Every bad feeling is potential energy towards a more right way of being if you give it space to move towards its rightness.
The very existence of bad feelings within you is evidence that your body knows what is wrong and what is right. It must know what it would be like to feel perfect, or it could not evoke a sense of wrong.
Eugene Gendlin: Focusing.
To meet the client in his or uniqueness, we must let go of rigidly held assumptions or risk reducing the client to a shadowy player in our theoretical system.
In so far as we leave room for a sincere encounter, we have interpersonal therapy. Our professional demeanor has value, but our basic humanity, honest questioning, our awareness of personal limitation and our grounded presence encourages the deepest change in our clients. Mental knowledge, so essential in the development of our work, must translate down to blood and muscle, to our capacity ‘to be embodied’.
John P. Conger: The Body in Recovery.
In the process of training to become a practitioner in the healing professions we aim to develop: an alert and sensitive eye, ear and touch; a confident intuition; a simple honesty; a thorough and useful knowledge and a personal freedom which we may offer to others.
We must train ourselves; to find, to become and to surrender to ourselves, to find our strength, place, peace.
Our realm is contradiction and the creative force between polarities; Mind as an aspect of Body; Body as an aspect of Mind; inspecting the currents of time, and moving into the boundless simplicity of presence.
The essence of therapy is meditation, stillness out of which life wells.
Key Speyer
Somatic Psychotherapist
Stressful situations and unresolved emotional conflicts develop chronic muscular tensions. Chronic tension and rigidity diminish our aliveness as each contracted muscle blocks movement and inhibits our self-expression. The mind and body are directly connected so that a depressed mental state will contract the body and a contracted body will depress the mind. A decrease in the vital functioning of the body will inhibit motility, feeling and responsiveness, leading to depression. The more alive one is, the more energy one has. A free flow of energy allows one to effectively cope as the energy translates freely into spontaneous movement and expression.
Chris Campbell
We humans are a vast system of systems and subsystems; to make conscious use ofthe complex wisdom of the body isto achieve a sublime orchestral experience of the self and its many ecologies.
Jean Houston
All through the body, holding things together and holding things up, is connective tissue. Tissue that connects. You might think of it as the body’s built-in cling wrap. This tissue has tremendous strength and resilience. It also has bio-electric properties - that is, when it is tugged gently, it generates tiny electrical impulses which are experienced by the body as comforting, healing and regenerative. When you stretch you are gently tugging these tissues all over your body.
Every kind of tissue has a favourite kind of movement and a favourite way of being stretched. Connective tissue loves to stretch, to stretch and be stretched. If you stretch juuuuust enough, your connective tissue will respond by producing the neurochemicals of pleasure.
This is a gift you can give yourself, (as connective tissue and as awareness), whenever you choose.
Julie Henderson. Embodying Wellbeing: How to Feel as Good as You Can In Spite of Everything.
Laughter pulses all the diaphragms of the body including those in the brain, pumps all the organs and fluids, stretches all fascia, strengthens the immune system and brightens the mind.
Julie Henderson. Embodying Wellbeing: How to Feel as Good as You Can In Spite of Everything.
Your body is organic, and you need to listen to its rhythms until you feel that each cell…is
talking to you. When you develop such sensitive awareness of your body…you can tell it what to do…your whole body feels light and blissful…It is liberating…you reach a point where your body and mind co-operate so perfectly that you feel body is mind and mind is body.
Lama Yeshe
The way we breathe is often a revealing metaphor for our willingness, or ability, to experience what is actually going on inside ourselves, and to move freely through and within our lives and ourselves. For some of us, for example, our restricted, superficial breathing is our unconscious way of suppressing our emotions, of feeling less. Opening up the restrictions in our breathing can help us open up the experiential spaces of our own minds and bodies and learn how to live in the full expanse of the present moment. It is in the spacious reality of the present moment that real exploration, healing, and wholeness can take place.
To live from more of the whole of ourselves is only possible, I believe, when we can fully exhale, when we can let go of everything that is truly unnecessary in our lives. We’re not just talking about a physical act here; we’re also alking about a psychological and spiritual one as well. Can I let go moment-by-moment, of my narrow, illusory self-image and all the unnecessary muscular tensions and contractions that arise from it? Can I let go moment-by-moment of all the unnecessary and fictitious things, both big and small, that I get attached to and identify with, so that I can receive new, more honest and complete impressions and perceptions of myself and others? Can I live and relate from my wholeness right now instead of from my assumptions, opinions and judgements based on past experiences and future expectations.
This is what the process of health, healing and self transformation is really all about - the inner space and freedom to explore, to be, and to appreciate who or what I already am in my essence. The way we breathe, the way we participate day-by-day in the breath of life - the boundless life force that animates and connects us all - can play a vital role in this intimate exploration.
Dennis Lewis. 2004. Free Your Breath, Free Your Life.
The basic work of health professionals in general, and of psychotherapists in particular, is to become full human beings and inspire full human-beingness in other people.
Chogyam Trungpa. 1993. Becoming A Full Human Being.