Category: Bioenergetics

So much FUN!

 

Wow, what a great group we had last night at the Bioenergetic Bodywork Group Session.   We had some people who had been at the group before, quite a few new people, and some folks with other connections to bio and to bodywork.

I really felt like dancing when we were finished…. The movements were great, we moved a lot of energy (you can tell by the heat and the sound!) and I was very relaxed and also energized by the experience.

Doing this kind of work within a group provides unique opportunities.  For example, the movement and sounds may bring up feelings, thoughts, or images.   You are invited to just stay with your own inner experience.  Doing that in the presence of other people may be new for you.  If, for example, you have a pattern of worrying about what other people think, or feeling responsible for other people, you might struggle to be yourself in a typical group.  In a bioenergetic group, however, you can just be with yourself, notice any orientation you may have toward other people, but continue to practice being YOU even when there are other people there.

I remember in my early group exercise experiences, I was perpetually looking at the other participants and trying to measure my performance against theirs.   Part of me NEVER wanted to be the first to drop out of the bow.  I wanted to be the very LAST person to stop sounding, the very strongest, the most stoic.   It took awhile to see how that pattern – working as hard as I could, hoping that I would be noticed and seen as a Good Girl  – is one that I was also playing out in my life outside.   When that became clear, then I was free to start to make changes.

The group exercise moves through a predictable sequence.  We connect to the ground, we charge up the body to increase the energy flow, we do some exercises to discharge the energy, and then we move back to a quieter experience after we have opened up some blocks and eased some tensions.   But the bioenergetic part of it is about taking the time in the process to reflect, and about staying open to the thoughts, images, feelings, and sensations that arise.   This is a way of making the unconscious conscious, and that’s what we are after.

 

 

Finding your ground

What do you do when the ground you stand on has been swept away from you?  There is a diagnosis….a relationship is breaking apart….a child on the way…..your job has disappeared?

According to Pema Chodron, the moment when the ground has disappeared under our feet is opportunity.  This is when we can notice ourselves scrambling, struggling for a foothold, for anything that feels a little secure when we feel like everything we have counted on is crumbling.  We can make a decision to just sit with the experience, to just notice what is happening and how we are responding.

If we can actually FEEL the ground, literally ground ourselves in our body sensations, we can often take the moment to stop clutching, stop scrambling, and just breathe.  It makes sense to me that we want to feel the ground.  We are not  tree dwellers, nor descended from tree dwellers.  We are not birds, equipped with wings.  We are creatures of the earth, whose feet depend on the earth for support.  When we cannot feel our feet, we cannot feel our support and connection.  The loss of support and connection can be profoundly disorienting.

What to do?   Check in with your feet.  Are they touching the ground right now?  Stand up, and check again.  If your feet are tense, then you will not notice as much contact with the ground.   If you habitually wear shoes that distort your feet, it may be harder to feel that connection, so slip off your shoes.   Now let the weight slide over onto one foot.   Use the other toe to balance, but just let all of your weight down onto one foot.  Soften your knee, even bend it a little, and see if you can drop your shoulders, soften your belly, and let the weight down on that one foot.   Move your toes a little, so that you can be sure they are taking some of that weight.  Stay there, pushing that foot into the floor and letting your weight down, until you start to feel a bit tired.  Now hold it, tired, feel how tired your leg is getting, and then, only then, gently allow the weight onto BOTH feet.

STOP!  Don’t do anything yet…just notice…notice both feet.  How do you experience them?  Do they feel different from one another?  Once you have explored this, then allow the weight to slide to the other foot and repeat the experience.  Work until you are feeling tired, and then wait, going into that tiredness a bit before resting on your two feet.  Then notice the absolute LUXURY of having two feet, and having two feet on the ground.   And notice anything else that is different in your body, or different in your mind.  Do you feel more connected to the ground?  Do you feel more relaxed in your shoulders, or softer in your belly, or more peaceful in your mind?

Resistance is futile….

