In the last chapter we saw that what Freud (or his translators) called the Ego can be understood as 'the grip we get on ourselves', the self-image which knits together bodily impulses and sensations into a whole. In practice we do this by rejecting a whole crowd of impulses as 'not really me', thus making these feelings unconscious. This is what happens mentally; the bodily parallel is that we take on a pattern of chronic tension which is constantly preventing certain movements and expressions - they 'just don't feel natural'. The 'spastic I', with its terror of letting go, is identical with the spastic musculature, unable to let go because the holding-on isn't even conscious.

But the 'I' doesn't have to be like this - or we would be in a real mess. It is possible to have a sense of self that is relaxed, flexible, open to change and spontaneity, able to surrender to our own impulses and to the reality of the world around us.

Any sort of self-awareness and intention is going to carry muscle tone - the difference between a limp, flaccid arm, and one which is relaxed but energised and ready for action. However, if we keep ourselves permanently ready for action, we tend to lose the capacity to relax; this is what is called a chronic anxiety state, or stress. It produces a rigid, inflexible body, and an 'I' to match.

So what makes possible a relaxed 'I', a subtle, flexible, pulsating bodymind? The keyword is 'surrender': not to anyone or anything else, but to ourselves.

For some people the idea of surrender to ourselves, to our own feelings, will make immediate sense. For others it needs more explanation: it involves one of the central ways in which therapy is different from everyday ways of being in our society - one of therapy's radical aspects.

If it's raining outside, we don't generally say - or not at least without conscious childishness - 'But it mustn't rain any more, it's been raining all day and I don't want it to!' However, people constantly take this sort of attitude towards their emotions: 'I can't go on crying like this'; 'I've no right to feel so angry'; 'I must stop being frightened'.

We suggest that your feelings are like the weather: there's no sense in arguing with them.

If I am in a state of sorrow, for instance, then it makes no difference how 'good' or 'bad' the reasons are. The sorrow is there, a unitary bodymind state, woven of ideas, emotions, physiological changes, energy flows. I can't expunge it by an act of will. All I can do is stop myself expressing it, and perhaps blank out my consciousness of it. What this ensures is that my sorrow will continue - forever, quite possibly; locked up in the muscles I've tensed to stop myself sobbing and weeping; locked up in my unconscious mind. It won't simply go away.

The paradox is that feelings change through and in their expression. It's by opening to my sorrow, or anger, or fear, or whatever, by truly accepting that this is, for now, my reality, that I am able to move beyond it. To complete themselves, feelings generally have to pass through consciousness and out again: it seems to be the only exit.

We experience this extraordinary miracle over and over again: just by surrendering to our feelings, we see them change. The trap that seemed inescapable, the wound that seemed unhealable, the dilemma that seemed insoluble - suddenly they are different - smaller, softer and more malleable; because our whole bodymind is softer and more flexible in its approach to the world.

Surrendering to our feelings is not about giving in to difficulties, but about liberating our energies to confront them in whatever way is appropriate. To face the world we need to face ourselves, as we are rather than as we would like to be. Neither is this to say that we should switch off our intelligence. We have to acknowledge sometimes that our emotional reaction is over the top, irrational, that we are responding to old memories and not to present facts. But this acknowledgement provides the context in which we can effectively let go to the feelings and thus let go of them - knowing them for what they are.

Emotions always have a rational basis. Fear is the bodymind's shrinking away from real threat; anger is the mobilisation to blast away whatever blocks our creative expression - nature's Dynorod! Often, though, this rational basis is in the past not the present: we are responding in ways that were appropriate for vulnerable children, but are no longer appropriate for adults with a potential for strong and independent action.

So it is often helpful to have a safe space in which we can express our feelings away from the people who may have sparked them off: for instance, a therapy session where we can beat up a cushion rather than our lover. At other times, though, the appropriate form of discharge is in real life action, by getting angry with whoever is oppressing us and making them stop.

