Posts Tagged ‘communication with core’

Tests of Analysis

Do You Dream

Tony Crisp

Chapter Nine

From all that has been said, a whole collection of methods present themselves suggesting how we can understand a dream. I suppose one could use all these methods on a single dream, and arrive at a whole spectrum of information. But the question now arises as to whether the interpretation is correct. After all the effort, is it right? It is not just a question of whether the answer satisfies us; it must also enlighten us. It must do even more than that. What we arrive at must fit the events and symbols of the dream, and unveil the characters of our inner life that have clothed themselves in the forms and events of the dream. The interpretation should make sense to other people also, so that if explained, they too can easily see the connection between dream and interpretation. The interpretation should be able to stand the test of time as well.

One of the biggest temptations in analysing our dreams, the thing that most often leads to a false interpretation, is to attempt a purely arbitrary translation of the symbols. By this is meant that because one dreams of a bag, a large key and a snake, one should not therefore immediately denominate these as ‘sexual symbols’. They may be; and we have to keep this possibility in mind. But the dreamer may be a locksmith who is having difficulty opening an important bag. In which case the symbols represent a problem and not sexual intercourse. And he may have a friend who keeps snakes, by one of which he was nearly bitten. So the snake might mean fear of death. This is why one has to be careful to find one’s own associations with the symbols. Only when we cannot find a personal association; or the dream setting does not point to the possible meaning, should we try a general interpretation. Jung has said that if the dreamer finds difficulty in arriving at an association, he would ask him to describe the symbol in his own words, as if Jung knew nothing about it. Therefore, if one dreamt of a table, one would say, ‘It is a thing usually made of wood and having four supports. Upon these a flat surface is fixed, so that one can place objects, food, books, etc., on it at a level nearer one’s hands or mouth.’ Or at least, one would describe it as one saw it.

As for how we can test the interpretation, dissatisfaction is the biggest clue to our inadequate understanding of the dream. If there are factors in the dream which we have not explained, or if the interpretation does not bring to light the inner feelings that shaped the dream, then one will always have a feeling of dissatisfaction. It is as if two parts of a puzzle have not been properly fitted together, or, although the pieces fit, the colours do not quite match. Thus arises the feeling of not having found the right solution.

On the other hand, when the right understanding is arrived at, a very profound thing happens. There is usually a feeling of thrill, a sudden pleasure of exaltation, a feeling of being on the track. This is usually accompanied by a sense of seeing deeply into yourself, sometimes into parts of your being never bared to view before. In all, there is a feeling of pleasure and achievement, of certainty. One is usually somewhat amazed at the wisdom of dreams, despite having felt the same many times before.

Another test of the interpretation’s accuracy, and a guard against arbitrariness, is to see whether it fits everyday experience. A dream nearly always deals with things one has experienced in one way or another. Therefore, if an interpretation does not fit or explain our actual experience, then it should be placed to one side. We must beware of using words we do not understand. For instance, we may read that Jung has said a dark-haired woman can represent a man’s anima, or female nature, while a dominant man in a woman’s dreams represents her animus. Or that Freud suggests that some cutting or scissors dreams might symbolise a fear of castration. But do we really, in our own experience, know what these mean? Can we see them in our own life? It is certainly not sufficient to label our dream symbols this, that or the other. If these ideas are true, then we shall see them in our own experience. We may not give them the same name even; but one that describes them to us! This is not to say that a knowledge of these ideas is not extremely helpful. It may even help us to see these things in our own experience. But we must beware of using such ideas without seeing them in ourselves. Therefore we have to look at ourselves and ask, ‘What part of me does this dream symbol represent? What experience is it dealing with?’ And when the word experience is used this does not simply mean events in the outer world. It means emotions, attitudes, ideas, response to people and events, relationships with others, with self, and with Life.

Sometimes, however, the dream deals with things that have not yet happened, but are about to happen. I am not here dealing with prophetic dreams. When a woman has a tummy ache and says, ‘Ah, my period is beginning’, she is not prophesying. She is speaking from past experience. In a similar way, the dream often sees that things are about to begin that are not outwardly obvious to us. For instance, a man dreamt that a bull broke loose and rushed into a field of cows. Shortly afterwards he was almost carried away by a release of sexual desires he had kept ‘chained up’. His inward feelings had warned of this in the dream. Yet outwardly he could see no sign of it. So with some dreams we have to see if ‘time’ reveals their meaning. Or to put it another way, we may interpret the dream satisfactorily but find no signs of it in our experience. Then it is for time to bring it into the realm of the real.

An example of arbitrary interpretation can be seen in this dream. ‘An unconventional looking postman delivered a registered package. But I didn’t open it.’ This was taken to mean that due to an Unconventional experience, the dreamer had realised something. Something had ‘registered’ on his consciousness, but he had not explored the possibilities of it. Although this seemed to fit the symbols, and no other ideas were forthcoming yet the dreamer could not, despite a lot of searching within, discover an experience of something registering that he had not explored. The registered package is a double symbol, because it also suggests something valuable contained in it. Therefore, despite a seemingly good interpretation, when it came down to testing it, no satisfaction was forthcoming. Which makes us realise that proper interpretation lies not only in reading the symbols, but in seeing the understanding applied to our life.

We can sum up the tests for interpretation then, as: Does it satisfy us? Does it explain us? Does it enlighten us? Can we see it as a part of our experience in the past, present or future? Above all, does it help us carry on with the business of living?

Link To Chapters – Link to Chapter Ten

Your Dream Interpreter



Your Dream Interpreter

In dreams you are freed from the usual restrictions of mind and body, of social rules and personal limitations. But beside meeting your wonderful creativity, you may also meet and transform the shadows of your fears and negative attitudes.

Your Dream Interpreter is available at Amazon USA and Amazon UK.

Sections Include

THE DREAMERS’ WORKBOOK INTRODUCTION – What are dreams? The Amazing experience of dreaming. Recording Your Dreams Where Do Dreams Come From? To Imagine is to Create Mapping Your Dream World Dream Healing: Resolving Conflicts in Dreams Sleep on a Problem Dealing With Nightmares Understanding and Controlling Recurring Dreams Understanding Dreams of Family Understanding Dreams of Love and Romance Relationship Growth Sexuality Understanding School Dreams Understanding Your Work Dreams Looking Into the Future THE DREAM DICTIONARY – An A to Z of Dreams INDEX OF DREAM THEMES AND OBJECTS BIBLIOGRAPHY Publishing History  

Introduction – Your Dream Interpreter

Tony Crisp

Introduction Dreams are one of the most extraordinary experiences any of us can have. This is why they have fascinated men and women in every culture throughout the ages. The roots of our own culture show that we are no exception to this. The Old and New Testament are full of dreams and dreaming, such as that of Pharaoh and of the warning dreams experienced by Joseph. (1) In our own times an enormous amount of experiment into the nature and meaning of dreams and sleep has taken place. This has occurred both in the laboratory and in the testing bed of everyday experience of tens of thousands of men, women and children, along with the professionals dealing with human problems. A vast amount has been learned, showing that dreams are more profoundly revealing of transformative insights and self-understanding than even the ancient cultures realised. This flood of new understanding has shown that dreams are not mysterious jumbles of random images, but arise from the innate mental and physical processes of life within us. They express the unconscious wisdom that enabled and sustains the growth and health of your body and mind. This enormous experiment and research have also defined ways that each of us can learn to understand the dramatic and graphic language of our dreams. What are dreams? As with any area of thought, there are a wide variety of views as to what dreams are and what function they play in life. But if we attempt to find a synthesis of these ancient and modern views, it is that dreams are an expression of the most fundamental processes of life in us reaching toward awareness. Creatures have dreamt for millions of years prior to human emergence, and in their dreaming we see the biological life of our planet arriving at its own kind of consciousness, but achieving it in a very different way than we know in our waking life. It is like a huge pool of collective awareness that never knows itself as any one thing, but is the experience of all living creatures. The Psychiatrist Carl Jung gave it the name of the Collective Unconscious. The Australian aborigines called it The Dreamtime, and recognised that all creatures emerge from it, and pass back into it in sleep and dreams. The aborigines call it the ‘all-at-once’ time instead of the ‘one-thing-after-another’ time. Whether we want to see this fundamental level of awareness as instinct, as holy, or as a collective unconscious, this fundamental part of us has the experience of millions of years. It has within it the essence of all human experience, from all cultures. Not only is this pool of collective experience ancient, holding all patterns of relationship already developed, but also it is always changing, always forming new possibilities from gathered experience. In our waking state we have built an image of who we are. We frequently really believe we are the person that image creates. What you touch in your dreams is the person you can be beyond those limitations and concepts. Dreams open to you this possibility of vastly extending your own experience, and finding wholeness and a connection with your roots. (2) Dreams are more than random images Countless experiments have shown that each of us dream about four or five times each night. While we dream our voluntary muscles no longer respond to our attempts to move, and our eyes move rapidly under closed eyelids. Our muscles are paralysed in this way because, if they were not, we would actually run around or act out what we are dreaming. Animals in which the brain area that blocks such impulses has been damaged live out their dream in movement. It can then be seen they are practising their basic life skills such as hunting or survival tactics. But dreams do not simply extend your experience and allow you to practice your future actions; they express all the other functions of the human mind and spirit, reaching beyond the limits of waking awareness and your senses. Dreams solve problems; they reflect the state of health of your body and mind; they reach into your past and often access your earliest memories and responses; they are an expression of the self-regulating process of your body and your mind; dreams express your deepest creative ability and reach into new views and possibilities; they are a safe area to directly experience, and therefore practice, having a baby, getting married, dying and exploring the unknown. Dreams reveal to you what you fail to see about yourself while awake. They show what you miss realising about the world around you, and the directions you are taking in life. They unveil things that usually lie beyond the boundaries of your five senses. But their information is sometimes obscured in apparently strange drama or feelings. Fortunately men and women throughout the ages, and especially in recent times, have clarified ways of extracting information from even the most obscure of dreams. Using these techniques enables you to gain insights that can transform the way you live and experience yourself. (3) It allows you to release old tensions and hurts. More than anything else it starts to unveil your immense potential. Link Back to Chapter Headings Notes (1) See Genesis 40:007 to 41:49 – and Mathew 1:20 and 2:11 (2) It would spoil the flow of the ideas to quote all references to support the statements made. However, the stated view of the dream and what lies behind it can be further explored in such books as: The section by Marie L. von Franz ‘The Process of Individuation’, in Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung. There is a River – The Story of Edgar Cayce, by Thomas Sugrue. Cosmic Consciousness – A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke. The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra. Supernature by Lyall Watson. The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. Collision With The Infinite by Suzanne Vega. (3) The word insight is used purposely. It is defined as ‘the capacity to discern the true nature of a situation; penetration. The act or outcome of grasping the inward or hidden nature of things or of perceiving in an intuitive manner.’

