Bioenergetics

Since this particular forum is home to a lot of people struggling with lack-of-confidence and bottling up a lot of negative emotion, I wanted to show this to you guys since I've had a positive experience discovering and experimenting with this over the last week or so.

The basic premise is that humans have a lot of emotions and feelings, the purpose of which is to promote primal behaviours. In a civilised society a lot of these behaviours are no longer permitted and so these emotions and feelings build up with no release besides self-destructive behaviours.

Enter Alexander Lowen, who pioneered a psychotherapy and physical therapy that he called Bioenergetics. You put yourself into various stress positions, move erratically, and either scream or speak-in-tongues; the ultimate goal being that you charge your body with oxygen, relax the muscles, and potentially let out any trapped emotion through sobbing (which you can see in the video below).



An advocate of this process is a YouTuber called Elliott Hulse, who gave a talk on Bioenergetics which is extremely entertaining. I've linked that below, and although I would recommend watching the whole thing, I've specifically linked from about 23:38 when he's running an exercise with a volunteer and eventually the whole crowd joins in, screaming and beating their chests in unison. It's pretty visceral and cathartic to watch (and join in with for that matter).

 

I know there are usually a couple of groups that do this in every city. I was looking out for a bioenergetics group to see if that was a thing, but this seems to fit the bill.

Although I'm not sure what their stance on the screaming aspect of the bioenergetics would be...

 

Let me know if you attend anything! I'd love to hear a first-hand account.