From the author: Author: Zvaigzne Maria Sergeevna. Contact with the body or about the fact that it is useful to live not only with your head. Modern society dictates its own rules that contribute to the “dominance” of people who think but do not feel. Thinking a lot, getting carried away by “verbal” techniques, placing the main emphasis on the development of rationalization, we forget that the best indicator of our condition is our body, which cannot be deceived. Modern man often loses contact with his body. All our fears, grievances, suppressed experiences, traumas remain in us in the form of chronic muscle tension. If there are many such clamps, then a whole muscular shell is formed and the expression “flexible character” or “tough person” corresponds to the real state of things - flexibility or tightness in the body. Our body does not know how to lie and remembers (imprints) states and events from the past. In body-oriented therapy, the body is viewed as a kind of screen onto which all our experiences, traumas, and symbolic messages of the subconscious are projected. Our bodily movements, facial expressions, voice reflect the state of the nervous system. Our “emotional anatomy” begins in the prenatal period and is then formed in the long process of growing up. The period of childhood and especially the first year of a child’s life, his relationship with a significant adult, is very important. Violation of such relationships leads to difficulties for the child to mentally control his body, emotions, and impedes his ability to connect thoughts and feelings. In the process of growing up, the child often experiences various “social” abuses of the body: stand up straight, sit quietly, don’t cry, be a man, etc. .d. Such social rules require our bodies to be in certain shapes. An adult already has a social structure of the body - this is his knowledge of how to sit, stand, and move. If a strong imbalance is formed towards the social structure of the body, then we lose naturalness, plasticity, and the ability to seek and receive pleasure. Alexithymia is a social disease that is encouraged by modern society. From childhood, boys are taught: “Men don’t cry,” girls are told: “Don’t show your weakness,” “Don’t wash dirty linen in public.” From childhood, a person is taught to constantly restrain the expression of feelings. In the most negative version, this leads to the fact that over time a person ceases to distinguish between feelings, blocks them and becomes alienated from them. This creates a depressive society in which one cannot show one’s emotions, lest they be taken by others as a sign of weakness. Many researchers (Reich, Lowen, Feldenkrais, Jim Kepner, Peter Levin, M. Sandomirsky, etc.) consider the cause of various mental disorders to be suppression of feelings, which manifests itself in the form of chronic muscle tension that blocks the free flow of energy in the body (according to Reich and Lowen) or leading to loss of contact with one’s own bodily and emotional processes (according to J. Kepner). Man is a biosocial being. But society dictates such rules that there is less and less biological in us. In this regard, it is interesting to observe animals and how they react to a stressful situation. For example, a polar bear that is chased for a long time and knocked down with a shot containing a tranquilizer. Coming to his senses, the bear begins to tremble, the trembling intensifies and turns almost into convulsions, when the shaking stops, the animal takes a deep breath, spreading throughout the body. So, using the mechanism of bodily self-regulation, he exhales stress from himself and throws off the remnants of frozen energy. Man, unfortunately, has forgotten how to use his physicality. Although there are special bodily exercises similar to animal movements, which are used in body-oriented therapy after stressful situations. In these exercises, we seem to “revive” our biological basis, which is strongly.