Dreaming a New Life

Surviving Tomorrow

Part Three

Tony Crisp

Forty years ago, during my twenties, I fell in love with a beautiful woman, she was intelligent, from a well placed family, lovely figure, and she wanted to be my partner. But there was a problem. I was married with three children. The result – conflict.

I struggled for months to restrain my passion for my new love. My fear, barely recognised at the time, was that if I let go my control my marriage would be smashed by what I would do, and so would my children. So I allowed myself no hand holding, no kissing, and definitely no sex.

The stress of restraint was such that travelling to work one day, and thus nearer to my new love, I suddenly found it hard to breathe, and a continuous ache in my chest began its entrance into my life that lasted for years. Medical examination showed there was nothing physically wrong. My doctor told me I had been working too hard and suggested I take a tranquiliser. The thought of surviving emotionally using something that deadened the way I responded to life didn’t appeal to me. So I started a quest for healing to deal with the chest pain and the depression that arose in what felt like a loveless life.

The search for healing led me on a long journey of discovery. During that quest my ‘New Love’ married someone else and we are still friends years later. My quest has been successful, and many treasure uncovered. One of the most precious of these, and one of the healing tools in meeting what I was facing, was my discovery of the world of dreams.

This new relationship with dreams started very slowly. Most experts at that time were saying you needed to interpret a dream – remember this was the sixties. Interpretation was fine for ideas, for thinking clever thoughts, but it made not one jot of difference to my pain or depression. Fortunately, as I have so often heard since, I hadn’t been exposed to the idea that depression was incurable. So my affliction of physical pain and my affliction of depression were like touchstones telling me what didn’t work. But those touchstones, when I moved on from interpretation to exploration of dreams, showed me that dreams worked – really worked.

The way dreams worked for me wasn’t by thinking about them or analysing them. They worked when I used them as a doorway to enter a deeper previously unknown dimension of myself. I have at times likened this to lifting up the floorboards or going into the cellar, and discovering what foundations the house of my personality is built on, and how all the apparatus of life is wired up. Once I learned to enter that place in myself, usually called ‘the unconscious’, I could begin to see what circuitry had created the depression, and what cross wiring had brought about the psychosomatic chest pain. It took work, but I could gradually restructure myself and correct the circuitry. In that way I saw that the chest pain had arisen because the enormous amount of emotional and sexual energy I had restrained had turned inward. Instead of a positive loving expression of passionate feelings it became personally destructive, like a knife wound. My depression had different causes. It was like a projector putting a distorted picture on a screen. The energy or light of my fundamental core self had blockages or filters put in the way of the light flow. In more direct terms events in my earliest years had led me to block off the full flow of my feelings, desires and anger – the full me. The shadows the blockages caused were what I experienced as depression. As the blockages were removed the depression faded.

In this exploration of my inner structure I saw that some things were cross circuited. My ability to love, for instance, had been damaged early in my life, setting up vulnerability in my emotions – my chest. So when the big challenge came regarding love the vulnerability became an open wound. Some things we carry go deep, and this one had level upon level.

Because of these powerful life changes, my observation over many years is that dreaming is vital for survival and health. I believe dreams arise from the very core process that gives us life and preserves health. Our core processes are an expression of life itself. They may be largely unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they cannot flow into our awareness. As with animals that move, and even experience bodily changes with the seasons without having a conscious mind, or watching the news on TV, I believe we also, at our deepest levels, are linked with changes the earth and heavens move through. The process behind dreams is always trying to get us ready for such changes to help us move with what is happening.

In past cultures life was often extremely difficult. In the Inuit (Eskimos) tribes for instance, the elderly knew that if there was a bad winter when food was short they would need to walk out into the frozen night to die, so the younger in the family could survive. Such tribal people often used their dreams to help them hunt in the right place to avoid such starvation. We may not need to go out with a bow to hunt our food, but when we face the unknown, the outreach dreams can give us, the depth of understanding of our life situation, are still often more helpful than any everyday skill we may have acquired.

I need to repeat some of that because it is not a popular statement supported by most of the scientific community. Dreams arise from the process that gives you life. They are part and parcel of the action in you that spontaneously makes you breathe faster when you run, or perspire when you are hot. They are an expression of the process that constantly regulates your body and mind in its attempts to keep you functioning.i But mere functioning and survival isn’t enough. The process goes beyond rebuilding and clearing out past trauma and pains in order to become healthier. The action of life in us presses to grow, to expand, to thrive and become more than we are at the moment. Beyond that too, dreams are often a helicopter ride surveying our life situation. From that wider perspective we can see possible dead end directions, traffic jams of delay, and ways we can take to meet our needs. Survival is not enough! We need to thrive and move with the times.

Dreams hold a mirror for us to look in. In the mirror we see what we have created of the life and love that flows through us. For in dreams we see the beauty or the tragedy, of what we have formed with our gift of life. The mirror of dreams is a way of checking the heights and depths of our being, seeing if all is working well, and in that way we can see how true we have been to what we know within us is our best.

In the mirror of my dreams I was shown clearly what I had done to the love that was innate in me, and how I had badly used enormous energies within me. Being able to see those things I could heal the damage I had unwittingly caused myself, or that had resulted from childhood experiences. An easier love became possible, as well as a greater flow of my creative potential.

Recently I asked other people to write and tell me how they survived great change or difficulties in their life. Sandra, one of the people who replied, wrote:

Through my dreams I have met perhaps the most devastating events in my life, creating both loss and change. Also, my dreams created the ability to really see, know and love.

For years I had a recurring dream/nightmare of not being able to open my eyes. They were stuck shut and no matter what I did I couldn’t open them. Eventually, in large part due to my dreams, I learned what I was unable to open my eyes to. For over 40 years I had lived my life unaware of my childhood. I had very few memories of home and family, but knew it was a life of poverty and parental abuse, and I was always aware of these things. But at some point I began dreaming of things I had not been aware of, things that I eventually learned indicated sexual abuse. – Sandra

What may be the most important fact here is that through her dreams and her efforts to understand them, Sandra was able to see and know what she had previously been blind to. In her case it was the painful and abusive facts of her childhood. Such hidden experiences are the ‘circuits’ as I called them above, that produce the most awful effects in our waking everyday life. But dreams also open our eyes to creative and extended dimensions of ourselves we might otherwise remain unconscious of.

Dreams encompass the largest and the smallest. They portray to us everything from the health and well being of the cells in our body, to our unconscious impressions and intuitions about the people around us, the society and world we live in, and the meaning of our existence. They bring to our limited everyday personality its connection with the hugeness lying under the surface of who we presently know ourselves to be.

As an example of this, a man I was working with told me that he had dreamt he was walking with a long-standing friend. They came to a river. The friend crossed the river but the dreamer could not cross and woke very disturbed. He found later that the friend who appeared in the dream had died at the time he had dreamt of the river crossing. The dream not only showed him that deep within himself he knew his friend had died, even though consciously he was unaware of it, but it also told him that the friend, in ‘crossing the river’ of death, walked on into another form of life. Without the correct awareness of his friend’s death, the information about life continuing would not have been so impressive. That is just a tiny instance of how subtle dreams are.

As children we have all had dreams, not perhaps the dreams of the night. But the ‘dreams’ of childhood, whether of the day or the night, are often direct expressions of core potential and wisdom. Such dreams impelled us toward something or away from something. As the years passed, those dreams may have become covered by the debris of experiences, opinions of other people and events. And you know inside yourself what it is like to live in the absence of those dreams, the emptiness left when you have lost that light, that urgent guide toward the future. For they held in them the passions and loves that give meaning and purpose to each day. Those dreams may have been pushed into the night, and to find again that bright guiding light, you can open the door of the night to allow your dreams into your waking.

So, is it enough to dream without being aware of what is implied by your dreams? Well, is it enough to love without giving that love to others? Is it enough to create without making that creation real in the world? Is it enough to want a child without bearing it? It takes our own movement toward what is offered from within to bring it fully into being. Our dreams are also an invitation to live in worlds beyond our present imagination, but an invitation that you might neglect.

Exploring your dreams

Dreams are a language, a language that frequently appears foreign. This is because the dream is seldom in words. It expresses itself in images and drama, and really we understand that, otherwise we would not get such a kick from films and theatre. So the first step is to wonder what your dream is expressing in its drama and its action. What is taking place? Is it love, anger, avoidance, building something, or a relationship? Whatever it is put a name to it.

The following dream was told me by Lorraine during a phone-in I did on London Broadcasting Company.

My Mother asked me to go and buy some butter for her. A chain on my left leg prevented me from going very far. I look down the road and see my Mum, Dad and my four brothers in the back of a car. I wave and call and they drive right past me, going over the chain I am wearing on my leg.”

If we put words to what is dramatised in Lorraine’s dream we can say:

• Lorraine is doing her mother’s bidding.
• She is restricted in her freedom.
• She tries to get family attention.
• She is shown as being left out of family life. What we have done here is to simply say what was happening in the dream. So if this were your dream you would need to ask yourself if you feel, or truly are, restricted by your emotional connection with your mother. And does that indicate that despite trying to gain your family’s attention you still feel ignored? So the aim is to see how the drama relates to, expresses and unfolds, what is being met in your life. Then you need to be ready to look at that.Dreams seldom if ever merely reflect the events of what is felt or experienced in our waking life. What they do is to use the imagery and feelings of our life to describe something we probably have not been aware of, or even are avoiding acknowledging about ourselves. So once the dream drama is clarified, it is worth thinking about what it suggests. If this is difficult talk it over with a friend.In Lorraine’s case, whether the things shown in her dream are happening in reality, the fact is that her dream shows her feeling ignored, chained, and that she is attempting to please. So the next thing for Lorraine to consider is what she wants to do about the situation that will give her maximum satisfaction. This can be explored by imagining herself back in the dream and exploring various alternative outcomes.What this means is that in imagination she needs to alter the dream in any way that satisfies. With your own dream you would need to experiment with it, play with it, until you find a fuller sense of self expression or well being.

  It is very important to note whether any anger or hostility is in the dream that is not fully expressed; or if there are resistances as you try to alter the dream. If there are emotions not fully expressed, imagine a full expression of the anger or other feelings. Because anger, hostility, or even love is sometimes socially taboo we often restrain it, even in our dreams. In expressing it in your imagination you are not in any way doing anything socially wrong. The aim is to imagine or even act it out physically without in any way doing it to others in the real world. Restrained feelings and desire can damage us internally, and also tend to leak out anyway into the way we relate to others. So it is really healing to acknowledge, express them, and understand their roots.

