Pulsation

Pulsation is most clearly felt and observable in the breathing. It is a rhythmic expansion and contraction which is the sign of life. If a person ceases to pulsate, he or she is literally dead: we identify a corpse by its stillness. We look for signs of life in an injured person by finding the pulsation of the heartbeat, or trying to detect breathing. The pulsation of breathing is most extensive in a new born baby: the whole front of the baby, both chest and abdomen, rises and falls freely with each breath; the head tilts slightly forward and back; and the pelvis and legs also rock slightly. In some adults this pulsation is so inhibited, that movement is nearly invisible except for a slight stirring around the diaphragm or in the chest. More often it is relatively open in one area and blocked in others: the chest may move readily, but the abdomen be tight; or vice versa. The slight rocking or tilting movements of head and pelvis are less apparent in any adult than in a baby because musculature is more developed and harder in the former but it can still exist in the form of a discernible letting go in the musculature on each out-breath. In deep crying or sobbing, and especially in orgasm, the pulsation of the breathing is intensified and may involve most or all of the body.

In the sessions above the explorer will probably have felt both pulsation and holding against it. They will have become conscious of the movement of breathing in chest and abdomen and also of sensations of tightness or immobilization in certain areas. They may also have noticed that, as the breathing pulsation intensified with the sighing out, there was an increase either in anxiety or in pleasurable sensation. The reaction to anxiety or pleasure may have been either to reduce the pulsation by tightening muscles, or to try and control the breathing by imposing a measured rhythm on it or keeping it slow and shallow. Whether through conscious effort or not, any blocking of pulsation is achieved through the tightening of groups of muscles.

The guide has been invited to become aware of both the explorer's breathing and the impediments to it, to pulsation and its blocks.

The concept of pulsation is vitally important in all work with the emotions and sexuality. Intensifying the simple pulsation of the breathing is the key to a whole world of emotional experience and a consequent intensification of streaming sensations. This can cause anxiety, as well as pleasure and a sense of being united or fused with a partner in love and with the cosmos.

Through this work I hope you can both intensify your capacity for pulsation, and therefore life, and understand it. The pulsation is autonomic, and can function without your control. You cannot even learn it. But conscious understanding of how it functions in you, and of how you tend to block it when you are anxious, which might be every day in a state of underlying anxiety, may help you dissolve whatever blocks you discover in this work.

Contact

Breathing is the expression of the basic pulsation of life in you. Contact, whether with another person through the eyes or touch, or with your own internal processes, is the perception of this life. Breathing in the presence of contact leads to an intensification of both pulsation and streamings. If this makes a person anxious, they will block either in breathing or in contact. Blocking in the breathing is easily observable from outside. Blocking of contact is less easy to observe but can be discerned in such events as the avoiding of eye contact, "spacing out," blinking excessively, or the eyes seeming to be looking "through" another person. It can also be felt in a way of touching which seems mechanical, a way of interacting which is "out of touch."

In the absence of blocks, if two people enter in contact with each other there is usually a quality of excitement, at least the triggering of a deeper breathing. If this is allowed to continue, breathing deepening in the presence of contact, the result is either movement in the sense that the people will embrace, or fight, or communicate vigorously in some way, or perhaps agree to a joint project—or it is emotion, the inner movement of which is felt as sadness or longing or a joyful wish to share, or growing anger. Of course, external movement and the inner movement which is emotion are often associated: we work together with pleasure, we argue with anger, or we feel love moving and we embrace, and so on.

Some psychotherapy works to dissolve blocks to contact and blocks to breathing, to intensify the capacity for streaming and pulsation. You may have noticed in the exploration session that even a simple injunction to "breathe out all the way and keep looking" is fairly difficult to follow. I often find myself saying in teaching sessions for therapists: "the basic technique of therapy is simple: breathe out." But normally there are a hundred resistances to breathing out. Therapy works through the resistances. When there are no more resistances, the person breathes out fully and therapy is finished. This oversimplification cannot, of course, take account of the knottiness of all those hundred resistances.

You may have noticed that when the explorer began to breathe out more fully it became more difficult to maintain contact. Or that when the explorer couId look the guide in the eyes and remain in contact, the breathing then tended to stop. Since breathing and contact between people do lead inevitably to either emotion or a movement together or apart, or both, it often seems safer to preserve the status quo and to immobilize the process. This is done unconsciously through what we call the "armor," which will be discussed in detail later. It is enough to say now though, that this armor is not always reprehensible, nor is resistance to breathing out morally wrong. This is a dangerous world and it is especially dangerous for children. We form our armor as children; it is useful to us in as much as it helps at times to be able to contain resentment, postpone impulsively joyful actions, or keep our tears to ourselves instead of showing vulnerability to a persecutor. With luck, our armor is disposable and we do not use it unnecessarily. Unfortunately, much of it is likely to be chronic. Instead of being able to open to the life pulsation and streamings in ourselves when we play with children, take a walk in the fields, or embrace the person we love, we find ourselves dull, immobile, vaguely anxious—not like a sparkling sunny day but like one of those days when the weather seems stuck, the leaves do not move, the skies are oppressive. At least the weather changes in most parts of the world whereas human structures can become too stuck to change.

Even in doing these explorations with the person you love you may find there are blocks, an armor between you. It grew up as a protection against anxiety, but it survives at the expense of pleasure, contact, and excitement. It may be possible to let go of some of it.