Body Psychotherapy. Vassilis Christodoulou
the patient can begin rotating the joints of their shoulder blades, using small movements and pressing their back gently against the support. Another type of support that strengthens the patient can be given when the patient is lying on their back on the floor: after raising the patient, the therapist can get underneath their back and support it, thus enabling the energy to flow. On an emotional level, at this point it is not unusual for the patient to burst out in sobs.
As we have seen, our main concern is achieving a balance. Just as we seek to achieve an energy balance between the upper and lower parts of the body, we should also seek to achieve a balance between the front and back of the body because if there is a surplus of energy at one point, there will be a deficiency elsewhere.
The front part of our body, which is used in the contact and relationships we have with other people, is a very sensitive part. For protection, it draws from the back of the body, where our willpower and strength are based. Thus, sometimes there is a large concentration of energy in the front of the body because of great pain and fragility. The opposite happens when the heart loses its energy as a result of a person’s efforts to protect themselves. In such cases, in which a person channels all their energy into protecting themselves, the heart loses its vital energy and dies – or, in the best of cases, we have a ‘warning’ heart attack.
We need our hearts; rather, we as human beings, in order to achieve balance in our lives, need a heart which is sensitive enough to allow us to communicate and connect with others and yet at the same time strong enough to enable us to pursue our goals. Therefore, we need a heart that is sensitive and receptive – and therefore vulnerable, because that is the only kind of heart that can enable us to draw close to other people – and at the same time strong and determined, a heart that can keep us steadily on course in the pursuit of our goals, of those things which are important to us. I have known people who, because they were incapable of finding a solution to their emotional problems, despite their wealth of professional qualifications and social or professional achievements, had their problems ‘solved’ for them when their heart collapsed. For some people, however strange it may seem to most of us, death is the only way out of what they have come to regard as an impasse in their lives. It is another, what I would call ‘silent’, form of suicide.
In relation to the heart, the hands are in a privileged position and have a special relationship with it. However full the heart might be, if the hands are not free to express its joy, if, in energy terms, they are not capable of touching and feeling the objects of its love, the heart can do nothing. How can the heart embrace another person without hands and arms?
Our hands are bridges that connect us with the outside world and help us to draw the things we love close to us. Our hands enable us to give what is in our heart to others. In energy terms, our hands are not connected merely with the opening of the throat as an energy centre, they are not connected merely with our breathing; they serve as wings for the heart, enabling us to fly, always through our connections with other people, in worlds which, by ourselves, we would never be able to approach. We feel a unity, we become one with the person we embrace – two individuals with ‘one’ big heart – when we are truly united by love.
Connecting heart to heart…
Often, when I work with individuals who feel lonely and disconnected, individuals who have never really experienced unconditional love, regardless of their own understanding of love – you cannot imagine how ingenious many patients are in their attempts to justify the deficits of love they are suffering from –, I hold their left hand in my left hand and, placing my right hand on their heart, I ask them, as a first step, to make contact with their heart. Through this holding of hands and contact with the heart, we effectively form a figure-8, which is the well-known symbol of infinity. In the process of making a connection, this infinity symbol becomes the circuit which unites the hearts. Do not be surprised if very often the patient tells you that they can see the flow of energy. The patient really can see it. They can see it flow from the therapist’s heart, first through the therapist’s left hand into their own hand, then through their shoulder down into their heart and then from there into the therapist’s right hand and back into his heart, where it began. It is an energy circuit with a yellow colour, a circuit of love that unites the hearts. Not all patients, particularly at the beginning, can feel their heart or any contact with it. If a patient has no sensation of their own heart, I ask them simply to feel my hand and tell me how it feels on their breastbone. Does it feel heavy? Does it feel as if it’s pressing down? Do they feel stifled by it? Do they find it irritating, even if they do not know why? Do they find it warm or cold? Are they unable to feel it at all? If my hand in some way feels heavy or irritating – here I try to obtain as much clear information as possible – I take it away and place their own hand on their heart. If they can bear it, I then put my hand on top of theirs and ask them to feel their heart. If the patient feels comfortable with my hand on their heart, a little later I ask them to place their hand on top of mine and tell me what they feel.
Do not think it strange and do not be dismayed if someone tells you they cannot feel their heart at all. Gently and lovingly ask them what they can feel, whatever it is. The mere fact that you are showing concern for them may be enough for the time being. We humans can almost always understand – even if for reasons of self-protection we do not admit it to ourselves – when another person is really there for us. Then we feel something, and that something is love. Yes, we show love when we are there, in an absolute way, giving our full attention to the other person. At that moment, in the therapy session, our complete giving of ourselves to the patient means only love for that person. Our total focus on the other person is love, and this love is God. This does not mean that I always agree with the other person and do what they want. It is one thing to love another person and another to become that person’s stooge. As the Church Fathers say: ‘love is the highest of all the virtues, while discernment is higher still.’
Now maintain the contact you have established and ask the patient to keep their eyes closed and maintain that contact with their heart. Whatever kind of contact they have, now ask them to feel your heart. Can they feel it? Can they see it? And in what way can they see it? Do not be surprised: at moments like this it is not unusual for patients to talk to you about their spiritual experiences. Rather it is to be expected… When we escape the tyranny of the mind and enter the realm of the heart, the spirit and the body, then we enter the timeless Now, the Present which is our true home. It is here that we can make true contact with other people as somato-psycho-spiritual entities.
All patients, in their own time, usually make contact and see the heart that is inviting them to enter into a personal encounter. If you do not feel that you are fully in the Present and totally focused on the person who is trusting you with the opening of their heart, then do not go on. This process is more than a mere exercise. You should devote to it the time that you yourself really need. In order to open up, a heart requires respect and truth. The heart is not like the mind, which plays games with words so as to hide from the truth. This heart-to-heart encounter can take place at some other time, when perhaps you feel more prepared, so that the patient, in their open heart, can sense the presence of a heart that will be with them for ever – a heart that connects them with THE HEART OF THE ONE and brings them into contact with the forgotten memories of the unity of all things. The patient obtains the thing that all people need, the thing they were deprived of as a child or did not get as much of as they needed, and no longer feels this deficit in their heart.
True relationships vs. dependent relationships
A person who is not instructed in the secrets of the heart might believe that a connection of this kind will create a relationship of dependence. Such a relationship does indeed develop, and this happens when the patient, as an adult and on an adult level, develops such a strong connection with another person that it is a completely novel experience and, wishing to keep what they have found and recognised as something they need, they become ‘hooked’ on the other person in an often intolerable way. In the body therapy process, when the patient experiences a deep connection, this connection will lead them to the primary deficit that was created in the ‘then’ of their childhood, which is experienced in the ‘now’ of the therapy session. The therapy always takes place in the present and when the patient’s needs are covered by the therapist in this ‘now’, they have no need of any kind of dependent