No, no way.   I’m not doing THAT.  No how, no way am I going to look at THAT issue.  Nope.  You can’t make me. But our issues have a way of wearing us down, wearing us out, as long as we resist them.   What could happen if we just stopped resisting?

I remember reading something years ago that struck a chord with me.  It was a statement that we most resist that which we most need to look at.  I have tried to keep that in mind as I move through my life, and take notice of those things that I avoid doing, or that I procrastinate on, or that I “hate” or that I try to palm off on other people.   Those things are the things that I really need to look at.

How to do, it, though, when resistance is peaking?    Usually resistance is just felt as “I don’t want to…” and often you can feel it in your body as well.    Try it:  think of some conversation you don’t want to have, or some issue in your life that you don’t want to deal with, and say “I don’t want to…” and notice what your body does.  Perhaps you find tightness in your jaw.  Maybe your upper body pulls back.  Maybe you find your breath getting more shallow.   Whatever your response is, notice how your body mirrors your thought of resistance.

Sometimes just noticing is enough and we can soften and move through the resistance and do what needs to be done.  But sometimes it works better to actually go INTO the resistance and act it out.  If your body wants to pull back, then really pull back.  If you find yourself making fists, well, then, use them to hit a pillow or shake them…saying, with emphasis,  “I don’t want to!”   Or lie down on your mattress and kick your legs, using your whole leg and shouting, “I don’t want to do that!  I won’t!  I won’t!”

Can you imagine being able to do that?    Maybe you can go and try it (or maybe just try it out in your mind, first) and then let us know what you find out.

Getting your money’s worth

Money, like our other resources, is important...make sure you get your money's worth out of therapy.

 

Why do people GO to therapy?

Generally, people begin because they are suffering.   They are experiencing emotional distress and would like some help with it.   Often, though,  once people start, they learn that therapy is a productive way to learn a lot about yourself.    The more you know yourself, know your thinking, feeling and behaviour patterns, know your emotional stuck points and your hot buttons, the more freedom  you have in your life.   If I don’t know about my tendencies, about my defenses, about my patterns, then I am doomed to keep repeating and repeating them.   It is only through self-knowledge that I have any chance at all for creating a new life for myself.

You could argue that you don’t need a therapist to develop self awareness, and I would agree.  In fact, there would be no argument there!  But for many of us, we have a pattern of isolation and independence (“I can do this myself…I don’t need any help!”) that can lead to a lack of intimacy in relationships, or can be related to problems trusting other people.   Sometimes allowing ourselves to accept the support and the disinterested perspective of a therapist is a way to break out of a pattern in itself.

But suppose you have decided to start therapy.  What can you do to make the most of the experience?   Therapy isn’t like medicine;  you don’t just go for the hour every week and wait for it to work.     The more actively you involve yourself in your therapy, the more you’ll get from it.

Usually therapy helps you to see things in a different light.   This can be because of the experience of relating to another person in a different way, or because of hearing yourself say something in the presence of a caring other, or because of other experiential processes that happen during the therapy hour.  You can extend this shift by continuing to “process” during the week or weeks between sessions.  The following suggestions might be helpful to you.

  • Reflect on your session.  What have you heard or seen or done that was different for you?  Are there ways that you can bring this difference into your everyday life?  Even if you are not ready to make such a change, can you think about what it might be like if you were ready to do this?
  • Work on body awareness.
    •    Several times each day, take a moment to “check in” with your body.   Notice your energy level, your body sensations, any “felt sense” that arises in your awareness.  Notice any thoughts that are persisting.
    • Use body movement to help you identify what’s going on in your body.  Try grounding exercises,  or alternating vigorous movement with stillness to just see what’s up right now.
    • Journaling.   Handwrite about your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Do this without allowing your inner editor to have a voice.  Just write.  This is for you, not for anyone else.
    • Process emotional material.  When you have an emotional response to something, take time to notice it, notice what you do with that response, and watch the consequences.   What was actually happening?   What can you know about how you felt, what you did or said?  Would you like to be able to think, feel, or behave differently in the future?
    • Accept that you are a work in progress, and so is everyone else.   See how close you can get to accepting things as they are, including other people just as they are, and yourself, just as you are.   Acceptance isn’t condoning and it also isn’t necessarily forgiveness, but it is a step that can allow you to relax into reality rather than struggling in resistance.

