Posts Tagged ‘wisdom from core’

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

Letting the Body Speak

Liberating the Body

Chapter Two

LETTING YOUR BODY SPEAK

 

Spontaneous movement was natural to you as a baby. You moved arms and legs in ways that would develop muscles, express feelings and stimulate growth. Your emotions were vented directly and powerfully through such movements. You cried when you were upset, laughed when happy, and when the time was right practised all manner of sounds in preparation for speech. All this without the intervention of any planning or list of exercises to do. In this way you maintained your physical and psychological health. In a similar unselfconscious manner you were able to traverse formidable stages of physical and psychological growth.

Without formal lessons or given exercises you practised what was new from an inner-directed source. You learnt the lessons of language and walking quickly and persisted despite many failures. Without boredom you practised the same movements and sounds endlessly until you were capable in them and could move from them to extended skills. You took in the cultural and grammatical information around you and put it to work. Without sitting and concentratedly thinking about the mass of information presented, you found order in its chaos. Even as a baby your body and mind were incredibly resourceful in their own right without formal tuition. Nearly all this was a natural response to your environment. It occurred because you were letting your body and mind move spontaneously in response to your environment.

Regaining Youthful Abilities

Learning inner-directed movement is relearning how to trust your own innate capability and power again. To trust the life enhancing drives you felt in childhood. It is learning to trust the subtle urges your body has to move and feel, urges arising from the unconscious centre from which your growth and life emerged. Trust, because it takes self reliance to allow the new, the previously unknown and unplanned to emerge and be felt. We must learn to let ourself play and move without the deadening self criticism that can cripple expression in adult life. You also learn in some degree to stand outside the social conditioning you acquired as you grew up.

Learning to allow the same inner-directed movement and mental learning that operated in early childhood, is not done to replace your hard won conscious will, your reasoning and decision making. The more instinctive or intuitive source of growth and learning promotion that operated in childhood is a great addition to conscious will, not a replacement. In fact when the rational mind acts in a co-operative and monitoring way with the unconscious or intuitive self, a much greater efficiency occurs in both.

Through this co-operation you access resources that can lead to greater health, and an improvement in the functioning of the immune system. You can also meet your own creativity in a degree usually only glimpsed in the adventure and strangeness of dreams. One of the most significant aspects of inner-directed movement however, is its ability to continue the action of your psychological growth into greater maturity and freedom.

Letting-go and allowing your being to fulfil its own spontaneous needs is a thing of great simplicity. It is easy. It takes no effort or thought at all. It is even easier than attempting to relax. But because we have habits of constantly deciding or willing what to do – the feeling that nothing will happen unless we do it – you may need to take time to learn how to let-go in a way that allows action. In Eastern practices this is called action in non action. It is helpful to see it akin to holding yourself in a condition of sensitive balance, like the keys on a piano. A touch on a piano key causes it to move and the note to play, but as soon as the finger is removed the key springs back into place ready to move again if necessary. The difference between the piano key being moved and the action of inner-directed movement is that no external finger or force motivates you during inner-directed movement. The same sort of subtle but persuasive impulses that move your chest in breathing are allowed to flow into action and feeling.

If there is anything to be learnt, it is to feel and allow the flow and movement of these life impulses – to let them lead you into unanticipated and creative movement and self expression. You learn to meet and melt the subtle resistances causing you to hold back from wholeness, from bringing to awareness more of yourself. It is therefore helpful to explore and respond to some of these subtle feelings in yourself before attempting the full freedom of inner-directed movement.

 

 

Liberating the Body – Phase One

Warm-Up and Loosening Movements

It is useful, at least in the early days of learning inner-directed movement, to warm-up your body with some given movements. Below are listed some that are extremely helpful.

The series of movements were arrived at in a special way. After I had learnt to allow inner-directed movement and my body and mind felt expressive in it, I found the spontaneous movements would respond to a question. For example if I had a dream that puzzled me, I could ask what a particular figure in it represented, and my body would respond spontaneously in a descriptive mime. Because the information the mime presented often added to what I knew consciously, I felt the ‘answer’ that arose through movement was expressing unconscious insights.

One day I was experimenting with this question and response, and asked what would be a helpful way to bring the body and mind to harmony. I was astonished as an extremely long and detailed response flowed spontaneously from me. Movement after movement arose apparently from my unconscious, along with an understanding of how the movements influenced basic biological and psychological processes such as introversion and extroversion of energy and awareness. As I used these movements, I realised they are not simply exercises to make the body active and stimulated. For instance if I cannot breathe properly I am not functioning well. If my hips are locked in tension and my pelvis cannot express tender sexual feelings, or if my abdomen is tight and my internal organs cannot digest food properly, then the basic urges of life are being interfered with. The exercises loosen the body in a way to allow a more fuller expression of these basic life-movements – such as the expansion and contraction of the chest in relationship to the spine; the swinging pelvis expressing sexuality and its connection with the chest, neck and head. Tensions restricting the way life-processes expresses in movements such as breathing lie at the root of much physical and psychological illness.

The following movements are those I learnt that day. If you enjoy them and have time, by all means do the movements consecutively. They are excellent for health in themselves, but they are not inner-directed movement. They are given to warm your body and help mobilisation and internal balancing.

Use these movements at least three times over a period of a week or so, before going on to the next phase. Practice each movement for between one minute to three minutes, depending on your energy and time. Try doing them with music sometime to see if it aids the good feelings they can produce. Later suggestions for types of music are given in detail. At this point something fairly flowing without too much drama in it.

These are only warm-up movements, they are not inner-directed movement. Inner-directed movement, once learnt, can be used easily and for a few minutes. There is not a long list of ‘movements’ to use in the proper practice, although there are a variety of ways you can use it.

 

It is helpful to ‘meditate’ on some of the movements after performing them. This means that you try to recreate the feelings, or sensation of the movement again without allowing your body to make the movement. The idea is to exercise your inner awareness and feelings of energy movement. So in the third of the movements, the pelvic swing, you would create the feeling of the hips pushing forward and up, followed by the pulling back and down of the pelvis. This meditation exercise is important as it enables you to gain some control of your inner feelings. Often such feelings are stimulated by external events or unconscious worries. Your meditation is harmonising and balancing these feelings.

These movements take time, so if you are not able to do them all in sequence, do those you can within the time available and work through the other movements during future sessions. You need a reasonable space – something at least the size of a single blanket, so you can feel free to move without bumping into things.

 

Squatting and Rising

This first movement you start from a standing position. With feet slightly apart you take an in-breath, and as you reach the high point of inhalation you take head and arms backwards to really open up the chest. From that standing position with head back you then begin to breath out and bend the knees so that you can drop quickly into a squat. As you do so let the arms move forward and up so the hands come palms together near to the face. Meanwhile you drop into a squatting position expelling your breath fast as you go down. You rest there for a moment and then the movement carries on by breathing in and rising back up to the first position again. So you slowly stand as you breath in, then when standing expand the rib cage again by opening the arms slightly backwards and apart, and taking the head slightly back.

When you get used to the movement, going down into the squat position should be done fairly fast with the out-breath quite strong so there is an audible blowing of air out of the lungs. It can be done gently, but if possible, do it strongly as the body drops. Let the hips go down as far as you comfortably can, and let the head collapse down too so the body is relaxed. Some people need to put their heels on books to make squatting comfortable, so do that if necessary. The hands come forward in a scything movement until they meet just above the dropped head. If you cannot squat so low, use a stool or chair to sit on as you go down, so you only drop a short way.

At least two feeling states are involved in this movement. One is the standing erect and ‘open’ feeling. The other is the down, closed and relaxed feeling. When you feel fluid in the movement see if you can enhance these feeling changes as you move between the opposites of up and down. While down feel the relaxed letting-go feeling. While up feel the active, energetic feeling.

1. In this first movement you start from a standing position, with feet slightly apart.
2. Take an in-breath, and as you reach the high point of inhalation take head and arms slightly backwards to widen the chest.
3. From the standing position you then begin to breathe out and bend the knees so that you can drop into a squat. Let your arms move forward and up so the hands come palms together near to the face and expel your breath while dropping into the squatting position .
4. At this point you should be squatting with head relaxed forward. Rest there for a moment and then carry the movement on by breathing in and rising back to the first position again. This means you have slowly stood as you breathed-in, and expanded the rib cage again by opening the arms slightly backwards and apart, letting the head drop slightly back.
5. Repeat the cycle of Squatting and rising in your own time.
6. Now ‘meditate’ the movement for about a minute. This means standing or sitting with eyes closed and imagining doing the movement, but hardly moving your body. Try to reproduce the feelings of the movement. Feel the relaxed, down condition, then move into the up, dynamic feeling. This is an important exercise in becoming aware of the subtle feelings connected with movement, and learning to mobilise them.

Circling the Hips

 

Suggestions – To get the movement satisfyingly mobile, it is helpful to imagine yourself standing in the middle of a large barrel. The aim is then to run your hips around the inside of the barrel, touching it all the way around. This helps to get the full circling of the pelvis. So, as the hips are circling back the trunk is bent slightly forward, but still with the head high. The hips should go well out to the side, and as they swing to the front they should be far forward enough to cause the trunk to be inclined slightly backwards. If you cannot manage this at first, simply do what you can.

The knees and ankles should be kept relaxed, as should the hips themselves, so they adapt to the circling. The breathing should then also find its own rhythm. Generally it is out as the hips swing forward, and in as they swing backwards. This is because the chest is slightly compressed as the hips are forward if the head is floating erect.

1                    Begin from a standing position as the first, but feet slightly farther apart, about shoulder width.

2                    Keeping your head and shoulders more or less floating in the same position, circle the hips horizontally. The pelvis is taken gradually into a wide circle.

3                    At half time rotate the hips in the opposite direction for the rest of the time.

4                    Meditate the movement for about one minute. You can stand or sit to do this.

Pelvic Swing

Suggestions – If you imagine a vertical circle – seen from one side of your body – and move the hips around it fluidly while letting the legs and trunk follow, that is the movement. Although simple this is an important movement as far as becoming aware of the subtler side of your own being is concerned.

 

The movement is similar to the backward and forward movement of sexual intercourse, except that it is circular and involves bending and straightening the legs. But it does still involve the pelvis swinging backwards and forwards. Do the movement until you can feel your body loosening and flowing more easily. Then, do the movement slowly, being aware of the different feelings of the pelvis being forward and backward. These feelings are quite subtle, but are strong enough to be easily noticed if the movement is done with awareness of the change.

 

1                    Standing with your feet about a foot apart move your pelvis backwards – as if starting to sit down – to begin a circle. This half sitting position brings the head and trunk forward and bends the knees slightly .

2                    Start to push the hips well forward. As you do so the knees are straightened again, and this completes the full circle with the hips in a way that describes or ‘draws’ a vertical circle.

3                    Do the movement in a way that keeps the hips swinging in the circle in a continuous flow.

4                    Meditate the movement while sitting or standing.

Roller Skating

 

Suggestions – If possible let most of the movement occur from below the navel. You can keep your eyes looking ahead, your arms swinging in time with the hips as well to let the body move fully. But it is the lower back that is being worked here. The movement massages the lower internal organs as well, so you may get the stitch until you adapt to the exercise. Do the movement fairly vigorously. If you do get the stitch, don’t stop altogether, just slow down. The movement will then massage the area of discomfort.

1                    Stand with feet a little wider than shoulder width, with trunk bent forward and knees bent also. Your back should be reasonably straight although at an incline.

2                    Now swing the hips from side to side, making the lowest part of the spine alternate to the left and right.

3                    When finished meditate the movement.

Swinging the Trunk

Suggestions – Be careful to check how slippery your feet are on the floor surface. If you cannot easily maintain a feet wide position, it may help to stand with bare feet. The movement is an active one, with a light pause as you reach top and bottom. Some people like to allow their arms to extend in a wide arc as they come up. It feels more balanced. Also, as you come to the upright position with the in-breath, let the head drop back slightly, and arms extend sideways and back to increase the chest stretch. This balances the deep exhalation accomplished by dropping the trunk forward.

This is a very pleasing movement, and because it connects with the breath cycle, develops a particular rhythm. If you can manage it without becoming giddy, let the exhaling of breath as you go down be quite energetic.

1                    Stand with the feet about twice shoulder width.

2                    Let your head and trunk drop forward, and the arms hang relaxed, allowing the spine to be gently stretched.

3                    When you feel your spine has adapted to the position, from an out-breath swing your head and trunk to the left, allowing it to roll over and up to the standing position as you breathe in.

4                    Drop the trunk downwards in the mid-line again, breathing out – do it fairly fast – then roll head and trunk to the right as you come up and breathe-in again.

5                    Continue the cycle with a slight pause at the high and low of each swing.

6                    When finished meditate the movement, reproducing the relaxed drooping feeling, and the active, ‘up’ feeling.

 

Surrendering Backwards

This movement works the abdominal muscles quite strongly, and needs to be approached slowly until you feel confident and able in it. It is not primarily a physical exercise. It is an expression of letting-go of self, of surrendering. You start with feet about shoulder width apart. The aim of the movement is not to see how far backwards you can go. It is to express the feeling of letting go of self, of dropping control in a disciplined way. At first, when the head and shoulders are back, hold the position for a very short time, then recover to the upright stance. As you get used to the movement, you can stay in the surrendered position longer – just as long as is comfortable – then recover.

1                    From an in- breath you drop your head slowly back and breathe out, allowing your head, shoulders and trunk to drop slightly backwards with the arms limp.

2                    If you are comfortable in that breathe as normally as you can while your trunk is backwards.

3                    Hold for a short time then return to the upright position.

4                    Repeat several times.

5                    Meditate on the movement, moving between the surrendered feeling and the taking control upright feeling.

Sideways Lunge

 

This movement uses the legs a lot more, and introduces more spinal twist. Because you are reaching forwards with the opposite hand to the bent kneed, there is a common tendency for people to extend the whole trunk forward too, and that is unnecessary. The trunk curves upright from the trailing leg. The breathing sequence for this is out as you lunge, in as you centre again.

When you are reasonably capable at the movement try doing it as slowly as possible. Make the breath slow, and move in time with the breath – out as you lunge and in as you centre. This is a very powerful movement so don’t attempt too many repetitions at first.

1                    You start with feet about a metre apart in a standing position, with the hands palms together in front of the chest.

2                    Turn the left foot to point to the left and turn the trunk to face in that direction also.

3                    Let the left knee bend until the hips drop right down near the left heel. To make this easier, let the left heel rise if necessary. In other words, don’t try to keep the foot flat on the floor unless this is easy. Meanwhile the right leg is trailing, forming an curve from the floor up along the spine. The right knee is on the floor but hardly bent.

4                    As you lunge to the left, let the right hand reach forward in the direction you are lunging. The right arm stretches out backward toward the right foot – i.e., in the same direction as the right foot. This gives a slight spinal twist.

5                    From the lunge position, using the strength of the left leg, push back into the upright position until the trunk faces forward, and bring the hands to the centred position in front of the chest again.

6                    From the centred position you lunge to the right. Don’t forget that it is now the left arm you extend forwards – always the opposite hand.

7                    Pause in the lunge, then, using the strength of the right leg push up and centre again.

8                    With a slight pause at each lunge, and while ‘centred’, repeat the movement alternatively to left and right.

9                    Meditate on the movement, remembering to get the ‘centred’ poised feeling between each imagined lunge.

Spinal Twist

 

This is more of a spinal twist, more so than the last. The arms are extended describing a wide arc, and coming to rest where you feel comfortable, but not floppy. The breath cycle is to complete exhalation as the spinal twist is complete, and to complete inhalation as you reach midpoint between the left and right twist. Like the previous exercise, if the breathing is united with the movement, it makes for a more satisfying experience. Once you have got the feel for integrating breathing and movement, perform this one fairly slowly and purposefully.

 

1 –        Stand with feet a little wider than shoulder width and with hands at your sides.

2 –        Leading with the head, turn to the left, letting your arms describe a wide circle, and continuing their movement when head and trunk can turn no further. As the trunk turns to the left, let the feet and knees accommodate the twist, so when you have turned as far as you can to the left, your left knee is slightly bent in a semi lunge to allow the fullest twist, and your foot is pointing to the left.

3 –        Now turn from there to the right, going round as far as you can, fairly slowly to let the feet and legs change.

4 –        Continue this slow swing, making sure you allow a semi-lunge at the end of each swing. This gives a little more twist.

5 –        |Meditate on the movement.

 

The Swinging Rib-cage

 

This exercise aims at mobilising the rib cage in one of its movements seldom made in everyday life. To make sure your movement is actually doing what it should, it is helpful at first to practice in front of a mirror. Keeping the hips still and rib-case centred, hold your index fingers about two inches away from each side of your lower ribs. Now see if you can swing the ribs sideways towards the extended but still finger without swaying the whole trunk and hips sideways as well. At first it might be that you do not know just what muscles to move to accomplish this, but with practise it becomes simple.

Like one of the earlier movements, this one may cause you to develop a `stitch’ if you do it fairly actively. This is because it strongly massages the internal organs, and this is a healthful stimulus to them. It may also cause an unusual bellows action with the lungs, causing a pumping of air in and out of the lungs without actually breathing. This is quite normal for the movement, and is not harmful. No need to meditate this one.

 

1 –        Keeping the hips still, swing the lower ribs slightly sideways. If you do this with the right side of the rib-case, it causes the left shoulder to drop, and the right to rise. When you alternately swing to the right and left, the shoulders alternately rise and fall also.

2 –        Therefore, if you lift and drop the shoulders alternately, this may help produce the extending of the rib-case, but not necessarily so. Many people move their shoulders thus, or swing their hips energetically, without their rib-case being mobilised at all.

3 –        Swing alternatively left and right until you can do the movement easily.

The Crawl

Your attention has been moving up the body in this series of exercises, and so are concentrating more on the chest and shoulders at the moment. This exercise is primarily to mobilise the shoulders and rib-case in relationship to the spine. But it also brings the arms into action in more than a supporting role.

It helps if you imagine the hands are pulling backwards through water. Meanwhile, the head and hips should remain facing forward, so the shoulders swing around the steady spine. The movement can be done slowly but strongly, or fast and energetically. This is a wonderful movement to massage neck and lungs.

1 –        Start by standing with feet about shoulder width apart.

2 –        Be aware of the knees, and keep them very slightly bent and relaxed.

3 –        Keeping your head and hips still make the swimming movements of the ‘crawl’ with your arms. This means the right arm swings up and forward above the head as the left arm is low and moving backwards. Then the left arm is up and forward as the right drops.

4 –        The movement is a slow circling of the arms.

5 –        Finish with the still meditation of the movement.

The Breath Meditation

 

This is more of a meditation than an exercise, but is important in mobilising inner feelings that lie behind movements. When you begin this meditation, do not be in a hurry to open the hands to let the feeling of pleasure radiate out. In fact, let the hands be as spontaneous in expressing what you feel as you can. It may be that your hands thereby move a great deal, or very little. If there is an urge to move the hands in other ways than suggested allow this to happen.

1 –        Stand in a comfortable balanced position with the hands in front of the chest, palms together and eyes closed.

2 –        Imagine that as you breathe-in, the air is fanning a small glowing coal inside the chest. The incoming air makes the coal glow gently, and you breathe slowly and with awareness. This coal is just a symbol of the subtle pleasure sensations generated by slow purposeful inhalation. If you can be directly aware of this pleasure, dispense with the image of the coal.

3 –        In either case, let the hands indicate the amount of this glow or pleasure. Let them do this by moving apart, so if the pleasure is intense the hands reach wide. As you exhale and the glow fades, let the hands come together. But if there is little felt, then the hands remain unopened.

Playing With the Voice

 

If you have lots of time you can use this after the warming-up movements. Otherwise use it by itself, taking up to fifteen minutes. It may help to use music as a background. Something not too invading.

In this exercise you explore the use of sound. To make different sounds you need to move not only your throat, but also your trunk and even limbs in different ways. Sounds also evoke feelings and move or exercise them. Just as many of us do not move our body outside of certain restricted and habitual gestures and actions, so also your range of sounds may be quite small. So for several minutes you will explore making sounds.

 

As your sound production improves though, and you begin to enjoy it, in different sessions explore making all sorts of happy sounds; different sorts of laughter, proud, childish, funny, etc.; angry noises; animal and bird noises; sensual sounds; the sound of crying or sobbing; natural sounds such as wind, water, earthquakes; make the sounds of different languages and different situations such as a warriors chant, a mothers lullaby (without real words, just evocative sounds), a lover’s song, a hymn to Life, or even sounds about birth and death; and just plain nonsense noises. Don’t attempt to explore all these different types of sound at one session. Just choose one and explore it until you can feel yourself limbering up in it and getting past restricting feelings such as shyness or stupidness. Those are the walls of restriction.

 

1 –        Start by taking a full breath and letting it out noisily with an AHHHH sound.

2 –        Do this until you feel it resonating in your body. This may take one or two minutes.

3 –        Change to a strong EEEEEEEEEE sound. Once more, continue for at least a minute.

3 –        Now try MMMMMMMAAAAAA.

4 –        If you are doing this exercise for the first time, that is sufficient for one session. If not, go            on to use one of the themes suggested above.

 

The Yawning Exercise

Do not use this exercise until you have used the Warm-Up and Loosening Movements a few times, as well as the voice exercise.

