Stupid

If you are serious about this work, that parental-introject-superego-should is going to get very upset. Expect it.

But, as bad as that first bogeyman is, as anti-life-enjoyment as it is, it is not the worst of our internal anti-heroes. The worst, the most vicious, the most destructive and the biggest bogeyman of all is just one word:

CONTROL!

Famously, the author Henry David Thoreau wrote: "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." All too true. And all too unnecessary. The biggest hurdle you will face and one that you will face right unto the end of this work, through both parts of the book and all the exercises, is the refusal to let go of control. It is not that control is wrong — it is certainly not inappropriate to control what you say or watch where you're going — it is that the mass of men can not dismiss control when it is not needed. Control becomes so pervasive, so pernicious, that we come to even control our control.

Has there ever lived a parent who has not said to his (her) child "control yourself" and/or "you've got to learn self-control?" Do you remember those stern disapproving looks or those reprimands when you were simply being silly, simply having fun, simply being spontaneous? The demand for control has been burned into your soul. It is there eating at you, feeding on itself, making sure that even spontaneity has to be planed. But, especially, making sure that your body, your reactions and your emotions are controlled.

Like other character attitudes, control is manifested in the body. I have had patients who finally came to identify their point or area of control. Variously that place has been in the neck, the upper chest, the whole chest, the upper back, the tip of the scapula bone (the wing bone), the lower back and the legs.

The need of control is a lack of trust in yourself, your abilities and your nature. It is a paradox of humans that the more we attempt to control our lives, the more the need to control comes to dominate our personality. Control in this sense feeds on itself.

An unintended result of the need to control is that all of life becomes a performance. We do not live life, we are lived by life. We come to be not what we would enjoy being, but rather what we think others want us to be.

But control is not in itself a bad thing; it is necessary if we are to live in society.

Self-control is crucial to empathy. It is hard to consider someone else's emotional state if all you can do is think about yourself. Of course, when you empathize, you do not switch off your feelings, since having an appropriate emotional response to the other person's feelings is empathy, but you do need self-control to set aside your current (self-centered) goal in order to attend to someone else.

It is when control changes to rigidity that it becomes anti-life; when control changes from self-control to self-control that life become endurance rather than enjoyment.

One of the things that will happen to you I can say with confidence is that as you get deeper into this work you will get unplanned (and if you allow it, uncontrolled) jerking and twitching in your body. You can treat the jerking and twitching as fun, as a wonderful release, or you can be afraid of it. Your choice.

But even if you come to accept and enjoy the twitching, there will still be a big layer of control-demand present. In a little while I will present some advanced breathing exercises that strike to the very essence of control. There will be some of you who can through these exercises allow control to be done away with; some of you who will come to trust the "wisdom of the body." But, unfortunately, all too many of you will demand performance of yourself in even those exercises and will control yourself through them. You are the time binders; you are the ones who say: I will be better when I am through with this work. After I have finished, then I can start to get more out of life. But there is no finish to improvement, only death ends that. You can continue to be the living dead or you can choose life as its own goal. I can't control that, you can.

Footnote 19. Baron-Cohen, S. (2003).The Essential Difference; The Truth about the Male and Female Brain. New York: Basic Books

Footnote 20. The medical term is either: myokymia or tonicoclonic.

Stopping Point!!!

You have been working on your character (flaws) with the exercises I have presented up to this point. But there are issues I have mentioned but I have not given you the correction for them.

Recall: (1) the two chest shapes and (2) the accessory muscles of respiration. You may well have already taken care of the held-high and the held-low chests by using the push breathing for the held-high chest and the belly-out-breath-chest-only for the held-low chest. If that is the case then part of Chapter 6 is not necessary for you. You have already corrected the situation.

But there may still be the issue of using those accessory muscles of respiration to move your chest. Remember way back when I spoke about using a tape measure or a string to see that your chest is expanding? Try that again now. You should be getting one inch to an inch and a half expansion on the tape measure around your chest. If you are not getting that, if there is either no expansion or just barely some expansion, then go to Chapters 6 and 7 to find out how to correct that situation.