So…that’s a short list of some ways that you can get your money’s worth out of therapy.   What other tips do you have?

 

 

Leap Day!

Credit: nickshell1983.wordpress.com via Nahno McLein's blog

 

I just had to make sure I got a post up on this special day….Leap  Day, that only happens once every four years.  Of course, every single day is just as special as Leap Day, in that it will never come again, and that my job is to try to make the most of it, even if that means just sitting and being in the day.   But I still have some attachment to posting something on this day.

So I am going to post an information sheet that I’ll be handing out at the group meeting tonight.  I hope you are coming!

Here it is:

               Body-Mind Psychotherapy: Bioenergetic Analysis & Therapy

Are you stressed?  Anxious? Sad? Worried?  Having trouble making decisions?   Things feel like just too much?

Bioenergetic Analysis is a holistic form of psychotherapy that listens not only to your words but also to what your body has to say. Bioenergetic analysis diminishes anxiety and depression, and promotes health and wellness in body, mind and spirit.

Bioenergetics assumes that the mind and body are one.  The experience of living in a body shapes and creates the subjective experience of the mind.  Feelings are a body experience, for example, and our minds use the information from our body experience to construct thought, generate behavior, and motivate our ways of being in the world.

The body-mind approach of bioenergetic analysis helps to heal a split between what our minds tell us and what our bodies experience.  In bioenergetics, we use body responses as a way to understand our patterns of behavior.  When we can feel those patterns in our bodies, then we become free to change them.

Becoming oneself~

When we were children, our feelings were huge.  When a very young child has a feeling, it happens all over the body….joy, sadness, anger or fear is a whole-body experience, filling the child and often filling the room.  As children, we learn that such explosive emotion is not acceptable.  We learn to contain our belly laughs by tightening our abdominal muscles, to constrict our longing by tensing our shoulders, to hold back our rage by tucking in our tails, setting our jaws, and tightening our backs.  In this way, we become socially acceptable but we cut ourselves off from our deepest feelings, including the sources of pleasure. In bioenergetics, we can take back our birthright.  We can learn to feel all that we were meant to feel, and experience our life in all of its fullness.

Working with a bioenergetic therapist is a way to help alter old patterns, heal persistent wounds, and move into a fresh future.

In bioenergetic therapy, you will explore your internal landscape with a trained therapist.  You’ll use movement, your voice, and other tools to help you experience yourself in a safe, comfortable setting.  With support, you’ll find that you can allow yourself to feel more, experience more, appreciate more, enjoy more.  When you can have these experiences in the therapy room, they become more possible in the world where you live and work.

Good to know….

An essential part of bioenergetic training is extensive personal bioenergetic therapy.  In bioenergetics, you know that your therapist has been through this very therapy.  This allows us to create a collaboration, in which you develop ways of moving forward in your life, while becoming more fully the person you were meant to be.

Bioenergetic Bodywork:  become vibrantly alive!

Bioenergetic exercise classes are fun!   Exercises are designed to help you get in touch with your body sensations, getting to know and like yourself in a different way.  Exercise classes are not psychotherapy, but helpful for everyone.   Exercise is tailored to your body needs, and incorporates stretching, sustained postures, vocal expression and fun!

During 2012, we’ll be offering FREE monthly bodywork groups on the last Wednesday of the month at Lokamotion Studio, 7-8 pm.  Call to register or just drop in.

 

Was there anything new and interesting in this post?   drop me a note or post a comment and share….and I hope to see you becoming vibrantly alive!
 

