CATEGORY: THERAPIES

After I first moved to Port Townsend, I read a book called RIGHT USE OF WILL.  It related to another book I had read many years before: THE SECRET SCIENCE BEHIND MIRACLES.  Both books said that we have both an electrical body and a magnetic body.  Our electrical body lets go of things and our magnetic body holds them.  The electrical is masculine and the magnetic is feminine.  We need a balance between the two, but we tend to get polarized by denying our negative emotions because we don’t want to deal with them.

RIGHT USE OF WILL proposed a process for discharging suppressed energies.  Lie down.  Relax.  Let your mind drift any place it wants to go.  Then examine how you FEEL about that thing.  Then “let yourself feel it until it manifests into some kind of noise or action.  Let the noise or action continue until you are through.”  Those were the magic words, and the therapy was that simple.

I did this self therapy off and on for seven years. I did not do it every night, but maybe once a week when I was “on.”  It was tricky, because often an unpleasant thought that I was loathe to deal with would go by so fast that I had to force myself to stop and go back.  I also discovered that there were layers of feelings.  I learned to make myself go deeper and then deeper.  Some of the sessions lasted most of the night.  I lived far enough away from other people (there were only four houses in my block) that I felt safe making any kind of noise because I knew no one could hear me.

Once I found myself howling.  I couldn’t stop.  My conscious self remembered that someone I knew who was a night nurse at the hospital had told me she went out running at night on her nights off .  I wondered if she might be running past my house and would hear me.  Still howling, I got out of bed and looked out the window.  There was a full moon.  I was howling at the moon!  I must be truly and totally crazy!  After a while longer, I stopped howling and went to sleep.  Another time my whole body twisted around in a grotesque position and stayed that way.  It was so bizarre that I almost started laughing.  After remaining in that position for a very long time, my body returned to normal.  Again, I then relaxed and went to sleep.

In the throes of “discharging” I often wondered if it would ever end.  I would think that I would never “be through,” but it always did end.  OF COURSE, or I would still be lying there crying, screaming, howling, twisting–or laughing (yes, I did that too).  What a circus!

When Clif moved into my basement apartment, I knew he would be awakened by the noise, so I had to stop.  But I felt good about what I had done; it was time to stop.  I felt I had come a long way.  I found that I was much calmer–more at ease than I could ever remember being.