In this workshop, we will explore the dynamics of the body as a living being including our instinctual and animal-like nature. We can describe this aspect of us as the Bodymind, a sentience that is not mental, or based solely on the brain but rather one that resides in our entire body and all our cells.

The chinese call this part of us the “Po”, or “animal soul” which is Earth-bound and which is attached to our Body. It gives us our basic raw physical vitality as well as our primitive drives and survival instinct. Through it we can connect to the Earth and Nature. Its simplicity can give us that “here and now” perception that allows us to be ourselves and let go of mental or ego preoccupations.

Consider young infants as being primarily in their Po and that early life experience being “the perception of existence from a Po perspective that is pre-verbal and pre-egoic”.

Metal also resonates with the issue of loss and hence the emotion of grief and sadness and the pain of our Bodymind needs not being met.

During this module, the aim will be to harness the Metal reality of the young inner child to remind us of who we are in this basic natural state of being. We will also look at the issues that arise from early life losses and woundings to our Po such as residual grief and emptiness.

In relation to the Reichian ideas, Metal can correspond to the Psychopathic defence structure which also is deemed to be the outcome of loss and the betrayal of the child’s needs and innocence by the primary carers/parents. Once that trust is lost we rely on our ego to dominate or manipulate our environment for our safety and to get our needs fulfilled. The extreme outcome of this way of being is psychopathy but we all share to some degree this propensity to control our life and not be vulnerable.

So paradoxically, in order to trust Spirit and the cosmos, first we need to heal the wound to our Po and the resulting “Mask” we erect to protect us. This facade of control, power or aloofness however divorces us from our primal feelings, our essential humanity, and our ground.

Hence this workshop is also structured in a way to help release us from such armoured structures which our ego erected, and so enable us to reconnect with our Bodymind’s truth and capacity to be authentic and real.