2 ENERGY AND ARMOUR
Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim within theenergies of the senses.
Tarthang Tulku, Kum Nye Relaxation
He who remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recoveringelasticity of mind.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and AnimalsLife has energy.Or rather, life
is
energy: moving, vibrating, seeking, pulsing. We may not be able to definelife energy, but we all experience it in our own beings, and perceive it in other people:watching a fine dancer or mime or Tai Chi exponent, making love, meditating, expressingstrong emotion, receiving or giving hand healing. Many people over the ages have givennames to the life energy and its different forms - 'prana'. 'magnetic fluid', 'vital essence', 'chi','od', 'archeus', 'kundalini', and many more. Reich's name for it was Orgone, which he made upfrom words like 'orgasm' and 'organism'.This life energy is the vitality of our being: when we are moved, this is what moves. Emotionsare e-motions, movements out; they are not just in our minds, but in our bodies, in the chargeof energy that builds up and. with luck, discharges; in the flooding of hormones, the surge of bodily fluids and electrical potential, expanding from deep within us towards the surface, orretreating into the caves of the abdomen, or flowing through and out via head and hands andlegs and pelvis, shifting form easily between muscular or electrical tension, fluid, sound,movement sensation, emotion.For example: I feel sorrow, but am inhibited about showing it. So as it 'rises' in me, maybe mythroat contracts - I'm 'all choked up', mucus forms and my throat aches; my chin tightens andtucks in as part of the effort to restrict flow in my neck; maybe my fists tense, and transmitthat 'holding' up my arms to my shoulders and throat - I'm 'keeping a grip on myself'.If my grief starts to break through the holding, probably I'll first sigh, cough or groan, releasewhat I'm 'swallowing down' in the form of sound or mucus. As a channel opens up, asensation of softening and melting flows up the sides of my throat and jaw. Another personcan actually watch my cheeks suffuse with fluid and colour, my face softening as the emotionex-presses (pushes out) through my eyes in the form of tears, with the piercing sweetness of release. At the same time my hands will open, my shoulders come forward in a vulnerable'giving' gesture as my chest heaves with sobs, my 'full heart melts'. As I surrender physicallyto my grief, my mind may fill with corresponding thoughts, memories and images.Thoughts, emotions, sensations, changes in electrolytic fluid, muscle tension and hormonebalance, flow of life energy: there is no point in saying that any one of these causes or comesbefore the others. They are different aspects of a single whole event in a single wholebodymind. We will focus on one or other of these aspects depending on what we are trying tofind out or do.Focusing on the play of life energy has the advantage of being fresh and uncompromised byour society's dubious assumptions about what feelings are. It gives the space to include manydifferent aspects of the bodymind. It's a good starting point, but we don't want to give theimpression that we think energy 'causes' thoughts. feelings or bodily changes. There is onlythe endless dance of transformation.
In fact we are all used to speaking about ourselves in energy-images. These metaphors areoften very literal, as when we say we feel full of energy, or drained and empty; our head iswhirling or stuffed up; we feel electric; someone else is magnetically attractive; we have itchyfeet; we melt with desire.If we look at the human being as an organism among other organisms, to see what it shareswith the rest of life, from amoebae to elephants, then we will almost certainly notice the role of pulsation.
Life is constantly expanding and shrinking, reaching out and pulling back inresponse to internal needs and to outside influences - the 'friendliness' or 'hostility' of theenvironment. These continuous wavelike vibrations are the organism's ongoing 'conversation'with the rest of the universe. In humans, one expression of this continuous pulsing is ourheartbeat, sending oxygenated blood out to the extremities of the organism and bringing wasteproducts back. Another, and particularly important for our purpose, is the breath.
Watch a small baby breathe, and you'll see how the whole of her body is involved, committed,swept up in the smooth wavelike expansion and contraction that reaches from top to toes. Forthe healthy baby there's no resistance, no avoidance of the involuntary breath-pulse; at the topof the out-breath the in-breath is born and the top of the in-breath turns out again, Yin fromYang and Yang from Yin, a constant exchange of polarities with the universe (Yin and Yangare ancient Chinese names for the two complementary poles of existence, the Active and the Receptive).As we grow up and confront this difficult world, however, a voluntary element soon creepsinto our breathing, a hesitation, a holding-back, which likewise affects our whole body fromtop to toes. In-breath and out-breath begin to separate from each other, to lose their seamlesscontinuity, to become more shallow and jerky, without the generous graceful flow. We maydevelop a tendency to constantly hold our breath, never fully emptying our lungs or,contrariwise, to keep our lungs permanently half empty. And so we lose our basic groundingin the universe, our identification with it. We become separate, lost, lonely, anxious beings.Why does this happen? If we
breathe freely and fully, then we feel freely and fully.
