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This post is an introduction to the perspective and training landscape called the pentagon – about the 'unlearned skills' – first described and published in book form in: ‘An essay on inner freedom”" by Jes Bertelsen, 2010.
The pentagram is an invitation to open five 'doors' into ourselves that we are all born with contact with – natural competencies rooted in body, breath, heart, consciousness and life-creativity. The five gates/doors are universal, and rest on innate possibilities in our biology and nature. The five areas are first trained one at a time and later in combination, so that for example three areas are activated simultaneously.
WHAT WE ALREADY CAN DO
The basis and framework for the pentagon are five competencies we all have. These are basic biological and physiological components that are present from birth: The body, the breath, the heart, wakefulness/consciousness and creativity understood as the very experience of being alive - immediate expressions of life. These are therefore basic prerequisites that evolution has made available to us humans - and then the derived competencies we have acquired in the encounter with life through these five gates.
During the first one or two years of life, these competencies accumulate as languageless 'body-energetic plus/minus experiences' – what is included in the formation of emotional models.
The pentagon's perspective on 'unlearned competencies' has been crucial to my work in understanding the difference between mental models and emotional models. The very fact that we have a whole landscape within ourselves and our being in the world, which is not defined from outside by culture and language. This does not mean that culture - and thus language and mental models do not 'mean' everything possible about these five areas - this is completely inevitable. What is important is that we have the opportunity to open up to a landscape, behind the mental models and language. That by putting these five gates on the exercise agenda we can begin a journey towards deeper - languageless - aspects of who we are. Aspects that can contribute to self-organizing 'natural dynamics' becoming more visible - and that through this we are invited to sense more impersonal or collective sides of ourselves - to sense more of the whole - inside and out.
The unifying framework is the body, which the other four are part of and circulate with.
The model is a map of fundamental elements of a more whole person, and it invites and describes ways in which it is possible to move into oneself through:
- THE BODY
- BREATHABLE – the energetic movements associated with breathing and contact with the autonomic nervous system.
- THE HEART – attachment, trust, security, cohesion.
- BASIC CREATIVITY – the reality that our body, mind and the world around us are experienced as being in continuous change.
- THE WAKENESS or AWARENESS as such.
The idea with the pentagon is that the movement deeper is promoted by combining 3 or more gates in the same exercise. As suggested in the book Empathy – what holds the world together, however, it may be advantageous to get to know them one by one.
First, you can concretely contact the pentagon with your attention – clarify that you feel your body, notice your breathing, feel your heart beating (possibly by placing a hand on your heart), register that you are awake and conscious – and finally experience basic creativity through being alive – feeling energy and life in your body.
Next, you can choose to delve a little deeper into each of the five:
1) Becoming aware of the body – by distributing and moving your attention evenly through the body to feel it in its entirety. There is a wide variety of body scan exercises from which you can draw inspiration.
2) Becoming aware of the breath – by observing it without intervening. That is, noticing the inhalation, pause, exhalation, pause, inhalation, etc.
3) Becoming aware of the heart – for example, by thinking about a person you care about – and thus activating emotions.
4) Becoming aware that you are awake – for example, by noticing that thoughts come and go.
5) Becoming aware of basic creativity – by clarifying all the many ways it is immediately possible to feel that one is alive.
These exercises are directly taken from or inspired by the exercises section in the aforementioned Empathy book.
In the book Beautiful is the Earth Jes Bertelsen brings the pentagon into relation to the circulations between the biosphere and us – for example the very fact that we all have a body and breathe and how it is connected to the larger whole. The body is related, for example, to the two basic needs before anything else: food and water. As inspiration, here is one of the book's inner exercises in its entirety:
MEDITATIVE INTERNAL EXERCISE: WATER CIRCULATION
Make yourself comfortable and relax your body.
Distribute awareness throughout the body – throughout the entire body – and then feel or imagine the sensation of water, of the circulation of water within yourself.
Notice that water circulates through all living beings, plants, animals, humans – and throughout the global system, in the whole. In the entire global system, water circulates in this way – and it flows through all individuals.
Let your consciousness rest relaxed with the sensation of the incessant movement of the water circulation on the globe and through all living beings.
Michael Stubberup, cand.mag and head of SYNerGAIA.
Co-founder and vice-chairman of the Association for Children's Life Skills. He has 20 years of experience as a manager. Established SYNerGAIA Rehabilitation in 1999 and is currently the acting chairman of the board. He has also been responsible for development and continuing education in SYNerGAIA Innovation. Together with Steen Hildebrandt, he has also founded Sustainable Co-Creation. Michael is one of Vækstcenteret's permanent teachers.
This post is the fifth and final in the series of excerpts from Michael Stubberup's book Social Sustainability – Everyday Expressions of Trauma – and Restoring Balance organized for Kontemplation's blog.
Below you will find links to the first four posts in the series on Everyday Expressions of Trauma:
