Secrets the Body Knows

 Liberating the Body

Chapter One

The Beginnings of Inner-Directed Movement

Life is movement and is the sign that you are alive, and you already know of how to relax enough to allow the beginnings of allowing your body to make its own spontaneous movements. As examples of this yawning and sneezing are the side of this process you can already allow. Also if you breathe in harmful dust your body makes the spontaneous movement of sneezing to protect the lungs and rid itself of the dust. Other similar movements are coughing, shivering when you are cold, and watering of your eyes. In these ways your body self-regulates and protects itself. But this is just the tip of the iceberg in regard to what you are capable of if you understand and learn to work with this process. It is the very edge of what you innately know about your own mental and physical needs and how to satisfy them.

It may seem strange I am suggesting that the process behind something as ordinary as yawning can have a potential which can revolutionise the way you feel about yourself, can improve the mobility and well-being of your body and mind, and can reveal your intuition and creativity. But that is what I have witnessed in helping people use inner-directed movement. Not only do you know, through inner-directed movement, just what your body needs to keep it functioning healthily, but also you know how to keep the feelings and mind mobile and healthy too. An intuitive function opens within yourself that can inform you wisely on important areas of your life.

This is understandable if certain facts are remembered. To grow physically, and psychologically your being moves and directs itself from its own unconscious resources. You see this in everyday things such as your heartbeat, digestive movements, perspiration, and even your ability to speak without searching for every word or worrying about what gestures you make. The important processes of your being, such as breathing, nearly all express as inner-directed movement – that is, movements you do not have to consciously think about or copy from outside. They are movements that arise from your unconscious mental and physical life. The difference between a dead body and a live one is movement. All the gross and most subtle aspects of your life are expressed as movement. Laughter, crying, lovemaking are all powerful movements, largely inner-directed. Such movements integrate the different aspects of yourself. For instance love making is not just a physical activity, but blends emotions, personal needs, as well as deeper instinctive drives. In fact you, as a living being, are a master of expressive movement, but you may be holding yourself back. Having no self confidence doesn’t remove your skill. I have discovered that even shy people, as they learn to relax deeply, have a world of splendid expressive movement inside them waiting to become known.

The organising principle that regulates the growth and shape of your body expresses through inner-directed movement. It is the unconscious self-regulating process of life in you. Its action continues working night and day. It is common to all of us, but few of us know how to work with it consciously to allow its magic to unfold more fully. This is possible through inner-directed movement.

In helping people to learn how to relax enough to allow such simple movements as yawning to extend into fuller spontaneous movement I witnessed people discovering the wide range of exercises, mimes and feelings their body could express unexpectedly. As people learnt to really relax they opened the door to abilities within their body and mind that had previously remained unconscious. For those who made this discovery it was rather like the dream some people experience in which they have lived in a house for years, then one day they find a door leading to a whole wing of the building they have never known before.

When they open to inner-directed movement, people find it is:-

1 –        A fuller expression of the natural power that regulates the body and mind. This can lead to physical and mental health. The contact is sensed as an awareness of the essence of life active in them.

2 –        An inbuilt and spontaneous urge to move and express the parts of oneself inhibited by the specialised environment of family, society or work. This is an urge toward wholeness. Wholeness because when the concentration upon a limited area of yourself such as thoughts or emotions is relaxed, then a greater symphony of expression between mind body and spirit occurs.

3 –        Creative and intuitive abilities of the mind. This is frequently experienced as spontaneous visualisation.

4 –        You are being taught how to learn the immense force of transformation in your life – Self Regulation/Homeostasis – See Self Regulation

Your Unconscious Source of Life and Growth

To get an even clearer picture of what it is you tap during inner-directed movement, it is helpful to consider how you might see yourself if a film were made of you like those showing speeded-up plant growth. On such films you see the plant moving and growing with incredible vigour. Its leaves and flowers open with powerful movement. If the film showed you from conception onwards, you would see amazing change and expansion. An extraordinary process would be seen causing your body and mind to unfold. You would observe incredible amounts of movement, many of them spontaneous. The movements in the womb, in babyhood and even in your adult sleep, you would see as inner-directed, and powerful. You would notice that as you gradually matured, conscious control of movement became more prevalent. But still your sleep movements, breathing, yawning, stretching, laughter and tears kept you in touch with the incredibly wise process which directs your overall growth and survival. It is the often forgotten, but very real process underlying your original growth and continued existence, that you allow into a new level of expression when you relax fully.

