About Stanley Keleman

Stanley Keleman has been practicing and developing somatic therapy for over thirty-five years and is a pioneer in his study of the body and its connection to the sexual, emotional, psychological and imaginative aspects of human experience. Through his writings and practice, he has developed a methodology and conceptual framework for the life of the body.

Keleman maintains a private practice for individuals September through June and has ongoing groups intended for those who have had experience at the Center and who wish to deepen this experience.

For information about private appointments, seminars, lectures, or consultation, call (510) 845-8373, or FAX (510) 841-3884

The Center for Energetic Studies, Formative Psychology, under the direction of Stanley Keleman, offers personal and professional education through workshops, classes and private sessions.

The Center is concerned with the act of daily living and with body process as the basis for how individuals form both themselves and their worlds. This approach honors the universal process that animates us all while seeking to nurture and mature a personal and social self.

Somatic emotional education uses individual experience, emotions, states of feeling, action patterns, insights and images to discover how life has been shaped and what is seeking to emerge.

The key issue is how we use ourselves; learning the language of how viscera and brain use muscle to create a personal skill for managing one's life, in one's own way, with vitality and emotional truthfulness.

Center Press2045 Francisco StreetBerkeley, California 94709

510-845-8373510-841-3884-Fax

center@centerpress.com

The Center For Energetic Studies2045 Francisco StreetBerkeley, California 94709

510-845-8373510-841-3884-Fax

center@centerpress.com

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A NEW VISION FOR SOMATIC PSYCHOLOGY:Stanley Keleman's Formative Approach

Formative psychology is based in the evolutionary process in which life continually forms the next series of shapes, from birth through maturity to old age. At conception each person is given a biological and emotional inheritance, but it is through voluntary effort that a human fulfills the potential for forming a personal life. Form gives rise to feeling. When individual identity is grounded in somatic reality, we can say: I know who I am by how I experience myself.

Formative psychology gives a philosophy and method of how to work with our life. We learn to regenerate our emotional and instinctual vitality, to inhabit our body, and to incorporate our excitement and emotional aliveness. The goal of formative practice is to use daily life to practice being present and to create an adult self and reality. I proceed from the premise that we are each conceived as an adult and that we grow the adults we are meant to be.

All of us are in a continual process of forming, stabilizing, and reforming our adult reality. This process of forming and reforming is a continuous extension and contraction of tissue motility, a reflex that is an unbroken chain through our life. Pulsation is an essential expression of our hormonal and emotional life. The pulse process, like the heartbeat, is crucial in the maintaining our body shape and development. A continuous pulse organizes cycles of arousal. When pulsation is inhibited or overstimulated, our somatic, emotional and mental life also changes.

In the practice of forming, we work with the pulsation patterns of the soma and restore the bodys natural rhythm and vitality. The areas of voluntary management in the brain are used and undergo growth.

There is a methodology to formative psychology that I call the Bodying Practice. The Bodying Practice engages the voluntary part of the brain to work with the reflex, nonvolitional somatic functions. The brain can suggest patterns of behavior as well as form an image of its own body to have a relationship with itself. Of first importance is to be bodied, to form ones body in living the stages of our somatic existence.

The Bodying Practice is inaugurated by intensifying whatever we recognize as our present somatic-emotional stance. This intensifying is meant to magnify the pattern of our way of being present along with its images, memories, and thoughts. We can then disorganize what we have voluntarily done and in so doing learn how we can have some say over what we do. This helps bring into relief the reflex or unknown structures that have been inaccessible to us. It is similar to throwing a pebbled into the water and initiating rings of response. In this sequence, we become familiar with how we organize our actions and how we can use our brains to affect our responses and feelings. The work of the exercises is to form an adult soma and brain, and an adult emotionality in social relationships.

The work is not only meant to be intimate with past structures and how to disorganize them, but it is also about having a tool for present and future situations.

The exercises are done slowly in frame-by-frame fashion to discover ones own speed and to compensate for somatic anesthesia---to become intimate with the unforming and forming sensation of the pulse pattern.

To work somatically in this way is to bring about a shift in recognition and to experience the way we organize to be present, to solve problems and to try on

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the new shapes of expression. It also organizes a dialogue between body and brain which shifts the patterns of meaning and order. We begin to live our destiny, our somatic inheritance. We begin to empower ourselves in forming our adult and its relationships.

Formative Methodology: The Bodying Practice

Few people realize that their somatic-emotional presence is a complex organizing that is usually unconscious. The formative exercise method is designed to bring into relief and vivify the organizing and disorganizing sequence of somatic-emotional shapes.

The Bodying Practice is based on the expansion-contraction pulsatory reflex and has five steps:

1. What is our somatic situation? Organize the muscular pattern of our organization

2. Intensify the pattern to make vivid the emotional attitude

3. Undo the intensified emotional-muscular attitude.

4. Pause. Contain the pulsatory response

5. Reorganization of new patternsSteps two and three, done voluntarily, make it possible to influence unconscious behavior. As we practice increasing and decreasing the intensity of muscular emotional shape, we generate specific sensations and feelings. This voluntary practice grows the cortical function to influence reflex responses, making them personal. This dialogue of body and brain grows our personal somatic adult.

The Bodying Practice is a powerful tool to help reorganize past somatic traumas and to help form somatic solutions to problems. However, its most urgent purpose is continue, extend, and reorganize experience to grow a personal somatic identity. For example, it can help identify and then reorganize constraint around the heart allowing a flood of blood warmth that might enable us to love again. It may also use its warmth to personalize a love relationship and deepen bonds.

To be able to influence the intensity of how we respond is no small thing. There is no stereotyped way to do the exercises, no need to perform. What is important is how you learn from doing. I recommend doing the exercises with a slow rhythmic pace. This helps freeze-frame a phase, to hold the form so as to savor the shift in shape and feeling. This is an important experience in self-regulation and identity.

The work is to link the deep pulse process between form and expression so as to deepen the instinctual and personal somatic adult self. The exercises are ways to help us know our somatic-emotional identity and, if we wish, to change our state, to be here differently. This is how problems are truly resolved. The work, then, is a process that aids in establishing a basic somatic adult self that gives us a truer sense of our identity, a somatic sanity and reality.

The Bodying Practice stresses daily life as the practice of forming. bodying the adult self. It is a process of existence, a pulsatory continuum. It invokes a reflex of expanding, gathering, disassembling, regathering, reorganizing, growing, and forming.

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The urge to form is a basic appetite that is the generator of optimism, hope, and charity. The ability to commit to this process, using the brains cortex, gives our life a reference for living and generates satisfaction.

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THE FORMATIVE METHOD: How We Voluntarily Influence Being Present in the World

Formative Philosophy

Anatomic structure is behavior. Formative philosophy states that there are two ways the body manages its behavioral process. One is inherited, the pulsatory, neural, and muscular patterns we are born with; the other is voluntary effort. Both arise from the cells and are a natural body process. Inherited behavioral patterns are autonomous and automatic. They require no voluntary effort. Voluntary behavior arises from the inherited, nonvolitional and is localized in the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex has the ability to voluntarily influence behavior, creating new connections and new patterns. These new behaviors becomes anatomic and supplement inherited behavior. Both of these behaviors, the inherited and the voluntary, are experiences of self-knowing.

The soma grows an adult by organizing a series of shapes over time. There is a sequence in this series of shapes. They begin as unformed, motile shapes; then they become diffuse and porous. Finally, they become more formed and stable, rigid or dense shapes.

This sequence of developmental shapes can be influenced by gradients of voluntary effort. With voluntary effort, the cortex can manage surges of motility, the osmotic diffusion of porosity, rigid firmness, and compacted shapes. The unformed, unstable and the stabilizing continuum of shapes takes place between the body and its cortex and the world.

Adults who learn to influence their behavioral process develop an ability to govern their lives and their transitions. Adults who grow their voluntary function are able to embody new experiences and actions. They develop a variety of ways to be present in the world. Discrete voluntary acts make complexity from simplicity and transform and deepen both our anatomic and our experiential reality. Voluntarily formed behavior organizes anatomic structure—-a living memory that is a center of acting and knowing.

The forming of a personal anatomic structure requires persistent voluntary effort. Voluntary effort extended over time grows anatomic connections that form relationships between the body and its cortex. It is a somatic function that can alter and create an anatomical structure.

Voluntary effort is the driving force in the development of a personal life. It has consequences for influencing emotions, satisfaction, relationships, and personal destiny and awareness.

Anatomic Memories

An anatomic structure is a remembered behavior. Remembered behavior is ready to be used, since it has already gone through the motile stage and the diffuse and porous stage. A remembered behavior may be recognized as anxiety, yielding,

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stiffening, or hunkering down.