One of the easiest ways to begin inner-directed movement is to use your body’s own urge to express spontaneous movement, as with yawning. To do this first take time to create the right setting for the practice. You need a reasonable space – something at least the size of a single blanket, so you can feel free to move without bumping into things. Play some music that is flowing, but without a strong beat. A strong rhythm grabs the body and feelings too much and so prevents creativity in your expression. Most of Kitaro’s music is useful for this. Try also – Moods, a collection of modern mood music – most of the Enyo music – Meditation by Thais, and some of the Vangelis albums. Music also ‘gives permission’ for easier self-expression in that you are less worried about making a noise or moving.

Do not go onto the other exercises described after the yawning exercise. Practice this one a few times on different days before attempting the next ones.

You need clothes suitable for easy movement, and about ten to twenty minutes during which time you can give yourself fully to whatever your body and feelings suggest. Do not take this suggestion of time rigidly though. If your session is shorter or longer follow your own needs.

1 –        When ready, stand in the space, listen to the music and drop unnecessary tensions. Remind yourself that for the next few minutes you are going to let your body play. You are going to let it off the lead.

2 –        Open your mouth wide with head slightly dropped back and simulate yawns. As you do so notice whether a natural yawn starts to make itself felt. If it does, allow it to take over and have a really luxurious yawn. Any following impulse to yawn again should be allowed.

3 –        Let the yawns come one after the other if they want to. Without acting it out, let the impulse to yawn take over your body, not just your mouth and face. So if the urge to move includes the arms or elsewhere, let it happen.

4 –        Give yourself over to the enjoyment of having time to really indulge your own natural feelings and body pleasure. If the yawning develops into other movements and stretches, let it. In the same way you would normally allow your body to express itself in a yawn, let it express itself in whatever other form of movement, postures or stretches arise. Maybe it will be noisy yawns, so allow whatever noises you want to make, however ‘silly’. If this flows into movements following the music, don’t hold yourself back. Or your movements might not follow the music, but have a direction of their own. This is play-time with your body, so enjoy it. What has gone before has simply been preparatory. Now you can do what you want.

5 –        Until you feel ready to stop, simply enjoy or explore the movements and feelings that arise – even if what arises for you after the initial yawns is a desire to lie on the floor and rest. That also is you expressing your needs.

The yawning exercise is an excellent way to release tensions, especially those of the neck and face. It is also the beginning of inner-directed movement.

Fiona, a woman who allowed herself this liberation of the body for the first time, describes her experience as follows –

“I found a quiet moment, spread a rug on the floor, knelt down with my head touching my knees and started running my hands through my hair – I have always found this very comforting. Soon I noticed myself beginning to wobble and shake, and it seemed so funny I began to laugh. I laughed without stopping for twenty minutes, rolling about the floor, on my face; on my back kicking my legs in the air; on my knees beating my hands on the floor. The tears rolled down my face, my voice became cracked, my diaphragm began to ache with unaccustomed exercise and still I went on laughing. Eventually I ended up by going round and round on the rug on my knees and elbows, banging my elbows on the floor in joyous abandon, my head and arms muffled up in my jersey which had slipped off me at some time, singing a wordless song of joy and freedom. Absolutely nothing mattered.”

 

Experiencing Your Body’s Magic – The Relaxed Arm Test

This interesting test helps to experience the sensation of inner-directed movement in a playful way. Try it with your friends.

It is important to let go of effort and allow your body to have the ‘piano key’ poise when you relax your arm at the end of the experiment.

1 –        Stand about a foot away from a wall, side on, so your right hand is near to a clear space on the wall.

2 –        Lift your right arm sideways, keeping your arm straight, until the back of your hand is against the wall. Because you are near to the wall and your arm is straight you will only manage to lift your arm part of the way. So when the back of your hand touches the wall, press it hard against the wall as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the arm.

3 –        Do not press the hand against the wall by leaning, but by keeping the arm straight and trying to complete the lifting motion. Using a reasonable amount of effort stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about twenty seconds.

4 –        Now move so you face away from the wall, and with eyes closed relax and be aware of what happens.

5 – Try the experiment before reading on, and use the left arm afterwards. In fact try it a couple of times with each arm before reading the next paragraph.

What you have done is to attempt a movement. Because the wall prevented this, the body was not able to complete the movement you asked it to make. Therefore a muscular charge built up in your shoulder (deltoid) muscle. When you stepped away from the wall the arm, if relaxed, was free to complete the movement. So your arm may have risen from your side as if weightless, thus discharging its energy. Some people need several tries before they can find the right body feeling to allow the arm its movement. It is easy to prevent it moving because the impulse is quite a subtle one.

The technique enables you to learn how to give your body freedom to move under its own impulse. The way the arm moved, and the experience of an unwilled movement, is so similar to inner-directed movement you are thus provided with an experimental experience of the real thing. It is also an example of how the body self-regulates through spontaneous movement. It is therefore helpful either to practice the technique until you can do it, or use it a number of times to establish your relationship with the feeling of it. The sense of allowing movement can then be used in inner-directed movement itself.

It would be quite helpful to practice this experiment a few times though before moving on to the next.

 

Liberating the Body – Phase Two

In Phase One you began to learn the process of permitting your body to move in a way that allowed it more freedom of expression. Now this will be extended showing the beginnings of your own creativity.

Once more create an open space for yourself in which to allow not only freedom of movement, but also freedom to express yourself. The space is both physical and mental. You need to have enough space to stand or lie on. That is why a blanket size was mentioned. If you have more available space though, use it. Clear it of objects you might bump into, as you might like to practice with your eyes closed. Remove jewellery that might get caught or broken by free movement. Wear clothes – or be without clothes – allowing you to feel unrestricted.

 

Creating the Right Setting

The mental space you create for yourself might be even more important than the physical. This is because just physical space is not enough. You must be able to give yourself permission to express freely with your body, your feelings, and your voice. The restrictions in your mental space might be obstacles such as – wanting to know what it is you are going to do before you let yourself do it – worry about what someone might think if they knew or could hear what you are doing – the feeling there is nothing worthwhile in you to emerge anyway, so you are just acting the fool.

A man who had just started exploring inner-directed movement explained to me that certain requirements are very important to him. When he started the practice he found that although he was getting results he felt he was holding himself back. He took time to consider why this was and realised it was because, living on the first floor, he was anxious about the possibility of people seeing him. He closed the curtains and immediately had very full spontaneous movement. He explained it was also necessary for him to be alone. What he said referred to him personally, but shows the importance of setting.

To create the right mental setting it is necessary to decide that for at least half an hour, you have the complete luxury of being able to move and express yourself in any way pleasing you within the physical space you have prepared. What you do within that time doesn’t have to make sense. It doesn’t have to please anyone else. It does not have to produce anything. It can be quiet, active, noisy, sleepy, aggressive – because there is nobody but yourself involved, nobody to be judged by, and you are going to withhold judgement of yourself until the end of the session.

During the half hour any spontaneous movements that occur might come in waves of activity followed by waves of quietness. If there is quietness simply rest, holding the ‘piano key’ feeling in the body so it is ready to respond to any arising impulses. You do not have to be continually active. Give yourself this period of time in which you allow yourself this liberation. It means letting your being find its own way of resting, its own level of activity, its own path of healing and growth.

In speaking you seldom know beforehand the words you are going to use, except in a formal situation, but you do have a ‘felt sense’ of what you are going to say. This only becomes real to you when speak. Also, if you think of two friends, and move from one to the other in your thought, you have a feeling sense of how different each one is. You have these feeling responses regarding everybody you meet, everything you see. They underlie your whole life, but you may fail to notice them. It is this feeling sense you are going to use and exercise in the next form of movement.

With all our technology and scientific understanding we cannot create anything near the complexity and wonder of a living creature or a simple life form. Despite this, few modern human beings have much veneration for the process of life as it shows itself in their own body. There is certainly a growing attempt to work with the natural, but nearly always with readily formed techniques. As individuals we also frequently kill out what is natural or instinctive in us, perhaps even with our ideals of spirituality or environmental harmony. It is rare to find someone who will drop aside ready-made approaches, and listen to what their own being has to say. Such listening and learning is real respect. It is an admittance that the process of life sustaining us, in its experience of millions of years, in its creative struggle, its countless lives and deaths, has something of great value to show us. It is also an expression of trust that the unconscious secrets of Life’s experience are communicable to our listening consciousness.

 

Your Body Is a Moving Sea – Steps in Liberation

You will need about an hour to complete this session. The aim of ‘moving sea’ is to continue the development of body awareness and how you allow spontaneous movement. Once you have used the ‘water’ approach as suggested below, there is no need to go through the preparatory stages in future uses. For instance do not do the yawning and arm lifting . Go straight into exploring the water movements. These can be used over and over with enjoyment and gain.

1 –           To start Phase Two, use again any three of the movements given to warm up.

2 –           Remind yourself of the feeling of spontaneous movement by using the ‘arm against the wall’ exercise.

3 –           Extend your awareness of how your body and feelings move spontaneously by simulating yawns and allowing them to develop into stretches or movements.

4 –            Stand in the middle of your space and close your eyes. Lift your arms from your sides and take your hands high above your head. Do this a few times noticing the difference in feeling with hands high or low.

5 –           Pause with hands by your sides. Now hold the idea of taking the hands up high again without consciously attempting the movement. Take your time, and be aware of how your hands and arms want to make the movement. This means watching to see if the sort of feelings that entered into your yawning and arm rising sideways exercises are in operation here. If this includes the rest of your body, or your arms go in another direction than above your head, that is fine.

6 –           Stand in your space with eyes closed. Drop unnecessary tensions as you listen to the music. Hold in mind for a moment the idea that you are giving your body space to explore the expression of the quality of water. There is no need to think up what to do. Let your body explore. Trust it to find its own way to expressive movements. Allow yourself about 30 minutes for this.

7 –           Let your experience of yawning and listening to how your arms wanted to move be used here. Take time to observe and allow the delicate motivations – magnetic pulls – directing your body to watery movement.

8 –           You will find you have resources of imagination you did not suspect. Aspects of water you hadn’t consciously set out to explore will be expressed in your movements. If you are expressing deep still waters, you will actually feel a deep quietness and power. Or if it is the power of rushing rivers, then a feeling of power will surge through your body as you touch your resources of strength and healing. The flowing feelings that arise are actually healing.

As you learn to trust this process and allow it to grow in expression, you will find unexpected themes will arise. Even though you are expressing water, your expression will have in it feelings that are particular to yourself.

While recently leading a group practising inner-directed movement, I was struck again by how creative we all are if given an environment in which we can allow our originality. One woman in the group, exhausted from the demands of her job, experienced deep relaxation out of which enthusiasm and pleasurable energy arose, leading her to dance and bathe in her own joy. A man explored his relationship with love, and saw that he needed to gather to himself the love he received from others to call out his own resources of affection. A woman who worked as a nurse met the painful emotions arising from observing the difficulties of a mentally retarded patient. Her creative movements led her to find a way of accepting the reality of life’s difficulties. The pain cleared and she felt was ready to give a more flowing response to others in difficulty.

As with the woman mentioned above who found new enthusiasm in the midst of tiredness, you will find your creative movements deal with and heal personal situations. I believe this is because the self regulating or problem solving process that underlies dreams surfaces during inner-directed movement.

Using the ‘water movements’ has the benefit of toning the body. It brings harmony between the emotions and body. Your feelings are allowed to be active and thereby move to emotional well-being. Areas of your body and mind not usually allowed pleasure are bathed in it.

 

Link to Chapter three – 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

Philosophy of Dreams

In attempting to put together the information gathered from viewing thousands of dreams – not simply at face value, but explored in depth through the emotions and direct associations of the dreamer – a philosophy or view of life arises.

The synthesis of the information gathered suggests that our birth as a physical and psychological being is a paradox. We are unique, and at the same time a common undifferentiated process. Psychologically we have our identity out of the lives of thousands of humans who preceded us and left the gift of language, of music, art, of concepts and information. Our mental life, our consciousness, is in some real way formed out of what they left from their life. Our consciousness has been whittled out of the rock of possibilities by the love, the struggle and pain, the endeavour and wit of their lives. Particularly our psyche has been shaped by or modelled on our parents, and the traces in their life, unknown though they may be, of their parents, backwards for many generations.

Our identity is given to us by the humans who raise us. This sense of self arises because we are treated as if we were a self. This, with language is the creative matrix of our self awareness. The giving of a name is therefore a miracle that acts as a nucleus around which the many mental connections can be made that form our self image. Perhaps this is why giving the name in baptism is seen as a holy rite in Christianity. See Programmed

Our conscious personality can live without ever becoming aware of its connections with other lives except as it meets them in everyday affairs. That its existence has depended upon what was given by countless other lives – that human’s constantly create each other through the dynamic flux of communication, consciously and unconsciously – might never be realised. That ones own life is also a part of this creative process, this sea of living consciousness, might never be known. Nevertheless, each individual life constantly takes part in the collective, negatively or positively. This is not a mystical thing, but is plainly observable. Language for instance is not something we created alone. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, the house we live in and the materials it is made of, are all a part of collective skill, effort and knowledge. We exist in this collective creativity all the time. We depend upon it but perhaps seldom acknowledge it. Our unconscious however is vitally aware of it and communicates to us as fully as it can considering our frequency of ignoring it, what it sees of our relationship with this collective life process and social activity.

From the point of view of dreams, if our life has given nothing in deed, in love, in rearing of children, in ideas or art, or in common humanity, we are dead, – during life and afterwards. Giving and receiving, kinship and symbiosis, growth and decay are the fundamentals of the Life and the living process according to dreams. Life is action within the whole. See Life

At death, we face a very real end, a real death. There is no magical escape from this. All that we have been, all we have become, all we gathered and won is lost – finished. But the paradox occurs again. Dreams suggest that out of all we gave of ourselves, out of all we received from the being of others, arises a new existence recreated in a realm of univeresal consciousness. This may mean that we continue as living influences in the lives of those who still live. But the suggestion is that something more than this occurs. For death is shown in dreams as a huge transforming experience. At death we can no longer live in an individual body, and to survive in this new experience, which is the world of the universal, we have to learn how to change from an isolated individual into someone or something that is part of universal forces – the universal forces of Life and the world that in fact caused us to exist in the first place. In fact we have to go through a transforming proces much as a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. We cannot retain consciousness in the life after death without transfroming into universal awareness. For some cannot meet these levels of experience and are asleep at this level. See Steiners view of life and death

One of the great secrets observed from over thirty years of dream watching concerns health. It is that each of us carry within us fears about our health, or about our own personal adequacy. This is natural enough, but in dreams these feelings are shown as being like a hypnotic suggestion for the body to be ill. These negative emotions are like bad infections or viruses we have contracted. To counteract their influence we must take time to feel the basic force for life and survival in us. Become aware of the force that is constantly renewing body and mind. Imagine it pervading every part of you and work with it toward healing and renewal. Whatever feelings of pleasure you can find, let them spread to areas of pain or discomfort. Let them fill your body and restore it. See Life’s Little Secrets; Martial Art of the Mind

The second great secret is that behind the facade we may erect to tell people who we are, each of us want to be capable of loving and supporting at least one other human being. We want at least one other person to be glad we exist. This secret of love permeates your sexual drive. Even the sex cells – the sperm and ovum – when they meet, burst asunder and give themselves completely to each other. Dreams suggest we have an urge toward this at a personal level. We deeply desire our lover to so open to us, and we to them, that we take them into ourselves and are enriched by the merging of the other personality without compromising our independence. If you are frightened of this giving of yourself, you remain frustrated in a large degree. And one of the great themes in dreams is the constant reminder of the fears and hurts that stand in the way of such love. See Learning to Love; Beware of Love

A fourth secret is that we can communicate with the deeply unconscious parts of our nature such as body processes. Dreams portray the life process as intelligent and purposive, as something existing in all things and synthesising all individual experience. Life as presented by the unconscious is responsive to our own actions and attitudes. If we care for and love the innate process of our being, such as daring to face the cultural and childhood sources of internal pain, and heal them, then life loves us, responds more fully to us, and opens its treasures to us.

It reminds us not to run away from or repress emotional pain and depression, for such pains are like fire alarms warning us of danger to our well being. See Pain-Meeting It

There is so much that dreams have explained or taught me that I have only given an introduction, so I would suggest reading such features as Meeting yourself – Features Found on Site – Things I Want to show You

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.

Mind and Movement 2 – Mind and Movement

Carl Jung said that within each of us are resources of information and wisdom which are usually overlooked. He called this aspect of human experience The Transcendent Function. People who were able to work with this function, he said, experienced meaningful change from negative feelings and attitudes to more inclusive and positive ones. Often they found healing of physical ills too. Yet although Jung saw the Transcendent Function as a natural part of a persons resources – a spontaneous and self-regulatory source of healing – he never explained clearly to the public how they could access it themselves. His method has remained largely clinical and in the hands of professional ‘Jungians’.

Others, like Dr. Wilhelm Reich, have also described this source of healing, but still they have left a gap in their explanation. Namely they have not described in a way understandable to the public what the source of healing and help is, and how it can be tapped.

On the other hand many ancient cultures, in traditional teachings such as found in Yoga, Tai Chi, Setai and Meditation, have attempted to make publicly available knowledge of how to use this internal and wonderful process. Their symbolism and viewpoint is so different to ours however, that it is difficult to accept or understand many of their rather strange claims. This was made very plain to me while working in Japan with my wife Hyone. She had been helping a man, who was obviously very tense, to release the tension in his muscles. As this occurred he experienced powerful spontaneous movement, which is a feature of the self-regulatory process. Afterwards the man came to us with some of the other Japanese people attending the class and they asked us what point on the body or nervous system we had pressed to produce so powerful a response. They were so steeped in the oriental viewpoint expressed in acupuncture, they felt what they had experienced must have been produced from pressure points. To the Western structure of thought, much in acupuncture still remains outside of rational explanation. In my years of work in this field I have attempted both to understand in a Western sense what that Japanese man experienced, and to explain it in a way that makes it available for other ordinary people like myself to use.

During a period when I had just gone through divorce, the starting of a new relationship, and taking over a tumble-down property, I developed a permanent pain in my right forearm. I talked about this to a doctor who diagnosed it as tennis elbow. He told me there was nothing I could do except avoid exertion. As I was working to renovate our house, that was difficult, and the pain continued for six months without any change. I decided to ask my unconscious if there was anything I could do to help the condition. It was a technique that was accessible using the self-regulatory  processes described later. I had used this approach many times before, so had some experience of it. Holding in mind the pain in the arm I waited for the responses to arise from within. Soon, spontaneous fantasies and ideas bubbled into awareness, almost as if someone were explaining the situation to me. I was led to understand that during the past year I had not only been working hard physically to renovate the building, but because of divorce, family conflict within my new relationship, plus the change of home, I had experienced much stress and anger. During my sawing, planning and hammering, I had discharged much of this anger and stress. As with any hard work, the cells in my right arm had broken down, but the anger and tension had prevented the cells from regenerating adequately.

As this insight emerged I could see what a shrewd summary of my recent unconscious attitudes it was. The emerging explanation went on to say that each cell is a tiny individual life, and in the body, they each take on a particular task. Some live as workers in the muscles; some are thinking beings in the brain, and some act as transformers, as in the liver. Each cell depends upon the others to co-operatively share food, oxygen and pleasure. The cells in my arm didn’t mind the hard work, but they also needed to share the pleasures of eating, music and love making. I had been unconsciously deluging them with anger and tension, and denying them laughter and relaxation.

I started to use this information. For instance when I ate I would consciously allow the pleasure I felt in my mouth to be felt by the rest of my body, particularly the right arm. When I made love, I attempted to relax and let my whole body feel the pleasure, not keep it in the genitals. I frequently concentrated on my right arm, relaxing it and allowing pleasure felt elsewhere to flow to it. Within a week it was completely free of the pain, and the problem has never returned.

The technique of consciously co-operating with or listening to the processes of life active in the unconscious, and allowing them to become known, I call Coex. I have coined the word from two other words -consciousness and expansion- because the process of coex is partly that of expanding our awareness into areas of ourselves previously unconscious. It holds in it many exciting possibilities, such as:- 1] Tapping the activity of natural forces in us toward healing of physical and psychological problems.  2] Gaining information which we hold within us, but which is usually unconscious.  3] Using the creative process of the unconscious to enrich our work and relationships.  4] Tuning into the body’s self regulating processes to discover a spontaneous form of exercise or dance which releases tension and keeps the body fit.  5] Through expanded awareness discovering our connections with the rest of life and cosmos.

So what is coex, and what makes it function?

During 1968, while teaching relaxation techniques to people at the Tyringham Naturopathic Clinic in Buckinghamshire, I found the first clues to an exciting possibility in human beings. I had been teaching the usual form of relaxation in which one consciously tenses the muscles, then relaxes them. As an aid to people experiencing the pleasure of dropping tension as fully as possible, I often went to each person in the class and gently lifted an arm or leg. The aim was to give them the experience of someone else moving their body, so they could give up their own effort or tension. I found that many people’s limbs were very difficult to move because they were rigid with tension. Surprisingly when I asked the person how they felt, they would usually say they felt relaxed and comfortable. Meeting this in person after person, no matter their age or sex, led me to realise how ineffective ‘normal’ forms of relaxation and stress release were. Also, more important, it showed that many of us are living with quite enormous unconscious tensions operating in us. Unconscious because the people I tested were unaware of their tenseness, and ‘felt’ relaxed. Yet to maintain the sort of muscular effort which makes an arm or leg difficult to move uses a great deal of energy. If you lived with such tensions, because of the energy wasted in maintaining them, you would have less energy to use in the other departments of your life.

