People's Experiences of LifeStream

Tony Crisp

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What follows are people's own descriptions of the things they experienced and the previously hidden aspects of themselves they discovered in practising LifeStream

John, a 54 year old, says of this process:

The body postures and movements that arose in LifeStream were near miraculous to me because during the previous nine years, two serious accidents and a disease had resulted in five separate spinal fractures. For a period I had been encased from hips to jaw in a metal and leather support harness; for years I had endured great pain, and never in my prayers for help had I really hoped for the return of mobility of movement which was now shown in my childlike LifeStream play movements.

The return of mobility is the only one of the blessings I have enjoyed since beginning LifeStream. For many years I had experienced consistently poor health; a lifetime of asthma, compounded by TB in both lungs, and poor digestion with its attendant consequences had all produced a dismal attenuation of minimal well being with serious illness. In the first four weeks of experiencing LifeStream I felt great draughts of air pouring into my lungs. At the end of eighteen months my chest had expanded by four inches, which I discovered when I bought new underwear. My spine was moving more freely than it had for years; my indigestion, with its accompanying constipation, had disappeared. I am fitter than I have been for the previous forty five years.

Ann's experiences are fairly typical.

After practising the action of LifeStream for nearly 2 1/2 years there are considerable physical changes which I am aware of in myself They are not dramatic in the sense of 'pick up thy bed and walk' but have come about gradually. I was always a very cold person - I felt shrivelled up with cold, and wore numerous jerseys to keep warm. I ached with cold, and being thin I felt these keenly. Now, however, I haven't worn a vest for a year, I am far more often warm than cold, and feel so much more alive because of this. My feet were usually cold, now I always wear sandals and they are warm - as are my hands. I feel so much more energy and joy in living. I feel it flow through me.

I was often sick with diarrhoea for 48 hours - several times during the year - but not since I began LifeStream because I feel that the sickness and diarrhoea was a form of tension release for me, which I no longer need in this form.

My throat was permanently sore and red inside. Sometimes it hurt a lot, other times not so much. There seemed to be no cure for it. Now the soreness and redness has gradually disappeared. This also I feel was a great tension area for me because I was afraid to speak my mind. Now if my throat feels sore and tight I am being told that I am withholding my speech. A lot of my painful throat tension was due to being very verbally suppressed as a child.

As I released my feelings in words through sessions, this tension gradually drained away, and I was often led into singing and chanting quite clearly and strongly in sessions. I felt my throat to be much freer and purer sound could come forth. I am not completely free in this area yet, but this will take time. My voice is already lower and more relaxed than it was.

I had a habit of tilting my head on one side when I sat still- many people noticed this, more than I did. This has vanished now, of its own accord. I believe that I always leaned my head to the left because I was so strongly emotionally motivated - that as I began to develop the capacity for receiving insight into my behaviour patterns - that as I grew in confidence - and I was more able to talk and discuss things, that I became more balanced and my head straightened.

I used to keep my shoulders permanently raised, accompanied by breath-holding. This became my natural position especially in times of stress. Gradually over the two years my shoulders have dropped and my breathing is freer. Yet I do not consciously remember this change taking place. Now, when I raise my shoulders and my breath on purpose, I am amazed to realise that I used to live like this most of the time.

In watching myself more closely over the year I notice that I have dropped another habit of keeping my hands clenched. Again I didn't especially notice that I stopped doing this, but I have. It was another 'holding on' tension. 'Keeping a grip on myself'. I no longer need to do this, so my hands remain open.

In none of these examples did I set out to try to stop doing them, or deliberately alter my physical pattern. These changes occurred as I opened more to myself in LifeStream. I have always suffered from constipation since childhood. It has been a great inconvenience, and in recent years I resorted to using suppositories to assist elimination. This was coupled with a lot of 'wind' and internal discomfort. Now I do not suffer from these troubles. I find that I can digest raw vegetables and fruit skins easily, and because of this I eat and enjoy more useful foods - it is a circle now which has self-regulated, from being a tense viscous circle before to a freer, more open circle. Yet again it happened over two years - which perhaps is not really slowly, when I had been suffering for nearly 30 years as my memory recalls. I was literally 'tied up' inside - full of nervous tension and 'holding back from life'.

My eyes used to water, and feel weak often, especially in times of stress, also a long-standing habit, now they are getting stronger as I am 'seeing' myself more clearly.

