Writing this book has only deepened my interest in emotion as a subject of study. It has connected me to a worldwide community dedicated to the pursuit of the complexity that emotion is. It has inspired me. It has also left me feeling deeply humble. For as much knowledge as our species has collectively accumulated on emotion over its span of existence, it appears that there is so much more we do not know as yet. The span of an individual life and its contribution is even more limited. Therefore, for further inquiry, one can only focus on a limited number of topics of utmost personal interest.
I will focus this chapter on two subjects for further exploration, both for myself and for others who might feel similarly inclined:
My interest in emotion started with the observation that my clients and I had considerable difficulty with accessing emotions as well as with tolerating them long enough to process them through. I had already learned from intersubjective psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, alchemy, and Advaita Vedanta that affect tolerance—the capacity to tolerate opposites in emotional experience—is important for psychological as well as spiritual growth, so building capacity for greater affect tolerance became a focus of my personal and professional work from very early on in my career in psychology. Just staying with the emotional experience wherever it appeared in the brain and body physiology did not always help; in fact, it often made symptoms worse. Therefore, I started to look for better methods for increasing affect tolerance in my clients and myself, especially in the body, because that is where the difficulty in tolerating an emotional experience often showed up.
I also got into the habit of asking my clients where in the body they felt the emotional experiences they were reporting, in part because I was oriented to the body from the very beginning of my career, and in part because I needed to get back into the body. From my early reading on emotion and the body, I was particularly influenced by learning that the generation of an emotion as well as its experience could potentially involve the entirety of the brain and body physiology, and that basic emotions might have distinct patterns in the brain and the body physiology. So I was naturally curious to check whether there were any patterns in the emotional experiences my clients and I had. That is, did all of us feel a basic emotion such as fear or sadness in the same places in the body?
It turned out that, consistent with findings from the early research on emotions and the autonomic nervous system, there was no pattern such as people always feeling anger in one place and sadness in another. Different people reported experiencing an emotion such as fear in different places—the brain, the eyes, the chest, the abdomen, and so on. Some places, such as the heart and the chest, showed up often, but not always. When I started posing this question to large groups of people in my classes, the sum total of all the areas reported in the experience of an emotion such as fear often ended up covering the entire brain and body physiology.
There was, however, one pattern I did observe. When people were able to tolerate being with an emotion for longer periods of time without falling apart or forming symptoms, they started reporting that they could feel their emotional experience as being more spread out in the body than before. These observations led me to believe that not only is it possible to expand the experience of emotions to more places in the body, but it might also lead to a greater capacity for tolerating the emotional experience. So I started to make interventions such as “As you experience the emotion in the chest, please expand your awareness to more of your chest, with the intention to expand your emotional experience to more of your chest.” “Where else do you experience the emotion in the body?” “Are there other places in the body where you experience this emotion or some qualities of this emotion?” And so on, to good effect, which increased my confidence in the fledgling approach of embodying emotion.
As I continued to develop the practice of embodying emotion in my clients and myself in the above manner, I also continued to read on the subject for ideas about how to enrich the practice and ground it in hard science. From the literature on the physiology of emotions, I learned more about how the generation of emotion could involve the entirety of the brain and body physiology. From the body psychotherapy approaches I gathered that people tend to form strong physiological defenses in the body to minimize emotional experiences (especially unpleasant ones). I inferred that physiological defenses could compromise vital physiological flows such as blood and increase the level of stress in the physiology, thereby making emotional experiences in the body potentially more difficult to tolerate than if the emotional experiences were allowed to involve more of the body.
Putting this all together with my observation that an emotion could be potentially experienced throughout the brain and body physiology, I theorized that undoing physiological defenses against emotion to decrease the level of stress and increase the body areas involved in generating emotion could expand the experience of emotion in the body and increase a person’s capacity to tolerate an unpleasant emotion for a longer period. This turned out to be a productive path, one that led eventually to the maturation of the method of embodying emotion, and to this book, at the end of which I am left wondering how much I really know about emotion!
I was fortunate enough to discover the idea that an emotion could be experienced throughout the brain and body physiology—the idea that inspired me to observe where we experience different emotions in the body in the first place—early in my reading of the literature on emotions. Candace Pert attributes this idea to Paul Ekman, and she paraphrases Ekman’s understanding as follows: “Each emotion is experienced throughout the organism and not in just the head or body, and has a corresponding facial expression.”1 I say I was fortunate because I have not been able to find another scientific source supporting the idea that an emotion could be potentially experienced throughout the brain and body physiology, even though emotion is now generally understood as an assessment of the situation’s impact on the well-being of the whole organism. Ekman believes, with some evidence, that every emotion such as fear is generated by a unique physiological pattern in the brain as well as the body. It therefore makes sense that he would state that the experience of it could involve the whole organism.