I started to search for ways I could help people to release such tensions. Because people have always lived with tension and the forces of unconscious life within them, many men and women in the past and present have attempted to understand them. Each age and culture has developed its own approach, but they all have evident similarities. This is because they are dealing with the same natural inner processes. In general these different approaches break down into two different types. Historically the approach was usually of a very religious or sectarian nature. At the present the approach to the unconscious is often clinical, as in psychiatry. So in looking for already established techniques there was the choice of a clinical approach or that of a sect. Yet the forces of life in us are not bounded by authoritarian psychiatry nor by the narrow beliefs of a sect. Both of these groups attempt to own what belongs to everyone. So I sought to find what is common and functional in the different approaches.

For instance, as long ago as the seventeen hundreds Franz Mesmer found that by helping people to relax muscular tension, but remain open to movement, there was a spontaneous cathartic healing action. The person experienced spontaneous movements and feelings which led to the healing of their illness.

In this century, Dr. Wilhelm Reich, working from the background of a medical doctor, a biologist, and a Freudian psychoanalyst, did not feel content with the usual years of analysis needed to help people with serious psychological difficulties. From the standpoint of the body and mind being a unity, he began to look for signs of the mental condition in the state of the body. He found that all his patients had unconscious abdominal tension. One patient who was resisting change in his life exhibited powerful neck tensions. People repressing their emotions usually had tensions in their rib cage, whereas restrained sexuality produced tensions and pain in the pelvis and lower back. Many of our commonly used words, such as ‘stiff-necked’, ‘held back’, or ‘stone-hearted’, are recognitions of how our attitudes shape our body tensions.

Reich observed that when any of these tensions were released a great deal of physical and/or emotional energy was released also. In fact the tension was a block or suppression of the natural flow of energy in the person’s being. The energy itself can be expressed as physical movement, sexuality, emotions, drives such as parental caring, or the process of thinking. Usually, as a tension dissolves, the person experiences spontaneous movements. These are an extension to the usual spontaneous movements we make all the time, such as breathing, sneezing and yawning. But they are often movements we do not associate with general spontaneous activity.

Reich noticed, as had Mesmer before him, that if this spontaneous release of movement and feeling was allowed and worked with, the person was helped toward greater equilibrium. Reich also defined that the spontaneous movements occurred through the release of tension. He saw such physical and emotional release as an expression of the homeostatic or self regulating process. Homeostasis is the function in our being which directs such activities as the balancing of body heat, and blood pressure, and is behind the regulation of growth. Jung and Hadfield also speak of dreams as being connected with this self regulatory function acting in the area of the mind. They see dreams as helping to keep psychological balance, just as perspiration helps to keep a physical balance through loss of excess heat.

To clarify just what activities in human beings Reich and Mesmer were dealing with we need to look at some typical experiences of coex in action.

The first is that of a woman – Linda – who came to me at the recommendation of her doctor because she was ‘on the verge of a breakdown’. Linda was married for the second time, had three children from her first marriage, and felt very tense. She was the first person I taught coex to in a one-to-one situation. Until then I had been teaching general relaxation, and as this hadn’t helped Linda I asked if she wanted to learn coex as I thought it might be useful to her. She agreed and we decided to work once a week until we could see if she benefited or not. During the first session I began by asking Linda to stand while I moved her arms and body to see if there were any obvious muscular tensions. When I moved her arms by lifting them away from her hips, I found there was a point, when her hands were about a foot away from her body, where her arms remained suspended by shoulder tensions. I asked her to be aware of this without interfering. She did this as well as she could, and her arms remained suspended in the tension for about half an hour before we finished the session.

In the second session the tensions in the shoulders [deltoid] were found again and her arms remained suspended. The reason for this waiting is that prior to leaving the limbs in the position held by the tension, the person is usually unaware of having the tensions. If one ‘relaxes the tension away’ it does not in fact disappear, it merely slips back into the unconscious. By leaving it showing, so to speak, what was unconscious enters into awareness. The person is then in a learning situation. They learn to be aware of and allow into consciousness something that was unconscious. I see this as learning the skill to work with unconscious content. So once more I encouraged Linda to be aware of the tensions without interfering by relaxing them away or by trying to interpret what the tension meant. As she did this small jerks occurred in her arms. I assured her this was alright as she felt slightly disturbed by these spontaneous spasms. As it was a completely new experience, it took her a while to learn the ability to allow her body freedom of movement without interfering or stopping its activity. I therefore explained to her that the spasms were the muscular tension beginning to discharge, and that learning to allow the discharge was rather like learning to ride a bicycle – it was a new skill which became an easy habit through practice. We spent a full hour allowing these small spontaneous movements before finishing this second session.

This stage of honouring simple movement is important in coex because all the processes and expressions of life in us express as the swing between movement and relaxation. Obvious movements in this connection are the heartbeat, breathing, and the peristaltic action of the digestive tract. The feeling reactions we experience as an organism in relationship to our environment can also be thought of as movements expressive of a life process. Consciousness is a ‘life process’, and when we cry or feel angry, our body makes movements to express these feelings. Crying is a very strong muscular movement, and includes subtler but powerful movements such as the discharge of tears. Anger too involves a lot of physical movements, including faster heartbeat, glandular discharge, and maybe powerful punching or kicking. Sex expresses as strong and subtle body movements. If through tension or suppression we hold back what our being is feeling in response to our environment, we block these powerful and subtle motivations to MOVE. Therefore, in the body we can often find these blocked motivations as muscular tension. If we release the tension, then the self regulatory process in us begins to express the movements. And don’t forget that here I am talking about movements as including glandular discharge, tears, emotions, muscular activity, and mental functioning.

Supposing that what we are holding back are the movements connected with sexuality. Supposing we have done this because we have either a fear, or have been hurt in connection with it. In allowing a tension to become conscious that we had been unknowingly using to immobilise the pelvis, we would, in a sense, be uncovering a powerful ‘NO’. i.e. “No, I will not allow sexuality and its accompanying movements because they are frightening or painful. By letting the tension remain in consciousness it usually begins to vacillate to a ‘YES’ – it begins to break down or release. For a while it may swing backwards and forwards between the ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Physically this means the tension releases for a moment but snaps back again, causing jerks or trembling. Sometimes, if a great deal of energy is held back by the tension being released, the trembling will be intense and the person may feel cold. Occasionally the person then complains that the room is very cold.

Linda began to feel she was learning to co-operate with her inner process in the third session. She began to discover how to allow the tension to release without interfering. The jerks then became tentative movements. Her hands spontaneously moved to her lower abdomen and made pressing movements. At this point neither of us understood what this meant, or what her inner process was beginning to express. Because the movements were strong enough, and Linda could allow the spontaneous action easily now, I suggested she lay down instead of standing.

The fourth and final session began with Linda lying on a blanket. Her arms quickly began the spontaneous movements to her abdomen without needing any priming by finding the tensions. The movements were much stronger this time and her whole body became involved. Her knees drew up and her abdominal area domed. She made very little sound – some people are extremely vocal – but she was intensely absorbed in the movements for nearly an hour before they stopped and she lay peacefully. She then sat up and told me she had experienced something extraordinary. She said that four years earlier she had been divorced and went to live in Spain with her children. While there she had an affair with a Spaniard and became pregnant. Because she already had children and was not wanting to stay with the man, she had an abortion. During her body movements it had seemed to her as if the life in her had said the abortion had hurt it. It then led her through the spontaneous movements to complete the process of birth of that baby, and in that way she now felt whole. The process of birth which had been cut off had been able to complete itself.

Although I have already quoted the next experience in my publication THE INSTANT DREAM BOOK. I use it again here because it describes the spontaneity and unanticipated nature of coex so well. Su had attended a seminar at which I explained how to work with coex. She describes her experience as follows: “When Tony came to explain coex to the group, I had just reached the point of despair with my marriage. A few days before I had taken the first step towards breaking it. From the first my experience of coex wove itself, directly or indirectly, into my outer life. It was never a separate thing going on inside only.

“Tony explained to us about letting whatever came, come. I did not understand too well, but lay down with the others and he came to each of us briefly and moved our arms, and left us lying. Perhaps two minutes passed when I felt a distinct twitching around my brow, which was repeated, and then it spread down my face, a downward pressing movement. My face was involved then in a big muscular movement, pressing down, seeming to flatten the face, and then spread down the body towards the feet. Gradually my whole body became involved in big waves of pressing movement which flowed down, lifting and tossing my legs, so that my heels were banging on the floor. Wave succeeded wave. I did as he said, and let it happen, using the skills to relax which I had learnt. I wasn’t afraid, although I couldn’t imagine what was happening to me. Instead I felt happy and elated, warmed through. I knew I had found something of great significance, but it was many months before I could put words to it. It remained an intriguing mystery, like a dropping away of chains, or a touching of promise, while I passed through the pain of divorce. I feel that my experience that day released considerable energy. It did not break my marriage – that would have happened anyway. But I received strength which I used for my needs at that time. Months later it came to me with the force of revelation, that I had been born that day.”

Linda and Su’s experience demonstrate that simply by changing the way they related to themselves they opened the door to a power and expressive part of their nature. Neither of them previously suspected what was hidden behind a change of attitude. It is worth noting also that while Su’s experience was an unusual form of movement, Linda’s was a particular theme. But neither of them were haphazard or random. Noting this same fact generally in people using coex, I felt it must express some basic process and wondered what it was. Gradually I have come to believe that one of the main processes at work is that which also lies behind the creation of dreams.

All mammals are known to experience a stage of sleep characterised by rapid eye movements [REM] behind closed eyelids. In humans this REM sleep in connected with dreaming. Until recently however, it was not known just what animals dreamt. But while investigating a condition called ‘narcolepsy’, a condition characterised by sudden and uncontrollable lapses into REM sleep in animals, Adrian Morrison at the University of Pennsylvania, uncovered some interesting information. Usually, in animals and humans, a small area of the pons in the brain, prevents our muscular system from responding to signals from the brain while we are dreaming. Morrison noticed that in mammals in which this area is damaged, full body movements are made during REM sleep. This shows that not only can the dream process create a spontaneous fantasy or experience we call a dream; not only can it invest the dream with deeply felt emotions or creative ideas, it also expresses as full body movement. Except in cases of sleep walking, such body activities are prevented by the pons from being expressed except perhaps in small jerks or movements. Nevertheless, speech, walking, dancing, fighting and making love, are all frequent dream subjects. So human beings have at least two centres which can direct body processes. We are used to making conscious decisions about walking or moving our hands, but few of us suspect that another part of our being outside our conscious volition is capable and practised in making full body movements and expressing in complex speech.

I believe that by letting things happen without criticism or interference, we are actually allowing the dream process to break through into waking life and express in full body movements, speech, a dramatic theme, and deeply felt emotions. This is another reason why I have named this process COnsciousness EXpansion, because the usual boundaries of our awareness have been enlarged. We begin to be aware of things that usually happen to our psyche only while we sleep. Our consciousness is expanded to the point where it includes a realm of experience which is in many ways different from our waking world. In quite a real sense we begin to ‘wake up’ in what was sleep. As exciting as that is, it might not have much point, apart from a novelty, if it were not for the many possibilities the awakening holds. Freud was reasonably cautious in ascribing to the dream function anything which was not easily observed, yet if we look at his definitions of what occurs in dreams, we begin to understand something of the possibilities in coex.

1] Dreams are ‘thoughts-in pictures’. It seems likely that early in human evolution, prior to the development of complex spoken language, people used images as tools of thought instead of words. So dreams may be in part a return to this earlier level of thinking. Silberer, a student of Freud’s, gives an example in that while falling asleep he was thinking about something he had written, and decided to tidy up its rough edges. He then realised he was dreaming of planning a rough piece of wood.

2] Dreams are ‘ego alien’. This means that they happen to us rather than that we deliberately create them. David Foulkes points out that this has led many people to believe that dreams are given to us by God or gods, or come from the dead, or from some force outside oneself. In general however, all this means is that they arise from a motivation in ourselves which lies outside of our conscious volition and awareness.

3] Dreams are ‘hallucinatory’. In dreams we create, seemingly outside of ourselves, apparently real characters in environments which we feel deeply involved in. When we sit and have a daydream or think, there is not this sense of really doing or being what we are thinking. Yet in a dream this is so.

] Dreams are ‘drama’. Most of our dreams are not merely a tumbling kaleidoscope of images and feelings. They have definite plots, with a beginning middle and end. They describe scenes which are understandable to other people. Sometimes they are as well produced as a first class film or play. In fact, many stories have been written from dreams. Nothing so highly structured could be the result of random neuronal firing. Because of this, Freud thought dreams must be ‘constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind’.

5] Dreams have different ‘moral standards’. In dreams we rape, pillage, murder and adventurously act in ways we would resist with horror in waking life.

6] Dreams have access to a more active ‘association of ideas’. This means that not only can we have a much wider response to any idea we hold in mind, but also the response jumps beyond the usual pathways of our thoughts. It can thus be very creative.

Since Freud’s research, many other people have added to his findings. So Jung, Hadfield, and people like Caldwell, writing about waking dreaming in therapeutic situations, have enlarged understanding of dream functions. Therefore we can add to the above definitions as follows:-

7] Dreams are compensatory or ‘self-regulatory’. Hadfield says of this, “There is in the psyche an automatic movement toward readjustment, towards an equilibrium, toward a restoration of the balance of our personality. This automatic adaptation of the organism is one of the main functions of the dream as indeed it is of bodily functions and of the personality as a whole. This idea need not cause us much concern for this automatic self-regulating process is a well known phenomenon in Physics and Physiology. The function of compensation which Jung has emphasised appears to be one of the means by which this automatic adaptation takes place, for the expression of repressed tendencies has the effect of getting rid of conflict in the personality. For

the time being, it is true, the release may make the conflict more acute as the repressed emotions emerge, and we have violent dreams from which we wake with a start. But by this means, the balance of our personality is restored.”

8] Dreams have access to ‘complete memory’. Penfield’s experiments definitely proved that no experience is lost from memory. Many dreams exhibit memories from earliest childhood – ones not know by the person, and only confirmed later. This includes memories dating from before birth.

9] Dreams ‘incorporate ESP’. Whether we consider ESP to be the result of realisations arising from already held but unconscious material, or because some part of mind transcends space and time, dreams certainly exhibit this function.

Without any exaggeration, if we can accept that the above are reasonable definitions of dream functions, and if coex gives access to the dream process while awake, then through it we have at our disposal a variety of tools, whether mental or physical, which we do not have otherwise. Linda and Su’s examples show some of these possibilities in action. Through thinking in pictures we can often clarify a situation by bringing it down to its simplest factors that general thought left unclear. Co-operating with the self-regulating process enables us to more efficiently keep our health. Having the doorway to wider association of ideas enhances our creativity. Being able to bring to awareness parts of our memory usually lost in childhood, makes it possible to re-program the gut level reactions which were imprinted on us in babyhood, which are frequently completely out of place in adult life. And the ESP faculty sometimes gives us the bonus of extending our awareness and gathering information helpful to work and life in general.

Because LifeStream is based on two of the most universal and fundamental functions in humans – dreaming and the self-regulatory process – it has been available to human use throughout history. Although this has given rise to many different approaches there remain certain aspects that have to be similar.

One of these is the need to have an open and allowing state of mind and body. Writing about this in relationship to problem solving in his commentary to the book SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER, Carl Jung says:-

“…the essential urge to find a new way lay in the fact that the fundamental problem of the patient seemed insoluble to me unless violence was done to the one or the other side of his nature. I always worked with the temperamental conviction that in the last analysis there are no insoluble problems, and experience has so far justified me in that I have often seen individuals who simply outgrew a problem which had destroyed others. This ‘outgrowing’, as I called it previously, revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness…..

“Here and there it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond the dark possibilities within himself, and the observation of the fact was an experience of the foremost importance to me. In the meantime I had learned to see that the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They cannot be solved, but only outgrown. I therefore asked myself whether this possibility of outgrowing, or further psychic development, was normal, while to remain caught in a conflict was something pathological. Everyone must posses that higher level [of possible growth], at least in embryonic form, and in favourable circumstances, must be able to develop the possibility. When I examined the way of development of those persons who, quietly, and as if unconsciously, grew beyond themselves, I saw that their fates had something in common. Whether arising from without or within, the new thing came to all those person from a dark field of possibilities; they accepted it and developed further by means of it….

“What then did these people do in order to achieve the progress which freed them? As far as I could see they did nothing but let things happen… The art of letting things happen, action in non action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Master Eckhart, became a key for me… The key is this: we must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace. It would be a simple enough thing to do if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists solely in watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy. Nothing could be simpler than this, and yet right here the difficulties begin. Apparently no fantasy fragment is at hand – yes there is one, but it is too stupid! Thousands of good excuses are brought against it: one cannot concentrate on it; it is too boring; what could come of it? It is ‘nothing but’, etc. The conscious raises prolific objections. In fact, it often seems bent on blotting out the spontaneous fantasy activity despite the intention, nay, the firm determination of the individual, to allow the psychic processes to go forward without intervention. In many cases there exists a veritable spasm of the conscious.

If one is successful in overcoming the initial difficulties, criticism is likely to start afterwards and attempt to interpret the fantasy, to classify, to Aestheticise, or to depreciate it. The temptation to do this is almost irresistible. After a complete and faithful observation, free rein can be given to the impatience of the conscious; in fact it must be given, else obstructing resistances develop. But each time the fantasy material is to be produced, the activity of the conscious must be put aside.

“In most cases the results of these efforts are not very encouraging at first. Moreover, the way of getting at the fantasies is individually different… oftentimes the hands alone can fantasy; they model or draw figures that are quite foreign to the conscious.

“These exercises must be continued until the cramp in the conscious is released, or, in other words, until one can let things happen; which was the immediate goal of the exercise. In this way, a new attitude is created, an attitude which accepts the irrational and the unbelievable, simply because it is what is happening. The attitude would be poison for a person who has already been overwhelmed by things that just happen, but it is of the highest value for one who, with an exclusively conscious critique, chooses from the things that happen only those appropriate to his consciousness, and thus gets gradually drawn away from the stream of life into a stagnant backwater.”

Very few people have written so powerfully, or with such insight as Jung has on the nature and practise of coex. That is why he has been quoted at such length. Also, some of the above statements are important to our understanding of what coex is and what it can do. It must be realised however, that Reich and Jung were doctors, and so write on the subject from the viewpoint of dealing with illness or human problems. Coex is a great deal more than a doorway to the possibility of healing. As Jung himself mentions, it is also a way of growing beyond our present limitations, of finding ‘more’ in life. That more might be that we simply extend our awareness. A description given by David explains this.

“I had learnt coex and, at first, used it to deal with personal problems. But as these became less pressing I discovered other possibilities in it. Tony had helped me to see that each of us pick up thousands of impressions from our environment without realising. With that in mind, one day when I had a job to do two hundred miles away from home I used coex to check something out. I had agreed to mend someone’s flat roof. The job was not difficult, but needed a reasonably dry day. If I travelled two hundred miles and it rained, I would be well out of pocket. As the weather had been unsettled and with days of heavy rain, I asked my unconscious if it had any impressions on what the weather was likely to be in the area I needed to work. I allowed spontaneous images and feelings as I had learnt, and was amazed at the result. It was as if some part of my being was looking at the most immense forces. All the time they moved and shifted, with so much power I felt that if humans could harness one tiny part of them our energy needs would be solved. From the overall view my inner awareness then shifted and gave me the impression that there would be occasional light showers in the area I had asked about, nothing heavy enough to warrant not going. I was so impressed by the clarity and strength of the impressions I drove to the job. While I worked there were a couple of showers as heavy clouds passed nearby, but nothing that delayed me or penetrated the uncovered roof.”

I have myself frequently used coex to clarify or give more information on important situations. Part of the action of coex is to release to consciousness areas of our experience or impressions which may be relevant to our present needs, but which have remained unnoticed or forgotten. For instance, while working in Japan teaching coex, I was asked to show a young Japanese women how to use the technique. She was experiencing feelings of tension and discomfort in her chest, and could not understand their cause.

Akiko was married to a Westerner and pregnant with their first child. As she allowed the spontaneous movements of coex she began coughing and choking. This continued for some time without change and I became puzzled as to what her body was expressing. When I asked her if she could feel what was behind her movements she shook her head. Wondering whether my unconscious had understood her body language I sought it’s help. Straightaway a flow of impression and feelings arose which suggested that Akiko feared her husband would look for another woman after her child was born. I therefore suggested to her that the feeling in her chest was connected with her husband and the baby. She exploded into tears, as she had apparently been holding back that very fear for some time without expressing it.

