Alternative POIS Forum

Boundary Position
 Eye segment block: issues of
existence
 In the first days of our life outside the womb, we urgently seek contact with those who carefor us, usually our mothers. We need to receive unspoken messages which tell us 'Yes, you'rehere, you exist, I recognise and care for you'; to see and be seen, touch and be touched, hearand be heard. The focus for this affirmation that we exist seems to be the whole skin surfaceof our bodies, and more specifically, the upper head and particularly the eyes.We are not really describing anything mysterious here; you can see parents and babiesinstinctively drinking deep in each others' eyes right from the start, especially during feeding,and there have been several studies of how badly affected a baby is if the parent keeps turningtheir attention away. The same happens if she is not held and stroked enough - enough to feel
real
.We depend utterly on this fundamental validation, and if we don't get it at the start of lifethrough our eyes and skin, there will be a long-term incompleteness and fragility built into our

 
49bodymind development A part of our energy will stay back in those first days of life, stillseeking that primary contact which says 'you exist'. This insecurity can be seen in the eyes of the adult, and sensed in their interaction with the world. At least part of the character will bebuilt upon a basic uncertainty about their own wholeness and reality, and every crisis of lifewill be experienced as a threat to
being
.If the person stays in the same family situation this lack of warm human contact in earliestinfancy is likely to be continued in childhood, and may be reinforced by frightening orconfusing experiences that need to be shut out of awareness. This kind of history puts aparticular stress on
boundaries
. Do I have any? Where are they? These are very real questionsfor someone with a strong eye segment block. With a 'yearning block', someone will feel alack of wholeness. They may experience themselves as 'in bits', fragmented, 'all over theplace', liable under pressure to flee or fall apart- There will be a drive to find some form of themissing primary contact: 'I must see, 1 must understand', a compulsion to make sense of things, to find an answer. There will be a 'seeking', intense expression in the eyes, which canbe frightening to other people whose own deep feelings are sparked off by this demand forcontact.Does this sound familiar? It is partly this need to understand which draws someone to read -or to write - about the structures of the bodymind. You may also recognise in yourself the'denying eye block', which seeks to repress this frightening need for contact, understandingand validation. Its message is 'I can't or won't see or understand'. The fear of what's out there,or what's inside, is so great that the person closes down their perception in some way, cloudsor fogs or confuses, 'goes away in the eyes' as Reich puts it.A small example is the otherwise sensible person who 'just can't see' some area of reality.Because of our training, for women it is often mathematics or mechanics; for men, it isemotions. We can't understand it because it stirs up too much: we cannot bear to keep ourattention on it and re-experience the anger, say, of being put down in childhood, or theanguish in our own heart. For many people, psychic and spiritual realities fall into thiscategory: 'I won't look because there's nothing there.'On a wider scale, the denying eye block puts people severely out of touch with the world andwith other humans. They feel 'cut off', 'unreal', but may well be giving out conscious orunconscious messages of 'stay away'; a coldness and an invisible wall which is their responseto intolerable
 fear
.Fear is very much the key emotion with the boundary character position: fear of beingoverwhelmed. of exploding or imploding, of one's fragile foothold on existence crumbling. Asource of denying eye blocking is very often the need, as a child, to escape adult scrutiny, tonot be seen
into
. There is a lack of fundamental confidence which means a natural boundarybetween inside and outside fails to develop, so that a harsh and exaggerated cut-off is createdin its place.A good sign that we are occupying the boundary position is if we become confused aboutwhat is
outside
and what is
inside
. Perhaps we find ourselves seeing other people as feelingangry or afraid when that is what
we
are feeling, or perhaps we let other people's ideas take usover and dominate our own sense of things. Or maybe we mix up one kind of reality withanother, mistaking our own energy for some sort of psychic or science-fiction 'attack' fromoutside.
