Chapter summary: presents different methods for expanding different areas of the body, to expand an emotional experience to as much of the body as possible and thus to make it more tolerable to be with over a longer period.
In chapter 7, we saw the different ways in which defenses can form in the brain and body physiology against overwhelming emotional experiences, and how they can get in the way of accessing and processing unresolved emotional experiences. In chapter 8, we saw how undoing such physiological defenses against emotions can help us in expanding an emotional experience to more of the physiology, and how that can lead to a greater capacity to tolerate, be with, and process the difficult emotional experience. We saw in chapter 6 how creating a greater capacity to be with an emotion by expanding the physiology involved in its experience can improve not only emotional but also cognitive and behavioral outcomes.
As mentioned earlier, we use the phrase “expanding the physiology” to mean “undoing defenses against emotions to involve more of the physiology in the emotional experience.” In expanding the physiology to expand an unpleasant emotion, it would be optimal if we could minimize the difficulty in experiencing the unpleasant emotion. In Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP) professional trainings, we use a model of physiological regulation, a model of energetic regulation, and a number of different strategies and tools to optimize the expansion process, in order to minimize the stress, dysregulation, and distress inherent in the experience of unpleasant emotions. A full discussion of both models of regulation and all strategies and tools used in the expansion process is not possible in this book, to keep its length manageable. In this chapter, we will look at some simple, essential, and effective strategies and tools for undoing defenses in the brain and body physiology, to optimize the expansion process that readers can put into immediate practice for embodying emotions in themselves or their clients.
From chapter 5, we know that an emotional experience, especially an overwhelming one, can potentially involve the entire brain and body physiology. In such circumstances, if the emotional experience is limited to one area of the brain and body physiology, we know that physiological defenses are preventing the other areas from fully participating in the emotional experience. When an emotion is present in one area, we can try to expand the emotional experience to the area that immediately adjoins it. We will call this strategy the “local expansion” strategy. Or, we can try to expand it to other areas, which we will call the “area to area” expansion strategy. Both of these are the general strategies for expansion of emotion in the physiology.
For the purpose of having a simple framework for implementing local and area-to-area expansion strategies, we can do a simple division of the brain and body physiology into different areas: the head, the neck, the arms, the thoracic cavity (from the shoulder to the diaphragm muscle), the abdominal and pelvic cavities (from the diaphragm muscle to the pelvic floor), and the legs. We can also do a simple classification of the physiology into three layers. The outer layer consists of the skin, fascia, muscles, membranes, bones, ligaments, and tendons. We consider the muscles, governed by the somatic nervous system, to be the most dynamic component of the outer layer. The middle layer consists of the organs, the glands, and the blood vessels, which are governed by the autonomic nervous system. The third and inner layer consists of the central nervous system areas of the brain and the spinal cord, and the peripheral somatic and autonomic nervous systems.
There are a number of tools we can use to work with physiological and energetic defenses to expand the emotional experience locally or from one area to another. Awareness, intention, visual imagination, detailed tracking of sensations in the brain and body physiology, movement, breath, self-touch, the therapist’s imaginal touch, the therapist’s actual touch, bodywork, and energy work are all possible tools. In this chapter, we will limit our discussion to the use of simple tools, such as awareness, intention, and self-touch, which can be used more easily for self-help as well as for helping others. I hope that those who touch clients as part of the treatments they offer can translate the information on self-touch presented here into use with their clients through therapeutic touch.
Detailed tracking of body sensations, an effective evidence-based tool that is used widely in psychology these days, is not suggested as a tool here. It is complex to use, and it suffers from its potential to neutralize or regulate away difficult emotional experiences when we are trying to create a greater capacity to tolerate them. If you are interested in reading more on this topic, you can read my paper “How to Avoid Destroying Emotions When Tracking Body Sensations?”1 Movement and breath, effective tools that can also be in the expansion process, are also excluded from discussion here for the same reasons. Those of you who use the great tools of breath, movement, and detailed tracking of body sensations in your work, please make sure they do not regulate the emotions away when you are using them to embody emotions.
Intention: Intention is an important tool. When we use tools such as awareness or self-touch, the intention with which we apply the tool determines the outcome. In general, a tool can be used with one or more of four intentions:
Whenever a tool is used, there is always an intention, be it conscious or unconscious. It is important to make the intention conscious so it is not in opposition to what we are trying to achieve. For example, when inviting a client to use self-touch to undo a defense in an area to uncover the vulnerability it is defending against, if we do not make this intention explicit, the client might just use the self-touch to soothe the area and free it from both the defense and the vulnerability. Intention can be used with a tool to determine the outcome of using the tool as well as to directly expand the emotional experience. For example, we might use self-touch in an area with the intention to undo physiological defenses there, accompanied by a statement such as “Place your hand on the constriction in your chest to soften it to uncover what the constriction is hiding.” Or we might use intention to expand the emotional experience locally in an area or from one area to another with a statement such as “As you experience the fear in your chest, please try to expand the fear to more of the chest or to the belly.”