There are four patterns of remembered behavior: Two are inherited, one is unprogrammed and the last is volitionally formed. The first inherited pattern of remembered behavior is the organization of an organism, its architecture and its movements of expansion and contraction. The second inherited pattern of remembered behavior is the patterns of electrical excitatory pulses, which resonate and form bonds with other cells, like birds chirping together. The next pattern is the experiences that accompany the developmental process. Then there are the anatomic behaviors formed by voluntary effort. Voluntary effort influences inherited and developmental behavior.

The Formative Method

The method of formative psychology regenerates our emotional and instinctual vitality. It suggests ways to inhabit our body and to resist shrinking from our excitement and emotional aliveness. Emphasis is on daily life as the practice of being present as an adult somatic self.

Each conception represents a unique combination of tissue types with a particular organizational process. The endomorph, a pear-shaped soma with big lungs and intestines, gathers and incorporates. The square-shaped, muscular mesomorph likes to act and confront. The long-bodied ectomorph has a large sensory area for gathering information and is hyperactive and alert. These body types give an orientation to the organism’s experiences and toward others---to incorporate, to confront, to be alert and motile. How we do the exercises, and the responses we have to them, are related to the type we are. We can do them and respond in an endo or meso or ecto way. We can misjudge our responses or be critical of them.

There is a general organizing process that forms our somatic reality. This organizing process is essential in establishing a relationship to ourself. It has several phases and stages. Four stages, on a continuum, are tissue responses: swollen, porous, rigid, and dense. These stages affect how our soma also has a shape. We can be a mesomorph that is swollen or porous, rigid or dense. Our bodies can be inflated, with the membrane stretched, or the membrane can be porous, rigid, or compact. These states influence our organizing process. It is important to know that our inherited vitality and desires, our arousal and emotional and social response patterns, can be modified or exaggerated, individuated and personalized. We can do the exercises and respond in a swollen, porous, or rigid way. The brain is able to influence its somatic state and compensate.

Pulsation is an essential expression of our emotional life. The exercises influence and extend the motility and pulsation of our tissues which in turn organize cycles of arousal. When pulsation is inhibited or over stimulated, our shape also changes. The organizing pulse, when interrupted or over aroused, disturbs the bodying process. The methodology of formative psychology engages the volitional part of the brain to work with the nonvolitional tides of excitatory pulsation, desire, and feeling.

The exercise method is inaugurated when (1) we recognize the pattern of our present somatic-emotional stance, an ectomorphic, alert state.( 2) we intensify our pattern of somatic presence and give ourselves more definition, a mesomorphic function. We magnify the pattern of action, and the images, memories, and thoughts that accompany it. (3) we disorganize the muscular pattern that has been organized. This is also a mesomorphic function. These three steps bring into relief unknown somatic-emotional structures and their rings of response. Step two organizes rigidity and density, while step three organizes porosity and swollenness. (4) In this step, we contain the swelling of pulsation,

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excitement or image made available from step three. This is an endomorphic, porous shape. (5) This step is new form, new behavior. It is a reorganization for a new somatic adult reality.

Somatic work organizes a dialogue between body and brain which shifts the pattern of meaning and order. We begin to live our destiny, our somatic emotional-inheritance. We begin to empower ourselves in forming our adult and its relationships. In this way we recognize and experience the body we have, the body we live, and the possibility of the soma we can be.

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September 11: A Crisis of Transformation

America is in a crisis of transformation. The planes imploding into the twin towers catalyzed a process of change. Alarm is now our collective situation and it is unclear how long the cellular shock will last.

If there is a threat to our somatic integrity, we are challenged to respond. Alarm acts as an excitatory electrical storm, and when it floods the organism, the body feel in danger of being overwhelmed. There is a threat of impending disorganization. Excitement, with no object for action, leads to panic and then depression.

Crisis can bring about a loss of somatic contact with ourselves and our values. There is a loss of an orderly sense of being in the world. We become exceedingly alert and develop a continual attitude of investigation. For some, the somatic-emotional response to this heightened investigatory stance is avoidance or passivity and collapse. In others, the anticipatory dread of being overwhelmed causes an immediate urge to act.

The pattern of alarm can be managed somatically by modifying the organization of alarm, hyperalertness, avoidance and collapse. Formative work with alarm starts with the external muscular patterns of vigilance or helplessness. The internal somatic attitude is reached by making minimal alterations to the external layers. Gradually there is an internal shift in body shape and orientation.

Tragedy carries many messages. One of them is a respect for the holiness of the individual, an individual grounded in ordinary daily life.

For further information see two books by Stanley Keleman: Patterns of Distress and Emotional Anatomy .

Dreams and the Body

by Stanley Keleman

Working somatically with people reveals the interconnection of dream and embodiment. Dreams are important because they are direct statements of our deep somatic reality and they demand attention from the awake brain to continue the body's emotional growth. For me, they are connected to the stages of our bodied life.

I became interested in somatic work and dreams when I began to notice a relationship between working

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physically and an increase in my dreaming life. I noticed a similar relationship with clients and their dreams. For example, working with assertion, increasing feeling in the legs, or having a sense of one's body disassociated from feelings easily brought dreams of no support, of falling, or of striding confidently. How the body dreams itself is a way the therapy can take direction. Confronting a change in age, having a different body, being someone else could evoke working with being softer or more assertive.

Dreaming presents us with how the somatic self is rehearsing and getting ready to appear. Dreams are the soma's interiority seeking embodiment, our inside reality using the language of society embedded in non-societal time and space. The underformed and undersomatized body has a hunger for more body and it announces this in the dream. To work somatically with a dream is to feel the characters in the dream as desires or emotions seeking to be embodied in the awake reality.

Jorge Borges, the Argentinean writer, tells a story about a man who wished to have a son. The man began his creation by dreaming him part by part over a period of many nights. When he was finished, he prayed to the god of fire to animate the son he had dreamed. The story ends when the dreamer discovers that he, like his creation, is also a creation of some dreamer.

Borges' tale offers insight into the role of dreams in the body's image-making process. Dreams make images and sequence them in a narrative form. The dream process connects the body we are with the one we are becoming. Dreams are part of the body's way of maintaining the ongoing relationship between the inherited body and its deep brained and the personal body of the cortex of the new brain. Dreams, then, are a part of the reality of the life of the body.

Dreams display what is becoming but not yet fully realized. As the body grows and farms its somatic identity, it speaks to itself in many languages. One is the dream. The body as process is always imaging and dreaming of its next shape and how to incarnate. Borges, the dreamer, represents all of us dreaming of the body we are and the body we will be.

His story also tells us about inner experience, how dream and awake states are two sides of the bodying process. Dreaming, and our ability to access dreaming, demonstrates the relationship we have to ourselves. Thus we learn about both the difference and similarity of the night self and the day self, how desire and image are linked.

There is a continuity between body process and dream image. The unconscious body appeals to the cortex for its images of itself. The awake brain appeals to its own body to animate its images. Borges' dreamer, who wants a companion, writes not only about a literal offspring but an inner brother/son. His theme parallels both the Christian story of resurrection-God sends his son-and the Golem story of the Hebrews, the making of a human-like creature. The theme of self-generation of oneself from oneself also is part of complexity theory, the most recent thinking about evolution.

These stories share a common theme the relationship between the brain's emotional and reflex centers and the more awake and volitional cortex. The brain makes an image of the body and then asks the body to animate it. Borges' story deepens the theme of human participation in the formation of the shapes of our existence from youth to full adulthood to maturity and then old age.

We can learn from dreams because we can reorganize meaning and association as well as influence somatic-emotional structure. Dreams have an emotional matrix that dream characters, or objects, are embedded in. Although we try to decode dream images and representations, we do not learn to experience them as an inner environment and to see them as expressions of a bodily state. Dreams are part of the mystery of somatic wisdom, the process of the soma's becoming self-aware, of having a subjectivity. As the body grows its subjectivity, the cortex forms images and motoric expressions to match. As the body dreams, it uses the soma's cortical imaging, or futurizing, to influence its way to be present.

Two aspects of our body' s process, the inherited and the socially experienced, organize and form an intermediate subjective realm. This complex relationship forms a life shape of its own, influencing the outside and the inside shape. Our bodied life is its own subject, and the experiencing of its experience makes it a personal experience. Our body is the subject of its own living, the source and reference for living. The body as a process has an essential relationship with itself. Dream is being intimate with

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oneself.

Dream images are snapshots of the unbroken, but non-linear, continuum of body shapes, expressions, feelings, and gestures. The inherited body's deep brain continually tattoos its image on the brain's receptive and dynamic cortex. The brain functions like its close relative, the skin, in that it, too, receives and absorbs the body's patterns.

