It was amazing to witness the Sema ceremony in Turkey, an impressive embodied spiritual dance in harmonious with self and others. The focus on body as container of spirit and mind, and locus of contact with the others, enables the dancers to contact the environment as a whole. In this wholeness, the body movements expressed the freedom and agency of self interact with the others in fully present. The ancient wisdom-practice of integration of body-mind-spirit can be understood through modern science, as Kepner beautifully describes in his work (1987):
In all of these situations of unbearable and constant pain or threat of pain we can see how the aspect of self being damaged is somatic in nature. The child responds to such hurts by shrinking away from the contact surface of skin and muscle. With repeated hurt, the child shrinks even further away from the source of pain. divorcing the sense of self from his or her body, disowning the location of pain to help reduce the damage. The result, which I see so often in people who come to me for body-oriented work. is heartrending. They desperately seek love and relationship but are so detached from their body surface that they cannot bridge the gap between their self, so deeply pulled into their body core, and the other with whom they want to connect because the medium of connection, the body, is no longer identified as self. (p.18)
The desensitisation of body sensations in protecting oneself from overwhelmly suffering may turn into habitual way contacting the environment. Thus, diminishing the functions of self.
We can keep our disowned self out of our awareness by physically preventing the movements intrinsic to those parts, such as tensing to prevent the movements of reaching out to others and thereby maintaining the identified-self characteristic of independence. We can physically dull and deaden the bodily sensations (by tensing against them) that are part of feelings of love, anger, and compassion. (Kepner 1987, p.14)
They are left with a desensitised body (forcibly so,because of the anxiety they had to grow up with),
they are unable to love deeply, to fall in love by letting the attraction towards someone other than themselves turn their lives upside down, to find themselves, to understand what they want and who they are. (Spagnuolo Lobb 2015, p. 26)
Thus, the counselor play a role to resensitize the body sensation, to accompany clients re-owning and discover their capacity in containing, the suffering, and to support the spontaneity of client in reaching out toward others. This requires acceptance, love, care and support of counselor toward clients in embodied interaction.
Creating an environment where clients can risk coming back into their body is a labor of love and caring by the therapist. As each layer of body-self is recontacted, old emotional wounds must be reopened so the disowned experiences can be brought to the present where true healing can take place. Facing the outpouring of emotional "pus" as the person reconnects with his or her body is an emotionally trying task for both client and therapist. (Kepner 1987, p. 18)
According to the Gestalt point of view, therapeutic change is the result of an event of contact that generates a restructuring of perception in the client, who eventually becomes able to sense what she could not sense before (in other words, she increases her own awareness): the contact with the therapist can change the way she usually sees the world. Therefore, the therapeutic factor here is not making what is bodily something explicit, but rather supporting incomplete intentionality of contact or perception through fully awakened senses. (Spagnuolo Lobb 2015, p. 28)
Body work in counseling requires counselor to be sensitive to his/her bodily experience in contact with clients' bodily experience. In this connection, counselor is capable to assist clients to be in contact with their body, a locus of being-with-others and spirit-mind fully indwell again. As such, the clients will able to interact fully and freely with environment, to execute the spontaneity of their body moving toward others. To breathe fully and freely while moving their body with awareness of themselves and environment in contact.
References:
Kepner, James I. 1987. Body process: a Gestalt approach to working with the body in psychotherapy. New York: Gardner Press.
Spagnuolo Lobb M. (2015). The Body as a “Vehicle” of our Being in the World. Somatic experience in Gestalt therapy. British Gestalt Journal, 24 (2): 21-31.