Awareness: Awareness is a tool that is always used with an intention. When we are paying attention to an experience mindfully, we are using awareness to pay attention to the experience with the intention of accepting the experience and reacting to it as little as possible. Awareness works in different ways. When we bring our awareness to an area of the body, the brain mobilizes more neurological resources to gather more information on the condition of the area and to send commands to different parts of the brain and body physiology to regulate the area, if the area is dysregulated. Also, when we bring awareness to an area, the energy tends to increase in that area, increasing the possibility of an experience there, according to the first principle of energy psychology, which is: energy follows awareness, and experience follows energy.
The second principle of energy psychology, which will come in handy when our task is to expand an emotional experience from one area to another, is: when two areas in the body are connected through tools such as awareness, self-touch, therapist’s touch, or needles, the two areas will get connected energetically. Because experience follows energy, we can expect an emotional experience to expand from one area to the other when those areas are connected energetically. When working to expand an experience from one area of the body to another with awareness, we can hold both areas in our awareness at the same time, or we can go back and forth between the two areas.
These two principles of energy that connect awareness, energy, and experience are easy to verify. Give them a try right away before you read further. For example, if you find yourself feeling an intense emotion in the chest, place one hand on the chest and the second hand on the abdomen, with the intention to connect the two areas in energy and emotion. You can go back and forth between the chest and the abdomen with your awareness, or you can have them both in your awareness. What changes do you notice in your experience of the emotion? Is it less intense in the chest? Do you notice that qualities of the emotion you first noticed in the chest are now in the abdomen? Is the experience of the emotion more or less bearable now?
Self-touch: Different parts of our brain and body physiology, such as our brain and heart, generate fields of bioelectric and biomagnetic energy. These fields of information extend beyond the systems that originate them. They can integrate to become larger fields of energy with greater reach than the individual fields, even beyond the skin boundary. These information fields function as another system of regulation of our brain and body physiology, in addition to the nervous system. They can regulate not only our brain and body physiology but also those of other people they interact with. Our hands are good conduits for these bioelectric and biomagnetic energy fields. They provide a scientific basis for why therapist touch is effective in bodywork and energy work healing modalities.2 We will look at this topic in greater depth in chapter 14 on interpersonal resonance.
We can use self-touch with one or both hands on different parts of our brain and body physiology, with different intentions, to assist with different steps of the emotional embodiment process. Self-touch can be used in step 2 to support our emotions, in step 3 to expand them, or in step 4 to aid in integration. In general, therapist touch can be expected to be more effective than self-touch because of the involvement of the resources of two systems, the client’s and the therapist’s, as opposed to one. However, self-touch does have some advantages. It can be used for self-help at home. It can be suggested more freely in different therapy modalities, in different cultures, across genders, for clients who have difficulty being touched, and for therapists who have difficulty touching their clients. It is also quite simple to learn to use. For all these advantageous reasons, self-touch has proved to be an effective workhorse in emotional embodiment work. We will see many examples of the use of self-touch below.
Before we look at area-specific strategies for local expansion of emotion for different parts of the brain and body physiology, let us look at simple strategies we can use to expand emotion locally in any area, using the physical heart as an example. It makes sense to expand the emotional experience to the immediate neighborhood of where it is already present. The emotion’s presence in an area signals that the area is either resourced enough to allow it to be experienced there or that the defenses cannot inhibit it out of the area altogether.
Our awareness tends to become dysfunctional in areas where we are struggling with an emotional experience. Either we try to pay less attention to the area, or we concentrate our awareness in the area in hopes that the experience will simply go away. This reduces the support we could provide the experience by using a more functional awareness strategy. When we concentrate our awareness in an area, the energy in the area tends to increase, according to the first principle of energy. As the energy in the area increases, it can energize the emotional experience, the defenses against it, or both. This in turn is likely to increase the level of stress and dysregulation in the area and make the emotional experience even more intolerable than before. People with chronic pain suffer from this dynamic. They cannot help paying attention to pain. The more attention they pay to the pain, the worse it gets, until physiological defenses such as numbing kick in to provide some relief.
In order to facilitate local expansion in an area without such dynamics, we can make the following suggestion to the client: “As you experience the grief in the heart area, please allow your awareness to expand beyond the heart to envelop more of the chest, so that those additional areas in your chest, such as your lungs, can expand physically as well as emotionally with your grief, to reduce the physical and emotional difficulty in the heart area.”
Here we are using the tool of awareness with intention to help facilitate the local expansion of emotion in the heart to the chest area, between the shoulders and the diaphragm muscle. Because many people experience difficulty in using awareness as a tool, and awareness alone is often not effective when the defenses are strong, one can bring in the additional tool of self-touch. For example, we could suggest the following: “Place your hand on your heart area to help it expand physically and emotionally in order to expand your experience of grief in the heart, and to areas around the heart, so it can become more tolerable.”