The body's pulses, of which the dream is one, deepen the relationship of the body to itself by osmosis and volitional influences, thus shaping personal identity.

The dream is somatic activity, speaking about itself as it prepares for the awake world. The instinctual body and personal, social somatic shapes talk to each other. Some people dream of the wild man or woman even as they live as proper social citizen. Each self influences the midbrain the cortex in an inner dialogue. The body is an excitable, contractile continuum that is responsive and able to shift its shape Dreams, too, are like the heart, continually shifting shape, a pulsation from stable to less stable, and back to stable again. These cellular pulses deepen the range of tissue metabolism and emotional expression. The dream, which is organized from the pulsation of the body, helps give the soma a personal structure and sense of presence.

The method of working with a dream is to connect it more fully to its own source, the body. In this approach, the focus is on somatic experience rather than meaning and interpretation. Dreams are about organizing how we use our bodies to be in the world and how we inhabit the body we live. We use dreams to grow a somatic reality and a complex subjectivity that embraces multiple realities.

In working with the dream somatically, I ask people to tell their dreams forward and backward in order to experience a non-linear reality. By going back and forth between different somatic shapes in a slow and controlled way, we engage the cortex and brainstem muscle patterns. We begin to be intimate with how we experience the given body and body images in the brain. This approach generates feelings and memories associated with the growth of our personal body.

Working with the dream, slowing down its sequences and freeze-framing the characters-the body's expressions and gestures-vivifies feeling and imagination. Telling the dream forward and backward intensifies the characters and establishes the relationship of the different bodies. The relationship aspect of our interior and exterior somatic shapes brings a subjective aspect to our bodily life.

The somatic work with the dream brings the process of bodying into the daily world of work, love, and relationships.

The practical application of this practice has five stepsStep 1: Recollecting the dream, in language and in the experiences of body or brain.

Step 2: Intensifying the somatic characters of the dream, making their structure and expressions more manifest by a process of neuromuscular intensity and differentiation.

Step 3: Using the cortical and volitional function to influence the disassembling of the characters' somatic structure. Steps 2 and 3 provide an experience central to all somatic processes, to organize and disorganize sequences of behavior.

Step 4: The soma learns to contain what has been made available from dreaming, the steady flux of feelings and form that reassemble, that begin to incubate a subjectivity.

Step 5: We re-body, give form to feeling, embody our somatic and personal identity.

Dreams give a subjectivity to our soma's existence. Working somatically gives the soma both a narrative and a process by which it grows its own destiny: to be born, to be present, to die. The significance of this realization mirrors our conception of the immortal.

The Organizing Process

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Embodying Experience Forming a Personal Lifeby Stanley Keleman

"Every activity involves movement, and every movement, however gross or subtle, has an organizing process. This organizing process is based on the biological law that muscles contract and that contraction is followed by elongation.

Muscle action has a tidal function. Muscle elongates and contracts; it expands and shrinks. This rhythm of expansion can be either small or all-encompassing, a micro-tide or a macro-tide of different muscles states called tonus. In the continuum of muscular movement, there is sometimes more tension, sometimes less.

The tide alters but never stops. All activity, even inhibition, involves this organizing process of movement. An understanding of the organizing process is essential in learning how to do things differently because the muscle tonus can be altered by the neural centers of the synaptic junction of the spinal cord, or through higher brain synaptic junctions.

All sensations, all emotions, all thoughts are, in fact, organized patterns of motion. By altering basic muscular pulsatory waves, people manipulate their emotions or develop physical stress patterns."

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The Body We Are

by Stanley Keleman

We are destined to live an embodied life. This means that we grow from small to big and change our somatic shape half a dozen times in one life. Our fate, when uninterrupted, presents a parade of distinct bodies from embryo to child and from child to adult, mature, older and aged.

We are born to this task of bodying the many selves of our lifetime. Our destined shapes are always with us as we continue in the process of forming the layers of our current

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and future selves. The child shape waits just as our adolescent, adult, mature and aged shapes wait in the wings to take their turn at being bodied. These bodies, as our experience shapes them, form the configuration of a universal body and our personal identity.

The body is a living, creative process. It is not merely an object of consciousness, nor is it the material side of spirit. It is not a lump of flesh we carry around or something from which we must try to escape. In the most basic sense we are our bodies, and more, that our bodies are an expression in microcosm of the creative organizing principle of the universe. Our life is continually forming and reforming, and from birth to death the shapes of our fate present themselves to be lived. The appearance of each new shape is another incarnation.

We are not just waiting to die; we are living our selves. Each of our is a distinct self, and has its special feeling, needs, images, actions, and a consequent world view. Throughout our lives we form bodies appropriate to the age we are. A somatic-emotional approach offers a way to work with the feelings and challenges of each emerging shape. Somatic work begins with discovering our individual patterns of self use and the emotional body states that give us a primary reality.

With this self knowledge, we learn to grow an interior presence, to be bounded in ourselves and to sustain our process in relationship to others. Growing ourselves, then, is not a state of mind but a state of the somatic entity.

Depression and PanicAn Interview with Stanley KelemanInterviewed by Terrence McClure

"The purpose of the exercises is to be able to have an influence on your behavior. In this particular instance, we're talking about depressive and panic behavior. Your brain influences your body and your emotional life by shifting its attitudes. Attitudes are an emotional and physical shape. This is partly the neurophysiology of emotional behavior. The exercises continue this dialog between brain and the muscular attitude with the emphasis on managing depression and panic."

(From the interview)

Introduction

Depression and panic are words that are used more and more in conversations these days. "I've been clinically depressed." "I've been waking up panicked lately." "I had another panic attack." A poet recently observed of this phenomenon that "one has the sense...a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape".

After researching material on depression and panic, interviewing several psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists, I came upon the work of Stanley Keleman. He is a formative psychologist, who, over thirty years has developed a specific and aesthetic language of the body. Hence, the name of this language, 'somatic

His somatic psychology borrows very little from others. You cannot compare it to Jung or Freud, for example. But, there are some fingers pointing toward Keleman's work from those pioneers: from Freud, "anatomy is destiny", and from Jung, "if you're going to have an institute, make it as disorganized "

Keleman understands anatomy as behavior and behavior as anatomy. He uses the words 'organize' and 'disorganize' when leading a client to and from their situation. He

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might ask, "what layer do you experience that in?" referring to the skin/nervous system, muscular system, or soft organs. And where Freud and Jung might finally have agreed on something, Keleman refers to the 'somatic imagination': images and dreams which mirror processes in the always forming

It turns out that somatic psychology has a lot to say about depression and panic. Quoting from his last interview in Yoga Journal, Keleman says, "a major element in my work remains to develop ways to help people deal with the abiding helplessness of the human condition. Anguish comes about from a state of being helpless about helplessness. Once we grasp the notion that life organizes shape, we can choose to identify with the shaper or the shape". In this interview, Keleman focuses on the shapes of depression and panic.

Interview

I'm very interested in how your 'somatic-emotional' practice exercises work to help the depressive and panicked character. But first, how do you as a somatic educator, define depression?

Depression is an identity. It is a way of being in the world. We're talking about depression as a way of using yourself that results in a pattern of behavior that you, in one way or another, live with or struggle to live with. It becomes a lifestyle.

This is a lifestyle and not a short term reaction

There needs to be a distinction between the depressive character vs. the person who is suffering from some situational form of depression: a person who has had a severe loss and has retreated, has not necessarily withdrawn from life. A person who has retreated because of a loss is not really in a depressive state, although we call it a depressive state. They're in a pause place in dealing with their losses, trying to mend the wound of a torn form of relationship.

That has to be differentiated from the person who uses depressive organization as an identity and as a way of being in the world: complaining, negating, the disruption of the promise of the future, keeping oneself deliberately smaller or shrunken as a personality organization. This is not simply a reaction formation.

The opening lines to 'Annie Hall' demonstrates that complaining and negating part as a way of being in the world. It goes: "...two old ladies are at a resort in the catskills. One says, 'this food is terrible', and the other says, 'and in such small portions'." Then the narrator says, "that's basically how I feel about life."

That's the attitude of people who have the philosophy: "I'm a skeptic" or"I'm a cynic", who are really hiding a depressive attitude toward life. It is a holding back and taking smaller portions.

How is a depressive character using themselves that leads to all this and why would they do that?

You can understand why they do that by understanding this: depression is also the psychology of being underwhelmed and panic the psychology of being overwhelmed. They're in relationship to each other. It's a continuum. On one end there is extreme underwhelming depression, on the other side there is extreme overwhelming panic, and in between you have the degrees. All these degrees and extremes are body shapes. Somatic shapes. Each shape determines your experience of depression and panic.