 
50All these experiences are seen in orthodox psychiatry as reflecting 'schizoid' characterStructures. This is
not
the same thing as 'schizophrenia' but, one might say, a very mildversion of the problems for which that label is used. These are the sorts of experiencesdescribed so well in R.D. Laing's earlier books, like
The Divided Self
. In a sense, though,Laing perpetuates the split he describes by writing only about the
mind
, and not the body.This is one boundary that tends to exist very strongly in such characters.Eye segment blocking makes it hard to live in the body - one form it can take, as we havealready noted, is the 'ivory tower' intellectual. It also makes it hard to achieve wholeness; thebodies of people with strong boundary characters often have an unfinished or unintegratedlook to them - different parts may give contradictory messages. Sometimes there is achildlike, undeveloped physique, perhaps the large head and spindly neck of the baby who inessence is still present still seeking wholeness and validation. Someone really stuck in theboundary position will give off a deep sense of 'wrongness' with their bodymind; other peoplewill instinctively tend to avoid them, which of course reinforces their isolation and fear.Another form which this 'flight from the body' often takes is an extreme sensitivity to, andinterest in, the 'psychic', 'spiritual' realm. However, because the boundary position is severelyundergrounded, the very real sensitivity is quite undiscriminating. Genuine contact gets mixedup with complete fantasy, often projecting the person's own feelings and sensations 'out there'on to other people or 'spirits'. The awareness of energy, however confused, is real and strong;in particular, the boundary character will often be strongly conscious of the energy fieldsurrounding the body - the 'aura'.It is important to see how the needs and concerns of the boundary position as with every othercharacter - are basically quite rational and universal. Every baby passes through a phase of contacting the world and other people through eyes, ears, nose and skin, and a phase of settingboundaries, making a sense of self which is secure against outside invasion or 'leaking'. Everyadult can develop out of this 'eye energy' a creative enjoyment of looking, thinking, discovery,eye contact, flirting, visions, inspiration and meditation.What we are calling an eye block, a boundary position, is a state where someone has not yetfully managed to create a basis for this adult creativity. They are still partially stuck in anearly childhood crisis, and are reducing adult experience to these terms. By their very over-sensitivity, though, they are many of our artists, our mediums, our prophets, our seers.Exercises to give a direct experience of the character positions necessarily involve workingwith another person, since the positions are fundamentally about relationship. If you have afriend with whom you feel happy to try it, then the following exercise should put you in touchwith your boundary material (for the idea of these exercises and some specific details, we aregrateful to Helen Davis)
Exercise 15
 Person A, stand with your back close up against a wall, pressing yourself against it and coming up on tiptoe, so your whole posture is 'up and away'. Open your eyes very wide,breathe high in your chest, without ever fully emptying your lungs. Person B, stand a few feet away, and holding eye contact slowly advance on A.Person A, experiment with saying thingslike 'No', 'keep away', and so on; let yourself go into the feelings that come up.

Clearly there are many 'stages of growth' - as many as we choose to name - but our system of character analysis focuses on some main stages relating to those parts of the body where we'exchange energy' with the universe: places where we take things in and give things out - andwhich are, therefore, sites of pleasure and frustration, satisfaction and loss. These partssurround what we call the 'heartlands' of the body: our torso and belly, the inner areas of which, the great involuntary muscles of the heart, the diaphragm and the intestines, we canidentify on a bodily level with the Core. The word 'core' in fact comes from the Latin for'heart' and there is a very special relationship between the heart segment and our primaryfeelings of love, contact and creativity.Thus the places where character is defined are the places where energy moves between theheartlands of our body and the outside world: eyes, mouth, chest, anus and genitals are themain systems involved, with other areas like legs, throat and back taking their cue from thesorts of charge, blocking and investment that happen at the two ends of the organism, headand tail. Armouring elsewhere will give a particular 'flavour' to the character, but it is whathappens in the head and tail that defines the essential character attitude.Since we all go through much the same biological process of growing up, we have allexperienced the essential attitude towards the world that goes along with each character type.These attitudes are all part of a healthy life function; we all need an energetic connection withseeing and thinking, with feeding and speaking, with self-regulation, assertion and love.What keeps us stuck in