In an attempt to understand where my unconscious had gathered this helpful piece of information I later explored the impressions. I saw that what had appeared to come almost magically to mind from nowhere was based on a forgotten sentence Akiko had spoken to me two days before about her coming baby. I had said that the baby would probably be quite a beautiful mixture of East and West. In a rather diffident voice she had said, “I hope so.” At the time I had not attached any great importance to this mixture of words and feelings. Yet my unconscious had understood very well what she was saying.

As human beings we have a great many more possibilities in our life than we  presently use. Coex in action demonstrates that we have the ability to use faculties which often lie dormant. Whether the faculty is that of healing through a release of the self regulatory process; or whether it is that of bringing to consciousness information or realisations we had previously been unaware of, the act of allowing something to be experienced or known in body or mind, which was not evident there before, is fundamental. This bringing into operation what was previously only latent, is something we live with every moment of our life. The everyday remembrance of how to walk and talk, of simple facts such as our telephone number, show how we constantly call into the arena of our awareness what is usually stored elsewhere. Words such as conscious and unconscious are sometimes made to appear very complex. When we connect them with memory though, it is obvious the experience we have gathered is never all at the one time in awareness. Only tiny parts of it are evident at any one moment. The rest is ‘unconscious’. Also, between what we are aware of and what is unconscious there is a threshold. We can think of this as a screen of resistance which holds back the major part of what would otherwise flood into our awareness and cause massive confusion. To overcome this resistance a certain active force or procedure is necessary. Because this procedure is used so often we seldom notice what it is we do, but it is a little like a swinging door. When we hold a question in mind, or there is any call for information such as words to use in speech, we simply wait with a clear mind for the natural response we call memory to take place. In a similar way physical movements are a response to our motivation to walk or reach for something. So when we are actively thinking or willing something the ‘door’ swings from our consciousness to unconsciousness. What we thought or willed is then entered into memory. If we then call upon our memory and wait with an open mind, the ‘door’ swings in the other direction to let the unconscious express its contents. It is upon this basic action of calling a response from our unconscious, that coex is founded.

It is quite easy to see that all of us have huge areas of our memory which we seldom or never use. But occasionally we may meet a school friend, or begin a conversation, which stimulates us to recall memories we thought long gone. Likewise there are areas of mind or body, the potential of which we hardly use. We need to remember also that because most of what emerges through the resistant screen of our ‘threshold’ is what we have sought or allowed, we may only build into our personality from within what appeals to us, what we like or agree with. This leads us to become one sided. In everyday terms it means that one person develops their intellect to the point where all of their views and decisions are dictated by it, while another person almost totally lives in their emotions or sexual drive. this may not be too important in terms of physical survival, but it can be extremely unhealthy in terms of our personality relating to the whole realm of biological, instinctual and life processes active within us. In the quest for the things which they value as a personality, many people find themselves in direct conflict with what their body or life in them wants.  Having watched many people as they worked with coex, I have seen this battle between Life and the personality rage in the person’s body, largely unconsciously. It has reminded me of national revolution, where a small elite – the intellectual government – rule the lives of millions of people who constitute the ‘body’ of a nation. If the governing group have not listened to the needs of the body of their nation, then conflict arises. Worse still in personal terms, we miss awareness of much of our own potential and satisfaction. It matters not that we dub ourselves ‘spiritual’, ‘conservationists’ etc., if we have not taken the time to carefully allow our own being to speak to us, then we are one sided and out of touch.

These considerations made clear some of Jung’s statements, and explain the rationale behind them. The ‘dark possibilities within’ are those aspects of ourselves or our stored experience which have not been allowed or encouraged to break through the threshold of resistance into conscious expression. They are dark because they are unconscious. ‘Letting go of oneself’ can also be seen as a rational necessity if we are to allow not only a balancing and healing of our personality, but also if we wish to contact the riches of what life in us knows. We have to ‘let go’ because otherwise the swinging door cannot open for the unconscious to release its contents. The changed attitude of mind is as relevant as pushing in he clutch if we wish to change gear in a car. In other words, unless we understand the functions of our being, we cannot use it wisely or well. The open, non critical state of mind and body is the very first step in coex. The next step is to ‘continue these exercises’ of listening to the unconscious ‘until the cramp in the conscious is released.

Although the simple use of the open-listening state of mind and body is sufficient for most people to establish communication with their inner resources, there are other factors which I have noticed are very important. These are to do not only with personal, but also cultural attitudes and concepts about the unconscious. Most people brought up in a western, Christian culture are deeply suspicious of the unconscious. We train ourselves and our children to remain in control; of our feelings and drives to such a degree that to allow anything spontaneous is highly threatening. Many people I have worked with have said the same thing to me at the outset of learning coex. “But how will I know if it is good or bad?”

This statement sums up the fears most people have about the unknown of their own nature. They want to know in advance what is going to emerge so that they can edit it, change it, make it socially acceptable. I believe this shows a deep sense of not trusting ones own innate nature.

Something else many people say is, “But it might not make sense!” or “I don’t know what to do.” This suggests a sense of needing to have ready made ideas about what to do. During classes in which the people were asked to explore body movements, most people gave up after one minute or so. Some of these classes were ones in which the people had been exercising with ‘given movements weekly for many months. Yet after a class in which they were asked to discover their own spontaneous movements, several of the class dropped out and never returned. This I take to be an expression of an apprehension about anything new emerging into the person’s life. Also, there is an element of these people not believing in their own power of discrimination to sort out what is useful for them. For myself, I have never found the unconscious to lie, but of course we can fool ourselves in projecting beliefs or hopes onto what it presents.

These anxieties, hopes, attitudes and expectations stand in the way of an easy and honest relationship with our inner process, just as they can stand in the way of an honest relationship between two people. In fact, the deepening of a ones experience of coex is based on the same factors as the deepening of a person to person relationship – trust, patience and an attempt to grow into further understanding and co-operation.

When I attempt to have an overall view of these different pieces of information pertaining to coex, then I see something which appears very important in human evolution. It seems quite clear that for millions of years the human animal lived without rational thought – which is a very recent thing – and they lived without what we call self awareness. Their actions did not arise out of thought as we know it, but out of a feeling response, a directive from the experience of their unconscious which  had its own wisdom gathered from countless generations. This feeling or intuitive response was probably manifested in direct impulses to move, or in dreamlike thought processes. The very tools of early writing were pictures, which probably indicates the mental life of those times. But as human beings developed a sense of personal identity, as they gave themselves personal and individual names, the ancient feeling sense, still obvious in such peoples as the Eskimos and Aborigines, was pushed out of use. When reasoning too became a common tool in human mental life, the separation between the sense which had guided human life for millions of years, and the modern individual life was complete. Not only separation but also division and even conflict. So we arrive at the dilemma of modern human beings who have a personality that is out of touch with major areas of their own being and unaware of their heritage of wisdom and problem solving faculties from the past.  Therefore, I see the process of coex as a means of bringing about wholeness where there was division, integration in the place of the terrible weakness which self-conscious personality, being the veneer it is, has brought about.

Mind and Movement 3 – Honouring Yourself

When attempting to use coex we must remember that we are dealing with natural processes, and they have the possibility of entering into our conscious life when, and as they need. However, because of the way our personality relates to spontaneous drives, and perhaps also because of our social training as children, the self regulatory process of coex does not work spontaneously in most people. Nevertheless, the movements and techniques given in chapter three, and those about to be explained in this chapter, must be seen as exercises to re-establish our natural spontaneity. Therefore, when we use coex in a situation where we have chosen to apply it, to be clear, we need to recognise that we are choosing to allow it, or are ‘practising’ it rather than it is emerging in its own way. Practising coex, or allowing it to emerge are both valid ways of experiencing it. The need to be clear about this point however, arises from that fact that if we ‘practise’ coex, it will gradually begin to ‘emerge’ in ones life anyway, and that is natural and good.

Some examples will illustrate how this works in everyday life. But I want to set the scene a little to bring out certain aspects of what we will look at. So Peter and Adelaide, who we are going to consider, need to be seen as human animals. As physical animals they have certain very real needs such as a reasonable amount of food, air to breathe, sexual expression and protection from the extremes of temperature. Physically they feel these needs and respond to there absence or their fulfilment. This response can be by feeling well and happy, or feeling ill and dying. But their organism as a whole responds in a whole range of ways to many more things than food, air and temperature. Having conscious personalities which are named Peter and Adelaide extend this range of response enormously, and make it more complex also. For instance Peter’s father may be ill in hospital. At a physical level Peter’s body was looked after by his father while Peter was too young to fend for himself. From purely basic animal kinship feelings Peter has a drive to return that caring, but because of personality clashes between the two males, Peter doesn’t visit his father while he is ill. He suppresses any feelings of wanting to care with memories of past arguments.

In this situation Peter’s psychological self-regulatory process would attempt to find some sort of balance between the kinship drive and the hurt feelings in the personality. Biologically the kinship drive is more important than a hurt pride, so the drive would attempt to express into conscious life. If Peter had learnt to suppress such feelings however, they would remain unconscious. If Peter suppressed such attempts at self regulation over a period of time, then a growing feeling of dis-ease would occur, with Peter unaware of its cause.

That is purely a ‘suppose’ situation created to illustrate how coex can be suppressed from spontaneous emergence. But let us look at a real situation existing with Adelaide. She is 42, a good looking woman with a strong drive toward sex, (i.e. relating to a man, procreating, raising children). Adelaide’s mother recently died, and this triggered an emotional breakdown, causing Adelaide to withdraw from caring for her children, caring for her home or herself. Her husband left her during this period and Adelaide found another man who lived with her. Normal conversation was difficult with her because she spoke on and on in a long blurt about sex, her children, other people, her work. After a few months her new man left her. Adelaide was hospitalised several times.

From the intensity and length Adelaide spoke about love making, having a man, and suicide, her organism had very powerful responses to these areas, yet her expression in regard to them was not organismic. I mean that if an organism, a cell, a creature, a human animal, is hurt or pleasured, it responds in a physical way and with obvious feelings. The reaction might be sexual erection, deep sobbing or any other straight response. But Adelaide’s was almost wholly verbal. This suggests that Adelaide had a powerful suppression on her self-regulatory process, preventing the experience of emotions flowing from her real inner fears and pains. Yet why would a person suppress the very things which would balance their being and bring about greater ease?

The answer could be linked with how Adelaide is structured as a personality, and how her personality relates to the processes of her body. Clues to this lie in her age, that her breakdown occurred after her mothers death, and her preoccupation with procreation. One of her statements was that the man she lived with couldn’t give her a baby, and this was the only real form of love. So we can see that the structure of her personality is deeply bound up with being capable of childbirth. That she is 42, faced with losing her procreative ability, confronted by death and the loss of two men, must not only threaten to destroy her personality as it is, but cause many inner responses to occur which she is not allowing to express. If she allowed the responses to emerge into consciousness, she, Adelaide, would have to meet and integrate the very facts of life she most rejects – meet them WITHIN HERSELF!!!

Peter is in his late forties in his second marriage, and has attempted to honour self regulation in his life for some years. What follows is his description of how this emerges into his life spontaneously now.

 “After some years of gradually learning to let myself meet the sort of feelings I used to hold inside, I now meet the self regulatory activities in quite gentle yet effective ways. For instance this morning I woke feeling good, but knowing that I needed a sexual meeting with my wife Eileen. When I got close to her though I could feel her withdrawal and lack of physical excitement, so I didn’t push my need. As I was dressing the conversation revolved around how Eileen related to her first husband who was more sexually active than I, – a topic she initiated – and how we were relating which was not very active – initiated by myself. We had not reached any satisfying conclusion by the time I was ready to start the day by visiting the post office, and I left feeling I wasn’t going to be pulled down by her mood, and determined to be independent. As I left I had an uneasy feeling inside. I started to push it down but realised that my attitude to Eileen only satisfied my independent self, and there was another part of me which was upset by what had happened. By the time I was walking back from the post office the feeling was clear enough for me to see that although it was fine to be independent, I was attempting to achieve it at the expense of my feelings of care and connection I had built with Eileen over the years. When I arrived back Eileen was sitting playing with her granddaughter. She looked okay but I went to her, hugged her and said, ‘It’s a big world out there, and I don’t want to go it alone.’ Tears sprang to her eyes, so I saw she had been trying to play silly buggers just as I had. Then the tension which had existed between us vanished.

“Maybe that sounds like a very small incident, but I know that in the past I let those small things mount up until they were huge grudges inside. Now I can allow the feelings which arise, and so I let my whole self have a say in how I live, instead of being the sort of dictator I used to be.”

The simplest way of allowing coex to enter our life is to honour what we feel. While working with a man – Andy – recently, one of the common errors connected with this was demonstrated to me again. Andy had allowed spontaneous movements and feeling while working alone, and had arrived at a sense of confusion and failure. In his words, “I feel blitzed”. When I asked him to explain what he meant he said that he just couldn’t do whatever was necessary to succeed with coex, and felt devastated. In other words, Andy was looking for a feeling of success and confidence as the thing he should have found. When I suggested he allow himself to experience the ‘blitzed’ feeling instead of searching elsewhere, he cried with real emotion, and could directly see how the feelings were related to his childhood when he was put in an orphanage. In his very search he had been avoiding the things most meaningful by only wanting to see the positive side of himself. Allowing the tears enabled him to acknowledge how important his ‘orphanage’ feelings were in influencing his life. Letting them be felt was the beginning of their integration into his conscious life.

This integration would let them grow and change instead of being locked unconsciously into him in the same form they were in his childhood.

HONOURING OUR FEELING SENSE

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Apart from our well known five senses such as seeing and hearing, we have other senses, equally as well known to us through experience, but seldom mentioned or defined. We have a sense of balance, a moral sense, a musical sense and a feeling sense. When using coex the feeling sense is particularly important, and the experiences of Peter and Andy show how this sense worked for them. Long before the development of language in the human race, or in our childhood, the feeling sense was the urge or means by which the complexities of life were dealt with. When we watch animals in the wild deal with difficult situations and survive without being able to think as we do, it is obvious how practical the feeling sense is. It becomes understandable when we remember that most of our memories and experience are unconscious. Also, many impressions we gather, and many of our mental functions such as cross referencing information, take place outside of our waking awareness. Information arising from these sources and expressing through the feeling sense has been given a variety of names such as hunches, intuition, presentiment, and so forth. Obviously, what some people call premonition or a hunch is simply their own anxieties or prejudices. My mother in law, before I married my second wife, told us she had experienced an intuitive insight that our marriage would only last eighteen months before it failed. Our marriage is now in its seventh year, and what was claimed as intuition was obviously an expression of hidden desire.

Most of us have correct hunches arising from our feeling sense though. Such hunches or insights can be about our own internal psychology, such as Peter and Andy experienced, or about any aspect of our life. Years ago while I was running a book business and was only beginning to learn how to use my feeling sense, I read a book about Edgar Cayce. For two days I had a powerful urge to write to people who were continuing his work in America, and make contact with them. I did this but still the feeling persisted. It subsided only when I wrote again and offered the services of my book business if they needed it. A week later two letters arrived from Virginia Beach. The one with the earliest postmark explained the work of the organisation – A.R.E. – and then asked if I knew of someone who would stock their books, as they had a lecture tour planned, and needed someone to act as agent for them. The second letter simply said, “We must be working a fine case of telepathy here. Thanks. The books are on their way, and our lecturer, Col. Adams, will arrive soon.” The results are seldom that dramatic, but are nevertheless generally helpful.

Memories and processes occurring outside of verbalisation and conscious thinking, have often never been formatted into words or clear concepts. Therefore they cannot be conceptualised – but they can be FELT! Our subtle feelings and senses enable the unconceptualised material to be presented to our conscious mind. Feelings form a link between our thinking, verbal self, and the deep unconscious self. If, like my mother in law in her response to my marrying her daughter, one is the victim of ones feelings and anxieties rather than the observer of them, hunches are confusing rather than helpful. But there are very clear techniques which enable us to meet our feeling sense in a constructive way. These techniques form an excellent introduction to the ‘practice’ of coex.

NONE OF THE FOLLOWING METHODS ARE ‘BETTER’ OR ‘WORSE’ THAN ANY OF THE OTHERS.

I THEREFORE SUGGEST YOU TRY THEM IN THE ORDER EXPLAINED, AND FIND WHICH MOST SUIT YOUR NEEDS AND ENVIRONMENT.

DISCOVERING THE SEED OF GROWTH

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There are exercises of mind and body one needs to practise to develop acquaintance with the feeling sense. Each of us have a feeling sense, but often we have not developed it or learnt to use it consciously. So these exercises are rather like an artist learning to use their sight for their art. Eugene Gendlin, in his excellent book FOCUSING, (Bantam Books) calls it the ‘felt sense’, and says that it is what we experience before we speak. We seldom know beforehand the words we are going to use, except in a formal situation, but we do have a ‘felt sense’ of what we are going to say. This then becomes verbalised when we say it. Also, if we think of two friends, if we move from one to the other in our mind, we have a feeling sense of how different each one is. We have these feeling responses about everybody we meet, everything we think, and everything we do. They underlie our whole life, but very often we fail to notice them. In the following exercises we are going to spend time considering, exploring and learning to work with them.

To begin this first practice you need to create the right setting and situation. You need to wear comfortable clothes which you can easily move and relax in. Take your shoes off, put a blanket on the floor area you choose to practice on, and clear a space big enough for you to stretch out in and spread arms and legs. Create a space in time also. It is important to give yourself about half an hour without other pressing issues to properly meet your inner feelings. Drop self criticism and give yourself permission to express sounds and movement freely.

When you are ready to begin, stand or lie in the centre or your space and raise you arms above your head. Hold them so they are quite extended. Then bring to mind the idea or image of an unplanted seed. It can be any sort of seed. Now 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. So if you do not feel your being is expressive of the seed, move about, explore different postures until you begin to feel more satisfied.  Explore in this way until you feel you have found a position that is right. Take your time. Notice whether the arms and head are right. Would a seed that is not growing feel alert, sleeping, waiting? See if you can find an inner feeling 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. If you get lost, come back to arms and legs extended and spread and again consider whether that FEELS like a dry unplanted seed. If not, work with that feeling of ‘not right’ until it gets to be ‘right’.

When you find a position and inner feeling which suits you, take the next step by letting yourself explore, in just the same way, what happens when the seed is planted in warm moist soil and begins to grow. Continue your feeling exploration to find out what will occur when the seed grows, puts out leaves, blossoms and fulfils its 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 we are looking for is that you explore your own feeling sense in regard to the thought of the seed’s growth. It might be that as the seed you feel very strongly you do not want to grow. In which case simply remain in the form of the seed until you feel a change and an urge to grow, or until your session time is up.

Not only is this an exercise for our feeling sense, but it is also a way the process of coex can express. The concept of the seed structures what happens, but it is still a channel for self regulation to occur. You can consider it a successful coex experience if some aspect of what arises is spontaneous or unexpected. Even if the unexpected does not emerge in the first session, it will do so as you learn to let go of thinking and critical appraisal of what is happening, and leave the body open to free expression. So at first it doesn’t matter if the session feels mechanical and contrived. Having those feelings means 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.

It is helpful to use this form of coex once or twice a week for a full half hour or longer each time. What happens may differ each time, for the unconscious is very creative. In symbols, or in direct experience, something of your own nature will be expressed in the drama of growing. As you practice, any stiffness of feelings or hesitancy will lessen. The theme of what emerges will become clearer and more fully felt. As this happens you can use different starting points. Instead of the seed, use the image of WATER, of AIR, of EARTH, or the SUN. Just thinking about them they may seem very abstract, but my experience is that very few people are unable to enter into them quite deeply through their feeling sense and coex.

Judith, who teaches a yoga class, describes her use of this approach to coex as follows:

 “….I felt as if I were 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…..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 coex to see how they would react. I explained it as well as I could, and the feedback I got was:- 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 personally was surprised at the outcome, that so much should happen first time.”

When using the starting point of the seed, or water, etc., we are giving the unconscious a ready made structure to work with. Because we may be unfamiliar with a completely unstructured approach to our inner processes, such a structure gives at least some sense of familiarity and confidence. Even so, some people find they want everything fully described, scripted or choreographed. The very point of coex however, is to begin moving beyond the known in ourselves, towards creative newness and the unexpected. So even if some anxiety is felt, as with the woman Judith describes who defends her anxiety of the unknown by calling the exercise ‘bloody rubbish’, one needs to gradually move beyond such resistant feelings.

With the structured approach one also needs to leave the result open ended. With the man in Judith’s group, for instance, although he started with the structure of the seed, his experience was one of being in a womb, in a peaceful feeling state, and the woman felt as if she was about to give birth. With a large enough sample, the results would be enormously varied. Many people would go through the whole cycle of the plant’s life; some would find they grew to a certain place and stopped; some would have no impulse to grow at all; some would move quickly from the seed structure to personal feelings. So in your own practice leave yourself open to what emerges. If you stay with the seed and its growth that’s fine, but if you find you inner process diverging, let it express what it wants to.

 

IF FEELINGS ARE A NEW WORLD

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Eugene Gendlin suggests exercises which are less active physically than the seed structure, and are helpful if you are uncertain whether you have feelings or not. People often tell me that they are not sure if what they are observing in themselves is a feeling or a thought, and Gendlin’s approach is helpful. He suggests:-

1] When in a time of quiet, think of something or someone you love or think is beautiful. It can be a pet, an object, a person, anything.

