Week 1

Introduction to the HEAL Project and Its Discoveries and Developments.

Have you ever noticed that it feels like being lost in a maze when we can't discern the real problem we're facing? We tend to come up with assumptions, hypothetical issues, scenarios, and solutions for these assumed problems. This frantic guessing game keeps us running in circles, wasting energy, and increasingly confused without addressing the root cause. It's like chasing shadows while the real issue remains hidden and unresolved beneath the fragmented surface of our minds, a place we cannot reach through reflection or interoception — ‘We don’t know what we don’t know.’

It has become evident that our experiences shape how we ‘use’ language, including how we think, feel, socially empathize, and emotionally and physically react to different situations. Our HEAL Language Project sheds light on these dimensions of experience, which can either integrate or fragment, depending on whether we feel supported or unsupported. While integration harmonizes, fragmentation agitates and confuses. HEAL stands for Human Experience Augmenting Language, and it lets us study our language use as expressions of consciousness during different phases of development from early childhood onward. The objective is learning to integrate and harmonize our experiences by transforming language use.

Our primary means of communication in early childhood are through facial expression, sound, eye contact, gesture, and touch, based on which we develop our cognition, verbal skills, and multiple intelligences. These language abilities use the whole brain and reference our pineal cortex as a linguistic “witness” to foster integrated language skills. The pineal cortex, in turn, synchronizes the brain’s activity with our heart. The heart plays a central role in human development and integrating bodily systems, starting from early pregnancy —from day 18-22 when our heart starts beating.

Developmental trauma during pregnancy, early childhood, and also later in life hinders our emotional processing, causing us to shift from “witnessing” from to a cognitive “observing,” which anchors survival mechanisms, beliefs, personality traits, and social behaviors reflected in how we disconnect from ourselves and deal with the world around us.

As a result of this shift in consciousness, our cognitive and verbal skills disintegrate from our nonverbal, emotional, and physical expressions, disconnecting our brain functions from our embodied experience and from how we socially interact. This shift reshapes our use of language and influences our thoughts, feelings, communication, behavior, and actions toward determinism, fragmentation, polarization, and competition—this anchors disintegration at all levels and contexts, personally, socially, and systemically.

Most of us grow up thinking that our language use, even when disruptive, is part of who we are and our identity. This gap in our understanding anchors us in a survival mode, reflecting our imbalance, reactive patterns, fear, cognitive dissonance, beliefs, co-dependence, confusion, and conflict. Experience has taught us that this gap in understanding, our blind spot, is the cause of human suffering. In particular, we refer to ‘intellectual error and defective judgment,’ which we describe as a cognitive bias. Several knowledge systems refer to this.

In HEAL’s learning journey, we will explore and examine what causes our gap in understanding, using our novel language framework and process to help us reveal our blind spots, evolve beyond our current limited mindsets and worldviews, and, when practiced collectively, evolve us toward heartfelt connection, harmony, and synchronous collaboration. This transforms how we experience and engage with life everywhere and with everyone. We will explore all this and more in the nine weeks we spend with each other.

What we present in this educational journey constitutes essential knowledge that can help transform learning into a profoundly transformative process.

Story: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

Experience:

Throughout this 9-week journey, we will engage in numerous experiments. Within this learning context, these experiments are where facilitators show participants how to use the multiple modes of attention to discern, discover, expand, resolve, and realize. This process evolves participants through different stages, which we will explore later in this journey.

In this first session, we will start with an experiment called ‘grounding:’

• In grounding, we become familiar with the multiple modes of attention: selective (or focused) and/or non-selective (or open) attention.