EMBODYING POWER & LOVE

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Body Numbness As the Root of Child Abuse, Family/Social/ International Violence and
Environmental Degradation.

Body Awareness As the Key to Moral Education, Global Change and a Humane World.

Paul Linden, Ph.D.
Columbus Center for Movement Studies


221 Piedmont Rd
Columbus, OH 43214
(614) 262-3355
paullinden@aol.com
www.being-in-movement.com



INTRODUCTION

Such seemingly different problems as interpersonal and international conflict, ethnic or
gender prejudice, drug abuse, family violence and child abuse, and environmental
degradation are all very similar in one crucial way. From my perspective on body and
movement awareness education, all these problems are branches on the tree of body
numbness. Whatever else may be involved in these problems, body numbness is a
necessary condition for their existence, and body awareness training is a crucial
component in their solution.

Body numbness is the condition of not feeling oneself. Numb people don't have a clear,
detailed perception of their own bodies. They don't feel accurately their position or
movement in space, and they don't fully notice the physical sensations and emotions that
stream through them. In this state of body numbness, people cannot feel or notice the
effects of their actions. They cannot feel or identify accurately what gives them pain or
pleasure, and they move toward things that are harmful to them and avoid things that are
beneficial.

Body numbness is also the condition of not feeling other people or the planet itself.
When people cannot even feel themselves, they have very little feeling for others or for
how their actions affect others. They are not fully aware that other people really feel
things, and they are inclined to unthinkingly use them and hurt them.
1
In the same way,

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Copyright 1994 by Paul Linden. This article is copyrighted by Paul Linden;
however, it may be freely reproduced and distributed for non-commercial uses as long as
the complete article, contact information, and this copyright notice are included.

numb people will have so little empathy for other non-human life and the earth itself that
they may unthinkingly and unfeelingly destroy species of plants and animals and despoil
the soil, water and air.

Without body awareness as a foundation for change, such problems as child abuse,
international violence and environmental degradation will not be solvable, whatever else
may also be needed for their solution. This paper will examine the nature of body
numbness, describe a number of exercises for cultivating body awareness, and discuss
how the development of body awareness can be used in solving our world's problems.

Underlying the practical body awareness exercises is a theory of moral education.
Solving the problems mentioned above requires teaching people moral thinking, feeling
and acting. And for this teaching to have practical importance, it cannot be simply a
matter of abstract information or conceptualization. It must be a practical process which
achieves concrete changes in the way people act and live.

There are a number of questions which are fundamental in a practically effective theory
of moral education. First, are there general ideals or standards which define right actions
and which are universal and logically compelling? Second, given such general standards
of right behavior, what procedures can people use to arrive at specific, practical decisions
about how to behave in specific situations? And third, what educational procedures can
be used to help people internalize an ideal so that it becomes a lived guide rather than
merely an empty, external formula? This paper will examine how body and movement
awareness training offers an empirical, testable approach to answering these questions.

Body/movement work is for me a process of learning to feel and understand the internal
consciousness map of one's body. The body method I have developed focuses on
learning to sense in and through the body how choice or intention operates to give form
to the body and to action.
2
It is based on learning to feel how thoughts, beliefs and
feelings shape and are shaped by muscle tone, breathing, body alignment, energy flow,
the rhythms and qualities of movement, and the use of space.
3
It is a way of using this
awareness to integrate intellect, body and feelings. It is a way of creating an integrated
state of power and love and using this state in breaking free of old patterns and learning
to live effectively in the present.

In order to provide a context for this paper and help make sense of my approach to
body/movement work, I should at this point say a bit about my background. My work is
part of a field which over the last twenty years has been emerging as a unified profession
called "somatic education".
4
Somatic Education is an educational approach which
examines the structure and function of the body as a process of lived experience.
Somatic education methods work with the whole human being at once, though different
methods focus in different ways and to different degrees on each of the aspects of body,
mind and spirit. There are a broad variety of somatic methods, which take very different
approaches.
5


My movement "home" is Aikido (a non-violent Japanese martial art), which I have been
practicing and teaching for twenty-four years and in which I hold a third degree black
belt. In addition, I hold a Ph.D. in Physical Education, am an authorized Feldenkrais
instructor, hold a black belt in Karate and have been influenced by a number of years of
Alexander work.

The material in this article derives from my own work, which I call Being In Movement
and which grew out of a problem that caught my attention twenty years ago as I was
teaching Aikido. I realized that there was a relation between attentional focus and
postural balance in the execution of self-defense techniques, and I wanted to figure out
what attentional/postural state would lead to most effective movement and how to
achieve it. To investigate this, I found that I had to go outside of Aikido itself and
develop my own tools for investigating the body as a process of consciousness.
2


I have concentrated on learning to observe, understand and deal with objective
biomechanical facts of posture and movement as both manifestations and causes of
subjective states of awareness, consciousness, feeling and thought. I have focused on
how the mind/body organizes itself for action in the world and about how we restrict our
capacities for action. Over ten years ago I co-founded the Columbus Center for
Movement Studies, in Columbus, Ohio. There, and in workshops throughout the country,
I have had the opportunity to work extensively on developing ways of applying my
method of somatic education with such groups as musicians, athletes, pregnant women,
computer users, and survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
6
As you will see in reading this
paper, my work is very much tied to the life-and-death perspective of martial art training
and in particular to the philosophical focus in Aikido on balance, stability, mobility,
power, love and harmony.

The forms that people choose for their bodies and their movements whether
consciously or nonconsciously are expressions of their sense of what they are and
what the world is. By experimenting with simple movement situations, people can
discover the nature of the beliefs and strategies that underlie their actions. They can
evaluate the efficacy of their choices and discover why they have become committed to
them. By practicing new ways of being in their bodies and new ways of moving, people
can consciously and deliberately construct, experience and evaluate new ways of
approaching the world. This very specific learning process can lead to deep and lasting
personal change and to new and different patterns of behavior. In this way,
body/movement education can be an effective method of facilitating change in the broad
variety of areas of human difficulty mentioned above.

This paper will describe how becoming sensitive to what goes on in the body as life
decisions are confronted and resolved gives people a concrete indicator of what decision
would be most life affirming. The focus will be on decision-making procedures. Instead
of attempting to furnish lists of externally imposed "oughts", this approach aims at
helping people improve their feeling and thinking so that they can decide for themselves
in the particular situations to which they are exposed what is their best course of action.