  It may be that as this is practised more independence, anger, creativity or love is openly expressed in subsequent dreams. This is healthy, allowing such feelings to be vented and redirected into satisfying ways, and not turned inwards on oneself in a way

  that damages health. In doing this do not ignore any sense of resistance, pleasure or anxiety. Satisfaction occurs only as we learn to be aware of and integrate resistances and anxieties into what we express. This is a very powerful process, so don’t underestimate it. ii

  If there are resistances to changing the dream, these show there is a difference in what you want, and what you feel unconsciously, or what your core self wishes. If you can, relate to any feelings of resistance as if they are sources or voices of realisation and information. Do not push them aside, but let them unfold to see if you can understand where they are arising from and what their message is. Only then can you move on, having cleared a blockage within you.

  Being your dream

  No computer, however amazing, can yet do what you do in creating a dream. While you sleep you produce a living being such as a dream character that you can have a conversation with. In creating such a character, complete with background, you draw spontaneously on huge areas of your experience or memories – and of course your immense creativity. Think how much technology and staff it takes to create a film cartoon. Yet you do it each night and perhaps think nothing of it!

  Behind each dream image lie enormous data, emotional responses and patterns of behaviour you may be unaware of. So remember that when entering into a dream, you are in a full surround virtual reality databank of fantastic information. You can tap that information just as you would with any person, by asking questions and prodding for a response. Even the trees and animals in your dreams are also enormous reservoirs of information, linking back perhaps infinitely with your potential, creativity and past experiences.

  One of the easiest ways to access this vast information is to imagine yourself as one of your dream characters or objects. This may sound strange, and something you may not have done before, but it allows you to explore, rather than just think about, the huge and wonderful world of your dreams.

  It doesn’t matter if the character you choose to ‘be’ is someone known or not, or whether they are young or old. The character needs to be treated as an aspect of your dream, and not as if they were the living person you might know in waking life. The same applies to something like a tree, dog or place.

  To ‘be’ the person or thing, you need to sit quietly, close your eyes, take a few moment to relax and be aware of what you are feeling and what body sensations you have. You do this because your body, feelings and thoughts are your computer screen that will respond to or show you what is emerging. They are the monitor on which you will feel, see or know things about your dream. So when you are ready, imagine yourself as the character or thing. Really get into it. Be inside the dream person’s body. See what it feels like to be them, that shape, that temperament, having that viewpoint on life.

  If you don’t get this immediately, try going in and out of the body of the person or the object slowly, and note the difference in what you feel and what you sense as them, and then back as you. Once you are in the person or thing describe who or what you are – in the dream remember, not as an outside person or thing – and what you are doing, seeing or feeling in the dream. Do the same if you are an object.

  This takes practice, and you need to let yourself go a bit to play at it. It doesn’t have to be serious, because if you hit important things you cannot help them really grabbing your attention and sticking.

  To go more deeply into this, as you take on being the person or thing and have finished describing yourself, notice what you are feeling in yourself. Give attention to what changes occur as you watch what is arising in your body, your feelings and imagination. This is a bit like watching a blank television screen, waiting for something to show. Watch until something relevant or promising starts to arise then observe it as it grows. After that, see how it explains you more fully, or helps you make clearer decisions about what you are dealing with.

  I am talking to myself and getting great answers!

  An example of this is given in the following description of David exploring a dream in which he sees an elderly couple in a flying summer house, rather like a big kite.

  I was a bit anxious about working with the group as I hadn’t opened myself to them before. As I started though I felt okay and there were no hesitations. I told the dream and felt changes in my body and feeling state. I felt happy and laughing, and also a rising up feeling, an opening.

  It was suggested that I be the flying summer house. So I imagined myself as the structure and this was a lovely feeling. I described myself as being well-built, built with skill and with strong material. Until recently I had been well fastened to the ground and a house. But I had felt filled with a lightness that had lifted me up. I had broken the connections that used to hold me anchored. There was something I felt deep in me about this that I wanted to communicate. It felt like a powerful feeling and at first came out only as a loud cry.

  Before I could explore that someone asked me what had enabled me to fly. Because my feelings were now flowing I immediately felt it as something generated by the couple. It was love, a sort of love that wasn’t locked onto one person, one place. It was a love that had the sort of easy, laughing eccentricity of the couple. At this point I began to feel a lot of emotion. It was very powerful, to do with the beauty of being free and mobile and uplifted. The emotion was because a lot of my life I had been so trapped, and this new me that was emerging, breaking loose of old restraints, was wonderful to experience.

  Carol asked me what it was like to be the couple, or something about the couple. I immediately identified with the man, saying something like – I am an old man. I have learned to love this one woman. Through the years of difficulty I have found my love for this woman. Through the changes of age I have found love, and the love has gradually changed me. It led to the death of love. But in its place something is growing. Something that is a finer love, a touch of the spirit. This was at the same time incredibly beautiful and painful. So much so at the beginning I could hardly breathe. Energy was pouring through me and my body was shaking and my breath going through many changes of pace as I felt my ability to love breaking away from old restraints.

  As can be seen, David was deeply and passionately experiencing his dream. Not only did this clarify for him the changes going on in his life and relationships, but it also let loose feelings and energy that was, in itself, a force for growth.

  That old dream about my T-shirt

  There is something else that can help in understanding how to explore a dream. While at a business meeting with a web designer who was thinking of producing a site based on my book Dream Dictionary, he jokingly said, ‘Yes, but how can anyone know what their dream is about? It’s all guesswork isn’t it?’

  He had on a rather faded T-shirt with a design on it. So I asked him what he thought it would mean if he dreamt about his T-shirt. He said he didn’t think it would mean anything. The next question I asked was where did he get the T-shirt and what memories were attached to it. He became very quiet and serious and wouldn’t really talk about it other than saying he got it in Los Angeles and a lot happened to him there. And whatever it was he wouldn’t tell me was what his T-shirt would have been commenting on in the supposed dream.

  We have feelings, thoughts, memories or passions attached to every single thing we encounter, every object, every person, every place, and every creature, real or imagined. Even if it is boredom or disinterest it is still an association, a feeling, like a word in a dictionary, that your dreams might need to use at some time to express something. Most of the time, as with the web designer, we are unaware of what associations and emotions we have attached to the things around us and that appear in our dreams. We can sometimes generalise about such dream objects as a fork used to dig – thus there are valid dream dictionaries – but very often the associations are uniquely ours. That is why the technique of ‘being’ the person or thing is given. It helps to uncover those hidden associations and feelings.

  To get behind the images of the people, objects, places and creatures of your dreams to find what your usually unconscious associations are with them, is to unveil an amazing wealth of information about yourself and what you know about people and the world, but might not have let come to the surface. It isn’t that the associations in themselves are revelatory, it is how the dream weaves them into something new and insightful that is astonishing. But even that is only the beginning. Like the hidden depth of an iceberg, an enormous amount of passionate feelings or sometimes pain lie under the associations and the dream theme. It is only when you can allow yourself to experience these intense pleasures and pains, these wonderful storms of insight and revelation, that you really meet your dreams. Then you also really meet yourself and realise what a really big, deep, amazing person you are.

  To unveil this underbelly of the dream is to open a door into a vast world. If you enter that world by allowing emotional and physical responses to what is discovered; if you let all that touch and work in you, you will be greatly enlarged. You will grow beyond who you were. So let the unveiling begin. It will unfold insights and talents that enable you to more confidently meet what changes life and the future bring. In fact it may well make you one of the architects of those changes.

  Bon voyage.

  Below is a summary of the many different aspects of self and functions dreams can express:

  • An expression of what is happening in the physical body. Some doctors consider dreams to show signs of illness long before they are evident in other ways. Women frequently know they are pregnant very early on through sleep awareness in a dream.
  • A way of balancing the physiological and psychological activities in us. When a person is deprived of dreaming in experiments, some degree of breakdown in mind and body occurs. This type of dreaming can often be a safety valve releasing tension and emotion not allowed in waking life – thus nightmares.
  • An enormously original source of insight and information. Dreams tap our memory, our experience, and scan information held unconsciously to form new insights from old experience. Dreams often present summaries or details of experience we have been unable to access consciously. Sometimes this is as early as life in the womb.
  • A means of compensating for failure or deprivation in everyday life, and thereby enabling us to carry on despite setbacks and difficulties. They are a means of expressing the otherwise unacknowledged aspects of oneself. Such dreams are a move toward wholeness.
  • A response to a conscious question or problem. This is sometimes used purposely to gain help, and is called ‘dream incubation’. The person clarifies a question then ‘sleeps on it’ watching for a dream response.
  • In dreams we may be integrating new experience with what we have already gathered and digested. In this way our abilities, such as social skills, are practised or gradually upgraded.
  • Dreams often stand in place of actual experience. So through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which survival is built.
  • A means of exercise for the psyche or soul. Just as the body will become sick if not moved and stressed, so the mind and emotions need stimulus and exercise. Dreams fulfil this need if it is not happening externally.
  • An expression of human supersenses. Humans have an unconscious ability to read body language – so they can assess other humans very quickly. Humans have an unimaginable ability to absorb information, not simply from books, but from everyday events. With it they constantly arrive at new insights and realisations. Humans frequently correctly predict the future – not out of a bizarre ability, but from the information gathered about the present. All these abilities and more show in our dreams.

  • A means of solving problems, or formulating creative ideas, both in our personal life, and also in relationships and work. Many people have produced highly creative work directly from dreams.

  • A presentation in symbols of past traumatic experience. If met this can lead to deep psychological healing. Such dreams are therefore an attempt on the part of our spontaneous inner processes to bring about healing change.
  • In the widest sense nearly all dreams act as a process of growth or a move toward maturing. Some dreams are very obviously presenting internal forces or dimensions of experience that might lead the conscious personality toward a greater balance and inclusiveness.
  • A way of reaching beyond the known world of experience and presenting intimations from the unknown. Many people have dreams in which ESP, out of the body experiences, and knowledge transcending time and space occur. This type of dream may indicate a link between the present person and people who had lived in the distant past; or between the dreamer and all existing life. Some of these dreams present powerful insights into how the human personality may arise out of processes in nature that precede our personal existence – language and inherited family tendencies for instance. They thus deal with the spiritual aspects of human nature. This extension of awareness often gives us experience of what is called ‘the meaning of life’. Out of it we become enriched and strengthened through personal experience rather than book reading.

Lucid Dreams

The Way to a New Adventure

Tony Crisp

To dream with awareness that you are dreaming is called Lucid Dreaming. It is one of the most amazing frontiers of human life. It opens possibilities denied by our  phsyical body. You then enter sleep with critical faculties, with active curiosity, and the ability to explore what you find. When you become lucid in sleep you carry the bright torch of personal awareness into the depths of your body and mind. This is a frontier only a few people have crossed.  Like the frontiers of sea and sky that past generations overcame, the frontier of awareness holds enormous treasures and benefits.  However, unlike the frontiers presented by the exploration of the oceans and space, the crossing of this frontier is open to us all.