Inner-directed movements, occurring as spontaneous movements, they do when you relax deeply, arise from the unconscious processes that control your existence and growth. It a fuller expression of what lies behind the growth of your body and mind. It is what enables you to maintain a stable existence amidst the ever moving forces of your environment. It holds all the systems of your being integrated in common purpose and is the foundation of consciousness. It is not something distant or separate from you, but is innately in everything you are and do.

Freedom To Be Yourself

One of the first person’s I taught inner-directed movement to was a woman in her sixties. Maria was married, had a lovely country cottage, but had not been outdoors for months. She was suffering from aches and pains in her arms, felt life had lost its interest, and asked for help. Maria quickly learned to relax enough to allow her body freedom to express without inhibiting self criticism. Her movements were slow and tentative at first but soon included her whole body, producing feelings of pleasure. To allow such movements Maria had to learn how to give her body and feelings time in which to explore unplanned movement – movement arising from her own subtle body impulses. Such subtle urges are often overlooked, or are crowded out by ones thoughts of what one ought to be doing, or what is appropriate in the circumstances. So Maria created a mood, and gave herself time, in which she could allow irrational movement – movement that had not been thought-out beforehand, or given by someone else. Such movements are usually quite different to the sort of things one finds recommended in exercise books. The reason being that they are often unique mixtures of exercise, dance, mime, and generally letting oneself go enough to do what might have otherwise be seen as ridiculous. Nevertheless, such irrational expression is very satisfying. In Maria’s case she started with slow arm movements. Gradually the rest of her body was included in an expression of pleasure and sensual enjoyment in which she rolled and squirmed on the floor – movements and feelings that surprised Maria.

Within three weeks Maria went out with her husband, and bought new clothes, something she hadn’t done for years. She told me she realised she had been holding back all her pleasure, all her positive drive and feelings. In fact Maria had unconsciously been holding back HERSELF. In liberating her body and emotions she had liberated herself from the prison of her own depression. Frequently depression or lack of enthusiasm for life occurs through the suppression of our own feelings – the stagnation of our urge to move and live.

The freedom and release which arises from inner-directed movement is also evident in what happened to Jim. A group using inner-directed movement started in Bristol. Jim, an unmarried gas fitter, bored with his work and life, joined the group. Within a couple of weeks Jim had learnt to give his body and feelings freedom to move. He was amazed at how fertile an imagination he had when he stopped holding himself back. His movements were creative and deeply felt. Less than two months had passed before Jim had given up his job, found a woman whom he married, and together they started working in a Steiner School for children. Jim also had been holding himself back.

Both of these examples show that inner-directed movement is basically a way of allowing what is already innate in oneself to be expressed more fully or easily. Put in the simplest of terms, by restraining the way you express in movement and voice, you may be inhibiting important parts of your physical or psychological nature.

 

How Do You Learn Inner-Directed Movement?

Learning inner-directed movement is in part learning how to drop the inhibitions and physical tensions you may be applying to yourself unconsciously. So the first stages are a series of physical and mental exercises that help you drop unnecessary inhibitions enough to let your body, emotions and voice express in ways you may previously have restrained because of social or personal expectations. As you learn to allow yourself to express more freely, then you will learn how to work with the emerging inner-directed movements in various ways.

What Will Happen If I Really Let Go?

For most of us to ‘let go’ or deeply relax enough to allow inner-directed movement is a learnt skill. To learn anything new means you tread new ground, you open yourself to new experience. This is certainly true of inner-directed movement. What you learn is largely non intellectual. It is something you experience rather than think. Because it involves movement it opens you to the realm of what you sense and perceive through body postures and feelings. This is an extraordinarily rich area, much overlooked in general schooling. In his book The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra, writing about the tendency in Western culture to overemphasis the intellectual capacity of the mind to the point where we see the universe and earth as mechanical systems, says, “Retreating into our minds, we have forgotten how to ‘think’ with our bodies, how to use them as agents of knowing.” Later, describing the effect the intellectual and mechanistic view has had on modern medicine and the lay person’s approach to their body, he says we are led to see our body as a machine “which is prone to constant failure unless supervised by doctors and treated with medication. The notion of the organism’s inherent healing power is not communicated, and trust in ones own organism not promoted.” See Super Heroes and Mythical Creatures

This ‘knowing’ through your body and heart has many dimensions of experience. Some of the possibilities of what you might find can be illustrated from my own and other people’s experiences. When my friends Sheila Johns, Mike Tanner and I first realised the possibilities of spontaneous movement in 1972, we created an environment in which we could explore. This meant dropping our usual expectations of behaviour, and allowing ourselves great freedom of possible self expression. We took time to listen to how our body and emotions wanted to announce themselves. We let ourselves move in ways we had not preconceived. We followed the usually unacknowledged impulses in our body and soul. I was amazed over and over again by what emerged from us.