We can use our heads, and other people's, to work out which sort of situation is which, to disentangle the mixture of past and present which is usually involved. We can deal with the Social Security much more effectively if we aren't seeing them as our mother, giving or withholding vital nourishment! Often it's good to try hitting the cushion first and see what rational here-and-now core of feeling is left afterwards.

The key point is that emotions are e-motions, movements out, their natural function is precisely to clear what stops us moving on. Feelings are value-neutral, neither good nor bad, simply there. It's not our feelings that cause us trouble, but our feelings about feelings, our shame, embarrassment, denial - our resistance.

'Resistance' is a word for all the ways in which people seek to avoid their own movement, their own living process. And one paradoxical form that resistance can take is to beat ourselves up about our own resistance! 'Oh God, I'm so blocked. why can't I let go, why can't I change?' It is important to see that resistance in therapy is like resistance in politics - it originates in fighting oppression.

If a child finds its feelings invalidated by the adult world in the ways we discussed in the last chapter, this is oppression of a very powerful kind. It's a life-threatening experience, and the child responds like a resistance movement in an occupied country - by going underground. We have all built up defences against outside threat and inside emotion for the best possible reasons, and in the best possible way. So let's congratulate ourselves, and respect our resistance as we might respect a guerrilla leader from some past war of liberation. The only trouble is that the guerrilla leader may have got stuck in a posture that actually obstructs the liberation for which she was fighting!

Therapy is one way of investigating this sort of situation. Almost certainly our circumstances will have changed since childhood, and it would probably make sense to revise some of our past decisions, let go of some of our resistance, let go of some of the limitations we have placed on our self-expression.

What we are really talking about is surrender to reality, the reality of our own feelings, and of the interactions which spark them off: the reality of the past, and of the present; the reality of our body's need for breath, for pleasure, for rest, for activity. Because the reality which confronts us is constantly changing, we need to be very flexible in order to deal with it: we need to be secure enough to face the bad along with the good, rather than run away into fantasy. That security and flexibility are rooted in a sense of belonging, being part of the universe, being fed by it in a constant pulsating exchange of energies: a sense that is part of our natural birthright, and is inherent in full free breathing.

Sex and Surrender

To stay soft and open, we need the capacity to discharge tension that builds up in us through the stresses of living. Free breathing helps to minimise this build-up - we let go of tension with each out-breath. But the 'I' needs periodically to let go completely, to 'melt' as the armoured muscles melt, to relinquish control and allow the spontaneous rhythms of the organism to emerge. A natural, innate, powerful way of doing this is through lovemaking and orgasm: insofar as we can surrender to our own body, its pleasure washes us free of the tensions and blockings that have built up. The movements of orgasmic release are wavelike, pulsating, an involuntary contraction and relaxation of the whole body that transcends consciousness.

So can we all get healthy or stay healthy by making love? If only it was that simple. For a few people it is, or nearly so. It's one of those Catch 22 situations: the more soft and open you are already, the easier it is to stay so. The way our body seeks to move in orgasm is totally different in nature from the controlled, circumspect movements of the armoured bodymind. The 'spastic I' perceives involuntary movement - in sense, quite rightly - as a dreadful threat to its survival. It panics, and clamps down even harder - perhaps tries to take control of the orgasmic movements, to 'let go on purpose'. For most of us, making love creates tension at the same time as releasing it.

Orgasmic surrender cannot really be separated from surrender to life and spontaneity in general, surrender to our selves. The way we relate to sexual excitement matches the way we relate to other sorts of stimulus: the way we live our lives. So the work that we do is not 'sex therapy'; but neither do we seek to disguise the central role of sexuality in life, and of orgasm as a form of discharge. We are also well aware that much of people's unconscious anxiety and tension has a specifically sexual content.

Orgasm in the sense of surrender to the involuntary is something rather different from simple mechanical spasm or heavy breathing. Many people influenced by Reich's ideas have made something of a fetish out of the 'Total Orgasm', treating it as a specific goal, something you either 'get' or 'don't get'. This is unrealistic, and very much at odds with Reich's central point about letting go and saying yes to our pleasure wherever it takes us. (Reich himself was not able to follow through consistently with his own best insights.) Sexual release is a primary form of discharge, a way to stay soft and sweet. But it can be directly worked for and learnt only in limited ways: it is above all a function of our overall openness and capacity to handle pleasure and excitement.

