BODYMINDING 2

...................................by Stanley

Bodyminding is not a replacement for focusing. It is certainly a useful exercise in itself, but it is also an essential as part of focusing. Without the ability to stay with the body, focusing is much more difficult. Time and effort is used up in therapy because the person simply has no idea how to stay unhurriedly with their body – metaphorically they have lost touch with the heart.

The first learning step in a focusing session is: “Make yourself comfortable in the chair, feel your body and get yourself in the room”. Gendlin has said that this step is often treated as a mere introduction, a preliminary; but it is probably the most important step of all. In bodyminding I am simply taking this advice very seriously.

There is one observation that makes bodyminding worth considering. With focusing, a person gives attention to the non-verbal felt-sense of a problem. In doing this, a process goes on out of sight that eventually produces a valuable change of viewpoint about the problem. Prior to this conscious shift such a hidden process must have been going on to make this shift possible.

Let me put this another way: when the focuser gives attention to the felt-sense of a problem, all she is aware of is the murky, body-feel of the problem. After a few moments of getting the body-feel of it, something will emerge that carries the problem further, producing a valuable shift of viewpoint. What I am stressing is that some process must be occurring out of sight during that moment of silent attention to the body sensation; it is certainly nothing that the focuser is doing. The subsequent shift of conscious viewpoint is the result of that unseen body process.

We have no idea what is going on in that unseen process. All we can say is that the conscious shift arising from it indicates that something is going on; and it happens only when the person gives a certain kind of attention to what the body is manifesting as a sensation.

But the question immediately arises: why should the body need my attention to do this unseen work? Remember, though, in focusing we are giving the body a certain kind of attention. Perhaps we do not always give it conditions favourable for it to do its work – just as pathogens around a wound are unfavourable for the body to do its repair work, maybe some of our ‘infected ideas’ impede natural processes. It may be that the body needs a certain kind of attention analogous to the kind of attention the client needs to move forward in therapy. In essence this could be summed up as ‘being with’ the person – not demanding, not suggesting, not criticising – simply being with. Perhaps this is what the body needs from me to do its work effectively.

The body has work of its own that has nothing to do, at least directly, with my conscious activity: it has its own processes that can’t be influenced by thought, any more than cognitive meddling can assist the body’s fight against a virus. The body has its own methods, as when it induces a feverish high temperature to inhibit invading bugs. The body knows how to do all this – I don’t.

But there are many ways to make it difficult for the body to do its work. Smoking, drugs and drinking are the most obvious. But also some of our health prescriptions are counter-productive. For example, one is supposed to breathe properly right? – right!

But also wrong if you try to impose correct breathing.

In not breathing properly you will notice a sensation of physical restriction. Now, when you find your chest tight and your breathing constricted it is not a good idea to impose ‘positive breathing’. Tightening and constriction is where you are stuck – maybe from a time when you inhibited breathing to hold down emotion. The body wants to unfreeze, to move on, but it has to go down its own track to do so. You interfere with such a process in trying to get the body to do what it should do. But the trick is to tune in to the sense of tightness and be with the body in its tightness. Let it do what it wants to do – not what you think it should do – what it wants to do. Maybe it wants to experience the tightness even further. Find out!

Look at the analogy of going through the grieving process. When a person is in grief they have to fully experience it before they get through it. When a person is in grief and just about to cry, one way to freeze them in grief is to tell them to look on the positive side. In therapy you don’t tell people how or what they should feel. You stay with them as they go through their own process. In the same way, you don’t tell the body how to process itself by trying to make it breath properly.

Another difficult condition to impose on the body is the attempt to relax. ‘Relaxation’ exercises are said to be a way to help oneself mentally and physically. There are all kinds of prescriptions to progressively promote physical relaxation. Now, it is quite true that relaxed states can be achieved this way. It can also be done with various altered states using drugs or hypnosis or booze; their fatal attraction is that they do give temporary relaxation.

In some relaxation exercises you are told first to tense and then relax each part of the body in turn. This is nearer to what we are advocating and has some workability by all accounts. But the induced tensions and relaxations in these exercises are coming as commands – they are not originating from within the body, from body’s own processes; moreover, the order in which each limb is addressed comes as an imposed routine and so the body does not pick it up with its own steps to carry it forward. This system would be rather like telling a client in therapy: “Well, in today’s session we are first going to work on your problem with women; then we’ll move on to the eating; and then to your job. We’ll spend five minutes on each topic, first looking at the problem and then the solution....OK!”

The same difficulty is inherent in all forms of ‘exercises’ attempting to train the body. Many of these methods treat the body as a thing that can be conditioned, an object that can be manipulated. It’s our favourite western mode where the body is regarded a mechanism. So often though, as soon as you come out of the relaxed state, the stiff neck or tense shoulders return. There really has been no movement, and for good reason – the body has not been allowed to go through it’s own process. It has been given more commands on top of all the other ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ and ‘directives’ that put a strain on natural homeostasis – one more thing it has to cope with. Look at it this way: how much does your body have to cope with you? We underestimate the enormous stress we ‘normal neurotics’ place on our biological system with our curative methods and demands for improvement.

Returning to the point I made at the beginning: a common error for beginners in focusing is not staying long enough with the felt-sense: being in a hurry for meaning, impatient for ‘what is supposed to happen’. One misses then what is actually happening. Bodyminding slides easily into focusing because it is an essential part of it. But try it as a simple exercise in itself.

Remember that little number I wrote called Pausing to Focus. Bodyminding is good training in pausing.

Doing nothing is something you have to be able to do! How’s that for a Zen paradox ?