I think the essence of healing is emotional openness and motion. You have to get, somehow, to places where you are hurt, then add motion.
As we move through life, many of us have our flow of action blocked, or constricted, or redirected, as an unconscious means of going around and avoiding emotional knots tied to traumas, large and small, which forced at some point a reaction of avoidance and forgetting (what I have called forgession, which is a more or less intentional forgetting). The image I would use is a flow of water constricted by many partial dams and turns in the river. Action is tied to emotion, which you will note has the word motion in it. Less blocks, fewer bends, and you get more effective expressions of energy, of emotion, of action.
As an example, I would submit that anxiety is simple a very small dose of anger, directed at people who hurt us long ago. It is both precautionary–a mild, highly diluted fight or flight response–and reactive to certain eternal moments that exist in us, certain places which NEVER CHANGE, certain situations that you can’t get over, not least because you can’t remember them, or remember them in a way which subtracts the honest emotions you felt.
The task is to feel those feelings, which we have done many times, but to add motion. What Holotropic breathwork does, as an example, is first induce a state in which suppressed emotions are allowed to come up, but then through gradual changes in the music, adds motion. You don’t know where the music is going, what is next, and you have to accept this. This adds motion.
Or another example would be Barry McDonough’s 20 second response for panic attacks. First, you accept the anxiety. Second, you ask for MORE. Finally, you add a 20 second countdown. You ask it to do its worst, but in 20 seconds, no more. The countdown, I realize, adds motion. Where a panic attack is more or less falling into what feels like a never-ending spasm of terror and sense of incipient insanity, you break that spasm by adding motion, by adding time, by putting in on a line which you move along, one which has an end. It’s a very clever system.
I think I’m getting close to figuring these things out. One of my goals is to create an actually, consistently effective psychotherapy. The Holotropic Breathwork is already invented, and already effective. What I feel, rightly or wrongly, is that I may be able to better systematize it, and better able to frame it cognitively such that it sees much wider use, which I feel could only benefit our society in pervasive and desirable ways.