A Guide to Healthy Descension

Throughout time sages have sought out the meaning of life – why are we here, what is life about, how are we evolving as men, both individually and communally?  Questions on our existence, on the very meaning of life, only bring up that many more questions.  These are what I call “head” questions, queries that can only be thought - not felt and experienced.  Where is the body in all of this mental masturbation?  Much of our lives, from birth to adulthood, are spent thinking and deciding, evaluating and assessing, following a linear verticality of energy, as if our heads are ultimately the end goal in this quest for enlightenment.  The body however, has it’s own instinctive wisdom.  We get a felt sense in our bodies of the truth of something when often times we do not in our heads.  And truth is what those sages are seeking – the place to begin isn’t up, in the revered halls of cognition, but down into the primal depths of our animal knowing.

In Sensory Energetics work, the principal focus is on descension instead of ascension, on sinking down into our hips and our feet.  We need to drop down into the muck of our bodies to experience the rawness of pain, the longing for connection, and our inability to breathe deeply.  As men, we become anesthetized, numbed out of our bodies through addictions to the gym, food, coffee and alcohol, even TV – all of the ways that take us out of connection to ourselves and, most importantly, with other men.  Descension is the foundational work of our lives, without which we can never experience nor appreciate the joys of ascension.  In most yoga classes the energy, both quiet and meditative, is expected to be rising, to reach for the realms of bliss contained in the 6th and 7th chakras.  In Sensory Energetics it is the exact opposite – I ask men to allow the energy to drop down, to hang out in their hips and their pelvis, to experience the rage and the fear residing there, and also the sensuality and power.

In addition, there is also a relational model for the class - ways for men to interact on many levels, in pairs and in groups, skin on skin, breath on breath to enliven, to break the trance of their lives, to play with the masculine of doing and efforting, with the sacred feminine of allowing and surrender – with the ultimate goal being the lived expression of the integration of these two polarities.  This is what a MAN is all about.  Men have been competing with other men for so long they have forgotten how to make contact on the most basic level. I believe that men desire connection with other men, to touch and be touched, to be held, and to be accepted just as they are, in all of their messiness.  The media would have us believe that the majority of men are well built, muscular and well hung when that is far from the case.  They are, in fact, the minority.

Men have been conditioned to manage who they are in public, hanging out in the liminal state of being who others want them to be, as if in a suit that is too small, so that they lose touch with who they really are: lonely, afraid, and angry at being told how to be.  Sensory Energetics offers men an opportunity to experience and re-experience in a safe environment what it is like to connect with other men, the joys and the frustrations of connecting and disconnecting that we go through as men in this culture.  The class began as a call to that end, to address the longing for intimate connection on all levels, to claim and re-claim grounded masculinity and our own innate eroticism.  I am continually asking men to take emotional and communal risks, to explore and be present with their process while being naked, in addition to moving in and out of connection with others.  What do they notice?  Is there a momentary stiffening of the abdomen as a participant moves away to work with another, a sadness in the leaving?  Is there a hollow aching in the chest from a yearning for connection?

Staying with our emotional process, for men, is difficult, yet if we stay with these emotions, usually they pass quickly.  These emotions, after all, are pure energy, and energy is always moving, transforming into something else.  In Buddhist thought, it is not the emotions that are the problem; it is our attachment to them (our thoughts about the emotions).  Awareness of emotional process, a part of the Sensory Energetic work, is a powerful tool, a form of externalization, helping men to realize (and experience in their bodies) that we are not our emotions, and that we, as men, are more powerful than we thought.  This awareness offers men an opportunity to integrate the shadow, that which is split off from self, moving toward a more holistic embodiment.

How do our bodies participate in our lack of embodiment?  Shallow breathing, along with a tight, inflexible body, is how we mediate our environment, our emotions.  Think of a young infant being startled, not having the developed musculature to turn away from a threatening stimulus – they take in a sharp in-breath while probably tightening the muscles around the eyes.  In a very real way, the breath and musculature become the tools with which we negotiate the influx of physiologic stimuli, how we manage our surround.  Our bodies are our tools, yet when these patterns of comportment, the shallow breathing and muscular holding, become generalized for all situations, we lose our ability to have choices in our lives about how we move through the world and ultimately connect with others.

As men, we’ve forgotten how to breathe from our belly as a baby breathes, effortless and easy.  This is because of the important psoas muscle (sometimes called the fucking muscle), the only muscle that attaches the lower half of the body (the head of the femur) to the upper half (vertebral bodies T-12 through L4) in addition to (most importantly) the diaphragm!!!!  As we breathe, the pelvis should naturally rotate down and away, just as in yoga, but hours spent at a computer or sitting on a couch watching American Idol has formed and shaped our bodies into something else, something less than flexible.  You can bet this affects how we play erotically.

Do you remember what it was like as a young boy on a sunny summer morning, how excited you felt to go outside and play?  Do you recall the feeling of how anything could happen, that sense of wonder and discovery?   Growing up was loud and joyous, a time to see how big each of us could be in the world.  Sensory Energetics teaches men how to remember to make noise, to groan, to yell, and to take up space again in their lives like they once did as children on the playground.  I train students to open their jaws and let in life and to breathe.  I want the breath to inform the belly; to breathe in life and have the body follow that movement.

I wonder if men fear descension because of the link to devolution (versus evolution), as if dropping down would take us further from our truth, that knowing we’ve sought for ages?  Yet how can we exist without our bodies?  As small, curious children, we only experience life through our senses, the sharp immediacy of a hot oven or the tickley texture of a fuzzy caterpillar, not having the developed cognitive skills to think about something.  This, I feel, is where the ultimate truth lies, in the grounded sensations of our childlike curiosity, to experience our lives and not think about them.  This, then, becomes the meaning of life while the truth, inherent in our bodies is an end in itself.  No question.