I considered myself to be a 'normally functioning person' two years ago - not a freak. Probably few people would have noticed anything amiss. I had perfected excellent camouflage, and I handled myself well. Now I can look back and - amazed at how strong human beings are. How I could have gone on year after year, imposing such strains on my system. But I did, as many of us do. It was not until I had self regulated for two and a half years that I begun to understand fully what real living is.

Not being manipulated by fears and tensions - 'not pushing on' a self in the morning - dropping those many Self's. The 'coping self' - there are so many - and then the let-down when it didn't always work out - when things went wrong.

None of these tensions are necessary. Now that I live more fully from what I call my intuitive centre, I find that increasingly I self regulate in situations. I instinctively know what is needed and follow this.

Sometimes I find myself 'off centre' but I know when this is happening so can watch to see why - this may take a few days or weeks if a big block is coming up.

Best of all is MYSELF which is so wonderful.

Some LifeStream experiences are not simply movements to mobilise the body, or sounds to mobilise expressions of feelings and thought. For some there are sessions in which they express in voice, inner feelings and body movements, being a Negro, an Indian, an Oriental, European or Arab. Or else there arises very clear feelings or being a dog, lion, pre-historic man, snake, etc. Sometimes these are definitely linked with a problem such as is seen with Reich's patient being a fish, but that is not always so.

Mark describes one of these sessions like this:

Started this session very quickly, singing in some foreign language, and foot stamping. The song wasn't really coming out very well, but my right arm began to swing round and round, and this seemed to lead through bark-like sounds to full African singing. I don't think I have ever sung as noisily or as lustily as I did in this session. Gradually the singing chant became more and more forceful and fluent. Now I was surrendered into it deeply, and a torrent of words and chant poured out. I really felt like an African Chief chanting to a great crowd of people, not only in the sounds, but in my feelings flowing. The chant became even more forceful, filling the hall with sound, and finally in a tremendous roar or bellow, I called out, just as if warriors had been roused up and up, and the roar sent them on their way to battle.

Rita, a nurse who had been hospitalised with emotional difficulties -

describes what happened to her when she let go of her 'self control' in what at the time we called self-regulation, (SR), but now name LifeStream.

"In most every part of me I have felt energy stirring or moving since I started SR. I look different now. When I look in the mirror I see I am a different shape. I am much stronger than I was. I think this is because I am not wasting energy now. I am also less afraid of my feelings. I was a very passionate person and would get into arguments about everything. Now I can be more detached. I never thought I would be like that. Somehow ones energy gets re-organised in LifeStream. You get rid of the stuff which is potentially destructive, and you are left with what is really a force for growth.

The process of SR seems so sensible to me. Having had a fairly good medical training the idea of homeostasis and energy being blocked, even though it may not be charted in Gray's Anatomy is very straightforward. It seems no more puzzling, although it's mystical, in the same way as the process is going to happen, whether we open to it or not in our body. It is quicker and easier if you give it the right conditions. Most of the time, almost deliberately we give it adverse conditions. All we need to do is take the concrete off so it can grow. This force seems to be there all the time.

When I started SR I wasn't prepared for the violence of the feelings or the strength, immediacy and freshness of them, and the fact it was real. Our society deals so much in second-hand experience. The immediacy of it really took my breath away. I am beginning to allow myself now a glimpse of what we often put down as so much religiosity.

I am allowing myself now, having had almost an overdose of grieving and anguish, to open up to the other extreme which I have never experienced very much, which is the sheer joy of living. The other day I found myself walking into the sea and shouting, 'Hey sea, I love you' and it really came up from my boots. We get stuck in the bad stuff and don't let ourselves feel the good.

A couple of months back in SR with M. I went through the event of my son's birth. It was thought he might not live and I had been super controlled from the nurses point of view. I hadn't given way to anguish at the thought this child might not live. But what I wanted to do much more than that was to shriek with joy that he was born alive and well, and I hadn't done it. We think so often being a puritan society, it's only the pain we have got to face, but it seems we have got to open those channels of joy too. It's too easy to become hooked on the masochistic element. When I began to let myself experience joy in SR I even began to think I was no longer doing real self regulation because it was so pleasurable."

Tom has had very clear experiences of this energy at work.

He had always since youth, been interested in keeping his body healthy and mobile. About a year before he started LifeStream he had this experience. He says:

I had a peculiar conscious and semi conscious experience without dream images. I cannot remember ever having had it before. My hips and pubic area vibrated. Moved is not the right word, nor shook, as the movement was as quick as that produced by an electric vibrator. I have seen this movement, or something like it, on a buck rabbit during mating. Not really a backward or forward movement, but a very rapid vibration. This occurred with me quite spontaneously and I relaxed and let it happen. There was no erection. It happened for fairly long periods four or five times, then as I became more conscious, disappeared.