We could also make use of the second principle of energy—energy tends to flow between two areas that are connected somehow—and suggest the following: “Place one hand on the heart area, and place the other hand on the lung area, with the intention of helping both areas expand and connect physically and emotionally. Please notice if your experience of grief expands in the heart area, and then from the heart to the lungs. Also, at some point, please notice if there is greater physical ease in the heart area and whether your grief is more tolerable than before.” The last statement belongs to the fourth step in the embodiment process, integration, covered in the next chapter. One aspect of integration is paying attention to improvements in physiology, energy, and affect tolerance. Such improvements can be theoretically expected from embodying emotion, as we saw in chapter 8. Integration can be used from time to time as a resource in the expansion process to make the emotional experience more bearable.
Sometimes it is difficult to engage in local expansion. It could be that the intensity of emotional experience is simply too much when expanded locally. Perhaps there is simply too much energy or emotion locally causing extreme distress. Or local expansion simply may not work, for one reason or another. In these cases, one has to use strategies to expand the emotion to other areas. Also, it is part of the emotional embodiment process that emotional experience is expanded to more parts of the body.
Let us look at simple strategies we can use to connect any two parts of the body, using the chest and the abdomen as an example. We can use one or more of the following suggestions that use awareness, intention, and self-touch: “As you are aware of the anxiety in your chest, which makes sense given the situation of job loss you find yourself in, please expand your awareness to the abdomen. Hold both your chest and your abdomen in your awareness, or go back and forth between the anxiety in your chest and your abdomen, to see if you can expand the experience of anxiety to the abdomen as well. The experience in the chest might not feel exactly the same as in the abdomen, but search the abdominal area to see if you can find any of the qualities of the anxiety you first felt in the chest. Place one hand on the chest and the other hand on the abdomen, not to regulate your anxiety away but to expand both areas and connect them to each other in the experience of anxiety that is related to your job loss.”
When we use awareness and self-touch in two areas at the same time, we are using the second principle of energy: two areas that are connected in any way tend to come together in energy. When we continue to remind the person of the situation and the emotion, and we continue to validate and support the emotional experience as appropriate, the two areas are more likely to come together in the emotional experience as well. These simple strategies for facilitating expansion of emotion from one area to the next can be used with two areas that are next to each other, such as the chest and the abdomen, or distant from each other, such as the head and the legs.
Next, we turn to area-specific self-touch strategies for expanding specific areas (local expansion)—the chest, the abdomen, and so on—and for connecting two parts of the body to each other (area-to-area expansion), especially areas that are adjacent to each other.
We begin with the arms, the legs, and the head and neck areas. They are the organs of action in the body with which we take care of ourselves in the world. We express ourselves primarily through the head and neck area and act mainly with our arms and legs to deal with the world. We can form defenses in these areas to hold ourselves back from expressing and doing things, or we can inhibit these areas so as to not feel emotional experiences in these or other areas of the body.
The legs can be further divided into three segments: the foot, the lower leg, and the thigh. These segments are joined by the ankle and knee joints. The thigh and the entire leg are connected to the rest of the body by the hip joint. Osteopaths have known for a long time that defenses such as constriction in these three joints can disrupt nervous system, blood, interstitial fluid, lymph, and energy flows across them, which can cause dysfunctions by dysregulating each of the segments locally or the entire leg globally. The connection between the leg and the rest of the body can become compromised at the hip joint, creating problems in the rest of the integrated brain and body physiology. To work with the legs, osteopaths have found it most efficient to work at these three joints.3,4 They have also found it more effective to do touch work with two of these joints at a time rather than just one joint: with the hip and the knee joint, the knee and the ankle joint, or the hip and the ankle joint.
We can work with the legs to expand them locally, as well as to connect them to the rest of the body, especially with the adjacent abdominal and pelvic areas. We can ask clients sitting in a chair to draw one leg up, support its lower portion on the thigh of the other leg, and use touch to work with two joints at a time. We can touch the joints from above or below. To work with a hip joint, you can place a palm on top of the hip bone with your fingers pointing toward the groin, with the focus of your attention on the hip joint below the tips of your fingers. The choice of the two joints for touch would depend on the leg segments not involved in the emotional experience. We can assume that the leg segments not involved in the experience are defended against the emotional experience. For example, if the lower leg and foot segments appear to be involved, it would make sense to work with the knee and the ankle joints. It is not uncommon to find both legs uninvolved in emotional experiences.
The work with the legs in general and the hip joints in particular is important in emotional embodiment work. One reason is that the defense at the hip joint can disconnect the legs and the rest of the body in emotional experience. Another reason is that most people tend to concentrate their emotional energy above the diaphragm muscle. It is also common for people to concentrate emotional energy in the head. This typical top-heavy concentration makes the experience of emotion more stressful than necessary, due to the defenses formed in the rest of the body to keep it out, and due to the defenses formed in the limited areas emotion is present in to cope with it.
In energy psychology, different types of energies have their grounding in different areas of the legs. Any work at the legs therefore tends to produce a downward flow of energy and emotion and an easier experience of emotion in the body above the diaphragm. Self-touch with one hand on one hip joint and the other hand on the other hip joint, and self-touch with one hand at the hip joint and the other at the ankle joint on the same leg, are two effective strategies for expanding the legs and connecting them to the rest of the body in emotional experience, especially to the adjacent pelvic and abdominal areas.
