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This website is dedicated to helping people heal their mental conditions (depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, etc.) by giving information on how to feel and release difficult emotions (such as fear, sorrow, shame, rage, etc.) from the body. Most mental illnesses (excluding severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia) are primarily driven by difficult emotions being held in the body as forms of energy. Indeed, emotions are invisible forces held in the body which have psychological and physical consequences. Moreover, emotions can be held in the body along a continuum between active or armored. When an emotion is active we are aware of the emotion (at least the physical and/or psychological effects of the emotion) in our conscious awareness. However, the majority of emotion in us is held in an armored state, a term coined by the Viennese psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich, which refers to how the body forms tight muscular contractions of tissue around difficult emotion to hold it in place, and outside of our awareness. Therefore, we are generally not aware of armored emotions (but this does not mean they do not have a significant impact on us).
We feel difficult emotions, such as fear and terror, in the body and with the body by moving our awareness into the body and relaxing and breathing calmly and openly. In this manner we allow the energy of the emotion to move, and hopefully, to release itself from the body. This is different than what our left-brain-analytical-mind wants to do, which is to psychologically and physically contract and control the emotion, study it, ruminate upon it for hours, and prevent it from entering consciousness. However, if we can surrender to the process of relaxing and feeling, we can start to release difficult emotions from the body, and thus, start the process of embodiment— when we release a difficult emotion from the body, more of our native lifeforce returns to the body and inhabits it. When this happens we feel better, more at ease, more heart-open, more vital, more sensitive to life, more grounded to the earth, and connected to others and the greater universe. This site also gives information on how our minds and behaviors actively work against the process of feeling and embodiment. We will specifically look at the topics of victim consciousness, perfectionism, and ego-contracts to see how this happens.
Most of us are holding large amounts of difficult emotion in our bodies and many of us are unaware of this fact— we just assume that living up in our heads in a tough, devitalized body is normal. This holding obstructs the normal flow of lifeforce energy in the body, which keeps us unwell and ungrounded (even during periods of relative calm for some of us). However, If enough difficult emotion becomes activated, we will likely develop a mental health condition, whatever that may be in anyone’s case (major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, worsening posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, to name a few). The main emotion that keeps our lifeforce out of our living, breathing, and sensing body is fear. Consequently, we must face our fears in order to embody. Indeed our consciousness only evolves to the extent we face our fears.
It is recommended that you start your journey through this website by reading “Feeling Our Emotions” below before moving on to other parts of the site. Moreover, while the information on this website can be useful as stand alone exercises and activities, it is highly recommended that you work through this material with a therapist or healer who is skilled with powerful and difficult emotions and has a proficient knowledge of the energy body. What one may realize as they go through this process and awaken their feeling or energy-body is that the body is a vast sea of living energy. And that living life grounded in this energy is quite different than going through life with attention mostly consigned to the thinking realm of the head. Lastly, just as you would not indiscriminately walk out into the ocean for miles with a minimal swimming ability, one needs to be intelligent about incarnating their lifeforce into the body. A professional healer and guide is not only worth it, but often necessary.
Citation for Reich's Character Analysis:
Character analysis (Third enlarged). (1972). . Farrar Straus and Giroux.
Feeling Calisthenics guides us through feeling a series of body regions. It’s purpose is to strengthen our ability to feel into our bodies, supporting emotional release and embodiment (bringing more life force into the body).