 

 

 

Mindfulness of the body

Mindfulness is everywhere these days….but, like most things that become fads, the basic concept may have been somewhat distorted in the rush to publicize.

Mindfulness is defined in a number of different ways, but what I want to talk about it a specific aspect of mindfulness.   When we are being “mindful” we are being fully present in the moment that is right here and right now.  We are doing that on purpose, and with no other agenda other than being present.  For example, we are not being mindful in order to relax, although often, relaxation may accompany mindfulness.   We are present to whatever is, without judgment or expectation.   That means that we are present to our thoughts that might complain about how we are doing something (“Mindful!  This is mindless!  Can’t you even pay attention for a minute?”….and let that judgment go) as well as to anything that might come in from the world via our senses.  For example, when I take a moment in my office to just breathe and be there, the ticking of the clock on the table is highlighted….the sound is there all of the time, but when I become aware of the present moment, that awareness include that tick-tick-tick.   If I wait, sitting with that awareness, the ticking recedes and something else arises in my field of awareness.   I have no agenda, I have no expectations, I have no need to “let go of my thoughts” or “stop thinking” or “breathe deeply.”  All I am doing is being present and aware of whatever is in my field of awareness.

In bioenergetics, we actually work to develop self-awareness, which might reasonably be called “mindfulness of the body.”  We do this work through movements that may present some level of strain to muscles, through exaggerating characteristic motions or body attitudes, and through expressive exercises with an opportunity to reflect on what happens inside us when we do these things.   What I have learned is that there is a big difference between a conceptual knowledge of the body (“Yes, I have a body.  Arms, legs, chest, organs, all of that…”) and an experiential awareness of being in a body.   Maybe better to say an experiential awareness of BEING a body, because, of course, that is what we are, human organisms experiencing life.

I taught preschoolers for years.  One activity was did was to get out large pieces of drawing paper and have the kids lie on the floor, and we teachers would trace the outline of the child’s body.  The kids would then use markers or crayons or paint to fill in the parts of their bodies.  This helped them to develop the conceptual outline….this is my body and these are its parts.  However, it may not have done much to help them understand that the body they conceptualized is also the body they inhabit, live in and through, and the vehicle from which all feeling flows.  So when I started my training and therapy in bioenergetic analysis discovered that while I knew ABOUT my body, I really didn’t know my body.  That is to say, I really didn’t know….myself.   I thought of myself as a person who resided….I don’t know where…in some thought bubble over my head, maybe.  In an astral, unseen body that accompanied my organic body.  Somewhere OTHER than in this flesh and blood and bone and muscle bag that does all the thinking, feeling, and behaving of my life.  Somehow I thought I was something other than this.   Because of that, I tried to “rise above” my feelings.  Or I tried to “control” my body reactions.  I controlled my appetite by limiting food intake;  controlled my body shape and size by over-exercising;  controlled my response to people I related to by overworking and being so busy I didn’t have time to notice how I was feeling.   I denied that I had a body at all, and I certainly denied that my body was ME.

But if my body isn’t me, then who am I?   There is no evidence that people exist in thought balloons over their heads.  There is no evidence that I am anything more than what I appear to be;  a human organism, with human thoughts, feelings, spiritual life, and bodily needs.   The best part is that by minding the body, I can  really experience life as a human, a juicy, vibrant, energetic, warm and alive human person.

Take a moment to be mindful of yourself in your body.   Take a breath, and just notice what it is to be a body, breathing air, sitting or lying or standing on the planet.   Notice the outer surface of your body;  where the skin touches fabric, feels air temperature, takes in the breeze.  Notice what parts of your body, what parts of you, are most vibrant and awake.  Notice what parts are less available to your awareness.  Just notice, and sit with whatever arises.    If nothing arises, sit with that.  If there is emptiness, sit with that.    If you feel full to overflowing, sit with that, also.  Notice that whatever arises will also slip away, as something else arises.   This is holding your self, your bodily self, in mindful attention.

What is this like for you?   If you wish, post a note below to let us share this experience of mindfulness of the body.

