Now let us look at how armouring works in practice; where the different 'segments' are located, the sorts of emotions that tend to be stuck unexpressed and unexperienced in the tense muscles of each body area, and the sorts of physical symptoms that tend to accompany these tensions. We need to remember that people usually don't know about their own armouring: the muscle tension exists to protect us from conscious realisation of our needs and feelings, which may come as an extreme shock to us when the armouring gives way. It also tends to make us unaware of the tension itself, which through long familiarity feels 'normal'.

We must also bear in mind that as well as being choked up with intense held feeling, a segment can in effect be 'emptied' of charge by spastic muscles around the area keeping energy and feelings out, in an alternative strategy for self-control. There is more than one layer of musculature in any given area of our body; we may be relaxed at one level, tight at another.

What follows is necessarily simplified. Although the seven segments can be a tremendously useful way of seeing patterns of holding, they are only a tool - only one way of seeing things. As we go through the segments, we will be constantly pointing out interlinkings between them - other, equally valid, ways of understanding our bodies. The segments are to a large extent artificial, reflecting the artificial bodymind pr~ of self-armouring.

The seven segments, as shown in the illustration, can be identified by the main feature of each area: the eyes; the jaw; the neck; the heart; the waist; the belly; and the pelvis and legs. We shall look at each in turn, working down the body in the direction that an embryo grows in the womb, the direction that our bodywork tends to move, from crown to base.

The eye segment ('ocular')
The first and uppermost segment includes the scalp, forehead, eyes, cheeks, ears, and the base of the skull. It is an area of intense charge, containing as it does two crucial 'windows' on the world, our organs of sight and hearing. Whether because of this, or because of the location of the brain, most people mentally place their '1' in this segment; this is where we watch the world from, where we think where we press the buttons and move the levers to work our body.

Such notions and experiences are themselves a product of armouring. They show the extent of cut-offness from our heart, guts and sex. The mind is a bodymind - not a headmind - however 'natural' it may seem to be 'in our heads'.

One very common effect of working to melt the armour is that people's centre of awareness shifts downwards, into the 'heartlands' of the body. We begin to experience our heads, weirdly at first, as just another limb like our arms or legs. We start to realise how stiffly we have been holding our head, so as to stay's' it; and how tension in and around our eyes represents the need to 'hold ourselves up' through seeing, rather than through the support of our legs and feet - desperately gripping on to the world with our eyes, in the same sort of way that whenwe were learning to stand we kept ourselves erect by gripping onwith our hands.

As well as being a vital channel for information and contact eyes and ears have also been a source of threat in our lives. Scary and existence-threatening energy has invaded us through our sight and hearing - the coldness in the look of adults who should be caring for us, for example, the anger or pain in their voices. Most of us came into the world in the agonising glare of hospital lights, the cacophony of hospital noises, later, we may have tried to minimise dangerous excitement by 'not looking', 'not seeing' stirring images, 'not hearing' the confusing sounds of our parents making love.

So very often the eyes and ears are in a permanent state of blocking which says 'I won't see - won't hear - won't understand'. Muscles inside and around the eye sockets, and at the base of the skull, are in constant tension, stopping us from really focusing on the world around us, from opening up to reality.

Exercise 2
Try an experiment yourself.. sit upright, and bum your head as far as it will comfortably go to one side. When it reaches a stopping point let your eyes carry on round until they too reach their comfortable limit - no need to strain, then bring the eyes very slowly back round until, as they face forward again in the head, they 'pick up' the head and both continue moving back round to the front of the body. The illustration should make this clear. The point is that the eyes should move continuously, without jumping, so they 'sweep' the field of vision, carrying the head along with them. Keep breathing while you do it!

Most people find this exercise very difficult - to let their eyes move slowly and continuously rather than jumping forward in spurts, impatient to see 'what's next'. This impatience has a quality of fear in it, and repeating the experiment a few times to each side can make us conscious of a great deal of anxiety about seeing, really seeing, the world around us. We tend to filter reality through a screen of prior judgement so as to protect ourselves from dangerous excitement or pain, and this anxiety is bound into tense muscles around the eyes.

A similar process happens with the ears, and with our thinking processes. The words we use about thinking embody these connections: 'I see what you mean', 'I don't like the sound of that'. In French, 'entendu' means both 'heard' and 'understood'.

The core of the armouring is actually inside the head, in the small muscles that move our eyes, and in the muscles behind our ears and at the base of the skull, some of which are reflexly co-ordinated with subtle eye movements. Blocking in all these areas can give a hard, blank, superficial expression to the eyes, or a cloudy 'absent look - both masking deep fear. Shortsightedness, longsightedness, deafness, etc., are very much bound up with armouring of the eye segment, and the same goes for inability to smell - a very powerful and fundamental sense linking us with our animal heritage.

Repression of contact with the world through eyes, ears and thinking covers up a deeper neediness. Eye contact which is loving and supportive gives us a fundamental anchoring in the world: it says 'you exist, I see you'. When the channels are open, the heart speaks through the eyes, and comforting sounds and smells can give an almost equally deep reassurance. If this sort of validation is missing in very early childhood, then someone's ability to make proper contact through the eye segment can be profoundly injured. They tend to 'go away in the eyes' and in their thinking: closeness can be experienced as invasive, threatening - only in isolation are they safe. Similarly. they may develop ideas which are bizarrely isolated from how most people see the world.