One of the earliest experiences for me was that while sitting quietly one day, my head began to move backwards. It was a gentle movement and I could have stopped it at any point. In fact I was so interested in it I tried to help it – tried to make it happen, and the movement stopped. Later, when I learnt to remain in a more relaxed state while my body moved, the spontaneous motion started again and my body re-enacted having my tonsils out as a six year old. Tensions had remained in my neck for all the years between six and thirty four, and now that I had actually relaxed in the right way, my body could discharge the inner disturbance. Just prior to starting inner-directed movement my neck tension had got so bad that as I lay down to sleep at night my head pulled backwards painfully. After the release during inner-directed movement the pain never recurred.

Less specifically I remember that at first I would repeat really peculiar movements, what seemed an endless number of times. I felt that my body was working at freeing itself from habitual postures, attitudes and the results of past experience as well as massaging internal organs. Gradually my movements became freer and more mobile – although since my teens I had exercised and stretched regularly. Also the movements became mobility of my feelings as well as my body. For the first time in my life I realised that my soul, my psyche, had also been tense and stiff, and was being gently made more responsive, alive and whole.

This mobilising of my psyche was effected by lots of movements in which I expressed powerful feelings. For instance I remember once doing a forceful stamping dance in which I felt like a Japanese warrior. My voice also came into full play with such dances and movements. I need to stress that I had never danced before in my life, and I found such movements surprising. So apart from the purely physical movements during inner-directed movement, there is also as aspect some people experience in which there is a fuller experience of inner feelings.

Because of such encounters, and there were dozens of them, I felt I was allowing myself to experience something extraordinary. The experiences arising spontaneously from within created a sense of wonder in me. I recognised I was touching a secret which existed in everyone. The secret is that we are much more than we usually suspect. We are capable of more than we dare imagine, and have access to internal founts of healing, adventure and wisdom, and experience that can enlarge and liberate us, not only physically but in our psyche as well. Our unconscious is full of creativity and splendid experience.

Voice As Well As Body

As already suggested, the voice is also one of the important aspects of inner-directed movement. It is one of the areas of our life in which many inhibiting factors may occur. When sound and movement combine, as they do in this practice, a huge realm of experience and healing is possible. This is described by Joan as follows. “Nothing else I have ever done is comparable to my experiences with inner-directed movement. When I began attending the group I honestly envied some people their ability to let-go and say through their voice and body what was obviously deeply important to them and just as deeply satisfying. Seeing myself today I realise I have reached that sort of freedom and enjoyment.

Friends ask me just what it is I do in the group. I just say I let my body express freely and they nearly always have a look of puzzlement. As far as they are concerned they already relax their body, but it doesn’t dance or sing like mine. I don’t even bother to explain as I know from experience they will not understand unless they do it themselves. All I know is that I have experienced all manner of magical things. I have felt the joyous abandonment of a baby and the fire of my body’s power and sexuality. More than anything else though, I have discovered I am a much wider and deeper person than I ever knew before.”

Because I have not simply been a teacher, but have practised inner-directed movement myself, I am just as much an enthusiast as Joan. I have no difficulty at all in being positive about what has come into my life from the practice. I look back from my mid fifties, to when I began at thirty four, and see that my body is far more mobile now. It is unbelievable to consider the attitudes and moral rigidity I lived with in my early thirties, and how tired I felt constantly, as well as how depressed. The dark cloud I lived under, or in, has gone. Of course I had to meet some of the difficult emotions I had stored inside myself. Gradually ‘blue sky’ peeped through as the clouds I had unwittingly created in my life cleared. Also, because inner-directed movement puts you in touch with your creative centre, after twenty years I am not through, I am still learning from the process.

Liberating The Body Is More Than Avoidance Of Tension

Learning how to promote inner-directed movement is learning to trust yourself in a new way. It is also a way of learning how to use areas of your potential not previously employed, and to keep in contact with yourself and other people in a more enriching manner. But perhaps the most important fact about learning to allow inner-directed movement concerns liberation.

The difficulty is not that of saying or being what is innately yourself, it is in doing so in a manner which does not conflict with the needs of others. The liberation you can find through inner-directed movement is very complete. It is not something you do to someone else or inflict on the world. It is yours to experience in your own physical and emotional privacy. Just as when we dream we can have the most intimate and complete experiences without involving anyone else, so we can relax and find full self expression without anyone else present.