negative
versions of these attitudes is when some of our growthenergy is still trapped back in that phase of our development, never having satisfactorilyresolved the issues that arose there. At each stage we need help, validation and support fromthe world. Without these, a certain part of us never makes it through to the next stage: likePeter Pan, we just can't face growing up.That part of us will then tend to identify every new situation which comes along as beingnothing but a new version of that same issue from the past. So, to use the same example asearlier, someone who hasn't properly dealt with the experience of being weaned will see everynew person in their life as a potential provider or witholder of nourishment - 'Are you myMummy?' is the unconscious question. Every crisis of life will then be understood as beingbasically a threat to nourishment, whatever the actual issues may be. The process of creativelearning, whereby we use the past to draw lessons for the future, has here gone out of control.In a sense no future exists, only action replays of the past. We will return to some of theseissues in Chapter 10.The same sorts of pattern correspond to each phase of development over the first few years of life, up to the point at which our basic character is pretty well formed. To each bodily functionof exchange with the world there corresponds a basic
need
, which must be satisfied before thebodymind can fully move on. Insofar as that need is denied or left unsatisfied, a part of ourlife force is 'left behind' in the form of muscular armour and character structure, and futureissues will be comprehended largely in terms of that unmet need. For the eyes it is the senseof existence and reality; for the mouth, feeding and support; for the chest, validation; for theanus, grounding and self-management; and for the genitals, assertiveness, love and surrender.The great majority of us have to some basic extent made it through to the end of the process,the beginning of independent life, with the ability to be open, accept reality, and have genitalsexual relationships, Bruised and battered, tattered and tom, we've made it; but not
 
46completely. We've left a considerable part of our potential power and pleasure back in thosegrowth stages, locked up in the armouring that forms around our frustrations.We can only fully let go to reality and pleasure, it seems, when we replay and release this oldhistory, re-own our existence, nourishment, self-regulation, validation, assertiveness and love.What we then achieve is the
wholeness
of our bodymind from top to toes, able to focus andexpress itself through each and every organ, able to carry on with the open-ended process of growing.We can achieve a relationship of wholeness with our entire developmental process. There is aperfectly healthy 'regression' that goes on all the time: every night we return to a womb-likestate to sleep and dream, and at different moments in our daily life we are using the attitudesand feelings appropriate to every phase of life. Even a six-month old baby can at times beseen regressing to earlier phases for reassurance and comfort. And there is also a process of what we might call 'progression' along our lifeline - the times when we feel old as the hills, orwhen a child suddenly shows unexpectedly adult attitudes. This is all a natural part of beingalive. The important thing is to have the capacity for free movement, rather than beingcompelled to enter or stay in a particular state.It is our character structure which can make some forms of 'release therapy' verydisappointing after a while. It's a tremendous relief to cry, to rage, to scream and to shake,especially if we have spent years being unable to do so. But eventually it is brought home tous that there has been only a limited change in our ways of living our life; that we still havemost of the problems we came with, and we don't seem to have
that
much less need todischarge emotion.Our character is like a sponge which soaks up and holds on to certain kinds of feeling, It'scomparatively easy - and very important - to learn how to let those feelings go - likesqueezing out the sponge. In itself, however, this won't alter
the structure of the sponge
: itwill soak up the same feelings again at the first opportunity. Working to change the characteritself is a much harder and more subtle task. In the following chapters we shall show how wego about it.
6 CHARACTER POSITIONS
 Most people have very little tendency to look at their character objectively.