This paper will pay particular attention to examining the body processes which constitute
power and love. When balanced and integrated, power and love are the foundations for
awareness of, respect for, and empathy with oneself, other people, other living beings,
and the earth itself. People acting in a spirit of awareness, empathy and respect will make
choices that will be as humane and constructive as possible. Thus the body experience of
power and love is the actual foundation for moral thinking and the standard for evaluating
moral decisions.

By describing some of the body awareness exercises which help people experience and
understand power and love, this paper will give readers the option of trying out for
themselves how a somatic approach to moral education can operate. At the very least, it
will allow readers a vicarious experience of this process and will help them gain an
intellectual understanding of it.



TEACHING EXPERIMENTS

My teaching is based on setting up experiments for students to work with. I find that
the most explicit and effective way to help people notice how they handle moral thinking
is to structure specific, concrete experiments which will embody and bring out the
various moral issues they are working on. The experiments focus on simple body or
movement situations which present a challenge or threat, and they are safe, controlled
situations which function as solid metaphors for or limited representations of real life. I
have the student demonstrate how he or she would deal with a situation, and I teach the
student how to monitor his or her physical responses, how to evaluate them, and how to
construct new responses to try out.

The situations may be physical tasks such as balancing a pencil on a finger. They may be
imagery processes, for example, imagining standing up on a stage in front of five hundred
people and giving a speech. They may be role playing situations such as acting out
telling someone at work that their proposal is poorly researched and ineffectively written.
They may be practice of some large movement task, for example playing catch with a
tennis ball. In any case, the way the student meets the challenge offered by the
experiment reveals her or his internal and external strategies of action.



Body-Based Language

Concrete thinking is the key to using body and movement work to reveal and elucidate
patterns of perception, thought, emotion and choice. Thinking concretely means using
language which refers to events in the body rather than to abstract mental concepts. This
means pinning down feelings, choices, behaviors and so on by giving operational
definitions of them, that is, by defining them in terms of observable physical movements
and tangible physical sensations.

Feelings can be thought of as the sensations or experiences that arise when certain
physical events occur in the body. Choices are defined by observing which actions are
performed when a situation requires that only one of many possible actions be performed.
Behaviors can be defined as the totality of internal body sensations and external
movements which occur in a given situation.

Defining feelings and behavior this way accomplishes a number of purposes. Mental
feelings are ethereal, hard to observe and pin down. Physical sensations and actions,
however, are much easier to pin down since they lend themselves to concrete observation
and testing. Specifying the content of feeling experiences in terms of physical
concomitants such as breathing, muscle tone, posture and movement helps people feel
their feelings and remember to notice their feelings by focusing them on the ongoing
details of current body events. Physical thinking helps people stay in touch with their
feelings by getting them to notice just exactly what they are doing at the moment they do
it. It also forces them to notice that their feelings are actions that they choose and do. It
forces them to assume responsibility for themselves.

Physical thinking helps people achieve more precise communication about feelings. The
words we use to denote feelings are slippery and often mean very different things to
different people. By specifying the physical content of emotion words, body-based
language allows people to pin down the specific meanings they attach to the broad, vague
words that name emotions. Once people using an emotion word agree on which body
events they will use the word to refer to, they will be as sure as possible that they are
actually referring to the same internal experience.

Concrete thinking also offers a clear and distinct avenue for creating internal change.
Once people experience mental, emotional, energetic, intentional and behavioral patterns
as lived physical configurations/actions, they can identify the physical configurations of
undesirable patterns and then deliberately construct more positive physical patterns as
replacements.



Responses

Once I have devised an experiment situation which elicits a response authentic and strong
enough to be productive yet weak enough to be safe and tolerable for students, I have
them try the experiment and observe their responses. I have them specify what they are
feeling by giving detailed and complete statements of precisely where in their bodies they
feel something and what exactly they are feeling there. I have them go through their
bodies part by part and notice whether anything is occurring in each part. That forces the
students to notice the actual sensory content of their experience, and it allows them to
begin taking a new relation to it. Rather than being distracted and overwhelmed by it,
they begin to stay focused on remembering themselves and maintaining perspective on
what they are doing inside of themselves.

Once students can monitor and detail their responses, the next step is to help them
understand and evaluate the effects of those responses. Evaluating the responses means
discovering whether or not the responses are the most effective as well as comfortable
ways of handling the challenge. It also involves understanding the underlying purposes
or motivations for their chosen responses. I find that usually the easiest and most
effective way to help people evaluate their natural responses is to help them construct for
comparison responses that will be better in terms of comfort and task effectiveness.

However, I confine myself to teaching students to perform physical actions. I make a
point of not telling them that I think the new actions will be better, and I encourage them
to test for themselves what feels better and works better. This way they become
empowered to make their own judgments rather than simply accepting my ideas.

Staying focused on the experimental method is also valuable for me. My perceptions and
judgments about what each individual needs are based on over twenty years of studying
body processes, but they are no more than working hypotheses for me. They may not be
completely accurate for any given person or situation. Staying committed to the primacy
of students' experiences builds a self-correction procedure into my work. If I am going
off in the wrong direction, this will become obvious as the students report on their
experiences. In addition, if students are not clear in their experiences or understanding of
the experiences, that lets me know what needs to be addressed next.



Change

Most often, people are motivated to begin working with me because their habitual
responses have led to uncomfortable results, and they can't understand why. In the
process of a movement experiment, students discover that many of their natural responses
to a challenge are actually ineffective and uncomfortable no matter how reasonable and
comfortable they seemed at first, and they begin to understand why. They try out new
responses which feel unfamiliar and awkward but which they also experience are more
comfortable, powerful and effective. The next step in the learning process is unlearning
old response habits and internalizing the new responses as habits.

This deconditioning and relearning process starts with the concrete experiment situations.
These situations incorporate whatever problematic situation the students face and are
designed to trigger old habits of thought, feeling and behavior. The situations are
opportunities for students to deliberately refrain from doing old things and do the new
and better responses instead. This weakens the old learnings and allows the gradual
construction of new habits. Once students can perform new responses in the artificial
environment of the lesson, the last step in the process of change is for them to watch for
instances in their daily lives when the old body and movement patterns pop up and then
deliberately replace them with the new ones.

AN EXPERIMENT IN MORAL ACTION

Any feeling, belief, situation or task can provide the starting point for constructing an
experiment in body awareness and behavior. There are many very common issues that
people want to learn to deal with, and there are a number of stock experiments I use in
helping people learn about these common issues. One experiment that I often use
provides a concrete framework for investigating issues around violence, alienation,
conflict resolution and harmony . Examining this experiment will give a practical
understanding of how body awareness processes can be a foundation for moral education.

