Radix Institute
Radix and SpiritualityRadix approach to Spirituality
– Ronald Hook
There has been a surge in the number of those who call themselves spiritual, rather than religious. Radix principles can be applied to spirituality as well. Radix work puts us in touch with the creative stirrings within our body (including the stir of emotion and a deeper intimate experience of human sexuality). it is in that way that we are put in touch with The Creative Process in Nature as it flows, moves and pulsates within and through us, and around us.
I can imagine that The Creative Process in Nature is what many have referred to as G_d the Creator. That G_d is conceptually more fixed and “out there somewhere”, yet, I would argue that G_d is the Creative Process, a moving process, within and around living beings. The sense and experience of The Creative Process within us and around us as a moving process is what people refer to as spirituality. As a sense of movement it is not a straight line, but curved: a swirl or a stir. It leaves us with a sense of awe with respect to something larger than ourselves of which we are also part: The LIfe Force.
The Life Force is a fundamental concept of Radix work. Thus, a direct link exists between Radix concepts and Radix bodywork with the experience of spirituality. Radix bodywork can significantly deepen one’s sense of spirituality and would also be a help to the spiritual aspects of all religions and creeds. As an example: Songs of praise are more beautiful when they come from a body that is more open emotionally.“
Feeling IN to the body
Osho Pulsation has a certain reputation amongst Osho therapies as being tough, pushy, and cathartic.
It is true that Osho Pulsation is a high-energy method and uses techniques that can, and do, help people open to deep emotions, and to release their pain, their anger, their fears. But feeling and expressing emotions does not require your pushing; it requires your awareness, presence, sensitivity, a willingness to breathe, and the capacity to allow your own feeling to arise from within.
So it is important to remember that the capacity to feel and connect with deep, authentic feelings and emotions, is one that needs time, patience, and preparation for the body and the energy system.
What is this preparatory work?
The first step is to bring the consciousness into the body, to help people ‘arrive’ into their physical bodies in such a way that their attention, their awareness, is focused on physical sensations, emotional feelings, the feeling of breath moving in and out, touching the body from the inside. This is the “felt sense” described by Eugene Gendlin, founder of ‘Focusing Therapy”. Through this turning inwards of the attention, we arrive here and now, into the present moment, into contact with the body. And the body lives and breathes only in this present moment.
We connect with grounding, with legs and feet, to feel the earth below and its support. There are all kinds of simple but effective grounding exercises for the feet, legs, and pelvis that quickly bring people into contact with their bodies. We connect with each other through the eyes, and feel ourselves more deeply. A touch of hands, a deeper breath, and we are fully in the here and now presence.
Another way to bring awareness into the body is to focus the breathing in three basic areas of the torso—first the belly, then the diaphragm, and then the chest. Feel the body from the inside as the breath touches every nook and corner inside your lungs.
Sometime in the first few hours of all my groups, I invite people to lie down and breathe into what I call the ‘hollow tube’. This is a continuous, empty space located at the core, extending down through the length of the torso, beginning with the mouth and throat, connecting into the chest, diaphragm, and belly, and ending at the genitals. It is through this tube that we feel/imagine/sense the breathing, moving in and out; first in the belly, then the diaphragm, then in the chest. In Pulsation we use the breath both as a way to energize the body, and to bring awareness there.
There is a drawing that I use to help people understand some of the energy ‘maps’ that I use in working with the flow of bio-energy within and through the body. In groups and trainings I teach from these maps, and those of you who have been in groups with me in the last 10-12 years have seen my drawing of what I call our ‘humanoid’. It demonstrates first of all my inability to draw, but over the years, ‘it’ has taken on a sort of predictable, familiar character that I like.
In this drawing I show two different maps that can support deeper work in Pulsation. One is Wilhelm Reich’s Seven Segments of Muscular Armor, shown here as green lines across the body, dividing it in sections. Reich described how these seven groups of muscles act like belts or bands around the torso that can open and close, much like the sphincter muscles of the digestive system, either to allow or prevent the flow of energy, feelings, and emotional expression, up and down the body.
The chronic tensions of emotional repression reside in these muscles, and when we move the body and breathe into these tensions, those blocks loosen and long-held feelings can be consciously felt, expressed, and released. By coming into contact with the sensations, feelings, tensions, and also pleasure and relaxation in the body, we form a deeper connection with ourselves.
The other map shown in this drawing is the Chakra System, discovered and explored by yogis and tantrikas in ancient India. Shown here as red circles, the Chakras are perhaps more like energy vortexes spiraling deep into the core of the body, and made of much subtler stuff than muscles. Actually, the muscles could be considered as the outermost layer of the chakras, the physical, material layer. The chakras fit exactly into the muscular segments, and the energetic activities of the chakras stir feelings and impulses in these very places in the physical body.
Very often we live in a state of disconnection from our bodies and our feelings. We are stuck in the head, stressed out and tense, living in regret of the past and fear for the future. We don’t even realize how far from ourselves we have gone. These maps, and the physical reality they represent, can help us to rediscover our own interiority based on a ‘felt sense’ that can only be known from within each one of us.