 Wilhelm Reich, Character AnalysisWe shall now work down the body again, as we did in the chapter on the segments, but thistime looking only at the head and tail 'energy exchange' segments, which the Freudians call'erogenous zones'. We add to these the heart segment, which also reaches out to exchangeenergy with the world.We shall describe the sort of character attitudes which accompany aserious block in each segment. In this way we will set up some caricature figures, stiffer andmore one-dimensional than almost any real person, but from a blend of which, and influencedby armouring elsewhere in the body, our individual character is formed.We call these attitudes character
 positions
to emphasise the fact that, for most people, theymanifest only at certain times and in certain conditions. Most of us are pretty healthy andcreative in our best moments, though even at these times we may tend to show a certain
style
 of creativity which reflects a favoured character position. We may be better at standing our

impossible, a defensive habit imprinted on the body, just as it becomes mentally 'impossible'to feel and express the repressed emotions. Changes take place in the sheaths of connectivetissue that surround our muscles. What started off as
doing
- tensing muscles as a deliberateact - has become a state of
being
: 'that's just the way I am'.We are going to show how these character patterns - 'just the ways we are' - emerge out of specific stages of development that we all go through, and which in turn correspond tospecific areas and organs of the body. These patterns, found in particular segments or ourarmour, first formed during the phase of childhood when our energy was focused in that areaof the body, a result of the work of growing up that was going on there. The body armour is amap of character - but an
archaeological
map.In the womb, the embryo grows from the head down. This is the direction of the energystream around which we develop. After birth, the process is repeated on another level in ourformative interactions with the world. The energy of our need, our interest, our desire, streamsthrough one body system after another, tracing in the first few years of life a path down thebody from head to pelvis. This is partly a metaphor, but to a remarkable extent - as we shallsee - it is a simple statement of fact

5 GROWING UP
These children are not your childrenThey are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself You can strive to be like them But you cannot make them just like you ...
 Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
We cannot solve life's problems except by solving them.
 M. Scott Peck, The Road Less TravelledFacing things as they are is the essence of growing up; owning and using new capacitieswithin ourselves; recognising and responding to new features of the world around us; copingrealistically with the gains and losses to our well-being that these changes bring.Or at least that's the idea. For many people, however, the phrase and the associated idea of 'growing up' carry such a mass of pain and anger that they will already have turned off fromreading these words, and are responding by reflex. 'Why don't you grow up?' 'Stop being sucha baby!' 'When I grow up I can do what I like, I'll understand everything and have power atlast.' 'I don't ever want to grow up and be like
them
.'Growing up is a process, not a state; we never reach a point of 'grownupness', certainly not onour eighteenth birthday. Neither is being physiologically adult a measure of how muchgrowing up we have managed to do. As children we are fed a lot of images of grownupnessthat may seem both enticing - power, freedom, status, knowledge - and discouraging -conservatism, rigidity, responsibility, worldweariness. These are images and not reality, but of course they impose a certain reality on most of us. The process of growing up becomes one of growing into a set of shared beliefs and attitudes, many of which in our society are crippling.Even in the healthiest environment there are always losses alongside the gains in skill andenjoyment which growing up brings. Apart from anything else there is the simple loss of
 familiarity
, which we tend to equate with security. However limiting and impoverished aparticular situation may be, we are at least surviving it, and it's often tempting to choose thefrying pan rather than the fire, a known and survivable limitation rather than an unknownmixture of promise and threat.
