It is impossible to relax involuntary tension voluntarily. A part of this tension is necessary and important for living and moving. Opening our attention towards the inside of our body, we explore its relationship with the environment, both in the material and social world. When we perceive this relationship, we are able to find ways of being and moving that make it possible to relax the tension that is excessive.
A huge part of our behavior, our movements, and our sensory experience is organized in habitual holding patterns that are unconscious.
Recognizing these patterns makes it possible to introduce small changes that are sustainable.
First of all, that is good for health. The habit of holding interferes with bodily functions: breathing, digestion, circulation, evacuation of toxins and damaged cells, repair of damaged tissues, defenses… Habitual tension puts a lot of strain on your joints, all of the time, and wears them out. It makes your tissues acid, fostering inflammations which, in turn, may become precursors to more serious diseases, like cancer, if they are not treated on time and effectively.
In human relationships it is useful to know your pattern, because it allows you to shape your movements so as to make interaction easy, be it with a client, a superior, a subordinate, a loved one, or someone unknown.
Also, it comes as a great relief to discover that what keeps you in conflict with the world, or yourself, is a bunch of tensions in your body that you can learn to let go.
Participants in the workshop explore their patterns through the regular movements of living: breathing, lying, sitting, standing, walking and communicating, individually in guided sequences and explorations with a partner, in small groups and the whole group. The theoretical part provides the necessary information to understand how these patterns come into being and how they manifest in the relationship between the body and the gravitational field of Earth.
According to how you occupy your space with your body and what relationship you keep with the coordinates of the gravitational field of Earth, it supplies you with an energy that brings about a sense of elevation and ease in movement, a feeling of living in consonance with a greater force. Poor alignment causes discomfort and, on the long run, dysfunction and disease.
The tension that is generated when you live in conflict with gravity traps the flow of sensations in repetitive patterns that interfere with your ability to perceive clearly what is really going on. Then, the tissues that make up the body are impregnated with unresolved emotional contents from the past that remain underneath the threshold of consciousness from where they inform your view of yourself, life and the world.
Psyche seems to keep them alive until we are mature enough, or have enough distance, so that we are able to attend to them instead of simply repeating them. They are even transmitted from generation to generation so that children and grandchildren in their own body and psyche can see to the traces of their parents’ and grandparents’ traumas, because they did not have the opportunities to do so that we have nowadays. As we are taking the origin of the trauma into account, it becomes possible to leave it where it belongs and reorient one’s own behavior and attitude towards life and the collective in a way that is coherent with the requirements of the present moment. As we approach the collective traumas of war, totalitarian regimes, terrorism, exploitation and abuse through their manifestations in the individual life of each person, we make a contribution towards a sustainable change not only in our own lives but also in the collective and we promote peace. Each person counts.
The format of the workshop provides experiences and knowledge of added value to professional in the field of physical and psychological health, education, the arts, enterprise, sports and many others, but it does not require any prior training. One essential requirement is the willingness to develop a certain degree of sensitivity that makes it possible to perceive sensations in the body, independently of whether they are pleasant or painful, and to learn to manage their flow efficiently in order to be able to attend to the parts of oneself that are trapped in the conflict with the greater force fields of the world. The workshop provides the tools to develop this kind of sensitivity, even if participant have invested much energy in making themselves insensitive and does not know how to perceive their body.
Teacher: Brigitte Hansmann
Taller en Midline Institute