Therefore liberating your body through inner-directed movement releases reserves of energy and enthusiasm which might have been subdued by attempts to live within the boundaries of social or interpersonal demands. For many people, it is this enormous freedom which is the most important feature of the practice. Many people using inner-directed movement have told me they never before felt such freedom, even in childhood. They either had never been allowed it by parents or teachers, or they had never allowed it to themselves.

How Does It Happen?

Earlier in this century Dr. Wilhelm Reich observed the process of spontaneous movement during relaxation and wrote about it, becoming the father of modern body oriented therapy. Adding to the basic biological statement that a function of life is movement, he studied the frequency in living organisms of particular types of movement. He saw movements such as contraction and expansion, and the sexual pelvic movement as fundamental life movements, and connected with personal wholeness. He found that if such movements were inhibited, frustration or illness of some sort resulted. But his work was still prior to the publication of information arising from research into sleep and dreams, which has thrown such extraordinary light on how our body and mind work together. In particular, the observation that one’s eyes always move rapidly during dreaming gives insight into how movements can arise without consciously attempting them. The brain produces all the impulses to the muscles during the dreamt movements, that it would during waking activity. So the variety of experience occurring when we relax and allow our movements to become inner-directed, may be arising from the same source as our dreams. I make this connection because the powerful mimes and experiences, such as that in which I danced, have an intensity and reality akin to dreams. Inner-directed movement and dreams arise out of a relaxed condition. Both produce spontaneous movements and dramatic experience or fantasy.

Laboratory tests in which subjects were prevented from dreaming show that those tested developed symptoms of great stress and decreased mental efficiency. The conclusion was that the process underlying dreaming is of critical importance in keeping the mind and body functioning properly. If we remember that dreams do this by releasing spontaneous drama, movement and emotions, then the spontaneity of inner-directed movement can be see as linking with the important release and balancing action of the dream process.

The evidence showing dreaming as critical to mental and physical health suggests that dreams may be a last ditch stand against the inhibition of some of the most important aspects of yourself. There may therefore be a connection between the expression of subtle needs and emotions in dreams, and the uninhibited expression of your body and feelings during inner-directed movement. People also find that inner-directed movement enhances their personal growth and intuition.

The Experience of Inner-Directed Movement

A female student once said to me, ‘I have relaxed thousands of times and no unwilled movements have happened, so why will it be different this time?’ She went on to say, ‘I don’t believe there is anything in me to create the sort of experience you are talking about anyway!’

Her question and statement have behind them viewpoints and attitudes that in fact make it difficult to understand just what inner-directed movement is, and how it can happen. They imply that there is nothing about oneself to experience beyond what is already known – that after years of life, surely if there were dimensions of oneself full of rich experience you would have had hints of them – and also perhaps that the body is dumb flesh, largely mechanical and lacking deep intelligence.

Nevertheless, laboratory tests have shown that the most materialistic people, while they are in the relaxed state of sleep, develop spontaneous fantasies, accompanied by body movements, emotions and speech. Namely they dream, even if they do not remember. The spontaneous movements we make in sleep, and the deeply moving feelings and dramas we experience in connection with them, are usually not strong enough to break through to conscious life except in a few cases. To work with this process which is vital to your well-being, you need to be receptive and create the right mood and environment. The body and mind are not disconnected. The wisdom that keeps the body-heat at the correct level, the intelligence that keeps millions of various cells interacting in an integrated way, though unconscious, unknown, untouched by yourself in everyday life, can begin to bubble up into awareness and self realisation when you listen by letting it express in its own way.

That is the theory. The experience is that if you do take time to let this subtle action have a space in waking life, you will first learn to let your body be free enough to move to delicate impulses. This will lead to movements that at first you may not know whether you are making them up, or they are occurring by themselves. As they strengthen through learning to trust yourself in letting-go, the movements will follow certain themes. Perhaps at the end of the session you will see your body has been exercising and loosening. Or maybe you have made dance like movements that have a theme such as emerging from restrictions and growing. You may see this relates to how you feel in everyday life. In this way you will see for yourself that the unconscious resources of body regulation usually only expressing at the level of blood pressure or temperature control, are manifesting at a new level because you are learning to work with them. You will see that the creative imagination of dream life is clarified and showing itself to you while you are awake.

It’s An Old Truth In A New Form

The view that you do not need to practise disciplined or energetic given exercises to keep physically and psychologically healthy may be new to you. Everything from PE. at school, Aerobics at the fitness gym, and Yoga, suggest series of given movements or postures. And you must perform them correctly to get the benefits. Inner-directed movement is not a new practice though. Because it is a basic human function, and an extension of movements like yawning, it has been frequently used in the past. In fact it has a history of many thousands of years, different cultures giving it different names and explanations.