Feelings and emotions are felt through the body. Without a body, presumably there is no feeling. Every wave of feeling that passes through the body, every impulse to act, to express, literally flows through, and moves, the liquid contents of the physical body. The more sensitive we become to these inner sensations, the more available we can be to feel what we feel, and to live a more emotionally connected, authentic life.
Spiritual Practice and Somatic Therapy
Pulsation and Dynamic Meditation
I have used Dynamic Meditation for myself and also with my clients consistently for the last 25 years, and want to share, from my point of view as a Reichian therapist, my understanding of the value of Dynamic meditation as a support in my work, Osho Pulsation. This approach is based on the therapeutic techniques of breathing, bodywork, and emotional release developed by Wilhelm Reich in the 1930’s and ’40s and ‘resurrected’ in the Human Potential movement in the ’60s and ’70s by the “neo-Reichians.”
When I first tried Dynamic Meditation myself I was astounded at my good fortune to discover an eastern mystic who combined catharsis and expression with meditation. I had often noticed something in my personal therapy and also with clients – that after a deep emotional release session there was, along with freer energy flow, an inner space of silence and acceptance. These moments felt to me to be the most important in the session.
These moments felt to me to be the most important in the session.
When I first tried Dynamic Meditation myself I was astounded at my good fortune to discover an eastern mystic who combined catharsis and expression with meditation. I had often noticed something in my personal therapy and also with clients – that after a deep emotional release session there was, along with freer energy flow, an inner space of silence and acceptance. These moments felt to me to be the most important in the session.
What struck me immediately was that the Dynamic meditation has within its structure something similar to the four- phase “bio-energetic” cycle of charge and discharge that we use in Pulsation emotional release work:
- breathing accumulates an energetic charge
- muscular tension arises as the body strives to contain or hold the energetic charge
- catharsis/ emotional release happens when the body can no longer contain the charge and the energy is released through spontaneous expressive movements and sounds
- relaxation as the released energy flows back inside and through the whole body.
Reich called this energetic process the “Orgasm Formula.”
Emotional catharsis is rooted in the same bio-energetic principal that underlies sexual orgasm. In orgasm the energy reaches a peak of excitation and is discharged specifically through the genitals. In emotional release, the energy can be discharged through any center in the body, but the principle of energetic charge and discharge is the same. Reich discovered that whenever we repress the expression of any emotion, or stop ourselves from living any natural energy, we simultaneously diminish our capacity for gratifying sexual orgasm – and the converse also happens.
If we repress our sexual energy, we become at the same time more “dead” or stuck emotionally, tense in the body and inflexible in our character structure.
Repression begins when we disown a feeling or emotion that we are taught by our parents is unacceptable. From birth onwards we receive endless lists of do’s and don’ts which comprise what we call our conditioning. Dynamic Meditation is a highly effective and yet safe way to shake up the old rigid patterns of conditioning and give space to express the repressed emotions from the past. Once expressed, the tensions and blocks in the body (which Reich called “muscular armoring”) dissolve, the muscles relax, and energy is able to flow freely again. Then, falling inside becomes so effortless; meditation is natural and easy as the witnessing presence expands.
Providing Space for the Joy
Dynamic “cleans” the energy system so effectively because it activates the natural, biological effect of the Orgasm Formula, the process of bio-energetic tension and release that Reich described. Regular practice of Dynamic meditation is the best way I know of to maintain a naturally orgasmic quality that I call “energetic fitness.”
By this I mean the capacity of the organism to surrender, uncontrolled, to waves of feeling, whether sexual or emotional. The capacity to give and receive energy, to flow into oneself, and to flow out towards the world, unimpeded and gracefully, creates an orgasmic milieu in which every part of the body is related to every other part, enhancing the sense of wholeness and integration. To experience this orgasmic wholeness is cause for great celebration!
The Dynamic meditation is unique in providing space for the joy and celebration that naturally arises out of such deep-felt aliveness. This phase is missing in Reich’s model; he allowed for relaxation, pleasure and a kind of sexual fulfillment through the body, but blissfulness, the fragrance of meditation, was not part of his experience. This is why I find Osho’s vision of therapy and meditation so important – the full spectrum of human energy is given space, from the roots in our animal nature to the wings of our divine-ness.
Sometimes people remark that jogging and aerobic exercises also move a lot of energy, deepen the breathing, and leave one feeling good and fresh afterwards; so why not just do that instead of Dynamic? There are several reasons why. One is that Dynamic breathing is deep and fast, but also chaotic. This chaotic quality of the breathing and the catharsis and “hoo” phases loosen up old fixed patterns of muscular tension and control.
Jogging tends to be regular, even robotic, and in that regularity we retain our old patterns; jogging and aerobics cannot reach there. And the charge-discharge cycle of deep breathing and energetic release activates a deep biological response that reconnects us with our orgasmic roots into life itself. Dynamic meditation takes us into the depths of ourselves and shakes up the unconscious, bringing to light many things which have been buried and hidden away; and it takes us to inner heights, to the sunlit peaks within, revealing the mysteries of being.
Used alone or in combination with body-oriented or verbal psychotherapy, Dynamic deepens any process of self-inquiry, and can awaken the longing of the seeker to discover the truth of being.