 
40So it's a genuine question: do we
want
to grow up? Physically, we may have little choice - thefirst great example is the foetus who simply grows too big for the womb to hold it, and ourgrowth process continues with the same irresistibility (though some people do seem to keep a'childlike', underdeveloped physique which corresponds to an emotional unwillingness togrow up). As far as feeling and behaviour go, however, we can choose at any point to stop,not to pass through the next gateway in our developmental process. Although we apparentlycontinue with life, our being has said 'No' on a deep level: inwardly we are committed topreserving the attitudes and values of the past.In childhood, this refusal is clearly not literal. We can't, for example, go on breastfeeding forour whole life. But we
can
go on manifesting the attitudes which are appropriate to thebreastfeeding or bottlefeeding period and which, if maintained, become negative andunhelpful. Genuine dependence becomes a clinging, weedy behaviour; we act as if the worldowes us a living.This is quite different from the way in which one stage can and should act as a
 foundation
forthe next To continue the breastfeeding example, we should be able to build on the securefeeling that we can be fed by the universe, while breastfeeding itself builds on the deepsecurity of the previous experience of being continuously nurtured through the umbilical cord.We move from continuous, effortless feeding into a situation of dependence on a reliablesource of nourishment, where we become more and more capable of actively asking for itThus by stages we move gradually into the adult situation of having to create our ownnourishment. If all goes well there is a safe and gradual progression, even if there are somedifficult moments, like weaning, or adolescence.Growing up isn't just about childhood. True, it is most obvious and intense early in life, butthe
opportunities
to grow continue throughout our existence. Physically, our body goes onchanging and developing both emotionally and mentally. We face new situations whichchallenge us to respond in new ways, to reconsider ourselves and reintegrate our values. Howwe cope with these opportunities depends a great deal on what has happened in our childhood,because by the time we are physical adults most of us have made some basic decisions
not
togo on changing. At one or more of the crucial developmental thresholds, we have rejected thenew in favour of the old; not through wilfulness or inadequacy, but because our world did notgive us the necessary support in a deeply scary and demanding situation.As we have already suggested, these 'decisions not to change' are what creates armouring.Once made, such choices are not easy to unmake, especially since we are normally unawareof having made them. They are frozen into the basic pattern of our bodymind; secretly,tenaciously, they warp our responses to every new situation, enforcing a particular style of limitation of our bodily and emotional mobility.We may be unable to raise our arms easily over our head, for example - unable to ask for help.Or we may be unable to push our jaw forward - and to defy authority; unable to balance onone leg - and to feel securely grounded in the world.There are limitless examples, but as we shall see they tend to be organised within each personinto a few basic patterns, a few main styles of defending against the world and our ownimpulses, each relating to a major threshold of development over which we stumbled inchildhood.
 
41We use 'character' as the name for these patterns - for the inflexible, protective structures builtinto our ways of being in the world; the armoured bodymind which people often falselyidentify with the real self.The irony is that many of the attitudes which physical adults hold up to the young as examplesof 'grownupness' are in fact pieces of character armouring. The caution, the conventionality,the exaggerated politeness and deep habitual patterns which are supposed to indicate'maturity' are really more like the first stages of death. Young people who instinctivelyrecognise this shrink In horror from the cold rigidity of adults, retreating into destructivenihilism - 'I'm never going to grow up'.Armouring forms different patterns in each person; each of us favours some styles of expression and of holding more than others. In a very real and remarkable way our armouringpresents a fossilised history of its own development: old feelings that have turned to stone,layer upon frozen layer, like the rings of some prehistoric tree. It is possible systematically tobring these fossil feelings back to life, liberating the energy that is trapped in holding themdown - trapped in the past.It's a great help in this task of creative archaeology to realise that character, though differentlyconstructed for each person, falls into patterns. We can look at a particular way of relating tothe world, of holding tension in the body, and connect it with other similar patterns, and soapproach the individual with some sense of what feelings are being frozen and why, someidea of which era of childhood the process relates to. Of course, we can never deny thatperson's uniqueness, the very uniqueness we are trying to help them liberate, but the
armour
,as distinct from the human being within it, will almost always fit into one of relatively fewpatterns.There are many different ways In which theorists can and do classify character for purposes of recognition - and no way to say that one is 'right' and another 'wrong'. It's like sorting buttons:we can put all the red ones together, or all the ones with four holes, or all the wooden ones - itdepends entirely on what we are aiming to do with the buttons. We can, however, point outthe different values which different modes of character analysis hold up as 'normal' and'healthy'. What do they think human beings are 'really' like?Some approaches to grouping character are attempting to say something about the origin andfunction of the attitudes involved: what they protect against, for example, and why. We feelthat these approaches are powerful and potentially useful, for they have direct implicationsabout how character can be melted and loosened. But at the same time they are dangerous,because if we go off at the wrong angle we are likely to miss the real person completely, andbecause they create the possibility of manipulating individual personality into what we regardas 'good for them'. Our own work with character starts from the belief and experience thathuman beings are originally and fundamentally loving; that our primal impulses are forcontact and creativity; and that character armour represents our response to the
 frustration
of these original impulses. So rather than trying to 'turn people into' healthy and loving beings,we are trying to help them melt the layers which obscure their original healthy and lovingnature.Of course, it's a rare individual whose character consists of one pure type, who reacts all thetime to every situation along the same groove.