Ekman’s theory that an emotion is a product of simultaneous activity in both the brain and the body has support in the more recently formulated enactive approach to emotion.2 This is a dynamic systems approach which theorizes that emotion is a product of simultaneous—not sequential—activity across the brain and body physiology. In contrast, in the sequential or hierarchical model of Damasio3 and Craig4 that we saw in chapter 5, for example, a situation happens that impacts the body, and the brain then makes emotion from the information it gathers from the body about the impact. In Ekman’s model, something happens, and there is a simultaneous brain and body instinctual reaction to it that is emotion.5 In the dynamic systems perspective of enactive emotion, all experiences—cognition (including perception), emotion, and behavior—are constantly, continuously, and concurrently happening, simultaneously involving the brain, the body, and the environment. The contrast between Ekman’s theory and the enactive emotion approach is that in the latter, there is no immediate implication that there are different physiological patterns for different emotions in the brain and the body, as in Ekman’s model.
I wondered why the scientific literature on emotions contains hardly any statements on how emotions are experienced in the body. One possible reason is scientists’ skepticism toward using self-reports of subjective experience as evidence in research studies. Another possible reason is that emotion researchers have been focused more on the mechanisms of how emotions are generated in the brain and the body, and whether they are generated more in the brain or the body, than on where and how they are experienced. Because the basic premise behind the practice of embodying emotion is that an emotion could potentially be experienced throughout the brain and body physiology, I think an analysis of different evidence-based theories of emotion, to determine the extent to which they imply that emotions could be experienced throughout the brain and body physiology, is in order.
Theories that limit generation of emotion to the brain imply that the experience of emotion is limited to the brain as well, because they do not allow the body a role even in the generation of emotion. Theories other than those of Ekman and his followers that allow a role for the body in the generation of emotion differ with respect to how they see the body’s involvement in the generation of emotion. In the theories of Damasio and Craig, in the tradition of William James, the brain processes detailed information from the body on the impact of the situation to generate higher-order body maps (or abstractions of the more detailed body information, akin to seeing a face in a cloud) that are then somehow recognized as emotions. In Barrett’s constructive theory of emotion, very general information on the situation’s impact on the body, such as valence (good or bad) and arousal (low or high), is combined with learned linguistic concepts to arrive at emotional experiences.6 In all three theories, emotions are constructed in the brain. There is no implication that such brain-constructed emotions such as sadness could potentially be experienced throughout the body.
So if an emotional experience such as sadness is a construction in the brain, even though it might be based on body information, how does one account for observations that emotions such as sadness are experienced throughout the body—something we can easily verify personally with a little bit of effort? Either these evidence-based theories offer limited explanations of the ways in which emotions are generated and experienced in the brain and the body; or there are brain and body mechanisms we do not yet know about that would make it possible for emotions constructed in the brain to be experienced throughout the body.
Theories that say emotions are generated in the brain, through instinctual brain circuits or through abstraction of information from the body, need to add mechanisms through which such emotional experiences could be experienced in the rest of the body. Two possible avenues for exploration are projection and transfer of information. Let us explore each in turn.
The brain is known to have the capacity to project an experience on the body and experience it as though it were the actual first-hand experience of the body. For example, according to Damasio, even our very basic experiences of body sensations such as heartbeat are projections on the body of abstractions of more detailed body sensations from the area. If this is the case with even simple body sensations, then one can well imagine that the brain indeed does have the capacity to project emotions such as sadness onto different places in the body. Another example of the brain’s ability to project an experience on the body is the phantom limb phenomenon, in which the brain is capable of experiencing the pain in an amputated leg. We shall call this the projection hypothesis.
It is also possible for information on emotion generated in the brain to be transferred to the body through deeper physiological structures and processes, such as through information molecules in interstitial fluids in the way Pert theorizes;7 or through subatomic particles at the quantum level, even involving instantaneous information exchange through quantum entanglement. We shall call this the information transfer hypothesis.
In emotional embodiment work, when we are working with an emotion such as fear and we work with physiological defenses in an area of the body in which we do not experience the emotion, it becomes possible to experience the emotion in that area. This has been my experience, both in my work with clients and in my own life. Some might argue that this empirical phenomenon tends to support the information transfer hypothesis more than the projection hypothesis as an explanation for how emotions generated in the brain could be experienced throughout the body. One could argue that removal of physical defenses against regulatory flows such as blood to an area allows for the transfer of information on the emotional experience generated in the brain to that part of the body.