With less extreme damage, the urge for contact may simply take a diversion, and express itself in a way which is distorted and therefore less threatening: as with people whose life is organised around a need to see - voyeurs, intellectuals, detectives, journalists - and therapists! Which is a good moment to stress that reaching out with eyes, ears and mind is a healthy, creative process - unless it coincides with a block to making deep emotional contact.

As well as being windows, the eyes are doors: they are a channel for emotional expression. All feelings, to be fully released, need to come out through the eyes. Besides the obvious example of crying, the eyes must release fear, anger, joy, and so on in appropriate ways in order to stay soft and open. Different people tend to be able to show different feelings through their eyes, and to block other ones; and these tendencies can often be seen in the way we hold the muscles of this segment

Exercise 3
Look in a mirror, and raise your eyebrows as far as you possibly can. What does this look like? What emotion does it convey? Now screw your eyes up tight, lower the brow: see what the apparent emotion is now. Keep breathing, and move as fast as you can between these two positions, several times; how does this make you feel? Is it easy for you to do? Is one position harder than the other? Relax into your normal eye position for a moment, let yourself breathe, and see how you look in the mirror and how you feel inside.

As we hope you will agree, the wide open eyes show an expression of fear; and if you kept breathing in this position, you may even have felt some of this fear. People who habitually keep their eyes like this are generally unaware of it, getting them to exaggerate, or conversely to screw their eyes up tight can make them suddenly aware of the extreme tension there, and of the underlying fear and sadness. It's a position which helps one cope with being seen, and is common in politicians, but also in people who have had very frightening visual experiences in childhood.

Screwed-up eyes may convey several different emotions: anger. desperation to see, anxiety. Notice whether your cheek muscles also screw up tight, turning your face into a mask. When people habitually use their faces in this way. it's as if their eyes have retreated into their head - 'I can see out, but you can't see in'. Flat, stiff, heavy cheeks, on the other hand, are often holding tremendous grief and unshed tears.

Another emotion often held in the eye segment is worry: the wrinkled brow and fixed gaze of compulsive thinking. It doesn't matter what the person is thinking about now - it could be absolutely anything; but originally they will have taken refuge in thinking as an escape route from intolerable childhood pressures - for example. trying to work out how to satisfy contradictory demands from mother and father.

The 'ivory tower intellectual' is demonstrating a similar, perhaps more successful, form of escape: the skull is a literal ivory tower, high and dry above the scary and confusing world of the body. Intellectuals who try to ignore body and emotions have concentrated on the genuine erotic pleasure of thought to the exclusion of most other things.

Thinking is a real, healthy pleasure, but surely only in harmony with other functions, not in isolation from them. Often there is considerable panic bound up in this stance - about sexual feelings, and also about bodily assertiveness and rage. The opposite form of defence is found in people who fog up their own thinking processes as a protection against painful realities, making themselves stupid and incompetent, and giving their eyes either a dull smug look, or a peering vagueness.

These are some examples to stimulate your own observation of what people do with their eyes. The eye segment will be involved in suppressing any and all feelings; but the fundamental blockings here are of very young emotions and experiences, our primal interactions with the world, starting at birth or earlier. Through the crown of our heads and the space between our eyes, we are linked to sky and cosmos, to webs of subtle energy, to something much bigger than our individual self. Pain and danger may make us close these channels down, or may make us retreat into a 'spirituality' which is ungrounded in the reality of our bodily life.

Apart from defects of vision and hearing, the most obvious physical symptom connected with eye segment armouring is chronic headaches - stemming from tense muscles at the base of the skull and around the eyes. We believe as well that specific ailments like styes, conjunctivitis, sinusitis and so on can be linked with eye segment armouring; often they all occur when a specific feeling is being held back about some life situation, and in particular when someone is not allowing themselves to cry.

Jaw and mouth segment ('oral')
Just as all emotions need to be expressed through the eyes to complete themselves, so they also need to be expressed in sound - sobbing, yelling, sighing, screaming. laughing. The mouth and jaw are clearly a key part of the vocalising process: when armoured. they form a 'lid' to the expressive channel, either closing the voice off entirely or else deadening and flattening it Sound may emerge mechanically, but it lacks meaning and vibrancy as long as the jaw is tight. We can learn to recognise the dead. droning or quacking tone of an armoured jaw; we all know to avoid someone who sounds like a bore.

An underlying fear of expressing one particular emotion can set up a block that affects all expression. With the jaw, there is very often some held back anger: a desire to growl, roar and bite which, when suppressed, can create a fixed unreal grin of underlying hatred. This held back rage - the Wolfman in all of us - is simply frustrated love and wanting, a softness that has turned hard in self-protection. Every time a child is stopped from saying what she wants, every time she is force-fed with food she doesn't want, the anger builds up. And usually, the anger itself is prevented from expression by adult sanctions - like a hand held over the mouth, a hand we want to bite and tear.

To many people, the idea that we have such feelings seems dreadful and unacceptable. Naturally enough, it is often those who on the surface are mildest and gentlest who are holding the most rage in their jaws. But real sweetness and melting is only possible once the hate is discharged. Often people need to gag and cough to release their 'swallowed' feelings (see also the section below on the neck segment).

