21 Apr Core energetic focussed work at Trauma Recovery Institute

Core Energetics is a powerful personal development approach:
Which seeks the integration of all aspects of your being; mind, body, emotions, spirit, and your will. It is a supportive process that enables you to explore your past and present issues and patterns. Your Practitioner partners with you to bring about a greater awareness of yourself and a deeper experience of your feelings. You begin to let go of defensive patterns that no longer serve you.
Through this unified and holistic process, you take steps on a journey to connect ever more deeply with your Core essence. Your truest nature is energetic, creative, loving, and open to life. Core Energetics is a dynamic system for personal growth, healing, and transformation. You work to unblock your innate life force through the use of movement, breath, voice, and other techniques. You gain greater understanding of what makes you tick. This understanding opens up more choices about what you create in your life. When your energy is blocked, your body and personality suffer. When your energy is flowing, long standing patterns shift. You have more clarity, purpose, and pleasure.
Though we begin with the body, the five levels overlap at various stages of the process. Core Energetics presupposes that feelings flow on energy, carried through the body on the breath. That energy, which is meant to flow in the healthy person, is sometimes blocked, split, or leaky in an unconscious effort to prevent the flow/experience of feelings. This process of blocking energy and the flow of feelings starts very early in life, when the child perceives needs not being met. It may be created to stop the flow of painful or “parentally unacceptable” feelings, but in turn, it blocks the flow of the creative life force within the individual. The child finds many ways to block this flow: breathing shallowly, or holding the breath, chronic muscular contractions, along with psychological defense mechanisms, all of which become unconscious.
Much of the bodywork consists of breathing and physical exercises designed to release these blocks, or charge and contain energy. Supportive counseling helps you process and integrate what your body reveals, bringing greater consciousness. There are psycho-spiritual presuppositions as well, based on the Pathwork, by Eva Pierrakos. The child comes into the world as pure light, the Core, the Higher Self. The child brings needs into the world, as well.
When these needs are not met, there is an organismic reaction of terror and rage. This is the development of the Lower Self. The child learns quickly that this Lower Self reaction is unacceptable and must negate this part of the self, in order to survive and keep parental love. A third layer, the Mask, develops to hide both the Lower Self and the need. The Mask consists of the defenses the child uses to protect the self. The Mask blocks the flow of the child’s true essence, both Lower Self and Higher Self. It becomes unconscious, leaving the individual cut off from his/her true essence and identifying himself with the Mask.
The work of Core Energetics is to confront and penetrate the Mask, energize and release the Lower Self in ways that are harmless. The goal here is to free up the flow of energy into and out of the Core, which is the connection to Spirit and all that is. The energy that is released, enhances the ability to experience pleasure, creativity, connection, and fulfillment. It’s important to honor the creation of the elaborate defense system that helped you survive. This work requires a willingness to look courageously and gently at parts of yourself, you may not want to see. It also encourages and empowers you to claim your higher-self qualities and align with your higher purpose. The benefits are great, as you work through your body, bringing greater energy, consciousness, and choice to the life you are creating.
The Core process involves working through a series of steps or phases. Each phase invites us to explore deeper levels of truth. The Core model reveals that there are several levels or centers of energy out of which we act at any given moment. The work helps us become more conscious of these levels within ourselves, and allows us choice as to which part of ourselves we will inhabit. These levels are the mask, the lower self,
 
PHASE 1: PENETRATING THE MASK
Core Energetics calls the most superficial layer of our personality the MASK. The part of our self which we generally present to the world. Often it reflects the “role” we adapted in our families, or an idealized image of who we believe we are supposed to be. For example, the good girls, or the tough guy, or the quiet one. Though we may come to believe this is who we really are, the mask is actually a false self. It is an adopted survival strategy devised to compensate for & escape from, the hurts and humiliations of our past.
We invest energy in our mask(s) in the belief it will gain us love, approval, power, or safety. Unfortunately the false promise of the mask as the solution to suffering is never fulfilled, because even if we do get what we want from this place, it will fail to satisfy. This is because we will be unable to genuinely receive the love, or power we are given, as we came by it through a king of deception, and therefore internally remain feeling undeserving and empty.
The mask cannot gain us the fulfillment we seek because it is not the truth. The mask will distort the energy of LOVE and turn it into submission & false giving. The mask distorts our true POWER and turns it into aggression. The mask distorts inner SERENITY and turns it into a withdrawal from life. The energy of the mask is separative and stagnant. Unfortunately most of us stay unaware of how invested we are in this place and fear that if we let go of it, we won’t really know who we are. We must have courage and receive support to PENETRATE THE MASK. This is the work in the 1st phase of Core Energetics.
 
