2 ENERGY AND ARMOUR

Our feelings and our bodies are like water flowing into water. We learn to swim within the energies of the senses.
Tarthang Tulku, Kum Nye Relaxation


He who remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering elasticity of mind.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Life has energy.

Or rather, life is energy: moving, vibrating, seeking, pulsing. We may not be able to define life energy, but we all experience it in our own beings, and perceive it in other people: watching a fine dancer or mime or Tai Chi exponent, making love, meditating, expressing strong emotion, receiving or giving hand healing. Many people over the ages have given names to the life energy and its different forms - 'prana'. 'magnetic fluid', 'vital essence', 'chi', 'od', 'archeus', 'kundalini', and many more. Reich's name for it was Orgone, which he made up from words like 'orgasm' and 'organism'.

This life energy is the vitality of our being: when we are moved, this is what moves. Emotions are e-motions, movements out; they are not just in our minds, but in our bodies, in the charge of energy that builds up and. with luck, discharges; in the flooding of hormones, the surge of bodily fluids and electrical potential, expanding from deep within us towards the surface, or retreating into the caves of the abdomen, or flowing through and out via head and hands and legs and pelvis, shifting form easily between muscular or electrical tension, fluid, sound, movement sensation, emotion.

For example: I feel sorrow, but am inhibited about showing it. So as it 'rises' in me, maybe my throat contracts - I'm 'all choked up', mucus forms and my throat aches; my chin tightens and tucks in as part of the effort to restrict flow in my neck; maybe my fists tense, and transmit that 'holding' up my arms to my shoulders and throat - I'm 'keeping a grip on myself'.

If my grief starts to break through the holding, probably I'll first sigh, cough or groan, release what I'm 'swallowing down' in the form of sound or mucus. As a channel opens up, a sensation of softening and melting flows up the sides of my throat and jaw. Another person can actually watch my cheeks suffuse with fluid and colour, my face softening as the emotion ex-presses (pushes out) through my eyes in the form of tears, with the piercing sweetness of release. At the same time my hands will open, my shoulders come forward in a vulnerable 'giving' gesture as my chest heaves with sobs, my 'full heart melts'. As I surrender physically to my grief, my mind may fill with corresponding thoughts, memories and images.

Thoughts, emotions, sensations, changes in electrolytic fluid, muscle tension and hormone balance, flow of life energy: there is no point in saying that any one of these causes or comes before the others. They are different aspects of a single whole event in a single whole bodymind. We will focus on one or other of these aspects depending on what we are trying to find out or do.

Focusing on the play of life energy has the advantage of being fresh and uncompromised by our society's dubious assumptions about what feelings are. It gives the space to include many different aspects of the bodymind. It's a good starting point, but we don't want to give the impression that we think energy 'causes' thoughts. feelings or bodily changes. There is only the endless dance of transformation.

In fact we are all used to speaking about ourselves in energy-images. These metaphors are often very literal, as when we say we feel full of energy, or drained and empty; our head is whirling or stuffed up; we feel electric; someone else is magnetically attractive; we have itchy feet; we melt with desire.

If we look at the human being as an organism among other organisms, to see what it shares with the rest of life, from amoebae to elephants, then we will almost certainly notice the role of pulsation. Life is constantly expanding and shrinking, reaching out and pulling back in response to internal needs and to outside influences - the 'friendliness' or 'hostility' of the environment. These continuous wavelike vibrations are the organism's ongoing 'conversation' with the rest of the universe. In humans, one expression of this continuous pulsing is our heartbeat, sending oxygenated blood out to the extremities of the organism and bringing waste products back. Another, and particularly important for our purpose, is the breath.

Watch a small baby breathe, and you'll see how the whole of her body is involved, committed, swept up in the smooth wavelike expansion and contraction that reaches from top to toes. For the healthy baby there's no resistance, no avoidance of the involuntary breath-pulse; at the top of the out-breath the in-breath is born and the top of the in-breath turns out again, Yin from Yang and Yang from Yin, a constant exchange of polarities with the universe (Yin and Yang are ancient Chinese names for the two complementary poles of existence, the Active and the Receptive).

As we grow up and confront this difficult world, however, a voluntary element soon creeps into our breathing, a hesitation, a holding-back, which likewise affects our whole body from top to toes. In-breath and out-breath begin to separate from each other, to lose their seamless continuity, to become more shallow and jerky, without the generous graceful flow. We may develop a tendency to constantly hold our breath, never fully emptying our lungs or, contrariwise, to keep our lungs permanently half empty. And so we lose our basic grounding in the universe, our identification with it. We become separate, lost, lonely, anxious beings.

Why does this happen? If we breathe freely and fully, then we feel freely and fully. Open breathing washes emotion through and out into expression; we are unable to hide it, either from ourselves or from each other. Yet from a very early age, most of us experience a need to suppress some of our feelings.