Chicken and egg take two

Which comes first, the thought or the feeling?  Do our thoughts actually create our feelings?  Or does a sensation in the body give rise to a thought, which would suggest that feelings come first?

One of the things I have learned in my studies is that when you have an apparent dichotomy, you can bring the level of analysis down to a finer view and the dichotomy will disappear.  Okay, that’s a fancy way of saying that most things look different when you take a different point of view.

So ages ago, psychologists theorized that a sensation in the body was just that, until the person gave it a label and then it became an emotion.  Much later, pioneers in the cognitive therapy movement suggested that what we THINK can dramatically affect how we feel;  specifically, we can generate a whole lot of personal distress by thinking distressing thoughts.  That doesn’t address the question of where those thoughts actually arise, though.  Lowen (check out the lowen foundation for his writings, and audio and video recordings….http://http://lowenfoundation.org/index.html) was ahead of his time, really, in pointing out that the neural activity of a thought likely arises from a sensation in the body.   Damasio offers a variety of clinical and scientific support for this…that the FEELING of what happens is what creates our thinking and our behaviour.

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES ANY OF THIS MAKE?

Okay, I am getting there.   You know that I love the theoretical but the practical is infinitely more, well, useful.   What it means is that everyone has a piece of the truth.  In your own experience, you can point to times when thinking about something in an unhelpful way has made you feel worse than you were feeling before.  So that part is verifiable with experience.   And when you develop your body awareness so that sensations register on your consciousness, it becomes apparent that there are links between body sensations and at least some of the thoughts that seem to arise spontaneously.   Here’s a pretty crude example:   You start to notice an empty feeling in your belly, and then there are some noises from in there, and at the same time, you suddenly notice that someone in an office down the hall must have popped popcorn (that should be illegal unless they plan to share) and you have a thought…..Maybe I’ll go out for lunch.    It would be hard to argue that the internal sensations, the external stimulation and the thought were unrelated.

Try it…try to see what connections you can find between your thoughts and your body sensations.   Or just your thoughts and your feelings (emotions, or overall mood states).   Notice when your thinking is affecting your feeling state.  Notice what thoughts arise when you experience particular body states.   See if you can figure out which is chicken, and which is egg.

Chicken, egg or something else?

Where do our feelings come from?  And why do we have them?  Lots of time, we might wish we didn’t…feeling deeply sad or rageful or terrified are not comfortable ways to be in our bodies.  We might wish those feelings away.  So why were we made or evolved to have them, anyway?

Okay, those are a couple of Big Questions.   If you have been reading here, you know I have a fondness for the way that Antonio Damasio explains the whole “feelings” thing.  He gets right down to the molecular level and talks about how the body works continuously to keep us alive, to maintain blood chemistry that is compatible with life, to keep our behaviour within limits that will keep us alive, and to activate systems to make dramatic changes when necessary for our survival.
But are our emotions necessary for our survival?  He says probably yes. We apparently cannot even make the simplest decision without our capacity for feelings.   Emotions are a movement in the body-mind (not his term) that result from an accumulation of smaller movements of energy and information, many of which have to do with keeping the body alive.  Emotion is an “image” in the body-mind (he uses that term broadly, to mean any thought, idea, picture, or felt sense) and when we become aware, in our consciousness, of that emotion, then it becomes a feeling.  Everyone doesn’t use this same set of definitions but it is useful to separate emotion and feeling when we are trying to figure out what’s going on with us personally.

Dan Stern talks about categorical emotions but he means feelings.  These are the usual:  happy, sad, angry, afraid, disgusted.  He also talks about “vitality affects” which refers more to the overall energy level you may be experiencing.   You may be low in vitality early in the day, but your overall feeling may pick up somewhat.  We experience these overall “feelings” much more consistently than we have categorical emotions.  Both vitality affects and emotions (feelings) are important, but we tend to ignore the everyday vitality stuff unless it is markedly out of our usual realm.