When the emotion of grief is concentrated in the chest or when there is a great deal of difficulty in the chest in the conflict between grief concentrated there and the defenses to cope with it, we could say things such as “Please place both your hands on the hip joints for a while. Observe how it might help your chest as well as your legs to expand physically and feel at greater ease. Look at whether the grief in your chest is expanding in the chest and whether it is easier now to be with your grief there. See if your grief is expanding downward into your abdominal and pelvic area, and even into the legs.” When the emotion of fear is strong in the abdominal or pelvic areas, we could suggest things such as “Please place your right hand on your right hip joint and your left hand on your right ankle joint, after you place your lower right leg on the thigh of the left leg. See what happens. Do you notice the right leg expand physically? Do you observe the expansion of the fear in the abdominal or pelvic area? Do you observe the right leg joining in the experience of fear?”
Please remember that we can also use simple area-to-area expansion strategies to expand the grief in the chest to the legs by placing one hand on the chest and the other hand on any part of a leg, with the intention to connect the two in energy and experience. We could similarly expand the fear in the abdomen to the legs by placing one hand on the abdomen and the other hand on any part of the leg.
We could also just use awareness and intention without self-touch. For example, you could suggest, “As you experience the grief in your chest, please also include your legs in your awareness. You can hold both places in your awareness along with your grief, or you can go back and forth between the two places. Notice what changes happen in your chest and your legs. How does that change the grief in your chest? Does the chest expand physically? Does that grief expand in your chest? Is it easier to be with the grief in your chest now than before? Do you notice whether any of the qualities of the grief you first noticed in your chest are now present in your legs?”
The muscles of the arm are capable of a large number of fine and gross motor movements. There are a large number of muscles of varying sizes in the arms to carry them out. The neurophysiology of the arms is appropriately more complex than that of the legs. Given the involvement of the arms in a large number of actions in all kinds of situations starting at birth, especially in psychomotor acts such as pulling someone close and embracing them in close relationships, there are many reasons for defenses to form in them. Physiological defenses in the arms can also form as a defense against emotional experience in adjacent areas of the body, such as the chest cavity.
As with the legs, the three joints in the arms (shoulder, elbow, and wrist) are the most efficient places to work with to expand the arms locally and to connect them to the rest of the body, especially to the adjacent chest cavity between the shoulder and the diaphragm. As for connecting two arm joints at a time, we are more constrained with the arms than with the legs. We can get creative by using one arm to hold one of the three joints on the other arm, and then either move one of the other two joints or bring our awareness to it to connect the two joints. Or we can simply keep the two joints in our awareness so as to connect them. We can also use the knee joint on the leg on the same side as the contact point for the other joint. To do that, pull the same-side leg up, bend it at the knee, and place its lower leg or foot on the thigh of the other leg. One can then place the elbow or the wrist on the knee of the leg on the same side while touching one of the other two joints with the opposite arm. For example, we can touch the left shoulder joint with the right hand and connect the left elbow or wrist joint to the left knee.
As with the legs, the decisions about whether to work with one joint or two joints, and which joint or joints to work with, will be determined based on where the person is experiencing and not experiencing the emotion, and whether adjacent areas could be helped by working with the arms. For example, it is possible for the lower arm segment to be uninvolved in the emotional experience. That would indicate that we need to work with the elbow and wrist joints. It is not uncommon for an entire arm to be uninvolved. Working with the arm is often helpful in expanding the adjacent chest area, connected to the arm at the shoulder joint.
Working with the shoulder joint and the wrist joint is a great way to expand the arm and connect it to the rest of the body, especially to the chest area, provided that there is no major block at the elbow joint. Just working at the shoulder joint with the other hand is enough to help to achieve the same objective in some cases. When one is experiencing a high level of anxiety in the chest area, we can have the client sit in a chair, and then we can make suggestions such as “Please place your right hand on the left shoulder and the left wrist on your left knee after drawing up the left leg and placing the lower left leg on the right thigh. Then, as you stay with your experience of anxiety, which makes sense given the situation you are facing, notice how it might help to expand the left arm and the chest area. Then observe whether your anxiety is expanding more through the chest area, and whether it is also spreading to your arm. And notice whether it is easier to experience the anxiety in the chest now than before.”
I have chosen to illustrate working with the arms with the emotion of anxiety as an example because this can be helpful in working with panic attacks, a common symptom. In the formation of panic attacks, there is usually a great deal of fear about something and constriction of the breathing muscles as a defense to cope with the fear, which constrains the fear to the chest area. When the source of the fear continues to be present, the breathing muscles are constricted even more, making breathing increasingly difficult, creating panic in the brain as it is deprived of oxygen. It can be said that a panic attack is an attempt on the part of the brain to release the defenses in the breathing muscles all at once to survive. So when one is working with panic attacks, it is extremely important to quickly expand the adjacent areas of the arms, head, and neck, to expand the experience of anxiety so that the breathing muscles—especially those in the chest—do not constrict too much and scare the brain into a panic attack. (In working with anxiety attacks, it is also important to move the energy and the anxiety downward into the abdomen across the diaphragm.)
