Right now something is happening in you that began a long time ago, specifically at the time of your birth, and that will end when you die. I only ask that, to find out, pay a little attention to some issues that I propose in this article.
A little distraction that I really likeand that surely you have also practiced on some occasion, is to sit in a crowded place and watch people go by observing the large number of ways of walking and moving.
When we take a closer look, it is easy to realize that, behind these movements, there is a person with a specific body shape and gestures. Sometimes I have thought about what those forms suggested to me and words such as “rage”, “fear”, “joy”, “anger” have appeared… curiously, words that correspond to emotions.
Other times, I have wondered what it must be like to live in that body so different from mine, what these internal and external bodily sensations will be like and how they facilitate or hinder the experience of the emotions to which I referred before.
Today we know that emotions are innate states of the organism and common to all people. No one has to teach someone to be sad or angry, since emotions are made up of powerful bodily sensations that are organized into behavior.
experiment free
Emotions are responses of the body to our state and tell us what to do with it. If, for example, we lose contact with a loved one, the body undergoes a series of changes. Then we say that “we are sad” and, depending on the intensity of the emotional state and if we do not repress it, we end up crying. Finally, crying provides relief and comfort is obtained from others.
Anger is a reaction of shaking off something irritating. and fear is a statement that there is a danger and, moreover, an action to seek help. As we can see, emotions seek a change in external situations and, at the same time, an internal change in bodily sensations. On many occasions, people who seek help to “express their emotions” ask for therapy.
It is not a problem of expression that causes their discomfort, but a problem of being able to freely experience that emotion again.
If a person at some point in his life believes that she is going to stop being loved or that she is going to be despised for showing her sadness and crying, and that this loss of love will be worse than being left without comfort, it is clear that her organism begins to develop the appropriate respiratory and postural mechanisms to cushion the bodily sensations that can lead to the experience and discharge of sadness through crying.
The previous example is applicable to any other type of emotion; In other words, each time I am going to feel less sad, or less angry, and even less happy. And, at the same time, I will feel worse since, by inhibiting the emotion, the body, in some way, becomes sick.
Alexander Lowen, one of the great diffusers of Bioenergetics, said: “When a person has a depression, it is the body that becomes depressed.” The vast majority of ways to stop feeling translate into bodily blockages that in turn materialize in fixed structures, in fossilized ways of moving.
allow change
I remember a patient who said that he never got angry and whose constant complaint was: “Others take advantage of me because I’m too good.” He complained in a meek voice as he clenched his left fist. That man was able to start saying “no” to the excessive demands of others after managing to hit a cushion with force with his fist.
Then he broke into a sad and deep cry as she remembered all the times she had been promised something and then denied. Like him, we are all an organism in a process of continuous change, we are not a static organism isolated from the environment.
Our body perceives contact with others and gets excited, and from that reality we interact and notice the emotion of the other receiving an emotional “nutrition”, which makes our body have a possibility of change and also of enrichment. To the extent that we become aware of our areas of emotional rigidity and, therefore, of physical blockage, we have a chance to do something different and develop as people.
We can stiffen the body to scare others, but we can also be afraid of damaging them and end up rigid and fearful at the same time. Likewise, if we don’t achieve something, we puff up our chest acting as if we were very important with the unspeakable purpose of being accepted unconditionally. We can be so disillusioned that, exhausted, we drop our body and our eyes to flaccidity, in resignation and defeat.
But these are nothing more than ways of presenting ourselves to the world. They are not an “immovable and determining identity” but beliefs that we can change through personal work to connect with our emotions and bodily sensations, trusting in regulation and wisdom as an organism that tends to health and balance with the environment and with myself. same.
We heal by connecting
It is contact with others, emotional and body contact what heals us. Through it we can experience communication, vulnerability and intimacy.
Love and intimacy modify our emotional expression by allowing deeper experiences in which beliefs and defenses are less present, in which we can regain spontaneity and trust in the goodness of all our emotions. Favoring a certain energy circulation in the body, which is easy to maintain from small stretches or movement that allow us to keep it flexible and conscious.
Now, while you’re still holding this magazine, you may begin to suspect that what is happening in you and that started when you were born is a reality that you can choose, if you trust your body and what it tells you with your emotions.