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Mind/Body

WE ARE BORN WITH, or develop soon after birth, a particular sense of living in our bodies that will condition our responses to the world for the rest of our lives.

Only we truly know what it feels like to live in this particular body, and we have no context for the feelings associated with the experience, since we have no clear idea of what it is like to live in someone else’s body. We could infer that other people might have radically different experiences and assumptions—we might even be able to guess what some of them are—but we don’t know why, or how, or what it is like to be another.

This very personal way of experiencing our bodies is different from the visual models of types and character that come from the outside. You might, for example, be a very short tight person, yet have a quite different experience of yourself from that of someone else with the same body type. It would depend on your nervous system, your genetics, and your early experiences.

For example, my hypermobility and weak core muscles resulted, as far as I can tell, in a feeling of inner emptiness, powerlessness, and general wobbliness that was based in the physical experience of having unstable joints that I couldn’t trust to hold me securely. As I learned to walk, the paradigm for how we learn to move in and negotiate the world, the information I got back about myself and my relationship to my environment was, “Things are wobbly and uncertain. You can’t trust yourself or other people. The ground may not be there when you put your foot down!”

I don’t know whether the loose and shallow joint formation and the subsequent weak core muscles came from genetics, physiology, or something else—but they were there at such an early age that they formed my core beliefs and my basic view of the world. The prevailing emotion I felt was anxiety and a sense of chronic insecurity. If you can’t trust your own physical container, what can you trust? Even now I can’t walk in the dark without putting one foot out gingerly to make sure the ground is there in front of me before I trust myself to step down on it.

The important aspect of this awareness is that changing the physical structure changes the psychology at the core level. I have experienced this and tested it out on myself. As I strengthened and stabilized those weak muscles, I became much more confident and less fearful. I stopped hating myself for being a wimp. It worked!

However, I had to be very specific about exactly which aspects of the physical structure were affecting me. Strengthening peripheral muscles, like biceps and legs, which was relatively easy, did not change my core experience. Only the deeper stabilizers actually seemed to connect with my sense of self. They were very hard to strengthen—it has taken years to understand how to do this—and I felt a strange inner resistance to the task, which guided me to the right kind of work for my body. I knew that this particular kind of resistance meant I was on track. Changing deep aspects of the self, on any level, including altering the structure of deep layers of muscle and tissue, threatens our sense of identity and our primary defense structures, so naturally the survival self will resist fiercely.

Other people, with very different types of bodies, have different psychological structures too. S., for example, is tight all over, and his joints hurt. I’m interested in this subject, and I ask him how he thinks his early body experience molded his physiology.

He answers, “My body is so tight I’ve only been able to feel my head—and maybe my penis—since I was a child. So I have been shut off from most of myself, especially my gut feelings, all that lower-brain stuff.” Interestingly, S. was recently rushed to the hospital with acute diverticulitis (inflammation of the colon).

He continues, “What changed things for me was bodywork. As my body opened up, I felt parts of myself I’d never experienced before. I had been mostly unknown to myself, and my body was just a tight, painful nuisance.” S.’s active tightness changed passively through being worked on, and my weakness changed through my own active work.

H. tells me her body has always felt twisted. Her spine is quite off center, and nothing wants to line up correctly. I ask her what that is like for her.

“I wanted to be a dancer,” she tells me, “to feel that fluidity and grace in my body, as I could hear it inside when I listened to music. But when I moved, everything was all twisted and dammed up—I suppose like my emotional life was. I could never express myself freely. At least that’s how it felt.”

H. became a songwriter. She still looks wistful when she talks about dancing. Now she practices a lot of yoga. She talks to me often about her sense of something being in the way, standing between her and her goals. She doesn’t really know what “it” is, but it’s palpable; she feels it, and it does seem to manifest on the outside, as circumstances block her free flow of energy.

As we untwist her, and she untwists herself (her healing process being both active and passive), her life also flows in a freer and more directed way. People now seem more helpful, there are no sudden surprising setbacks, and success opens itself up to her. Still, her main conscious desire, for a successful relationship, is thwarted, just as the central axis of her spine is still subtly rotated.

I don’t know whether she’d magically be transformed into someone who could have a good marriage if her alignment were corrected. Or, if she became that relationship-ready person, whether her scoliosis would untwist. It seems far-fetched—I think that the same factor in her that creates her inability to flow into relationship gives her the structural distortion. We could call this a neurological rather than physical or psychological issue.

