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 ?

BODY MINDING

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

For most civilised people there seems to be a gap between the thinking awareness level and the physicality of the body. Sometimes, on a thought level, a problem or concern can seem trivial; but on a physical level it can have quite a big effect. My boss was rude to me yesterday. I think about it, sure. But it’s not a heavy deal. I am not consumed by it – it’s just life! I didn’t like it, but it didn’t worry me.

But, seemingly unconnected with it, I was tense and sleepless that night and felt unwell in the morning. I say to myself, “I often feel crap after a night like that”. That’s how I pass it off. The two phenomena: the minor incident with my boss and my physical body events – don’t seem to be connected. They are completely different orders of magnitude. The stress of my sleepless night does not match the trivial episode with my boss. If I were asked if there was a connection, I would probably laugh and say, “Oh yes, probably”, and pass it off.

But the truth is that my unpleasant physical experience was quite definitely a reaction to the incident with my boss the previous day. Something instantly happened in my body when my boss was rude to me. But I don’t live in my body; I live in my head where I by-pass bodily events, dismissing them so as to get on with the business of living. Thus, there appears to be completely no connection. My sleeplessness and headache come as though out of the blue. My physical bouts of unwellness seem completely random.

But there’s more to it: the incident with my boss is really only a trigger. My physical reactions have a deeper origin. Most likely as a child the original experience was a physically felt impact that the body has carried ever since. It triggers whenever someone treats me badly.

Real emotional impact is physical – felt by the total organism. In the engulfing physicality of the early incidents there is no split between mind and body. That comes later when we learn, as they say, not to let things effect us. But unknown to us the body goes on carrying the trauma.

Later, it only takes the merest reminder to jog the body’s memory where some small event can cause a massive physical reaction, giving us perhaps little indication of the trigger in present time. Like the incident with my boss I described above.

But even if we suspect the trigger, it still may not lessen the physical disturbance. Cognitively suspecting the connection is not enough.

Some time ago I started a small experiment. I thought to myself: ‘I wonder what it would be like to live in my body instead of in my head’. This led, in the course of time, to a little sideshow I called ‘Body Minding’.

Unlike focusing, I didn’t use interaction between the felt-sense and symbolising; in other words, I didn’t try to name what I felt. Instead, I paid attention to bodily sensations only. To put it another way, I made a space for the body to do its own thing, to carry forward its own needed processes without inquiring or probing, simply recognising non-cognitively what is happening physically. Not trying to solve any problem or difficulty. Not trying to do anything, in fact. It could be described as a time where one just lives in the body, rather than merely having a body. They were like little meditation sessions, except that my orientation was different to that of meditation. I was not watching my body, I was being my body.

What I called ‘Body Minding’ is like, ‘joining in’ with one’s physical sensations rather than merely observing them. You could say ‘being in’ sensations rather then ‘looking at’ them. Quite a trick until you get the idea. To begin with each session took me a little while to get there, but when I did it was quite noticeably different: being alive in my body instead of my head – the locus of myself ‘lower down’.

I have found that just a little practice in Body Minding has made me much more aware of my immediate physical reaction to present time situations. That gap I spoke of at the beginning – the gap between the thought level and the physical reactions of the body – is not so wide. I catch a physical reaction sooner and so I am much more aware of what turned it on. I seem to be more immediately responsive.

It’s not at all that I am practicing body minding all the time. It’s just that a little practice has made a difference to life when I’m not practicing it. Quite small physical sensations are more perceptible and their connection to events of the moment is sharper.

For example – and this is a true one – it’s nine in the evening; I’ve had my meal and washed up – and I think, ‘what shall I do now?’ Instantly I get the slightest empty feeling in my chest – almost unnoticeable. I nearly overlook it.

Ah, I know what that is. It’s the dread of nothing. I’ve known that one all my life. As a child one of the most awful feelings was: ‘there’s nothing to do’. It was more than just boredom, it was more like an anguished dread of nothingness – death’. And I got it too whenever it was time to go to bed which I would put off as long as possible, driving my parents crazy.

And interestingly, that little scene as an adult was at 9.0pm. Nearly bedtime !

But at least that evening I got just what was happening to me. A small thing? Yes, I suppose so. Not exactly life threatening or dramatic. Not the sort of thing they’d give you medication for.

But a win is a win. And a small win leads to others.