It comes out of the Freudian roots of Reichian therapy, and it is still possible to understand what we do as a form of psychoanalysis - though a very mutated form. Our concern is still with the unconscious memories of childhood traumas and the unconscious structures of defence which they have created. The role of breathing in Reichian work is, in one way, very similar to the role of free association in classical analysis, the analyst says just say whatever comes up' and watches the blocks to this process, while the Reichian says just breathe freely' and watches the blocks to this process.

Within the range of psychotherapies, however, we would identify at least as strongly with the cluster of styles and practices known as 'humanistic psychology'. Some of the differences between this and classical psychoanalysis are an emphasis on the client's own responsibility and empowerment; an attitude of 'whatever works' rather than strictly defined techniques; and a focus on the 'here-and-now' rather than on past history. This last theme is identified most often with Fritz Perls' Gestalt Therapy: it is very much a position we share - that there will always be more to uncover about the past, always more old pain to 'get out', and that the real healing comes from letting go of the past and moving on.

The influences here work both ways. The whole of humanistic psychology has been very much influenced by Reich's work, so that in a sense our fusion of the two represents 'what Reich might have done if he had lived into the 1980s'. Or so we would like to think! In practice, Reich was very much committed to the idea of the therapist-as-expert, and even believed that only medical doctors should give therapy. In any case, the influence is strong; Fritz Perls, in particular, derived more of his ideas than are generally realised from Reich's work - and we in turn use several of Perls' techniques.

This 'here-and-now' emphasis is the mental and verbal expression of what we have described as the theme of incarnation. But incarnation, of course, means 'coming to be in the flesh', and it is through bodywork that a person can most strongly confront, and change, their resistance to being here and now, can make a new commitment to facing and resolving the problems of life. Although we may quite often not touch a person during a therapy session, or even directly engage with their bodylife, it is always a crucial foundation to the work we do. We feel that purely verbal therapies are handicapped in facilitating deep change.

There are many forms of bodywork available these days, and although Reich was the first person to link bodywork into psychotherapy many people have independently since made the same breakthrough. There are also several schools of bodywork directly descended from Reich's work apart from our own - historically speaking they are our cousins. These schools often refer to themselves, or are referred to by others, as 'neo-Reichian'. We'd like to say a little bit about two of these: Bioenergetics and Postural Integration.

Bioenergetics, developed by Alexander Lowen (a therapist of immense wisdom and love who studied with and received therapy from Reich), is in some ways very close to our own work. Some important differences are that Bioenergetics focuses more on a standing, 'vertically grounded' position rather than a lying down, 'horizontally grounded' one, and that it works more with postures and exercises than with direct touch. Both of these features put an emphasis on qualities of independence, assertiveness and control, rather than on surrender and acceptance - a different route to the same goal.

Postural Integration is a deep restructuring of the body's connective tissue which surrounds each muscle and muscle group: it argues that until the connective tissue is made supple and flexible it is not physically possible for muscles to relax and lengthen. Postural Integration is profoundly influenced by Reichian ways of seeing, and emphasises the role of the breath and of armouring.

A big difference between our own work and Postural Integration - and even more so with Rolfing, another form of deep massage restructuring - is that we try very hard to avoid a concept of how someone should be: to avoid offering a model, either implicit or explicit- of how a person ought to breathe, ought to stand, ought to move. In practice, of course, the difference is only one of emphasis; we do have a very strong sense of the difference between health and unhealth, while any good practitioner respects the uniqueness of each individual.

There is, however, a big difference between the programmatic approach of an essentially remedial system like Postural Integration, and our own work's focus on opening up to our own core, to our innate capacity for growth and healing. This is the bodywork level of what becomes on other levels a stress on the unconscious wisdom of the individual, and its capacity to find the right path if our ego 'gets out of the way'.