Modern psychiatry has discovered the “biological base” of a lot of emotional illness, which it generally treats with medication. Despite many side effects and other problems with this approach, it’s generally quicker than psychotherapy and often more effective. Because we are integrated beings, all problems exist on many levels (physical, psychological, and spiritual). However, it’s often easier to change something on the physical level, because it’s more tangible and therefore easier to manipulate.

So if you’re depressed, I think it makes sense to start trying to correct the problem by using physical, harmless approaches, such as exercise, clean diet, and so on to normalize neurotransmitter levels. Nine times out of ten that works. Changing physical structures in a more profound way, as can be done through bodywork, will have much deeper effects on the mind and emotions.

MEMORY AND EXPERIENCE

The content of the personality is related to the experiences we have, and it is a little more conscious and under control than the structure of the body. Most of the defensive structure in the body is acquired, usually very early in our lives. The structure of the body influences not only the form that the personality will take, but also the basic way we engage with the world. As such, it tends to be very unconscious. Various types of “held energy” can be released from tissues without much verbal processing and still create major life changes.

Memory is not locatable in any particular part of the brain, nor can it be isolated in any part of the body. “Muscle memory” is probably a metaphor, yet I’ve seen thousands of people recall feelings, have déjà vu type experiences and flashbacks, when muscle and fascia release during bodywork. Perhaps that area of the body started to tighten when the experience happened, and the shock of the lengthening of the muscle somehow jolts them, triggering memory. We don’t know the mechanism. However, there is a fairly predictable pattern to the kinds of feelings that are held in different muscles: The shoulders hold anger as impulses to hit are suppressed in the trapezius and in the gripping of hands and jaw; the hips and thighs tend to hold insecurity, sexual conflicts, and control issues (for example, toilet training). Feet and legs hold power and energy and express the way we connect to the ground.

How much of experience is memory? As we get older, memory becomes set into the physical structure and feels like our identity. Not all the memories that pattern us are conscious. Even if we were to lose all our conscious memories (i.e., become amnesiac), we would not lose all our habits, tendencies, or basic character. Multiple personality syndrome, where several identities are present in the same body, each with its own set of memories, illustrates this seemingly solid (because corporeal) and yet entirely insubstantial quality of the nervous system. One “personality” can have an allergy or some other physical condition, and the alter personalities can be quite free of it, even though they all inhabit the same body. So when identity Number 1, for example, ingests orange juice, and this identity is not allergic to it, there is no problem—but if the person shifts over to identity Number 2, which is allergic, while the orange juice is in his body, he can have an allergic reaction to it, even though he has no memory of its ingestion.

This demonstrates the power of the “mind” over physical reaction and also shows us how little the conscious, aware mind has to do with it. It’s a very deep, unconscious level of the nervous system/mind that controls our body, and it is extremely hard to access. You can do affirmations to cure a disease until you are blue in the face, but nothing will change unless this part of the mind agrees with them. The chattering, externally focused part of our mind that most of us live in doesn’t change our destinies much one way or the other.

THE POWER OF IMAGERY AND VISUALIZATION

Imagery and visualization can help us contact that deep part in an indirect way. I’ve learned from teaching people that it’s usually much more helpful to teach a complicated alignment adjustment (for example, Neck and Head Alignment in chapter 8) by actually stopping people from using certain muscles. Usually, we copy a movement shape by using the most available muscles we have, and the point of the alignment work is to use the very deep, subtle connections that we don’t access.

So, if I say, “Absorb your C7 (see fig. 2.17) bone into your body,” most people will pull their shoulders back, stick their chest out, and so on. C7 doesn’t move a bit. Whereas, if I say, “Don’t move any muscles at all, just visualize or feel C7 moving into the core of your body,” sure enough, the right muscles, the paraspinals, will magically engage. Visualization helped the body to correct in a way that was impossible with intentional physical effort. Some people are more visual, some more kinesthetic (touch and feeling oriented). For kinesthetic people, I might put my hands on their backs in such a way that they feel the right movement, and then say to them, “Remember how that feels when you think of C7 softening into your body.”

You can use imagery yourself this way also. Visualize or feel each exercise carefully without moving—actually stop yourself moving—before you perform the exercise. Notice the differences between doing it this way and simply rushing right into the movement. If you can’t visualize and feel yourself doing something, you will not be able to do it. The nerve connections are not hooked up along the muscle pathways to the brain. Work with the imagery of it, and you will eventually be able to do it.

Once our brains recognize something, we will start to process it automatically. Healing often does not happen because a traumatized area is shut off from the brain. We can reconnect it through imagery, feeling, and of course bodywork.