The point of all of this talk is this:  we have emotions/feelings and we have overall vitality affects, which some people will refer to as ‘mood.’   We have these experiences because they are related to keeping our bodies alive.  But, because we are human beings, we actually make a whole lot more use of our emotions than just staying alive.  Emotions, including both categorical emotion and vitality affects, give our lives colour.  They help us to make decisions, to approach or avoid situations or people, to engage in particular behaviour or react when certain stimuli are present.  We also influence our emotions consciously.   We choose a lot of our activities for the effect we expect them to have on our emotional experience.  For example, we go to movies to be excited, to feel good, to get scared, or to enjoy being with a friend while sharing this emotional experience.  We watch TV because we are ‘bored’ or because we need to be distracted from our thoughts.  We call a friend when we need contact to feel different than we do.  We call our mothers because we need to stop feeling guilty.   Many of our behaviours are motivated by a desire to change our feeling state.

The interesting thing is this:  we THINK that we are in control of our emotional lives, and in fact, we do influence our feelings a lot.  But the connections between what we think, do and feel is part of a hierarchy in the nervous system.  This part, the conscious and modifiable part, is higher on the phylogenetic scale than the part of the system that is just about sustaining life.   That’s probably obvious….feeling happy isn’t a requirement of life, but an adequate oxygen-CO2 balance in the blood is.   So even though we think we are making all kinds of changes to our ‘feeling’ life, the essential and essentially unknowable substrate is how our body is keeping us alive.

So why did I start out talking about chickens and eggs?  This post has taken on a life of its own…I was originally going to compare Al Lowen’s assertion that all thoughts have their beginning as a feeling or sensation in the body to the cognitive behavioural tenet that our feelings are the product of our thoughts.   I guess I still have that post to write…another day.

Fight, flight, freeze….or interact!

Nexus, Colorado’s Holistic Health and Spirituality Journal.

This link goes to an interview with Dr. Stephen Porges about his polyvagal theory.  This is a way of looking at the parasympathetic nervous system that helps to explain a lot about how people respond to traumatizing events or situations.

The old story was that we have two pathways in our involuntary nervous sytem, the sympathetic, or the arousing system, and the parasympathetic, or the calming system.  The sympathetic was activated by a sabre-toothed tiger leaping at us (or someone stomping on the brakes ahead of us on the bridge) and we were inspired to fight or run away.   The parasympathetic went into action in opposition, calming our bodies down when the tiger was gone or we had outrun him.   Turns out that this “either-or” model probably doesn’t really describe how things actually happen in the nervous system.  The model worked pretty well clinically;  people who were stressed had over-active sympathetic systems and needed to do relaxation exercises to activate their calming system.  When Herbert Benson labeled this the Relaxation Response in the 1960’s, it was a breakthrough and it still works pretty well when we are simply talking about external overstress and calming the body.

However, the realities of life in a body that has PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) were not really accounted for by this model.  For example, people who have been traumatized will often experience hyper arousal and hyper-vigilance.  That’s consistent with the opposition model.  But on the other hand, PTSD victims will also often be numbed, hypo-aroused, emotionally empty or frozen.  This can happen with or without being dissociated or depersonalized.  The old model just cannot account for how a person could have TOO MUCH activity in the parasympathetic system.

So Porges’ polyvagal theory is hierarchical rather than simply oppositional.  He posits that there are three distinct aspects to the vagus nerve, the tenth cranial nerve, and that these developed in the mammalian nervous system concurrently with our social and emotional behaviour.  That is, the physiology of the nervous system develops as a cause and an effect of behaviour.  The three parts are responsible for different aspects of functioning;  communication, mobilization, and immobilization.  Social connection requires visual and auditory attention and expression;  this part of the system ennervates the face, mobilizing the mouth and eyes, making it possible to listen and to speak, and to make eye contact.  The mobilization system makes fight or flight possible, while the immobilization system enables the organism to “play dead’ or to feign death or syncope to the degree that a potential aggressor will lose interest.

