Archive for June, 2010

Insted of a written blog this week I’m posting an audio broadcast which I recorded with my friend and fellow healer, Ryan Orrock (http://kristallleben.com).  In this first shared podcast we talk about emotions and the body. Specifically, we answer the following questions:

1. How is it that emotions get repressed and stored within the body?
2. What are the effects of this on the rest of your life?
3. How do you access and process these emotions to free these blocks?

Emotional Blocks in the Body

As children we were probably told “grow up”, “act your age” or “big boys don’t cry”, “stop fidgeting”, “sit still”.  We learn to suppress our natural vivacity, our aliveness and the expression of our emotions which are our true state of being and to become fixed and rigid in ourselves and in our relationship with the world.  Our natural state of being is to be free and to experience whatever is in each moment.  We exist only in the moment and it is in that Now, which Eckhart Tolle writes, about that we experience the divine.  Sadly as adults we are hardly ever in that state.  What stops us is usually our minds.  Our thoughts so often control and limit us.  This can be a by-product of a well developed mind, sadly.  For the most part, a Western education stresses and encourages thought processes based on binary logic (one of the basic principles of Western philosophy and science).

But there is a way that we can help ourselves to break out of this limiting logic trap of the mind.  If we observe children, we can learn so much.

Different Ways of Learning

Children often have instinctive understanding of language, maths and art.  Often this is suppressed because they aren’t learning in the (limiting) way that teachers and educators expect them to.  If they don’t conform to the prescribed model of learning they usually lose this intuitive way of understanding and it can take years to un-learn the learnt behaviour.  Let me give you an example.  My nephew is a naturally gifted mathematician and is highly intelligent.  When he was very young he had an internal computer in his head that could tell you almost instantly what day of the week any given date fell on – “27^th February 1971?” I would ask.  “Monday” we would flash back with unerring accuracy.  But when he went to school this type of calculation didn’t fit in with the taught model and over time he lost this impressive ability.

This indoctrination (which also of course serves some positive purposes too, I’m not wholly condemning it, simply observing that skills may get lost through the rigid enforcement of it) stultifies our creativity.  Most of us are at our most creative and most free when we are around 5 years old.  This is a time when we have developed sufficient motor and cognitive skills to express ourselves but have not yet had our freedom of expression stifled by the rigid imposition of a received form of wisdom.  How many of us have felt self-conscious about our artistic ability because what we created at school didn’t conform to what the teachers expected of us?  Learn from the children and un-learn the taught ways of what art is “meant to” look like and find your own unique, personal way of expressing yourself.  It doesn’t have to be with painting or drawing.  It may be making creations out of bits of old rubbish or knitting spaghetti into interesting shapes – the form is not important, what is the ability to express one self.

Move into Freedom

Children they are rarely still for more than a few minutes.  This is the natural state of the body if energy is flowing freely through it.  Most adults spend the majority of their time static – sat at a desk, passively watching television or just not feeling able to wriggle and writhe in a way their body may want to.  This is very true of any movement which has a sexual connotation.  As children we were probably told not to play with ourselves or to move our genitals in a provocative way. Sometimes our bodies want to move in this way and it’s wonderful to give yourself permission to do just that.  I’m not suggesting that you should thrust your hips at passers-by or on the tube but when you have space and privacy I encourage you to stop and feel into your body and allow it to move in any way it wants.

Doing this may provoke strong reactions or judgments, especially if you find yourself making pelvic thrusts or any motion which you may perceive as being sexual.  Try just to allow yourself to move as you wish and if the resistance is strong, allow that too.  Don’t make it wrong that you have an emotional response to this exercise.  Playing music will also help to get you into the space to allow freedom of movement and be aware that different types of music may provoke different emotional states and responses.  Again, just allow yourself to be exactly as you are in this as much as possible.

Dance is a wonderful form of self-expression which is for many people suppressed because they may feel self-conscious about how they dance.  Very young children dance and move without the limiting beliefs and judgements which most of us learn as we grow.  They have an innate sense of their own rhythm and know naturally how to move their bodies in ways that give them pleasure.

