From a formative view, the human process is a continual series of forming and re-forming. Cycles of organizing, disorganizing and re-organizing are biological-emotional processes that go on all our lives. From conception, we are continually bathed in pre-personal inherited programs that form our bodies. Our challenge is to individualize and personalize this inheritance throughout the various stages of our bodied existence. 

With practice, we can learn to have some influence in how we live our inherited process. Developing the ability to influence inherited behaviors is how we grow a personal somatic life. As we deepen and share with others the forming of the personal world, we shed light into the pre-personal unknown. 

The simple yet complex truth of the universal formative process is that shapes come into being, mature and deepen, then fade away and the cycle begins again as new shapes appear. This basic life process of changing shapes is the ground floor for understanding how our world is perpetuated and differentiated, how it begins and ends. The growing and changing of our individual somatic shape is how all of us live the universal process of coming into being and fading away. 

The gift of the human cortex, the center of our creativity and intentional action, makes it possible for us to learn to participate in the changing of somatic shapes in the blooming and fading of our individual lives. Using voluntary muscular effort to influence body shape, emotion and thinking enables us to form a personal life and a personal world. 

The inherited human body is a pre-personal organization that is formed from our living biosphere. The biosphere has patterns of excitement that become organized into anatomic structure and function. As each human body develops, so develops the potential for self-reflection and self-influence. When we learn to identify a body shape and its pattern of action, we can also learn to recreate a shape or act through voluntary muscular effort. A pattern of behavior that has been voluntarily organized can then be voluntarily influenced by differentiating muscular intensity and duration to make variations in shape and action

The membrane surrounding a single cell is a primary boundary that defines an inside and an outside. This primary differentiation is an analog of how our body creates distinct shapes. Imitating making a boundary to vivify inside and outside surfaces by incrementally increasing and decreasing muscular intensity is how we experience and practice creating multiple layers of differentiation. The learned ability to voluntarily differentiate body shape and patterns of behavior enables us to grow a personal adult—with our own feelings and thoughts, our own intuitive notions, our own rationality and poetic creations of ourselves and the world. Engaging the agency for voluntary differentiation increases our choices for different behavior and increases the opportunity for deepening satisfaction and personal happiness 

Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Laureate poet, was interested in writing about human existence. He wrote that all that is necessary to justify existence is to describe existence. I would take that further; I would say it is worthwhile to participate in forming our existence. To be engaged in the forming of our experience, the changing of our somatic and emotional shape, to grow and manage a personal world and to articulate our experience in words or expressions—all these require voluntary effort. And this effort is more than description—it is the development of personal somatic behavior. 

Self-influence through voluntary effort opens the door to our generative and imaginative interior. Our body is the theatre where we form characters with their own sensorial and logical facts and their own motoric, intuitive, poetic experiences. This internal dimension expands the world inside our skin, and supports the inventing and re-shaping of behavior, feeling and meaning. Using voluntary effort over time, we influence pre-personal process to form a unique internal dimension of human knowing. When we do this, we personalize our life. 

The hero of Saul Bellow’s novel, Ravelstein, speaks of a man who felt instinctively that everyone has an embodied destiny, a destiny that takes effort to live. This embodied destiny—the soma’s cycles of expansion and contraction, blooming and fading that form the essential plot of the human story, can be influenced by voluntary effort. Most Americans, Bellow points out, want to cut loose from the social mooring of birth to create a new image of themselves, an image of their own devising. Phillip Roth speaks of the human urge to form an alternative destiny that repudiates the past and persuades us toward a new interiority. These statements are, to my mind, insights into how we, as living organisms form, govern, and invent our lives. When we learn to participate with the universal Formative process, we can have an individual voice that influences our growing, maturing and even our dying. 

Our life, as William Shakespeare said, “is a play within a play.” The inherited body and the personally formed body are the play within the play that everyone lives. The inherited adult and the voluntarily formed adult—each a distinct presence in the world—play their parts in the narrative of embodied existence. We are all individual and collective subjects engaged in forming a human world of shared concerns for living and deepening, maturing and dying. 

First published in the USABP Journal 2007, Vol 6. No. 1, this article has been edited for the IFPI website.