This is because our environment - initially mainly the adults who are caring for us - does not support us in our feelings. They reject our neediness or tears or anger. They threaten us with punishment - including the withdrawal of love. Or they simply do not give the validation and care which our baby-self needs in order to cope with powerful feelings. This process can begin at birth or even sooner, as we shall see. It's no one's fault, generally speaking; all of us who are parents know how our own anxiety and pain and practical problems interfere with the sincere wish to nurture our children. But the effect is that children learn to hold back on feeling - by holding back on its expression - by holding back on breathing.

Don't worry if you are finding this difficult to follow: it is a theme to which we'll be coming back over and over again. But to make it a little more concrete, consider two examples. Imagine a baby who cries out as her natural way of expressing a need - hunger, cold, a desire for company - and no one comes. It will take a long time for this to sink in: she will cry and cry again, but eventually she will stop. She suppresses her crying by holding her breath - which holds back her grief and anger, not identified consciously as feelings, but implicit in the whole state of her body. Now imagine another baby who is picked up and manipulated by cold hands: not so much physically cold, but emotionally cold, uncaring. Babies feel these things, and there will be a reaction of shock, a gasp, like the way we gasp if we step into cold water. If this experience of cold touch is repeated often enough, then that gasp, that held breath, will become built in to that baby's body nature.

These are only examples from among many ways in which an unfriendly environment can interrupt the full, whole-body, involuntary pulsation of natural breathing. Muscles tense against it, first in the diaphragm, which is our primary breathing muscle (see Chapter 4), and then spreading into the chest, throat, back, belly, pelvis, arms and legs, face, head. The entire body is drawn into a battle against itself, against its own natural impulse to breathe and feel. In effect the energy 'splits'. turns back on itself and blocks its own natural movement; like Indian wrestling with ourselves.

Sometimes the battle is conscious - whenever we deliberately tighten our jaw, tense our belly, swallow down emotion. But the infant's basic holding-back against breathing quite soon becomes unconscious. If you think about it, this must happen: the purpose of the holding is precisely to stop us feeling our feelings, and this can only work if it stops us knowing what our feelings are. Emotions are bodily events; if they are blocked in the body, then they don't happen in the mind either. The fundamental holding acts as a pattern around which every later denial of feeling organises itself; we get very good at it indeed, artists and technicians of self-deception and self-denial.

Exercise 1
Take a moment now to check out how you are feeling and breathing. It's very likely that, while reading the above, you've tightened yourself up to resist the inward stirring these ideas create. So first put your attention in your belly and diaphragm - all around your navel. above and below. Is it gently rising and falling with your breath; or have you been holding it rigid? Are you able to deliberately relax it and let the tension flow out - perhaps with a sigh or a groan to help it along? Check out whether your chest, too, moves as you breathe - as part of a continuous wavelike flow with your belly. If not, you are probably holding your shoulders, hands, and/or jaw stiff. Try to let them go, and experience the feeling they have been holding on to. Allow yourself to breathe easily and fully; just watch where the holding is, if anywhere, and what thoughts cause an interruption to the flow. As you go on reading, try to come back periodically to a conscious awareness of your own breath and body state.

Blocked breathing is the essence of armouring: Reich's name for the state of chronic muscle tension and emotional holding-back by which almost all adults in our society are imprisoned. Along with the suppression of breathing goes the suppression of specific impulses - to cry, to yell, to laugh, to hit to reach out for love, to run away. The muscles are tightened to stop us e-moting. moving out, and if this tightening happens regularly enough it becomes a chronic, unconscious habit, built into the structure of our bodies - part of our sense of ourselves, as familiar as an old scar.

In fact, a lot of what we customarily identify as a person's 'self' is really their pattern of armouring: their high. tight shoulders, or stuck-out chest, or pulled-back jaw, or wide-open or narrowed-down eyes. 'Well, that's just the way I am,' they'll say. But in fact it's the way that person has become, by cutting off certain forms of self-expression and emphasising others.

Maybe one individual is constantly angry and aggressive, never letting herself feel soft, sad and small. Another is continuously polite and meek, censoring any assertiveness. As we shall see later, there are specific relationships between muscular armouring and emotional armouring: these cut-off emotions are locked into tense muscle patterns, locked in permanent, frozen battle with the suppressing impulses. They are imprisoned there like genies, bottled up in the rigid 'no' of our bodies. And, like genies, they can often be released by rubbing!

Our held-in feelings have power. When we liberate a feeling we can liberate not only the energy of the feeling itself, but also the split-off energy which has been devoted to holding it down. In doing this, we allow our breathing to open up, drawing on the infinite energy of the universe around us.

The 'Spastic I'
Unfortunately this empowering process has a frightening side to it. It also involves releasing the fear of consequences which made us shut down our feeling in the first place: the fear of adult anger or coldness or withdrawal, the fear of a dangerous universe. Even more, it means changing the whole basis of our identity - the sense of 'I' upon which our life is founded. Opening up can sometimes seem like a threat to our very survival.

As Freud pointed out, our sense of 'I' (he used the German Ich, though it was translated into English with the Latin word Ego) starts out in the body. As the infant grows, she begins to organise bodily sensations and impulses into a whole, to 'take command' of them and develop an image of 'me' - when she looks in the mirror she realises that this image is herself, that this is how other people see her. In a healthy and supportive situation, she can grow into a powerful, realistic capacity for self-management, based on a strong but relaxed sense of identity and wholeness.