This swing between waking and sleeping can be seen as the extremes within the possibilities of our experience. Sleeping and waking are the polarities, the North and South Poles of what we can confront. In quite a real sense we can say there is nothing beyond what is included in those polarities. But usually we call sleep a period of unconsciousness, but in lucid experience we can explore to the very beginning of our being – what I call The Core. And that gives freedom of an extraordinary kind.

Chapters

1 –  Some Truths about Lucid Dreaming

2 – Lucidity Means Awareness

3 – Techniques to Lucid Dreaming

4 – Lucidity – Awake in Sleep

5 – The New Frontier of Lucidity

6 – The Waking Lucid Dream

7 – Going Deeper

 

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

Movement to Wholeness

 

Liberating the Body

Chapter Three

MOVEMENT TO WHOLENESS

Discovering Your Power of Growth

Although another approach to inner-directed movement will be described below, this is not a suggestion to avoid using the previous approaches. Using the water movements or yawning, even if employed dozens of times, will still bring new facets and freshness. Each approach does produce slightly different results however. This is what was meant above by the dimensions of experience. The yawning method of starting for instance, appears to lead more to release of physical tension – the water method leads more to expression of feelings. The latter aids in expressing yourself in movement and harmonising your body and feelings. It is no exaggeration to say the next method, if used a number of times, helps you to fuller self expression. It brings to the surface qualities and energy that may have been sleeping in you.

To make this clear, it is easy to see that an acorn has within itself the potential of a full grown oak tree. Even if the acorn is planted and the emerging tree is a metre high, you can still believe there is a lot more to emerge. As a human being, even though you are physically mature, there may still be a great deal more of yourself which has not yet become realised externally.

The Seed

Create your environment again, with sufficient space, clothing allowing mobility – loose and soft if possible, without tight undergarments. This time you will need music played quite softly. Again it should be music that does not grab the attention too much. Warm up with two or three of the movements already described. Give yourself up to three-quarters of an hour for the whole session.

The important thing about the ‘seed’ practice is that you are purposely not imagining a specific movement for your body to follow. You are only holding an idea, an outline, and to follow it your body and feelings must move into the unknown and play creatively with the idea of the seed to produce any result. So let your body feel its way slowly into finding its posture or movement. Don’t get frustrated if in this first practise little happens. Remember that inner-directed movement is a learnt skill, and you are still learning.

Not only is this an exercise for your feeling sense, but it is also a way the process of inner-directed movement can express. You can consider it a success if some aspect of what arises is spontaneous or unexpected. So at first it doesn’t matter if the session feels mechanical and contrived. Having those feelings mean you are sensing what is happening, and you can thereby refine your technique with their help. By letting go of the controlling urge, you can let the spontaneous and creative part of you express.

1 –        Stand in the centre of your space and raise your arms above your head. Hold them so they are quite extended.

2 –        With eyes closed, bring to mind the idea or image of an unplanted seed. It can be any sort of seed.

3 –        Notice whether your body in its present posture feels as if it is expressing the form and condition of the seed. The aim is to consider how you and your body feel in relationship to the idea and sense you have of the seed. Many people find, for instance, that having the arms extended does not `feel’ like an unplanted seed. Don’t struggle with this. It is just an experiment, play with it, have fun.

4 –        If you do not notice such feelings of difference between your extended posture and the idea of a seed, try another approach. Remember the experiment in which, after raising your arms above your head several times, you let your arms find their own way to move. Once more follow the subtle urges of your being. Play with the feelings of what it would be like to have the shape of the seed; to be waiting for the right conditions to grow and express all your hidden potential of leaves and flowers. Let your body play with these ideas or feelings, just as you let it move when you allowed your arms to find their own way upwards. Do not make this an intellectual inquiry. Use your body and feelings, even if this is a new for you. Explore in this way until you feel you have found a position that is satisfying. Take your time. Notice whether the arms and head are right. Would a seed that is not growing feel alert, sleeping, or waiting? See if you can find an inner mood which for you feels like a seed. Do not attempt to think the whole thing out or consider it scientifically. Let whatever feeling sense you have guide you.

5 –        When you find a position and inner feeling that suit you, take the next step by letting yourself explore, with body movements, postures, and awareness of your feelings, what might happen when you as the seed are planted in warm moist soil and begin to grow. Continue your feeling exploration to find what will occur when you as the seed grow, put out leaves, blossoms and fulfil your cycle. Explore the whole cycle of the seed’s expression. Don’t hold a rigid idea of what the growth of the seed means. What you are looking for is that you explore your own feeling sense in regard to the seed’s growth.

6 –        It might be that as the seed you feel very strongly you do not want to grow. In which case remain in the form of the seed until you feel a change and an urge to grow, or until your session time is finished.

7 –        When you sense the experience has finished, rest quietly for about five minutes and end the session.

The following quote from a letter I received gives an idea of the wide range of experience which can arise from this exercise. Judith describes her use of this ‘seed’ approach to inner-directed movement as follows:

“I am a trainee yoga teacher and have been teaching for three years. I have a small class of fourteen students who are keen and attend regularly. I decided to have my students try the seed approach to see how they would react. I explained it as well as I could, and the feedback I got was as follows – A man in his thirties said, `I felt I was in a womb. It was very comfortable, cosy and dark. I wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to come away – it was so peaceful. I have never experienced anything like it before’. He was very impressed.

“A woman in her thirties felt like throwing her arms around and kicking her legs. `I felt I wanted to give birth and was about to deliver’. She didn’t fling herself about, but held back. I think it was a pity she didn’t let go. Perhaps I didn’t explain the whole procedure clearly enough for them to understand that it was entirely free movements. The majority acted out being flowers. Only one in the class thought it was a lot of `bloody rubbish’, her words. She didn’t even try. She thought she would feel stupid acting out a seed.

“I was surprised at the outcome, that so much should happen first time. I personally felt as if I became the bud of a crocus. I seemed to be slowly unfolding with difficulty. Not until I fully opened did I feel a great relief. The results of this have made me feel very positive in my outlook, and far happier.”

Experiencing your growth as the seed is enjoyable without any concern about what it might do or be beneficial for. Its possibilities are worth understanding though. Judith’s experience of feeling difficulty in opening, and great relief when opened, typifies its action.

What this means is made clear by the experience of a man, Graham, whom I worked with personally. He found that while being the seed he had no urge whatsoever to grow. He lay on the ground for the whole period and felt how wonderful it was that he didn’t have to actively express.

When we talked this over Graham told me he could easily see the connection this had with his life. He said that although he was energetic, and as a male nurse had to deal actively with people all day, he never felt he was really present as himself. As a person he hid behind his role as a nurse and seldom exposed his real feelings with other people. In fact he wondered if he had ever really expressed in activity what he felt or believed.

Graham then used the seed approach again. This time he felt the urge to grow and emerge from his non expression. He gradually opened out from a curled up position and slowly moved, with hesitations, to a kneeling position. At that point he stopped. He explained that standing up – being present with his own feelings and potential with other people – was so new to him, that the half way position was as far as he could grow at that time. Nevertheless, it gave him an exultant feeling to be at last, for what he felt as the first time in his life, daring to go into the world as a real human being. He felt sure that in following sessions of the seed approach he would progressively emerge more fully.

The seed approach deals specifically with your growth as a person. It helps you work out, through creative movement, any restriction in expressing your potential and your physical energy. People who have not lived out their own inner needs, or are unexpressive physically, will find this helpful.

The Seed Group

 

Part of the pleasure of inner-directed movement is sharing it with others. I still enjoy seeing how much pleasure people who have used inner-directed movement for the first time have when they see what wonderful experience they create with their movements. Because it is a pleasure, and because there is support and a more powerful atmosphere or ‘space’ is created when sharing, it is worth considering whether a friend or friends would join with you.

The seed approach can also be used with others. If so, one person is the seed, the supporting people – two to three at the most – can be earth and water. The aim is to support the growth of whoever is the seed by physical and emotional contact.

If you want to use this, whoever is the Seed starts by standing in the middle of the others, who take time to make contact with her/him. They allow time to find an attitude that enables them to get closer physically and emotionally than in usual social roles. So without forcing or acting mechanically, the members touch and draw near to the Seed. When this is established the Seed curls up on a prepared space – with blanket or cushions – on the floor. The members draw near and make contact again. Get close, cover the Seed’s body with yours, penetrate with your touch, as does earth and water.

Liberating the Body – Phase Four

The approaches to inner-directed movement described in the first three phases, although different, all revolve around the allowing of spontaneous movement. Through the use of these varied approaches you gain direct experience of your own creativity in working with your body and discovering its links with your language of posture, gesture and movement. You begin to discover the emergence also of spontaneous creative fantasy. It is creative because each of the approaches allow expression of something slightly different – and each session is itself unique in some way.

The next approach to be described is the cornerstone of inner-directed movement. It is presented as the fourth because through the other approaches you will have become more practised in the technique. This enables you now to use the great simplicity of the ‘open’ approach. With the previous approaches there was either a physical activity or theme, such as water, which gave direction for the practice. These structures are absent in the next approach.

The Open Approach

Most of the great traditional approaches, such as Shaktipat, Seitai, Qi Gong or Subud use this open approach, though they each explain it differently. Its special quality is that it reduces limitations. The other approaches, because they have more structure, direct what arises for you in some measure. It is like walking into a library and saying, ‘I am looking for some information on my health’ or ‘I am looking for something about personal growth’. That would limit your search. If you walked into the library with the attitude – ‘I am open to discovering anything relevant to my life’ – then the limitations are fewer.

The open approach is an access to your whole self. Because much of yourself still awaits discovery, is still unknown to you, it is impossible to know just where to look to find your own wholeness and health. You are unique. You have a different background in family or cultural traditions than many others. You have personal and particular life experiences and different personal qualities of mind and body which make your needs distinctive. Allowing your being freedom of expression during inner-directed movement empowers your ability to work at and express your own special needs.

Despite the fact that virtually all the healing or helping professions or techniques attempt to apply cures or methods to our being, it is obvious that we know our own needs and are largely self-righting or self-regulating. This is meant in the most down to earth and observable manner. Expressed in its simplest form, if you are hungry you have an urge to eat. Beliefs or fears may degrade that pure urge into other forms. Worries about weight gain; ideas about what is healthy food; habits perverted by trying to be ‘one of the boys – or girls’ – at business / club dinners, may achieve this degrading process.