We can also use simple area-to-area expansion strategies with just awareness and intention. You could say, “As you feel the anxiety in your chest, please enlarge your awareness to include your arms. You can go back and forth between your chest and your arms in your awareness, or you can hold them both in your awareness at the same time. How does that change your experience of anxiety in your chest? Does the chest feel more expanded or a little less constricted? Does the anxiety expand more in the chest area? Does it feel more tolerable than before? What about your arms? Do they feel more expanded? Do you now feel in your arms any of the qualities of the anxiety you feel in your chest?”
This is an important area in emotional embodiment work for a number of reasons. One, it houses the brain. The brain can generate emotional experiences on its own without involving the rest of the body. Also, the brain can construct emotions from information the body provides on the situation’s impact on the person’s well-being. Two, the neck musculature, especially its posterior section, is known to mediate the information flow between the head and the body. Blocking the neck area can compromise the flow of information between the two areas. Three, muscles and other structures in the head, face, and neck area (such as the tongue and the larynx) are known to perform a number of important functions in relation to emotions. They play important roles in generating, expressing, regulating, and defending against emotions; in understanding the emotional states of others through mirroring; and in facilitating the processing of emotional experiences in the brain as well as the rest of the body. Defenses against emotions in these areas can therefore significantly compromise the expansion and embodiment of emotional experiences in the brain as well as the rest of the body.
The polyvagal theory of the autonomic nervous system identifies seven muscle groups in the head, face, and neck area as part of what it calls the social engagement system.5 They are: a) the jaw muscles; b) the eye muscles; c) the inner ear muscles; d) the other facial muscles; e) the muscles of ingestion and expulsion at the throat; f) the muscles of vocalization; and g) the muscles that move the neck and the head. This is one area where we can use movement effectively to undo defenses against emotions and thus to access and expand emotional experiences. In order to work with these muscles through movement, we can open and close our jaws; open and close our eyes; move our eyes around in multiple directions; focus our hearing on faint sounds in the background, moving the focus away from loud sounds in the foreground, to activate the inner ear muscles; contort our facial muscles into different facial expressions; swallow, cough, or simulate throwing up; vocalize different sounds; and engage our head and neck in movements in different directions (forward, backward, and side to side).
In addition to movement, we can also work with these areas to undo defenses in them by just bringing our awareness to them or by gently touching them or massaging them, to expand an emotional experience locally or as preparation for connecting to an emotional experience in the brain or in other parts of the body.
Working with the head, face, and neck area with one or more of the above methods can counteract defenses and help in recruiting the area to participate in generating, experiencing, and expressing emotion. Connecting the brain or other parts of the body to the “bridge” of the head, face, and neck area can allow emotion in those areas to become more expanded throughout the brain and body physiology, more regulated, and more clarified. When the facial muscles are being blocked during emotional experiences, processing of the emotion and the situation in the brain is severely compromised.6 When the face and throat physiology become involved in emotional experiences in the rest of the body through facial and vocal expression, greater clarity about one’s emotional experience is possible. Because vocal and facial expression of emotion are closely linked to nonverbal expression of emotion throughout the body, these expressions can help in further expansion of the emotional experience throughout the body. In addition, when we get the emotion to the face, the likelihood of support for it from other people increases, which would make it easier to tolerate the emotional experience.
To connect this area to the emotional experience in the brain or in other parts of the body, we can make suggestions such as “Imagine someone making a sound or a facial expression that matches the emotional experience in your brain or body.” “Imagine yourself making a sound or a facial expression that matches the emotional experience in your brain or body.” or “Try to express the emotion you feel in the brain or body as a facial expression or as a sound through vocalization.” When there is no clear emotion in the brain or the body, we can work in the same way with the distress that a situation or a psychophysiological symptom is causing in either place, to check if it can be clarified as a possible emotional reaction to the situation. To do that, we can use suggestions such as “As you feel how bad this situation or the abdominal pain or headache is making you feel, please try to express it through a facial expression or vocalization that matches your distress. I will do it with you.”
The polyvagal theory of the autonomic nervous system also offers us an understanding of how movement of the seven muscle groups in the head, face, and neck listed earlier can expand the head, face, and neck area and the upper chest area at the same time and help connect the two areas in energy and emotional experience. Evolution has given rise to an extremely fine-tuned coordination between the seven muscle groups and a parasympathetic nerve called the ventral vagal nerve. An intent to move any of the seven groups of muscles immediately triggers the ventral vagal nerve to stimulate the heart and lungs to increase heartbeat and breath rate to increase cardiovascular output, in order to supply the muscle group with the energy needed for the movement. This means that if one wants to expand the emotional experience in the chest to the head, face, and neck area or vice versa by working with the head, face, and neck area, movement of the seven groups of muscles (including muscles of facial expression and vocalization) can be of assistance.
For example, to expand an emotional experience from the chest to the adjacent head and neck area, we can make suggestions such as “As you feel the fear in the chest, open and close your mouth to loosen the jaw muscles, open and close your eyes to expand the muscles of the eyes, turn your head and neck in different directions, or express the fear through facial expression or vocalization. Do one or more of the above actions, and notice what you experience in your chest and in your head and neck as a result. Do you notice physical expansion in either area? How do you experience the fear in the chest now? Is it more expanded? Is it more tolerable than before? Do you experience any fear in your head, face, or neck area?”