Tragically, our culture doesn't generally let this process of self-management happen naturally in its own time and rhythm. Most children are fed and put to bed and toilet-trained to fit in with the needs and timetables of adults. They are often forced with threats to learn rigid control of processes like excretion which should be developing spontaneously. Small children literally cannot control their anal sphincters: the muscle-nerve connections aren't formed. So they must tense up the whole pelvic floor in a massive, straining effort to 'hold it in', a tension which easily becomes chronic, extending to the whole body and tightening the breath, so that the person 'holds themselves in' on every level.

Similarly, if our feeding is controlled by timetable, or if we are forced to eat food we don't like, then we 'swallow' an external regulation of our bodily processes. and have to swallow down our rage if we want to get fed at all. These are all examples of the way in which the whole business of attaining self- management in our own body, which can be a proud and joyful affirmation of autonomy, very easily gets entangled with patterns of denial and negative, so that our very sense of 'I' is bound up with bodily tension. Like boys at an old-fashioned public school, we learn to 'get a grip on ourselves'. and to identify with that grip. Feeling tense becomes part of our continuous background experience, so that full relaxation seems like a threat to our existence, as if we are going to melt and drain away completely.

Just as muscles are forced into chronic spasm in order to comply with external restrictions rather than inner self-regulation, so our 'I' develops a 'spastic', uncontrollably rigid emotional tone - a set of fixed attitudes towards the world and other people which we are unable to vary in response to changing circumstances. The 'I' becomes identical with the body armour.

'Armouring' is a good name for this process of physical and emotional rigidification. Muscle armour, like its medieval counterpart, is hard, stiff, restrictive, suffocating; also like iron armour, its original purpose was defence. We have no reason to feel guilty and inadequate about being armoured; on the contrary, it represents our skill and courage to survive in very difficult circumstances.

We have always done the best we can. making a rational decision to protect our vulnerable insides from an unsafe world - and. since we're still here. we have succeeded! But the price has been high in lost pleasure and potential. Now that we are bigger and stronger we have the option of melting our armour, re-experiencing our feelings in a safer way - and letting our soft pink insides out to play in the sunshine!

Of course, even now there isn't always sunshine; it isn't always safe or appropriate to be soft. People often get the idea that Reichian-type therapy will leave them vulnerable to whatever comes along. But the whole aim is to regain the power to choose, the power to be loving and open, or to scorch with righteous rage' or to close off totally for a while. Very few of us have access to the whole range of possible reactions.

Another way in which muscular armouring resembles its iron counterpart is that it tends to be arranged in segments: bands of tension that wrap horizontally round the body. constricting flow along the head-to-feet axis. If you imagine how a worm or snake moves, in wavy pulses, this gives a good image of the free unarmoured body. But if something pins the serpent down at one point in its length, the graceful undulation turns into jerking and thrashing.

This is like a human body becoming armoured in one segment: it can no longer expand and pulse in a smooth, expressive. unified way - expression becomes distorted and ugly, both physically and emotionally.

Most of us are armoured in more than one place. It's as if the snake is a child's wooden toy, split up into separate stiff lengths and able to bend only at the joints between the segments, in a parody of undulation. Having lost our sense of unity with the world through disjointed breathing, we lose our sense of internal unity through the disjointing effects of the armouring.

We'll look in much more detail later on at the segments and what they mean, but it's worth emphasising here that the specific details of armouring, as Reich described them or as we use them doing therapy - so many segments in such and such places - are rules of thumb rather than gospel truth. The human organism is immensely rich and complex, full of subtle channels, links, patterns and mirrorings, and each human individual is in many ways unique.

But the more each of us is armoured, the less freedom of expression we have, the less individuality and richness; and the more we tend to operate in a groove to correspond to the mechanical system of the segments. It's the armouring that has segments, not the person; and the process of therapy is precisely one of rediscovering our individual uniqueness.

Armouring and Illness
We've used the word 'healthy' once or twice to describe the state of natural, unarmoured openness. It's also the case that being armoured is the precondition for being ill in the medical sense. When energy can't flow freely through the body, we get areas that are over-charged, where energy 'sticks' and stagnates, and other areas that are under-charged, where energy can't get to at all. Over time, this sets up a chronic imbalance in the tissues and organs, which allows infection or functional disorder to take hold.

The sort of ailment which results is by no means random: our illnesses express, in vivid dumb-show, the issues around which we tense and close off. To pick some trivial examples, most people who have a cough are suppressing anger - if you pretend to cough, and then exaggerate it, you will find yourself roaring. Similarly, most colds have to do with unexpressed grief - the tears have to find some way out.

This is a tremendous over-simplification: every illness is the expression of a complex and longstanding set of issues. But we do see physical symptoms as the bodymind's attempt to resolve conflict, to break free from the constraints of the armouring. In Chapter 4 we shall look in more detail at the relationship between specific illnesses and specific forms of armouring.

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