I ask students to work in pairs and examine what it is like to be hit hard on the thigh with
a light plastic tube and what it is like to do the hitting. The plastic is light enough that
when someone is hit on the leg by it, the tube bends and produces a loud thwack and
some stinging but no injury at all. Though the attack is mostly symbolic, it feels
emotionally real to most people and gives them a safe violent action to work with as an
opportunity to examine their reactions to violence.

As an ethical and practical matter, before having people work with this exercise, I am
careful to find out whether any students have been molested or assaulted or have had any
experiences which would make this exercise too emotionally difficult to be safe. If the
situation is problematic for anyone, I adjust the intensity for them until some workable
equivalent is found. I might, for example, substitute having a person stand back ten or
fifteen feet and throw tissues at their partner. For people who have suffered traumatic
violence, this will still arouse real emotions, but it will almost always be inoffensive
enough to be safe.



Responses

There are a number of common reactions to the attack with the tube. People being hit
often experience surprise or fear. They may feel invaded and invalidated. Frequently
they tense themselves to resist the strike and the feelings it produces. Many people get
angry and wish to hit back. People may freeze in shock or panic, and some people go
into a state of shock or dissociation.

People doing the hitting often feel very reluctant to hit their partners. They may identify
the action of hitting someone as abusive and feel a deep aversion to doing it. Many
people find that it is much easier for them to take the discomfort of being hit than to
cause someone else this discomfort. Some people find that in order to overcome their
discomfort and do the strike they must work themselves into a state of anger. And some
people enjoy doing the hitting.

At first, people normally give responses couched in the mentalistic language just used.
Frequently, however, they discover that describing their feelings with mentalistic
language does not get across to the other people in the class exactly what they were
feeling. Moreover, people often find that they are not themselves altogether clear about
just what feelings they experienced in the violent interaction. In order to help people
clarify their responses and communicate them clearly, I teach them how to convert the
reports of their experiences from feeling-based language to language based in physical
sensations and events.

I ask people to repeat the hitting exercise and notice what physical sensations arise and
just where in their bodies they occur. These usually are fear and/or anger responses such
as raising and tensing the shoulders, tensing the neck, or clenching the fists. They may
include inhaling suddenly, breathing shallowly or breathing primarily at the top of the
chest. They also frequently include facial changes such as glaring at the partner or
raising the eyebrows and widening the eyes. Frequently people identify physical
responses that they hadn't been aware of previously, and often they aren't sure just what
emotions those physical responses "contain". I usually have people magnify and
exaggerate their responses to get in touch with what they are doing and what that feels
like.

As people in a class examine their experiences in this way and discuss what they notice,
they realize that there are some important commonalities in people's experiences: such
feelings as fear, anger, reluctance to hit or enjoyment of hitting all involve smallness and
twisting in various areas of the body. This smallness most often takes the form of
constriction and rigidity, but it can also take the form of limpness and collapse. The
twisting takes the form of muscular, postural and perceptual lopsidedness, imbalance and
indirectness. The best way to clarify the meaning and importance of the process of
smallness and twisting is to examine some exercises by which I help people experience
power and love, which are expansive and symmetrical, just the opposites of smallness
and twistiness.



Power

Power is the ability to control the environment in order to maintain one's safety and
secure one's needs and desires. Power involves the elements of force and control. Power
has to do with such qualities of body organization as solidity, weight, rootedness,
resoluteness and tenacity. The body organization which gives rise to physical power is
also the source of emotional and personal power and the capacity for powerful action in
one's life, and this body organization is rooted in a particular way of using the pelvis, the
pelvic floor musculature, the belly and the breath.

Breathing. I start teaching students about breathing by having them stand up and
alternate tightening their bellies and letting them plop out. Then I have them release their
bellies without doing a preliminary tightening. People generally experience a noticeable
release even though they had not first consciously tightened their bellies, and they realize
from this that they had been unconsciously holding themselves tight and that they
probably hold themselves tight all the time.

As people practice letting their bellies stay relaxed and experience what it is like to move
and act this way, they realize that tensing the belly produces a feeling of physical and
emotional constraint and weakness (though often it is such a familiar background feeling
that it goes unnoticed). They experience also that relaxing the belly produces a free, open
and focused physical state and that this internal physical softness creates a psychological
state of relaxed alertness. This state of mental and physical relaxation and focus is a
fundamental element in empowerment.

I next have students continue by experimenting with the mechanics of their breathing. I
have them touch their bellies, their chests and their lower backs and notice where the
movement is when they inhale and exhale. Though many of are used to sucking in our
guts as we inhale, we are anatomically designed so that the belly should expand down
and out during the act of inhalation. Rather than breathing primarily by expanding the
chest, we should feel a gentle expansive movement in the belly, the chest and the back. If
you can recall watching infants breathing, you will notice that this is how they breathe.

To understand this way of breathing, it is important to know some basic facts about the
body. In the act of breathing, the lungs are passive and it is the diaphragm muscle which
is the primary mover. The diaphragm stretches across the lower chest. When it tightens,
it depresses, causing a lowered pressure in the chest cavity, and the relatively higher
outside air pressure forces air into the lungs. The key point is that the guts, which lie
below the diaphragm, have to go somewhere when the diaphragm pushes down. They
are meant to be moved down and out during the act of inhalation. If the belly is tight, this
is not possible. Breathing will be tight and restricted and will involve excessive
movement of the top of the chest. Generally, when the belly is tight, the low back will be
also be tight, and there will be reduced breathing movement there too. Breathing which
is tight and restricted is part of the fear/startle reflex. In different but related specific
forms, restricted breathing is also involved with the physical processes of anger,
depression, dissociation and so on.

illustration of breathing

I have students experiment with their breathing until they discover how to soften it and
drop it into the pit of their bellies, expanding both the belly and the lower back as they
inhale. Along with this, softening and opening the anus and the genitals is important in
releasing tension. This is just the opposite of the physical pattern of breathing involved
in the fear/startle reflex or in anger, and creating this physical state of relaxed alertness
also creates the emotional/spiritual state of relaxed alertness. (Many people experience
that the cultural imperative to "suck in the guts" is so strong that they are very
uncomfortable relaxing their bellies and feeling power. It is interesting to speculate about
why we are taught to maintain a tense and disempowered body state as our cultural ideal.)

Once people have grasped this new way of breathing, we go back to the hitting exercise,
and I have people keep their breathing in their bellies as they hit or get hit. When they do
this, they interfere with their ways of doing fear and anger and do relaxed alertness
instead. In this new state, they find that the experience of being hit or hitting is really not
that bad and that they can handle it fairly easily.