To connect the head, face, and neck area to any other area of the body, we can also use the simple area-to-area expansion strategies employing awareness, intention, and self-touch. For example, if we wanted to connect the experience of sadness in the face and throat area to the abdomen, we could make suggestions such as “While paying attention to the sadness in your face and throat, expand your awareness to include the abdomen, hold both areas in your awareness, or go back and forth between the two. See if you can move the sadness down into your abdomen with your intention. What happens in your abdomen? Does it expand? Does it start to experience the qualities of sadness you are experiencing in your face? Do you find your sadness more tolerable than before?”
You can also bring in self-touch to expand the emotion to another area as follows: “As you feel the sadness in your face and throat, place one hand on your face in a comfortable manner and the other hand on the abdomen, with the intention to connect the two areas. Notice whether the sadness or some quality of it in your face and throat is expanding into your abdomen. Is the sadness now more tolerable than before? Do the face, throat, and abdominal areas feel more expanded now?”
The body psychotherapy system of Bodynamic Analysis has empirically found that the muscles of the neck, especially those in the back of the neck, can form a block to compromise the flow of information between the head and the rest of the body.7 In addition, the neck muscles have also been found to have the ability to cope with or defend against high levels of energy, stress, fear, and shock. In order to work with the neck to expand the neck area locally as well as to connect the head and the rest of the body in emotional experience, we can just become aware of the neck with the intent to make it more available. We can also move our neck in different directions or touch the back of the neck with one hand with the intent to undo the defenses in the area.
I once asked a woman who suffered from anxiety where she experienced her anxiety when she thought of a situation that triggered it. She said it was all in her brain. I asked her if I had her permission to gently place my hand on the back of her neck, to help connect her anxiety to the body. She said yes. In a dramatic demonstration of how effectively the neck could block the expansion of emotional experience from the brain to the body, within a minute, she reported that her anxiety was all over her body. So I always check on the neck during emotional embodiment sessions, to see whether defenses there are in the way of emotions expanding from the head to the body or vice versa. This holds true for all emotions in general but especially for fear, terror, and grief. Why grief? We often repress our grief by holding back its expression at the throat. Touching the back of the neck seems to help in releasing the inhibition in the throat.
The torso, from the shoulders to the pelvic floor, includes the chest, abdominal, and pelvic areas. The viscera (organs, glands, and blood vessels in the interior of the torso) are protected by muscles, bones, fascia, and skin on the outside. The functioning of the viscera is dependent on the functioning of the torso musculature. For example, the lungs depend on the breathing muscles of the torso for respiration. The viscera constitute the core metabolic machinery of respiration, digestion, and blood circulation through which energy is produced and distributed, to cope with life situations ranging from the ordinary to the extraordinary. The generation of emotional experience, an assessment of how situations affect our well-being, therefore has a lot to do with this core physiology. The torso muscles such as the diaphragm, the intercostals, and the abdominal muscles, identified as the primary breathing muscles, have also been identified as the primary muscles of emotional management in body psychotherapy. We can readily verify this by holding our breath to reduce the intensity of most of our emotional experiences. These connections show how intertwined the viscera and the torso musculature are in their physiological and psychological functioning. In working with ourselves and others, we can also notice how working on one brings about changes in the other.
In emotional embodiment work, we are often interested in expanding the emotional experience locally in the chest cavity between the shoulders and the diaphragm or in the abdominal and pelvic cavities between the diaphragm and the pelvic floor. We are also often interested in integrating the torso area above the diaphragm with the area below it, connecting the chest cavity with the head and neck above, or linking the abdominal and pelvic areas with the legs below. There are many ways to work with the torso in emotional embodiment. As with our work with the arms and legs, we will borrow methods from osteopathy to work with the torso.
Osteopaths have identified three diaphragms within the torso: at the shoulder, at the diaphragm muscle, and at the pelvic floor. A diaphragm is a horizontal structure in the body that, when dysfunctional, can reduce the level of regulation in the body by interfering with vital biological flows, such as blood and intercellular fluid, from one area to another. Osteopaths have found working on the torso’s diaphragms to be effective in working with the torso’s internal structures, such as organs, and external structures, such as muscles.8,9
We can work with the shoulder diaphragm with awareness or with self-touch by placing a hand on the opposite shoulder or at the center of the top of the chest, where the breastbone and collarbones come together. This can be done with the intention to help the chest cavity expand locally in the downward direction or to integrate the chest area with the head and neck area above.
We can work with the diaphragm muscle with awareness or with self-touch with one hand on the middle of the solar plexus just below the breastbone, or with two hands placed on the front of the rib cage, on either side of the one-handed position described immediately above. This can be done with the intention to expand the chest cavity locally in the upward direction, to expand the abdominal and pelvic cavities in the downward direction, or to integrate the chest cavity with the abdominal and pelvic cavities in emotional experience.