What in practice happens, in the course of therapy - what has happened many times to each of us - is that we begin to experience an inner sense of 'not being right' in our bodies. We sense a need to be helped in expanding, lengthening, straightening, softening. This, it seems to us, is the point at which it is fruitful to find a remedial practitioner of one sort or another, the point at which our bodymind is ready and able to accept and use this new way of holding ourselves, rather than immediately 'snapping back' into the old shape. Without emotional change, physical change won't stick; equally, without physical change emotional change won't stick.

We have discovered some forms of 'remedial' work which are tremendously gentle and subtle in style, encouraging and allowing growth rather than pushing the individual. The Alexander Technique is a non-invasive approach to opening us out into a more natural and relaxed posture, an effortless way of being in the world; in many ways it seems the perfect complement to Reichian work, approaching the same goals from the opposite direction. It may well be that Alexander practitioners also have something to learn from a therapy which involves emotional release. Tai Ch'i, though not a therapy (and indeed the Alexander Technique doesn't see itself as a therapy), is another gentle and enormously powerful way of aligning us with subtle energy flows, teaching us to make less and less effort to achieve better and better results. And the Feldenkrais Method seems to be a third, independent style of working with the same principles of non-effort, not-doing, going with the flow.

If we feel slightly cautious about remedial bodywork which in some of its forms can simply introduce a whole new lot of tensions to cover up and mask the original ones, then we feel a lot more dubious about methods of 'remedial mindwork'. By this we mean all the vast range of therapies and 'positive thinking' techniques which aim to alter our thoughts and behaviour to match a conscious ideal.

The most obvious example of this is 'behaviour modification', a set of tricks and techniques which can be highly effective in removing symptoms like phobias, compulsions, blushing, and so on. Certainly, such methods are a lot less harmful than alternatives like drugging or ECT, but we are convinced that what is going on here is masking, a suppression of symptoms rather than working with the problem which those symptoms express. Just as allopathic medicine, by suppressing the symptoms of a deep problem, make it harder and harder for the body to heal itself, so behaviour modification techniques can make it harder and harder for real emotional healing to take place.

There are other versions of behaviour modification with a very different image and appearance; these work with affirmations, with visualisation, with positive thinking. Most of these techniques assert that 'we create our own reality'.

There is very deep truth in this statement, but there is also often a very superficial illusion. We can create our own reality; we can identify and let go of the negative 'scripts' and assumptions through which we constantly recreate our own suffering. But we can also impose a layer of illusion on top of an inner negativity, a quite false and unlived positivity which is the mental equivalent of a new layer of physical tensions masking the original problem.

What all these systems have in common is a tinkerer's approach to the human unconscious, seeing it as a box of tricks where one has only to press the right button, to find the right switch, in order to achieve the desired goal. The bodymind unconscious is the source of our wisdom and the source of our life; physical or emotional symptoms of dis-ease are messages that our conscious behaviour is out of balance, and that we need to return to the source - not to find some simple and effortless way of pretending to feel better.

We are not saying, of course, that all work with affirmations and positive visualisation is damaging. In fact, we use these techniques a lot ourselves. But what is vital is to check out our response to the new message on all levels; never to suppress an inner resistance or denial, but to give it all the space it needs to express and discharge itself. As with remedial bodywork, such techniques are only healing when the emotional space exists to make use of them.

The idea of space seems to come up over and over again in our work: the need to create and allow a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual spaciousness in which we can let things be, let ourselves be, rather than trying to tinker all the time. The need for real change, both in ourselves and in the world, can then flower out of space and quietness.

Apart from the specifically 'neo-Reichian' approaches, one form of growth work with which we feel a special connection is Rebirthing, or 'conscious connected breathing', which is centred on a simple and powerful bodily technique: encouraging clients to breathe continuously in and out with no break between breaths, focusing high in the chest, and keeping breathing no matter what feelings and thoughts come up. This is an amazingly powerful technique, highly effective in many ways in releasing blocks and coming through to joyous, streaming sensations and spacious attitudes.