A person begins using themselves by holding a little, waiting, holding more, stiffening, squeezing, compressing, then compacting, until they are protected from being too overwhelmed or panicked. Any kind of freezing up begins to set the stage for depression

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which starts to go the other way on the continuum. You could say that a person who was startled and freezes themselves in response to being too overwhelmed is already in the outer extreme of depressiveness. They are now underwhelmed. And this is their use. This is the pattern: compression and compaction.

So, this use has a use. It can be a response to being overwhelmed and panicked. What is panic in somatic education?

The first response to any stress or challenge is always arousal, to be aroused. To be aroused means more excitement, more activity. If arousal is not containable, if arousal is of such intensity that boundaries are incapable of organizing what's available to itself, we will be overwhelmed, we will move toward unbounding liquefaction panic. Panic is down the road. Panic is a situation where there is not enough form. There's too much excitation.

When there's too much excitation, there is no form. Depression is an attempt to squelch and manage the unformed excitation. Performers are a good example of this. Kurt Cobain comes to mind. He moved toward isolation and hibernation, because of constant overarousal. Then was left alone.

When you begin to disorganize some of the somatic aspects of depression, the danger is they are now unformed and they panic. Leaving the extreme of one pulse. Depression has a function and you have to come to terms with what this function is. Just as much as to some degree panic and anxiety have a function.

This seems like a dilemma to me. One side is panic and fear, the other side depression and agony, neither one desirable, but both needed to regulate each other. Then to add insult to injury, it's your identity.

It is. It's one of the central dilemmas of dealing with a depressive. They are caught in the conflict between their fear of a liquidity: of disorganizing, unbounding, being overaroused, leaking out, and their fear of congealing and compressing into one unchanging despairing lump. So, they get locked in the place where they're afraid to be responsive, and they hold onto their unresponsiveness.

One of the goals in somatic education is to help a person form themselves. But, also, to help a person re-experience and reuse their basic experiences of how they sustain their excitement, and how to think about a problem and how to plan an action with this lifestyle. You are using all those functions and not just changing or trying to get at a memory or hurt or reframing a pattern of injury or insult.

You're not just lifting the veil of depression.

If you just lift the veil of depression, using whatever method, there is no blueprint for how to exist in a new form. Our assumption is that if you lift repression or if you get them to talk about the feelings and encounters that depress them, that there is a ready made form that will pop up like a jack-in-the box and say, "here I am, no longer depressed, and capable of functioning. ".

This is an illusion to say the least. Compression, compaction and depression in, inhibits the way we use ourselves in social and personal situations. This means there is kind of a disuse atrophy underneath. Something is not being exercised.

This reminds me a little of Awakenings and Oliver Sacks. Something was lifted, and these people were left with old memories and atrophy, then went right back where they came from.

The situation Oliver Sacks ran into a long-term encephalitis disease where people were in a coma, was a short-term arousal and a retreat into even a worse collapse.

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I'd like to get something out of the way, because it's in the air everywhere. You have clients who have tried Prozac at one time or another, and I only want to bring it up here because I think what you say about it relates to an essentialingredient in your work.

I have a few people who are taking Prozac. They talk about their mood shifts, then you watch the content and the application of the insights. It's as if they went to an interesting movie. The urgency to have to rebody yourself is gone. What you get, since the urgency is gone, is pleasure in insight or being able to communicate. They're happy with that. Nothing has to reorganize itself. They feel better. They say there's a shift in their mood. "I'm not well, but it makes it tolerable." And this is the key sentence: to keep doing the things that they've been doing well, not to reorganize and relearn. I don't deny there are times that you need it. I only question what its long-term effects are.

It's true there are illnesses that are biochemically induced. There are dopamine and serotonin based illnesses. What people leave out is that in a common response to a situation, like, having to control yourself when someone is shouting at you, you begin to shrink and hold yourself back. The body sends the brain two signals: compact, which stops the dopamine or serotonin, and, send some epinephrine to to be charged and excited. So this muscular attitude starts stiffening even more to try to stop from being overwhelmed by it's own epinephrine. This finally depletes the chemical that keeps us alert and aroused and you get exhausted and depressed. So, the chemical disturbance is not only caused on the inside by a mess up in the brain physiology, it's also a signal from the muscular attitude in response to a situation.

My interest is in one of your therapeutic modalities. You refer to it as the 'five steps, or the 'how exercise', or 'the bodying practice' or 'a somatic-emotional practice' or simple as 'a practice'. How does this practice or principle relate to depression and panic?

The purpose of the exercises is to be able to have an influence on your behavior. In this particular instance, we're talking about depressive and panic behavior. Your brain influences your body and your emotional life by shifting its attitudes. Attitudes are an emotional and physical shape. This is partly the neurophysiology of emotional behavior. The exercises continue this dialog between brain and the muscular attitude with the emphasis on managing depression and panic.

I'll relate a depressed form to five steps. In this person, everything is moving in, compressing and compacting. They are squeezing and stiffening themselves, maybe as a defense against be overwhelmed. They are overformed with density. To identify and know what's happening and what you're doing is the first step. I've just given it to you. Then step two is to do that more. Compress yourself a little more. You've now volitionally created an additional part of the larger pattern, on purpose. Step three, is to do what you just did slightly less, then less and less. Then, in step four, you merely wait. Incubate. And step five is finding out what you learned and how that may have affect your daily life.

The small window you've created, taking the same depressive pattern you have and doing that more, then undoing it, feeds back to the brain. And it tells the brain, "I did this much, and I undid what I did. I managed myself." This eventually begins to have an effect on the more global pattern in the brain. Feeling better is not the goal. Self-management is. Particularly with the extremes.

What do you usually expect to witness when you're working with someone in this way?

When you ask someone to undo, by doing it more then doing it less, you have stepped into how a person has to reorganize a depressive way of being in the world. And the problem they will run into, as I say over and over, is that their unformed part has no shape. There are no pathways of action. It has to then be reformed. People do not have a structure for relating differently, and this helpless pattern perpetuates the depression.

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When you help someone form themselves, what exactly do you mean?

Finding the appropriate behavioral shape for the situation they're facing. An appropriate behavioral shape to contain the excitement and vitality their life can generate. That means having the neuromuscular emotional coordination to organize new expression and gesture in relationship.

What exactly is the danger of disorganizing someone's depressive identity?

When you begin to work with someone to deal with the depressive organization, the specific danger is disorganization of some of the density and compaction to the person of too much stimulation and arousal. They will respond to the fear of being washed away by increasing their density. So, it becomes imperative to understand that you as a therapist do not need the approval of the patient. They tell you that they feel better and you feel justified in continuing in your act. You need to accept the misery or the complaining. The complaints serve the function of self expression and maintenance of arousal which will not wash them away.

So, you see the importance in the exercise: do it more, do it less. The idea of doing it less is to be able to turn the rheostat just enough so that the light shed is the appropriate light and not a big jump. Because everytime you make a big jump you run the risk of a depressive response. You have to agree that less is more and that compacting is a personality trait, a way of organizing being in the world. How to come to terms in forming that, rather than trying to feel free of the way you have organized living is managing your basic processes.

When using the somatic practice, how does one manage panic, when there is no form to begin with? I mean, it's unformed excitation, right? So, do you excite yourself more, then less, etc.?

You'd strategically rigidify yourself to give yourself an emotional shape. You'd purposefully give yourself a firmer, manageable body form that doesn't compact, which would also take a little edge off the panic. You are choosing a form as a way to undo a degree of panic and not liquefy and spill in every direction.

Could too much rigidity anesthetize you?

Too much can be numbing, in which nothing can be aroused. That's why you learn the nuances of these forms in your situation. It's also helpful to know that sometimes you do need to panic. It's there. And for good reason.

It's interesting to me that a lot of people when first taking antidepressants report being agitated, nervous, panicky, and sometimes fragmented. The depression may be gone, but now they're left with panic. I would say that they would now be on the unformed part of your continuum. Having less solidity and body. Then, in this panic, these same people are often given a tranquilizer to deal with this terror. That tranquilizer gives them more body on your continuum; less fragmented. It's just interesting to see that the biochemical management, or juggle, has the same continuum. The major thing that is missing is the development of that persons volition, which your education seems to offer.

Also, the internal environment changes on an antidepressant. A different oil in the car. A different grade of gas. But, the structure may not be built for this. The structure really hasn't changed. The car itself hasn't changed. This person will have great insights, probably communicate well, but doesn't know how to organize a different behavior in a profound enough way.

I need to be careful here but, my general impression is that most pscyopharmacologists

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do not know exactly how their stuff works. That's okay. They seem to have a general idea. They know it ends up in the brain. And the brain is the organ they're trying to fiddle with. How do your five steps relate to and effect the brain of a depressive?