Just for comparison, I usually have people tense their throats, their pelvic musculature
and their breathing in preparation for being hit and feel how that brings back and even
increases the discomfort. Having them alternate between the tensed and relaxed states
convinces them that being in mental and emotional control and being able to handle being
hit is a very concrete process of placing the body in the right state. Finding that feelings
are so easily changed by making physical changes goes a long way toward convincing
people that the mind and body are truly one. This radically changes their view of what
the self is and gives them an undeniable experience of their ability to use simple, concrete
tools to make changes in themselves.

Inguinal Power. In addition to relaxation of the belly and breathing, skeletal alignment of
the pelvis and spinal column also is very important in the process of developing power.
One important exercise has to do with pelvic rotation. I have people sit on flat chairs,
toward the front edge, not leaning on the back rest. Then I push on their chests and have
them attempt to resist me. Generally people strain to resist and get pushed over
backwards anyway. Then I show students how to anchor themselves in their pelvises.

This anchoring process involves learning how to differentiate two ways of producing
forward rotation of the pelvis. ("Forward rotation" means tipping the pelvis so the guts in
the pelvic bowl would spill out over the front edge.) Learning this anchoring skill starts
with feeling how slumping and sitting up straight are done. Most people think that
straightening up is done by throwing the shoulders back or by straightening the back, and
practically no one notices that the whole process is built around pelvic rotation. When
the pelvis rotates backward, the stack of vertebrae has no foundation on which to rest and
it slumps down. Rotating the pelvis forward in the right way provides a foundation for
the spinal column and the torso as a whole and creates upright posture.

illustration of pelvic use, Figs 1,2,3.

It is important to realize that there are basically two ways to rotate the pelvis forward --
lifting the rear edge or lowering the front edge. Using the extensor muscles of the back to
lift the rear edge of the pelvis is how people usually rotate the pelvis. However, this
action arches the back and creates tension and discomfort, which is why everyone will sit
up "straight" for a minute when exhorted to and then give it up as uncomfortable. Using
instead the deep, internal psoas muscle (which runs between the head of the thighbone
and the front of the spinal column) to create a movement which in effect drops the front
edge of the pelvis creates a very strong and comfortable physical organization of the
pelvis and spinal column.

To help people find this new way of rotating the pelvis, I have them sit toward the front
edge of a firm flat chair with their knees spread apart, feet flat on the ground and lower
legs perpendicular to the ground (not tucked underneath or stretched way out in front).
Then I ask people to roll the pelvis forward by rotating their genitals forward and down
so that they point toward the floor (instead of moving the pelvis forward by shortening or
tightening the lower back). It is almost as though they were going to sit on top of their
genitals. This movement takes place very low in the body, in the creases at the top of the
thighs (which is where the hip sockets are). The back and shoulders will not be actively
engaged in muscular work but will move simply as a result of the pelvic rotation. For
most people, this experiment provides enough of a hint to create the new movement, but
many people find the movement very obscure and need more work to discover it.

This new way of sitting places the bones of the pelvis and spinal column in
architecturally optimal alignment. The weight of the body is on a vertical line through
the head and torso and rests squarely on the sitbones. In this posture, horizontal pressure
on the chest is redirected into a pressure which moves diagonally downward through the
rear of the pelvis and into the chair. The pressure on the chest is resisted without any
sensation of strain. As more pressure is applied to the chest, the pressure into the chair
increases and the position becomes more stable (up to the point where there is so much
pressure that it overcomes the stability by brute force).

This effortless strength produces a physical sensation of clarity and power. That is a very
strange sensation, and it is a hard experience to deny. People have to accept that they can
actually find tremendous power in themselves. Releasing the belly, breathing, genitals
and the anus, and realigning the pelvis and spinal column these processes create a state
of fluid, grounded power that is very new to most people. And people experience that
this new physical state is simultaneously a new emotional and spiritual state. This form
of body organization produces a psychological feeling of personal stability and strength
of will, and acting from this new state means establishing a new relation to one's self and
one's world.

Once people have learned to integrate the work with pelvic relaxation and pelvic
alignment, we go back to the experiment with hitting and being hit. Adding the process
of stability and strength to the process of relaxation and alertness vastly increases
people's ability to handle the hitting. Both as the hitter and the receiver they can maintain
an unshakable concentration. They can hit more strongly or stay strong when they are
being hit. Such emotions as fear and anger are either absent or manageable.



Love

The next step in this experiment on moral action focuses on the physical process of love.
Love has to do with such qualities as softness, fluidity, mobility and lightness, and love is
involved with the elements of perception and sensitivity. The experience of love is
rooted in a particular way of using the chest.

This can be experienced through working with imagery and body responses. Everyone
has something or someone -- perhaps a friend, a lover, a child, a flower, a work of art --
something that when they imagine it makes their heart smile. I have people stand with
their eyes closed, imagine whatever it is that makes their hearts smile, and notice the
changes in their bodies. Most people experience a softening and warmth in their chests,
and a freeing up over their whole bodies. These sensations of being "warm hearted" or
"tender hearted" are the bodily manifestations of love or compassion.

For contrast I might ask people to imagine a situation in which they have to deal with a
boss who is antagonistic and critical, and I have them note the physical changes this
produces. Generally it creates tension in the chest and shortening of the breath as well as
other tensions throughout the body. Negative feelings such as fear, anger, and aggression
manifest physically as constriction and imbalance in breathing, posture and movement.

The physical process of love creates a soft, balanced openness and evenness in body,
perception and movement. The work on power described earlier showed how a state of
power could replace the inner processes of such feelings as fear or anger. In working
with power, the body becomes open and free, ready to allow the softening of love. By
the same token, in working with love, the whole body becomes freer and more unified,
and this improves the coordinated delivery of power in any action.

The symmetry and expansiveness created by power and love are related, and creating the
sensation of love in the chest is another and complementary way of replacing negative
feelings. Love is soft and power is bright, but both are about openness and freedom. The
physical state is also an emotional state, and in this physical state, people will indeed feel
loving and act in genuinely loving ways.

When people return to the hitting experiment and do love in both the role of the hitter and
the receiver, they find that their experience is radically different. People find it strange
that they can love someone and still hit them or that they can be hit and still love their
attacker.

"Love" is a broad term, and this exercise actually has within it the seeds of many
exercises focusing on how people deal with themselves and others and on such elements
as acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness. Forgiveness, for example, is a process of
using the psychophysical state of love to supplant whatever physical state is produced by
the remembrance of past wounds. Forgiveness is more about the relationship of the self
to the self than it is about the relationship of the self to another person who has been
hurtful.