So our therapy doesn't simply work on sexuality as such, or on tension in the pelvic area alone. It seeks to encourage an overall loosening of the armour, a release of anxiety which will make it possible to give in to our own impulse for genital pleasure. Breathing is an accessible yardstick of openness and spontanei- ty, and Reich noticed that when a person is relaxed and breathing freely and fully, the movement of her body is similar, in a gentle and unchanged way, to the movement of orgasm. As we breathe out, lying on our backs, the pelvic rocks forward and up, while at the same time our throat comes forward as if to meet our pelvis. Our head and shoulders fall back and open in a vulnerable gesture of surrender. This is identical for men and women.

So now you can go off and practice free breathing! This won't do you any harm, but it is unlikely to do you much good either. We can't practise the spontaneous or will the involuntary; what is crucial is the feeling-tone of the movement, rather than its mechanical 'correctness'. Reich called this full, free breath the 'orgasm reflex'; by definition, a reflex is something which bypasses conscious control.

Full, free breathing is not a state, but a direction: we can always breathe more or less than we are doing at the moment. Exploring what happens as we try to alter or increase our breath - or rather, to stop holding it back and distorting it - is a direct route to the heart of therapy, involving us in a long term project of melting armour in all parts of our body, all aspects of our character. When we find ourselves, for a while, breathing very freely, we experience all sorts of strange and pleasurable sensations in our bodyminds, an opportunity to directly perceive the flow of life energy in ourselves, which Reich called 'streaming'.

The flow of Orgone is immediately experienced as pleasure; its blocking as unpleasure.

But pleasure, for most people, is very often bound up with anxiety. It makes the 'Spastic I' feel that it is losing its identity; it brings back bodymind memories of childhood situations where our pleasure was frustrated, together with the associated feelings of grief, fear and rage. If our first reaction to pleasure beyond 'a certain limit is no rather than yes, then our wires need uncrossing. We need to unpeel, layer by layer, the different negative feelings that have come to overlay our innately joyful, playful response to energy flow.

But it's plain too that making love isn't vital to being in a good state (as Reich seems to say it is). There are many people, for example, who are celibate but who use meditation or other bodymind disciplines to keep themselves soft and clear. It's also very plain - as Reich was well aware - that sexual activity as such is no measure of health or pleasure - frantic fucking can be precisely an avoidance of surrender.

So if you don't seek orgasmic surrender, perhaps the best question is 'Why not?' Some reasons are better than others. A long term relationship may go through effectively 'asexual' phases - and yet both partners feel it would be destructive to look for sexual satisfaction elsewhere.

Also. sex and sexuality in our culture carry a tremendous weight of political meanings which make it hard to simply follow our feelings - our feelings may be contradictory. Above all, heterosexual love - and therefore, homosexual love in a hetero society - is intimately bound up with power and patriarchy. We'll come back to these matters in Chapters 6 and 9; for now, we just want to say that because of this political charge, sexual surrender becomes even more frightening. Surrender to our own feelings is not easily separated from surrender to someone else, or to a particular sexual ideology. It can be difficult to disentangle saying 'yes' to our bodies from saying 'yes' to patriarchy, because in a sense we may experience our bodies as colonised and imperialised by society's models of sexuality, power and pleasure.

The way forward through this jungle, hard though it is, is surely to stay with exactly what comes up for us when we try to let go, breathe, and feel ourselves. If we can accept and own our sensations and emotions, without judgement or denial, then we can eventually find the way through to our truth, a truth based on far more solid foundations than any intellectual model. This means being able to face the pain and fear of our original childhood confrontation with sexual roles and rules.

In the next chapter, we shall look at the way we tighten up each area of our body, each segment of armouring, against surrender to feeling, to pleasure, and to reality.

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