But one could also argue that our experience of being able to expand an emotional experience to a part of the body after working with physiological defenses that limit vital regulatory flows such as blood to the area can also support the projection hypothesis. In order to project an emotional experience generated in the brain onto a part of the body through interoception, that part of the body has to be available for interoception. The work with the physiological defenses that limit the regulatory flows to that area, through which we also become aware of that part of the body, makes the sensing of that area through interoception more possible. So the empirical phenomenon that an emotion can potentially be experienced throughout the body could support both hypotheses. It remains for science to verify which dynamic is more likely and whether both dynamics could be in play.
Current research on the physiology of psychological processes such as emotions is done at the level of relatively large objects such as muscles, organs, neurons, hormones, and so on—objects large enough to be measured. These objects are made of different types of molecules, such as water and nitrogen molecules. A molecule is made of two or more atoms. For example, water is made of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. An atom can be broken down into subatomic particles. The three major subatomic particles are protons, electrons, and neutrons. These subatomic particles break down further into a larger number of even smaller subatomic particles. Quantum physics is the study of such small or fine or subtle subatomic particles of matter, which are hard if not impossible to observe and measure. Scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research on the French-Swiss border use a huge subterranean particle collider to accelerate larger subatomic particles such as protons close to the speed of light and crash them against each other or against barriers. This impact breaks them down into finer subatomic particles, allowing researchers to detect more of them and study how they interact with each other at the quantum level of our existence.8
Given the expense and effort required to study subatomic particles in the optimal environment of a particle collider, it makes sense that little is known about how quantum mechanics operating within our physiology at the subatomic level might contribute to generating and regulating our psychological experiences of cognition, emotion, and behavior. There have been attempts in the West to formulate a quantum psychology on the basis of methods and findings from quantum physics, to add to our understanding of how the deeper level of our physiology affects our psychological experience.9,10 These attempts appear to be having a limited effect on the field of psychology.
Eastern psychological approaches, which date back centuries, have a two-level model of human physiology that can accommodate the world of subatomic particles. The level of physiology that is relatively easy to observe and measure, from the atomic scale and upward, is called the gross layer (or gross body), with reference to the relatively larger size of the objects involved, such as muscles, organs, and neurons. The level of physiology that is relatively harder to measure if not observe, the world of subatomic particles, is called the subtle layer (or subtle body), with reference to the relatively smaller, finer, or “subtler” sizes of the objects involved. The subtle layer is theorized as the deeper layer of our physiology. Changes in the subtle layer affect the gross layer, and vice versa, in the process of generating and regulating our physiological and psychological experiences.
These Eastern psychological approaches present theories of structures and processes of the subtle body and how they affect structures and processes in the gross body, physiologically and psychologically, as well as methods for working with both layers to facilitate physiological and psychological well-being. These theories, which date back thousands of years, were developed primarily through well-developed introspection and self-observation of one’s physiology and psyche, and they were tested based on the effectiveness of the methods derived from the theories. In case you think this is all too subjective, please note that the use of introspection—self-observation of one’s own processes—to build psychological theories is not uncommon in Western psychology, even today. In addition, physiological measurement of structures and processes (and even outcomes) of Western psychological theories remains limited by our ability to measure psychological structures, processes, and outcomes or to afford the measurements, even at the gross level of neurons and biochemicals, not to mention the subtle level of fermions and bosons, as subatomic particles of matter and energy particles are categorized.
Before we proceed further, it is important to clarify that the equivalence between the Eastern concept of the subtle body and the body layer of subatomic particles from quantum physics, which was arrived at through introspection, cannot be exact. The Easterners differentiated the gross body and the subtle body thousands of years ago in terms of how difficult their components were to perceive and measure through the five senses as well as by introspection, according to the standards of what they could measure in those days. Clearly, science is still constrained in its measurements of many things at the gross level of atoms and their combinations that make up the larger objects and energies in the world. So the many things at the gross level that are hard for us to observe through the five senses or through sophisticated instruments that can be thought of as extensions of the five senses these days could also be included in the Eastern concept of the subtle body.
