Healing Gardens, in the most commonly experienced sense, offer a completely passive environment of respite or seek engagement primarily in an educational and exhibited manner. An AWPR(TM) Therapeutic Garden, on the other hand, is very different. It applies the integrative notion of the Roji-en Japanese Garden (cultivation of the spirit taking into account the holistic; all the while appreciating the subtleties of conscious and unconscious human-ecological interaction. Poetically, I like to say that our AWPR facilitators evoke the Divine Rhythm to activate the soul.
We appreciate that two main parts of the mind control our biology. We also understand that the conscious mind is the part that represents our personal spirit and creativity. It manifests our wishes and desires. Unfortunately, you are only in control about 5% of the time.
The other part is the subconscious mind. As an efficient and autonomous agent, it functions to recognize and execute patterns. It is therefore orders of magnitude more powerful than the conscious mind and is operating about 95% of the time. This part of the mind essentially records and retrieves repetitive patterns. And, like a voice-activated recorder, it responds to emotionally dynamic events by requiring only a single “recording session.” The challenge in this arrangement, of course, is that the subconscious is in the driver’s seat most of the time and controls the melodies to begin with. Worse yet, it’s tuned to an old station, literally: playing behavioral programs we accumulated in our most receptive imprinting period (when parents, educators, and society encoded us in multiple layers).
To get to the controls and change the wonderful pattern response, we have to first: get attention, second: wake up awareness. It is not an easy task when one is practically immune to background noise. (And implicitly trust the DJ who puts together the playlist we instill before thinking critically about it.)
As cell biologist Bruce Lipton, Ph.D puts it, “The individual’s ability to hear, hear, and filter information is key to evaluating that information.” In other words, one must be able to perceive the pattern in order to gain understanding. Lipton addresses this question of perception from the cellular level and suggests that multisensory pathways of cellular activity can be very effective in changing behavioral patterns. He likens the vibrations cells use to communicate to the undercurrent of electromagnetic rhythms that reflect our unique identity. “These identity receptors act as signal receiving antennas, downloading complementary (resonant) environmental signals. These identity receptors read a signal of their own that does not exist inside the cell but comes from the external environment,” Lipton concludes.
It is in this nexus between self and environment that AWPR enlists the body (in the pragmatic sense) and the soul (in the subtle sense) to conspire over the mind. Paradoxically, the mind relinquishes control when the body is forced to be hyperattentive and capable of meditating. This frees the mind to wake up and move, thus creating the “momentary lapse of reason” that allows powerful remediation of these unconscious programs. Again, to quote Lipton from an interview in The Harp Therapy Journal, Vol 14, No.4 (Winter 2009-10):
“The subconscious can perform all functions of the unconscious body/mind. Conscious focus and captivating moments can stop unconscious control (i.e. yoga, meditation). If an individual’s energy field can be trained to be conscious and in harmony, can override negative programming in the subconscious mind.”