Free Bioenergetics Book
"There is another way to understand what will happen with this work. Consider a young child. He has fallen and scraped his knee. He is crying. Now someone comes along and says “stop crying!” The question is: how does one do that, how does one go about ‘stopping crying?’
Well, if we were to see that child crying, his eyes are crunched up, his chin is quivering, the sound is coming from his throat, his chest is heaving up and down, his belly is going in and out. He is using his body all the way from his eyes to his belly. Now if he clamps his jaw so it can not quiver, he tenses his throat to stop the sound, he takes a breath and holds it, he tightens his abdominal muscles; he has then, by choice, interfered with all the body motions that permit the crying.
Over time with repeated experiences of having to stop his crying these tensions become a body habit. These areas are now tense all the time, just like an upright posture (how many parents keep saying: “don’t slouch, stand up straight” or “sit up straight”). Soon the child can no longer cry, he can only leak tears. That too gets stopped as the muscles around the tear ducts are tensed. Then we get the person who “has not cried in 20 years.”
Well the same chest that this youngster tensed in order not to cry is also the same chest that relates to tenderness, love, empathy, sadness, pride, homesickness, and a host of similar feelings."