Anger in the jaw is thus very closely related to defiance and stubbornness: 'I won't let you see my hurt'. Many of us as children felt that showing our anger represented defeat and punishment. We might be laughed at, so we learnt to tighten our mouth and push our chin forward in a habitual gesture of silent resistance. Or we started to pull our chin back in an expression which says 'I'm harmless': people with retracted chins are usuallyover-positive and determinedly cheerful whatever their true circumstances.

Exercise 4
You can experiment in front of the mirror, pushing your chin forward and pulling it back as far as possible - while still breathing. How do these positions make you feel? What effect do they have on the rest of your face, if any? Does one feel easier or more natural than the other? Move between them a few times, then let your jaw relax and see how it looks and feels .

And while you're at it, do what a child does when trying to hold back tears: tighten your chin muscles up, clamping your lips together.

This 'stiff lower lip' is an expression we can all recognise in children, and in very many adults who keep these muscles permanently stiff, holding back a deep and by now unconscious sadness. This may be combined with a tension under the jaw, an area linked with the tongue muscles, which should be soft and supple but in adults seldom is. The sound held in this region is the angry yell of a baby whose needs are not being recognised.

Exercise 5
The simplest way to check out the armouring of your jaw segment is to look in the mirror, raise your chin slightly, and let your mouth drop open. Don't force it, but just see how far it fails under its own weight. If your jaw is free, then the 'hinge' muscles in front of the ears will let it drop wide open - enough, say, to insert three fingers sideways on between your upper and lower teeth; but more likely, there will be one or another sort of holding that keeps your mouth half closed. Breathing freely with your jaw dropped like this could put you in touch with the specific emotions and tensions around your jaw.

As with the eyes, under the hard blocking in the jaw are soft feelings of need. Naturally enough, these are very much bound up with feeding, and the baby's pleasure in sucking: any disturbance in this phase of life will be reflected later in jaw armouring - especially anger and disappointment about not being fed when hungry, harsh or premature weaning, or a general lack of warm contact in the feeding relationship.

It is widely accepted that we pick up many of our mother's emotions through her milk - the hormone balance varies with her state of being. And more generally, both breast and bottle fed babies are highly sensitive to the feeling-connection with their mother or any nurturing adult: her involvement or preoccupation, her happiness or sadness. Our reactions to this, our feelings of not getting what we need from her, will lodge among other places in the jaw segment

The muscles which move our jaw link in to the base of the skull, which is thus a point of connection between eye and jaw segments: a crucial body area which often collects a good deal of tension, and sometimes has to deal with real contradictions between the two segments: a person's face may be split in two. so that the eyes and mouth express quite different emotions - happiness in the mouth and fear in the eyes, for example.

Migraine headaches have recently been linked with tension in the jaw, causing a displaced bite which transmits up into the head. Tooth and gum problems of all kinds are related to suppressed emotions and the resulting tension; in particular we have noticed a relationship between tooth abscesses and the need to express hidden anger. Coughs and colds can be part of a suppressive or releasing process in this area.

Neck and throat segment ('cervical')
In each segment it is possible and often helpful to distinguish a soft, inside, 'Yin' aspect (often in the front) and a hard, outside, 'Yang' aspect. For the jaw this is represented in the difference between the sucking, melting impulses of the tongue and palate, and the assertive biting and growling of the teeth and chin. With the next segment the difference is particularly clear between the softness of the throat and the hardness of the neck.

Much of the expressive energy which develops in our torso has to work its way up through the narrow channel of the throat in order to emerge through the mouth and eyes. It's not surprising that this passage easily becomes jammed up, and the word anxiety itself comes from the Latin angustus, which means narrow'. The choking, strangling, 'can't get through' feeling of jammed up energy can set up tremendous anxiety in the throat area, sensations which we probably associate unconsciously with birth - with being stuck, half-suffocated, in another narrow passage, perhaps even with the cord around our neck, certainly with our throat full of mucus. In bodywork therapy a huge amount of coughing is sometimes necessary to 'clear the throat', both energetically and emotionally. Mucus has a strange capacity to create itself. as it seems, out of nowhere, as a representation or embodiment of held feelings.

In fact, one of the most powerful and therapeutic tools can be to induce someone to retch and gag, while breathing and letting the sound come. All the swallowing down' of feelings that we've been doing for a lifetime is turned round; the energy starts to move up and out, and we experience it directly as a melting and softening of throat, jaw and eyes all at once. There is also a fat of fear released - many people hate gagging. and are scarcely ever sick, mainly because they unconsciously feel they must keep their feelings down at all costs. When someone becomes secure and strong enough to let themselves retch, the effect can be astonishingly liberating. On the other hand. there are people who retch and gag very easily, and often, as a way of avoiding having to take in and digest feelings.

The fear held in the throat seems to have a different quality from that of the eye segment The eyes are afraid of invasion and dissolution on what we can call an 'existential' level, while the throat often seems to hold a fear of real bodily death rather than ego-annihilation. It's as if our birth process is also our introduction to the reality of death - and the throat is a place where this death-fear roosts in us. Then, later on, it attracts to itself our fear of our own murderous impulses. We strangle ourselves on our own hatred as the urge to hit and hurt and tear, which develops in our hands if our love and pleasure are frustrated, gets pulled back up our arms and jammed into the muscles round the base of our throat We turn our anger on ourselves, and strangle ourselves rather than someone else.