One issue that often arises as people work with exercises on love is that they feel too soft
and tender. They feel vulnerable. To experiment with this, I have people go back to their
familiar ways of holding themselves tight, in which they don't feel overly vulnerable.
Then in this state, I have them try the hitting exercise again. People experience that since
their minds and bodies are constricted and shut, their movements are restricted and they
would be unready to dodge the blow or take other appropriate action. When they go back
to the state of love, they are loose and open and ready to move. They are able to defend
themselves much more easily, gracefully and effectively from the vulnerable place than
from what they initially felt was a less vulnerable place. In other words, it is through
feeling vulnerable that people can act effectively and reduce their actual vulnerability.

Through this experiment, people realize that their initial feelings were that being less
vulnerable means having a hard shell and that being soft means being unable to keep
threats and intrusions out. In our culture, rigidity is taken to be the source of strength and
readiness to deal with threats. Rigidity is, however, created by tensing muscles against
one another, and the sensation of muscular conflict is what people interpret as strength.
The feeling of rigidity is a sign that energy is being wasted internally rather than being
applied externally to good effect. Therefore the sensation of strength that people
experience when they are rigid is actually a signal of weakness.

Twisting and shrinking away from a threat are usually attempts to escape a threat, but
escaping effectively requires marshaling all one's power and alertness. Shrinking simply
makes a person awkward, weak and unable to escape. It is the smallness and asymmetry
that people adopt to handle difficulties they face that really makes them vulnerable. And
it is being willing to become vulnerable (which means open and free) in the face of a
threat that truly enables people to handle the threat. This openness can be accomplished
through the integration of power and love.



Integration

It is important to balance and integrate the processes of love and power. By fusing the
two physical/spiritual states of power and love, people are able to move freely, perceive
sensitively, and exert efficient force. In our culture, power and love are conceived to be
separate and opposite. However, contrary to the model that our culture uses, power and
love really are inseparable. In fact, they are the same. Love without power is limp and
ineffective, unable to truly nurture those who need it. Power without love is rigid, harsh,
destructive, and ultimately self-destructive. In either case, love or power is diminished to
the point where it becomes just a shadow and not true power or love at all.

A person acting from power without love is strong but so insensitive that he or she cannot
apply the power with precision and wisdom. He will apply his power in a way that will
be clumsy and destructive rather than constructive. A person acting from love without
power is sensitive but cannot affect the world through clear effective action. Even
though his heart is in the right place, he will not have the power to achieve anything
useful. The fusion of power and love produces an ability to act forcefully and effectively
from a place of sensitivity and compassion.

Power is the foundation for the ability to act with love, and love is the foundation for
wise use of power. This is not mere philosophy but is simply a shorthand method of
stating that the body/self must be soft and receptive as well as active and strong in order
to function well. By defining power and love as different and opposite, our culture sets
people up to experience pain and failure in many important areas.

When I have people return to the hitting exercise and do power and love together, the
exercise seems very different to them. People can feel how staying rooted in power and
love transforms the experience of hitting or being hit. In both cases, rather than closing
down to themselves or the attacker, people come to the experience in an open way and
stay open through it. People find that the physical and emotional discomfort is vastly
lessened, and they realize that most of the discomfort they experienced they actually
created themselves by their tension and resistance. They realize that in a real conflict
shrinking in fear would make them respond weakly and ineffectively to the attack and
would actually encourage further aggression. They realize also that hardening
themselves with anger would make them respond to the attack in awkward, uncontrolled
ways and would encourage escalation of the violence.

Receiving the attacker and the attack in a body/spirit of love and power, people find that
they do not react with fear or anger to being hit. They can continue to experience a
compassionate connection to the attacker rather than feeling alienated from him and
feeling an urge to hurt and destroy him. People find that they can love the attacker. If I
ask them to decide what to do as a response to the attack, they find that they can think of
loving and effective ways of handling the situation.

I often use the term "radical vulnerability" to signify the state of openness which results
from an integration of power and love. This vulnerability is actually the source of deep
power. Being willing to stay wide open and take an attack fully to themselves, people
can perceive the attacker deeply and clearly and respond effectively to the attack. In
shying away from the attack and their own fear, people become incapable of handling the
attack. In facing any challenge, if people take whatever pain and loss may confront them
fully into their hearts, they can face the challenge and find ways of dealing with it that are
not only effective and life-affirming but which lead to learning and growth.

The experience of hitting also becomes very different when people stay open. When
people focus love toward the person they are hitting, they experience that hitting someone
does not need to be a way of demeaning them and does not even need to be a spiritually
violent action. They find that the action of hitting is itself neutral, and it is the purposes
and feelings of the hitter that determine its moral significance. In the exercise, hitting is
actually a gift insofar as it is done from a place of love and with a desire to help the
partner learn and grow. Love frees people's power, and they find that the movements
they do are softer, more graceful, more economical and more effective. They can
actually hit harder with less effort. But they also see the person they are hitting as a
human being and feel a sense of empathy with and protectiveness toward him.

In a real life conflict, the roles of hitter and person being hit are not as distinct as in this
artificial exercise. Each individual involved will experience both roles in some way.
However, the powerful, loving, empathetic and protective state of mind allows people to
see the situation as it is without an overlay of fear or anger. It allows them to decide from
an objective place what is really necessary. They can choose to hit (whether physically
or in some other way) if it is absolutely necessary, but they do not rush to do this. They
prefer peaceful alternatives to handling a conflict and will look for peaceful solutions
before deciding that force is necessary.

It is often hard for people to feel comfortable with the idea that force could be used in a
moral, non-violent way. However, in determining the morality of an action, more
information is necessary than just the description of an action. The context of the action
is important. What is the purpose of the actor in doing the action? What is the mind/body
state of the actor?

Looking at the broad context for human life, any organism has two basic needs for
sustaining its life. The organism must be able to exert power in its environment, and it
must be able to connect to its environment. It must be able to exert power to defend itself
and its young from predators and other dangers, and it must be able to exert power to
secure food. It must be able to connect to its environment both in the sense of receiving
sufficient perceptual input to function and in the sense of connecting with others of its
species for reproduction and possibly other purposes such as grooming or nurturance.

Translating this into more human terms, the fundamental requirements for a person to be
a fully functioning human being are that he or she be able to kill and be able to love. I
recognize that in formulating this in such a blunt fashion I risk alienating people who
have been conditioned to think that love is the only spiritual truth and that power is
necessarily wrong. (Twenty-four years of training in martial arts does tend to give one an
unusual perspective on such things as the relation of power and love.) However, this
formulation of mature human functioning points toward an important understanding.