Many people experience this vibratory energy during LifeStream, but as Tom's experiences are fairly clear I will continue to quote him. After about two years of LifeStream the experience came back.

Tom, in a journal of his experiences says:

Recently my body has been vibrating more consciously than ever before, i.e. even in waking it has remained. Also, some nights it feels as if it is flowing deeply into P's (his wife) being. Sometimes she is aware of this too.

Janov points out that his 'post primal' patients experience a different, more conscious sleep. This is my own findings in LifeStream. Gradually a different experience of sleeping occurs. Sometimes one wakes up in sleep. That is, like Tom, although deep asleep, there is an awareness of what is occurring in oneself. How far this can develop I have no means of knowing, but there seems from the evidence I have, typified from Tom's experience, that the conscious release and experience of one's core energy as we contact it in sleep and waking LifeStream, leads to quite a different sort of relationship between the opposite and same sexes than we generally know.

This came home to me recently when attending a weekend where most of the people practised LifeStream. I noticed a very different sort of relationship operated between some of the people. I will quote Tom again to explain.

I was talking to R. who I had never met before. We were alone in the small hall as the others were outside eating. It seemed like an ordinary conversation but suddenly my body began to vibrate and then to shake heavily.

R. could accept this so I didn't stop it as I could have done. I sat holding R's hand and it seemed to me as if my central being wanted to express something to R. It seemed quite beyond verbal expression. Gradually this expression from the core defines for people. It is as if our own released energy reaches out and calls up the other person's life energy. If this happens it may not be pleasant to be near the person. For our own energy to move in great excitation may be very painful because our past agonies have not been cleared.

One woman said of such a contact, 'It made me realise how I have thrown the beauty of my life away along with the rubbish. This was so painful I felt on the verge of tears all the next day. And when Andrew spoke to me I couldn't hold it back any longer.' Another person describes it as follows: The worst day for me was undoubtedly the one where A, letting that deeper living part of himself flow out to me, pushed me into the appalling realisation that I'd been shutting life out and still was. And for the rest of that awful day and the ones to follow there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. One can only wonder what, in marriage, as a parent with children, with friends and animals, it is really like to contact each other Core to Core.

Alive but dead

In LifeStream we often are led to directly relate to our sexuality. Most people at some point in their journey into the experience of LifeStream find, if they remain open, they are led to masturbate. Few of us have, in the prevailing attitudes of our culture, properly fulfilled the urge to masturbate when it arose in childhood and youth. As this urge arises and is fulfilled, and the problem attending it worked out, a new feeling grows in us. It appears as a strong feeling of independence. The pleasure in fully released masturbation is so intense and complete we realise we do not need anybody else to fulfil us sexually. Out of this sense of independence a lot of compulsive dependence upon others falls away. In its place comes a desire to share our intense pleasure with someone of our choice. We see this in Mark's experience where the melting longing feeling arose after his desire to masturbate. The desire to share and give pleasure is quite different to the need for someone else to give us pleasure.

For some people this process is a great struggle and not over quickly. Just to permit sexual feeling to flow more fully is difficult.

Ann says of an early phase of her LifeStream:

At first the new energy took the form of tremendous sexual feelings. For three months I was engulfed in my own sexuality. I felt the need to masturbate several times a day. I was quite overwhelmed by the strength of these feelings. It was a relief when it died away, because I was not really ready to deal with my whole sexuality. However, by permitting the masturbation I was allowing my sexual feelings to come through and leaving the door open for what might follow.

The lengthy persistence of Ann's urge to masturbate is not typical. We might understand it by remembering Rita's insights into her ascending - into compulsive eating - or descending - into compulsive sexuality - energy. There is a world of difference between basic sexual need and compulsive sexual desire. Rita had begun to find that it was not simply a case of letting herself eat or have sex to find satisfaction and self-regulation. The LifeStream had exposed her compulsion not her need. Until she recognised it for what it was, the problem behind it could not be felt.

Tom shows us another side of this in one of his sessions.