We are talking about reforming and rebuilding the brain. One of the central ingredients is to mobilize the part of the brain that emphasizes hibernation and inhibition. It's almost as if the receptor end and the motor end are squeezed out and the synaptic junction or middle portion is compacted and overactive. In that sense, the primary ingredient is to resurrect the flow of traffic in the reticular activating system. We're looking at the central brainstem - midbrain mechanisms that we want to uncompact and have a cortical relationship.

Let's say a person becomes familiar with their somatic forms during depression and panic episodes. Their use. How have they benefited?

Eventually, they learn how not to be so compacted and overformed during depression. The exercise of managing the compactness helps. Which means they are more responsive. During times of panic, they eventually learn to give themselves an appropriate form, i.e., a container or channel for expression that can act with that excitement. And maybe it's simply vacuuming or running.

That reminds me of Woody Allen when he says, "I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys." Probably a worse case scenario of inappropriate form for the situation.

Right!

The five steps are obviously not some sweet antidote. It doesn't seem like quick time, either. Nonetheless, I know that depressives, panickers and everyone all along the continuum want to feel better sooner than later and take the edge off. And I can even hear some saying, "instant gratification takes too long". To this attitude and urgency what do you say?

The 'five step practice' doesn't 'get rid of'. It develops the ability to 'live with' and reorganize. It develops your volition. It gives you an appropriate form for your situation. And that's a completely different story.back to top

Abridged Journal kept by client suffering from depression who practices the exercises

The somatic emotional exercise that has helped me the most, I know as a pressuring exercise. It amplifies and then lessens what's going on in myself during panic or depression. I began doing the exercise every day in the morning three years ago, but now, I do it informally wherever and whenever. I started out doing obvious movements, but now the pressuring movements are micro. Nobody would know I'm doing them even looking straight at me. But, inside, the movements seem quite dramatic and large.

In one of my forms of depression, I become frozen stiff, my concentration is fragmented: I pace, pick up the telephone, and shuffle papers. My panic is there responding to an impending depression and sometimes the other way around. A lot of times, I don't know whether I'm depressed or anxious. It's an awful experience. I've found that I automatically stiffen and depress myself in order to deal with the fragmented concentration. I may not even know that I'm doing it till several days later and wondering what the hell is going on.

When I first started, I discovered that disorganizing the depression led to higher amounts of anxiousness coming through. So, I didn't do it so much. I seem to be able to

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live with a higher threshold of anxiety. The amount of anxiety that used to drive me up the wall doesn't bother me as much.

Here are the steps I do during my own prelude to depression

Step one:I find out what's happening. Usually, I'm stiff on the outside. I'm rigid. A mild terror.

Step two:I make myself a little more rigid. I also ask myself why I would be rigid. May be there for good reason. Maybe something is making me anxious that I can't deal with right now.

Step three: I back off the rigidity I've added, just a little. Then a little more. I usually do several tiny levels of 'rigid'. This sort of digitizes it giving me sort of a sense of management of all these increments.

Step four: Wait. I kind of incubate. There generally are some pulsations. I wonder if I've undone anything besides what I purposefully made. Am I more anxious? Am I more depressed? And if so, so what? And if not, what changed? Was it an old habit?

Step five: What is different? Sometimes I don't like showing my terrified face of panic. Nor do I want to show someone a telling face of 'downness'. But, after running through the steps, sometimes just sitting at my desk, I'm less likely to hide what's going on. I'm spending less energy masking all of it. That's just the way it is. And I can live with it publicly.

The main configuration I always run up against is 'who's on first'? In other words, I can seem depressed, but it's masking lots of anxiety. So, maybe that's good. Or, I can be nuts, and maybe that's like sensing a storm coming on. I always find that when I disassemble one, I'm left with the other, so I've learned to manage both. What is amazing is that I know pretty much how depression and panic are organized in my body. But, it's taken a while. In the beginning, I did several rounds of the steps, to get to know the effect, in short spurts.

Frequently asked questions about the somatic-emotional exercise practice

Can I expect to feel better doing the exercises?

As you shift your emotional shape, you shift your mood. You can expect to open the door to emotional possibilities and a range. We're not looking to feel better but to influence this range of emotional expression.

What do you mean 'manage'?

The goal of the exercises is to manage the incremental shifts from shape to shape which give rise to degrees of depression and panic. If you have determined that pressuring yourself is a particular way that contributes to your depression, by pressuring yourself more then less you will give yourself a sense of managing a small window you have purposefully created.

And why should that be helpful?

The small window you have created - taking the same depressive pattern and doing it more, intensifying it, then doing it less - feeds back to the brain. And it tells the brain, "I did this much and I undid what I did. I managed myself." This eventually begins to have an effect on the more global depressive pattern. Remember, feeling better is not the goal. Self-management is.

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What happens if I feel worse?

You may have participated in the exercises too intensely. You may have contracted yourself with too much vigor, for example. This is a sign that you should do it less. Another reason that you may feel temporarily worse is that you are deanesthetizing yourself to the muscular part of your depressive attitude. Experiencing it increases your awareness of the depressive attitude. This is part of reorienting yourself to how, in fact, you pressure yourself. In a while, undoing it will relieve the feeling of too much spasticity and contracting of the pattern.

How often should I do the exercises?

A general rule of thumb is to do it in very short spurts. To practice doing it for minutes at a time. Then doing it many minutes over a period of time - 8 or 9 times in a day for 2 or 3 minutes at a time. This begins to set up a pattern inside that feels comfortable and finally becomes somewhat automatic in that you just simply function as unpressuring yourself and containing yourself.

Is there an ideal shape?

A lot of people try to say that there is an ideal shape. I say over and over again that there is no ideal shape. There is knowing how you use yourself and there is knowing and recognizing the shape that gives you a sense of comfort.

Why is self management helpful?

Self management - being able to influence yourself - is important because it restores a sense of self potency. It gives the person a recognized and established ability to affect themselves. And this reduces the sense of being a victim to oneself. A part of panic and depression is that one is unable to manage themselves. Being able to effect yourself - do something more and do it less - restores a sense of being able to influence yourself. And this lifts part of the pattern of panic and depression.

How effective are these exercises?

Doing the exercises is a practice. The attempt is to be able to influence your behavior. There are many factors in any situation that afflicts us deeply and there's no accounting for all the possibilities inside an situation. I would say that I have found these exercises very beneficial for helping many people. I wish you luck.

Terrence McClure is a writer and video producer from Berkeley.

Calendar of Programs2005-2006

The Center for Energetic Studies, under the direction of Stanley Keleman, offers personal and professional education through workshops, classes, and private sessions. The Center is concerned with the act of daily living and with body process as the basis for how individuals form both themselves and their worlds.

This approach honors the universal process that animates us all while seeking to nurture and mature a personal and social self. Somatic-emotional education uses individual experience, emotions, action patterns, insights, and images to discover how life has been shaped and what is seeking to emerge. The key issue is how we

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use ourselves; learning the language of how viscera and brain use muscle to create a personal skill for managing one’s life, in one’s own way, with vitality and emotional truthfulness.

Programs by Stanley Keleman throughout the year build on each other and are organized to form a whole; it is recommended that those persons interested in acquiring competence in his somatic approach participate in these courses in their entirety

Stanley Kelemanhas been practicing and developing somatic therapy for over thirty-five years and is a pioneer in his study of the body and its connection to the sexual, emotional, psychological and imaginative aspects of human experience.Through his writings and practice, he has developed a methodology and conceptual framework for the life of the body.He maintains a private practice for individuals September through June and has ongoing groups intended for those who have had experience at the Center and who wish to deepen this experience

Formative Psychology

Life makes shapes. Life is a natural, evolutionary process in which series of shapes are continually forming. These shapes are part of an organizing process that embodies emotions, thoughts, and experiences into structure. This structure, in turn, orders the events of existence.

Each person’s shape is his embodiment in the world. We are the body we inherit, the one that lives us, and a personal body, the one we live and shape through voluntary effort. We are citizens of these two worlds, the inherited and the personal.

Molecules and cells organize into clusters, which further organize as layers, tubes, tunnels, and pouches. These give structure to liquid life and set the stage for embodied human consciousness. Through the act of living, a personal human shape grows, one that is changed by the challenges and stresses of life.

Formative psychology is based in the evolutionary process in which life continually forms the next series of shapes, from birth through maturity to old age. At conception each person is given a biological and emotional inheritance, but it is through voluntary effort that this constitutional given fulfills its potential for forming a personal life. Form gives rise to feeling. The smallest voluntary effort brings forth the existential truth of one’s bodily experience. When individual identity grows from a somatic ground, we can say,“I know who I am by how I experience myself.”

