2:8 Observe the breathing and encourage the explorer to fill from the abdomen up and empty from the chest down. This may be a fairly smooth movement in which abdomen and chest rise almost simultaneously, or a more jerky two-stage movement. Or the explorer may find it difficult or impossible, or may tend to suck air into the chest only, or into the abdomen only.

They may breathe in a "paradoxical" way in which the abdomen goes down instead of filling with breath in, and is pushed out, instead of collapsing inward on the breath out. See if the explorer will change this. (Strictly speaking, in physiological terms, the breath does not go in and out of the abdomen, only in and out of the lungs. But on breathing in, lungs fill, diaphragm descends, and the intestines are pushed downward and outward in the abdominal cavity. Vice versa in breathing out: lungs empty, diaphragm rises, and the abdominal cavity contracts).

2:9 Withdraw both hands, and ask the explorer to move the knees, while still keeping the feet flat on the mattress. The knees may be together or splayed apart. Ask the explorer to move them gently and slowly in and out so that they come in to touch then are brought out to as wide apart as possible. After ten or so in and out movements, ask the explorer to find the position where the legs feel most shaky. This will usually be somewhere between 45 degrees and vertical. The legs may tend to vibrate or tremble. Encourage the explorer not to stop any trembling.

2:10 Make eye contact and ask how they are feeling. Take stock. Ask the person to breathe out as far as possible while looking in your eyes. Ask them not to stare without blinking. You can simply suggest they blink a few times. If they blink so fast you feel out of contact with their eyes, ask them to steady their gaze and look at you for a few moments without blinking. In other words, encourage them to make the kind of eye contact best for exchanging feelings. It may help to take their hand if they feel a little anxious.

2:11 Ask the explorer to describe bodily sensations, and to say whether they feel any particular emotion.

At this first session, it should be enough for you to share whatever emotion is present, without working deliberately to help it come through. The next chapter will discuss ways of working with emotional expression. For now, if there is strong emotion and you are not sure what to do, you can make whichever of the following moves is appropriate:

Grief may start as crying. Encourage the explorer to close the eyes tightly and roll over on their side away from you and curl up with the knees near to the chest. Ask them not to hold their breath, but to sigh out and give in to whatever they feel. You can hold them or let your hand rest on their shoulder or neck, from behind: this way you are present but not obtrusive. Then when the crying seems to have come though and spent itself, make normal contact again.

Rage may show as an angry expression in the eyes or a gesture of wanting to thump or hit out; encourage them to thump the mattress a few times while looking at you and telling you what makes them mad. But do not pursue this much further than a few emphatic blows of the fist or statements of anger or resentment. It is enough, for now, to acknowledge the anger rather than work on it.

Fear is best expressed verbally at this stage. Ask them to talk about their anxiety. Make reassuring gestures such as holding their hand and making eye contact. If they are trembling or extremely anxious, get them to curl over on their side, as when crying, and lie beside them and hold them for a while. They may begin to cry.

Joy or great feelings of pleasure should be shared by the guide as spontaneously as you know how.

If you encounter any serious problem in which the explorer is stuck for a long time in a given emotion with no sign of a spontaneous resolution, consult the next chapter for ways to work it through. There is no need for either of you to be discouraged, even if the result of this exploration is to evoke anxiety: it probably needs to come out.

2:12 Be sure you are in contact before stopping the session. This can be as simple as being in good eye contact, or a clasp of the hands, or a hug. Take a few minutes to share impressions.

Although, as explained earlier, it is not a good idea to follow one session immediately with another, in the case of these first sessions it may be useful for the guide to take his or her turn as the explorer later in the same day, or after a break for a walk or a rest. Comparing the observations of the first session may alert you to some of the ways in which your ways of being in your bodies are similar, or complementary, or contrasting.

What can you expect to have experienced and learned in this session? This varies greatly. The explorer may have experienced very little, or a lot. No one should be judged for any response or lack of it.

The explorer may have experienced some opening of sensation and feeling, possibly toward anxiety, possibly toward pleasure, more likely an alternation between the two. They may also have learned something of how feeling and sensation move in the body as breathing is intensified, and can be blocked in certain areas. Some self-discovery may occur, as an area of anxiety or blocking is identified. Possibly even memories from childhood or deep feelings have come up, whether they have been allowed to come through, or blocked.

The guide may have experienced feelings also, if in resonance with a partner who is feeling deeply. He or she will almost certainly have learned something about the explorer's functioning, and been able to see how there is an interplay between parts of the person which move and those which seem to block movement. If you are the guide, do not generalize from your observation of the explorer: different people vary greatly in body structure and observable response to breathing and feeling. Once it is your turn to be the explorer, do not expect the same things to happen: you have your own personality; your reactions will most probably be quite different, as will your partner's responses to them.

You will have noted that I have been directing both explorer's and guide's attention basically toward whether the body as a whole or particular areas of it are open to movement or closed and still. Some different patterns of blocking against involuntary movement will be discussed in chapter 6. For now it is enough to begin to gain some awareness, both as an explorer experiencing movement and blocks, and as a guide observing them, of two basic phenomena: streaming and pulsation.

Streaming

Streaming can be understood objectively through observations in nature, for example of a stream flowing around a rock, or what biologists call streaming in a cell under a microscope, where the liquid of the cell, the protoplasm, flows around and back and forth within the cell membrane. Subjectively it is a sensation of inner movement in the body. You may be able to test this: pause and take a breath out, so that your abdomen goes gently inward; breathe out as far as you can without squeezing harshly, then pause for a few seconds at the full extent of your out-breath. If you then concentrate on the area of your lower abdomen and genitals you may feel a melting or warm sensation which seems to move somewhere deep inside (it may seem creepy-crawly if you are anxious about it). During the previous session the worker may have felt such streamings here and there in the body while intensifying the breathing. At times they may have been transformed into harsher sensations of sharp tingling or congestion and pressure, but at times they may have felt soft and pleasurable, akin to sexual sensations. They may also have been most intense in moments of contact with the helper, whether in eye contact, or under the guide's hand.

If the explorer has felt these streamings only briefly then blocked them, this is nothing to be ashamed of: most of us associate these sensations with early childhood, when we have been encouraged to suppress them (they are considered "dirty" or prematurely sexual), or with sex only, so that they may seem to be out of context when evoked by simple breathing. (Those of you have done yoga may have learned ways to evoke them systematically, although the controlled breathing in yoga ensures that they do not lead to spontaneous movement or pulsation). If the streamings block when the breathing evokes them, we can learn two things: what makes us most anxious in terms of where we feel the streamings, and how we tend to block them: whether through tightening muscles or holding the breath, or wriggling somehow out of the way of the sensation. Streaming may also have been felt if the explorer has experienced a "soft" emotion, such as wanting to cry or reaching out in longing. In both cases streaming or melting sensations may be felt flowing in the chest or toward the face and eyes. They may have been caught in a throat which tightens, or suppressed by staring or losing eye contact. Again, at this stage, it is important to know both where you experience streamings comfortably and where you tend to become anxious and suppress them.

The guide will not have been able to observe the explorer's inner sensations, obviously, but may have been able to observe some indications of them, either as movements of the body such as a trembling or a stretching which suggests that something is happening internally, or as a tightening or immobilizing of certain areas of the body as if the explorer were trying to prevent further movement. The guide may also, if in good emotional resonance with the explorer, have picked up some of the explorer's feelings, either through eye contact in which an emotional expression is visible, or through a sixth sense.