Chapter 3 – Gentle, Not Forceful

The dam that bursts

Imagine a reservoir that has been dammed higher and higher over decades. You have understood that the dam is the problem: it killed the river, dried out the valley, drove away the fish. What do you do? Blow up the dam?

Whoever does that sets off a flood wave that sweeps away everything downstream – the villages, the fields, the people. Afterwards the river is not freed but devastated. Whoever opens the dam piece by piece instead, slowly increases the outflow and gives the water time to find its old bed, can end up with a living river again.

That is the second part of Senf's core sentence, and perhaps the wiser one:

"The solution (to the blockage) is the solution – gentle, not forceful! At the same time it is about overcoming the split of something originally whole …"¹

In the body: layer by layer

In his work with people, Wilhelm Reich experienced what happens when you go too fast. He dissolved the hardenings in his patients' bodies step by step, and he learned that the order and the pace were decisive. He began with the eyes and slowly worked his way down to the pelvis. When he went to the deepest layers too early, the held-back feelings burst out with such force that people panicked – and afterwards closed up even more tightly than before.²

That is an important experience: armour is not simply a mistake. It was once a protection. It helped a child to survive the unbearable. Whoever tears it open by force takes away a person's protection before they have found something else to carry them. Reich put it like this:

"Every muscular rigidity contains the history and the meaning of its origin."³

So being gentle means respecting the history contained in the hardening. Not fighting the armour, but giving the living thing underneath as much space as it can bear at that moment.

How important this is, I experienced myself – in my own body, not from a book.

I was on a course in tantric massage. That day it was about a massage of the pelvic area, and I was massaged by a female participant. To be honest, I had been afraid of her beforehand, because she was simply very attractive. I thought I would come far too quickly with her. Ha ha. It turned out completely differently.

That day she probably dissolved my last blockage. My kundalini started rushing, from the pelvis up the spine. It literally burned its way through my body. I was floating between heaven and earth.

And at exactly that moment she had to go to the toilet and left me alone. Then I heard her talking with our teacher out in the corridor. I lay there, wide open, somewhere between the worlds, and felt very, very abandoned. Finally I asked someone in the room to ground me so that I could land again.

I believe I picked up a trauma that day. It still shows itself today as pain in my lower back. A new blockage sits there now, and I still get to dissolve it so that the kundalini can flow freely again.

I am not telling this to blame her. She gave me something great, and she could not know what was happening in me at that moment. I am telling it because it shows what this chapter is about: opening alone does not heal. Whoever opens must also be able to hold, until the person has landed safely again. A release without accompaniment can itself turn into a blockage again.

Reich dissolved from top to bottom, from the eyes to the pelvis. In tantra, it is said, the power rises from bottom to top. But it is not that simple. In my Prana-Flow massage, with women I first push the energy down from the heart to the yoni, to open it. Only afterwards does it rise from the root chakra up to the crown. First down, then up – like a river that first has to find its bed before it can stream. I don't see this as a contradiction to Reich, but as directions of the same movement. And for everyone the same applies: the pace is set neither by the companion nor by the method, but by what the person can bear at that moment.

From this I have made a firm rule for my own work: I always accompany my clients to the end. I don't leave the room before my guest is fully back.

In society: why revolutions tip over

What applies to the individual, history has shown on a large scale – with terrible consequences. Many revolutions began with a longing for freedom and ended in new oppression. The Russian Revolution of 1917 wanted to liberate the workers and produced Lenin's state apparatus and Stalin's camps.

The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had seen this coming decades earlier. Senf sums up his warning like this:

"If, already on the way to the intended dismantling of domination, means are used that are themselves permeated with domination and violence, then the path to liberation would be blocked from the outset."⁴

And the result:

"A utopia of liberation turned into barbarism."⁴

Why? Wilhelm Reich gave an answer that is still uncomfortable today. People who have grown up under oppression carry both within them: a deep longing for freedom – and a deep fear of it. If freedom is brought about suddenly and by force, the fear gains the upper hand, and people look for new leaders, new orders, new enemies. Reich did not see this only in others:

"An intense longing of the masses for freedom plus fear of the responsibility that freedom entails produces fascist mentality, no matter whether it is found in a fascist or in a democrat."⁵

As early as 1981, Senf drew the conclusion that it is not enough to overturn the external conditions. The change has to go deeper:

"The cultural revolution must reach even deeper and also include the dissolving of those rigidifications that are anchored in people as character armour …"⁶

That is why, in this book, working on the world and working on oneself belong together. Not one after the other – first one, then the other – but at the same time.

In language: accusing no one

Violence does not only begin with weapons. It begins in language – in the image of the enemy, in mockery, in accusation. Whoever declares other people guilty produces in them exactly what Reich observed in the body: defence, hardening, counter-attack.

Senf was very clear here. He sharply criticised the monetary system, but never accused people:

"It is not about assigning any blame, but about working out the structure and dynamics of the interest system and the corresponding functional connections."⁷

And he showed why this is not just polite but right: the structures drive people to their behaviour, not the other way round.

"It is the structure and dynamics of the existing money and interest system that drive the individual actors to behaviour which, in the long run and in sum, proves disastrous for a large part of society."⁸

Whoever has understood this can look differently at the banker, the politician, the head of a corporation: not as a villain, but as someone standing on the same downward-moving conveyor belt as everyone else – just further up. That does not mean keeping quiet about injustice. It means naming injustice in a way that makes change possible.