It is understandable that there are a number of models of the subtle layer of the body and its relationship with its gross layer, given that they are products of introspection, however refined it might have been. One of these models is the meridian system, which is the basis for the evidence-based practice of acupuncture.11 Even though the effectiveness of acupuncture is now studied and explained in the West in terms of its demonstrated ability to bring about nervous system, biochemical, and bioelectrical changes in the gross body, the original theory, which is still taught in acupuncture schools, involves a subtle substance called chi that can be felt but not measured. The chi in the individual is connected to the chi of the universe. The universal chi differentiates itself into different types of chi and is distributed along the different meridians that are distributed in the gross body to maintain physiological and psychological well-being in an individual. The meridians can be thought of as channels for chi in the body. When there are blocks to the flow of chi along the meridians, physiological and psychological dysfunction can result, depending on the meridians along which the chi is blocked or excessive. Acupuncture practice unblocks the obstructions to the chi along the meridians, balances the chi in different parts of the body, and connects the chi in the individual to the universal chi.
In 2012, the American Psychological Association (APA) approved Thought Field Therapy (TFT)12 and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT),13 two similar evidence-based energy psychology approaches, for meeting the continuing education requirements of licensed psychologists. Both methods involve simple routines of self-tapping with one’s fingers along certain easily located meridian points in the body. More than thirty randomized controlled studies have been done on these approaches—more than the total number of studies of all body psychotherapy approaches—for the treatment of posttraumatic stress in a number of populations.14 A significant advantage of these methods is that they can be easily taught to clients as tools for self-help practice at home.
I became curious about what these techniques could add to trauma treatment, so I took a course in EFT. When I listened to the two facilitators and practiced the method with other participants, I realized that I was quite skeptical—as skeptical as the mental health professional audiences I used to experience in the 1990s when I tried to persuade them about the importance of working with the body for treating trauma. I thought about why I was so skeptical. It may have had to do with the labeling of these methods as energy psychology techniques, and the reflexive rejection of anything that has to do with “energy” as New Age psychology with no scientific basis, not only among mental health professionals but also in the general population.
It may have also had to do with instances when I heard some energy psychology practitioners claim that these techniques could resolve all kinds of problems, at times even cancer. When we have known for a long time that energy and matter are equivalent through Einstein’s famous equation (E = mc2), it is perhaps a bad idea to label a psychology as an energy psychology given the deep prejudice against the word “energy.” “Quantum psychology” would be a far better classification. It would run into less resistance, given that findings in quantum physics provide a scientific basis for these and other methods that have been traditionally described as having to do with energy.
What was my experience with EFT? In the course itself, I was eventually impressed with how it could regulate unpleasant emotional states quickly. At the end of the course, I was still not sure how it could be used as a tool in the practice of embodying emotion. I thought perhaps it could be used to regulate extremely dysregulated emotional experiences to make them more tolerable for their embodiment. I never followed it up. However, I encountered its power to regulate extreme distress soon afterward. Two friends, both therapists, were diagnosed with cancer within a short period. One underwent a complicated surgery and a series of treatments, and he was suffering from a great deal of anxiety about how it would turn out for him. The other was awaiting surgery shortly after his diagnosis. He and his wife were naturally quite anxious. In both instances, I was so grateful that I knew EFT to help them manage their anxiety relatively quickly and leave them with a self-help tool that they said worked better than anything else they had tried to help keep their anxiety down.
Physiological and psychological models that include the subtle layer of energy are not exclusive to the West. In both the East and the West, there are many different treatment models of physical and mental health, from the simple to the complex, that incorporate energy into their mix. (Here I am excluding methods that manipulate the energies produced by the gross body, such as electromagnetic waves emanating from the brain or the heart). As varied as these treatment models appear to be, they have some features in common:
When I went to Russia to teach Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP) and the practice of embodying emotion in 2011, I did not know that Russians (even Russian physicians) were quite open to alternative medicine,15 especially traditional Chinese medicine, of which acupuncture is often a key component.16 The Russians wanted to know if I could enrich the method of embodying emotion by adding an energy component to it. They were particularly interested in what I, a person from India who had spent the first twenty-six years of his life there, could offer them with regard to the use of energy in psychological work.
The potential benefits of working with the subtle body for the practice of embodying emotion were in my peripheral vision, given the attention TFT and EFT were getting in the field after their accreditation by the APA and because of an experience I had in treating trauma symptoms among tsunami survivors in India, which I will share in a moment. However, I was quite reluctant to jump in with both feet. I shared the collective resistance (or prejudice) of my colleagues and the population at large about anything that had to do with energy. I was quite concerned that the use of energy could damage the professional reputation of the science-based practice of embodying emotion. But I could not overcome the enthusiastic demands of the Russians and finally yielded.