2]Consider why you love what you have chosen, or why it is beautiful.

3] Notice what different feelings arise in you, how your body feels, when you consider what you have chosen, than when you think of something else.

I find it helpful to think of the body as a T.V. screen you are watching. Before you think about your beautiful thing, notice what tensions or peace are on the screen. Take note of any aches and pains, any sense of tiredness or energy, and any attitudes such as boredom, or being pleased, which are there. Don’t try to banish these, just note them. Then bring to mind your chosen object and note what changes take place on the screen of your being.

4] See if you can find any words which fit what you can observe or feel. Let yourself feel what the words are about, and note whether what is on your screen changes, and what it is expressing.

A series of exercises I devised which help to define this important feeling sense, is an extension of considering oneself as a screen. With a similar sort of setting as used for the seed exercise, stand and relax unnecessary tension. Take note of what is then happening on ones ‘screen’. Simply note, do not alter. Then think of a word such as ashamed. Hold the word in mind and note what changes occur on the ‘screen’, and what changes in body posture. Give this some minutes, then change the word to unashamed and note the difference.

Try this with different words such as depressed/happy, failure/success, etc.

Most people, but not everyone, can find an easily noticeable change with the different words. Even the body posture alters. And the exercise not only help us to note the different feeling qualities we have with each word, but also demonstrates how just holding a thought can alter our whole body and feeling situation.

Because the ability to consciously verbalise or be able to clearly think about what one is considering, is the last and integrating stage in levels of awareness, it is important to express what one experiences in these experiments. I believe a good test of integration is that what one describes is understandable not only to oneself, but also to any casual listener. For some people the word and the feeling are very much connected. Something which is very important is that when we look at the ‘screen’ and note what is happening, some parts of what are being experienced will be clear and easily put into words. But there will also be an area which is not yet clear, not yet capable of being expressed. You are looking into a place in yourself which is beyond words. If you continue to observe it however, it begins to open up, to grow, as it were, and gradually becomes clear enough to join with words. That is the most important area. In watching it we are looking into the unconscious. When it ‘opens’ the unconscious emerges into consciousness where it can be verbalised. WHEN YOU ALLOW THE FREE EXPRESSION OF COEX TO UNITE WITH THE OBSERVATION OF THE WORDLESS PLACE IN ONESELF, A NEW AND WONDERFUL LIFE SKILL HAS BEGUN. The process of coex can begin to release into consciousness important experiences which were previously unavailable. Our observation of the place beyond words allow a communication between our deep unconscious and our conscious sense of self. If these exercises in contacting the feeling sense are used, and the greater facility in this area is brought into the seed approach to coex, a much fuller experience will result.

THE UNSTRUCTURED APPROACH

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Because there are so many facets to human nature, ranging from nameless anxieties to insights into the nature of life, any structure we place on coex may limit it. I have noticed with groups which approach coex from a particular standpoint, such as psychotherapy or religion, that although the basic functioning is the same, the experience in the group is largely within that heading. In Primal Therapy for instance, even when the feelings arising are spontaneous and unexpected, they are nearly always about childhood pain. In Subud groups however, which is a spiritual brotherhood, although the activity is obviously self regulatory, what arises is mostly idealistic and to do with moral development. Barter for example, describing his early experiences in Subud, says it was like being baptised in a flow of water. Participants in Primal Therapy describe their experiences as reliving the pain of being born, etc.

W.V. Caldwell, writing about the findings arising from LSD psychotherapy says, “The kaleidoscopic patterns and heightened sensory perceptions; the sumptuous and exotic fantasies that seem to bear no personal application, the symbolic myths and rituals that do; the experiences of fusion, Samadhi, and psychosis; the physiological urges to squeeze, or bite, or throw; the passage of protoplasmic disorganisation; the historical recalls of childhood; the splendid religious and philosophical revelations – how can one make sense of them all? If the psychedelic experience had confirmed the theories of Freud, or Jung, or anybody else we might have been relieved. Instead it has confirmed them all and added a few more besides.”

We must beware of putting any rigid conceptual framework onto what it is to be a human being, especially in regard to our unconscious life. If we feel naked and anxious without such firm theories, then by all means use what is necessary. But recognise at least that your approach will limit what you allow yourself to find. It is easy to see that our being spans the distance between solid physical substances, such as our bones, to the most extraordinary subtleties of mind. All of these are ourselves. To open to only a part of what we are is to miss a great deal of the wonder.

The approach to coex in this unstructured form needs the same sort of approach we used in the structure of the seed – i.e. sufficient floor space, etc. You start by standing in the middle of your floor space, giving yourself the same sort of time and attitude as before. This time, instead of holding your arms above your head as with starting the seed, start by circling the arms. Take the arms above the head, down the opposite sides of the body with the arms fully extended, then upward crossing the front of the trunk. In the full movement the hands are then forming wide circles which cross the front of body. This arm circling, just like the arms stretched above the head in the structured approach, is simply to help you begin coex. Dispense with it as soon as you can allow coex without it.

Meanwhile, circle the arms with the eyes closed and bring your awareness to the shape your hands are making in space. As you become aware of the shapes the hands are carving in space, watch what feelings you have as to how you would like to move. Give yourself permission to ‘doodle’, to make any sort of shapes your feelings or body incline you to. Allow any sort of posture or movement, as active or quiet as you like. Allow sounds to accompany the movements if there is an urge to, and allow whatever feelings accompany them. Hold the attitude that what you are doing doesn’t have to make sense. Nor does it have to comply with what other people might expect of you. Realise that you are allowing another part of yourself, perhaps a non verbal part, or a facet unknown to the rational mind, to express. With a non critical watching attitude, relax and let your body and feeling sense direct what happens. There is no need to fiercely concentrate in order to wipe the mind clear of other influences. But you may need to relax the part of the mind that always needs to know beforehand what you are going to do. This is not like creative dance, in which there may exist a need to produce something pleasing for others to watch. With coex you need an open area in which your being can make its own adjustments, and movement and feeling has a chance to express outside of rational criticism and demands of everyday life.

Give yourself at least half an hour in which to explore what spontaneous movements and feelings emerge. Below is a summary of what may happen in this practice.

1] Although the movements may at first appear haphazard and irrational, if you allow them to continue without criticism, they usually express – perhaps only over a period of several sessions – a particular theme or point.

2] Like a dream, the theme or drama often symbolises ones life situation, or something within oneself, such as the remaining emotions or attitudes from past experience, or a creative realisation. Or the movements may be expressive of the body’s own need to release energy or mobilise itself and its urges.

3] There are obvious stages or depths to the experience. Movement is often the first. Feelings and fantasy can then combine with the movement. Only with a few people do they occur without each other. If met in the right way these can lead to insight into what is being expressed. In other words the symbolic movements, if that is what they are, can give way to rational understanding. This is not because one has thought out a plausible explanation for what happens. An example given by Barbara will make this plain.

“For several sessions in the group I was practising with, my hands had made complicated movements as if I were making something. I realised as I observed that my hands were working at something, operating on someone in a healing way. As this happened I had strong sensations of energy and feelings streaming along my arms into my hands. There was a woman in our group who had cataracts of the eyes, and what my hands were doing was a psychic or spiritual healing on her eyes.

The physical sensations and feelings were strong enough to make me wonder what would happen. I didn’t tell the woman, but watched to see if her eyes improved. Each week the same thing occurred, but the woman’s eyes did not improve. This left me with the question, ‘What on earth am I doing?’ Leaving this question in mind I allowed the thing to continue. As I was watching it during the session straight after I had considered the question I suddenly had a memory of my teenage, when I read a lot of books about spiritual healing. I felt again something of the intensity of desire which I had felt in wanting to be a healer myself. Suddenly the answer popped into my head. My urge to heal had set up a message in my unconscious to satisfy my ideals. There was something like a ‘program’ in me which diverted some of my energies toward healing, or at least, acting it out. As soon as I realised what was happening my hands stopped their movements and they never occurred again. Up until that point I had thought my inner self was lying to me. It was saying I could heal when I couldn’t. But with the new realisation I realised it wasn’t lying at all. It was simply expressing energy in ways I had set up in the past. That such expression was non-realistic had now become evident, and so I could let go of that old pattern.”

Barbara’s description shows that her understanding came out of observation, a ‘floating’ – not a forcefully searched – question, and by allowing the continuing process to respond to her question. Also, what she says illustrates another point about coex. Namely that some themes in coex express habitual patterns of energy use or attitudes. For instance if we have a habitual pattern of turning our anger inwards, our coex movements or theme might express as banging our own chest aggressively. Our awareness of such habits enables us to begin changing them.  5] The basic action in our sessions is self regulatory. In these movements, themes and fantasies, our organism attempts its own healing and balancing. But a part of self regulation is the process of physical and/or psychological growth. So some parts of what emerge are to do with adding to our psychic experience and stature.  6] The process is amenable to direction. It is a learnt skill, allowing the unconscious to express in a way that is meaningful and integrative with consciousness. Some of the possibilities of this direction will be explained in other chapters. 7] What arises, if we are open, comes from many facets of ourselves. Overall there is a uniting of the light and dark sides of ourselves. Caldwell describes this as follows:

One person, “looking for herself, came upon a tightly closed box. Tearing it open – in her fantasy – she found inside a lovely rose, and realised that she had been enclosed in a box of Puritanism, of self denial and physical shame. The outer petals of the rose, pink and mauve, seemed to whirl and dance; they sent her fancy spinning off like a ballerina into flowered landscapes of delicious femininity. The inner petals were shaded from the light, obscure and mysterious. Here the colours darkened to deep crimson and velvet purple. They reflected her deep animality. These she avoided, until she realised that it took both the light and the dark to make a lovely rose. She could not have one without the other. Gradually the rose became a nourishing symbol in her life and growth.”

TWO’S A POWER GREATER THAN ONE

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Anyone who has practised coex alone and then has the chance to experience it with another person, or other people with whom they feel safe, knows what tremendous amplification or added power is brought to it. Such a person or group need to have the same absence of destructive criticism and judgement, the same open curiosity that one brings to oneself in the practise. When this happens you may be able to enter areas of experience previously closed. Even though I have been using coex for many years, having a good partner or group who will witness my work is still an enormous stimulus.

A simple way to work in a group of two or more is to find a room or space that is suitable and start off just as one would if practising alone. Use the arm circling if you have never practised coex before – or if you can allow coex easily, start by standing together for a few moments to drop what has been happening in everyday life. Get into the feeling of an open body and non-judgement. Then stand apart and allow coex for the time allotted. This format can handle a group of two or a hundred. Size doesn’t matter. But by having other people with you, a good environment in which the action of coex can express is formed through mutual support. In such a setting it does not matter if very little or a great deal happens. Being in close proximity to other people allowing coex is helpful even if little outwardly occurs. It establishes in one the realisation that people can allow the irrational and be none the worse afterwards. So a sense of trust in ones own unconscious builds.

For some people coex will not occur until this trust is established, so they may need an ongoing group which will allow them to witness coex in action. Ursula began reasonably quickly, practising with Krysia who had learnt coex in a group with myself. She here describes her first three sessions:

The first time we met I was active in a pleasant mild way with the odd disturbance thrown in.

The second time was also quite contained and at the end I sat as in a meditation but aware of what was going on around me. Then Krysia came to me to let me know time was up. She knelt before me. I did not move. She touched me and it was like a dam breaking and release happened. I cried a strange cry. As I cried I was happy to the same measure as I was sad I had well-being in me to the same degree I was involved in it.

The coex after that started with yawning which could not be satisfied no matter how much the body helped the momentum of the yawn, or how loud the sighs were. Then the yawns became shouts and screams. I wanted to give the final yawn as I did not see much sense in spending an hour yawning. But then came a final piercing scream which only vaguely seemed to come from me; as I heard it more than did it. As it happened I was no longer looking out of the window of that room, but saw my mother’s portrait etched against the window, as I saw her once when I was a child. She was fighting an angina attack and screaming with pain, losing control of her body functions and senses almost. Then I broke into sobs and tears. Strange sobs to me, as I felt all the panic, yet all compassion, all the lies with which she held me, the negative lies, and I felt love for her too. Yet I was also watching myself sobbing; ‘Oh mum. Oh mum.’ And ‘Let go. Let Go.’ And later I felt freed and quiet after the storm. As my hands smoothed over my body it felt so good. As the sound ‘U’ came out on breathing deeply it made a warm vibration in the small of my back which radiated up to the ribs and down to the tailbone. During the period of quiet which followed I saw that place in me filled with light. I was coated in the light, and a counterpart of me, made of light, penetrated me and extended beyond me. I also felt my posture in that area had changed and I had no more difficulty with being comfortable in certain sitting positions.”

Ursula managed to allow herself greater freedom of expression in just three sessions. Although she was applying judgement to her yawns, she nevertheless allowed them until they became sounds which incorporated feelings. Her flowing energy could then clear a source of stress which had remained in her for years. When that cleared Ursula was able to allow feelings of pleasure which incorporated a sense of light. The result of this was an immediate change in her posture.

Another way of working is with just one partner, where one allows coex and the other witnesses. Although this may sound little different to the way Ursula was practising, where both people allow coex, in use there is a great difference. The witness acts as an unspoken question which stimulates our process to respond more fully. It is the format most often used in therapeutic situations, and in groups such as Co-Counselling. Its advantages are that the witness can give feedback to the worker, and with experience, can point out what the worker may have missed. But perhaps the fundamental strength is that when we have someone else’s attention our being is much more expressive. After all, it is the basic form in which communication takes place. Even if one regularly works with a therapist using Gestalt or Co-counselling approach, I find it an advantage to bring to them the freedom of movement and expression coex allows.

During a recent course I taught, I took advantage of being able to work with a partner and had a very helpful session with Barry, one of the students. Afterwards he said he had felt helpless at times because he didn’t know what to do or what to say. From my point of view that wasn’t true at all. Just by being there Barry had been a great help. Also, at no point did he judge what I was doing as good or bad. I felt an active sympathy and involvement from him, and that was enough. However, learning creative listening can aid the process still further. So below some useful points are listed.

1) There is no need to respond to what the worker says or does. It is their work session. They are working on themselves. Your main function is to witness, so do not be tempted to begin a conversation. In one class in which I was teaching creative listening, Di, a rather motherly woman, could not stop herself responding every time her partner spoke. Di had years of caring motherhood behind her, and she couldn’t get out of the role. So when her partner said something like, “Last week I had a real bust up with my wife”, Di would respond with something like, “What a pity. You shouldn’t row with your wife like that. It doesn’t do any good”.

Such responses are highly judgmental and are value judgements at that. If you are on the receiving end of such comments, they either irritate or lead you to feel you do not wish to expose you inner life to such a person.

2) Some of the most helpful responses  are:

3) A summary of what the worker did physically given at opportune times. Thus you might say, ‘At first you were quite still, then you crumpled to the ground.’ If you can gain an impression of what such movements describe in a dramatic sense that is helpful too. So in the already stated movements we might add, ‘When you crumpled I felt you were expressing despair. You remained quiet for a while then got up with what seemed like a new strength.’ If such information is given as an opinion rather than a fact, it allows the worker to find their own response, and to see whether it fits their experience.

4) A statement of any overall theme you notice. So you might say, ‘Many of the movements you made were backwards as if retreating.’ Or, Almost all you said seemed to have a note of complaint, as if you felt a victim.’ While using coex there is no need for the worker to respond to these comments as in a conversation. It is enough to hear them and let their inner process respond.

5) Questions are a very powerful tool in such a relationship and should be used with great care. If a worker is in the middle of a session in which subtle feelings are emerging, and you suddenly ask, ‘Has this got something to do with your mother?’ could draw them straight into an intellectual consideration of the question, inviting them to respond verbally. It would be much better to put the information as a suggestion, such as, ‘My feeling is that this has something to do with your mother.’ This does not call for an immediate response and so allows the worker to carry on with their experience.

6) Beware of preconceived opinions about what the worker is dealing with. I remember in one of my early experiences as a witness the worker, a woman, kept rubbing her vagina. I felt sure it must have something to do with a repressed urge to masturbate. Fortunately I kept my opinion to myself, and it turned out to be childbirth. If we do get stuck in an opinion, and pin it on the worker, it can cause a powerful conflict between what is arising within them, and what we are pushing on them from outside. It help to remember that our opinions on what someone else is experiencing are just that, OPINIONS. With experience our statements can be enormously helpful, but not until we have learnt some humility and discipline.

7) There are important questions, however, and these should be used at the end of a session. For instance, if the session is symbolic in some way, it is helpful to ask what the worker feels it expresses. For instance they may act out being locked up in a small space, and when asked for opinions of what it expresses, say it feels just like their work situation, where they feel stifled and cramped. Having moved from symbol to life situation the next step is ask the worker to explore via coex how they might satisfyingly get out of the trap. At first this might once more be in symbols, but can be brought into everyday terms by discussion.

If the worker uncovers an area of childhood experience that was painful, or any other important event, it is bound to have left certain habit patterns in them. Even when the stress of the event has been released, the habits will remain unless made conscious. Eddie had released the shock of being put in a hospital and separated from his mother at three. He went on to re-enact the scene where his mother used the threat of putting him in a ‘home’ in order to make him obedient. The tensions had been released, but when Eddie was asked what the experience left him with, how it influenced his life ‘now’, he discovered previously unconscious habits. Namely, he had made an unconscious decision as a child never to trust a woman with his love again. This meant that in his marriage Eddie always kept a lot of his feeling cut off from his wife to avoid the possibility of getting hurt again, as he was in childhood. Being aware of this pattern enabled Eddie to gradually take the risk of sharing more of himself with his wife.

Therefore the questions need to lead 1) from symbols to insight. 2) From past experience to what habits the experience left. From the awareness of the habit(s) to a re-assessment of what the person wants to do with that part of themselves now.

If the worker contacts feelings which are not clear, they need to look at what they are experiencing to see if they can recognise having felt it at any time in their life. Andy, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, from his unclear ‘blitzed’ feelings became clear when he saw them as results of being in an orphanage. One cannot always make this sort of connection with feelings, but if you can it integrates them much faster.

9) Discussion of the session is useful in nearly every case, whether as witness and worker, or as a co-practising group. It helps to clarify and define what occurred. It also means the person exposes to other people what may have been hidden even from themselves, which in a sympathetic setting can be healing.

THE SEED GROUP

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The structured seed approach can be used in a group form as well as alone. In group form it has a slightly different framework and a lot more possibilities than when practised alone. It needs three or four people, with or without experience of coex. It is best if at least one person has used coex though, and probably best if each person has used the ‘alone seed’ at least once.

To start the group, one of the members chooses to be the Seed. This person is the worker. The other members take on the roles of earth and water. But these latter roles are only loose guides, and I am not suggesting any attempt to act them out rigidly should be made. Basically they are witnesses, but in a slightly different form to the one-to-one work. 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 which enables them to get closer physically and emotionally than 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.

As a guide to this, it is helpful to consider in human terms, if you are in the water role, how you would penetrate the seed to stimulate its growth process? If you are in the earth role, again in human terms, how would you relate to the seed to give it a medium in which or from which to grow? If you are in the seed role, then you allow your spontaneous reaction to this. Allow the process of coex to move you without considering what you should do. Trust your inner process. The group is an intimate one. It has many dimensions of experience possible. Not only is it a meeting of people in a way not usually possible socially, but it is also a place to learn human contact, how to give caring and support to another human being, and how to communicate with others non verbally.

Because there are so many different ways people experience the seed group, I will quote a few responses. “I’ve never been with people in that way before. I think it was the first time I really relaxed with a group.”—”When I was the seed I didn’t have any urge to move or grow at all. At first this worried me. I kept wondering if the others would be bored or disappointed. When I told them, the worry disappeared; they were all just enjoying being close.” — “Being the helper was great. I got so much pleasure from supporting and being near the Seed and the others in the group. But when it was my turn to be the Seed I didn’t enjoy that at all. I felt restless and claustrophobic and quickly pulled out. It has made me realise for the first time in my life that I find it difficult to receive that sort of closeness from others. I have to be the giver.”— “Until I became the seed I had never realised how hungry I was to have other people near me. I wanted to hold and touch in a way I had never allowed myself before. Since then it has been easy for me to hold people, babies, my wife, with more giving than I could in the past.”— “First I was just curled up. I felt comfortable, and relaxed into it while the others completely covered my body with theirs. It really was like being planted. After a while a flicker of movement arose pushing my head out. This came in waves, increasing in strength, until my head was pushing out and up like a plant growing. I didn’t try to think what I ought to do, just went with the pleasure of it. In the early stages this didn’t seem to involve the others, although I could feel them close. But by the time I was up on my knees there was such pleasure flowing through me, such joy at being close, being able to feel the soft skin of a face against mine, that my pleasure involved the others. It is the nearest thing to making love without sex I have ever come across. I felt all the flow, the contact, without in any way going into areas that are unacceptable. When I was standing, growing from the sheer energy of movement welling up from within, we all seemed to be one moving, living process. I felt I had given something of myself to the others without saying one word. And I also experienced them as distinct qualities around me. At the end I could sit with them for a long time, holding hands, head on them, without the need to speak.”