Senf did not stop short of his own movement either. About the monetary reformers, to whom he himself belonged, he wrote:

"Part of the isolation and the political ineffectiveness so far of the free-economy movement seems to me to be self-inflicted, because it has partly built up false fronts and hardenings that were unnecessary in substance."⁹

I hold to this myself. I don't want to attack anyone. Everyone only acts the way they have been taught – me too. In chapter 1 I told how I still raised my children the way my parents had taught me. Whoever has seen this in themselves can also see it in others.

Gentle does not mean timid

A misunderstanding is close at hand: gentle sounds like quiet, cautious, waiting. That is not what is meant.

Gentle was the mayor of Wörgl, who in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, introduced a new currency and thereby created work, while unemployment rose all around. Gentle was Ralph Boes, who in 2015 went on hunger strike for 132 days to protest against the sanctions in Germany's Hartz IV welfare system – without violence, with his own body and through the courts. Four years later the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that cuts of more than 30 per cent are incompatible with the German Basic Law.¹⁰

Gentle means: as determined as possible in the direction, as mindful as possible in the pace and the means. It also means letting different paths count. One fights against rigid structures, another builds something living alongside them, the third works on themselves. Senf saw no contradiction in this:

"As long as the direction of change goes against rigidification and towards living unfolding, it is not the different paths that separate individuals or groups from one another, but above all what they have in common that connects them."¹¹

Neither wall nor open gate

Finally, a thought that is especially important in our time. Someone who is against rigidity might think that the solution is to abolish all borders. Senf disagrees. A healthy organism is neither rigid nor boundless – it has a living skin that opens and closes:

"The alternative is rather: a flexible handling of boundaries, the ability to open up to positive influences (and 'outflows'), but also to set boundaries against negative or even threatening influences."¹²

That applies to the individual, who may learn to say no without closing up. And it applies to societies, which should neither freeze into nationalism nor hand themselves over defenceless to every flow of capital:

"Social organisms, too, need certain membranes if they want to remain viable."¹³

Gentle, not forceful – this is not one method among many. It is the attitude in which everything else in this book is meant.

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Exercise: Breathing and being accompanied

An exercise for two. Take an hour with your partner, plus some quiet time afterwards – and a room where you are allowed to be loud.

One is the guest, the other the companion. Next time you swap.

1. The guest lies on their back, knees bent. They breathe as in the exercise for chapter 2: in deeply, out again without a pause, a circle without stopping.
2. The companion sits beside them and places a hand on the guest's belly. On the out-breath they gently give a little pressure and so help to let the breath out completely. Don't press – move along.
3. The companion keeps an eye on the time. About an hour, so that something can really dissolve.
4. The guest may get loud: scream, groan, cry, laugh, make sounds. In tantra we say: what dissolves flows out through the throat chakra, the Vishuddha – out through the mouth. The companion bears it, without judging and without holding back.
5. At the end the guest breathes normally again. The companion places a hand on their feet or on the breastbone and helps them land again. The companion does not leave before the guest is really back – not even briefly, not even to go to the toilet.
6. Afterwards the guest tells what they experienced. The companion only listens.

For your safety: Everything said in chapter 2 about the breathing exercise applies – never in or near water, and if there is pregnancy, epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure or mental illness, talk to a doctor first. A stop from the guest always counts, immediately and without discussion.

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Notes

1. Bernd Senf: Der Tanz um den Gewinn (The Dance around Profit), Kiel 2004, ch. D, book p. 159 (PDF p. 10).
2. Bernd Senf: "Die Forschungen Wilhelm Reichs (I)", emotion 1, 1980, pp. 18–19; likewise Senf, "Triebunterdrückung …", emotion 6, 1984, pp. 4–5.
3. Wilhelm Reich, quoted from Bernd Senf: "Die Forschungen Wilhelm Reichs (I)", emotion 1, 1980, p. 18 (Reich 1972, p. 227). Translated from the German.
4. Bernd Senf: "Die Marxsche Utopie und der Realsozialismus" (Marx's Utopia and Really Existing Socialism), 1998, p. 3.
5. Wilhelm Reich, quoted from Bernd Senf: "Die Forschungen Wilhelm Reichs (I)" (The Research of Wilhelm Reich, I), emotion 1, 1980, p. 14 (Reich: Die Funktion des Orgasmus, German edition 1972, p. 179; in English: The Function of the Orgasm). Translated from the German.
6. Bernd Senf: "Die Marxsche Utopie und der Realsozialismus", 1998, p. 6 (Senf quotes his essay of 1981 there).
7. Bernd Senf: "Denunzieren statt Argumentieren" (Denouncing instead of Arguing), 2008, p. 7.
8. Bernd Senf: Der Tanz um den Gewinn, Kiel 2004, book p. 198 (PDF p. 49).
9. Bernd Senf: Der Nebel um das Geld (The Fog around Money), ch. 7.6 (PDF p. 45).
10. Hunger strike 2015; Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht), judgment of 5 November 2019, 1 BvL 7/16.
11. Bernd Senf: "Konfliktverdrängung und Systemerstarrung" (Repression of Conflict and the Rigidification of Systems), emotion 3, 1981, p. 39.
12. Bernd Senf: "Der Wahnsinn des durchdrehenden Kapitalismus" (The Madness of Capitalism Spinning out of Control), 1998, p. 3.
13. Bernd Senf: Der Tanz um den Gewinn, Kiel 2004, book p. 200 (PDF p. 51).