The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 96 of 125
Trauma coded in the body
The coding of trauma in the physical body is an enormous subject; and the two cents’ worth of personal understanding I have of it comes down to a hunch that the convulsive body tremors are of key importance. At the time of these sessions the only analogy I had was from the work of Wilhelm Reich. Among the most widely used techniques in the bodywork drawn from Reich’s experiments are the “grounding” exercises developed by Reich’s student Alexander Lowen. In these, the trembling brought about by standing still in stress-inducing postures is used to loosen what Reich referred to as “muscular armor,” which he understood to be the chronic rigidity of groups of muscles originating in repression of unacceptable feelings: feelings, which, so far as he was concerned, could far more easily be reexperienced by dissolving the muscular armor than by conventional verbal analysis. Not until this book was virtually complete did I first run into the Taoist discipline of Chi Kung. In Chi Kung such tremors in the body, whether fine or gross, are seen as activation of what Taoists call the dantian or primal energy center and prize as the key to the healing of disease and rejuvenatory power in general. Indeed, thinking back, I recalled that body tremors had been the first symptom of the first acid trip I’d had, and, phenomenologically speaking, had been the most frequently repeated feature of all my sessions. Was this just personal idiosyncrasy—or was it possible that LSD accesses, at least in part, the same energetic powerhouse as is explored by Far Eastern, specifically Taoist, medical traditions? This, once again, is something that can only be checked out when more of us have made comparable experiments and pooled our findings.