In the most basic terms, being a successful mammal means being able to defend oneself
against life threatening dangers. And the most significant dangers that human beings
generally face come from other human beings whether in the form of a deliberate
attempt to cause physical injury or in more normal things such as rejection or ridicule. A
person who has not fully developed his or her power to deal with life-threatening dangers
cannot feel fully secure in a perilous world.

A person who has not contacted his or her power cannot have a secure self-territory from
which to venture out into the social world. His underlying response to threat will be fear,
and the fear will prompt him to perceive a lot of the world as threatening. It will also
give rise to anger and the desire to hurt and destroy what seems threatening. Without a
sense of security of the self, based on the realistic ability to defend the self from harm,
full compassionate contact with other people will be impossible. In order to risk being
fully open (vulnerable) to people, a person must know that he or she has the power to
handle anything undesirable that may occur once he lets his shield down. Once a person
is secure in his power, he or she can afford to take the risk of reaching out to others in a
loving way.

There is another somewhat paradoxical way in which power is the basis for love. Power
enables people to go beyond power to the experience of ultimate weakness. Human
beings are all ultimately weak in the face of the universe and death itself. It takes a good
deal of power to look squarely into the face of mortality and accept your fundamental
weakness in a calm way. Power gives people the courage to achieve a humble
acceptance of their fear and weakness. In that humility and softening of the heart, people
can let go of the barriers that keep them fearfully separate and defensive, and they can
then feel empathy with and compassion for the beings around them.

Even destructive power is not necessarily bad. Not all destructive force is hurtful.
Hurtful force comes from fear and anger and creates a condition of constriction in the
body. However, force which is truly necessary for protection and nurturance of life does
not create constriction, even when the process of protection involves destroying what the
force is applied to. Blanket proscriptions on force suggest that force is always wrong, but
sometimes force really is part of the process of life. Certainly, any rabbit or wolf would
use whatever force was available to it to defend its life, its food or territory or young.
The important factor in determining the moral significance of an action for a human
being is looking at the spiritual/physical state of the actor doing the action. If the action
is undertaken in a state of balanced power and compassion and leads to a continuance or
increase of that state, then it is a correct and life-affirming action.

The key to applying this learning in real life is the skill of self-examination.
Remembering to observe, interpret and control their physical responses gives people a
powerful tool for choosing harmonious ways of interaction. Rather than attempting to
give a list of ethical do's and don't's, this approach to harmony focuses on finding a
powerful, loving and centered state of being and from that state making decisions as to
how to act. It puts the power and the responsibility for harmony in the hands of the
individual and challenges him or her to constantly aim at understanding and creating
harmony.

In this approach to moral thinking, the body is the touchstone for decision making and
action. In practicing body/movement awareness exercises, people come to experience
that thoughts, feelings, intentions and actions which lead to smallness and twisting in the
body are those which upon reflection would be identified as weak, hurtful, immoral and
unethical. And thoughts, feelings, intentions and actions which lead to expansiveness,
symmetry and freedom in the body are those which are respectful, compassionate,
nurturing and confident. If people who are faced with decisions about how to behave
turn their attention to the sensations in their bodies, they will have a way of judging
whether they are moving in life-affirming or life-destroying directions.

Actually, it is a bit more complicated than this. Actions which lead to smallness and
twisting in the body are generally unethical, and actions which lead to an expansiveness
and symmetry are most likely and comparatively more ethical. Smallness and twisting do
indicate that there is some difficulty that must be resolved, but there are two kinds of
difficulties which may arise. The simple difficulty is that the thought or action is one
which is indeed hurtful and unethical. The more complicated difficulty has to do with
fearful and painful associations. If in our past experience we have learned to associate
pain and punishment with something that otherwise would be life-affirming, then our
bodies will become small and twisted when we contemplate doing that which actually is
good. Smallness and twisting, therefore, are indicators of a requirement for learning and
growth. Either we are faced with some traumatic experience to be worked out and
overcome or we are experiencing an urge to do something wrong and destructive. In any
case, experiencing smallness and twisting in the body indicates that some self-study is
needed before we can make an ethical choice.

Likewise, expansiveness and symmetry do not indicate perfection. Thoughts, feelings,
intentions and actions which lead to an expansiveness, symmetry and freedom in the
body are those which are moving in the direction of respect, strength, compassion and
nurturance. Opening and freeing of the body do not indicate that some choice or
behavior is absolutely true, but they do indicate that we are moving along the right path.
There is always more opening and freeing of the body to achieve, so there will always be
a deeper or more complete understanding to achieve of what is truly life-affirming. But if
we base our decisions about feelings and actions on a search for the more open and free
body state, we will be led in the direction of an ethical and constructive life.
7


It is wonderful to contemplate that morality is built into our physiology. When we do
something hurtful, our bodies rebel. And when we affirm our communion with life and
the planet, our bodies function well.



INTERNAL PROCESS

In addition to working toward discovering more effective and moral ways of handling
challenges, it can also be very productive to examine the inner personal function or
meaning of ineffective response strategies. It is this level of investigation which will
allow us to understand how body awareness can function as a core tool for dealing with
the diverse problems identified in the introduction.

To get at the inner meaning of a response, I start with a working assumption that I have
found very productive: the effect of an action is its purpose. Though in any specific case
this may not hold true, it is so often true that it is a very productive place to begin in
digging meanings out of responses.



Body Numbness

People's original responses in the hitting experiment revolved around rigidity or collapse.
To help people discover what meanings are contained in these patterns, I start by having
people go back to the untutored response patterns and feel what they are like. Now that
they have as a comparison the experience of the stronger and more open pattern, people
generally notice that in the collapsed or rigid patterns they feel distant and disconnected
from their partners and the events going on around them.

To sharpen this awareness, I ask people to work in pairs. I ask one person to stroke his or
her partner's arm or stomach, and I have the partner assume first a collapsed and then a
rigid body state and notice the effects that that has on their perception of the touch.
Generally people experience that the rigid response reduces perception by interposing a
sheet of muscular armor between the outside world and the inner perceiver. And they
experience that the collapsed response reduces perception by making the inner self feel
lifeless and dull. The effect of both rigid and collapsed responses is to reduce sensory
acuity, and as people work with this experience they usually come to perceive that this
effect of rigidity or collapse is indeed a fundamental purpose of the responses.

