Core energetics: opening the body to life.

Core Energetics is deep, expressive work that heals the mind/body split. It can help you transform feelings of being stuck, depressed, numb, angry, and isolated. Every physical tension and emotional holding is a refusal of life. We began this refusal at an early age. Growing up we learned to control pain by not breathing fully, by tightening muscles to keep from expressing particular emotions and by masking our true feelings. We learned to project an image of ourselves that was acceptable to others. The defensive patterns from our early child: hood conditioning got locked in the body and became unconscious holding. This was a great survival technique--very, creative and it worked! But it's probably not working for you now. Although these patterns began as creative solutions that provided a sense of safety they are now keeping you from living a spontaneous and open-hearted life. Using breath, movement and sound you can soften the physical holding, release the deeply held emotions and transform your pain. When the fearful hidden parts of your life are integrated you can live in the world with ease as your authenticity shines forth.

Core Energetics was developed by John Pierrakos. It grew out of the work of Bioenergetics, a collective effort by both Alexander Lowen and Pierrakos, and was inspired by the work of Wilhelm Reich. Core Energetics is a therapeutic tool that brings awareness to unconscious patterns held in the body. The goal of Core Energetics is to free yourself from your early conditioning and current reactivity, helping you become more fully alive. To be fully alive you have to refuse nothing. You do that by inhabiting, relaxing into, every part of your body.

But why work with the body at 'all? I'm sure that many of you have noticed that you can often understand your neurotic patterns with your mind but nothing particularly changes in your life. This is because the pattern still exists in your body. It's deeply held there in the muscles, energy field, and pysche. These patterns and emotions get set in the body at a particular intensity. In order to release them you need to provide enough consciousness or energetic force to shake them loose. Working with the body provides that needed force.

The split between the mind and the body creates a sense of separation that we long to overcome. Because the muscular system creates the physical armoring ,and maintains the split and sense of separation, the split can be healed by working directly with the body. We can bypass the mind. With our mind, we rationalize, justify and cloud our true feelings. But the body doesn't lie. It holds your entire personal history, your life story. Work with the body and whatever is held there can be clearly seen. You may be surprised by what you find.

Bodies are basically fluid and what happens to us in childhood is registered physically in the body. Every experience that we are unable to process completely gets stored there. We literally create and shape our body through the experiences and resulting feelings, thoughts and beliefs of our early life. As a physical response to experiences such as rejection, shock, hurt, or threat we tightened particular muscles and thereby slowed the natural flow of life energy. This physical armoring begins as a way to avoid pain, to keep from being hurt, but when the patterns get structured into the personality, they actually create a more severe hurt and greater crippling than what was originally suffered.

Core Energetic theory tells us that your major beliefs about life are formed by the time you are four to seven years old. By that age, you've experienced some form of rejection, loss, feat, or control. This may be subtle or blatant. From the imprint of these experiences you'll form ideas about life. Although these ideas, beliefs and convictions become unconscious, they play a key role in how we live our lives and the choices we make. When you decide that certain feelings are too threatening to experience, you cut off your life energy in some way, just like a logjam will dam a river's flow. You try to feel just the feelings you like and not the ones you don't like. But it doesn't work. The repressed feelings don't disappear, they just get somatized (absorbed) into the body.

Think of all the phrases we have about people that point to emotions held in the body: chip on his shoulder, full of herself, up tight, tight-assed, down to earth, stuck up, has his feet on the ground, looks down her nose, is a sad sack.......each of these phrases brings to mind a particular body shape. And the body was shaped by habitually feeling that way. For instance, to control anger you'd tighten your back, arms, and jaw. This would keep your mouth shut and your arms from striking out. To keep yourself from crying you'd tighten your chest, jaw, and eyes. When you suppress particular emotions over a period of time, the suppression becomes habitual, chronic and unconscious. Emotions get frozen or somatized in the physical body. The natural, spontaneous flow of your life energy becomes blocked or dulled. Experience becomes narrow.

To keep ourselves from feeling, there are basically two things we do--first we slow down our breathing or breathe very shallowly. We always begin by tightening the diaphragm so the breath is controlled. Less breath, less feeling. More breath, more feeling. Try it yourself next time you don't want to feel something. Or notice that when you "allow deep feeling, you also breathe deeply. Second, in order to ensure that die emotional expression stays hidden, we tighten other specific muscles associated with the emotion. At first, this takes a bit of attention. But after a while it becomes unconscious and we no longer even know we're doing it. We can no longer hear the feedback our body's giving us, such as: a tight chest and tension around the eyes telling us we need to cry. Or tight arms and a clenched jaw letting us know we're angry. The emotion, though unexpressed, is still there and stored in the tissue. You may be totally unaware of the held emotions since they now feel quite normal to you. But begin opening up your body, and it will quickly become clear.

To open the body we simply need to breathe more deeply and allow expression of whatever we're holding. It's not quite as easy' as it sounds because while part of us is willing to let go, the body is wired to hold on. In fact it feels quite 'dangerous to do otherwise. We've been holding on, defending ourselves, for a long time. And our defenses have served a valuable purpose. They formed our identity, how we know ourselves. Given the right conditions and circumstances, the defensive and habitual holding can be softened. The work, the letting go, is an organic process. The defensive structure is not something to blast through but instead is to be relaxed into. It takes energy to hold a defensive posture. As the posture is relaxed, blocks are released and there is now more energy and more awareness available. The dam has let go and the river can now flow unimpeded.

Nancy Pope, co-owner of Inner Healing, has been in private practice since 1991. Her practice is currently located in Black Mountain and Asheville, NC. For more information call her at 828-669-6874 or email her at [e-mail].