5 Rhythms is an excellent practice to allow you to explore the movement of your body without needing to learn the specific steps, style and rhythm that make up most dances.  There is no way to get 5 Rhythms “wrong”, it is simply a way of allowing the body to express itself through movement.  For more information about 5 Rhythms in London please visit http://www.acalltodance.com/

Free Flow of Emotion

But children have much more than an innate ability to learn and move in different ways to teach us.

Children have much freer access to their emotions than most adults.  If you watch a small child throw a temper tantrum, they will engage fully in the mood of the moment.  They allow themselves to go into their grief/sadness/anger/rage/joy/playfulness.  It is only as we grow that we learn that it’s not safe or not ok or not acceptable for us to feel the full range of our emotions.

Just as important as a baby’s ability to feel its emotions fully is to note that their emotions states never last long.  A child may be in a terrible temper tantrum mood in one moment and the next it will have stopped.  Possibly it’s become interested in something else or simply loses its attachment to that emotion state.  Emotions are waves or clouds that simply pass through us.  Babies inherently know this.  They allow the emotion to be felt fully (they do not naturally repress emotion) and once it is fully felt, it will pass through and be gone; forgotten by them.  This is also a healthy model for us as adults.  If we allow emotions to be fully felt they are not stored in the body and do not cause trauma or physical distress or illness later.  If we are in the same emotion, say anger or sadness, for more than a short time – by which I mean 5 or maybe 10 minutes – then the chances are that we are not truly in our emotion, we are in our story.  Our story is the baggage of our history that we carry around with us.  Our story is NOT the present, it’s our memory of the past and we bring it into the present through remembering it.  In this way we give the past disproportionate power over us.  Living in the moment and allowing the free flow of emotions to pass through our bodies enables us to be free and stops us from harming our bodies through blocking waves of emotion which need to be released.

Playing

Children love to play.  In fact everyone loves to play, it’s just that as adults we mostly forget that or think that we shouldn’t – it isn’t “grown up” enough.  My view is that we all need to play, to move our bodies and to relax into being ourselves.  This healthy playfulness can cover all aspects of our lives.  With the right attitude simple acts can become playful; try going downstairs by dancing down them or skipping every other one, then varying your rhythm.  Just because we do something many times a day doesn’t mean it has to become boring.  The opportunity for playfulness is all around us.  Even sex can lose its playfulness!  There is an innocence in our sexuality which we can explore if we give ourselves permission.

Things which we believe “ought to” be hard work, like learning lessons about how to be different in the world, can be made, developing our selves, etc., can be made playful.  The relationship workshops which I run with my partner work in this way.   There is an opportunity for deep learning and profound growth and change in the work we present but also joy and laughter.  Don’t make things hard work if they don’t have to be – and actually they rarely truly need to be as hard as we make them.  The whole universe is Shiva’s playground – so go out and enjoy it!

Breath of Life

My last point about the natural beauty of babies and young children is about breathing.  Most adults do not allow the full range of their breath.  They breathe into the chest unaware that the breath can extend into the belly.  This type of deeper breathing has many benefits (see my blog of 12^th June) but most of us don’t allow ourselves to breathe the full range of our breath.

If we watch babies they breathe deeply.  Their soft bellies fill with air as they inhale and become protruded, round, soft and full.  This is the natural breath.  Follow the example of babies and breathe more deeply.  It’s wonderfully liberating and invigorating.

So next time you see and baby or young child, just see what it can teach you and maybe you might like to try un-learning some of the less helpful things that you’ve grown up with and re-learning some more natural ways of being in our bodies and with ourselves so that we can live more fully expressed in each moment.

Following on from my earlier blog on the feminine belly, here are some further thoughts expanding on this (see my blog 24th April 2010 “Love Her Belly!”).