 
42Generally, each character can be seen as a complex interweaving of strands, often with manylayers of defences lying 'on top of' each other, so that as one dissolves the next comes into view
These layers represent phases of historical development in each person, ways of reactingwhich get frozen into us in a sequence of attitudes. Thus, in a crude example, there might be alayer of frozen fear which the person protects with violent anger, and then covers
this
up witha sneering politeness, which she tries to control with a stance of sweet reason - and so on.Reich saw each of us as consisting of three major layers which show up in our characterattitudes and in our musculature. He referred to these as Core, Middle Layer, and Surface. TheCore is our 'original mind' as Buddhists sometimes call it our innate, organic capacity for loveand creative work. For an infant growing up in our society, her attempts to express her corenature, to move this loving and enthusiastic energy outwards, are often met with systematiccoldness and repression. Love, by its nature, turns to anger when frustrated, the organism'sway of focusing energy on blasting through whatever obstructs its satisfaction.But if this anger is
itself
suppressed, we end up with a superficial layer of socialised 'niceness'covering up all sorts of hateful and vicious feelings, created out of anger which cannotdischarge itself, stewing and stagnating under the Surface. It is this Middle Layer which manypeople take to be their 'real innermost self' - a terrifying idea, which naturally enough makesthem feel they must stay concealed at all costs!A dim awareness of the Middle Layer, without any direct sense of the Core, is what stops a lotof people from working at their own growth. 'If I let go of my control I might attack people

 
43with an axe, or have sex in the middle of the road', is a common attitude. The core may beseen as if it was outside ourselves rather than inside, so that goodness is in
other
people, or inHeaven. Will I like what I find? Will other people like it? Am I
normal
? These are the fearsthat police our separation from our own core nature.Character defends against outside threats ('they won't like it'); but equally, or even moreimportantly, it defends against inside feelings which seem too dangerous to express or even toacknowledge ('I won't like it').Hate and violence, though, are only a distorted version of love and pleasure. Once we contactour original nature, with its primary feelings of wholesomeness, we, can find the courage torelease what Reich called 'secondary emotions' without feeling overwhelmed by them. Of course, to contact the Core we need to explore some of the Middle Layer which is in the way,so it is a delicate process of opening up as much as we dare, and seeing that we gain atremendous amount from doing so. At the same time our Core offers a natural self-regulationof how much we open up at any given moment. Once again, our feelings are not the problem,but our feelings
about
our feelings most certainly are.This is particularly true when the feeling is of guilt, manifesting itself in a belief that ourdefensive character structure is 'our fault'. But we are not to blame for our decisions to 'nevergrow up'; and nor, really, is anyone else. Everybody at all times does their best; all energystarts out from the clear core and struggles to reach expression. If we have decided to say 'no'to some of life's demands, it was always the result of an accurate judgement that we couldn'thandle them -
at that time
.However, circumstances have changed. As adults our potential powers and capacities havegreatly increased, and it would probably make sense to revise some of those past decisions.One thing this means is becoming
conscious
of them - re-owning the frozen history of ourcharacter armour

Belly segment: showing the rectus abdomini muscle (left) and internal oblique muscle (right).There are several more muscle layers running at different angles.