The methodology of formative psychology is voluntary muscular effort. The human cortex makes possible voluntary participation in our lives and gives the ability to make variations in muscular patterns. With voluntary effort, we can increase and decrease muscular intensity. The purpose is to generate and form emotional excitatory responses and to know how to receive, contain, and shape them. The ability to influence inherited behaviors, to differentiate them, is to participate with the forces of creation.

It is a gift of life to give shape to our existence. Making shape is learned with practice over time. This forming practice proceeds from the simple to the complex through a continual chain of events, establishing patterns that have duration. In this way, an inner dialogue grows, giving our lives a personal and sacred dimension.

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With practice and commitment, we can learn the skills for living the cycles of our embodiment with vitality and emotional truthfulness.

Programs in Berkeley  Somatic Practice Retreat ...................... October 1-2, 2005

Managing the Holoidays....................... December 10, 2005

Dreams and the Body: Part I ............... January 28-29, 2006

Dreams and the Body: Part II .............. January 30-31, 2006

Taking Charge of Your Life Part I ......... June 26-28, 2006

Taking Charge of Your Life Part II ........ June 30-July1, 2006

  Programs in Europe  March 25-26, 2006 ................................ London, England

April 1-4, 2006 .................................. Solingen, Germany

August 25-27, 29-30, 2006 ................. Solingen, Germany

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Program Descriptions

A Retreat for Somatic Practice October 1-2, 2005 ........................................................ $225Saturday 10 am–5 pm, Sunday 10 am–1 pm Santa Sabina Center, San Rafael Tuition includes Saturday lunch and dinner, Sunday lunch. Overnight $25 additional.

This retreat offers intensive practice in the somatic methodology of formative psychology. Working somatically is more than an analysis of one’s movements. It is, in fact, the shaping of yourself and your body. To work somatically is to learn how to live your destiny. Enrollment limited. Prior experience a prerequisite..

Managing the HolidaysSaturday December 10, 2005 ........................................... $2510 am–12 noon2045 Francisco Street, Berkeley

At the holidays and celebratory times, many of us struggle with how to maintain our adult identity.When faced with expectations that can overwhelm or depress us, it takes voluntary effort to influence our bodily experience.When a sense of self is managed somatically and grounded in our adult body, we can be emotionally present with family and friends to participate with intimacy and generosity.

Dreams and the BodyPart I: January 28–29, 2006.............................................. $235Saturday 10 am–5 pm, Sunday 10 am–1 pmSanta Sabina Center, San RafaelTuition includes Saturday lunch and dinner,Sunday lunch. Overnight $25 additional.8 Continuing Education Credits

Part II: January 30–31, 2006 ............................................ $125

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Monday and Tuesday, 10 am–1 pm2045 Francisco Street, Berkeley6 Continuing Education Credits

Dreams arise from our cellular depths and are the ways we speak to ourselves. They display what is seeking to come into existence in the awake world of daily living. Dreams help us embody our reality and are key to the growth and development of our humanworld.

In Part I we use voluntary muscular effort to give duration and stability to dream figures and to support the feelings that emerge. Applying the method of formative psychology to our dream experiences is a way to address the basic issue of how to grow a personal body from the body we inherit. When we learn the process to give duration to new form, we participate in the solution of our problems and the creation of life values.

Part II: Keleman works with individuals who wish to deepen their experience from the previous week. First section is prerequisite.

Taking Charge of Your LifePart I: June 26–28, 2006 ..................................................... $325Monday 9:30 am–4 pm, Tues. and Wed. 10 am–1 pmUniversity of California Faculty Club11 Continuing Education Credits

Part II: June 30-July 1, 2006 ................................................$125Friday and Saturday 10 am–1 pm2045 Francisco Street, Berkeley6 Continuing Education Credits

The personal power to take charge of our life cannot be found in external images or societal precepts. It is a power that comes from voluntary participation in the shapes of our embodiment. The ability to influence our destiny comes from the deepest source of inner pulsation, our life force. How we encourage or inhibit our innate actions establishes the autonomy to transcend the past and present and orient to the future.When you tap into instinctual life, there is excitement and knowledge, the possibility of personal transformation.

In Part I participants work intensively with formative methods developed at the Center. Daily sessions include somatic-emotional exercises, didactic presentation, and individual work with Keleman in the group. Formative practice exercises are the heart of the work and teach the volutional management of behavior. The intent is to support individual identity, deepen somatic process and patterns of feeling, and gain practical skills in working with oneself and others.

To register, send a nonrefundable deposit of $150 and a brief statement about your background, occupation, and interests.

Part II: Keleman will work with individuals who wish to extend their experience from the previous session.

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The Formative Method and Practice Class

The methodology of Formative Psychology teaches individuals how to participate in their embodiment. Through practice, a person learns to grow and form a personal future throughout the different stages of a life. Developing a voluntary

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relationship between body and cortex, a person invokes bodily attitudes just below awareness.

The intent is to generate experience by changing the intensity of these attitudes. The volitional management of behavior gives personal identity. Innate responses become personal acts. The cornerstone to becoming who we are meant to be is the ability to manage one’s shape and behavior. The purpose of the practice class is to help individuals experience their somatic patterns of organization and to give them personal and social expression.

Classes are taught by Stanley Keleman and are held October through June for clients of Keleman and Center associates and others who participate in the ongoing education of the Center.

Although participation in the ongoing practice class is limited, the methodology is introduced in all Keleman programs

For information about private appointments, seminars, lectures, or consultation, call (510) 845-8373, or FAX (510) 841-3884. Email center@centerpress.com

MANDATORY CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDITThe Center for Energetic Studies is approved by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences to provide mandatory continuing education for Marriage, Family, and Couple Counselors and Licensed Clinical Social Workers. Provider #1049. Programs in this brochure so designated meet the requirements for licensure renewal.

To be added to our Mailing List

To view or print the actual CES Brochure

To register for a Program or to order Books or Tapes

The Shapes of Depression and Panic:

A Video Simple exercises to help manage depression and panic on video from Center Press

This video contains four simple exercises to help manage depression and panic.

They can be played over and over as you learn to recognize and change your emotional somatic patterns.

Berkeley, CaliforniaThe Shapes of Depression and Panic is an emotionally dramatic 50 minute exercise video that shows the basic attitudes of depression and panic and how to manage them.

Available directly from Center Press, 2045 Francisco Street, Berkeley, CA 94709510/845-8373  ($24.95 -- Calif. Residents add 8.75% tax.Postage and Handling, add $5.50. Outside U.S., add $12.50)

The exercises are small movements of the body that organize physical and emotional patterns of depression and panic, then disorganize them, giving participants a new sense of management and knowledge of their own shapes of depression and panic.

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Depression and panic have their own body shapes, which bring changes in behavior, perception, feeling, and subjective image. When you change your shape, there is a possibility of changing your emotional state. The purpose of the exercises is to be able to have an influence on one's depressive and panic behavior.

The exercises were developed by Stanley Keleman, who, for over thirty years, has studied and written about the emotional life of the body (Emotional Anatomy, Your Body Speaks Its Mind), and is a pioneer in the field of somatic-emotional education.

The exercises are led by Terrence McClure, producer and writer, a lifelong sufferer of depression and panic, who uses the exercises daily to manage himself. He says, "When I started practicing the exercises, I didn't realize depression and panic were so closely related. Now, I can feel my panic lurking inside my depression. I see how I use one to mask the other".

Others practicing the exercises, who also have been using medication as part of their management program, say they are able to report more accurately to their medical practitioner as to what's going on with them, leading to more precise prescriptions and prognoses.

And finally, many who have had enormous difficulty tolerating their bouts of depression and/or panic, have been able to develop an ability to live with their condition much better, through practicing the exercises in The Shapes of Depression and Panic.

YogaJournalNovember/December 1995

The Shapes of Depression and Panic:Simple Exercises to help Manage Depression and Panic

Developed by Stanley Keleman and led by Terrance McClureCenter Press, 2045 Francisco St. Berkeley, Ca 947909;

59 minutes, $24.95

The exercises on this video are based on the pioneering "somatic psychology" of Stanley Keleman. His underlying premise is that panic and depression are "two

sides of the same coin," and that each of the various graduations in the emotional continuum marked by these two extremes has a characteristic physical "shape." In general, the panicked body is rigid, "paralyzed with fear," while in depression the body "collapses" into apathy and helplessness. Since we form these shapes

unconsciously, the exercises work by first intentionally magnifying or "dramatizing" the typical pattern, then by systematically "undoing" that pattern in

order to influence its emotional correlate.

There are two exercises for each condition, which may be done lying, sitting, or standing. Each exercise is done twice: the first performance focuses on the

physical shape, the second on the emotional components.