While I was teaching inner-directed movement in Japan I was introduced to an almost identical practice called Seitai. The founder of Seitai, Haruchika Noguchi, is said to have modernised an older practice which was a part of Buddhist traditional technique.

I had the pleasure of meeting several Seitai practitioners who taught me their approach to inner-directed movement. My wife Hyone and I were also able to attend group practices. Seitai is popular in Japan with the sort of popularity that causes articles about it to appear in high class women’s magazines. But its practitioners come from a wide age range and are equally represented by both sexes. The ongoing group we attended had about thirty people in it. There were teenagers, married couples, young and old, and lots of single people. In this group each person is encouraged to allow their spontaneous movements, such as their desire to stretch. They all practise at once, so each person does their own personal movements at their own pace.

Seitai’s appeal is probably due to Noguchi’s practical and down to earth approach. Through Seitai many people in Japan have improved their physical and psychological health using this very simple practice. What I learnt from the people who shared Seitai with me was how much fun it can be. Before my stay I had thought the Japanese would be very serious people. In the street and in formal social gatherings this is perhaps true, but individually or in informal groups they are very playful. Several times I watched groups of people decide, during a break in activity on a conference, to practice yuki, a form of Seitai in which two people practise together. Within minutes it had developed into active dance like movements which included lots of laughter and playfulness. In the following chapters some of Seitai’s approaches will be explained.

In India the use of inner-directed movement is called Shaktipat. It has a different approach to Seitai, contact with a teacher or Guru being recommended though not seen as indispensable. Individuals in most of these approaches practice both alone or in groups.

While working in Australia I was told by Jack Thompson the Australian film star who had been taught Tai Chi by a Chinese teacher, that for three years the teacher had him perform the given movements. Then one day he said to Jack “Now I will show you the real Tai Chi.” He then encouraged Jack to allow spontaneous movement – inner-directed movement.

Tai Chi is a stylised series of movements from China used for health and harmonising ones being. While in Hong Kong I saw hundreds of people in the early morning practising Tai Chi in Kowloon Park. Hyone and I joined in and it was a great pleasure to have the freedom to openly explore movement in public. Also originating in China there is a more direct approach to spontaneous movement called Qi Gong. As in Seitai the individual or group directly wait for spontaneous movement.

These Eastern approaches see the movements as expressing a subtle energy called Chi or Ki. This energy is seen as the creative, body forming, energy of life. Therefore the practice is considered to balance and harmonise the way this energy expresses in oneself.

The West has its traditional approaches to inner-directed movement also. Apart from groups such as the Quakers and Shakers, who gave inner-direction a religious orientation connected with the spontaneous movements of the original Pentecost, Anton Mesmer founded a form of group practice three hundred years ago. He was probably one of the first to attempt a scientific evaluation of the process. Without the recent findings which have arisen from psychological and neurological research however, his explanations were still based on older ideas.

In Hawaii there is a form of spontaneous movement that is allowed to express as dance. Ancient tribal healing or decision making frequently involved spontaneous movements and vocal expression. These are often linked to what is today known as Shamanism. It is a way ancient people found wholeness and healing, or sought intuitive information vital to their existence.

A more recent practice that started in Indonesia is called Subud. It has a format that has allowed it to become world-wide, although unlike Seitai, it has an element of religious feeling because of the culture and character of its founder, Pak Subuh. In Subud, groups of people meet twice a week. Someone in the group says, ‘Begin’, and the members allow spontaneous expression of body and voice.

Although all these approaches have a very similar core in that practitioners are asked to let go of their self-willed activity, the explanations of the practice, and the details may vary. For instance, in Seitai there is not very much vocal expression. The men women and children can all practice together, and there is no religious connection. In Subud the men and women are segregated. There is a lot of vocal expression, and there is a cultural religious connection.

The Best of Self-Help and Spiritual Adventure

The techniques described in the following pages have been developed from an acquaintance with approaches used in the past by other cultures, from study and practice of traditional and recent Western methods, and from my own twenty years of experience of personal use and teaching inner-directed movement internationally. From this I know that the aims of self-help and self responsible health, aimed at by alternative forms of healing, are available through inner-directed

movement. I find the practice combines the energy balancing of acupuncture, the release and personal growth of psychotherapy, and the inner adventure of meditation or dream work.

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Link to Chapter two – Link to Chapter List