#biofeedback

I’m just gonna move biofeedback to once a month? Because it seems like 2 wks is usually a little soon for ppl, and also bc I’m just super busy rn

system:

operators://No like.... what if i used the built in tumblr tools to document the system using multiple mediums to combat the amnesia memory loss--

system:

🗣️ Pronunciation:

a-ban-don /əˈbandən/ \uh-ban-don\

💭Feeling Family:

♻️Threshold emotion

📖Definitions:

noun

Merriam-Webster’s: a thorough yielding to natural impulses

Oxford English Dictionary: complete freedom from constraint or convention; surrender or abandonment to natural impulses; lack of inhibition or restraint

Oxford Languages: complete lack of inhibition or restraint

Cambridge: in a completely uncontrolled way

⬜Experience

We typically think of abandon as a verb, and when we do use it as a noun, it’s usually attached with a modifier to make it a state of being (‘wild abandon’). However, it is through the liberating abandonment of all else that we allow ourselves to become fully immersed in the moment, inspiring us to embrace life with open hearts. It can be raw despair—the sense of being discarded and forgotten, a hollow ache of isolation. It can be a liberated release—letting go of inhibition and dancing alone in the rain. And, sometimes, it’s both—a deep yearning to be seen but relief when disappearing. As a wound and as liberation, it is both the collapse of the walls of safety; one brings fear and shame, while the other is embracing the moment with an open heart rather than guardedness.

While ‘abandon’ may not be viewed as an independent emotion, it is a state of being that I felt was worth including. It’s a popular word in literature, but how do we truly define it? The best summary I’ve come across for this experience is: to feel abandoned is to feel fully present.

🫀Biofeedback:

Negative:

Chest tightness

Cold extremities

Lethargy and weariness

Tight throat

Positive:

Goosebumps 

Elevated heartbeat

Relaxed muscles

Tingling 

🛠️Facta Non Verba

⛔Negative

Body Language:

Gestures: fidgeting or even sitting entirely still

Posture: slumped, hanging head

Expression:

Eyes: Averted, unfocused, dull

Mouth: lip biting

Dialogue Tags:

Whisper - evokes a sense of fragility

Murmur - conveys hesitation

Plead - carries raw desperation

Sob - painful overwhelm

Choke - desperate restraint

Confess - shameful admission

Lament - completely mournful

Quaver - trembling with trepidation

Blurt - a sudden discharge

Moan - vulnerable ache

✅Positive

Body Language:

Gestures: loose, expansive, emotive

Posture: straight, leaning forward slightly when engaged with others

Expression:

Eyes: open, bright, focused

Many lists of descriptors or body language notes I’ve come across note that eye contact is consistent and intense. However, this should be considered from a sociological perspective. In some cultures where eye contact is considered confrontational, a marked awareness of the surroundings may be more appropriate.

Mouth: genuine smile (crinkled eyes)

Dialogue Tags:

Exclaim - exuberant communication

Shout - loud and untamed

Cry out - spontaneous defiance

Declare - unapologetic statement

Gasp - out of breath

Sang - euphoric singing

Whoop - loud celebratory cries

Bellow - crude release

Rave - fiery intensity

Spill - speaking rapidly with no filter

📃Microprompts

These prompts are to help get the juices flowing, now that you are armed with a definition, experience, biofeedback, and nonverbal cues. You are free and welcome to share them with us—but there is never any pressure to do so.

✒️Writer: Write a scene where a character is speaking in bursts because silence feels like erasure. Let their voice be the map, without using any feeling words.

🎨Artist:

Sketch a figure mid-collapse or mid-flight.

📓Journaling

When have you felt the most present?

Dorelle Markley Heisel called Cincinnati her home for several decades, but her mind was in another dimension. She was known as “Cincinnati’s Brain Lady” and held college faculty positions in literature, psychology and fine art. She pioneered biofeedback techniques to control mental and bodily functions while introducing Cincinnati’s strait-laced society to the psychedelic subculture of the Sixties.

Virginia Dorelle Markley was born in 1917 in Danville, Illinois but spent her childhood shuttling between her father’s Palm Beach restaurant and her mother’s St. Louis hotel. At DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, she was student royalty – literally – voted May Queen in her senior year.

It was at DePauw that she met and became engaged to W. Donald Heisel, a Cincinnati native and Western Hills High School alumnus. At the time of his 1940 marriage to Dorelle, Heisel was assistant secretary to Cincinnati’s Civil Service Commission and was, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer [21 May 1940] “one of the city’s youngest executives.” The Heisels built a new house on a quiet cul de sac in Westwood, where they raised two daughters.