The exercises are simple, yet profound. Their goal is not to make you "feel better" but to increase your capacity to self manage your physical-emotional experience

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and restore a sense of "self potency." This video is an effective tool for working with panic or depression, and I recommend it highly to anyone afflicted with these

conditions.back to top

Books by Stanley Keleman

• Myth & The Body: A Colloquy with Joseph Campbell

A review from Somatics JournalA review by Grover E. CriswellA review by Dr. John Conger

In 1973, two pioneers in their respective fields---Stanley Keleman and Joseph Campbell---began to hold what would be fourteen annual seminars, to trade their thoughts on the subject of mythology and the body. This recently published book, Myth & the Body, is based largely on the transcriptions from these years of taped seminars. Campbell and Keleman shared the belief that myths describe the experiences of the body and, in fact, are metaphors for internal body states.

Stanley Keleman says in the introduction, "Myths serve a practical function. They enable people to organize the experience of their own bodies. Myths are a collective dream of a culture and are no different than a personal dream."

Campbell, America's first comparative mythologist, asks, "Where do myths come from?" He views them as products of the human imagination and grounded in the energies of the body. Campbell retells the story of Parsifal, the medieval legend, as a somatic narrative of a youth from adolescence to mature adulthood. Myths educate us about how to tell our stories to others and how to understand the experiences that make a life.

Whether your interest lies in psychology or mythology--or both--you are sure to be fascinated by the connections forged by two original and celebrated thinkers.

ISBN 0-934320-17-9 paper (1999),91 pages Order direct from Center Press-$16.95 (shipped within 3 days) Order from amazon.com-(pay online with a credit card)

• Love: A Somatic View An insightful analysis of the biological basis of love and individual patterns or styles of giving and receiving love. Includes case studies and suggestions for therapeutic intervention. ISBN 0-934320-15-2 paper (1994), 96 pages Order direct from Center Press-$12.00 (shipped within 3 days) Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

• Patterns of Distress This clinical study shows the process by which shock, trauma, abuse and neglect are embodied into individual somatic patterns of distress. ISBN 0-934320-13-6 paper (1989) illustrated, case studies, 75 pages Order direct from Center Press-$9.00 (shipped within 3 days) Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

• Bonding A discussion of some of the somatic aspects of transference and counter transference and the relation of body forms to the therapeutic process. ISBN 0-934320-11-X paper (1996) diagrams, case studies, 131 pages

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Order direct from Center Press-$12.00 (shipped within 3 days) Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

• Embodying Experience A companion volume to Emotional Anatomy, this book describes the methodology that accompanies Keleman's somatic theories. Using a systematic guide, the reader is encouraged to identify his own somatic patterns and to learn from his experience.ISBN 0-934320-12-8 paper (1987), 108 pages Order direct from Center Press-$19.95 (shipped within 3 days) Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

• Emotional Anatomy A landmark work that revisions both anatomy and psychology. It presents in depth how sadness, anger, fear and other emotions are physiologically organized. With 120 original drawings. ISBN 0-934320-10-1 paper (1985), 176 pages Order direct from Center Press-$34.95 (shipped within 3 days) Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

• Your Body Speaks Its Mind This book is about the emotional language and biological language of the body, which Keleman puts together. He says, "We do not have bodies, we are our bodies. Emotional reality and biological ground are the same and cannot, in any way, be separated or distinguished." Life incarnate is a process of individual human experience manifesting in the body. ISBN)-934320-01-2 paper, 192 pages Order direct from Center Press-$14.95 (shipped within 3 days)Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

• Somatic Reality Transitions--crises-changes, and turning points--are part of each human life and they include bodily transitions and experience. How life changes are expressed somatically is the theme of Somatic Reality.ISBN 0-934320-05-5 paper (1979), 128 pagesOrder direct from Center Press-$10.95 (shipped within 3 days) Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

• Human Ground / Sexuality, Self and Survival This is Keleman's first book and the one which covers the most basic aspects of his work and philosophy. In a style that quickly engages the reader, he weaves a picture of human form and experience--the many ways people take on self-definition. Short, concise chapters include many case histories and therapeutic dialogues from Keleman's workshops. ISBN 0-934320-02-0 paper (1971), 195 pages Order direct from Center Press-$10.95 (shipped within 3 days) Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

• Living Your Dying Formerly published by Random House and now in its sixth printing, Keleman's popular book examines attitudes toward dying, styles of dying, and styles of living. ISBN 0-934320-09-8 paper (1974), 158 pages Order direct from Center Press-$10.95 (shipped within 3 days)Order from amazon.com- (pay online with a credit card)

Audio Casettes of Stanley Keleman $7.50*

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Somatic-Emotional Exercises Series• Bodying Practice 2000 .......................................................• Circle of Influence .............................................................• Descent Into Self ...............................................................• The Structure of Disappointment .........................................• The Structure of Humiliation ...............................................• Inner Pulsation and Human Ground .....................................• The Structure of Worry .......................................................• The Structure of Hurt .........................................................

$7.50*$7.50*$7.50*$7.50*$7.50*$7.50*$7.50*

Myth & the Body: A Colloquy with Joseph Campbell By Stanley Keleman

Center Press Berkeley California, 1999

100 pages: $14.95 softbound reviewed in: Somatics Magazine

Journal of the Mind / Body Arts and Sciences Vol. XII, Number 8, Fall/Winter 1999/2000

Myth & the Body is a wonderful coming together of the mind and experience of the somatics practitioner Stanley Keleman, with the mind and spirit of Joseph Campbell. It is a distillation of 14 years of annual seminars in which Keleman and Campbell traded thoughts on mythology and the body. Campbell's statement, "Mythology is a song. It is the song of the imagination inspired by the energies of the body." formed the basis of their relationship and foundation for the book. Keleman says that "for me mythology is the poetics of the body singing about our cellular truth." He continues, "I know that experience is a bodied event and that myth, as an organizing process, is one way to help make order from somatic experience."

Myth & the Body has five parts, "beginning with the initial definition of body as myth, describing the hero's journey as a means of understanding our own somatic destiny, and finally showing how we can experience a somatic mythic realm." Campbell says that "the human imagination is grounded in the energies of the body." Keleman adds that "from out of the great somatic collective from the genetic codes comes the story of our basic identity, our predisposition to respond to the world in a particular way."

Myth & the Body reminds us that "the hero's myth is about embodiment. It shows us how to learn the lessons of our embodiment as we overcome obstacles, challenged, and changes." Finally, Keleman tells us that "the goal of formative psychology is to get us to feel our situation so that we can find a way to form our experiences and to be intimate with our life."

Chapters include" Part One: Body and Myth: "Myth as Body," and "Body as Inheritance." Part Two: Entering the Formative Life, "The Wasteland," "Body as Image, Experience, and Somatic Imagination," and "The Sirens Call: The Authentic and the Inauthentic Life:" Part Three: there's Journey: the Somatic Unconscious"; "Parsifal: A Formative Myth of the West," The Legend of Parsifal Resold by Joseph Campbell, "Compassion, Transformation and Rebirth,"and "Our Life Stories," and Part Four: Initiation: Deepening our Somatic Humanity:"Deepening your Fate," "The Return to a Somatic Reference," and "Forming your Somatic Humanity: The Bodying Practice."

It is extraordinary that these seminars and this friendship occurred. Each man is a Renaissance man in his own right. Both Campbell and Keleman have a deep understanding of the somatic side of things, i.e. somatic humanity. Keleman makes extensive use of William H. Sheldon's body type concepts of mesoderm, ectoderm and endoderm. Keleman also explains his formative psychology. At time it is difficult to tell who is speaking until one recognizes the favorite themes of each. Campbell is a rich repository of myth, unconscious outcroppings,and Jungian understandings; Keleman has the genius of the somatic perspective.

Myth & the Body is full of nuggets of wisdom and significant insights. In addition, it has wonderful

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illustrations, drawings and photos of statues that reflect Keleman's aesthetic sense. One would like to listen to the seminar tapes in their entirety. The tapes are a rich collection of insights that could be mined considerably. The combination of Campbell's understandings and Keleman's body wisdom is a great contribution to human understanding and the field of somatics.

Stanley Keleman was born in Brooklyn, New York. He is director of the Center For Energetic Studies, Berkeley, California. A practicing somatic therapist for over thirty-five years, he is a "pioneer in his study of the life of the body and its connection to the sexual, emotional and imaginative aspects of human experience." His approach to somatic work can be seen in his recent books.

Joseph Campbell was an educator, author and editor. He received his education from Columbia University, the University of Paris and the University of Munich. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly forty years. He authored the four-volume series The Masks of God and the well-known The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and edited The Portable Jung.