We can work with the pelvic diaphragm at the pelvic floor in a number of ways. We can place one hand on the pubic bone or place one hand on the pubic bone and the other on the sacrum. We can also place a hand on either hip bone with the fingers pointing into the groin, as we did for working with the hip joint, with the attention now focused on the pelvic floor instead of the hip joint. We can work with the pelvic diaphragm with self-touch in all of the above ways, with our awareness focused on the pelvic floor to make it more functional, and with our intention to expand the pelvic and abdominal cavities locally in the upward direction, or to integrate them with the legs below in emotional experience.
When we work with two diaphragms at a time, we can expect the area in between to expand and to integrate with the area above the upper diaphragm and with the area below the lower diaphragm. For example, when we work with our awareness or both hands at the shoulder and the diaphragm muscle, we can expect the chest area to expand locally and for it to integrate with the head and neck area above (provided there is no significant blockage at the neck) and with the abdominal and pelvic areas below. When we work with our awareness or both hands at the diaphragm muscle and the pelvic diaphragm, we can expect the abdominal and pelvic areas to expand and to integrate with the chest area above and with the legs below (provided there is no significant problem at the hip joints). We can also work with the shoulder diaphragm and the pelvic diaphragm with awareness or with both hands, to expand the entire torso from the shoulder to the pelvic floor on the inside as well as on the outside (provided there is not a significant blockage in the diaphragm muscle), and to connect it to the legs below and the head and neck area above (provided there is no significant disruption in the neck or at the hip joints).
We can also use simple strategies for local as well as area-to-area expansion, with awareness or self-touch with intention, at other locations on the torso. We have illustrated what that might look like in the earlier sections on simple strategies for local and area-to-area expansion.
In the ISP professional training, trainees also learn how to expand emotional experiences across different layers of the brain and body physiology: the muscular system, the viscera, and the central nervous system areas of the brain and the spinal cord. Detailed discussion of all the strategies that could be used is not feasible here. However, because of the brain’s importance, we will learn some ways of working with the brain to regulate and expand emotional experiences in the brain as well as the body, and to expand emotional experiences in the brain to the other layers of the body, the viscera and the muscular system.
The brain regulates the body. Emotional experiences generated in the brain or in the two outer layers of the body can overwhelm the brain and dysregulate it. Defenses can form against this dysregulation in the physiology of the brain and the spinal cord. When the brain is thus overwhelmed, either the emotional experience can disappear all of a sudden, or symptoms such as migraines, confusion, loss of speech, and fainting can form quickly. Working with the brain as well as the viscera just through awareness and intention is not as effective as working with them through self-touch. This is because we cannot sense detailed physiological sensations of what is happening in the brain, the spinal cord, and the viscera through our conscious awareness. We can sense detailed physiological sensations of what is happening in the muscular system and the skin much better.
Two areas of the brain that are involved in emotional overwhelm are the brain stem and the prefrontal cortex. The brain stem manages vital functions, such as breathing and circulation, through the autonomic nervous system, which has its origin in the brain stem. Our survival depends on it. A blunt trauma to the brain stem can result in instant death. The prefrontal cortex—especially the orbito-prefrontal cortex, also called the limbic cortex—is the junction where the higher brain structures that manage emotion come together with the lower brain structures that have to do with generating emotion. In emotional overwhelm that involves the brain, both the brain stem and the prefrontal cortex areas are likely to be overwhelmed. Because some people are more easily overwhelmed than others, and because emotional overwhelm is not an uncommon experience even for those with a great deal of affect tolerance, I have found that knowledge of how to work with the brain directly with self-touch is quite often useful in emotional embodiment work. The self-touch strategies I use to work directly with the brain physiology are inspired by craniosacral therapy.10
In order to reach the brain stem with self-touch, one has to place a hand on the occipital bone, the lowest portion of the back of the skull, with the thumb and the forefinger below the bone, on the neck. Then one must set an intention of depth to reach the brain stem, which is located anterior to the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. In order to work with a deeper structure in the brain such as the brain stem, or a deeper structure in the body proper such as the heart, we place our hand on the surface above the deeper structure, with an intent of depth to direct bioelectric, biomagnetic, and quantum energies through our hands to find their target. The prefrontal cortex is easier to locate and work with. We can simply place the palm of one of our hands on our forehead with the intention of depth to regulate the prefrontal cortex.
When we run into a situation where there is overwhelming emotion, or a sudden disappearance of emotion due to the overwhelm, we can make suggestions such as “Please place your hand on your brain stem or forehead, or on both places at the same time, with the intention of depth to reach and regulate the brain structures under your hands. If you can visualize them, that would even be better. If you cannot visualize them, do not worry. Notice what starts to happen in your body. Notice how things start to get more regulated and expanded in the brain and the body. Observe whether emotions that were lost are coming back or whether emotions that were so overwhelming are becoming more manageable or tolerable. See if your brain is getting more regulated, more spacious, calmer, and so on, even though you are processing the fear of dying.”
When we worked in Indian villages with survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, simultaneous self-touch at both the brain stem and the prefrontal cortex was quite effective in regulating and expanding the high level of activation. I still remember the women who had just received their treatments showing women who were waiting to receive theirs how to do self-touch at the brain stem and at the prefrontal cortex, which we had taught them as a self-help tool to help themselves as well as others.
