Be that as it may, one thing I have recently started doing is engaging with my breath. I think one could make a case that the primary PHYSICAL reality we all deal with is the fact of our breath. If you think about it, breath is both conscious AND unconscious. We can choose to take a deep breath and hold it. But if we don’t think about it, it happens anyway.
I’ve been reading in a superficial way “The Perceptible Breath”, by Ilse Mittendorf. Her basic position is that trying to control the breath is useless, but so is ignoring it. The basic method is simply to let it come, naturally, then let it go, naturally. No work is needed.
But I find in doing this that all sorts of emotions start coming up. I would speculate that part of the reason for the effectiveness of Wholotropic Breathwork is that it accesses a root element of our unconscious perceptual reality, which is our breath. I suspect most all emotional constraints and traumas and everything else is locked up in our breath.
It is a strange thing: to be alive is to breath, which means that to accept life you must accept your breath. Sometimes, though, I get angry with it, angry with life, impatient, perturbed, untranquil.
We have what I normally call bodily gestalts, which is the result of the peace we have made between the need for motion and constraints on the willingness to move created by fear, and emotional scars. Moshe Feldenkrais noted many years ago that given perfect calm, all people would “operate” their bodies the same way, but we all know that many people we can recognize simply by how they move. This gestalt is also, I would submit, a paradigm, a framework from within which you perceive the world, but one which INHERENTLY prohibits certain types of movement. The emotional “binding”, and the perceptual binding are integrally linked.
As any long time readers I may have well know, I like to dream. I dream of a day in which the normal, standard education provided to all people in the world includes a physical education that teaches them to be aware of emotions, to process emotions, and to grant the world access to them, and all the wonders of experience that will enable. I visualize ritual centers, and beautiful monuments. Why not build Rivendell? Why not emulate the fictional elves in the Lord of the Rings and dedicate ourselves to tranquility, harmony and beauty?