Marianne Bentzen - Neuroaffective Meditation: A Practical Guide to Lifelong Brain Development, Emotional Growth, and Healing Trauma

NEUROAFFECTIVE
MEDITATION

Marianne Bentzen has been a pioneer in the field of somatics, child development, and neurobiology for many decades. This guide is a thoughtful and inspiring synthesis of her professional work as a psychotherapist as well as her life-long personal devotion to meditation and spiritual practice. Included is a cogent overview of her brilliant neuroaffective model to add theoretical substance to the practices. All will benefit from the depth and breadth of the meditations. Designed to expand our capacity for presence in the body, to deepen our connection to self and others, to inspire, to challenge deep-seated patterns, and, ultimately, to heal trauma. This guide will stimulate you intellectually, evoke a kaleidoscope of emotions, and drop you gently into the marvels of your inner world.

ARIEL GIARRETTO, MS, LMFT, SOMATIC THERAPIST AND FACULTY AT THE SOMATIC EXPERIENCING TRAINING INSTITUTE

This book is a gift for anyone who is ready to discover the value of meditation for internal healing. The consequences of mental injuries cannot be meditated away. They are deeply anchored in the brain and the whole body in the form of splits and blockages. But the broken connections between thinking, feeling, and acting, between body and spirit, between heart and mind can be found again, relinked, and integrated. In this book, Marianne Bentzen not only makes the neurobiological basics of these reintegration processes understandable, she also uses examples to show how easily neuroaffective meditation can be learned and practically applied.

GERALD HTHER, NEUROBIOLOGIST AND AUTHOR OF THE COMPASSIONATE BRAIN

What does it take to grow up and then embark on a path toward maturity and wisdom? Marianne Bentzens tour de force is a lucid journey through the developmental psychology, biology, and neurology of maturation. Drawing on her immense knowledge of both science and meditation, Bentzen offers a step-by-step approach to becoming a full human being. Beautifully written, with compassion and the awareness of our shared humanity, this book is a must-read (and a must-practice) for those of us who wish to cultivate body, mind, and spirit.

HALKO WEISS, PH.D., COAUTHOR OF HAKOMI MINDFULNESS-CENTERED SOMATIC PSYCHOTHERAPY

Neuroaffective Meditation by Marianne Bentzen makes a contribution to several fieldsdevelopmental psychology, psychotherapy, and meditation, to name somewhile also being a very user-friendly and entertaining read. In her own unique style, Bentzen lets complex ideas become powerful images that create a real Aha! experience over and over again as we become able to connect to what is behind the words. Her clarity of thinking together with her great compassion for people shine through and make this an important book that truly models what it talks about.

KATHRIN A. STAUFFER PH.D., BODY PSYCHOTHERAPIST AND AUTHOR OF EMOTIONAL NEGLECT AND THE ADULT IN THERAPY

Marianne Bentzen has woven a wonderful path through neuroscience, meditation, and psychotherapy that deeply explores the emotional development of our species. She has accomplished this at a time when the next phase of human evolutionspiritualizationneeds shifting to warp speed. No matter where you are on your lifes journey, this book will provide great value to you on your way to a fuller and more joyful life for yourself and those around you.

KEITH LOWENSTEIN, M.D., AUTHOR OF KRIYA YOGA FOR SELF-DISCOVERY

Marianne Bentzen has brought together a vast array of current research on neurophysiology and developmental psychology with spiritual teachings. She has woven this all together in a deeply satisfying manual for awareness training with good science behind it, along with very practical instructions for cultivating full-bodied living in our human bodies. I can think of no other book that brings all this together with such precision and poetry! I offer a deep bow of respect and a heartfelt hug of gratitude for her kindness in birthing this very wonderful book!

PATRICIA KAY, M.A., HOMEOPATH AND COAUTHOR OF CELL LEVEL MEDITATION

Finding stillness is much more than sitting still and, therefore, not so easy to reach as many people may think. Marianne Bentzen shows us with her newest book why.

URS HONAUER, PH.D., DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR INNER ECOLOGY IN ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

This book bundles knowledge with knowing, theory with stillness, body with mind. A must-have, must-do for every psychotherapist!

MARJOLIJNE VAN BUREN-MOLENAAR, DOCENT BODY-MIND INTEGRATED PSYCHOTHERAPIST

Acknowledgments

AN OLD AFRICAN PROVERB holds that it takes a village to raise a child. I have discovered that it takes a village to write a book, too. For this book and audio guiding project, I am particularly grateful to all the people who made the work possible. My thanks go to the following:

To Dorothea Rahm, for her unfailing trust and enthusiasm about the way my meditation guidings have developed over the years, and for luring me into writing this book! She also bears the responsibility for connecting me to Gottfried Probst and for a great deal of careful and cheerful editing. To Gottfried Probst of Probst Verlag, for his trust, patience, and commitment in investing in this somewhat unusual project. To Birgit Mayer, for being my flowing German voice in so many workshops and in the German recordings, and for her exceptional skill in expressing the feeling of the guidings as well as the mere words. Although she is the German voice, without her there would be no English version.

To Tatjana Lehman, Dorthe Enger, and Vibeke Vindelv, for reading the early texts and supporting me as I explored a new and more personal authors voice into being. To Michael Stubberup and Martijn van Beek, for their quick and thorough check of the text and their helpful suggestions.

For the audio recordings, I am particularly thankful for Petra Rickert, who has recorded and edited all the audio with the care, dedication, and humor that characterizes her work. Also, and again, to interpreter Birgit Mayer and to Dorothea Rahm, who was the sole and deeply engaged participant in the audio recordings, standing in for all the readers that Birgit and I were talking to. All three of these amazing ladies saved the day by traveling to Denmark on short notice and spending three days with me at my home to record everything properly and in two languages.

As any book must, this one grows from the lived life of the author. This book is thus an expression of my work with all the professional psychotherapists that I have taught over the last thirty years. In many ways, it is the essence of my response to the need and the longing for deeper inner and outer connection that I have met in these trainings. I am very grateful that so many people continued to draw me further into teaching this material, so that I now find myself actually invited to do workshops with a focus on spiritual deepening instead of just having my meditation guidings as a morning spice to the main course. Each statement in the written guidings in this book is a response to the wordless feeling and resonance of the participants listening at that moment, and in writing as well as in the audio guidings I have called upon my memories of them as well. The whole process of teaching the subject of spirituality, and of writing and doing formal audio guidings for the book, has been new territory for me. The safe professional context that has made it possible for me has always been the application of neuroaffective developmental psychology, which would not exist without my invaluable and tireless friend and fellow creator of the neuroaffective perspective, Susan Hart, my closest and best playmate in neuroaffective theory and professional application these past three decades.