By opening to inner-directed movement without structure you allow your being to gradually shed such degradations and return to an expression and recognition of your real needs. Because you are always feeling your own personal needs – as in the example of hunger – the open approach to inner-directed movement helps the dropping of preconceived ideas and social pressures. There may even be a process of clearing out the habits, fears and pains that have stood in the way of your own healthy self. Then comes the experience of meeting and accepting the real you. The you that is both ordinary and extraordinary.

The adventure of truly integrating the culture you have taken in, and forming it into your own personal and living self takes time. It is not going to happen in just four or five sessions of inner-directed movement. But if used for an hour once or twice a week for a year, very real changes will be seen.

Movement Toward Wholeness

Although use of the voice was mentioned, and exercises given in Phase One, it is worth remembering the healing value of this. Your voice, your body and your emotions are linked. Restraint in one restrains the others. So working with the voice can help free and mobilise the body and emotions. Tense or rigid emotions are just as difficult to live with as a tense and rigid body. Just as physical pain and restriction arises from muscular tension, emotional pain and limitation derives from emotional blocks.

If there are changes in pace during the period of practice, allow them. The range of possible movements and forms of expression are so enormous it would be boring to list them. They include all tones of feeling from angry to loving and exalted – all vocal expressions from deep crying to imitation of the sound and feeling of foreign languages – all types of movement from the most exquisite stillness to frantic tribal dancing. These are some of the spectrum of inner qualities you are healthily capable of as a whole human being. Sometimes people say ‘I have never expressed myself like this before, I wonder if I am bizarre’. The answer is that only whole human beings are capable of a wide range of expression which they can choose to end at any moment. It is the unhealthy person who is locked into compulsive and limited patterns of behaviour. Liberation of the body is a sign of health.

1 –        Prepare your environment of space, clothing, mood and music.

2 –        Put on some music which has energy but does not grab your attention too much. Use a couple of warm up movements to get your circulation more active and your body loosened.

3 –        Stand in the middle of your space with feet about shoulder width apart. For a few moments hold the thought and feeling that for the next half hour you are giving up your own conscious efforts. You are allowing your being to express its own needs in its own way by opening to the WHOLE you.

4 –        Get the ‘keyboard’ feeling in yourself. In other words give yourself permission to allow spontaneous or unexpected movements of body and mind – don’t forget to leave yourself open to vocal expression too.

5 –        Allow spontaneous movements to develop. Take an open, observing state of mind.

6 –        If movements are tardy in emerging, start by slowly circling the arms. Make the circles cross the front of the body. This will mean the right hand will cross in front of your pelvis as it moves left and upwards above your head.

7 –        When you have the arms moving with ease, become aware of the shapes your finger tips are carving in space. Stay with this observation for a few moments, then notice whether your hands and fingers have any urge to create their own shapes in space. It may feel as if delicate magnetic pulls are directing your hands. If so, follow these delicate urges by letting your arms be moved by them. Let your hands and arms discover any movements or speed which satisfies you. Permit your whole body and voice to become involved if there is a tendency toward this.

8 –        When you are ready to finish the session, stop the movements and relax on the floor or in an easy chair for a few minutes. There is often a natural sense of an end of the theme that has arisen.

 

Using the open approach you will experience movements, themes, emotional expression and insights particular to your personal bodily, mental and spiritual needs. The more fully you express the more you learn to command the whole of your being. Liberating the body is movement to wholeness.

 

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Link to Chapter four – Link to Chapter List

Your Internal Magic

Liberating the Body

Chapter Six

YOUR INTERNAL MAGIC

THE PEAKS OF EXPERIENCE

When you allow your body to ‘play’ with possible movements and feelings; when you allow your emotions to flow and stretch themselves through their huge range; when you unleash your mind to soar and swoop amidst its immense territory of memory and experience; when you permit the unknown in you to move, recognise itself and cry out its song, you stand upon the very peaks of your experience. This is your wholeness knowing itself. This is the wonder of inner-directed movement. When these experiences come again and again, you will know them as the greatest moments in your life. They are moments that will add colour to all that comes afterwards.

Getting the Best Out Of Your Practise

The central secret of inner-directed movement is the open state of mind and body. In using this ‘piano key‘ feeling and waiting for your being to declare itself spontaneously there is a key that unlocks a fullness of experience otherwise missing.

The openness, the spontaneity, and the fullness of experience are intermeshed. Understanding this enables you to find the greatest satisfaction in yourself through inner-directed movement. Missing this point you may take another direction. If you miss this point you may experience creative movement, or improvisation dance, or movement to music – but you will not be experiencing inner-directed movement.

When you experience yourself as a seed growing, or as the element of water, or express yourself in the open approach, the end result is not just a pleasant period of physical movement. If it were, this book might just as well be called Movement to Music.

If you were only a body that might be enough. You are more than just a mass of chemical and biological processes. You have emotions, you have hopes and fears. You are an integral part of all you see around you as external. You are the wonder of life.

When you open to the totality of yourself and allow its expression you will experience excitement. You will know that more of yourself than usual is involved in what is happening to you. Much of what emerges will be unexpected, and creative.

If, having used the graded approaches described, you have not felt that excitement, not touched the unexpected, there is still more for you to discover. But if you have felt the magic, there is no end to it. It continues forever, creative and new, though you bathe in it a thousand times.

Using Your Ability to Relax

The power to reach into your unconscious resources takes more than determination. To achieve it the conscious mind needs to become quiet and receptive. I am not suggesting that the passive, receptive state of mind is superior to the dynamic, focused will. However, each is an aspect of our total range of mental function. Each accesses different possibilities or processes. Having one without the other is as incomplete as having an accelerator pedal without a brake on a car. Although these functions on a car are totally at odds with each other, they are both necessary. The ability to become passive and yielding is as vitally necessary as being active and resolute if we are to be whole.

The power of this state of mind has been observed by men and women in other cultures for thousands of years. Its importance has been recognised as so great that the yielding or quiet soul has been depicted as of supreme importance in seeking personal healing and enlightenment. This mental condition has frequently been symbolised as a holy virgin, the mother of God. In Christianity we see this represented by the Virgin Mary. Paraphrasing what she represents one can say that when the soul does not hold preconceptions, then it can conceive of and give birth to its own innate potentials – represented by Christ, the healing and regenerating process within human beings. In Buddhism a similar process is represented by Maya the virgin mother of Buddha.

Joseph Campbell says in his book Myths To Live By – Bantam – “There are myths and legends of the Virgin Birth, of Incarnations, Deaths and Resurrections; Second Comings, Judgements and the rest, in all the great traditions. And since such images stem from the psyche, they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order, and its forces, in symbolic terms.”

If your experience of inner-directed movement is already spontaneous and creative, then you already know how to ‘wait’ or yield. If not, use the approach in which simulated yawning is allowed to lead into spontaneous yawns and movements until you feel at ease with the unwilled movements your body makes. Also try the experiment of pushing the arm against the wall and allowing it to rise by itself. Don’t discard whatever level of response you get in the practice. Carry on and enjoy it, letting a little more yielding enter it as you gain trust in yourself.

Remember that inner-directed movements do not usually start with a thunder clap of power that overrules your own will. They arise gently, almost imperceptibly. By allowing what are tiny urges to move, like the almost imperceptible impulse to breathe while your body is quiet, the movements get stronger and more power flows.

Help If You Cannot Let Go

Sometimes a major tension, physical or attitudinal, gets in the way of being able to let spontaneous movement happen. Three special techniques might be useful. They are not to be used on the same day, but separately, and as you have need.

Help Method One

Give yourself up to half an hour for this – shorter or longer as your needs dictate.

1 –        If you are aware of tension in yourself, instead of trying to drop or relax the tension, allow it to become stronger. Be willing to experience it deeply.

2 –        Do this by standing in your ‘space’ as usual, with appropriate music playing. Then take time to let the tension really be felt and allowed to direct your body posture, feelings and any movements.

3 –        The tension may get worse as it is discharged, so be prepared for this. It is a natural way the body does its own housekeeping.

Help Method Two

Prepare your space with fairly active music. Plan to give up to an hour to this. Keep the music playing for that length of time.

1 –        Move, or dance, to the music in any way that you can. It doesn’t matter how awkward you feel, how stiff, how much resistance you have to this – do it! Keep going no matter what, until you can feel the blocks or tensions melting and easy spontaneous movement emerging.

2 –        You may need more than one session to break through the physical tensions, fears and emotions that imprison you.

In his book Black Butterfly, Richard Moss describes the experience of an elderly woman, dying of cancer, who was taking part in a spontaneous movement class he was leading. The woman was supposed to be dancing freely to the music, but was hardly moving. When he asked her why, she said it was because of her illness. He said to her, “You are not dead yet – move.” She did so and to her amazement the movements got easier and she experienced a shift of awareness in which she realised she was an unseparated part of an ocean of life. Her physical illness was totally healed.

Help Method Three

Instead of movement you can use your voice. Take about fifteen to thirty minutes for this. Use quiet background music as an aid to giving yourself permission to make sounds. But be careful of pushing your voice too far as you may become hoarse.

1 –        Stand with eyes closed. Become aware of your breathing rhythm. Slowly deepen it but do not speed it up. If anything make it slower and fuller.

2 –        When you feel at ease with this add a sound to the outbreath. It is easiest to use the aaaaahhhh sound at first.

3 –        Keep this going until you feel the sound flowing out easily and reasonably smoothly. Then move the sound around by changing the volume. Make it soft, make it loud. Try the different volumes of your voice and the different levels of power.

4 –        Next try shifting the feeling quality. Make different sounds to see what variety of feelings you can discover or express. If you hit a satisfying sound, something you can enjoy, move it to express laughter, change it into sadness, thoughtfulness, anger, hurt – in fact try it in all sorts of pitches and feeling qualities.

5 –        This can be very entertaining because the voice is an incredible instrument, so enjoy yourself with the instrument you have played since babyhood. If words find their way into what you are doing let them – but see what range of feelings you can express with them.

6 –        When you have finished playing the instrument of your voice, relax quietly on the floor for a minute or so. This quiet period after the voice exercise is often very healing. It can produce very real internal peace.

Some Results of Inner-Directed Movement

Some of the ways the body self-regulates are not comfortable. Some people do not like sneezing or vomiting. Yet these uncomfortable movements are necessary at times to help keep the balance in your being. Such cleansing, not only of the body, but also of the emotions, IS occasionally a part of inner-directed movement. An ‘emotional sneeze’ might rid you of an emotion such as guilt or grief that you are unconsciously holding onto and causing stress in your body – just as a physical sneeze gets rid of harmful dust or bacteria. In Seitai the Japanese approach, it is emphasised that at the beginning of the practice the body may discharge toxins that have been harboured for many years. Therefore the practitioner might perspire more heavily than usual. Sometimes masses of mucous is discharged from the nose during a practice. Noguchi also says that occasionally the person even sees something like a piece of glass come out of their body after having existed there for years from an injury. Quite rarely, but worth mentioning, as the effects of past shock or hurt are got rid of, an old scar or mark from long past might show on the body again for a short period. More commonly however, it is negative emotions and memories we are cleansed of during the practice.

