhance one's life, one's relationship, and one's creativity, differs signifiantly from what is generally known as "emotional intelligence," which tends to focus more on enhancing workplace and social skills.

Over the years, I have presented these results at a number of the leading professional conferences on psychology and on body-related psychotherapies. The subsequent papers, and the evolving theories and applications, can be viewed at www.somats.com.

In the book I am currently preparing, Somats and Survival: The Path to Emotional Excellence, I discuss these findings and theories at greater length, supplementing them by 35 years of professional experience to show the average reader how to gain happiness, contentment, creativity and interpersonal warmth, either by participating in varied learning experiences, or by learning how to enhance the effortless awareness of the subtle, fleeting sensations that transmit wisdom and memories stored in the mammalian (“middle”) brain, and learning to make these appropriately accessible to the emotions, to behavior and to the neocortex (the “reasoning” brain).