Men & their Bellies
The masculine belly also needs to be fully expressed. Constriction of the musculature around the navel and at the top of the pelvis is the cause of the pot belly which so many men sport these days. If you breathe fully into the belly and soften the muscles, the shape of the belly will change (sorry guys, this isn’t a cure for drinking too much beer or eating too much, but it’ll help you redevelop a healthier shape for your stomach)as well as reconnect you with some energies in your lower chakras which you’ve probably been blocking.

The constricted belly is also another sign of the disconnection between man and nature. Western philosophy has stressed the important of logic and of the mind. Most of what we cherish in the Western world is a product of either the mind or the hands. This focus on the upper parts of the body raises the energetic centre of gravity of the body. Whilst this has some obvious benefits, the downside is that this raising of the centre of gravity disconnects us from our lower body. The effects of this are disastrous. It encourages a disconnection from our sex and sexuality (as discussed previously – see blog of 23rd April “Love Her Belly!”), a disconnection between head and belly/genitals and between heart and genitals/sex. This disconnect between heart and genitals is responsible for much of the distorted imagery of sexuality that we hold in our society, which tends to objectify sex and especially women in a sexual context. If our sexuality is expressed in connection with our heart, there can be no objectification. With this connection re-established much of the abuse and disrespect which our society experiences would cease. This is one reason that I am so passionate about this work . I believe that in doing our own sexual healing, we not only heal our own wounds but also the wounds around sexuality of the collective unconscious.

The Importance of Grounding
This societal focus on the mind and hands also disconnects us from our feet. This leads to a lack of grounding. Many people in the “spiritual” community can tend to be very much up and out of their bodies a lot of the time. They can tend to give attention to the spiritual but not the temporal. We exist in our bodies. A philosophy which tends to deny this, as many Eastern philosophies do by encouraging us to transcend the body, denies an essential part of our humanity. We may be “spiritual beings having a human experience” – but a big part of that experience is about being in our bodies. Any denial of this creates an unhealthy disconnect between mind and body. This is what Ken Wilbur refers to as the Centaur stage. The centaur is the mythical beast part horse, part man. We can often operate as two different entities – spiritual and physical, ignoring the needs of one or the other. But body and spirit both have needs and ignoring them will lead eventually to one form of existential crisis or another.

Man & Nature
One of the more drastic consequences of this identification with the mind and upper body is that we lose our sense of groundedness. This is not only unhealthy for ourselves but also for our environment at large. Not feeling our connection with the earth disconnects us from our feet, our roots and ultimately from nature itself. Maybe this has been exacerbated in part by the Judaeo-Christian philosophy as expressed in Genesis: “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”” This sense of having “dominion over” the other animals seems to set man “above” the animals. As soon as you create a two tiered structure you create a “superior” and an “inferior”. This sense of superiority can so easily lead to an objectification of that which is held to be inferior.

So, I encourage you all to bring your awareness down into our bodies, reconnect to your lower chakras, to your feet and to the earth itself, which ultimately supports us all, both physically and nutritionally. In the end even man made things come from the earth. Plastics are made from hydrocarbons which use oil based chemicals which come from plant matter millions of years old. Apart from the odd lump of meteorite there is nothing on the earth which is not from the earth. Anything which thus disconnects us from our sense of connection to it disconnects us from ourselves at a very core level.

A Simple Exercise
Stand with your feet about 8-10 inches apart. Allow your knees to soften and gently bend slightly. Make sure your feet are parallel to one another and bring your weight forward a little so that without lifting your heels off the floor, you are putting most of your weight on the balls of your feet. Now slowly and softly bend the knees and then straighten half a dozen times.

As you do this, breathing softly through an open mouth, breathing down into your belly, then lower down – into your genitals and finally breathe down into your feet and into the earth beneath you. Feel a sense of your connectedness to the earth, imagine your centre of gravity dropping lower in your body so that you are really present, grounded and have a “weightiness” that feels solid and sturdy.

Doing this exercise regularly or when you feel “light-headed” or stressed will help to bring you back down and give you a feeling of security and solidity which is much needed to balance the spiritual. Only once we have a strong sense of our physical self and a knowing that we are grounded in this earth can we truly experience in a full and healthy way the delights of the spiritual.