The overall action of inner-directed movement appears to be toward a reasonable level of wholeness. That is, the opposites of ones nature are allowed expression until they find balance. The healing processes in the body are made more efficient, and there is an attempt to do what I have called the backlog of ‘housework’. That is, old feelings we may have been holding onto to our detriment are discharged.

Once the physical and mental housework is done, then the process moves toward integrating and reviewing your life experience, to draw out of it what lessons, insights and creative ideas, you have gathered. Some of the Eastern practices see this as a spiritual change in which the person becomes more aware of their links with the rest of nature.

You Have Many Senses

When your mind, voice and emotions are expressing alongside your body movements, as occurs spontaneously during inner-directed movement, something very special happens. Old patterns of movement, behaviour, and emotions are played out in what arises during practice. Then gradually new or creative forms of expression arise. You break through the old patterns to discover a wider fuller you.

As you emerge from these restrictions, you will find your ability to see what is going on around you deepens. Your senses are not restricted to your sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell.

Very often the full range of our emotions have not opened. This is largely because muscular stiffness, physical tension, emotions injuries or hurt from the past, keep us from fully responding to each moment of experience. As ones body becomes more mobile; as emotional debris is cleared; as old rigid concepts are cleared from the mind, new levels of being able to sense other people arise.

When we are still cluttered with old hurts or rigid feelings, we may see the physical movements of people and animals; we may see the light reflected from their bodies, we might feel whether they are warm or cold, wet or dry, and experience their perfume – but we would fail altogether to see or understand what motivated, moved, impelled or disturbed them. We would not perceive their emotions. Their state of mind and body would not be visible us.

What You Can Gain

`Colin explains this from his own personal experience of inner-directed movement.

“To understand what a change came about in me you must realise that for all my teenage years I was painfully shy. I remember that even at fifteen when the whole school assembled each morning to sing a hymn, I found it painful to be visible in such a large group of people. I wasn’t standing in front of everyone. I was just mixed in with my class. Nevertheless it was agony.

“Inner-directed movement has helped me let go of some of those feelings that had haunted me since those years. Even though I didn’t use music as a background to the practice, I found myself doing a lot of stamping dances. To me it felt just as if I had been taught some Red Indian tribal dance. I was chanting to the movements too. And there was a lot of power in stamping. It made me feel strong physically and emotionally. I had never before in my life made those sort of movements or felt those feelings. Somehow they enlarged me, because beforehand I didn’t know I had it in me.

“At one time the dance movements were more African. I remember the pleasure that I felt when, like an African chief calling to the tribe, I roused them through my movements and chanting. The power in my voice was such that I boomed out feelings and commands with intense emotion. It was a wonderful experience to feel my body filled with strength and self assurance. It was almost as good as having lived it, so the feelings were ones I can now find in my everyday life. My son was still a baby at the time and I found I began to hold him differently. I felt my own body communicating strength and enjoyment of life to him – maybe even reverence of life. Sometimes during practice I had even felt what seemed to me the way I felt as a baby, and from this I was able to relate more fully to my small son.

“Other things I did during the practice had helped me experience the flow of love through me, and this has become a part of the way I relate to other people too. Not only do I feel it in myself, but from the experience of it I can see it operating in other people, even in animals. Sometimes I will see it pouring out of the eyes of a mother with her child, or in the face and posture of a couple. If they catch my eye a sort of instant recognition occurs. They know I have shared what they are experiencing and they smile.”

What Colin says is that until he had experienced certain emotions or feelings he could not see them in other people or in nature. Once his repertoire or range of experience had been enlarged, there was a lot more to see and connect with in the world.

In an article on inner-directed movement appearing in Harpers and Queen, ([1]) Leslie Kenton says:

“Often, as a result of trauma, life stress and social or family situations which are not naturally supportive of individual growth and development, we become separated from our own feeling sense or we tend to relegate it to the level of insignificance. When this happens ones life tends to become strongly habitual, mechanical, and eventually largely unsatisfying, no matter what kind of worldly success, excitement and glitter it may contain. For any real sense of joy, satisfaction or meaning can only come when the inner and outer being are linked up and when, what Crisp calls the feeling sense is allowed the freedom to regulate both physiological and psychological processes.”

Inner-directed movements help you develop an extended repertoire of physical expression. Because the body and personality are united, this means you have a greater range of responses to other people and events, and a greater awareness of what you see around you.

Sexuality

To give an idea of how inner-directed movement relates to sex, it is helpful to think of how a plant puts forth its sexuality – its flower. The flower is produced only at a certain point in the growth or cycle of the plant, and the flower is usually very different in shape and colour to the leaves or stem. The visual experience of watching a plant form a small bud that gradually grows and opens to a flower is exciting. The process is vulnerable though. If you think of something interfering with the flowering, inhibiting it at some level, then the flower exists, perhaps only as potential, but is not yet functioning fully.

The complex opening of human personality and sexuality has some kinship with this. Certain aspects of it can easily be inhibited in their flowering – perhaps the materials of experience are not yet sufficient – or the spontaneous instincts which usually inform and shape the maturing are withheld, suppressed, turned away from their task and full opening. Because inner-directed movement builds a link between your natural inner life and your conscious self, any aspects of your possible growth which have not emerged may be allowed. This is not an overnight thing, but it is a wonderful possibility. In fact few of us can reach maturity without some aspect of our nature, whether sexual, emotional or mental, being left behind, hurt or perhaps not given enough attention because other areas of activity were demanded by the needs of the time.

The action of inner-directed movement takes you away from the specific external needs which may have caused imbalancing tendencies in your nature. Because you let go of particular surface directions – because you do not set out to perform specific exercises, or work on particular issues, your internal self-regulating function can begin to express the areas of your nature that have been inhibited.

The Mind and Emotions

After some weeks of teaching a group of people in the small town of Porlock in Somerset, Julie, a woman in the group, told me something new had come into her life from what we had been practising. She said, “I never knew before that I have an inner life. This is such a wonderful thing for me.”

My understanding of what Julie was telling me was that she had never previously known what riches of experience and creativity, of insight and perception she already owned. She had thought of herself as just another housewife and mother, not unintelligent, but an unimportant person among billions of other unremarkable people living and dying.

The treasure Julie found that can be discovered through inner-directed movement is not to be mistaken with the realisation of intelligence or personal ability. A young and brilliant college student, Len, was recently describing to me his own realisation of his inner life through this practice. He said:

“I know this may sound strange, but the most powerful thing for me was that I realised I am alive. The realisation was accompanied by the sense of being life. I now know I am life and life is not just a chemical reaction or a set of biological drives or responses. As life I am always exploring, reaching out, becoming, learning what I am capable of and what I am. Just to exist is itself a great pleasure and miracle.”

As with Julie, Len’s realisation during inner-directed movement was not about his own intellectual ability or personal value. He had already proved his intellectual brilliance and ability in his scholastic performance. This had not given him the sense of being alive and liberated though. The contact with his own vital inner life enabled him to realise he was more than he thought he was. He learned through his own experience that the essential part of himself did not begin or end with his body, his emotions or his thoughts. From this arose a sense of freedom and liberation he had not known before.

Len’s changed experience of life was the result of just a few sessions of inner directed movement using the open approach. Previously he had been very reticent in relationships, yet often felt lonely. As he learned to let his own love shine out, he found it easier to make friends. He says:

“At first I found it difficult to let go enough for my body to freely express. When I did learn to do this my movements were very strong. At the time I was lying on my bed because my movements had started from quietness and stillness. They became so strong I fell off the bed at one point. My impression was that without realising it I had been holding back enormous amounts of my own energy. It was when I let the full current of my energy be expressed that I could achieve a new experience of myself. It is like having a dimmer switch on a light in an internal room, and all the time you have it just glimmering, and the room looks dark and dismal. Then one day you turn the power up and the whole room is transformed. All the colours glow, and features not seen before stand out.”

For many people this sort of release only occurs in times of crisis, high emotion, or if they are challenged by a public appearance and let themselves express at full power. At other times the dimming effect of social or intellectual conditioning anxieties, or not knowing how to let go, make us feel less than we really are. In fact you are more than you have ever believed.

Touching this vastness brings with it a sense of great wonder. In a recent letter to me Len describes what he feels when he touches what he calls ‘life’ through inner-directed movement.

“When I remember life and cry, as I am now, it is not sadness, it is everything. It is the beauty, the tragedy, the joy, the vastness, the thrill, the miracle, the mystery. It is a love from the depths of life of all creatures who have the courage to love, to embrace life in its vastness. From the firefly flashing its statement to the night, or the sparrow fetching worms for its young, to the dog running with joy toward me.”

Inner-directed movement gives you access to a new and vital experience of yourself outside the patterns of emotion and trains of thought from which you usually erect your self image. It leads to a discovery of your own unique inner life more fully than most forms of meditation or mental disciplines.

You Are Life – Live It

Apart from the sort of experience Len described, you already have a remarkable dimension of yourself you may be overlooking. It may not seem important, yet many people who use inner-directed movement learn to see it as a doorway of hope.

It can be explained by you imagining a scene in the long past. You are on a primeval river bed looking at the thick mud on the banks and gazing at the semi tropical plants and trees. As you watch, a small deer is pursued by a prehistoric human being. The ancient human hunter runs after the animal across the mud leaving evident footprints.

The day has passed, the mud has dried, another day has begun. The hunter comes back to the river bank. It is obvious he is there for water. With the caution necessary in this untamed environment he approaches the river and drinks. As he straightens and turns to go he notices the baked footprints. He follows their line with evident excitement. You sense he is reading the prints and feeling again the emotions written into the fluid movements now baked dry and preserved. He puts his feet into the prints and a look of strangeness comes onto his face. You share this magical moment with him as for the first time he realises his individual existence and feels with an almost painful emotion that he is looking back at himself in the footprints.

He looks down at his body, his hands, his feet, seeing them for the first time in this new light of self-awareness. Then he walks slowly to where there is still wet mud, left wet from the shrinking river after recent rains. Purposefully he places his foot in the mud, removes it and looks at the result, making a sound as an animal might as it declares its existence during mating. He again places his foot in the mud, and twice more, until the four prints make a cross, with the large toe of each print at the centre. He stands staring for a long time oblivious of his surroundings, in awe at what he has done.