This is a complicated and important sequence, an excellent example of how armouring forms, and it's worth going over it again to help make the process clear. Notice, to begin with, that from our viewpoint the anger and aggression are not primary (as they would be for some other therapies): human nature does not involve wanting to hurt people, but wanting to love and be loved, to make warm contact. It is when this warmth is rejected that anger - quite appropriately - comes, but children's fear of adult violence then intervenes to block any direct 'hot' expression of anger. The outward movement, first of love and pleasure then of rage, becomes an inward retreat, which tends to stick at the base of the throat. Warmth turns to cold, and freezes our muscles.

Thus because we can't vent frustration, we block off our search for love as well. Hands can't reach out for contact, throats can't open in a giving, surrendering way as they want to do. Often, before they can have soft feelings in their throat, people need to act out a state very like the stereotype fairytale witch with her strangled cackle, claw-like hands and spiteful hate, which very accurately portrays a throat block!

Although hands and arms connect mainly with the heart segment, we have just seen that they also relate strongly to the throat. You can see too how the throat links in strongly with the mouth and jaw: sucking and voice both involve both segments. One could say that the neck, in contrast, links via the base of the neck to the eyes. The neck has the job of supporting the head, and the attitude which the eye segment takes towards the world will very much affect and be affected by how the neck operates.

If the eyes are holding on desperately, then the neck will tend to be correspondingly rigid and inflexible - a proud, 'stiff-necked' attitude may manifest, covering up deeper fear. The more that someone is stuck in their head as opposed to inhabiting the whole body, the more tension will be found in their neck - it has to stop the head from failing off, or from being flooded with body-feelings. The neck may be stretched out nervously into the world, or protectively scrunched up into the shoulders like a turtle.

So the combination of eye-linked neck and jaw-linked throat can produce all sorts of different postures in this segment Two very important muscles are the big sternocleidomastoids, which run on either side from the base of the skull just behind the ears, round the side of the neck, down to the front of the breastbone holding the entire segment together. You may notice that when you are tired and tense these muscles become painful; many headaches originate here and slowly work their way up into our heads as we try to force ourselves to feel all right by stiffening the posture of our head and neck-

Often there is a tendency in people to pull the head back, scrunching up the base of the skull as if to say 'I'm undefeated, 1 won't bow down', but at the same time retreating from facing the world in front of us. In fact this posture is often associated with short-sightedness, and long-sightedness with pushing the head forward.

Many of us are afraid to let our necks go fully, and (as the Alexander Technique emphasises) holding on here can be the central cause of tension and contraction patterns throughout the body.

Exercise 6
You can explore the state of your neck by lying on your back with your head on something soft, and turning it from side to side as rapidly as possible. Don't hold your breath; if you can, let your head flop completely from side to side - and leave your shoulders flat on the floor, just move head and neck. Does this make you sick and dizzy? If so, it's an indication of tension. Also, try lifting your head and bringing it down strongly onto a pillow. Repeat several times; keep breathing, and again, don't use your shoulders. What does this feel like? If possible, get a friend to help by putting their hands round and under your head, and lifting it gently, moving it from side to side and up and down. Can you let them control the movement, or do you involuntarily help them with your own muscles? Do you have a similar need to stay in charge in your life?

Heart segment ('thoracic')
The chest, shoulders and upper back, arms and hands, between them make up the heart segment which must be open for us to express 'big' feelings, strong, expansive emotions, coming out in full resonant voice and powerful gestures. For most of us the heart is to a greater or lesser extent closed off, injuring our capacity for deep feeling and deep contact; because, consciously or unconsciously, it feels bruised, or broken, or frozen, or imprisoned, or hiding.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan teacher, tells us that true contact means taking on and owning a certain painfulness that goes with being open: 'The genuine heart of sadness comes from feeling that your nonexistent heart is full ... Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.'

What accompanies this opening up on a bodily level is a melting of the muscular armour in chest and shoulders, so that we are able to breathe fully into our chest - and out again. There is very often some interruption to this full cycle of inbreath and outhbreath. As we have seen, one person may hold her chest permanently half-full of air, never breathing out, while another person may never really breathe in. Often there is a prolonged pause between breathing in and breathing out, or vice versa.

Exercise 7
If you return to the mirror, you may be able to see what these two opposite forms of holding mean. Breathe in as deeply as you can, and hold it: what does this look like? Now push all the air out of your lungs, and hold this position: what attitude to life are you portraying?

You may well find that with your chest held full, you look afraid. Gasping air is a reflex accompaniment to a frightening shock. A permanent gasp goes along with high tight shoulders, and often with clenched hands. These are all part of the same fear pattern, inscribed on the body by repeated frightening experiences in early life. The fear is often covered up with defiance - sticking out your chest to make yourself look big, clenching your fists to look aggressive - but there is a tension, and often a look of powerlessness, in the arms which reveals the underlying meaning. It's a common result of having an authoritarian father, and can often be seen in skinheads and other teenage gang members.

When you breathe out as far as possible, your chest now caves in and your shoulders slump down and forward: an image of defeat. People who are stuck in this sort of posture have generally given up. Through constant frustration, especially in early life, they have formed the idea that it is safest and least upsetting to have as little energy as possible in their bodies so, as far as is compatible with staying alive, they've given up breathing in,

Which of these postures felt more natural and easy to you?