 Gently massaging the belly area while breathing freely and easily can bring up all sorts of pains and emotions. Often there are specific sore spots carrying particular ideas andmemories. The overall tone of the belly armour is frequently
tiredness
: old, tired grief; oldtired anger; old tired fear. The emotions may have been curdling away down there for a verylong time indeed.But the belly, when it is alive and functioning, is an agent of release and elimination - it helpssort out the nourishing from the threatening, and channel each appropriately. As the belly'wakes up' in bodywork, we hear all sorts of gurglings and rumblings - usually a sign of healthy activity as it resumes its functions of absorption and discharge. Gerda Boyesen hasworked for many years with the belly's wisdom; she has found - and we can confirm - thatwhenever the belly emits a particularly energetic gurgle, it signals some important thought,feeling or memory which may be below the threshold of awareness unless we take up thebelly's cue and look within.One particular set of feeling-memories in this segment is going to be about the cutting of theumbilical cord; there are usually very tender spots all around the navel which can restimulatethis experience. It is also very closely linked with the waist segment - the shock of cutting thecord makes the diaphragm contract with a great gasp which is the first breath, so differentfrom what that breath would have been had it been allowed to come naturally in its own time,with the umbilicus left to stop pulsing before it was severed.For many people - perhaps more obviously for women in our culture - there is a particularissue around the relationship between mouth and belly. Appetite in one does not necessarilyreflect hunger in the other: and often there is a good deal of confusion here, as we eat tosatisfy all sorts of needs apart from bodily nourishmentAmong these needs can be the need to push feelings down out of awareness. Familymealtimes can be excruciating, and can set up a permanent association between eating,suppression and pain. A lot of us are so busy nibbling all day for the comfort of our mouthsthat we wouldn't recognise belly hunger if we encountered it The poor, unloved, devaluedbelly has to bear the brunt of everything we shove down it. It needs restoring to its rightfuland central role in the bodymind.Pelvic segmentAnd so we arrive at the final section of the body armour - and an exceedingly important one.From the pelvis comes a whole other fundamental mode of relating to the world: oursexual@, which expresses itself in ways that cannot be readily turned into words. As Reichsays, it is not really possible to attach a rational label to the expressive movements of thepelvis. Sexuality expresses itself rather than anything else, and its involuntary, mysteriousquality is very frightening to the 'spastic I'.Before the pelvis can surrender to spontaneous sexual movement its armouring needs to besoftened; this will release feelings which, although they often colour our lovemaking, are notessentially sexual in nature. Our pelvis often holds a good deal of fear and rage. this meansthat in lovemaking the easy soft swing takes on a frantic tone - either shoving and grinding, ormoving very gingerly, like a person getting into a cold bath

In Chapter 6 we shall be looking in more detail at this pelvic fear and rage, and consideringhow and why such emotions develop. For now, let's just notice that pelvic armouring has adeep effect on how we stand and walk, the legs and feet are so closely linked with the pelvisthat we can treat them as part of the same segment If the pelvis is too stiff to sway freely aswe move, there will be a corresponding stiffness and a brittle or numb feeling lower down. AsAlexander Lowen says, sexual feeling to a great extent comes out of the ground, and our feetand legs need to be soft enough to let it rise.Exercise 1To help you understand what this means, stand with feet firmly planted and knees slightlybent and breathe down into the pit of your belly for a minute until everything has loosened upa little. Now explore the contact between the soles of your feet and the ground (this exercise isbest done barefoot): shift you weight gently around your feel so the ground is massaging yoursoles. Now let your weight press down on the ball of one foot, as if taking a step forward - butdon't take the step. What will happen is that your knee will start to straighten - but don'tdeliberately straighten the knee. Now your pelvis vvill want to rock forward and up: theimpetus is transmitted from your energy exchange with the ground. Play with this movementfor a while, and notice how important it is in graceful, dancing - and how sexual dancing canbe.If our legs, feet and pelvis are relaxed, then there is a constant sense of exchange betweenourselves and the ground: Mother Earth is really there under us, supporting and conversingwith our bodymind. But not many of us feel this conversation much of the time. The processof learning to stand and walk, coinciding as it does with intense emotional events, has led usto