This scene is not pure fantasy. Something like it must have occurred to a female or male human sometime in the dawn of history. It portrays the life of the instinctive animal, already on the verge of a new kind of awareness, crossing the threshold to self-awareness for the first time. Until that point all the actions, all the reactions, all the inner life of that creature arose out of instinctive drives or group information. All actions were performed in relationship to some real need such as hunger, mating, running from danger. The threshold crossed was the realisation that an action can be performed for no external need at all. It can be done for no reason other than curiosity, play, an exercise of mind. And so the first work of art arose – the first imprints in the mud that were not the result of the hunter chasing the animal, or running for safety, but just because!

Until that moment the human animal could only live within very marked boundaries. Beyond what was instinctively prompted; beyond what was feared; beyond what was lusted for; beyond what was the custom of the group – you could not go. The footprint in the mud stepped completely beyond those boundaries. It was freedom after millions of years of unconsciousness and instinctive behaviour. It was an open door to infinite variety of action and feeling. It was frightening and disturbing because freedom means no set rules, the unknown, the yet to be. It was stupendous.

It is impossible to describe all the implications of the ‘cross of footprints’. Without it we would be imprisoned within certain very restricted reactions – a small repertoire – to our environment. Our response would be limited to what we had inherited through our instincts and possibly learnt through painful experience. Human beings have a massive potential intelligence, but many of us are still extraordinarily limited in our repertoire of behavioural responses. We still haven’t quite taken in the fantastic meaning of art and music. We still haven’t really read the message left on the wall by the cave dweller who painted an outline of their hand, or fashioned the image of a bison, or who created symbols and ideas of gods and God, or pissed a pattern in the snow.

The message reads – I have found a new freedom. I have become more than I was. I am the creator.

Perhaps because we have developed a cultural attitude that splits things up, that separates the body and mind, the spirit and the flesh, we find it difficult at first to believe that such freedom, such realisation, can come about by allowing the body to move and express freely. Life is not a series of compartments. Our being is an integrated whole. If you allow your body freedom of movement, if you allow your body to go beyond what it has done before, then you are allowing your mind and emotions to do the same. You have gone beyond yourself. You have transcended what you were.

Of course the footprints in the mud story is just an example. But whatever it was that allowed human beings to paint, to imagine, to behave in ways that were outside of the necessary survival behaviour, opened the door to music, to variety, to drama, freedom of the senses and rigid roles. It means that a person with a broken body need not have a broken soul. They are limited only by their ability to imagine and experience. We are no longer limited by being born a certain sex, or by our own or other peoples ideas.

You are an integral part of a whole. Life is not trying to control or destroy you. You can take your place within the scheme of things if you wish. Your connection with the whole is through your own intuitive response to life. You can find this by allowing the spontaneous in you to emerge and declare itself. Then you will see for yourself that from the cosmic viewpoint the opposites of life and death do not have the same importance you attach to them while you only see life through your physical senses and culturally split viewpoint.

The Spirit

The film ET. captures our heart and imagination because it depicts our own longing to find a connection with life beyond our physical limitations. If our feelings are not dead, ET. speaks to us through them. The story of ET. depicts being trapped and dying in an environment other than the one our whole being can thrive in. ET. elicits longings in us to share the life of something beyond Earth.

This lost creature from a wider life, a more inclusive life, a more powerful life, a more connected life, is lost, trapped and injured here on Earth. It is the story of the human spirit and it’s desire to express its innate wonder again. It is the drama of how humans long for a connection with life that transcends time, space and death. It is a desire for wholeness.

People frequently describe the essence of what they find through inner-directed movement as touching life itself, as the life-force, as something which enables them to be free of things that shackled them, or that healed them of major illness. If this wonderful fount is given the name spirit, then in meeting your spirit you always find more of yourself.

The overall action of inner-directed movement is toward greater freedom from bonds; toward liberation from the monsters of self doubt, dependence on a partner or a social role, or guilt and rigid rules and beliefs. It opens you to the transforming influence of the spirit as defined above. It allows you to be touched by a power to heal sickness. If anything, this freedom, this move toward independence, this healing, is the real spiritual jewel to be found as your being liberates itself.

The movements you allow and the energy of your life – life itself – that express through those movements all reveal your innate freedom. There is no goal in this practice, and that in itself is a freedom. The moment your body gives expression to its own needs, you have cast off one of the great bonds – social pressure to conform. There is level after level of freedom beyond that, each with its own reward and difficulty. For freedom has responsibility, and it means losing chains that may have become precious in some way. The loss of beliefs previously cherished; the falling away of opinions that gave strength of purpose; the removal of walls of defence against meeting people and your own fuller experience, all have to be met and adjusted to. There is a way of experiencing life which only unveils itself to you if you dare to unrobe your mind and heart; if you chance the adventure of freedom from your own fears, and if your only reward sought is that of liberation from your self imposed limitations.

Daring To Live Your Best

Two years ago I watched a young man leave college showing obvious signs of anxiety about his own abilities. His offhandedness about authority also suggested he feared from the outset he would not meet helpfulness from any organisation. Despite having many gifts, and being highly intelligent and imaginative he nevertheless suffered a great deal of despondency about himself and how inadequate he felt. The world around him appeared to cause a degree of anxiety that paralysed him.

During my attempt to understand what held him back and what his possibilities were my intuition presented me with the image of a young bird on the verge of leaving the nest. What struck me when I considered the idea was that the bird had in fact never flown before. It had no experience of flying. There was no way of practising before it took that amazing leap into the literal unknown. It could not stand on the ground and run around flapping its wings taking little jumps until it could leap further and further through the air.

The small, unskilled, inexperienced bird takes the leap, dares death, opens its wings and flies – because a greater older bird, a wiser experienced creature stands within the small one. Perhaps you would give it the name instinct. Whatever you call it the unequipped immature bird, by its very leap, calls upon the experience of flight lying dormant in itself. The Great Bird, the ancient experience, would never come to the small juvenile bird if it had not made the leap. If you don’t take to the air you will never learn to fly. If you never plunge in the water you will never learn to swim.

In humans this wiser, more experienced self is our dormant potential. Dr. Clair King accepted the reality of this potential when he was confronted by a child with an injured eye. Five year old Robert Kasner was taken to him for an emergency eye operation. His cornea had been slashed by a piece of flying glass, allowing the liquid in the eye to drain out. The operation was performed at Aultman Hospital, and a flap of conjunctiva pulled to patch the wound. After twelve days the dressing was removed, only to reveal that the patch had not held. The iris was protruding again. Robert needed another operation. An appointment was made for three days later.

When Dr. King examined Robert prior to the operation after three days he could not believe what he saw. The eye was completely healed. He was astonished, even embarrassed. On asking the parents how this was possible, they told him simply that, “We took Robert to a Kathryn Kuhlman service. Prayers were offered for his healing.” (Kathryn Kuhlman’s book God Can Do It Again, published by Oliphants.) Dr. King Later joined the Order of St. Luke the Physician.

You have the power to access healing changes. You have a reservoir of potential from which you bring treasures to your everyday life. If you are ill, there is the possibility of reaching into this unconscious storehouse and finding healing change. If you are empty of pleasure you can be filled. If you are dead inside, you can come to life. I know that even if you do not trust enough to let-go fully and find a fast miracle, you can certainly allow a slow miracle to take place.

Using Your Intuition

The unconscious often reveals intuitive knowledge. The relationship between the young, inexperienced bird and the Great Bird that informs it can certainly be thought of as intuitive. The word ‘intuition’ is defined as knowledge not gained by reasoning and intelligence. It can also be seen as the gaining of information or perception without the use of the senses. Information has not been received from an objective source. We each have enormous powers of intuition if we accept the above definitions. Much of the learning of language is intuitive, in that we did not reason about, we were not informed, what the rules were.

Intuition is not a function one often hears acclaimed in the work-a-day world as a practical and useful ability. Perhaps if you are in a life situation or work which is routine and unchallenging, then intuition may have no real use for you. But if you are involved in the uncertainties of life and work; if you are faced by previously unmet situations with your relationships, your children, your projects, you need every resource you can access to bring to the creative act of living.

Betty describes an experience of this everyday side of intuition.

“Daniel, my son, was in the middle of studying for his ‘A’ levels and was facing a lot of uncertainty. The amount of effort and commitment needed was very great, but also he was having to make decisions about what direction to take in his studies that he realised would influence the rest of his life. He kept asking himself and me whether he was making the right decisions. We had talked around the subject a lot, exploring the various possibilities. So it wasn’t that we hadn’t given time and thought to the subject that was maintaining the question for Daniel.

One evening we were sitting in his bedroom and again the question arose. I said to him, ‘Look, we’ve talked over this lots, and going over the same things again aren’t going to give us anything new. I would like to talk to you from another part of myself just to see if it is any more helpful. Daniel knew I used inner-directed movement, and I explained to him that I had found it often gave me unexpected and useful new views of things – did he want to hear what might arise from that source? He said he did.

I had discovered that if I gave myself permission to be moved from within, words and images poured up into consciousness without me having to think about them. So I sat with my eyes closed in this way and asked the question of what would be the most useful direction for Daniel. Within moments I started speaking – and you have to understand that I didn’t know what I was going to come out, so I felt some tension as to what I might say to Dan; would it be stupid or banal? What I said was something like this. ‘There is a story about a young man. He was setting out on a journey by himself. He hoped to reach a town some miles away. He had only walked a few miles when he came across a fork in the road. He hadn’t realised when he had started that he might not know the way. He knew where he wanted to get, but he didn’t know now which road would be the right one. There were no signposts to say, and he must decide without help. He stood there a long time struggling with the problem. But try as he might, he could find no clues as to which road would lead him to the town. If he took the wrong one he might go so far from his destination much time would be lost. So he was unable to move. What he didn’t know was that it didn’t matter what road he took. Further on the two roads linked again so both led to his destination’.

I was amazed that I could make up a story about Dan’s situation without any conscious effort at all. But also, that I could so unhesitatingly tell him the story. The important thing for me was the effect hearing it had on him. It appeared to bring alive a truth he already knew in himself. The change was very quick. He never needed to talk about choices again. That was some years back, and he still talks about decisions in a way telling me the story is now a part of the way he thinks.”

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Let your time of inner-directed movement be an opening to the wisdom you have within yourself. Do not limit yourself. You, nor anyone else yet know what the limits are of human ability and experience. There is nothing in this practice apart from the discover of who and what you are. If you live in doubts or limited views about yourself that may seem little to gain. Those who have made the journey encourage you to open to the discovery of the many dimensions of yourself still left to find. Becoming yourself in fullness is the greatest adventure left in the world.

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[1] – The article was called Rituals Of Beauty – Awake In A Dream. Harper’s & Queen, September 1984.