Rebirthers combine conscious connected breathing with a quite elaborate set of ideas about which we are less enthusiastic, and which seem in many ways quite separate from the breathing technique itself. It is as if Rebirthing has become a sort of grab-bag of whatever notions and methods its founders and developers have come across, simply throwing them all together rather than incorporating new ideas around the central theme. The breathing technique itself, however, is very valuable, and we sometimes incorporate it into our own work. It brings people into contact with their core resistances very quickly, and also into contact with their of health. In fact it is a way of breathing which often happens spontaneously, a deeply natural way of releasing trauma that one can often see in small babies and in animals. Our own daughter 'cleared' the effects of her birth by repeatedly Rebirthing herself in the first months of life, and still goes back to this breathing in times of stress and illness.

We would also like to mention Polarity Therapy, an approach based on Indian Ayurvedic medicine which combines bodywork, energy balancing, nutrition and psychotherapy in a complex and powerful synthesis. From our own experience of receiving Polarity sessions, it is working with the same body energy as Reichian therapy - though there are differences in how this energy is understood.

In relating our own approach to other healing and therapeutic techniques we find that in some cases we can pick up and use elements of other approaches, adapting them to our own needs. In other cases a healing system feels more self-contained, as if one either has to work within that worldview or leave it be - thus we might recommend a client to go off and work with another practitioner, either temporarily or indefinitely.

To some extent we are increasingly moving away from the 'Reichian' label as our work while still in tune with Reich's essential vision of the world, becomes less and less like anything he himself did. We have to take on, as well, the fact that Reich himself came to despair of the effectiveness of individual therapy, saying that a twisted tree cannot be straightened, and that the only hope was to work with infants and with the orgone energy systems of the atmosphere.

It is true that a twisted tree cannot be straightened; it is true also that a human being can never have their past experiences erased, nor the imprint of those experiences on their bodymind. But this does not strike us as a cause for despair. Sometimes we feel like despairing - as must everyone who has any sensitivity to what is happening in the world. But even a twisted tree can thrive and blossom, can take joy and heart in its own strength and survival, and can send forth seedlings with the chance of growing straighter and more joyfully still. This assumes that straightness is in the nature of the tree, and maybe humans are more like hawthorns, whose grace is in their twistedness as it reflects the elemental forces which have shaped them.

Individual therapy and healing, as well as having an intrinsic value, are contributions to the great work of healing our planet, and healing our relationship with our planet. How can we free our energies enough to work effectively at this daunting project?

This book constitutes one possible answer to that question. A part of dealing with our despair about the planet's future, as Joanna Macy has argued, is to face that despair, to reach down into the grief and fear, to reach through to the underlying wellsprings of creative action. There are profound connections between our feelings about the planet and our feelings about our individual history. If we are sensitive to the poisoning of the biosphere, is this because it resonates with the poisoning of our own feelings and energy? If we fear explosion and destruction, is this connected with fear of our own repressed anger and excitement?

Of course, there are real objective threats, and it is precisely in order to be able to face them that we need to look at our own material. In fact, we can even understand the great arsenals of potential annihilation as themselves the result of armouring, of repression - human orgasmic energy, with its secondary violence and hatefulness, all exported and projected into The Bomb, because we cannot acknowledge and befriend these forces within ourselves.

Thus growth work can be a force for good in the wider world, as well as in the individual interaction of client and therapist But it can also be a force for evil. There are many techniques discovered or rediscovered by figures in the 'growth movement' which are powerfully effective in changing people's attitudes and behaviour, but which are in themselves value-free, equally effective in producing almost any sort of change. The transference relationship can become discipleship; the crisis and surrender which can be profoundly healing can also be the collapse and self-loss of brainwashing.

Many therapies, and not just the dramatic cultish ones, are devoted to brainwashing. They see their role as one of 'normalisation', turning their clients and patients back into ordinary, passive members of society who will then play by the accepted rules, even if those rules are destructive to life and creativity.

With any growth technique it is right and sensible to ask: What is your vision? How do you see human beings, and their place in nature? What sort of society do you want to live in, and how do you want to move towards it? A large number of growth practitioners, it seems, are unable or unwilling to answer these fundamental questions. In this book. as well as trying to share our techniques and insights, we have attempted to offer our answers.

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