There are many styles of protecting our heart from the world. Some people's chests scarcely move at all as they breathe: if you press down gently on the breastbone, it feels like a solid plate of armour, or a thick layer of rubber. With others, the chest gives completely to the least pressure - there is no assertiveness at all, no sense of 'here I am'. Sometimes one feels afraid to press at all, there is such a sense of brittleness and fragility. Some people are 'pigeon-chested' or 'barrel-chested' - two different ways of sticking yourself out rigidly and ungivingly into the world; not allowing the easy natural exchange of energies represented by the in-and-out of the breath. Everyone has their personal style of armouring.

Whatever else may be going on in a person, their shoulders are usually a reservoir of unexpressed rage. This rage, again, can be held in many different styles: high and tight, or pulled back to scrunch between the shoulderblades, or screwed up in the armpits. Generally it needs release via the arms, smashing your fists down on to a cushion, beating a mattress with your elbows (often necessary before energy can come down into the forearms and hands), scratching, tearing, pinching.

Exercise 8
You can find out how free your shoulders and arms are by moving them around: 'shrug' your shoulders in a circular movement from back to front, and then from front to back, working your elbows like a clucking chicken. Raise your arms slowly in front of you until they point right up in the air, then open them out at the sides to shoulder height Remember to breathe while you do it! Are any of these movements difficult, physically or emotionally?

As the armouring of our chest and shoulders starts to dissolve, we come into our power. We sense ourselves as strong, real and formidable, without being aggressive or having anything to prove: a soft power, which asserts our need for contact yet is able to deal with hostility or coldness.

Crying is done with the chest as well as with the eyes and mouth. Sometimes people think they are crying when a few tears leak out, but without any deep sobbing that moves the heart and the whole being. The pain here may be much more profound and shaking, and along with this comes a much deeper release, a sense of inner cleansing and lightness on a different level from the effect of simple weeping.

The heart segment is the seat of much of our passion, our intensity and vibrancy. Only when we are willing and able to let our chest and shoulders move - be moved - with our breath, can we deeply and seriously engage with reality. We say 'seriously', but this doesn't imply anything solemn: among the emotions of the heart segment is robust, hearty laughter, often held back in 'ticklish' irritable muscles in the sides and under the arms. Tickling can be a remarkably effective bodywork technique; it helps to 'unstick' the ribs from each other, opening up the independent movement of the intercostal muscles.

Armouring in this segment has a negative effect on the functioning of the heart and lungs, predisposing these organs to disease. In particular we see a relationship between suppressed anger and bronchitis and chronic coughs; between deep fear and asthma; and between physical heart failure and 'heartbreak'.

Waist segment ('diaphragmatic')
As the illustration shows, the diaphragm is a big, dome-shaped muscle that runs right through the body at waist level, separating our upper and lower halves(with holes for the oesophagus, veins and arteries, etc.). Above it are the heart and lungs; below, the stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and so on.

It is primarily with the diaphragm that we breathe - or that at least is how our body is designed! If our diaphragm is mobile, then each in-breath starts with its contraction, so that the upward, domelike bulge flattens out. This increases the space in the chest cavity, and the lungs automatically expand into the semi-vacuum, sucking in air. As the diaphragm relaxes, it bells out upward again, firmly pushing the air out of our lungs. Muscles in the ribcage, shoulders, etc., can stop us breathing by being too tight, but their role in causing us to breathe is secondary to that of this great, powerful sheet of muscle. Really, our chest muscles just have to get out of the way.

It is the diaphragm, therefore, which first tightens and freezes in unhappy babies, interrupting the spontaneous natural flow of breath. Thus this segment stores the intolerable primal terror which first made us cut off from our own energy; the sensation which, in a much diluted form, is familiar to most of us as 'butterflies in the tummy'.

A more intense version is often referred to as a 'sinking' feeling, a 'lurch' around the stomach, as if 'the bottom is dropping out'. This is a very accurate description of sudden movement in this boundary between our upper and lower internal world. The sinking feeling corresponds to a sense of failing down into ourselves - into the realm of 'gut feelings', emotions and sensations which are far less easily translatable into rational language than are those of our head and upper body.

The more frozen the diaphragm, the more of an absolute division there will be between head and belly, between reason and instinct, between conscious and unconscious, 'heaven' and 'hell'. The diaphragm is turned into a 'floor'; and if the floor starts giving way as bodywork enables the diaphragm to move again, the experience can be deeply disturbing. People with tight diaphragms very often breathe with either chest or belly, or if both move, they can be quite unsynchronised, so that the belly may even be sinking as the chest rises and vice versa (though this is nothing to do with the yoga technique of 'paradoxical breathing').

Exercise 9
To get a sense of what is happening in your diaphragm, you can try rapidly panting from this area of your body. You need to breathe firmly in and equally firmly out again, rather than putting the emphasis on either one. Be aware that your sides and back around waist level should expand and contract as well - imagine a wide sash around your waist, stretching all round as you breathe in. Make the breathing continuous, breathing in again as soon as the outbreath is complete, and vice versa. You may find that a very few such breaths make you feel distinctly strange, with your head becoming dizzy and highly-charged, and perhaps a slight nausea. This will pass off as soon as you stop - which you should obviously do when you start getting uncomfortable. This is a very early stage of panic, as you not only pass more breath-energy through your body, but also start to join up areas that you may habitually keep firmly separate.