The most interesting (to me) part of this model is that the social interaction system is connected to our sympathetic nervous system.   Look here at what Stephen Porges said in the interview when asked about how this works:

I’ve heard the human mind described as a paranoid instrument. The premise is that when we are living in our senses, in the here and now, we usually feel safe, but our thinking mind often throws scary impressions in front of us, as if it’s anticipating some threat.
SP: I’ll address that by describing to you a part of our nervous system that is entirely focused on responding to other people, even other mammals like dogs and cats. This is not the same part of the nervous system that can put us into states of enlightenment or ecstasy. In a sense, this is a very grounded component of our nervous system. It engages contact with certain levels of senses that are not the ones that you’re describing. It’s where we are feeling our bodily information from inside our organs. This information from the body actually travels through nerves up through the brain stem and radiates upward to our cortex. This part of the nervous system provides a contact with reality; it regulates our bodily state, so we become alert and engaged. That does not include all of human experience, but it does include most of what we call social interactions. We can say that the social interactions are a very important component of our psychological experience as human beings. And this system, the social engagement system, is what determines the quality of those interactions—the features that we show other people, the facial expression, the intonation of our voice, the head nods, even the hand movements, are part of this. And if I turn my head away while I’m talking to you, if I talk in a monotone without any intonation, or if I drop my eyes, will you have a visceral response? How do you feel when I do that?
RD: It feels like you’re not very present, like you’re withdrawing or you’re disconnected.
SP: Disconnected, which may be interpreted by the other person as evaluative, not liking, not being motivated to engage, condescending or suspicious. So these facial gestures, which for some people are purely physiological responses, are now interpreted with a moral or, at least, a motivational overlay. This may or may not be true. Social engagement is a unique and very powerful component of our interactions.

As a therapist, I am very interested in how to make “safety” for my clients.  As a person, I am interested in how to help myself feel connected and comfortable in my world.  When I can see a person looking away, unable or unwilling to connect socially, I can now think of this as a function of the autonomic nervous system, not just voluntary behaviour.  If a person has a trauma history, then these elements of their social interaction may be a manifestation of their struggle….and imagine how it can keep on influencing relationships!   Plus this model has a lot to tell us about how our awareness of our bodies influences our sense of safety and the ability to soften into our lives and connect with others.

Hmm, lots to ponder…..if you want more, I suggest http://www.wisebrain.org/Polyvagal_Theory.pdf

Bioenergetics and Mindfulness

Bioenergetics and mindfulness

You have probably heard of mindfulness in many contexts. It is a popular term for a very old concept. This old concept refers to something that people do spontaneously; we become aware of the present moment, with all the subtleties of that moment. This happens many times each day. However, we also may spend a lot of time in unawareness, or mindlessness. This can happen when we are “lost in our thoughts,” caught up in some internal story or conversation, struggling with memories or worries, or otherwise on auto-pilot and out of touch with what is happening right now.

Bioenergetic bodywork helps us to focus on the present moment by focusing on body sensation, movement, patterns of tension and relaxation, and even emotion. These experiences of the body are sometimes ignored or even pushed out of awareness. Bioenergetics allows us to locate ourselves in our bodies and, perhaps for the first time, really experience who we are, right here, right now.

A mindful state can be attained by simply paying attention.  Right here and now, stop reading and pay attention to your body sensations.  Feel your feet on the floor, your seat in the chair, your hands in your lap.  Notice how much of your weight you can let down into the chair.   Notice the breath as it enters your body.  Notice where it goes, and how it leaves your body.  Notice how much of your body moves with the breath.  Now just let that breathing happen, giving it about 25 percent of your attention, letting the rest of your attention just float.  Notice what it is like to let your attention rest lightly on your breath.  Notice what it is like to allow your attention to float.   Notice what it is like to be fully attentive to whatever is happening with your breath, with your body, in this moment…this moment…this moment.  This is mindfulness.  This is being with what is, right here and now.

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