Don Heisel earned a reputation as the “godfather of public administration in the Tristate” [Cincinnati Enquirer 6 March 1988] because of the many governmental officials he mentored at the University of Cincinnati and at Xavier University. Dorelle, who had earned a degree in English from DePauw, added a bachelor’s (1952) and master’s (1965) in education from UC while also taking classes at the Cincinnati Art Academy.

Dorelle taught English for several years in Cincinnati high schools and at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. During the summers she was a fixture at Pogue’s Department Store. Hundreds of Queen City baby boomers likely display pastel portraits of themselves, sketched by Dorelle at her stand in the Pogue’s children’s department. She hated the drab institutional brown walls in her husband’s office, so one day she hauled her pastels over to City Hall and executed a large mural of the Cincinnati skyline, drawn from memory.

UC’s University College recruited Dorelle in the mid-1960s and she flourished there, teaching literature, art appreciation and psychology. With assistance from the Procter & Gamble company, she brought innovative technology into her classrooms with a push-button feedback device that allowed students to register immediate opinions regarding class content. She told the Cincinnati Post [14 March 1968]:

“When students become frustrated with a lecture or feel lost or just plain bored, they can indicate their anxiety by signaling me on the monitor.”

Dorelle’s interest in media and their effects on human communication led her to Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan, known for his books “Understanding Media” and “The Medium Is The Massage.” Among the earliest mentions of McLuhan in Cincinnati newspapers is a reference to a 1966 Evening College class taught by Dorelle to introduce the Canadian theorist’s ideas to Cincinnati.

Simultaneously with her investigations of media and biofeedback, Dorelle dove into what was then known as the human potential movement. She presided over a multi-week UC Evening College class titled “Actualizing Your Potential: A Group Happening.” Enquirer reporter Jo Thomas sat in on the course and reported [21 August 1969] a most unusual classroom experience.

“I will not lecture,” Heisel said. “You will live out experiences, and I will ask you questions. Answer them in your head without verbalizing them. Writing is so slow and the mind works at such speed.”

Dorelle invited the students to form themselves into trains of about nine “cars,” kindergarten-style and take turns being the “engine” or the “caboose.”

“Elderly women hung on to 20-year-olds. Bald men chugged in front of bearded men. Around and around the room the trains went, gathering momentum and enthusiasm. One train burst out of the classroom door into the bright hall, chugging with gusto.”

The explosion of new ideas generated by the psychedelic Sixties energized Dorelle and she launched a series of public lectures to share her excitement. One wonders how her Cincinnati audiences, among such mainline organizations such as the Federation of Jewish Organizations and the Kiwanis Club, reacted to her exposition titled “Turn On, Tune In, Find Out!”

An early adopter of technology, Dorelle acquired a variety of devices to assist her research into altering thought patterns via biofeedback. Among these contraptions were the electromyograph and the alphaphone that made brainwaves audible or visual. She claimed that biofeedback, in addition to curing a variety of conditions from depression to migraines, transported users into a new state of being that she called the Kairos Dimension.

"The Kairos Dimension is nature taking its electronic course through you by providing strategies for amplifying your sensory range,” she announced in her 1974 book, “The Kairos Dimension.”

The titles of Dorelle’s non-credit classes and community lectures indicate the paths her biofeedback research led her down: “Brainfun: Steering Minds In New Directions,” “The Holographic Mind,” “How Biofeedback Opens Social Spaces,” and “How Biofeedback Supports Excitement And Growth.” Here is the course catalog description for one of these classes:

“Feelings of stress, tension and pressure take place only in muscles, never in the chemical-electrical brain that sends out orders. New research gives us a more accurate model of how we guide and control our range of ‘body sculptures.’ Small group exploration of the latest technologies.”

As the Human Potential movement evolved into various New Age philosophies, Dorelle’s biofeedback strategies caught on among that crowd. When the Montreal Star compiled a list of 50 important New Age books in 1975, Dorelle’s “Biofeedback Exercise Book” was featured along with books on transcendental meditation, herbal remedies, gestalt therapy and “The Joy of Sex.”

The nationally syndicated television show, P.M. Magazine, hosted Dorelle in November 1983 as “Cincinnati’s Brain Lady who enables you to see your brain on a television screen.” For a brief period, UC’s radio station WGUC aired a show devoted to Dorelle’s “Kairos Dimension.”

The Heisels divorced in 1977 and throughout the 1980s Dorelle’s public appearances waned. A Body/Mind/Spirit Festival at Avondale’s Unitarian Church in 1988 found her discussing biofeedback along with proponents of shamanism, tarot cards, crystals, chelation therapy and psychic powers.

Dorelle retired from UC and relocated to Plano, Texas where one of her daughters lived. In retirement, she played bridge and painted portraits. She died, aged 79, in November 1996.