Dr. Lowen believed that to release the tension and know and express our true selves, we must access the original source feelings in conjunction with the release of the muscle contraction. How does this happen? Using a combination of self-expression, movement, breathing and body awareness techniques, which are explained in more detail below.

Self-Expression

Bioenergetics provides a forum to express one’s thoughts and feelings in a safe, supportive environment. The use of sound and vocalization of feelings can be a powerful catalyst in building our sense of self and communicating with others with more confidence and clarity. In addition, Bioenergetics creates a space to explore the issues of boundaries and intimacy with self and others.

Movement

Dr. Lowen believed that we must move the body in order to release tension and access feeling.

This can take many forms ranging from passive movements such as stretching to more active movements like kicking. The movement prescribed is based on the quality and location of blocks in the body. Some examples of this are explained below.

Blocks in the throat and jaw restrain our crying and screaming; they also inhibit our joyous shouting and singing. Blocks in the shoulders and arms restrain not only our drive to get what we want in life and to be able set boundaries with others, but also inhibit our desire to reach out to others with softness and trust in ourselves.
Blocks in the waist restrict our crying and yelling as well as our breathing and sighing.
Tight muscles in our legs and feet curb our rebelliousness, our ability to protest; they also decrease our capacity to stand our ground and be independent.
There are many muscles that connect the pelvic girdle with the trunk and the legs, such as the muscles of the lower back, the buttocks and the thighs. There are also muscles that form the pelvic floor. All these muscles are involved in controlling our sexual and excretory functions. Their chronic tension dulls our sexuality and often causes lower backaches and even frequent urination.

Breathwork

"When the breath is disturbed, the mind is disturbed. When the breath is calmed, the mind becomes steady."

--Hatha Yoga Pradipika

We can go without food and water for a long period of time, but only minutes without the breath. Therefore, it is amazing how little attention we pay in normal life to the importance of breathing correctly. As babies and young children, we breathed deeply with our entire body. But many people have forgotten how to breathe properly and our sedentary work environments and lifestyles, coupled with the stress of busy lives, have conditioned most of us to fast, shallow breathing. This type of breathing restricts the breath to our upper chest and can ultimately undermine our health, decrease our vitality and compromise our ability to appropriately cope with mental, physical and emotional stress.

Most of us breathe without involving our diaphragm at all and use only one-third of our lungs. This serves to limit oxygen in the body. When an insufficient amount of fresh air reaches your lungs, your blood is not properly purified or oxygenated. Lack of oxygen can result in a low level of vitality and resistance to disease. Poorly oxygenated blood also contributes to anxiety states, depression and fatigue and makes stressful situations harder to cope with. Stress is a powerful mind-body phenomenon; it initiates interactions between the brain, nervous system and endocrine system that initiates shallow breathing which restricts oxygen. When faced with stress, oxygen deprivation switches on the nervous system's "fight or flight" mechanism, creating a physical sensation of nervous arousal, while triggering a feeling of fear, inhibiting concentration and sometimes creating a sense of unreality or detachment. Many people have a tendency to even hold their breath without being aware of it, especially those that suffer with anxiety, depression, panic attacks or other emotional disorders.

People with emotional disorders can benefit greatly by working on proper breathing. Dr. Ronald Ley, a professor of psychology and hyperventilation researcher at the State University of New York in Albany, speculates that oxygen shortages in the brain trigger a subconscious feeling of suffocation that leads to ‘irrational thoughts and feelings of imminent doom.' Chronic breathing, also known as over-breathing can contribute to feelings of anxiety, panic and fear. A contributing factor often associated with over-breathing is chronic tension is the muscles of the chest, back, neck and shoulders. The tension interferes with the normal breathing action of the diaphragmatic muscle.

You may have noticed that when you are angry or scared, your breathing is shallow, rapid and irregular. When you are relaxed or deep in thought, your breathing becomes slow. You can test this by listening for a moment to the lowest sound in the room. In concentrating, you may notice that you unconsciously slowed your breathing. So if your state of mind is reflected in the way you breathe, then it makes sense that by controlling the breath you can control your state of mind.

Ultimately, full breathing creates space in our bodies for new sensation to emerge and literaaly provides the oxygen that we need to become more alive. It also establishes a container for feelings to be held and formed in. Breathing into a feeling helps us take responsibility for it as an experience that we ourselves are generating, not one that other people are pushing onto us.

As the mind-body expert Deepak Chopra has said, the first step to change is awareness. So it follows then that just the awareness of the breath can lead to a shift in unhealthy breathing patterns and bring about a greater sense of physical and emotional well-being.

Body Awareness/Body Work

Emotional stress from many areas - relationships, family crises, jobs, health, etc. produce tension in the body. Contractions in the muscular system are often the result of carrying unresolved emotional tension. These contractions can have a direct effect on our energy level, and on our capacity for spontaneous and creative self-expression, as well as feelings of well-being.

Body awareness interventions are designed to assist you in attending to your experience of your body. The focus is on areas of muscle tension, posture, breathing patterns, and the ways in which physical and emotional tensions are related.

Body work is simply the inclusion of your body in the therapy session. This takes many different forms. At times, body work directs you to become aware of and stay in connection with how your body is responding in the moment. What parts of your body are you most aware of? What sensations are occurring in these parts of your body? What parts of your body are you least aware of? How might you describe the sensations in these, less felt parts of your body?

Body work is used to bring increased awareness of your bodily sensations, and to connect these sensations to your feelings and to historical events.

As you become more in touch with your body, the Bioenergetic psychotherapist works with the basic concepts of breathing more deeply, grounding yourself more in your body (becoming more conscious of what it really feels like to live in your body; allowing yourself to notice when you feeling nothing, go numb, get anxious, afraid; feel needy, desperate, hopeless - all on a body level), and helps you release a wide range of feelings that have been held back as a means of coping and surviving. This increased contact with your self and your feelings develops in the safety of a solid, trusting relationship with your Bioenergetic psychotherapist.

In Bioenergetic therapy, the therapist sometimes uses therapeutic touch, usually the palpation of muscles, to facilitate the therapeutic process. Certified Bioenergetic psychotherapists have been fully trained to appropriately use touch in the therapeutic setting. Because most of us were wounded either by the misuse of touch or by the lack of touch in our early years, therapeutic touch helps to contact, understand and release contractions in our body. The therapeutic use of touch also helps deepen your feeling of and connection with your own body and your feelings. It is important to know that the therapeutic use of touch is never sexually intrusive or exploitive.

You learn that to deny your body is also to reject your deep longing for love, contact and affection, in order to avoid your fear of being hurt, rejected and disappointed.

As therapy progresses, you'll realize that the constrictions in your body are really a defense against feeling and releasing a variety of different feelings. The immobility of your body stems from deep-seated fear of such expression. Given the opportunity to express your feelings by pounding or kicking and given the chance to voice your negativity, within the framework of a safe, therapeutic relationship, you discover that you will not be abandoned or destroyed for expressing your feelings. Since the body is such an important part of who we are, any increase in contact with and acceptance of your body will produce a significant improvement in your self image, interpersonal relationships, in the quality of your thinking and feeling and in your enjoyment of life.