The diaphragm often holds murderous rage as well as fear: a blind, total anger against the early repression that makes our breathing armour up. This anger can often be located in the sides and back of the waist segment, where the diaphragm anchors itself to bone - William West calls the side muscles here the 'spite muscles'. Lower back tension, that classic twentieth century problem, can often be related to a frozen diaphragm, and to conflicts between 'higher' and 'lower' needs and feelings - especially those involving the pelvis.

Thus a fundamental issue with the diaphragm is one of control. Problems in this area usually arise out of a struggle to 'control oneself' - that central, impossible instruction which our culture gives its children. Our nature as an organism demands spontaneity: only death is predictable, and predictability is death. The attempt to 'get a grip on ourselves' very much involves the diaphragm, one of the body's great core muscles, and seat of the involuntary/voluntary crossover at the centre of the breathing process. Only a few people can control their heartbeat, but all of us can control our breathing. In doing so habitually, we do ourselves great damage, yet the ability to be aware of our breath, to gently 'ride' its waves, is a deeply healing one. When the diaphragm is free and mobile, we are open to spontaneously arising material from 'the depths' - open to our bellythink.

There is a powerful reflex relationship between diaphragm and throat, such that armouring in one will be reflected in the other, and melting in one will likewise encourage melting in the other. If you listen to a 'catch' in a person's breath, you may be able to hear how it happens in both these places. Gagging and retching can be initiated in either the throat or the diaphragm, but they involve both. This is only one example of the elaborate system of reflex mirrorings in our body.

Tension in the waist will lay us open to all the stress-related ailments, since it disturbs our entire breathing pattern, with destructive effects on our metabolic processes. More specifically, it will tend to influence ailments like chronic nausea, ulcers (held-back frustration and rage), gall and kidney stones and, as we have mentioned, lower back pain.

Belly segment ('abdominal')
The belly is a storehouse of unexpressed, unacknowledged feelings, images, ideas, desires and intentions - in effect a bodymind unconscious. The very word 'belly' is unspeakable to some people! Here are the 'gut feelings', the instinctive self, and the more we are armoured higher up the body, the more these feelings are repressed. New material is being added all the time as we swallow down what we cannot say or do or feel.

The gurgling, bubbling belly is a place of water - the waters of life. Water needs to flow, or it becomes sour and stagnant and then this great subterranean sea turns into nothing but a huge septic tank. There is often much bitterness and stagnation down here in the body's underworld, expressed in toxicity, 'acid stomach', colitis and constipation - all of which reflect an inability to let go of waste and poison.

Our belly is vulnerable: the 'soft underbelly' of our stance towards the world, insofar as we are insecure in the world, we tend to tense up our belly muscles, creating the macho, 'go on, hit me as hard as you like', image: or the flat, sucked-in little-girl tummy which women are encouraged to strive for. This impossibly flat, anorexic tummy is quite a recent invention. Renaissance and mediaeval paintings show a much more realistic womanly mound. Similarly in the East a relaxed rounded belly is (or was) highly valued as a sign of spiritual achievement the ability to operate in a grounded and centred way. Many people, both men and women, find it very hard to deliberately relax their bellies.

Exercise 10
Take a deep in-breath, letting it fill your tummy area, so that it visibly and tangibly expands with the breath (you may need to do a few pants with the diaphragm to loosen up first). Then breathe out, without pulling in your tummy. Try a few breaths like this, and see what sensations and feelings emerge. Focus on relaxing as many muscles in your lower torso as you can - including the sides and back.

You will probably discover from this how closely your belly links with the diaphragm above and the pelvis below: muscles will stretch, and hopefully release, in both these areas as your belly expands. You can expect a few gurgles as well! Particularly important are the abdomini recti, two long muscles that run down the belly from ribs to pelvis on either side of your navel - these seem to be linked by reflex with the sternocleidomastoids in the neck.

Belly segment: showing the rectus abdomini muscle (left) and internal oblique muscle (right). There are several more muscle layers running at different angles.

Gently massaging the belly area while breathing freely and easily can bring up all sorts of pains and emotions. Often there are specific sore spots carrying particular ideas and memories. The overall tone of the belly armour is frequently tiredness: old, tired grief; old tired anger; old tired fear. The emotions may have been curdling away down there for a very long time indeed.

But the belly, when it is alive and functioning, is an agent of release and elimination - it helps sort out the nourishing from the threatening, and channel each appropriately. As the belly 'wakes up' in bodywork, we hear all sorts of gurglings and rumblings - usually a sign of healthy activity as it resumes its functions of absorption and discharge. Gerda Boyesen has worked for many years with the belly's wisdom; she has found - and we can confirm - that whenever the belly emits a particularly energetic gurgle, it signals some important thought, feeling or memory which may be below the threshold of awareness unless we take up the belly's cue and look within.

One particular set of feeling-memories in this segment is going to be about the cutting of the umbilical cord; there are usually very tender spots all around the navel which can restimulate this experience. It is also very closely linked with the waist segment - the shock of cutting the cord makes the diaphragm contract with a great gasp which is the first breath, so different from what that breath would have been had it been allowed to come naturally in its own time, with the umbilicus left to stop pulsing before it was severed.