I had woke that morning with a headache. This was very unusual so I knew another lump of pain was ready to come up. For some weeks my sessions had all been centred around being a tiny baby left to cry. As that baby I had hungered for my mother with every ounce of my being. I don't suppose many adults can conceive of a condition where any feeling or desire is totally engulfing. We are used to thinking of that sort of being swallowed up and possessed by a feeling as madness. Because of the pain most of us feel when we really begin to experience our deep yearning we do relate to our deepest feelings in a sick mad way. Yet a baby is neither sick nor mad, but it is totally engulfed in its feelings.

I had been experiencing this in the sessions, and how as a baby I had killed my longing when nobody came. And because of that I had not as an adult been able to really let myself feel deeply in relationships. Or when I did begin to go deep into a feeling relationship with someone it brought great pain. So I thought the thing coming up was another lump of baby pain.

As soon as I had an opportunity I had a session. I had been sitting in with a friend while she had a session, and now we swapped roles. As I lay down the pain in the head increased. I felt sick and dizzy. My body began to jerk and it was like words being forcefully squeezed out of my body. It feels as if those words, and the emotions pouring out with them, were literally in the body, like juice is in an apple, and the process of LifeStream, squeezes out this painful juice.

At first the words were just a jumble of noise being pushed out as my body cramped up and squeezed. Then I was shouting out 'I've got VD I've got VD' Then every so often I would gasp out 'A father...s father...'

I didn't understand at this point what it was meaning, but I knew from the past it would explain itself if I let it come, and there was no need to analyse or think it out.

Now the body contractions became deeper and I could feel some real deep emotion in my chest just beginning to come up. 'Dirty, I'm dirty,' I was shouting. 'I'm a father and I'm dirty'. Then my body just gave a big heave like I was having a baby or something, or a tooth out, and I was just one frozen block of pain, and a great moan of pain came out. I was sobbing and moaning about my children. Hardly able to say it because of the pain and sobbing, nevertheless the words squeezed out of me 'D.... Duh ...Does.. a... Does a father...' I just couldn't go on for a while. My body contorted up with this inner emotional pain again, and a sort of bellow of it came up from deep down. Then the words came again. 'Does a father...Does a father kill his children'?

I couldn't take it. I just wept. I knew that's what I had been doing for years. That's what most of us are doing, only we can't and won't see it. But even though we hide from it, the pain of it is there like poison juice in our body. Now mine was being squeezed out and the words were like pips forcing out of my mouth.

Back to Rita

"It seems to me that the biggest con at present, certainly in terms of my own life, is something we are taught right from being tiny. It is that emotional satisfaction and being happy is all to do with preferably being involved with one other person who is all things to you. If we look at this with the slightest bit of detachment, this is doomed to failure. I am not willing to take that burden on behalf of someone else, so its obvious they are not going to do it for me. If we begin to find what we are looking for in ourselves, we are going to take the crippling load off relationships.

"The thing I love about Ashram is the way you really do love people and care about them and you let them go. There is none of the frantic exchanging of addresses which goes on after most conferences. As far as I can see there

Kate from Canada gives us yet another viewpoint

Both in sessions and out I went through a very rebellious period, defiant, assertive and aggressive. I began to verbalise some emotions at this point. Shouting out in Polish (lots of SR in native tongue) I won't I won't. I won't. And I found myself more able to do what I wanted now. Able to get into pottery which was so relaxing and restoring. There was and still is an underlying feeling of being blown open, and this pottery soothed a lot of shocked parts. Began to discover a lot of sexual longing in my movements and sexual pride just at being a woman. Then there was a conflict in my life between staying with my husband which I had believed was fulfilling my karma or God's will, and expressing myself as a woman which seemed to be impossible in the marriage. But I stayed and SR got more and more exciting.

I spent an entire evening just crawling around on my belly, not using hands, like an earth worm. Began to growl a lot and shout, began to get into marching and singing. This reflected back to a time when we were young and we used to march from the country to the village about ten miles singing Polish songs as we went.

Then at Combe Martin I really got into the dancing. Felt I was really being danced. And then this dancing began to come out in SR. Beautiful affirmative 'yes' dancing which just freed all negativity. I remember those last few SR sessions at the Quaker Meeting house were more like far out parties. There was such a festivity of feelings. At home there was lots of time given to silence and listening to classical music and just being. An awareness seemed to grow of myself in all my different ages. Instead of being stuck in a concept of myself as a woman of 29 with two children, that in me which was young and adolescent and womanly all began to come out together. And in SR there was also this change all the time from one physical age to another in quick succession.

See: People's Experiences of LifeStream ; Practice of LifeStream; Life's Little Secrets.

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