We can touch either the brain stem or the prefrontal cortex with one hand and touch another part of the body in the same layer, such as the spinal cord, to expand within the central nervous system area. With one hand on the brain stem or the prefrontal cortex and the other hand on a part of the viscera or the muscular system, we can expand emotional experience across different layers of the physiology. We could, for example, make suggestions such as “As you feel the overwhelming grief in your heart, please place one hand on your brain stem or the prefrontal cortex, and the other hand on your heart to connect the heart and the brain stem with the intention to reach, regulate, and expand the heart. Observe the changes. Does it make the grief more expanded and regulated in your heart or your brain? Does it help to make the grief more present in one place where it was not present before? Does it make your experience of grief overall more tolerable than before?” When the overwhelming grief disappears suddenly, you can suggest, “Please place one hand on the brain stem or the prefrontal cortex and the other hand on your heart. And as you go back to remembering the situation that caused you much grief, please observe whether the grief is beginning to surface in your brain or your heart. Is it more bearable than before?”
We can use simple area-to-area expansion strategies for expanding emotion across the viscera and the muscular system, with awareness, intention, and self-touch. For example, to expand both areas and connect them to each other in emotional experience, we could suggest, “Please place your hand on the large intestine in your abdomen in the area just above your navel. Imagine touching it through your skin and muscle in the area, to undo any defenses there. Place your other hand on your thigh musculature to undo any inhibition there. Now, notice how the two areas might start to connect in energy and in emotion. Is the hint of fear that was present in the large intestine area expanding more throughout the abdomen? Is the fear in the abdomen connecting to the thigh and expanding there? Look for the quality of the fear in the abdomen in the thigh area. Please try to express the fear you feel in the abdomen through a facial expression and a vocalization to help expand it throughout the body. Is your experience of the fear more manageable than before?”
When we undo defenses in the brain and body physiology, the physiology tends to get more regulated, especially when we expand it using models of regulation. This could regulate the emotion away if we are not focused on the emotion and the situation causing it. That is okay if that is what our intention is. However, when we wish to increase the capacity to tolerate the emotion, we need to continue to remind the person of the situation, especially those details that are tied to the emotion, such as “You saw your wife alive but not your child when the tsunami retreated.” We must also continue to support the person emotionally in all ways possible, with statements such as “Of all the grief I know, the grief of losing a child is the worst. It is the hardest thing in the world to lose a child.” Otherwise, the emotion might just disappear, regulated by our singular focus on the expansion that excludes the emotion and the situation.
Questions are often asked about the optimal directions for expanding emotion from one area of the body to another. A good rule of thumb is to expand it to the adjacent areas of the body. For example, if the emotion is present in the chest area, one could expand from the chest to the arms across the shoulder joint, to the abdomen across the diaphragm, to the head and neck area through the shoulder diaphragm, or to the head through the neck. If emotion is initially present in the abdomen, one could expand upward toward the chest through the diaphragm or downward to the legs through the hip joints or the pelvic diaphragm. At times, when the emotional difficulty is too concentrated toward one end of the body, one might have to work at the other end of the body in a nonadjacent area, to pull the energy down and make the emotional experience more bearable. When the difficult emotional experience is too concentrated in the head or the chest, it often helps to work with the legs to expand the emotional experience downward, all the way down into the legs.
Other questions that are often asked about the expansion phase are: How much expansion does one do? Narrow expansion, confined to local expansion in the area or expansion to only one or two other areas? Widespread expansion, involving many other areas? In working on local expansion in an area, does one stay superficial or go deep? And how much time does one spend on the expansion task? The answer to all these questions is a frustrating one: well, it depends. It depends on what is necessary to get the symptom to resolve. It also depends on the capacity of the client, as well as the capacity of the therapist, because what is possible in a session depends on both the client and the therapist.
In general, the lower the client’s affect tolerance, the more superficial one needs to stay in expanding an area locally. The longer we stay focused on locally expanding an area, the deeper the opening. The deeper the physiological opening, the more difficult an unpleasant experience becomes, especially when the rest of the body is defended against it. In such circumstances, it is better not to spend a lot of time expanding the emotion locally in the initial area of emotion and instead to recruit another area to expand the emotion into, so that the burden of emotion is shared by both places to make it more bearable.
Sometimes, when affect tolerance levels are really low, the best strategy is to superficially expand the emotional experience to as many places as quickly as possible. We often work with the symptoms of anxiety attacks or migraines caused by emotions this way. There are times when we need to work deeply in one place, such as the heart, in order to resolve a symptom. In such cases, before we get to the deep local work in an area, it is recommended that more parts of the body are first recruited through superficial expansion in earlier cycles of emotional embodiment. Going deep into one place without some support from other areas can make the experience of the emotion more unbearable than it needs to be.
How much expansion one needs to do, how many areas an emotional experience needs to be expanded into, and how deep the expansion needs to be in one place for symptom resolution are all ultimately empirical questions, with answers varying from one client to the next, and from one situation to the next for the same client.
Next, we look at the last step in the emotional embodiment process: integration.