Although we start with the structure of the seed and its growth, you do not need to stay within that structure if your own experience takes you out of it. Some people feel they are a baby being born. Others have a direct here and now relationship with the group which needs to be explored. But basically one is setting up the group as an environment in which to allow coex to occur. The coex action might take up the seed image and use it, or express in another way. Because other people are so near, what emerges may be quite different to what arises alone. Like the person who found it difficult to receive, ones theme might be about the difficulty or pleasure in relating to others.

The notes given about the creative listening or witnessing also apply with the seed group. As a helper we are supporting the Seed in their work. The Seed is the one to say when they are ready to finish the session, but as a witness you may be able to give them an assisted passage by careful feedback. Also, discussion and feedback are important at the end of each session. There is a great deal to learn about ourselves, the way we relate, and what emerged in the seed group. It is an unusual social setting and we may have reached beyond boundaries we usually erect. To know how others felt about you laughing, touching, not moving, expressing deep feelings, etc., is vital to your realistic appraisal of future relationships. Again, this is something which although important, we do not experience often enough. The experience of Jane quoted below shows another side of the need to complete, through discussion and careful witnessing, what began in a non verbal way.

“When I got back – from the seed group – I felt quite ill, and dragged around for a few weeks feeling like death. I even went to the doctor, but all he could find was mild anaemia. This feeling developed into a period of absolutely compulsive eating, with an awful feeling of never feeling satisfied by what I ate, and guilt at eating too much. This went on for a couple of weeks until, trying to find out what was causing it, I remembered that after my birth experience in the seed group, I had a tremendously strong urge to suck. I checked with my mother and found she didn’t feed me as soon as I was born – so a possible explanation is that I’d gone back to this infantile experience of wanting to suck and not being able to. It certainly explains a lot – like my thumb sucking in particular and, more generally, my strong and continued dissatisfaction with everything, that nothing is quite right. After all, it was the first thing I ever wanted, and I didn’t get it. It seems to me I’ve been looking for that all my life. Anyway, once I’d realised this and thought about it the obsession for eating just disappeared, and I felt much better straight away.”

This situation could have been speeded up by attempting to see where the feelings had been experienced in the past; or by having another session with the question held as to where the continuous urge to eat arose from. Also, the woman was not regularly using coex, so it took her longer to clear what arose in the one session.

As was said at the beginning of this chapter, coex is a natural process. As such it does not need any techniques or special settings. But like any natural force, such as electricity, different structures cause it to express different qualities. These structures are ones I have found useful. You need to find which is most suitable for yourself.

Mind and Movement 4 – Opening the Doors of Mind and Body

There is a big difference between knowing about coex intellectually, and being ready and able to experience it. This is partly because coex is very real. Coex is connected with the dream process, and inherent in the experience of that process is:-

a] That we are deeply involved in what is produced. It is not simply something we consider at a remove – we are it!

b] It is ego-alien. It produces things we have not necessarily created already in our conscious ego. Therefore we have to realise that what we call ‘I’, the attitudes, beliefs, memories and reactions we associate as being ‘us’, is only an island in a large sea. It is only a reasonably small part of the many biological and psychological activities which together constitute our existence. In a sense it is one small room in a large and complex house. The walls of the room are the boundaries between ourselves and the other aspects of our existence. During our waking life we may seldom go beyond those boundaries. Perhaps ours is a square room, and some other people live in round, oblong or triangular rooms. If someone whose boundaries are thus different to ours – we might believe in God and they do not – questions our attitude or views, it might be upsetting, irritating or even frightening. Such fears and irritations make up the walls of the boundaries we place between ourselves and ‘otherness’. The forces of life in us, our own complete memories, and the sum total of what we compute from our entire experience, might be this very ‘other’.

 The following description by Ian is an example of this in the action of coex itself. He says:- “For some months, in my weekly work with coex, I had been experiencing movements which I felt were improving the health of my body. Many of the movements were unusual, ones which I could never have thought of. They seemed to be acting on parts of my body which felt painful or stiff. For instance for some time before starting coex I had what felt like a grumbling appendix. During my practice some of the movements which arose really massaged that area of my body. Subsequently the discomfort has disappeared. In this way my body was led to greater mobility. Then one week, without prior warning, something new arose. The session started with movements which were like setting up exercises – bending and squatting. A few moments of stillness followed, then suddenly I began to dance. No, that’s not quite right – I was danced from within, for I didn’t know the plan of the dance. I danced creation. With great sweeping movements I gathered material from the space around me. With mighty breath I blew upon what was being formed, and gradually a world was created. It was a great world which I then carried upon my shoulders like Atlas. But so mighty was this world I gradually fell beneath its weight, crushed and unable to rise. I lay there, trapped, but gradually a feeling arose that there was something within me from which strength could come if I struggled and did not give up. So, like a captive giant I strove against the ponderous weight of my own creation until the deeper strength rose from within me. With difficulty I lifted the world from off my back to my chest. Then gradually I rose. As if it were a ball on the end of a chain I swung the world around me, slowly at first, but then faster and faster. Then suddenly and with great relief I let go and the world was gone. Then I seemed to be standing before a bright and loving light. Although the world was gone, I still felt as if my hands were chained, and as spontaneously as the dance, words rose in me, asking the light to remove them. But the light replied, ‘Ian, I have never chained you, only you have bound yourself’. Although I didn’t understand in what way I had chained myself, the realisation of it being my own doing caused the chains to drop off and I lifted my hands to the light, bathing in its laughter and love. From a deep part of me a song was called, and I sang to the light my thanks and joy. Then came laughter, for I had been such a fool.

 “Slowly the powerful feelings ebbed away and I was left quiet but amazed at what had flowed through me. Being in some ways a shy person I had never before danced in my life. So to first do stretching exercises, then dance and sing because of the release and love I felt left me almost in a state of wonder. Where had it all come from? What did it mean?

 “It took almost three months for me to really begin to answer those questions. Then, one day when I was describing the experience to a friend I suddenly realised what it was saying. Before starting coex I had felt very ill, but also ill at ease with myself. At that time, although I had not been brought up in an actively religious family, I had lived by a strong religious code. I dealt with difficulties in my marriage and myself by applying the rigid morals I used to guide my life. I disciplined myself to live the sort of life I felt God called me to live. That was the world I had created. I had made a world so rigid and heavy to bear that it had crushed me and made me ill. Through coex I was beginning to throw off that old way of life and the restrictions I had placed upon myself. I had begin to develop a sense of meeting life face to face, instead of creating a God in the mould of my own narrow conceptions. I had begun to feel a communication with life itself within me, and truly it was saying -’Ian, I have never chained you.’”

 What Ian describes shows how he found something which was outside of and more complete than his usual personality. It has in it many of the conditions Freud stated as being relevant to dreams. So not only is Ian’s experience of coex apparently connected with the process underlying dreams, but it is more healing than most dreams, and enlarges his realm of experience. He found these things because he could allow the otherness that was himself to enter his waking life. So the recognition that coex will require us to allow other possibilities, other experiences, viewpoints and emotions than we usually allow ourselves, is basic. Also, this ‘allowing’ really means that we are letting ourselves experience things very fully, not just intellectually, but as one does in a dream, with personal involvement.

 The illness Ian mentions was pain in the chest, tiredness and depression. The chest pain was diagnosed as psychosomatic by his doctor, but was nevertheless a very real pain. This, his tiredness and depression gradually disappeared as he used the process of coex. But this only occurred because he took something to the process. What he took was regular practice over a period of years. Although there were highlights in what he experienced, as described above, there was only a gradual change to health in himself. Also he took agreement and his consent. Not only did he consent to the action of coex by continuing it, but when he was confronted by possible changes in his view of life as in his dance, when he realised what the dance meant, he agreed to take a chance on those changes suiting him. He did this by surrendering something of the rigid views by which he had previously lived. So, some degree of perseverance, agreement and surrender are necessary attitudes we need in the use of coex.

 If we remember that we are dealing with the dream process, and this process can create a spontaneous drama which can involve our whole being, then in the practice itself we need to ‘hang loose’. So apart from attitudes, the first step of practice is to learn a form of relaxation in which our body has dropped unnecessary tension, and is like a keyboard ready to be played. I find it helps if we create something of this feeling consciously, holding our body, our emotions, our sexuality, mind and memories as if they were keys upon which the inner dramatist can play. In a sense we are seeking to create a condition similar to sleep. As we fall asleep we let go of our control over what we think, what we do with our body, and what we fantasy. Our ‘I’, our decision making self has relaxed and left the stage free for the dream maker to create its realisations. So in approaching coex we need to take on a similar relaxed state without actually going to sleep. Dreams are not as healing as coex, mostly because we do not consciously co-operate and agree with the process. It therefore does not integrate as fully with our waking self.

Many people can easily hang loose, and so coex occurs freely. But in case this is not so, there are some things we can do to learn it. These are tools we can use which can help us define what it feels like to allow our body and mind to be loose enough for spontaneous expression. As such they need not be used once that is learnt.

 1] This is a simple and enjoyable technique which gives a direct experience of spontaneous movement. You need to stand about a foot away from a wall, side on. Start with your right side. You are going to lift your right arm sideways, but because you are near the wall you will only manage to lift it part of the way. So when the back of your hand touches the wall, press it hard against the wall as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the arm. Using a reasonable amount of effort stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about thirty seconds. Then move so you face away from the wall, and with eyes closed relax your arm and be aware of what happens. Try it before reading on, and use the left arm afterwards.

 What we have done is to attempt to make a movement. Because the wall prevented this, the body was not able to complete the movement you asked it to make. Therefore a muscular charge built up in the deltoid muscle. When you stepped away from the wall the arm, if relaxed, was then free to complete the movement. So possibly your arm rose from your side as if weightless, thus discharging its energy. Some people need several tries before they can find the right body feeling to allow the arm its movement. It is easy to prevent it moving because the impulse is quite a subtle one. The point of the exercise however, is to learn a relationship with oneself in which the subtle impulse can express. The movement the arm makes, and how it feels to experience an unwilled movement, is so similar to coex we are thus provided with an experimental experience of the real thing. Therefore it is helpful either to practice the technique until you can do it, or use it a number of times to establish your relationship with the feeling of it. This sense of allowing movement can then be used in coex itself.

 2] For the next technique you need to work with a partner. One person needs to be the ‘subject’ and the other the ‘helper’. The subject can stand or lay down, and the helper should take their hands. The subject should close their eyes and be in a ‘hang loose’ feeling. The helper should give the subject a few moments to feel relaxed in the situation, then start slowly moving their arms in random movements. If there is noticeable tension or resistance to their arms being moved, the helper should attempt to help the subject be aware of such tensions or points of resistance. Sometimes the arms are so tense they will stay in any position they are placed. Then it is easy enough to point out to the subject how they are tensing their arms. Otherwise, perhaps the helper can manage to have the subject feel the areas where resistance occurs, and have them learn to go along with the movements with less effort. This is the aim of this technique. One is helping the subject feel what it is like to have their body moved by someone/something other than their own directions. As this is a learning process, this may need some practice.

 In some cases it will be noticed if you are the helper, that the subject is trying to help you make the movements of the arms. If so, while still moving their arms in a random way, gradually lessen your direction and let them take the lead. If you do this slowly the person will feel you are still directing the movements of their arms. As this point is reached, take your hands away gently and encourage the subject to let their hands and arms explore their own movements. This is a gentle and effective way for some people to be led into the experience of coex. Once they are making their own movements, with the attitude that ‘you’ are doing it, they have effectively learnt how to allow spontaneous fantasy to take place.

 In her article on coex which appeared in Harpers and Queen, Leslie Kenton describes a woman’s experience who was led into coex by the above method. She says, “I watched one woman who was using the technique for the first time, lie quietly breathing. She then found that her hands began to move gently as though she was exploring the texture and quality of space near her body. Crisp encouraged her to go with these fine movements. Gradually they developed into larger stroking gestures in the air around her. Her imaging facilities came into play as the physical movements continued and she sensed that she was in what she later described as a kind of womb. But instead of being dark it was permeated with light, immensely safe and beautiful. Then gradually her torso and shoulders began to move as well until slowly she emerged from this extraordinary womb world into clear air and more light. She began to weep quietly, stunned by the power and the beauty of an experience which had come quite spontaneously from within her. When she later began to try and make sense of the imagery which accompanied the movements she realised that her own feeling sense [which until then she had not even been aware of] had created for her a physical expression of the particular life situation she was in at the moment. She was on the verge of a new beginning as far as her work was concerned, and had been feeling rather unsettled and anxious about it. She found this coex experience enormously helpful because it made her realise that the career changes she had planned had not been motivated by some capricious wish but were very much in line with the direction her deepest self was leading her. She also discovered that she has a feeling sense which she can experience for herself and that if she listens to it, it will express a summary of her life situation at any particular time or help her work through whatever blocks or tensions she experiences.”

MOVEMENTS OF MEANING

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As already explained, our mind or feeling self is linked with our body through movement. It is sometimes clearer for us to observe this in other animals than in ourselves. The expression of sexual drive, for instance, and the follow up of parenting, can easily be seen as physical movements of an instinctive nature in the elaborate courtship rituals of some birds. The movements of these rituals, and the movements of nest making, are examples of spontaneously generated activity. If such movements were inhibited for some reason, the animal would undoubtedly experience physical tension and internal stress. A puppy I once owned demonstrated this to me after I had trained her to sit and wait while I put her food in her bowl. Her instinctive drive was to move to engulf the food. I had put an artificial block to that impulse by smacking her each time she did it. The result was that while she waited from me to give her permission to eat, her body exhibited enormous trembling. As soon as my block was removed and she could allow her movements, the trembling ceased.

 A dog can express its natural and impulsive drives to eat, to chase, bark, be aggressive and have sex more openly than most human beings. Because of our social training we have often built into ourselves quite enormous physical tensions to hold back our feelings and the movements which would express them. The action of coex is a means of releasing the tensions by allowing the body and feelings to express in a ‘safe’ environment without inhibition. But coex itself cannot function sometimes because the very tensions it would release are inhibiting its action. Therefore it is often helpful to begin releasing such tensions in another more structured way. This can be done by making some of the movements we might have made if the body were freely expressing. Note has been taken of typical movements different people make during coex, and these have been put together in a series of exercises. While these are only necessary prior to coex if we have difficulty in starting, they are pleasurable to do, and probably better for health than general physical movements. This is because each one expresses in some way an inner function such as sex, extroversion, introversion, taking, giving, etc. They therefore integrate body and mind more fully than a simple keep-fit exercise. Originally all movement was linked with a function or meaningful activity such as hunting, communicating, and so on. While these movements are not as powerful as either those directly expressing our needs, or those arising in coex, they are extremely helpful.

 1] This first movement we start from a standing position. With feet slightly apart we take an in-breath, and as we reach the high point of inhalation we take head and arms backwards to really open up the chest. From that standing position with head back you then begin to breath out and bend the knees so that you can drop quickly into a squat. As you do so let the arms move forward and up so the hands come palms together near to the face. Meanwhile you drop into a squatting position expelling your breath fast as you go down. You rest there for a moment and then the movement carries on by breathing in and rising back up to the first position again. So you slowly stand as you breath in, then when standing expand the rib cage again by opening the arms slightly backwards and apart, and taking the head slightly back.

 The going down into the squat position should be done fairly fast with the outbreath quite strong so that there is a WHHHHH, an audible blowing of air out of the lungs. It can be done gently, but if possible, do it strongly as the body drops. Let the hips go down as far as you comfortably can, and let the head collapse down too so the body is relaxed. Some people need to put their heels on books to make squatting comfortable, so do that if necessary. The hands come forward in a scything movement until they meet just above the dropped head.

 The movement expresses in postures the two basic ways we deal with our energy – by exteriorising it, or interiorising it. The down position is introversion, and the up an extroversion. It is helpful to get something of the feeling of this as you do the movement. The exercise needs to be done for about a minute, and the aim of it is to get the body systems working, such as breath and circulations. But also it needs to be done over a period of time, as with the others, until it can be felt as a flowing expressive movement without kinks and blocks. As we are using the movements to help release tensions, they should be done even in the face of feeling very awkward or incapable in them. Such are the feelings tensions produce to resist our removal of them. After the exercise is done, sit or stand for a minute and simply ‘imagine’ that you are doing the movement. See if you can repeat within yourself the different feelings states – of being ‘up’ and ‘down’- that occurred while actually doing the exercise. If you cannot remember those feelings, do the movement to remind yourself.

 e next movement you begin in the same position as the first, but feet slightly further apart, about shoulder width. Then, keeping your head and shoulders more or less floating in the same position, circle the hips. The hips are taken gradually into a wide circle; so as the hips are circling back the trunk is slightly bent forward, but still with the head high. The hips should go well out to the side, and as they swing to the front, they should be far forward enough to cause the trunk to be inclined slightly backwards. If you cannot manage this at first, simply do what you can. The knees and ankles should be kept relaxed, as should the hips themselves, so they adapt to the circling. As the hips rotate, if the pelvis is reasonably relaxed, it swings backwards and forwards with the movement. Don’t make the movement complicated by attempting to reproduce these finer points, they will come as your body loosens and the tensions melt. The breathing should then also find its own rhythm. Generally it is out as the hips swing forward, and in as they swing backwards. This is because the chest is slightly compressed as the hips are forward, that is, if the head is floating erect.

 The movement needs to be done for about a minute, and at half time rotate the hips in the opposite direction from which you started.  The last movement expressed movement of energy and so does this – the circulation of energy within us.

So after the movement is finished, stand or sit, and reproduce the feelings of the exercise without moving your body.

 3] This movement is the most important single exercise in the series. Still in the standing position, with the feet about six inches apart, this time we are swinging our pelvis backwards and forwards while rotating the hips from back to front. This may need some practice, so if you stand and imagine you are taking your hips backward to hollow the lower back and then swing them forward, that is the basis of the movement. As the pelvis swings backwards it hollows the lower back, and when forward it causes the chest/rib cage to slightly collapse.

 If you try, and find you can do that, it now needs to be developed into a wider movement. So I will describe the whole movement from the beginning carefully. From a standing position you tilt the hips backwards, hollowing the lower back, and continue this backward tilt as if you were going to sit down in a chair, allowing the knees to bend slightly to keep balance. Although it is necessary to describe this in sections, the movement needs to be a flowing one. But in this position the trunk is slightly forwards, the breath in and the rib cage expanded. At the end of the backwards swing let the hips begin to push forwards. At the same time begin to straighten the legs and breathe out. What this does is to bring the hips in a circling movement from back to front. Because the knees were bent as the hips went back, the circle is down and back, forwards and up, until you return to the standing position started from and continue the movement.

 Not only does the pelvis swing backwards and forwards in the movement, the legs bend and straighten, the chest is expanded and collapsed, and as you gain fluidity, a wave of movement runs up the spine. If the chest is kept rigid this will not happen. So the chest and neck need to kept loose and ready to respond to the hip movements. Sex in animals expresses as spontaneous movements. In human beings the hips are often so immobile it is impossible for this spontaneity to occur. But this exercise is much more than something to mobilise our sexual responsiveness. Because the spine is the main nerve trunk for our whole body, and because movement is life [i.e. the big difference between a dead and a live body is that the live one moves] the spinal waves created in the movement help the whole body to come alive in the sense of releasing energy from tensions and in mobility and expressive movement. Also, this movement, along with the one before it and the next one, are extremely helpful in easing or removing lower back pains caused by tension or back strain.

 This exercise expresses the giving and receiving, the yes and no of relationship. When you finish it, sit or stand and recreate the feelings of it by imagining the movement. You may find your breathing responds to what you are imagining. This is normal.

 4] This exercise can be called ‘roller skating’. You stand with feet a little wider than shoulder width and with trunk bent forward and knees bent also. The back should be reasonably straight although at an incline. You now swing the hips from side to side. If possible let most of the movement occur from below the navel. You can keep you eyes looking ahead, your arms swinging in time with the hips as well to let the body move fully. But it is the lower back which is being worked here, although the movement massages the lower internal organs as well, so you may get the stitch until you adapt to the exercise. Do the movement fairly vigorously. If you do get the stitch, don’t stop altogether, just slow down. The movement will then massage the area of discomfort. After you have finished the exercise, imagine you are making the movements to recreate the feeling of it.

 5] In this exercise we need to stand with the feet as wide as we comfortably can. Be careful to check how slippery your feet are on the floor surface. If they are too slippery to easily maintain a feet wide position, it may help to take your stockings/socks off. From this position let your trunk drop and the arms to droop forward, allowing the spine to be gently stretched. When you feel your spine has adapted to the position, from an outbreath swing your spine and head to the left, allowing it to roll over and up to the standing position as you breathe in. You drop the trunk downwards in the middle again breathing out -do it fairly fast- then roll head and trunk to the right as you come up and breathe in again. The movement is an active one, with a light pause as you reach top and bottom. Some people like to allow their arms to extend in a wide arc as they come up. It feels more balanced. Also, as you come to the upright position with the inbreath, let the head drop back slightly, and arms extend sideways and back to increase the chest stretch. This balances the deep exhalation accomplished by dropping the trunk forward.

 This is a very pleasing movement, and because it connects with the breath cycle, develops a particular rhythm. If you can manage it without becoming giddy, let the exhaling of breath as you go down be quite energetic. When the exercise is finished, imagine doing it while sitting or standing. Psychologically, this movement expresses energy up and down the spine. But it also has something of bowing before something, then standing energetically erect.

