Sensory Reprogramming

The body is a system with an inlet and an outlet, and its only aim is to keep the amount of energy within a threshold: too much has to go out, too little has to come in. Hence the first claim of the method, which overturns almost everything else: tiredness is not objective. The same argument, the same job, the same day sometimes weigh and sometimes don’t. The fact doesn’t change — the handling does.

Energy has to be exchanged. When intensity finds no counterpart of equal intensity it comes back, is held in and turns into circuits of thought: intensity on its own is called stress. This is why we look for places and people where exchange is possible, and why the central movement of the practice is to take frustration in and bring harmony back out.

The order is gut, heart, head, in that sequence. First you sense without prejudice, then you let the heart answer, and only at the end do you put on the hat of the head to give it a name. Reason is not the enemy: it is the instrument that comes second. Understanding and thinking are two different things — you understand a rule and then you stop chewing it over.

Each of us places our energy in one point of the body, and that point decides the shape of the distress: the stomach gives anxiety, the heart worry, the throat what goes unsaid, the head a headache. The model is the tree: the sounder the connection low down, the better the structure holds all the way up. From this comes the criterion of the method, which judges not the action but the coherence of the energy along the axis running from the genitals to the head.

There are no right people and wrong people: there are congenial frequencies and frequencies that disturb. Sympathy comes from simpatos, same frequency; empathy is entering the other’s frequency without losing your own point of observation. Two practical rules follow: speak at the frequency where the other has the doors open, and love without adapting — adapting is not love, it is pleasing.

Energy pointed at a goal that is not reachable right now degrades in a chain: idea, emotion, frustration, doubt. The alternative is neither to repress it nor to demand that it be fulfilled, but to take away its direction and let it radiate, like the sun, which chooses no recipient, and like the flower, which gives off scent even when no one is there. What remains is an opportunity, for whoever is able to take it.

At the root of vital energy stand a creative force and a destructive one: sexuality on one side, food and violence on the other. The work does not consist in inhibiting them but in knowing their range and their shape, because energy that is not expressed does not die: it turns into thought. Those who have no relationship with these two roots stay up high, in a state of alarm, precisely in order not to meet them.

Within every form there dwells a quantity of energy that describes its characteristics: in-forma-azione, the Italian word for information read as “energy put into form”. Learning to read a form means knowing which energy it holds, and this holds for a rock, for a place and for a body. It is the point where the work on a person and the research on ancient sites become the same gesture.

Ask someone to get angry now, for no reason, and they will not manage it. Anger is not a substance we carry inside: it is a resonance on a mental image that we ourselves keep alive. Take the object away and it does not resonate. Which makes it possible to let it drain off in calm moments, without aiming it at anyone.

Three junctions in a row. The eyes govern brain waves, and while they stay alert they keep the system on alarm; the diaphragm governs the breath; the pelvic floor is the surface you rest on and regulates giving and receiving. The chain reads in both directions: a contraction low down reaches all the way to the gaze, and a gaze that softens descends all the way down.

Irony is not an ornament of the work, it is a central part of it. Anyone who proceeds predictably closes the channel; changing register and intensity keeps it open. Laughter is the highest form of balance because it puts together, in the same instant, violence, sexuality, intelligence and harmony.

Not on the symptom, on the structure. Today’s problem, the episode, the difficult relationship are not the point: the point is the system that produces them, because once the structure is sorted the symptom loses its reason to exist.

The work is done in a group and one to one. In a group what works is mirroring: the others say out loud what they see, and the one being seen says how it feels to be seen — because we exist to the extent that we are recognised. One to one the work is on direct reading: the eyes, the voice, the movement, the tensions, and from there the structure.

For individual work, for group training, or to bring these themes to a talk, a school or an institution, write to me.