For many people - perhaps more obviously for women in our culture - there is a particular issue around the relationship between mouth and belly. Appetite in one does not necessarily reflect hunger in the other: and often there is a good deal of confusion here, as we eat to satisfy all sorts of needs apart from bodily nourishment

Among these needs can be the need to push feelings down out of awareness. Family mealtimes can be excruciating, and can set up a permanent association between eating, suppression and pain. A lot of us are so busy nibbling all day for the comfort of our mouths that we wouldn't recognise belly hunger if we encountered it The poor, unloved, devalued belly has to bear the brunt of everything we shove down it. It needs restoring to its rightful and central role in the bodymind.

Pelvic segment
And so we arrive at the final section of the body armour - and an exceedingly important one. From the pelvis comes a whole other fundamental mode of relating to the world: our sexual@, which expresses itself in ways that cannot be readily turned into words. As Reich says, it is not really possible to attach a rational label to the expressive movements of the pelvis. Sexuality expresses itself rather than anything else, and its involuntary, mysterious quality is very frightening to the 'spastic I'.

Before the pelvis can surrender to spontaneous sexual movement its armouring needs to be softened; this will release feelings which, although they often colour our lovemaking, are not essentially sexual in nature. Our pelvis often holds a good deal of fear and rage. this means that in lovemaking the easy soft swing takes on a frantic tone - either shoving and grinding, or moving very gingerly, like a person getting into a cold bath.

In Chapter 6 we shall be looking in more detail at this pelvic fear and rage, and considering how and why such emotions develop. For now, let's just notice that pelvic armouring has a deep effect on how we stand and walk, the legs and feet are so closely linked with the pelvis that we can treat them as part of the same segment If the pelvis is too stiff to sway freely as we move, there will be a corresponding stiffness and a brittle or numb feeling lower down. As Alexander Lowen says, sexual feeling to a great extent comes out of the ground, and our feet and legs need to be soft enough to let it rise.

Exercise 1
To help you understand what this means, stand with feet firmly planted and knees slightly bent and breathe down into the pit of your belly for a minute until everything has loosened up a little. Now explore the contact between the soles of your feet and the ground (this exercise is best done barefoot): shift you weight gently around your feel so the ground is massaging your soles. Now let your weight press down on the ball of one foot, as if taking a step forward - but don't take the step. What will happen is that your knee will start to straighten - but don't deliberately straighten the knee. Now your pelvis vvill want to rock forward and up: the impetus is transmitted from your energy exchange with the ground. Play with this movement for a while, and notice how important it is in graceful, dancing - and how sexual dancing can be.

If our legs, feet and pelvis are relaxed, then there is a constant sense of exchange between ourselves and the ground: Mother Earth is really there under us, supporting and conversing with our bodymind. But not many of us feel this conversation much of the time. The process of learning to stand and walk, coinciding as it does with intense emotional events, has led us to cut off some sensation, from our lower limbs - tensing knees, ankles, and hips in particular, and often twisting our legs out of alignment. We've learnt to 'stand up for ourselves', 'on our own two feet' - but at what price in missing flexibility and sensitivity.

Many of us have great unconscious terror of the ground, developed as we learnt to stand. This can show up in all the many phobias of snakes, mice, spiders, and so on - all fast-moving ticklish, unstoppable creatures which we fear will run up our @ and into our bodies - like the earth energy itself and the uncontrollable feelings associated with it Other associated fantasies are those of the ground giving way, of quicksand, water and so on. There is often a fear of falling involved too - the ground seems a very long way down when we first pull ourselves erect

In particular, our 'groundedness' or lack of it is connected with eye armouring. We may unconsciously try to hold on to the world with our eyes, rather than resting securely on our feet.

Exercise 12
Try closing your eyes, and really 'letting yourself down' into your feet: the sensation can be rather like entering water. Your knees will need to be loose and bent. Take a few steps, very slowly, with eyes still closed, and explore the sensation. Perhaps you feel as though you are going to fall over, or be hit What do your arms want to do?

We have so far only looked at the front of the pelvis, the energy in and around our genital area. Also very important is the energy at the back, in our buttocks and anus, which may be extremely tight and tense. As we said in Chapter 2, children are very often pressured to control their bowels before they are naturally ready, before they are physically capable of closing the sphincters. So they learn to tense up the whole pelvic floor and buttocks in a desperate attempt to 'hold themselves in', 'pull themselves together'.

Such holding frequently becomes chronic and unconscious, leading to 'tight-arsed' attitudes in life, as we shall see in Chapter 6. A great deal of resentful hate is held here, which can take very brutal forms - both sadistic and masochistic - and involve a lot of stubbornness. This is a form of armouring which slows down our life energy and binds it in, and this sort of holding very much affects the energy in the back of our whole body.

The back of the body is our reservoir of strength: it's where we push from, where we hold on, support and endure. We can only be soft and open in the front if we feel, strong and secure in the back. But this all depends on being able to 'dig our heels in' and transmit this solid strength through and up. A tight bum generally means that this flow gets stuck, and the backs of the legs will usually be tight too.