When I began to work on people, I didn’t realize how powerful this simple reconnecting could be. I would put my hand on some part of their bodies, and they would start crying, sometimes even go into uncontrollable emotion, quite dramatically. It never seemed bad or even really frightened me; it seemed as though the nervous system was just unwinding and processing out some past emotions. Often the people did not even know what was triggering these powerful feelings. It did not matter. There was always both a physical change and an emotional relief, a sense that something that had been weighing them down was now gone. Moreover, this “something” did not return after the release was over. This seems to be how we can actually get rid of trauma. Animals, apparently, shake and emote for a while after a trauma and then are free of it. We are conditioned not to do this, so we hold in those natural responses, and years later, on my table, the release may finally happen. Too bad it takes that long.

THE EVOCATIVE POWER OF TOUCH

I was twenty-three and seeing one of my first regular clients, M. She wanted to “explore herself in a way that psychoanalysis hadn’t done” for her. This was about 1981, when that sort of statement wasn’t the usual thing I heard—now it’s totally commonplace. I had started to work on M.’s rib cage, opening up the breath. I had noticed that when she wasn’t breathing, not much that I did was very effective. Telling her to breathe usually resulted in a few overly deep breaths, as though she were trying to make up for lost time, and then a return to complete inertia. Breathing in an open way myself sometimes helped her open her breath, and of course it helped me maintain my energy, but the best way was to get the muscles that were so tight that they prevented her from breathing out of the way, by working the intercostal muscles between the ribs.

Despite her sincere intention to open up psychologically, M. couldn’t let go at all. Oddly, she seemed to be almost levitating off the futon we were working on. I was poking at her ribs, she began to breathe, and then I said to her, “You know, it seems like you’re not lying on the futon at all; why don’t you just try feeling the surface your back is resting on?” She let go a little more, and then it was as though she had fallen way back away from my hands and somehow fallen through space into her body. She was moving back into something, and she started screaming, “Get away from me!” over and over. Forget about breathing—I was thinking, What do I do? Who’s listening to this? HELP! She isn’t even aware I’m here. It seemed appropriate to lightly rest my hands on her belly and wait. So I did.

She was sobbing, gasping, hyperventilating, then calming down very slowly, and then an upset would rise in her again. The rhythm eventually calmed her, and she lay for a while in complete stillness that I did not want to interrupt. Her breathing was flowing now without intervention. I waited, and finally she opened her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said, and I was aware that I had done nothing.

“I remember it—I saw him standing over me—now I know it really happened.” She had had a flashback of her father raping her when she was five. Despite all the therapy she had done, some sense of authenticity was missing for her because the memory itself was not there.

This was a very direct experience of the power of “muscle memory”—whatever that may be. It is empirically the case that releasing certain muscles and long-held tensions in the body can open up memories that have not been available before. Perhaps M.’s chest tightened to repress the terrible experience of incest at that young age, something her system had no language for and could not process. Maybe her father had lain on top of her, causing her chest to tighten in self-protection, and when I opened that area, part of her consciousness that had been locked in that chronically tight muscle was released and she could remember.

Touch can also operate on the deeper levels of the brain just as smell does, evoking the feel of a time and place in an undeniably powerful way. I don’t know exactly how it happens, but it is a common experience. After that session I had a whole spate of other sessions with people who were abused or victims of incest, and who recovered memories as I worked on them. I was out of my depth. I didn’t actually have any bad experiences, but I was aware that I might. And I had another, worse fear—that a perpetrator of one of these crimes might end up getting bodywork from me and recovering memories from his or her own perspective, and I was sure I couldn’t deal with that.

On that basis, I decided to study psychotherapy, so I would be able to help clients effectively, as well as know what my own issues might be so I could keep them out of the sessions. The form I chose was Gestalt, because it is experientially based, deals with the present moment, and is nonanalytical, so it seemed to be compatible with bodywork.

  Working with Emotions through the Body

Here is a Gestalt therapy–based technique you can use with any uncomfortable emotion. I suppose you could use it to explore a pleasurable feeling also. You start by choosing a location in the body that you want to concentrate on; then you experience the emotion as a sensation in the body. You cannot feel any emotion without an equivalent physical sensation. It’s impossible. Try it—you’ll see.