Fortunately, I did not have to look far for an energy psychology model to experiment with in the practice of embodying emotion. In 2001, after I had completed three years of heady coursework for my doctoral studies in clinical psychology, to get back into my body I signed up for a two-year training in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, an approach that works with both the gross and the subtle layers of the body, with an emphasis on connecting the subtle energies of the individual to those of the universe to bring about healing.
During that training I started to refine my interoceptive ability to start to differentiate the gross from the subtle in my awareness. Franklyn Sills, an American who lives in the bucolic, windswept county of Devon in the United Kingdom, is a well-known writer in the field. I relied a lot on his book on Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy during my training.17 Prior to his incarnation as a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist, he was a practitioner of Polarity Therapy. I had encountered this modality a few times, both as a client for a few free sessions from a friend in Los Angeles, and through classmates who were also Polarity Therapists in the Somatic Experiencing trauma training. Franklyn had written a book on Polarity Therapy titled The Polarity Process, which immediately grabbed my attention because it appeared to have an Eastern energy approach incorporated into it, based on the cover design.18 I bought it on impulse, put in on my bookshelves with hundreds of other books, and forgot all about it. When I returned from Moscow, it was there where I had put it many years ago, waiting for me.
Polarity Therapy is an East-West bodywork/energywork modality developed by an Austrian osteopath after he moved to Chicago and changed his name to Randolph Stone. Driven by an intuition that healing involved more than changes in the muscles, organs, nerves, and brain, Stone had an epiphany while reading an old Indian text on energy or the subtle body. Reading further, and combining elements of Indian and Chinese subtle body theories with his understanding of the gross body from Western osteopathy, he developed what eventually became known as Polarity Therapy.
In Dr. Stone’s Polarity Therapy, our body has a gross level and a subtle level. Our physical and mental experience and health depend on interactions between the two as well as their interactions with the environment. In case this sounds familiar, it is because we have seen earlier in this book that modern neuroscience is almost exactly in this place these days: the proposition that our physiological and psychological well-being depends on our brain, our body, and our environment, in equal measure. The only difference is that in Polarity Therapy, the body is explicitly modeled as having two levels. Defenses can form on both levels and disrupt the connection between the individual body and its environment.
In Polarity Therapy the subtle body is modeled as having five layers, and subtle defenses are theorized to take the form of disruptions to the flow of the energies of the subtle body in the gross body. There is a map of the distribution of the subtle body energies in the gross body, which Dr. Stone often called the map of the “wireless anatomy of man.” Polarity Therapy has methods for working with both the gross and the subtle levels of the body and for restoring the connection between them and the environment. In addition to hands-on manipulation of the gross and subtle levels of the body, which we have translated into self-touch positions for use in psychotherapy settings that do not involve therapist touch, the integral approach of Polarity Therapy also includes nutrition, exercise, and psychological processing.
In Polarity Therapy, as in most other models of the subtle body, the subtle body is theorized as the source of stimulation of all physiological and psychological experiences, health, and illness in the gross body. There is no measurement-based verification of this theory, of course, given the generally hard-to-measure nature of the subtle body. However, there are reports of some very preliminary but controversial and much discounted research done in Russia based on measurements of the energy field around the human body that has found that changes in the energy field occur at the same time as or prior to the changes in brain activity associated with a decision-making task, implying that subtle body activity precedes activity in the gross body.19
As we have seen, in models of the subtle body (including Polarity Therapy), the inadequate supply or imbalances in the distribution of subtle body energies in the gross body are theorized to lead to physical and mental suffering by stimulating the gross body unevenly, excessively in some places and sparsely in others. Treatment then involves working to increase the supply of subtle body energies and balance their distribution in the gross body. We know from chapter 8 what happens when the emotional experience is too concentrated in one area of the brain and body physiology: it becomes difficult to tolerate and process, with attendant problems.