cut off some sensation, from our lower limbs - tensing knees, ankles, and hips in particular,and often twisting our legs out of alignment. We've learnt to 'stand up for ourselves', 'on ourown two feet' - but at what price in missing flexibility and sensitivity.Many of us have great unconscious terror of the ground, developed as we learnt to stand. Thiscan show up in all the many phobias of snakes, mice, spiders, and so on - all fast-movingticklish, unstoppable creatures which we fear will run up our @ and into our bodies - like theearth energy itself and the uncontrollable feelings associated with it Other associated fantasiesare those of the ground giving way, of quicksand, water and so on. There is often a fear of falling involved too - the ground seems a very long way down when we first pull ourselveserectIn particular, our 'groundedness' or lack of it is connected with eye armouring. We mayunconsciously try to hold on to the world with our eyes, rather than resting securely on ourfeet.Exercise 12Try closing your eyes, and really 'letting yourself down' into your feet: the sensation can berather like entering water. Your knees will need to be loose and bent. Take a few steps, veryslowly, with eyes still closed, and explore the sensation. Perhaps you feel as though you aregoing to fall over, or be hit What do your arms want to do?We have so far only looked at the front of the pelvis, the energy in and around our genitalarea. Also very important is the energy at the back, in our buttocks and anus, which may beextremely tight and tense. As we said in Chapter 2, children are very often pressured to

control their bowels before they are naturally ready, before they are physically capable of closing the sphincters. So they learn to tense up the whole pelvic floor and buttocks in adesperate attempt to 'hold themselves in', 'pull themselves together'.Such holding frequently becomes chronic and unconscious, leading to 'tight-arsed' attitudes inlife, as we shall see in Chapter 6. A great deal of resentful hate is held here, which can takevery brutal forms - both sadistic and masochistic - and involve a lot of stubbornness. This is aform of armouring which slows down our life energy and binds it in, and this sort of holdingvery much affects the energy in the back of our whole body.The back of the body is our reservoir of strength: it's where we push from, where we hold on,support and endure. We can only be soft and open in the front if we feel, strong and secure inthe back. But this all depends on being able to 'dig our heels in' and transmit this solidstrength through and up. A tight bum generally means that this flow gets stuck, and the backsof the legs will usually be tight too.Exercise 13Stand with feet forwards, a shoulderwidth apart, and with your knees slightly bent Rigidlystraight knees are a basic way of blocking off from the ground. Join your hands looselybehind your back in an 'at ease' posture; now bend from the hips - not from the waist - and letgravity carry you as far forward as possible. Breathe easily, and let the out-breaths help yourelax and lean further forward. The idea is that head, neck and back stay in the same straightline as when you were upright,- you simply fold at the hinge of your hips.You will no doubt immediately feel a stretch on the backs of your legs, which can be quitepainful. Don't strain yourself, just bend as far as you comfortably can, and if necessary holdthe position for just a few seconds. It's important to breathe down into your belly as far aspossible. With luck, if you maintain this position, your legs will start to tremble. This issplendid, it means that your muscle tension is letting go and your legs are lengthening,becoming literally more 'vibrant'. When you straighten up, still breathing into your belly andwith knees loose, you may well feel a much deeper contact with the ground - almost as if yourfeet are sinking into the floor.An important muscle in joining up the whole pelvis, front and back, is the psoas, which runson either side from the lower spine, right through the pelvis, and into the thighbone. This isthe muscle which lets our pelvis rock back and forth in the orgasm reflex we described in thelast chapter; often it is extremely tense and tight.As we suggested, there is a strong relationship between looseness or tightness in the pelvisand in the jaw: this is one of the body's strongest reflexes, and an armoured jaw will stop thepelvis being free. It can be a bit of a bootstrap situation. Any release at either end creates afeedback of release at the other, and so on. We can even imagine a head superimposed on thepelvis, facing forwards but upside down: so that the chin coincides with the pelvic bone.Many other interesting relationships emerge - for instance, between nose and anus, soimportant for our learnt sense of disgust - often encouraging a tense pull-back of the face,away from 'down there'.Exercise 14The simplest possible exercise for checking out your pelvic segment is to stand with yourknees loose, and rotate your hips as widely as you can - as if you were doing a hula dance.