 6] This movement works the abdominal muscles quite strongly, and needs to be approached slowly until you feel confident and able in it. It is not primarily a physical exercise. It is an expression of letting go of self, of surrendering. You start with feet about shoulder width apart. From an inbreath you drop your head slowly back and breathe out, allowing your head, shoulders and trunk to drop slightly backwards with the arms limp. If you are comfortable in that, allow your trunk to drop backwards while you breathe as you can. The point of the movement is not to see how far backwards you can go. It is to express the feeling of letting go of self, of dropping control in a disciplined way. This comes about because the top of the body is surrendered, but the lower part is highly organised to support that surrender. This is very much what coex is. So the dropping backwards need only be very slight unless your spine is flexible.

 When the head and shoulders are back, at first hold the position for a very short time, then recover to the upright stance. As you get used to the movement, you can stay in the surrendered position longer – just as long as is comfortable – then recover. The meditation of this movement is to create the sense of letting go, of surrender, without moving the body much. In this way we can create this feeling in ourselves when we come to use coex and need to let go of our muscular and emotional control. It is also important to recognise and create the feeling of recovery to the erect, self directing stance. coex is partly a way of learning how to direct the processes of our being more capably, and these two stances are important.

 7] This exercise uses the legs a lot more, and introduces more spinal twist. You start with feet about a metre apart in a standing position, and with the hands palms together in front of the chest. Turn the left foot to point to the left, and as you turn the trunk to face in that direction, let the left knee bend until the hips drop right down near the left heel. To make this easier, let the left heel rise. In other words, don’t try to keep the foot flat on the floor. Meanwhile the right leg is trailing right out behind you, forming an arc up from the floor along the spine. The right knee is on the floor but hardly bent.

 As this lunge to the left occurs, from the hands together position, let the right hand reach forward in the direction you are lunging, and the left arm stretch out backward toward the right foot – i.e. in the same direction. This gives a slight spinal twist, although the head should be facing front. Also, although you are reaching forwards with the right hand, there is a common tendency for people to extend the whole trunk forward too, and that is unnecessary. The trunk curves upright from the trailing leg.

 From the lunge position, using the strength of the left leg push back towards the upright position, bringing the hands back to be centred in front of the chest again. The breathing sequence for this being out as you lunge, in as you centre again. Then from the centred position you lunge to the right. Don’t forget that it is now the left arm you extend forwards – always the opposite hand. Pause in the lunge then using the strength of the right leg push up and centre again.

 I find this movement one of the most enjoyable, and there is a way of doing it which makes it flowing and a unity between breathing, moving and meditation. But before that can be done, you need to practice the exercise until you can do it without too much thought. Then, do the movement slowly, as if it were an expression of the breath being unhurriedly expelled as you lunge. Hold the position for a pause, then slowly back on the inhale, once again pausing. The exhalation should be felt inwardly as a giving out of oneself, and the inhalation as a receiving. As you can probably now begin to see, the movements are thus expressing some of the basic energy/feeling states – introversion/extroversion; surrender/control; giving/receiving; relaxed/dynamic. So not only are the series designed to mobilise our body by taking it through its possible basic movements, they also mobilise our energy and feelings by calling on them to stretch and move. The still meditation of this exercise is a little more complex than the others, because of the complex body patterns, but try it while you sit or stand.

 8] This movement is a spinal twist, more so than the last. You start by standing with the feet a little wider than shoulder width and with the hands at the sides. Leading with the head, we turn to the left, letting your arms describe a wide circle, and continuing their movement when head and trunk can turn no further. As the trunk turns to the left, let the feet and knees accommodate the twist, so that when you have turned as far as you can to the left, your left knee is slightly bent in a lunge to allow the fullest turn. Now turn from there to the right, going round as far as you can, fairly slow to let the feet and legs change. The arms are extended describing a wide arc, and coming to rest where you feel comfortable, but not floppy. The breath cycle is to complete exhalation as the spinal twist is complete, and to complete inhalation as you reach mid-point between the left and right twist. Like the previous exercise, if the breathing is united with the movement, it makes for a more satisfying experience. Once you have got the feel for integrating breathing and movement, perform this one fairly slowly and purposefully. End by imaging this one while sitting or standing in stillness.

9] This exercise is very difficult to describe in a book, but as it is important an attempt will be made to make it clear. It is a standing movement which aims at mobilising the rib cage in one of its movements we seldom make in everyday life. Keeping the hips still, it is possible for the lower ribs to swing slightly sideways. If we do this with the right side of the rib-case, it causes the left shoulder to drop, and the right to rise. When we alternately extend the right and left sides of the lower rib-case, the shoulders alternately rise and fall also. Therefore, if one lifts and drops the shoulders alternately, this may help produce the extending of the rib-case, but not necessarily so. Many people move their shoulders thus, or swing their hips energetically, without their rib-case being mobilised at all. As the chest in general is highly expressive of emotions, as seen in crying and laughing, any such inability to move the rib-case suggests tensions or repressed emotions in the area.

 To make sure your movement is actually doing what it should, it is helpful at first to practice in front of a mirror. Keeping the hips still and rib-case centred, hold your index fingers about two inches away from each side of your lower ribs. Now see if you can swing the ribs sideways towards the extended  but still finger without swaying the whole trunk and hips sideways as well. At first it might be that you do not know just what muscles to move to accomplish this, but with practise it becomes simple to do. Like one of the earlier movements, this one may cause you to develop a ‘stitch’ if you do it fairly actively. This is because it strongly massages the internal organs, which is a healthful stimulus to them. It may also cause an unusual bellows action with the lungs, causing a pumping of air in and out of the lungs without actually breathing. This is quite normal for the movement, and is not harmful. The movement should be ended by the still meditation.

 10] In a general sense we have been moving up the body in this series of exercises, and so are concentrating more on the chest and shoulders at the moment. This exercise is primarily to mobilise the shoulders and rib-case in relationship to the spine. But it also brings the arms into action in more than a supporting role as heretofore. Start by standing with feet about shoulder width apart. Be aware of the knees, and keep them very slightly bent and relaxed. Keeping your head and hips still, bring the hands up to the breasts and take the elbows backwards and close to the trunk. Now, keeping the left elbow back, reach forward with the right hand until the right shoulder swings forward a little, and the left elbow pulls back a bit more. Meanwhile, the head and hips should remain facing forward, so that the shoulders swing around the steady spine. Now swing the left hand forward and the right back, bring the right elbow back and down as the left was. Then alternate the arms reaching and pulling back. The movement can be done slowly but strongly, or fast and energetically.

 The exercise expresses giving and taking, like the lunge, but more forcefully. If you feel any aggression in the movement, let it be expressed. Like the last movement, this too may cause air to be pumped in and out of the lungs. Finish with the still meditation of the movement.

 11] This is more of a meditation than an exercise, but is important in mobilising inner feelings which lay behind movements. Stand in a comfortable balanced position with the hands in front of the chest, palms together and eyes closed. Imagine that as you breathe in the air is fanning a small glowing coal inside the chest. The incoming air makes the coal glow gently, and you breathe slowly and with awareness. This coal is just a symbol of the subtle pleasure sensations generated by slow purposeful inhalation. If you can be directly aware of this pleasure, dispense with the image of the coal. In either case, let the hands indicate the amount of this glow or pleasure. Let them do this by moving apart, so that if the pleasure is intense the hands reach wide. As you exhale and the glow fades, let the hands come together. But if there is little felt, then the hands remain unopened. When you begin this meditation, do not be in a hurry to open the hands to let the feeling of pleasure radiate out. In fact, let the hands be as spontaneous in expressing what you feel as you can. It may be that your hands thereby move a great deal, or very little. At the end of this moving meditation, there is no need to repeat it as a still meditation.

 12] These exercises, and the meditations accompanying them, may have introduced you to the idea of mobilising ones internal energy flow and ones attitudes or feelings as well as releasing tension and stiffness in the body. Yet physical tension is only partly to do with not flexing ones limbs and spine enough. Such terms as stiff-necked, heavy handed, rigid, and no backbone, although apparently referring to the body are actually describing character traits. Even if such character traits do not cause physical stiffness, to live with them is perhaps even worse than not being able touch ones toes or turn ones head. A great deal of bloodshed in the world arises out of people living in such narrow political or religious beliefs that they are ready to kill others who do not share them. That may be an extreme, but most of us have some areas of stiffness or pain in our soul. This is mentioned because this exercise, although completely physical, confronts many people with either the narrowness of some of their attitudes or the stiffness of their feelings.

 In this exercise we explore the use of sound. To make different sounds we need to move not only our throat, but also our trunk and even limbs in different ways. Sounds also evoke feelings and move or exercise them. Just as many of us do not move our body outside of certain restricted and habitual gestures and actions, so also our range of sounds may be quite small. So for several minutes explore making sounds. Start by taking a full breath and letting it out noisily with an AHHHH sound. Do this until you feel it resonating in your body and change to a strong EEEEEEEEEEE sound. Then try MMMMMMMAAAAAA.

 If you are doing this exercise for the first time, that is sufficient for one session. As your sound production improves though, and you begin to enjoy it, explore making all sorts of happy sounds; different sorts of laughter, proud, childish, funny, etc.; angry noises; animal and bird noises; sensual sounds; the sound of crying or sobbing; natural sounds such as wind, water, earthquakes; make the sounds of different languages and different situations such as a warriors chant, a mothers lullaby (without real words, just evocative sounds), a lover’s song, a hymn to Life, or even sounds about birth and death; and just plain nonsense noises. Don’t attempt to explore all these different types of sound at one session. Just choose one and explore it until you can feel yourself limbering up in it and getting past restricting feelings such as shyness or stupidness. Those are the walls of restriction.

 Because the above exercises are excellent preparation, coex can be practised directly after them. I am not suggesting they should always precede coex, simply that having done the movements the use of coex is an excellent finish. If used in this way, a period of rest or relaxation at the end of coex would be useful.

THE SENSE OF NONSENSE

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In an unpublished manuscript I was fortunate enough to be loaned, Dr. Caron Kent describes how some of his patients found healing through working with the self-regulatory forces in themselves. More interesting still in regard to what we are considering here, he also describes how he first made contact with the process of coex in himself. He says that he had been feeling unwell for some time, and as a doctor recognised his condition was more psychological than physical. He felt he needed to discover the latent resources of his own being and so decided to regularly give time to be with himself and learn. He did this by sitting at his typewriter and writing whatever came into his feelings or thoughts. At first such writings were disjointed, meaningless and appeared to be of no help to him. But he persisted, and into his spontaneous writing began to emerge pieces of information and insights into his nature which started the process of change and healing. He later refined his technique and used it to help others, as described in his book THE PUZZLED BODY – Vision Press.

 Although this differs from Jung’s approach in techniques used, nevertheless the underlying principle is exactly the same. Jung suggests fantasying with the hands, Caron Kent used his typewriter. People have used an enormous variety of approaches to experience coex, but basically what underlies each is that they have trusted their own nature and dared to allow seemingly irrational parts of themselves expression. Their belief in the resources of their own being was a powerful demand directed to their inner process to produce something helpful. Continuance in the face of initial meaningless made their demand an organising and disciplining force to draw sense out of the original jumbled expression of their unconscious. Whether we are attempting to define a new and more useful view of the world, to ease aches in our soul, or to transcend the limitations we find in our art or love, some aims in our life are big enough to need persistence in the face of obstacles.

 We can consider our body, with its variety of faculties, as our typewriter, or equipment extraordinary. I know that people may already have defined a working relationship with coex through their activity in such things as painting, music, dancing, etc. Nevertheless I still believe it is worthwhile learning to relate to coex directly through ourselves. This need not in any way detract from other techniques we use. In fact I believe it can only add to them, for they are all extensions of our basic bodily and psychological functions. Also, this direct approach links with some of the ways our internal processes work.

 Although it has already been quoted in an earlier book, it helps to be clear about this point of allowing physical fantasy if one understands the way completely unconscious inner events gradually emerge into consciousness. W.V. Caldwell, writing about the way Van Rhijn has defined the levels of consciousness says there are four stages:-

1] The deeply unconscious physiological process, such as cell generation and digestion. Problems which cannot move more fully into consciousness and so are held at this level, become psychosomatic pains or illness. This becomes clearer if we consider human life in relationship with other life forms. A plant for instance might have some sort of bacterial illness, but would not be able to bring that to awareness. In a sense many things which occur to us, although they are very real and definite, never become a part of our conscious life, but always remain in the ‘plant’ level. If they are to move from ‘deeply unconscious physiological process’ to becoming known consciously, there are stages such events go through.

2] As the physiological or psychobiological process moves nearer consciousness, its next level of expression is postural or gestural. Thus we may express our deepest hidden feelings in an unconscious body posture or movement. Not only our feelings express in this way, but also our physical tone or health shows in our gestures and movements. Even the plant droops if it needs water.

3] Next, when something moves from the gestural to the next stage of expression it becomes a dream or a symbol, which although it may not be understood, is now entering the arena of awareness.

4] At this stage, what had been deeply unconscious, then symbolised, now becomes known enough to be verbalised or thought about and analysed. If one had attempted to verbalise something in level two it would have been so far outside of consciousness as to defy description. Also, when looking at these levels or stages, they suggest that the dream process is a means by which deeper stages can be portrayed to awareness in order to make them known. Therefore, by working with the dream process via coex, we can tap deeper levels of awareness and make them known.

 An interesting example of these four stages and how someone can work through them is given by Reich. When the abdominal tensions of a patient were released the man found his body making spontaneous movements. These were allowed and the movements gradually led the man to take on the posture of an animal – he and Reich both felt it to be a fish. This puzzled both of them as to it meaning, but as the movements continued the man first realised he felt like a fish caught on a hook and line, then suddenly, that was how he felt in regard to his mother.

 As can be plainly seen, the first level is seen in the example as the man’s unconscious abdominal tensions, built into his physical structure. When these are loosened and considered by the mans conscious attention, and the spontaneous self-regulatory/dream process is allowed to function, level two manifests as movement and gesture. This moves to level three where the movements are recognised as a symbol – the fish. Then the fourth level, insight and understanding are achieved when the man realises the fish represents previously unconscious feelings he has about his mother. At this point he can verbalise and analyse. I believe that being aware of such facts enables us more easily to open ourselves to the process of self-regulation and trust what it produces.

GIVING THE URGE TO HEALTH THE RIGHT SETTING

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Apart from this mental set, the physical and emotional environment we choose to practice in is important too. When I had been seeking coex for some time, my very first experience of it came while I was sitting in a local church relaxing. As I dropped tension my head began to be pulled backwards in spontaneous movement. I was excited by this and attempted to allow what was happening. Even so the movement disappeared within moments. Much later in the company of friends interested in coex, and in a room we were using for its practice, the movement appeared again. This time it continued and fully released in a re-enactment of having my tonsils out.

 The setting and its social and emotional environment are extremely important. The movements and sound I experienced in re-enacting my tonsil operation would have been highly unacceptable and difficult to explain in the setting of a country church. In the company of my friends however, I could relax and know that whatever was produced in my practice would be sympathetically assessed.  Setting therefore includes more than simply the room we use or the friends we keep. This is brought out clearly by the experience of Joy whose doctor diagnosed a muscular illness because of spasms in her arm muscles. She had lived under the shadow of this ‘illness’ for some years before she attended a coex group and saw that such spasms were a natural attempt on the part of her self regulatory process to release tension.

 The aspect of setting that Joy confronted is of course an integral part of our own nature in some degree. As already said, an easy relationship with the unconscious is not something our culture teaches or encourages. Therefore, in teaching people how to learn the process I have been asked certain questions over and over. People ask: “Is it dangerous. If I let go of the hold I have on my emotions, will I lose control or go mad?”….”Is this against my religion? When I leave myself open like this, will evil forces take hold of me?”….”Isn’t it bad to express your negative emotions? Surely it’s healthier to keep them in myself and not load them onto other people.”

 Because such ideas and feelings can stand in the way of allowing ones own urge to health a reasonable area of expression, they need careful thought. Although I am going to look at each of the questions, it is important that if you find these questions in yourself you need to take them seriously. They are standards you have been living by. As such you are using them now to assess the safeness or usefulness of something new. Such standards may have been given to you ready formed by your family, your culture, or a group you belong to. Any such standards which you accept as valid will decide the directions you choose in life. Therefore you need to check them thoroughly to see if they are based on anxiety or observable facts.

 COEX CODE OF PRACTICE

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IS IT DANGEROUS – WILL I GO MAD…….There are dangers attached to any undertaking. Most of us drive a car or ride in motorised transport despite the fact that tens of thousands of human beings die annually in such transport. But when we learn to drive a car we recognise that the dangers attached to it are lessened by learning certain rules applying to it, such as driving on a particular side of the road. In the use of coex it is largely a natural process which has its own built-in safety factors. Nevertheless there are certain things which are important to its use – rules of the road so to speak. These are as follows:-

1] If you have any history of being hospitalised for mental illness you should not practice coex. Jung sums this up when he writes, “In this way (by letting things happen), a new attitude is created, an attitude which accepts the irrational and the unbelievable, simply because it is what is happening. THIS ATTITUDE WOULD BE POISON FOR A PERSON WHO HAS ALREADY BEEN OVERWHELMED BY THINGS THAT JUST HAPPEN…” 

2] Because one is dealing with the dream process, some of what arises will be in symbol form. Such symbols, whether in the form of the danced story or feeling oneself like an animal, need to be gently enquired into. They need to be understood in reference to ones everyday life, as did the man who acted out being a fish. If this is not done some degree of unclarity or lack of integration occurs. In terms of the four stages of consciousness, our symbol level has not unified with our verbal intellectual self.

 Despite observing hundreds of people use coex I have not seen anyone ‘go mad’. I have seen one woman who had an undeclared history of hospitalisation for a manic condition – in which she flew so high into feelings of idealism and what she called love, that all practical issues such as the care of her child were forgotten – again enter those feelings and need the help of tablets to bring her down to earth once more. In her case coex had not caused her condition, it had only triggered it into operation again, as did other events in her life.

 What coex does do often though, is to bring people to a completely new and more relaxed relationship with their unconscious. People who had been afraid of their unconscious rising up and swallowing them in ‘madness’ learnt to meet it as a friend and ally. The irrational was seen not to be something crazy to guard against like an enemy within, but as a natural part of ones own being, also working for ones survival. A patient of Jung’s sent him the following letter describing her own feelings about this:-

 “Out of evil much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and hand in hand with that, by accepting reality – taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be – by doing all this, rare knowledge has come to me, and rare powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accept things, they overpower us in some way or another. Now this is not true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can define an attitude toward them. So now I intend playing the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow that are forever shifting, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to my idea!”

 IS IT AGAINST MY RELIGION…Commenting on the woman’s letter above, Jung writes; “We must never forget our historical premises. Only a little more than a thousand years ago we stumbled from the crudest beginnings of polytheism into the midst of a highly developed, oriental religion which lifted the imaginative minds of half-savages to a height which did not correspond to their degree of mental development. In order to keep to this height in some fashion or other, it was unavoidable that the sphere of the instincts should be thoroughly repressed. Therefore, religious practice and morality took on an outspokenly brutal, almost malicious, character. The repressed elements are naturally not developed, but vegetate further in the unconscious and in their original barbarism…….Only on the basis of such an attitude (as the woman’s acceptance of both sides of herself), which renounces nothing of the values won in the course of Christian development, but which, on the contrary, tries with Christian forbearance to accept the humblest things in oneself, will a higher level of consciousness and culture be possible. This attitude is religious in the truest sense, and therefore therapeutic, for all religions are therapies for the sorrows and disorders of the soul.”

 SHOULD I KEEP MY NEGATIVE FEELINGS IN…..Recent findings in regard to repressed emotions of grief or shock show how by holding back such emotions they can lead to serious illness such as cancer. Even ailments such as the common cold, which were once thought to be the result only of exposure to germs, are now known to also afflict us when our immune system is weakened by stress. When investigating why some people come through a period of stress such as bereavement in good health, and others develop serious illness, Dr. Peter Knapp, professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, came to the conclusion that, “The ones who stay healthy actively grieve. They think about what’s happened to them and gradually work it through. If you lock feelings away, it seems as if your body mourns for you by becoming sick.”

 I have met people who are convinced that if they express such feelings as anger, these negative emotions spread out into the world like an infection, and enter other peoples lives. Obviously, anything we express in word or deed in front of other people can influence them in some way. But what is usually overlooked is that repressed feelings are unconsciously influencing the way we deal with people anyway. I remember a young woman who used coex for the first time and expressed a lot of body movements and angry sounds. Afterwards she told me she had experienced the release of a lot of anger toward her younger sister. She then said, “I never understood before why I could never get close to my sister. Now it is so clear. I was so full of hidden anger I could never feel affection.” So coex practised in the right setting offers a safe and socially acceptable way of releasing emotions which can cause illness or difficult relationships if held inside.