PHASE 2: TRANSFORMING THE LOWER SELF
Below the mask is a layer that is largely unconscious because knowledge & ownership of it highly threatening to the personality. This is the LOWER SELF, and it exists in each and every one of us. It is powerful in our lives despite its unconscious nature.
Where does the lower self come from? When our normal developmental needs are not met as children our normal response is anger & frustration, however when we subsequently experience rejection for our anger on a repeated basis, the result is rage. If anger created rejection and punishment, certainly rage is even more threatening to a child who needs its caregivers, and so the only solution is sending it underground into unconsciousness where the energy becomes dark and separative. However, just because it is hidden, doesn’t mean the energy of it does not continue to operate in our lives.
Most of us are unwilling to own & take responsibility for our lower self. As awareness of it emerges, we often feel enormous guilt and fear. This is because the lower self threatens our idealized image or conception of ourselves as well as societal norms that tell us how we “should” be. The guilt tends to send us right back into our mask, where we can disown our negativity, our cruelty, our rage, and our negative intentions.
Denial of the lower self creates a “s p l i t t i n g” of the energy and the consciousness within us. It is imperative that we meet and take ownership of this part of ourselves, otherwise we will be unable to transform it and harness its energy.
 
PHASE 3 TRASITIONING TO THE HIGHER SELF
When we take responsibility for the lower self, we open to feeling the cleansing energy of true remorse (different form useless guilt) for the pain we have caused ourselves and others through our previous destructiveness. Here we find liberating self-forgiveness.
As we open to the woundedness that lays beneath the lower self, we discover that our “here and now” adult self can hold ourselves in compassion and not be annihilated by the return of feelings that as children we felt so helpless against. In learning to not fear feelings, self-knowledge, truth and vulnerability we are transitioning to the Higher Self.
 
PHASE 3: CENTERING IN THE HIGHER SELF
In this stage the personality no longer finds satisfaction in the pseudo-reality of the mask. The positive orientation and commitment to authenticity creates a more aligned, unified individual able to “walk their talk”. The experience is of greater self-acceptance and self-love, opening you a heightened sense of connectedness to yourself and others, and you radiate a higher vibratory quality, producing pleasure, joy, and purpose in life.
This does not mean that there is no longer any mask, or that life no longer challenges you. It means that when you notice you are suffering, the path to releasing it is clear. We again turn our awareness to how our mask & lower self are operating, and work though the phases of the process, only now it can happen in moments instead of years. In this we hold the key to liberation and freedom and we radiate our Higher Self qualities.
PHASE 4: THE UNIVERSAL LIFE PLAN.
The final stage of Core Energetics is reached when the individual consciousness knows itself, not as a separate entity, but as an integral part of a greater whole, intimately connected with all life.
At this stage the energy of this consciousness predominates and infused the personality with the courage and the capacity to manifest the vital energy of the CORE. The result is experienced as a life filled with purpose and meaning and an enhanced capacity to shape and heal the world around us. Our journey of healing has transcended from the personal to the universal.
Interestingly in many ways this has always been true, but we can now live and experience this at the deepest levels because we have done the challenging work of healing the energetic splits & opened the blocked of the earlier stages.
Of course this does not mean our journey is complete. Our life and it’s challenges continue, but now we have in us the resources to work though whatever we are presented with, and use these challenges in service of our creative and continued growth. We are aware when we lose our grounding, or when our defenses have emerged to block our joy and our flow, and we know that what we need to do is see our own mask, release our lower self, and center once again in our Higher Self in order to return to our TRUTH & INTEGRITY, and to the PLEASURE & FULFILLMENT that is our birthright.
Life is lived form the most potent & creative center…LOVE!