Myth & the Body: A Colloquy with Joseph Campbell By Stanley Keleman Center Press Berkeley California, 1999 100 pages: $14.95 softbound

Myth and the Body:A Colloquy With Joseph Campbellby Stanley Keleman(Center Press, Berkeley, CA 1999, 112 pages)Reviewed by Grover E. Crisswell

In 1973, two pioneers in their respective fields-Stanley Keleman and Joseph Campbell began to hold what would be 14 annual seminars to trade their thoughts on the subject of mythology and the body. This book is crafted largely from the transcriptions from those years of taped seminars. The reliance on this taped material becomes both the strength and, what I see as a handicap for this brief narrative.

First let’s lay out their highly creative premises. Joseph Campbell said, out of his perspective, "Mythology is a song. It is the song of imagination, inspired by the energies of the body. " Stanley Keleman echoes this lyrically: " Mytholology is the poetics of the body singing about out cellular truth. Myth is a poem of the experience of being embodied and our somatic journey. It is the song of creation the genetic experience that has organized a way to sing, to dance, to paint, to tell stories that trancsnit that experience to others." They blend these two perspectives that on the surface seem quite separate and unrelated. When they finish their dialogues, it is hard to think of mythology and the body as not being intricately intertwined, each inseparable from the other.

Entering into this dialogue about the interrelationship of myth and the body requires that we think of myth in some different than usual ways. Most of us do not think of mythology as grounded in bodily processes. We see "myth" as cosmology and archetypes, as tales of the heroic journey, stories and legends of the human race, a source of symbols and images for our personal quest. When we take the step of seeing "myth" as a more intimate expression of bodily process, then we are able to recognize myth as a voice echoing our somatic development. "Myth is about the body's journey, recreating itself endlessly in a particular way. To form an individual personal structure called self." Likewise myth becomes a repository of symbols and images guiding us in the growth of our somatic humanity. Out of embodied myth, we evolve our own lived history and find the direction of our personal path.

This theme of body and myth is explored from several perspectives. Our inherited constitution, our body shape, plays a significant role in what becomes our mythic journey. Utilizing William H. Sheldon's theory of constitutional types, the mythic meanings of the endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph are described and are seen as

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the basis for our unique journey. Here is one of those places where the brevity of the book is frustrating. Even though this reference to "constitutional types" is explored some here and later in the book, much more could have been said to good advantage. The next perspective is about the abandonment in our culture of the body as a source of knowledge. This objectifying of the body puts us into a mythic Wasteland. "When we do this, we are tying to objectify a process, rather than live from it. When we begin to be intimate with the pulse and quality of somatic experience, we begin to appreciate this experience as a myth, outside of objective time; as myth that forms internal knowing. As we learn to live again from our organic responses, the soma grows itself, deepens its feelings and images. In this way we grow a maturity out of the Wasteland." Here is the movement toward the authenticity of the embodied self, the truth and maturity of one's own path.

The familiar myth of Parsifal is used to illustrate the journey to embodiment. The three bodies of the hero - endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph - are brought together in the search for wholeness. In the beginning, he is attracted by the image and social code of knighthood and then lives out the warrior drama. In the end when he is able to experience love shown to him by the pagan knight, he is able in that compassion to return to the Grail Castle and reconcile with the king. This is our journey to wholeness: the inherited body, the call of imagination, the inauthentic life, forming of a social body and acting out of that, going through an experience of transformation and finding in compassion the healing of opposites into a new wholeness. The telling of the Parsifal tale by Joseph Campbell is one of the rich parts of the book.

The last parts of the book are about the bringing of these insights into our own journey toward embodiment. "The quest for the Grail is the quest for that level within yourself which is beyond the little boundary of your ego thoughts. You break through to the human...the moment of compassion is the most effective." The quest is about finding your own destiny rather than being trapped in what society defines. This can be found only by returning to a somatic reference. "Being embodied is a statement that we are here: it defines a physical relationship with ourselves, with the world, and with what we call the transcendent."

So what is the difficulty with the book mentioned in my opening paragraph? Mostly it has to do with the frustration of not having been there for these dialogues over a period of 14 years and for the richness of that experience. Having read extensively from the work of both of these men, I am aware of how much was left out and wonder if those not familiar with their work could have gotten the message. In a number of places, I wish they had said more. I would have liked to see the application of their conceptual frame to other myths. Does it fit? Would women have a problem with Parsifal as the pivotal myth? I would have liked more about the journey not always being sequential and about what shapes the process. The limitations of Sheldon's "constitutional types" would also be worth discussing. I regret not having the opportunity to be there and talk directly with the authors about all of this. Even with this brief summary, you can feel some of the intense creative energy that must have been present during those events.

Grover E Crisswell351 Regency Ridge, Dayton, OH 45459To read another review of Myth & Body, by Dr John Conger, click here

Myth and the Body:A Colloquy With Joseph CampbellBy Stanley Keleman(Center Press, Berkeley, CA 1999 112 pages)Reviewed by Dr John Conger

In the recent book Myth and the Body,the taped seminar conversations of Stanley Keleman and Joseph Campbell, as they met yearly for fourteen years, are

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represented in an edited ninety page book. The book is dedicated to his "friend and colleague" Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), and stands as a brief introduction to Keleman's "Bodying Practice" in the context of myth.

Not since Reich has anyone applied biology to therapy so tenaciously and creatively. Keleman uses the restricted biological metaphor to explain all human experience. Even the imaginative range of the world's mythology finds it origins in cell tissue: "I define myth as originating from our tissue's cells, a nonlinear image that is governed by the body's metabolism. There is a pulse that initiates natural rhythms and tides of light, such as you see in dream (p.36)."

But just when one might suspect Keleman of being caught in 19th century scientific concreteness, on the following page he describes science as a mythology: " And when one wades through all the anatomic and physiologic information, one is reading science's myths of what it means to be human (p. 37). Keleman, as poet and therapist, engages Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, in a unique dialogue.

I remember, from attending one of the seminars, the excitement of bringing together two visions of humanity originating, one might imagine, from the earth and from the sky.

Campbell, who became famous with the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, who saw the mythic hero emerge as a coherent figure across all cultural boundaries, brings the story of Parsifal to the seminars as the particular heroic model in western culture.

Keleman identifies the hero's journey with the snake, "not because it sheds its skin; but because when it moves, it is continually changing shape...a snake, an animal with a thousand shapes, yet a snake...the integrity of our somatic process is like the snake (p. 61)."

Keleman also recounts a somatic experience of the snake, "I remember lying down and being fascinated by the motile internal image that I could feel. From inside my torso came a snake. It entered my brain going from right side to the left. I felt a visceral movement in my belly and throat (p. 78)."

Campbell, on the other hand recounts his experience in the caves of Lascaux when the guide turned out the light. " The world up there is experienced as being a secondary world when you are down in those caves.

"And that puts you into something inside you, the enduring thing in you. Because each of us is just a little flicker of an eternal life that is in us. We are functions of an eternal. We get attached to the little local forms. "Campbell explains in the book how the snake represents life bound to the earth while the bird breaks free in spiritual flight.

Myth and the Body gives us a glimpse of conversations between the earth and sky, between the snake and the bird, archetypes finding powerful expression through these friends, Stanley Keleman and Joseph Campbell.

By John Conger–Dr. John Conger is a psychologist and Bioenergetic Analyst who teaches and has a private practice in Berkeley, California. He is the author of (1988) Jung and Reich: the Body as Shadow and (1994) The Body in Recovery: Somatic Psychotherapy and the Self, and is editor of the International Journal of Bioenergetic Analysis.

To read another review of Myth & Body, by Grover E. Criswell, click here

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YogaJournalNovember/December 1995

The Shapes of Depression and Panic:Simple Exercises to help Manage Depression and Panic

Developed by Stanley Keleman and led by Terrance McClureCenter Press, 2045 Francisco St. Berkeley, Ca 947909;59 minutes, $24.95

The exercises on this video are based on the pioneering "somatic psychology" of Stanley Keleman. His underlying premise is that panic and depression are "two sides of the same coin," and that each of the various graduations in the emotional continuum marked by these two extremes has a characteristic physical "shape." In general, the panicked body is rigid, "paralyzed with fear," while in depression the body "collapses" into apathy and helplessness. Since we form these shapes unconsciously, the exercises work by first intentionally magnifying or "dramatizing" the typical pattern, then by systematically "undoing" that pattern in order to influence its emotional correlate.

There are two exercises for each condition, which may be done lying, sitting, or standing. Each exercise is done twice: the first performance focuses on the physical shape, the second on the emotional components.

The exercises are simple, yet profound. Their goal is not to make you "feel better" but to increase your capacity to self manage your physical-emotional experience and restore a sense of "self potency." This video is an effective tool for working with panic or depression, and I recommend it highly to anyone afflicted with these conditions.

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