Exercise 13
Stand with feet forwards, a shoulderwidth apart, and with your knees slightly bent Rigidly straight knees are a basic way of blocking off from the ground. Join your hands loosely behind your back in an 'at ease' posture; now bend from the hips - not from the waist - and let gravity carry you as far forward as possible. Breathe easily, and let the out-breaths help you relax and lean further forward. The idea is that head, neck and back stay in the same straight line as when you were upright,- you simply fold at the hinge of your hips.

You will no doubt immediately feel a stretch on the backs of your legs, which can be quite painful. Don't strain yourself, just bend as far as you comfortably can, and if necessary hold the position for just a few seconds. It's important to breathe down into your belly as far as possible. With luck, if you maintain this position, your legs will start to tremble. This is splendid, it means that your muscle tension is letting go and your legs are lengthening, becoming literally more 'vibrant'. When you straighten up, still breathing into your belly and with knees loose, you may well feel a much deeper contact with the ground - almost as if your feet are sinking into the floor.

An important muscle in joining up the whole pelvis, front and back, is the psoas, which runs on either side from the lower spine, right through the pelvis, and into the thighbone. This is the muscle which lets our pelvis rock back and forth in the orgasm reflex we described in the last chapter; often it is extremely tense and tight.

As we suggested, there is a strong relationship between looseness or tightness in the pelvis and in the jaw: this is one of the body's strongest reflexes, and an armoured jaw will stop the pelvis being free. It can be a bit of a bootstrap situation. Any release at either end creates a feedback of release at the other, and so on. We can even imagine a head superimposed on the pelvis, facing forwards but upside down: so that the chin coincides with the pelvic bone. Many other interesting relationships emerge - for instance, between nose and anus, so important for our learnt sense of disgust - often encouraging a tense pull-back of the face, away from 'down there'.

Exercise 14
The simplest possible exercise for checking out your pelvic segment is to stand with your knees loose, and rotate your hips as widely as you can - as if you were doing a hula dance. Keep breathing as you circle your pelvis first one way then the other, try large circles and very small ones, fast and slow movements; centring on one hip and then the other. But keep breathing! Notice what you feel while doing the movement, and while standing still for a moment or so afterwards. Where else in your body are you aware of sensations?

Tension in the pelvis is likely to set up the conditions for ailments of the reproductive and eliminatory systems - piles, constipation or diarrhoea, thrush, cystitis, cervical cancer, period pains, and problems with the change of life.

Grounding, Centering, Facing
This, then, is the body in pieces: the body split up, in self defence, into watertight compartments. Some segments are empty of charge, some overfull, some sour and stagnant, some at boiling point some frozen, some yearning, some hidden and fearful, Before we move on to look at how character assembles itself out of these fragments, we want to suggest some unifying themes for the whole bodymind.

Three issues identified by David Boadella are Grounding, Centering and Facing: three capacities which help create our health and openness to the world. Grounding, we have already mentioned: this is our capacity to take a stand, to get a purchase on the world, to anchor ourselves ready to put out effort. Bodily grounding, a strong and flexible relationship with the earth and with gravity, corresponds to emotional grounding; one will not be found without the other. The grounded body says 'Here 1 am'; it takes a middle way between anxious stiff uprightness ('uprightness') and slumped inertia - a springy, reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth which draws on the depth and solidity of the ground for a sense of nourishment and belonging as well as for physical support As Stanley Keleman puts it, 'if our relationship with the ground is tenuous, then our instinctual life and our body will also be tenuous. Our connection with the mystery of life will be tenuous.'

At times we need to ground ourselves in other ways: in relationships; in groups; in principles like loyalty and truth. The basis for all of these is a degree of freedom from armouring in feet, legs and pelvis; also in the buttocks, the back and shoulders, and in the head and neck. The more we look at grounding, the more we see how it involves a fundamental stance of the entire bodymind.

The same is true for Centering, which is a capacity for wholeness and singleness in our bodymind. For most people the centre - or its absence - is around the solar plexus. If the diaphragm is too frozen with fear, then there will be a conscious or unconscious emptiness, a vacuum where the centre should be.

An armoured diaphragm splits the body into an upper and a lower half, cutting through unity. Like ungroundedness, it may relate to the severing of the umbilical cord - a sense of being cut off from the sources of nourishment and meaning.

For many people, there is also a sense of division between left and right sides, or between front and back, accompanied by deep, subtle twists in the posture. Thus grounding and centering are fundamentally linked; and we need both in order to face the world and other people, which we do with the whole front of our body, face, heart, belly and sex.

Facing is incomplete if our navel area feels empty and vulnerable, say, or if inadequate grounding puts a twist in our stance. If the eye segment is armoured then, as we have already indicated, there can be a sense of unreality and fragmentation. You may feel that you have no core or boundaries, that you are open to being invaded, swept off your feet, or leaking away. Thus these three capacities are very much intertwined with each other. We can only feel secure enough to open up and face the world if we are confident of our strength, the capacity to defend ourselves, which is embodied in our backs, shoulders and buttocks.

Then we can face things as they are, rather than as we would like them to be, and respond appropriately by opening or closing, reaching out or fending off, advancing or retreating. It is this capacity for appropriate action which armouring damages or eliminates entirely: it represents one form or another of compulsive defence. We are now going to look at the different blends and combinations of strategies for self-defence which make up the individual character.

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