People generally respond to being hit by taking what appear to be the appropriate actions
of fight or flight. It is startling to people to find that hidden within these actions is a very
different process. As people contemplate their experiences in the hitting exercise, they
realize that real and effective fight or flight is accomplished on the basis of a personal
condition of strength and perceptivity. The psychological/physical response mode of
rigidity or collapse, however, is not a process of effective action but is instead really a
process of anesthesia.

It is very important to consider why it is so common for people to adopt a strategy of
anesthesia rather than a strategy of effective mobilization as a basis for reacting to
threats. Continuing to plumb the depths of their experience, people realize that the self
will opt for numbness rather than effective action in the face of a threat when it perceives
that it is really unable to take effective action to handle the threat. Even while it is
apparently fighting or escaping, the self that feels itself to be impotent will also be
shutting itself down so it won't have to feel what it believes it cannot handle. This
includes not feeling both the external environment and internal sensations and feelings.

By keeping this new insight in mind as they try out various ways of responding to being
hit, people feel how acting on the basis of impotence and numbness establishes a
feedback loop of disempowerment. When they respond to a threat in a weak and
collapsed or constricted manner, they experience that their responses are indeed
ineffective, and that reinforces the self-concept of impotence, which leads to still weaker
responses.

People also experience that the rigid responses sometimes do work in achieving some
manner of external control but that even this is problematic. The kind of control that
rigid numbness effects is harsh, insensitive, alienated and destructive. It creates pain and
suffering, both for the people that it dominates and for the people who live out this
strategy of self-protection. When people struggling to use rigidity to assume control of a
threat find themselves losing control, they will generally use even greater rigidity to try to
reestablish control, thus creating another vicious circle. As the self gets more and more
caught in the cycle of rigidity and pain, it eventually comes to perceive itself as impotent
to achieve its real goal of safety and comfort. So in the end, even rigidity, which is at
first experienced as strength, is a form of weakness and leads to ever increasing weakness
and the need for anesthesia.



Diminishment

How do people come to learn that they are powerless and that they need to adopt a
strategy of numbness? My experience in seeing people work with this question is that the
primary source of this learning is the diminishment that many children experience in
growing up. (See my paper on working with incest survivors5 for more details.)

I define diminishment as any behavior on the part of a caregiving adult in which the
adult's power is used to reduce the appropriate power of the child instead of enhancing it.
Active diminishment occurs when the child is used by the adult to fulfill his or her
purposes, and passive diminishment occurs when the adult simply ignores or neglects the
child. In both cases, the child's needs are not met, and the child, being a child, is
generally powerless to fulfill his or her needs himself. In both cases, the child frequently
internalizes the message that he and his needs are not important or worthwhile.

Outright child abuse is the clearest and harshest form of diminishment. Many children in
this country have been abused. I have seen estimates that one quarter to one half of the
children have been sexually abused, and that doesn't include the numbers of children who
have been abused in physical but non-sexual ways.

However, less obvious forms of diminishment also hurt children. Anything which
teaches children to ignore and deny the messages they experience in their bodies
diminishes their sense of self . For example, it is diminishing to tell a child who has been
frightened by a shadow, "Stop crying. It's just a shadow. You shouldn't be afraid." A
different message could be, "I can see that you are really scared. Would you like me to
hold your hand, and we'll both go chase away the monster?" The first message leads to a
feeling of being wrong, unsupported, invalidated and unsafe. It also forces the child to
suppress his feelings in order to be acceptable to the adult. The second message leads to
feelings of being respected, to willingness to stay in touch with internal sensations, and to
skills for investigating and handling threats.

Children really are powerless. Children start off powerless and incapable, dependent on
the adults around them for their safety and for the fulfillment of every need, and a
primary task of their growth is to gradually gain power and take over the job of fulfilling
their own needs. A major task of the caregiving adult is to respect and nurture the child's
development of power. This means recognizing and validating the child's feelings and
needs, nurturing his or her sense of self-worth, and leading her or him to the ability to
deal with the world from a secure and effective inner base of power and compassion.

The experience of being ignored or used interrupts this process of growth and
empowerment. Diminished children take in the message in a deep and destructive way
that they are in essence worthless and powerless. Since the diminished child is powerless
to change the external situation he or she faces, the child adopts a strategy of altering the
internal perceptions of his or her feelings and situations.

Numbness is a primary strategy for coping with ongoing fear and pain, and the essence
of numbness is body numbness. This numbness can embrace many areas of lack of
awareness. There can be lack of physical feeling for various areas of the body. There
can be a lack of contact with the physical sensations of emotions. There can even be
amnesia for traumatic experiences or for whole periods of a child's life.

Even when the diminished child grows up to be an adult, this learning incorporated at an
early age continues to be a fundamental part of the personality construct. The adult
continues to act from the certain knowledge of his or her own weakness and lack of
effective boundary defense. Many people try to brace themselves to handle the external
events and inner pain, and many people give up and collapse in resignation, and both of
these options create a state of anesthesia. And just as the sense of powerlessness
persists, so the strategy of internal anesthesia persists into adulthood as a fundamental
mechanism for coping with life's threats.



An Inhumane World

This process of anesthesia is supported and strengthened by our culture. For example,
two common ways in which this impacts individuals is in terms of what is perceived as
good posture and as strength. Our culture teaches us that good posture is achieved by
raising the chin, throwing the shoulders back, bracing the back and sucking in the guts.
This makes the body rigid, top-heavy, unbalanced, immobile and tense. It makes people
feel rigid and alienated, and it leads to rigid and alienated behavior. Our culture also
teaches us that strength is bulky, contracted, and high in the chest, which also leads to
rigidity and alienation.

insert photos

It is interesting to note that the body form our culture prescribes is practically a
prescription for the movement pattern involved in the fear/startle reflex. Body and
movement patterns both express emotions and create them. Feeling a certain way will
result in corresponding body patterns, and adopting those body patterns will create the
feelings. The cultural prescriptions for posture and strength both express a widespread
underlying fear pattern and serve to create and perpetuate the fear, rigidity and weakness.
And underlying our cultural concepts of both strength and good posture is the process of
sensory reduction and anesthesia.

Based on the work I have done with many people, it seems to me that this process of
prescribing and choosing anesthesia is both a result and a cause of diminishment . I see a
very similar process of diminishment occurring in interpersonal discord, drug abuse,
family violence, child abuse, ethnic intolerance, international conflict, and environmental
degradation.

