Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine and Focusing, devel-
oped by Eugene Gendlin. If at any time you are finding it hard
to get in touch with your body as a whole, it is usually easier
to focus first on your breathing.
Our awareness of our physical reactions, especially our
breath, is an important vehicle to increasing awareness. The
reason is that even when our mind has become disconnected
from our authentic experience, our breath usually remains
locked into it. Sometimes, when we attempt to mask our feel-
ings, our breath can sometimes give them away despite our best
efforts to hide them. Perhaps this is nature’s way of ensuring a
certain degree of emotional transparency between the creatures
of the world. Ironically, even when our breath, or some other
body-language sign, broadcasts our true feelings for all to see
despite our best efforts to hide them, often we are the only ones
fooled by the deception.
Tapping this potential key to greater awareness is a tech-
nique you can learn. A good place to begin is to find out what
happened to your authentic feelings and why your body is still
connected to them. The problem usually begins during infancy.
Most young children quickly learn that it can be dangerous to
express their full range of emotions. As they learn to hide unde-
sired feelings from their parents, siblings, and the rest of the
world, they also hide them from themselves. Gradually, they
stifle their own awareness of their true state of being and learn
to distrust themselves.
Gaining awareness of our physical reactions, especially
our breath can reveal buried experiences. One sign of neuro-
sis is that we “forgo self-awareness for self-consciousness.”
When self-conscious we project our minds outward toward
others’ reactions to us. As we increase our awareness, we
regain fresh, uncontaminated, whole sight. For example, as
we notice a tension or an expansion in our chest, how our
breaths vary, or other reactions to movie scenes and their
messages, they show us our biases and pinpoint the way to
our healing.^4“All neurosis is a substi-
tute for unfelt legitimate
pain.”
Carl Gustav
Jung46 E-Motion Picture Magic