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SUBTITLE – Movements That Awaken Your Inner Self

BLURB – AUTHOR DETAILS

Most physical movements, and particularly those we perform to keep fit – tend to be disconnected from the psyche. By contrast, LIBERATING THE BODY describes a form of movement which arises spontaneously in response to ones own unique needs, allowing free expression of one’s innermost self and releasing subtle emotions and intuitions.

In one of the most innovative and original approaches to wholeness and health ever published, Tony Crisp describes this unique process, its astounding potential, and its links with ancient traditions.

By liberating your body you can liberate the mind. This book opens up the way to lasting health, joy and vitality.

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Tony Crisp is an international author and teacher who has been researching natural health and the body-mind connection for 30 years. He is also a dream therapist/consultant for LBC, and has written regular features on dreams for THE MAIL, SHE and other magazines. He is author of several books on dreams and related subjects, including DREAM DICTIONARY (Macdonald 1990, and by: USA – Dell; Sweden – Viva; Japan – Dobutsu Sha; Holland – Spectrum) and MIND AND MOVEMENT (Daniel 1987).

LEARN EXERCISES that allow your innate spontaneity to express as physical movements which tone your body, release tensions, and stimulate overall health.

LET THE NATURAL WISDOM IN YOU communicate through subtle feelings and body impulses. This balanced interaction between the facets of your being, never manage by most exercise systems, is a remarkable feature of Liberating the Body.

YOUR UNBELIEVABLE CREATIVITY is locked in the unconscious processes of your own body and mind. By liberating your body you can liberate your mind and discover the treasures of your own experience.

Here is a whole rich new area to experience. Fritjof Capra has said that in today’s world, “Retreating into our minds, we have forgotten how to ‘think’ with our bodies, how to use them as agents of knowing.” Crisp explains how to “think” with your body. Here is a way to let your body and emotions discover their liberated joyousness and splendid creative exuberance and health. Like the practitioners mentioned in this book, if you liberate your body, for the first time in your life you might realise you are vitally alive, and know you are more than you ever previously believed yourself to be.

The result is a growing sense of wholeness and joy. The natural regulating process of your being always attempts to promote a balanced expression and growth not only of your body, but also of your sexuality, emotions and mind.

Link to Chapter List

Dream Interpretation Example 3

Story of Reincarnation

Before I went to sleep that night I focused on the question -Who am I, really?

The dream was vivid, and still gives me shivers to this day. I dreamed that I looked up and there was this incredible star that was emanating points of light in the sky. It got brighter and brighter and the bottom-most point reached down to where I was and transported me up to the star. The points of light came out from the centre in all directions, and I found myself on the end of one of the horizontal points. A wonderful (female) voice spoke to me and said this is who you are, and I had the strong sense of being located at the end of the horizontal light bar. Then she said and this is who you are and carried (transported in some way) me to the next bar of light, where I saw another version (incarnation?) of myself (in a different time and place, although I knew that the essence of this version of me was really me)

She continued transporting me from bar to bar where I experienced myself in many different versions in the past, present, and future. I had different skills and interests that were the focal point of each version of myself–a musician in one, a farmer in another. Some of the versions were females, although I experienced the same sense of self in all of them. Then she returned me to the horizontal bar of my current self and said to me that all of this is who I am, but that now she was going to show me who I really am. Then she drew me into the centre of the star (light, energy source) where I merged with her and could see each of the emanating points of light as manifestations of a single source or spirit.

It was one of the most incredible feelings of being integrated and whole that I’ve ever experienced, and I basked in the feeling for awhile just absorbing and soaking it in. Then she returned me to myself (with a cosmic wink) and I slept peacefully for the rest of the night. Ever since then I haven’t felt the need to ask who or what I am, and I’ve seen my various abilities and struggles in life in a totally new way. C.A.

Mind and Movement 1- Introduction

It is new years eve of 1986 as I write this introduction. The book beyond these pages has already been written. Over the past few weeks I have received cards and letters from people who have used the techniques and approaches described in it. In wondering how best to tell you about what this book contains, and what it may have to offer, I cannot think of any better way than allowing these letters to tell their own story.

The most exuberant letter was sent by Paul, a well known musician. The SEED GROUP he mentions is one of the approaches to personal healing and creativity described fully in chapter six. Paul writes: “I thank you again for the Seed Group experience at Atsitsa. With that I let go of so much accumulated rubbish! When I got back I had a session of Soul Directed Therapy and haven’t looked back. Those two experiences must rank among the most important of my life. In fact my life is rolling, my creativity is rolling, my relationships are rolling!! I hope you are too!”

Here are two short letters, the first from Sarah who says: “Life has been somewhat difficult and confusing lately – not such a bad thing, but I can’t see when it’s going to sort itself out. I’m still with Michael but also seeing Steve. I just don’t know what I want. Still, here’s to 1986 and hopefully some decision making!

“Michael has been doing coex here in D.. – amazingly – which has been very useful, thanks to you.”

From a very different situation Tony writes: “Just a line of thanks for your having passed on to me the practice of Inner Directed Movement / Lifestream. It is a path which has deepened and broadened over the years and although it functions differently it is still a source of eternal life. All my love, Tony.”

The last letter is much longer, but from it a fuller idea of what coex is, and how it works in ones life can be gained. It is from Pat Hudson who studied with me a few years ago. Since then she has explored in many different directions and has brought coex into her life and love in an everyday sense. She writes: “I want to write to you about a dream and its process which I had a couple of nights ago. It’s a marvellous dream. But first I need to say that there seems to be a tremendous healing process taking place in my inner being in three different areas. 1 I have been experiencing a growing sense of forgiveness love and compassion towards my mother. I see her as a very vulnerable, sensitive spirit crippling herself by alcoholism and arthritis because she didn’t and doesn’t know how to deal with what society puts on her.

I am becoming so much more alive sexually with my husband. It really astounds me at my age – fifty next birthday. I feel so much more loving and understanding towards him too. I am much more ready to receive his full-cream -milk kind of love.

He and I have been going to Blackpool once every fortnight to visit a recently bereaved aunt of his and this experience is turning out to be so healing for me. In the past I have hated common Blackpool and its common people. Now I have turned right round to find that I actually love the whole Blackpool experience, commonness and all. Instead of feeling separate and superior – I really thought was once – I feel so linked with those people. I love being in the crowds on the sea front. I love them wearing their purple tinsel wigs and foam plastic hats. Thank God I’m losing that awful sense of superiority. Goodbye – I’m well rid of you.

“Now for the dream. First of all it pushed me into reluctant wakefulness from a deep sleep in the middle of the night. I tried to kid myself that I would remember it next morning, but I was obliged to put on the light and write it down. It was one of my sobbing, sobbing, sobbing dreams which I’ve had now and then over the years. I had been doing dreamwork with a friend during the day, and I had told her about a sobbing dream I had the previous week. I said I had never got to the bottom of why I had such dreams. In this dream I was sobbing down to my very guts. The scene was a man, his wife and a lodger. It was in Victorian times and the woman wore a long white dress. She loved her husband with all of herself. The three of them were sitting at a small round table, and the lodger had to expose the husband as a betrayer of her love. She was sobbing and felt as if everything was wiped away and made as nothing. It seemed to her the basis of her life was taken away.

“Then the husband and she were walking along a river, she in a long white dress, still sobbing, knowing life would never be the same. And that was the end of the dream – yet it wasn’t the end because more was to come. I lay half awake dreamily wondering how Garry my husband had betrayed me. He never has, I know that, so I was puzzled. I kept sniffing around wanting to go deeper when suddenly a vision swept through me. I was standing deep down inside myself on the edge of a black hole, a black precipice, and I was shouting, ‘Well. what do you mean you silly devil?’ It was as if I was shouting down to the me right at the wellspring of my being. I came more awake, had a laugh at the daftness of it, then suddenly realised the black hole was a birth canal. It wasn’t my birth canal but my mother’s. Then the whole thing began to flow. I suddenly knew with utter certainty that when I was in my mother’s womb I was totally loved. I can’t tell you how marvellous it felt to know that love again – being totally, safely, securely lapped in love. I simply lay there experiencing the love. I knew, with a great sense of compassion, understanding and forgiveness that as soon as I left the womb my mother couldn’t love me the same way, couldn’t cope with the stresses life put on her. I remembered a vision I had when I was with you in Devon. I saw my mother’s breast dripping milk, a thin watery, vinegary milk and I burst into tears saying I wanted full-cream milk. I now felt totally linked with my mother again. All the rage and anger which had gradually been dropping away over the past few months was now gone. The tremendous linking remained.

“After that lot I lay in bed awake feeling happy. I lay awake for about two hours . I realised I had never been able to accept love – never been able to accept Gary’s full-cream-milk love. I was constitutionally unable to.”

When I first met Pat she struck me a someone with very frozen feelings, especially in regard to her sexuality. It therefore gave me a lot of pleasure to hear her news of change. But I wondered what Pat had needed to be or do to find such satisfying transformation. I wrote to her telling her this. She replied:  “The first thing which sprang to mind when I read your words ‘someone as frozen as you were’ was a brief dream I had when I was first with you. I was standing in front of an enormous iceberg. In my hand was a little ice pick and I was picking away at this great big berg. How vivid and wonderful. I have never stopped picking away at that berg since.

“This picking away has taken many forms. I have for some time worked with three friends doing explorative counselling work each week. None of us are trained, and we use all sorts of tools such as Reichian and Gestalt work. Through this I have come across much that needed to be made aware in myself, and have had three big traumatic sessions. So big that each time I was ill and had to go to bed for two or three days to recover. During one such session feelings about my religious up-bringing arose. As a teenager I longed and searched for the living spirit. I made the mistake of searching in the Church of England. The phrase comes, ‘I searched for bread and you gave me a stone.’ Kneel down. Stand up. Put your hands thus. Say this. Sing this. Nothing but stones. Such rage erupted from me I began vomiting green bile and kept on for almost two days.

“So I continue coming across chunks of stuff like that. I see it as searching for the inner flame of myself. I am no longer living a false self as I did for at least eighteen years of my life. I see that false self as socially imposed – but I accepted it. It was when the pain of living by this false self grew too great that I had to break out and came down to work with you. I have worked at stripping away the false bits and re-building the realer me ever since.”

Coex is the way of working with the spontaneous process which led Pat to remember her mother’s love in the womb. It is the function in us which produced the healing she found. It is the magical force which created Pat’s dream, her visions, her gradual change. It is a process which has been so often overlooked, twisted into a mystery, covered with the ornate overlay of religious ritual and dogma. Yet it is something alive in each of us. It awaits our contact with it if we dare to look and meet the challenges of our own life and existence.