 WILL COEX CURE ALL MY ILLS

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One should not think of using coex to replace the necessary skills of doctor, surgeon, psychiatrist or priest. It is a skill or tool we can use to enhance our life. Like any tool its uses are fairly specialised. A hammer is of no use to put a screw in properly. coex is useful mostly for people who already deal with their life reasonably successfully, but have particular tensions which need release, or who seek to further their creative ability and have a deeper experience of themselves. People who find it difficult to take responsibility for their own health in some degree, or find it foreign to think of their own life as something which can be improved and renovated like a house, need another approach. Taking these things into account, seeing it as a means of self help rather than a force outside oneself, coex has a place in society. Thousands of people feel an urge to transcend their present life situation. Doctors and therapists have neither the time nor the technique to deal with thousands of people at a time. Yet our present social climate screams out for forces of regeneration and positive change. If we cannot find means by which each person can take up this work themselves, using their own initiative and skill in connection with their own natural resources, then the future looks bleak. If we depend only on professional bodies and individuals, our turn may never come.

 Often there is no ready made answer to what we feel a need for in our life, we have to wrestle it out with ourselves, sculpt it out of our own nature. Perhaps others can support us in this, but it is still our work, our journey. Similarly, the answer to our world tension is still in the forming – and it is we who are forming it. For myself I often wonder how Faraday felt as he watched the laws of electricity reveal themselves in his experiments. What was in the heart of Stephenson when he was able to demonstrate the laws of steam? I believe that each of us, as we watch the unfoldment of one of the great forces of nature at work in us share something as fundamental and life changing as the discovery of magnetism or steam. Magnets in their everyday use now give us direction in the compass, electricity in the dynamo and sound in the loudspeaker. What – explored, researched and used – will this law of human potential breaking into consciousness lead to?

Mind and Movement 6 – The Dream and Coex

In general, and even from medical and psychological viewpoints, there is a blind spot in regard to the dream process and the action I have outlined under the name of coex. Because of the blind spot there is very little ‘trust’ in the ability of our organism to heal itself, to solve its own problems, or to act creatively outside the conscious rational mind. During the time my wife and I worked for The Daily Mail as dream interpreters, we collected thou­sands of dreams. One of the things which struck us as we studied the dreams was how few of them arrived at solu­tions to difficulties arising in the dream. Considering the almost awesome problem solving faculties of the uncon­scious this suggests we are culturally untrained in, or out of touch with, our own potential in this area.

Working as a psychotherapist for many years, using coex as the basis for my work, I observed how many ther­apists leave no room for the clients internal process and creativity to be expressed. It was during these years I realised first about the blind spot people have to their own possibilities. This is very clearly stated by S.M. Chrem in his thesis, The Role of Energy In The Psychotherapeutic Pro­cess. He says:

 It seems to us that although the body therapies described above, claim to practise organismic self-regulating tech­niques, all of them have highly developed structures in their therapeutic approaches. The least structured ap­proaches in which the process of self-regulation is much more respected are best exemplified by the work of David Boadella and Tony Crisp. Although they have a wide range of techniques to apply when necessary the client plays the most active role. These therapists trust in the self-regulative process and follow the client, waiting for the development of his process. This attitude serves as a model for the client, who soon starts to trust in his own internal spontaneity and the creativity of his un­conscious. With the arousal and amplification of the involuntary movements, gestures symbols or words, spontaneous activity is integrated with consciousness, will and analytic power. The therapist who applies the self regulative approach establishes contact with the client and accepts him as he is.

Lastly, I would like to briefly mention an intense ex­perience which I lived through within the therapeutic context of my training course in Bioenergetics led by David Boadella and Helen Davis. In this experience I could feel how physical, emotional and mental aspects reflect and influence each other, functioning as a whole.

It was in a workshop run by Tony Crisp. I was work­ing on a dream I had had many times in the previous two years. During this work, not only did I experience the energy flowing in my body, from my head down to the tip of my toes, as a pleasurable and relaxed sensa­tion, but I also felt a sensation of freedom during the process. My movements were easy and coordinated. I experienced these movements as a dance. I felt that the energy flowing through my body directed my move­ments. I began to express different sounds and to laugh noisily. I was truly happy. I had awareness of my inner potential. I had a clear, complete and vivid image of my body and there came to my mind flashes of scenes that I had lived in different moments of my life.

I felt that the good rapport that I had with the ther­apist was very important for me to express some parts of my being which had been buried for a long time. I felt deep gratitude to Tony who accompanied me and allowed me to go through this process of self discovery.

For me this experience was very significant from the therapeutic point of view. It gave me a great confidence in the self-regulative process for my body and simul­taneously provoked a change in my mental attitude. That is, I was more open to feeling and sensations as well as flexible and adaptable to different situations.

Moving into the Dream

If a dream is an expression of the same process we meet in coex, then it is clear that if we approach a dream we are already confronting deep and spontaneous activities of our inner being. In 1985 I helped a woman, Marilyn, to use coex in regard to the pain and anxiety she was experiencing about her impending divorce. Marilyn had dreamt of see­ing a dinosaur standing in her path, devouring all who approached it. The dream was a part of her own self-regulatory process which was easily available to work with. So we explored it by having Marilyn find a body posture and movements which for her expressed the feel­ing of the dinosaur. By doing this we gave more attention or consciousness to what might otherwise have remained an apparently unimportant part of her experience – the dream.

In her experiment with posture and feelings, Marilyn did not sense anger or aggression, but she did feel like a predator which always had to TAKE to gain her own needs. This feeling immediately reminded her of her family life as a child. She remembered one time when she was sent shopping as a very young child of three or four, and as well as buying what she had been asked, she purchased some sweets for herself. When she arrived home she was treated as if she had done a terrible thing, and that was when she began to feel like a predator. It seemed to her as if her own needs were always gained at the expense of someone else.

With this awareness, she could now see that the dino­saur standing in her path clearly related to her present situ­ation. Bargaining to gain a realistic share of the house and property jointly owned by her husband and herself, felt to her as if she were gaining her needs at his expense, like a predator. That made her feel so awful, she was almost ready to allow her husband to take all, leaving her without a house or money to start again. Her awareness of where the feelings arose from however, and the unrealistic part they played in her life, allowed her to relate to the situation with less pain and more wisdom.

There were two main ways Marilyn gained insight from her dream. Firstly she took on the physical posture of the dinosaur – inasmuch as she could. From that starting point she allowed herself to spontaneously express body movements, etc. So she was giving the coex process a key starting point by holding the posture and thinking of the dream. Also, when she allowed spontaneous movement her unconscious was enabled to ‘comment’ on the dream, add to it, or continue it – and by continue I here mean bring it nearer to conscious understanding. One might, for instance, in intellectually considering the meaning of the dinosaur, think of it as an angry beast. When Marilyn explored her feelings and spontaneous expression of the creature, she found it not to be angry but all – devouring. the subtle difference between the two was important for her in enabling her to define what it portrayed of herself.

When Marilyn reached points where she could gain no further insight another approach was used. I asked her to imagine that she stepped into the body of the dinosaur and see what it ‘felt’ like. If this was unclear I suggested she swung between being herself and being the dinosaur, and compare the difference between the two states. In our dreams we often create people or objects which are important. The approach of standing in the very form of the person or thing, using the ‘open screen’ technique described in chapter two, and noting changes of feeling, is a way of grasping very subtle and basic qualities being expressed in the dream. By themselves the movements and feelings may not bring insight into the dream. What happened for Marilyn was that once she had become aware of the ‘pre­dator’ feeling it immediately recalled to mind her experience as a child. So in working in this way one must leave the doors of ones being open, so to speak, to allow these associated memories and realisations to emerge. Therefore it helps if the question is in the back of ones mind as to what connection the movements, words or arising feeling, have with past or present experience. Do not be content with a purely intellectual understanding or interpretation. When you find real insight into a dream it will be accom­panied by something of a thrill or feeling of satisfaction, and there will be little or no room for doubt that the dream has been unveiled.

 Do You Like Eating People?

While Hyone and I were working at the holistic summer community of Atsitsa on the Greek island of Skyros, we learnt another approach to dreams which has proved to be extremely useful. Dina Glouberman, director of the com­munity, and Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at Kingston Polytechnic, taught us her ‘creative visualisation’ approach to the self regulatory process of the unconscious. It is extremely straightforward and effective. When we applied it to dreams it added an extra helpfulness to gaining insight. It can be used while one is exploring the dream symbol as Marilyn was doing through body move­ment and posture, or simply through speech. In fact the method is to work with a partner or group who ask you questions based on the symbol on which you are working.

If Marilyn were working in this way, we might ask her such questions as:- Do you like eating people?.. . What does it feel like being a dinosaur?. . . Are you eating every­thing because you are hungry?.. . Are you a young dino­saur? The questions should not take Marilyn away from what she is exploring, but lead her into identification with her symbol. They need to be simple questions. The strength of Dina’s approach is in its ability to lead one into watch­ing how we respond to our dream image through the stimulus of the questions. For instance, when we first used the technique with a dream group I was leading at Atsitsa, I was exploring my own dream image of a house. The members of the group asked me such questions as: Are your doors open to let people in?. . . Are you light or dark inside?. . . Are you a new or old house?. . . Are you a house to live in or a business premises? I found that with most of the questions I had a clear feeling response to them. As the house I was quite sure, out of how I felt, as to whether I liked people in me or not, how old I was, and what my function was. Out of the replies I gave, a clearer insight into how I personally felt about people, about whether I was ‘open’ to people ‘entering’ my life, etc, was defined for me.

In teaching her technique Dina explained that it is easier for people to talk about the house/dog/dinosaur and their depth of feelings and reactions to life, than it is to respond to the same questions about themselves personally. There­fore, it is most helpful only to come back to what the questions reveal to us about ourselves after we have fairly fully explored the symbol. Also, if any particular question arouses feelings or more than usual response, it is helpful to stay around the topic of the question for some time. For instance, if a question about age evokes a strong response, then other question such as – Is it difficult being the age you are?. . . Do dinosaurs of your age have special prob­lems to face? – need to be asked.

If the questions are being asked while the person is ex­ploring spontaneous movement, they need to be slanted to what is happening as well. So one could ask – Show me how dinosaurs eat things. . . What is that movement expressing? etc.

Whatever way you choose to work with dreams using the action of coex, it is important to remember the differ­ences between dream action while asleep, and possible change while awake. Freud pointed out that we take feel­ings of guilt or fear into our dreams, and there repress what might otherwise be openly and explicitly expressed. His examples were the use of keys, locks, fingers, to represent sexual activity. In such cases sex was symbolised because of fear or guilt instead of being directly experi­enced in the dream. What we allow into our conscious personality is a highly edited version of what we feel and have impulse to do within ourselves. While the unexpur­gated version of ourselves is certainly more varied than our conscious edited edition, it is certainly not a monster, as suggested by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is, in fact, a more balanced and rounded self. What we repress is not only our sexuality or our pain. As is suggested by the ex­perience of Dr. Semmelweis already quoted, we might also repress our noble instincts of caring and empathy.

Each of us has habits regarding what we edit out of our behaviour and conscious life. Some people edit any urge toward violence for instance, while for some people violence is their profession. Whatever our habit, we carry it into our dream life. It might be that our habit is to edit any emotion. In such a case, even if our spouse dies, we may not allow ourselves to cry our grief while awake. Because the habit is carried into our dreams, we find it hard to release our feelings even there. So the attempt on the part of the dream process to bring psychological balance through self-regulatory release is stifled. Recent studies of the connection between repressed emotion and the incid­ence of cancer, suggest the seriousness of this type of editing.

The reason these points are mentioned is because uniting dream-work with coex enables us to over-ride some of our editing habits. While asleep it is difficult to notice where our habits are causing negative side effects or killing our creativity. While awake and allowing the conscious dreaming of coex, we still have our critical faculties alert enough to see where negative editing is taking place and re-evaluate the process. In my INSTANT DREAM BOOK, I mention how Roger faced his habit of feeling anxious about what ‘might’ happen in his life. Because of his an­xiety Roger avoided taking risks in regard to his work. Although he felt frustrated he stayed in a safe job because of this. In recognising his habit however, he began to be able to allow creative drives in himself which would re­quire him to take risks. Although it promised no regular wage, he started free lance work in which he could express some of his own ideas.

Marilyn’s dream work also illustrates how she was able to recognise her habitual response and change it into some­thing more satisfying. Her habitual response was to feel like a predator when it came to asking for what she needed. Her re-evaluation of this was to see herself as having been led to the predatory feelings by others in her childhood, and to recognise her present needs as valid. This enabled her to seek them with more confidence.

If it is repressed emotions or insight we are dealing with, because it is our habit to repress them we will confront this habit as we work on a dream which contains them in symbols. In other words, because we repress the emotion we neither express it in waking or dream it openly, but symbolise it instead. While working on the dream we may conic to the point of realising the symbol represents our feeling of grief, but we still do not feel the grief. Sonic- times this critical point of change is typified by feeling as if one can go no further, or that ‘nothing is happening’. Although one may have been working well on the dream before, the reason ‘nothing happens’ is because the habit of repression has come into play, blocking further fantasy or feeling. To overcome our habit and pass beyond this point we need to consciously decide to allow our feelings. This following dream and description of Margery L’s, shows how feelings may be locked in us. She says:- My husband died suddenly four months ago. We had been married for 31 years. Ever since his death I’ve been trying to remember his face but cannot, which I find very queer and upsetting. I look at his picture but can’t see him in my mind. However, last night, for the first time since his death I slept fairly well, and I dreamt of him. We were together in our back garden. Suddenly I spotted lots and lots of horrible slugs and started to kill them by treading them into the ground – there were also a lot crawling up the shed wall! ‘Don’t kill them’, said my husband, ‘everything has a right to life. They will probably do some good, and we mustn’t kill them.’ He looked at me so kindly and seemed so peaceful and happy. Then I woke up. Normally, in real life if he’d seen a slug in his garden he would have said, ‘Fetch the salt Marge, that’ll shift him!’

What did this dream mean? I was brave all the days and months following his death. But lately I have been crying a lot, because it has suddenly struck me that I’ll never see him again. But today I feel more at peace. Can you explain it?

 The slugs are Margery’s difficult feelings about her hus­band, which she has been vigorously killing. When she says she was ‘brave’, what she really means is that she was suppressing her feelings, which in the long run could have caused illness. The dream shows both her attitude of ‘killing’ the feelings, and also the change which allows her to cry and feel the resulting peace.

All the examples given of dreams show how a change can come about the way we view or deal with life through dreamwork. The three factors responsible for this appear to be:

1. Awareness of some aspect of ourselves is achieved. Through becoming aware of what reaction she had to gaining her needs, Marilyn could begin to avoid its nega­tive consequences.
2. Releasing what was suppressed. Margery could begin to sleep again and feel at peace because the self-regulatory action in her dream helped her to allow the suppressed emotions for her husband.
3. Integration of our personality with the life processes which form it. By opening his personality to the forces active in his dream, Chrem found a change which resulted in greater trust in his own inner process and a sense of greater wellbeing. The forces in the dream were accepted and integrated into his personality.

The Keyboard Condition

Learning to allow our Dream Creator freedom to express

The keyboard condition is something that enables us to enter the unconscious and our wider awareness. It is something we have to learn to get into the deeps of our Inner World/unconscious. To do it we need to imagine our body and mind is now like a keyboard and the keys of our body and mind are no longer fixed but are capable of even gentle touches playing the keys. This is a way to allow your huge self to be able to wake you up to a new world.

Whenever we dream all our voluntary muscles are paralysed. That is fine while we are dreaming, but if we become slightly awake or lucid we are often scared that we have lost control. Such fear of loss of control shows how out of touch with our unconscious or sleep self, so we fight for control. Yet our sleep or core self is what keeps us alive, and because of the often ridiculous things we tend to believe or live by, our core self has to regularly – whenever we sleep – takes full control to balance our life again. So we have two levels of will, our Awake Self Aware Will, and our our Life Will. The life will not only continue to beat your heart and keep you alive, it can express as spontaneous movements, and creates in our dreams all that happens while we enter our dream state. See You Are a Dual Being – Life’s Little Secrets – The Waking Lucid Dream – Waking Awareness Versus Unconscious – Jesse Watkins

We need to ‘hang loose’. So apart from attitudes, the first step of practice is to learn a form of relaxation in which our body has dropped unnecessary tension, and is like a keyboard ready to be played.

I find it helps if we create something of this feeling consciously, holding our body, our emotions, our sexuality, mind and memories as if they were keys upon which the inner dramatist can play. In a sense we are seeking to create a condition similar to sleep. As we fall asleep we let go of our control over what we think, what we do with our body, and what we fantasy. Our ‘I’, our decision making self has relaxed and left the stage free for the dream maker to create its realisations. So in approaching our Core we need to take on a similar relaxed state without actually going to sleep. Dreams are not as healing as allowing the dream process to work consciously, mostly because we do not consciously co-operate and agree with the dreams. It therefore does not integrate as fully with our waking self. See devil

Once when I was teaching this approach to a group of Quakers, a man assured me that if we gave our being so openly the devil would enter us and possess us. But such fears show that the ‘devil’ has already claimed the man, otherwise he would be secure in himself, but in fact he has given control to thoughts and opinions to fear.

Many people can easily hang loose, and so spontaneous waking dreams occurs freely. But in case this is not so, there are some things we can do to learn it. These are tools we can use which can help us define what it feels like to allow our body and mind to be loose enough for spontaneous expression. As such they need not be used once that is learnt.

1] This is a simple and enjoyable technique which gives a direct experience of spontaneous movement. You need to stand about a foot away from a wall, side on. Start with your right side. You are going to lift your right arm sideways, but because you are near the wall you will only manage to lift it part of the way. So when the back of your hand touches the wall, press it hard against the wall as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the arm. Using a reasonable amount of effort stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about thirty seconds. Then move so you face away from the wall, and with eyes closed relax your arm and be aware of what happens. Try it before reading on, and use the left arm afterwards.

What we have done is to attempt to make a movement. Because the wall prevented this, the body was not able to complete the movement you asked it to make. Therefore a muscular charge built up in the deltoid muscle. When you stepped away from the wall the arm, if relaxed, was then free to complete the movement. So possibly your arm rose from your side as if weightless, thus discharging its energy. Some people need several tries before they can find the right body feeling to allow the arm its movement. It is easy to prevent it moving because the impulse is quite a subtle one. The point of the exercise however, is to learn a relationship with oneself in which the subtle impulse can express. The movement the arm makes, and how it feels to experience an unwilled movement, is so similar to waking dreams, we are thus provided with an experimental experience of the real thing. Therefore it is helpful either to practice the technique until you can do it, or use it a number of times to establish your relationship with the feeling of it. This sense of allowing movement can then be used in coex itself. Of course use the left arm also.

2] For the next technique you need to work with a partner. One person needs to be the ‘subject’ and the other the ‘helper’. The subject can stand or lie down, and the helper should take their hands. The subject should close their eyes and be in a ‘hang loose’ feeling. The helper should give the subject a few moments to feel relaxed in the situation, then start slowly moving their arms in random movements. If there is noticeable tension or resistance to their arms being moved, the helper should attempt to help the subject be aware of such tensions or points of resistance. Sometimes the arms are so tense they will stay in any position they are placed. Then it is easy enough to point out to the subject how they are tensing their arms. Otherwise, perhaps the helper can manage to have the subject feel the areas where resistance occurs, and have them learn to go along with the movements with less effort. This is the aim of this technique. One is helping the subject feel what it is like to have their body moved by someone/something other than their own directions. In other word drop the massive controls we have over all aspects of our conscious life. As this is a learning process, this may need some practice.

In some cases it will be noticed if you are the helper, that the subject is trying to help you make the movements of the arms. If so, while still moving their arms in a random way, gradually lessen your direction and let them take the lead. If you do this slowly the person will feel you are still directing the movements of their arms. As this point is reached, take your hands away gently and encourage the subject to let their hands and arms explore their own movements. This is a gentle and effective way for some people to be led into the experience of inner directed movement. Once they are making their own movements, with the attitude that ‘you’ are doing it, they have effectively learnt how to allow spontaneous fantasy to take place.

In her article on waking dreaming that appeared in Harpers and Queen, Leslie Kenton describes a woman’s experience who was led into this by the above method. She says, “I watched one woman who was using the technique for the first time, lie quietly breathing. She then found that her hands began to move gently as though she was exploring the texture and quality of space near her body. Crisp encouraged her to go with these fine movements.

Gradually they developed into larger stroking gestures in the air around her. Her imaging facilities came into play as the physical movements continued and she sensed that she was in what she later described as a kind of womb. But instead of being dark it was permeated with light, immensely safe and beautiful. Then gradually her torso and shoulders began to move as well until slowly she emerged from this extraordinary womb world into clear air and more light. She began to weep quietly, stunned by the power and the beauty of an experience which had come quite spontaneously from within her. When she later began to try and make sense of the imagery which accompanied the movements she realised that her own feeling sense [which until then she had not even been aware of] had created for her a physical expression of the particular life situation she was in at the moment. She was on the verge of a new beginning as far as her work was concerned, and had been feeling rather unsettled and anxious about it. She found this experience enormously helpful because it made her realise that the career changes she had planned had not been motivated by some capricious wish but were very much in line with the direction her deepest self was leading her. She also discovered that she has a feeling sense which she can experience for herself and that if she listens to it, it will express a summary of her life situation at any particular time or help her work through whatever blocks or tensions she experiences.” See Methods of Awakening – Arm Circling Meditation