One of the things that compelled me most about the work of Bioenergetics cofounder Alexander Lowen was his emphasis on the “functional sameness of mind and body.” In other words, what was once called “a disease of the mind” was simultaneously a “disease of the body.” And the problem could be solved by focusing on the body itself. In the case of bioenergetics, that meant grounding, excavating, expressing, releasing. This resonated with my own personal experience—crying as an act of liberation, healthy anger release as the road to equanimity and peace with path. And it felt like a message well worth communicating to a species that had been convinced that it’s every issue was a mental one. As a result, I wrote an abundance of quotes that endeavored to tilt the scales back in the direction of embodied awareness and somatic therapies. But my perspective was ‘wrong-headed’ and needlessly myopic.
For example, I wrote the following words in my popular gift book Hearticulations:
“I prefer the term “emotional illness” to mental illness. It may be true that our material is often manifested in our thinking, but I also believe that the mind is not the primary source-spring for many conditions. The focus on the mental keeps us looking in the mind for the core issues, when so often the real issue lies within the emotional body, and requires more embodied, therapeutic approaches. Once someone is labeled “mentally ill,” they often end up with an analytically-based psychiatrist who medicates them, rather than with a psychotherapist who can support their deeper healing. It feels very similar to the spiritual and patriarchal emphasis on the “monkey mind” as opposed to the “monkey heart.” By focusing on the mind alone, we get trapped in a head-tripping loop and it becomes very difficult to liberate our consciousness. If we focus, instead, on healing the emotional material that sources the condition, there is hope for real change.”
And this…
“Depression is frozen feeling. It’s not a disease of the ‘mind.’ It’s a disease of the heart. It is sourced in unexpressed, unreleased, and unhealed pain that is held deep within the physical and emotional body. You can talk about it in therapy to soften its edges, you can medicate it in the hope that it becomes more manageable, but the real work has to happen somatically, deep within the body itself. The frozen material has to be thawed out, worked through, released. Our shadow is not our enemy. Repression is. Unfortunately, we still live in a world that is afraid of the source material. So we shun it, bury it, ‘manage’ it with dissociative spiritualities, medications and feelings-avoidant psychoanalysis. All of this merely perpetuates and concretizes the problem. The only way to heal depression is to get to its roots. To get right inside those frozen feelings, and thaw them out somatically. We felt the initial pain in our bodies. We must go right back inside of our bodies to feel and resolve it. No more damming up of our emotions. No more defenses and denials. THE FEEL IS FOR REAL. Let’s feel our way back to life.”
In recent months, I have been humbled by an experience of the power of the mind to both obstruct and support my personal healing. There are many aspects to this, but the most profound was the way in which the mind catalogued my every experience, AND required a certain degree of remembrance and resolution of those experiences before it could arrive at a state of intrinsic well-being. In the absence of remembrance and resolution, the stockpiling of all that material led to a kind of internal messiness—something akin to a disordered or chaotic mind. Most significantly, it was very difficult to grok the extent to which the unresolved material was living itself out in my life. Nothing severe or deeply troubling, but significant enough that it became clear that I was not fully living in current time. The weight of the “then”, was over-powering the “now”, and it was obstructing my lens on certain aspects of reality.
On its face, this view is not entirely different from the philosophy at the heart of many somatic psychotherapies. That is, that a whole load of unresolved trauma blocks our access to the moment. But what was—and still is different—is the way that I couldn’t find resolution within the body itself. I could certainly access some of the old memories, but not enough of them to bring myself—and over sixty years of lived experience—into a state of inherent coherence. Not enough of them to reach a place where I finally felt ‘caught up with myself’ and ready to step back into life afresh and anew. For me, this could only seem to happen through the surrender to the mind itself. The cascading stockpile of memory wanted to be witnessed, re-lived, re-organized, as part of a necessary sense-making journey back in time. Only when the pile of remembrance got down to a certain level, and only when it reached a personally essential depth of integration, could I begin to understand where I had been and where to go next. And so the journey continues…
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THE POETRY HEALING COURSE: WRITING FROM YOUR HEART AND SOUL
If you are seeking an exquisitely supportive and affordable opportunity to heal and unite mind and body, I highly encourage you to check out and sign up for Susan Frybort’s imminent Poetry Healing Course. A transformative 4-week online workshop designed to help you discover healing and resolution through writing poetry, the next course begins November 7, 2023. With a depth of compassion and insight seldom encountered, Susan provides encouragement and support for anyone ready to embark on a personal journey to access their inner voice and poetic expression. It is a great way to bring the year to a close. This course really is that good…
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In service of our shared quest for healing and meaning,
Jeff Brown
It’s interesting for the last year I’ve been consistent with somatic work. It’s been amazing. Just last week I got to a place where I felt like I’ve done all this releasing ... but now what? So I have reached out to start working with a therapist but she very much believes in body work as well, and that gives me hope.
I have to come realize that both mind-work and body-work are essential and have their place. We can’t exclude the mind fully, although I think excluding the body completely would be worse.