Openbreathing washes emotion through and out into expression; we are unable to hide it, eitherfrom ourselves or from each other. Yet from a very early age, most of us experience a need tosuppress some of our feelings.This is because our environment - initially mainly the adults who are caring for us - does notsupport us in our feelings. They reject our neediness or tears or anger. They threaten us withpunishment - including the withdrawal of love. Or they simply do not give the validation andcare which our baby-self needs in order to cope with powerful feelings. This process canbegin at birth or even sooner, as we shall see. It's no one's fault , generally speaking; all of uswho are parents know how our own anxiety and pain and practical problems interfere with thesincere wish to nurture our children. But the effect
is that children learn to hold back onfeeling - by holding back on its expression - by holding back on breathing.Don't worry if you are finding this difficult to follow: it is a theme to which we'll be comingback over and over again. But to make it a little more concrete, consider two examples.Imagine a baby who cries out as her natural way of expressing a need - hunger, cold, a desirefor company - and no one comes. It will take a long time for this to sink in: she will cry andcry again, but eventually she will stop. She suppresses her crying by holding her breath -which holds back her grief and anger, not identified consciously as feelings, but implicit in the whole state of her body.
Now imagine another baby who is picked up and manipulated by cold hands: not so much physically cold, but emotionally
cold, uncaring. Babies feel thesethings, and there will be a reaction of shock, a gasp, like the way we gasp if we step into coldwater. If this experience of cold touch is repeated often enough, then that gasp, that heldbreath, will become built in to that baby's body nature.These are only examples from among many ways in which an unfriendly environment caninterrupt the full, whole-body, involuntary pulsation of natural breathing. Muscles tenseagainst it, first in the diaphragm, which is our primary breathing muscle (see Chapter 4), andthen spreading into the chest, throat, back, belly, pelvis, arms and legs, face, head. The entirebody is drawn into a battle against itself, against its own natural impulse to breathe and feel.In effect the energy 'splits'. turns back on itself and blocks its own natural movement; likeIndian wrestling with ourselves.Sometimes the battle is conscious - whenever we deliberately tighten our jaw, tense our belly,swallow down emotion. But the infant's basic holding-back against breathing quite soonbecomes unconscious. If you think about it, this must happen: the purpose of the holding isprecisely to stop us feeling our feelings, and this can only work if it stops us knowing whatour feelings are. Emotions are bodily events; if they are blocked in the body, then they don'thappen in the mind either. The fundamental holding acts as a pattern
around which every laterdenial of feeling organises itself; we get very good at it indeed, artists and technicians of self-deception and self denial.
Exercise 1 Take a moment now to check out how you are feeling and breathing. It's very likely that, whilereading the above, you've tightened yourself up to resist the inward stirring these ideascreate. So first put your attention in your belly and diaphragm - all around your navel. aboveand below. Is it gently rising and falling with your breath; or have you been holding it rigid? Are you able to deliberately relax it and let the tension flow out - perhaps with a sigh or agroan to help it along? Check out whether your chest, too, moves as you breathe - as part of acontinuous wavelike flow with your belly. If not, you are probably holding your shoulders,hands, and/or jaw stiff. Try to let them go, and experience the feeling they have been holdingon to. Allow yourself to breathe easily and fully; just watch where the holding is, if anywhere,and what thoughts cause an interruption to the flow. As you go on reading, try to come back periodically to a conscious awareness of your own breath and body state.
Blocked breathing is the essence of armouring:
Reich's name for the state of chronic muscle tension and emotional holding-back by which almost all adults in our society are imprisoned.
Along with the suppression of breathing goes the suppression of specific impulses - to cry, to yell, to laugh, to hit to reach out for love, to run away. The muscles are tightened to stop us e-moting. moving out, and if this tightening happens regularly enough it becomes a chronic,unconscious habit, built into the structure of our bodies - part of our sense of ourselves, asfamiliar as an old scar.In fact, a lot of what we customarily identify as a person's 'self' is really their pattern of armouring: their high. tight shoulders, or stuck-out chest, or pulled-back jaw, or wide-open or narrowed-down eyes. 'Well, that's just the way I am,' they'll say. But in fact it's the way that person has
become, by cutting off certain forms of self-expression and emphasising others.Maybe one individual is constantly angry and aggressive, never letting herself feel soft, sad and small. Another is continuously polite and meek, censoring any assertiveness. As we shall see later, there are specific relationships between muscular armouring and emotional armouring: these cut-off emotions are locked into tense muscle patterns, locked in permanent,frozen battle with the suppressing impulses. They are imprisoned there like genies, bottled upin the rigid 'no' of our bodies. And, like genies, they can often be released by rubbing!Our held-in feelings have power.
When we liberate a feeling we can liberate not only the energy of the feeling itself, but also the split-off energy which has been devoted to holding it down. In doing this, we allow our breathing to open up, drawing on the infinite energy of the universe around us.
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