Rekindling Desire: 

Engaging the Quantum Field

The process of engaging the Quantum Field has many healing elements for the ‘unlucky baby’: For one, it insists that our subjectivity does, after all, matter, and encourages us to build a more respectful relation to our own interior – to attend, as Winnicott’s good enough mother did, to the hopes inside us.

So the first - substantial - gift of the Quantum Field is this process of internal engagement. Conscious relation to the Field requires us to clarify what we want as if we are worthy of such attention and care. Immediately, this alters something: When we attempt to clarify a wish, we already leave behind the resigned fatalism of childhood for something else – a consultation with our subjectivity – a receptive interest in our own wishes.

The twin acts of valuing ourselves enough to locate what our desire(s) might be, and of identifying the desires themselves, change us. Both disrupt an inner culture of neglect, amnesia and self-negation.   ‘More’ of ourselves comes into focus; we awaken possibility, hope and expectation.  Now that we know what we want, we may move through life with an eye – (even if it is a wary-eye) - for it. 

This starts to carve a space where something different might happen: Our defended psyche withdraws a little from fatalism and nudges its slow way toward something more open. We cease, in Bromberg’s term ‘plundering of [our] life by foreclosing the here and now on behalf of the there and then.’  

If we are to receive anything from such an amorphous dimension as the Quantum Field, we need to be present, alert, sensitive. Thankfully, these are capacities we are likely to have. Receptivity to the Field’s subtle responsiveness may feel quite natural: Specific tendencies and strengths get shored up in humans who withdraw their hope in human others: a rich interior life, hyper-vigilance to the external, porousness and sensitivity to subtle impacts. And so the sensibility required to engage at this refined level is one our early shaping has often prepared us for:

…you're explaining a sense of what interaction happens with the quantum field, and how you can then experience that interaction or the effects of these interactions in your felt-experience. [Yes] So in essence…what you're instructing people, is to pay attention to be attuned to what happens… so we're talking about the attunement, more than just by the way “do it by rote”…  

(Serge Prengel in conversation with Hendrix, 2018)

When I write about the Quantum Field in the context of this article, I do so with an intuitive rather than scientific understanding. And I notice in myself two broad reactions to the whole possiblity: one is to see it as naïve, cliched, spirituality ‘light’ – (I am almost embarrassed to be associated with it); the other is to feel its resonance with what I know of the subtlety and grace I experience when truly present - that the universe is more open, more generous and pliable than my habitual self imagines it to be. My experience reveals that ‘Grace is more often available when I show up less guarded against it’.  This matters.

There’s another gain in developing a link to the Quantum Field: for anyone whose relational patterns seem to betray or undermine us, this connection takes our attention away from specific humans toward something broader – life itself.  Particularly when we carry a history of relational distress, we are inclined to over-value humans as sources of succour, believing they can soothe us more deeply than they can. When we tune our intentionality and desire to the Quantum Field, we create a new context to explore and support our desire. We articulate our hopes privately to the subtle field that encompasses all of life. (in one sense, we return to the world of the the pre-verbal baby, who carries a hope internally that cannot be fully expressed, and yet its’ hope is a ping to the universe, a bid for care. A bid calling out in hope to a responsive world.  

If this perspective has value, and I believe it does, we ignore the Field at our peril – and it will respond by offering us repetition of all we have come to expect from life. But when we cultivate a conscious relation to it, the Field offers a second – albeit more subtle experience – of a world that is naturally attuning to us. And it offers this responsive membrane as a ’practice space’ to our adult self, where our resources and capacities may be richer than in childhood.

Can we explore this invitation, learn to risk our desires again, and expose ourselves to what is given? For some of us, such quiet, subtle movements may prove profound, altering not just our inner relation to ourselves as objects worthy of care, but also what we call into being, what we draw close to us.

Over time, the private, interior re-awakening of desire made possible by engaging with the Field offers to form a bridge back to relational desiring.  We learn to traverse this bridge ever more fluidly and easily, allowing fresh experiences in each dimension to inform the other. Gradually we may come to bring forth our desires with more ease in the world of human others, growing into the ‘sovereign self’ Perel speaks of.