Body­work & Breath­work — an in-depth study of West­ern and East­ern Body cen­tered techniques

Author: (Wayne C. Allen & Dar­lene MacNaughton)

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Bodywork & Breathwork

By Wayne C. Allen / 29 Jan­u­ary, 2024

About this book

A new way of looking at how the body holds trauma, and how to release it.

Tra­di­tion­al psy­chother­a­py explores how the mind holds onto thought pat­terns and ways of being that are inef­fec­tu­al and/or harm­ful. Through dia­logue, the ther­a­pist attempts to help the client to loosen the grip of the non-help­ful belief.

Hold­ing on to such beliefs is demon­stra­bly the basis for dys­func­tion­al behav­iour. The “hold­er” forms pat­terns of behav­iour to sup­port and rein­force the belief. We see this in uni­ver­sal state­ments such as, “she always…”, “he nev­er…” which are con­flat­ed to “All (wo)men are…”

Clear­ly, noth­ing is uni­ver­sal. But the ini­tial “hold­ing / block­ing” set­up we con­coct is frag­ile and needs prop­ping up, so all evi­dence to the con­trary is repressed.

Body­work the­o­ry sug­gests that our bod­ies hold with­in their phys­i­cal struc­ture the sto­ry of our unre­solved issues and past trau­mas, both phys­i­cal and psychological.

This course is 213 pages, and is avail­able for $35.00 USD

More about the subject

As infants, we are taught to form a “self”  —  we do this by learn­ing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between “me” and “not me.” We also learn to repress our­selves by tight­en­ing our bod­ies and breath­ing halt­ing­ly and shal­low­ly.
We find our­selves locked in a prison of tight mus­cles and shal­low beliefs, hav­ing repressed much about our­selves   —   hav­ing repressed much of our pas­sion.

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This process hap­pens as we are social­ized into the rules and roles of:

• our fam­i­ly
• our soci­ety and
• the groups to which we belong.

Such groups encour­age only those aspects of our natures that fit in with their pre-con­ceived mind-set of what’s accept­able. At the same time, they sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly manip­u­late us to repress what doesn’t “fit.”
Thus, the tight­ness of our per­son­al “square box” is to some extent deter­mined by the val­ues and inten­tions of those around us, and by how much of our essen­tial natures we learned to (and agreed to!) sup­press.

The main physical mechanism of this suppression is muscular tightness.

This tight­ness is then played out in emo­tion­al tight­ness (lim­it­ed emo­tions, some emo­tions judged as good, oth­ers judged bad and hence avoid­ed.) Emo­tion­al tight­ness is exhib­it­ed in a person’s resis­tance to ful­ly feel­ing the range of their emo­tions.
We’ll devote a chap­ter to this, but suf­fice it to say that we tend, in gen­er­al, to empha­size “good” emo­tions and to deny, sup­press, or bury “bad” emotions.

This is one issue that Bodywork addresses.

In this course, we’ll explore Body­work from both West­ern and East­ern approach­es. Using descrip­tive text, pho­tos and videos, you’ll gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how our bod­ies “work.” With plen­ti­ful exer­cis­es, you’ll dis­cov­er ways to shift the things your body is holding.

This book is avail­able as a pdf e‑book, with access to online videos. The price is $35.00. 

You’ll learn:

• How to “read” the body
• What var­i­ous forms of tight­ness mean
• How to do Body­work — using pho­tos, descrip­tions and videos
• How to breathe to let go of tight­ness and tension
• How to release ten­sion in var­i­ous parts of the body
• Learn about East­ern med­i­cine — exer­cis­es for each Chakra
• … and much more!

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