On the basis of having been diminished, people grow up weak and fearful, either
collapsed and retreating or rigid and aggressive or both. They adopt the coping strategy
of numbness to avoid feeling what happens to them. They become numb to their own
feelings, and are not fully aware of what they do to themselves. And what they cannot
feel in themselves they cannot notice or comprehend in other people. They have shut out
their own pain, and they cannot feel anyone else's pain. They lack empathy and
compassion. They lack awareness of the fact that other people truly feel, and they are not
fully aware of what they do to the people around them. They are not fully aware of the
life in plants and animals, and the earth itself, and they are not aware of what they are
doing to the planet they are part of.

The ability to do evil is based on not feeling oneself and others. In the state of numbness
and lack of awareness, people can take care of their own needs in a short-sighted, self-
centered way. They won't notice the effects they are having on the people around them
or the long-term effects they will be creating in their own lives. By being absorbed in
themselves, people can unfeelingly diminish and abuse others and themselves. When
they become parents, they respond to the powerless children under their care on the basis
of their own needs rather than their children's needs. At best, they simply do not notice,
validate or fulfill the needs of the children. At worst, needing to feel powerful, they
repeat on their children the active abuse they themselves experienced as children. This
finally allows them to feel powerful, in the way they perceived their abusers as being
powerful, which is their only understanding of power. In the same way, numb people
form groups to diminish or abuse other groups. And numb people use the planet
carelessly and unfeelingly to satisfy their own needs, in the long run possibly destroying
the planet and themselves.

It is important to remember, however, that numbness is not in itself evil, and numb
people are not evil. People who chose numbness did so from a place of pain and
powerlessness. Presumably, given their situation, it was the best choice they had
available. All they were trying to do was survive. The problem with numbness, though,
is that in the long run it has disastrous side-effects. Like a powerful narcotic, numbness
is appropriate for dealing with the pain of an acute emergency but continued use will
eventually destroy the person using it.

The solution to diminishment is to shatter the numbness which is the result of
diminishment and the cause of further diminishment. Through the body awareness
exercises I have described, people can be brought to notice their numbness, to understand
and evaluate it, and to change it. Through the experience of power and love, people will
be able to find the courage to confront the powerlessness and numbness they have
experienced, which can be scary and painful. Through the experience of power and love,
people will understand the necessity of choosing to be vulnerable to their fear and pain,
and they will understand the effectiveness of that choice in securing their safety.




A HUMANE WORLD

There are many areas in which people, on the basis of disempowerment and numbness,
choose destructive ways of acting. If the powerlessness and numbness which are the
underlying causes of those choices are not rooted out, no amount of teaching new ways of
acting will succeed. But if people are brought into contact with their power, love,
awareness and freedom, they will be able to start learning life-affirming ways of
behaving. Living from their power and love, people will feel a sense of their
connectedness with all the people, animals and plants alive, and with the planet itself.
They will feel spiritually part of a community of the planet. It is wondrous to
contemplate that morality is built into our physiology. When we act in destructive ways,
our bodies rebel. And when we affirm our communion with life and the planet, our
bodies function well.

In the beginning of this paper, three questions were raised concerning the possibility of a
practically effective theory of moral education. The practice of body awareness answers
all three questions. The nature of the body itself constitutes a general ideal which defines
right actions in a universal and compelling way. And body awareness exercises
constitute procedures by which people can make specific moral decisions as well as learn
to live by the general ideal. This paper describes just a few of the many body exercises I
work with, but it does provide an idea of what body awareness work has to offer in
helping solve a number of grave problems facing us.

Of course, beyond just finding our power and love, there are many specific practical
changes that need to be achieved in making the world more humane, but the willingness
to begin the process must be founded on awareness of the experience of being alive in a
living body on a living planet. The courage to face and accomplish the monumental
restructuring of our civilization that is needed for the planet to survive can come only
from living in our awareness, power and love.





Footnotes note: The papers of mine referred to in the footnotes can all be found on my
website: www.being-in-movement.com

1
Some people can be numb to themselves but hyper-aware of the desires, feelings and
purposes of others. Such people generally allow themselves to be used to fulfill other
people's purposes, a process which is ultimately destructive to themselves as well as the
other people. Because they cannot feel themselves, these people cannot gauge the
appropriateness of their behavior or its effects on others, and so what seems like
awareness of others is really a convoluted form of unawareness.

2
For an elucidation of this concept of intention, see my paper "Being In Movement:
Intention as a Somatic Meditation" in Somatics, Vol. 7, Num. 1, Autumn/Winter '88-89,
pages 54-59.

3
For an example of body-learning as a basis for effective action, see my paper
Developing Power and Sensitivity through Movement Awareness in American Music
Teacher, Vol. 42, Num. 2, October 1992, pages 26-31.

4
This term was introduced by Thomas Hanna. See: Bodies in Revolt: A Primer in
Somatic Thinking. 1970. Holt, Rhinehart & Winston. New York. In 1976 he established
the journal Somatics. See: Somatics. Eleanor Criswell Hanna, Editor. 1516 Grant Ave
#212, Novato, CA 94945. Hanna was a philosophy professor and a practitioner of the
Feldenkrais Method of movement awareness training, and more than anyone else, he
provided the overarching conceptual framework which began the process of coalescing a
wide range of bodywork and movement disciplines into a single coherent field.

5
Among the older, more influential methods are:
Alexander Work: Jones, Frank Pierce. The Alexander Technique: Body Awareness in
Action. 1976. Shocken Books. New York. See also: Conable, Barbara. How to Learn
the Alexander Technique: A Manual for Students. 1991. Andover Road Press. Columbus
(Ohio).
Feldenkrais Method: Feldenkrais, Moshe. Awareness Through Movement. 1979.
Harper & Row. New York.
Rolfing: Rolf, Ida P. Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structures. 1977. Harper &
Row. New York.
Laban Movement Analysis: Bartenieff, Irmgard. & Lewis, Dori. Body Movement:
Coping with the Environment. 1980. Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. New York.
Charlotte Selver's Sensory Awareness: Brooks, Charles V.W. Sensory Awareness: On
Rediscovering Experiencing. 1974. Viking Press. New York.
There are many other somatic methods, such as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen's Body/Mind
Centering, Emilie Conrad Da'Oud's Continuum Work, Hellerwork, Aston Patterning,
Trager Work, Hanna Somatic Education, Rosen Work, Pauls' Ortho-Bionomy and so on.

6
Linden, Paul. "Applications of Being In Movement in Working with Incest Survivors,"
Somatics, Autumn, 1990, p38-47.

7
There is an interesting question about a special case. Could a sociopath perform
abhorrent and destructive actions in a symmetrical and expansive body state? I would
guess not, but I do not have enough information to answer this question.