1. Suppose the sensation you decide to explore is tightness in the chest. Suspend all positive or negative thoughts and judgments about that feeling, and focus, with your eyes closed, on the tight area of your chest.
2. Explore it with curiosity, sensing progressively deeper into the tightness. How are you creating it? Which muscles are involved? You could tighten it more to find out. Imagine this process as an exploration, as though you are taking a journey to a foreign land. You may see colors or images, hear a voice or sound, access a memory, think of a person, and so on. Don’t judge; just keep going.
3. Go into the sensations of that area until nothing more happens, or until you find no further changes. Keep the focus. Breathe into the area. As you exhale, melt the sensations, images, and so on into the rest of your body, experiencing any tightness left as held energy that you are giving the rest of your body. Let that energy go to any place that needs it.
4. Become aware of your entire body. Then become aware of the space around you, about nine feet all around your body. Let any energy left over flow into that area too.
5. Open your eyes and focus again on the original emotion. Notice how experiencing it as physical sensation only, with no justifications or “stories” attached, allows the brain to process it in a natural way.

Reverse the Process

You can work the other way too, starting with an uncomfortable, physical sensation, then breathing into it and experiencing all the feelings in that area in the same way. In this case, you may find locked-up emotions in the uncomfortable area. I do not find this a useful way to work with extreme pain, which tends to throw the nervous system off (at least for me) in such a way that calm focusing is not possible. It can, however, work for diseased areas of the body that don’t actually hurt.

1. For deeper organs and systems that are giving you trouble, but not real discomfort, or for systemic conditions, go into the body and allow the organ or condition a voice. Listen with attention and respect. We generally try to tell our bodies all kinds of things and are so used to commanding them, that we don’t take time to listen to what the body wants to tell us. Therefore, don’t be discouraged if your body doesn’t find its voice right away.
2. Again, the procedure is the same: Focus without judgment, breathe into the area, wait until there is no more change.
3. Then disperse energy through the body and nine feet around you, and reconnect with your environment.

RELAXATION OR SHAVASANA

Relaxation is a shift from sympathetic dominance to parasympathetic dominance in the nervous system. If we are not able to make the shift easily, we may have a hard time going to sleep or calming ourselves, or conversely, we may feel sluggish. Animals—wild ones, at any rate—switch from complete relaxation to total muscle activation, and back, very quickly and without difficulty. Humans deal with the obstacles of muscle memories, held emotions, and chronic stress. We may need to relearn the ability to switch autonomic dominance quickly.

Drugs that sedate or stimulate can interfere with this natural ability, and then the entrapment of the nervous system in one mode can lead us to use more and other drugs to soothe or enliven us. So let us learn this natural ability and bring our autonomic nervous systems back into healthy functioning.

Exercise, a prime example of sympathetic activation, can automatically bring us back into relaxation if our reflexes are healthy. The release of adrenaline, at a certain point, will actually relax us, as you may have experienced after intense stress, physical or emotional. There can be a wonderful feeling of physical calmness, tiredness even, and a mental softening, yet alertness. Chronic stress and fear let go for a while. However, this reflex works only as far as our minds can let go, and as we grow older and hold on more anxiously to ourselves, the stress/relaxation cycle can become less efficient.

  “Switching” to Relax

Practice “switching” to relaxation after exercise initially, and when you get used to this you can use it to release mental stress, too.

1. Make yourself comfortable on the floor, any way that you feel good. Use pillows as needed. Get any fidgeting or tensions out of the muscles first. You can tighten all your muscles and then release them.
2. Amplify any distressing emotion by moving deeply into it, then expressing it as movement, discharging it as fully as you can through your muscles.
3. Then find a comfortable position on your back and completely cease all outer muscular movement. Focus on being very still. Involuntary movements, such as twitching, may happen, so simply wait until your body has freed itself of the need to move.
4. When your body becomes still on the outside, drop your awareness away from your muscles into your skeleton, the framework of your bones, as you lie on the floor without moving. Trace your bones in your mind’s eye, starting with your feet, going up into the ankle joint, legs, knees, pelvis, spine, and so on. Don’t worry about anatomical correctness; just feel the hard core of the body, paying attention to what you actually feel, especially around the joints. You will naturally still feel the deeper tensions as you shift your focus into the bones.
5. All tensions are in muscle or soft tissue, so instead of focusing on them, imagine the muscles dissolving like air and the soft tissues floating away from the bones, until you are just skeleton. Feel the properties of bone, living bone, which is pink as it exists in your body (bone only whitens on exposure to air). Identify with the part of you that is your framework, your skeleton.
6. When you feel this, shift your attention to your smooth muscles: heart, intestine, bronchioles (lungs), and the movement of your blood in the veins. When these sensations are strong, you will automatically shift into parasympathetic dominance, feeling a sense of calm and relaxation. At this point, you can either meditate or return to sympathetic mode.