Just to ensure you are not left with the impression that incorporating the subtle body into your treatment modalities is too “subtle” to implement, let me give you an example of how easy it would be to implement it in clinical settings, even by those who cannot track subtle body dynamics in awareness or through touch. Acupuncturists do not need to see the energy along clients’ meridians or be able to sense the energy flow in their own meridians to treat clients or themselves with needles. People who live in remote villages in Africa do not have to sense energy flow in their bodies to treat themselves by tapping on certain points on their body identified by EFT or TFT, to relieve themselves of posttraumatic stress.20
In the Polarity Therapy model, a subtle body energy called the air element, which is associated with the heart, can form a defense of imbalance in its distribution in the gross body toward the head. This has the effect of making emotional experiences too intense in the chest area, inviting gross body defenses such as muscular constriction to kick in to further the difficulty and dysfunction. Each type of subtle energy has three areas in the gross body that are important for its even distribution throughout the gross body. In the case of the subtle energy of air, the three areas are the chest, the kidneys and large intestine, and the lower legs. This subtle body energy can be redistributed in the gross body toward a more even and tolerable experience of the emotion by connecting two of these three areas at a time with both our hands, based on the second principle of energy we have seen before, which is that energy will flow between any two areas that are connected by awareness, needles, or touch.
I started using Polarity Therapy as the primary model and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy as the secondary model for working with subtle body defenses against emotions in the practice of embodying emotions. I did this in as simple a manner as possible so people who had no background in energy work could implement these techniques—a task that TFT and EFT have succeeded in, with great results. I tried it first in Russia and then in India, two places where there is less resistance to the concept of subtle energy and more willingness to experiment with it, to see if it helped to improve outcomes. Due to encouraging outcomes and increasing interest, working with the subtle body is now a smaller part of the practice of embodying emotion in ISP professional training. Even though working with the subtle body in the practice of embodying emotion appears to yield incremental outcomes in emotional regulation at times over and above working solely at the level of the gross body, I must add that the experiment with the subtle body is still ongoing as far as I am concerned. I invite like-minded clinicians to join this experiment, to add yet another dimension of embodiment to psychotherapy—a dimension that has the potential to further improve cognitive, behavioral, and emotional outcomes.
When I invite my classes to experiment with applying the methods of energy psychology in the practice of embodying emotions, I motivate them by telling them there are a large number of therapy modalities out there; estimates range from two hundred to four hundred. Most modalities that have remained viable because of the outcomes they deliver do not have hard scientific evidence for their theories in terms of physiological measurements. A theory is formulated on the basis of introspection, observation, or inference. Methods are developed on the basis of the theory. When methods deliver good outcomes, the theory is held as not falsified unless another theory can better explain the outcomes. As therapists, we use such methods all the time. So as you implement the science-based practice of embodying emotion at the level of the gross body, why not experiment with adding some work with the subtle body from time to time, to see for yourself if your outcomes are better with it than without it? If you get better results, does it matter whether the theory is not verified by rigorous scientific evidence with physiological measurements, when most of the methods we use are equally unverified?
In 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, when we worked with tsunami survivors in Indian fishing villages to treat them for symptoms of posttraumatic stress, one therapist refused to follow my instructions not to use an energy work method she was trained in, in addition to the gross body method we were all using. This therapist ended up with results so much better than the rest of the team that we had to exclude her data when we published the very good outcomes of our study.21 We had to do this so we could claim that the significant differences were due to the common method we were using and not because of differences among the therapists. That was my earliest impression of the power of adding subtle body techniques to standard gross body methods for treating trauma symptoms.
TFT and EFT have since developed a body of evidence.22 A recent pilot study comparing EFT and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in the treatment of depression shows that EFT might be better than CBT in maintaining therapeutic gain at three and six months after treatment.23 If it is possible to further improve outcomes by adding subtle body methods such as EFT to gross body methods such as CBT in treatment, why deprive ourselves and our clients of better outcomes, just because we have a collective resistance to the word “energy”?
Some of you are probably working with an energy psychology modality already. Good for you! You are probably a pioneer in the field, advancing the embodiment project in psychology by adding yet another dimension to the body in psychology. You might wonder, as many in my classes do when I introduce the subtle body, which level—gross or subtle—to work with, and when, in the practice of embodying emotion.
The subtle body, the brain physiology, and the body physiology can be thought of as three systems constantly interacting with each other to generate and regulate our experiences. Changes in one lead to changes in others. Therefore, we need to be ready and able to shift our work from level to level depending on need. But that answer might be too complex for a beginner, so my usual answer is to remind my students that our interest is in building a greater capacity to tolerate emotions in the gross body of the brain and body physiology; so work on that first. Within the brain and body physiology, work on the body physiology first, unless it is necessary to work with the brain physiology because the work with the body physiology does not result in access to or regulation of emotion. If the work with neither the brain nor the body physiology leads to access to or regulation of emotion, then work with the subtle body, with the ultimate goal of creating a greater capacity for emotion in the gross body.
Good luck to all of you! And thank you for reading this book! I hope you find it of value to you in both your personal and professional lives.