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February 20, 2006
How Qigong Can Counter the "Immobility Response" and Heal Held Trauma in the Body
I talk a lot about how qigong can help us counter the impact of stress created by the over-stimulation of the flight or fight response in our daily lives.
But can qigong also help us recover faster from the trauma we experience in a car accident, as a rape victim, from surgery or from any event experienced as an immediate threat to our life?
Right now I am reading a fascinating book by Peter A. Levine,
Waking the Tiger, which discusses how to heal from trauma. After my rolfer, Jennifer Enslinger and a somatic therapist, Dakota McKenzie both recommended Levine to me within the space of a week, in quite separate contexts, I thought I’d better check him out.
I’m very glad I did.
From his studies in ethology, Levine identified the “immobility response” as a method animals use to handle a threat to their existence they perceive as insurmountable.
When an impala decides the pursuing cheetah is going to pounce, it switches from a seventy-mile an hour sprint and drops to the ground in a sudden dead-faint. This immobility response prevents it from feeling the pain of being ripped apart by the cheetah – or allows it a chance to feign death for a while in the hopes it can revive itself and escape before the cheetah decides to start devouring it.
The impala’s nervous system however is still operating at seventy-miles per hour. The conflict between its external stillness and raging interior creates a tornado-like force that remains trapped in the body. If the impala survives to escape, it has the instinctive ability to shake this force out of its system and remain relatively unaffected by the experience.
Levine explains that the human animal, confused about whether it is a prey or a predator often fails to shake off the effects of an immobility response -- and the trauma remains lodged in the nervous system, with often highly destructive results.
Levine’s breakthrough in working with trauma victims was to identify the bioenergetic component vital to healing this stuck trauma.
The original immobility experience needs to be revisited as a sensed experience and “shaken out of.”
As the world’s first self-domesticated animals, we humans need help to pull ourselves out of our trauma.
Levine cites the history of shamanic healing, often involving extensive vibration and shaking, to heal an individual’s stuck pain.
I love it.
Clearly, many qigong practices will facilitate this liberation of trauma through the use of deliberately-induced vibration and shaking.
I teach methods to my students to create oscillatory currents in their bodies which can be used either to heal or strengthen. Other methods involve the creation of energy-vortices within the system.
And of course there are wonderful “shaking qigong” and other free-form practices you can use to induce spontaneous healing.
If you have any interest in the subject I strongly recommend not only Peter Levine’s book, but also our own author Zhongxian Wu’s Natural Breath of the Dao, Chinese Shamanic Tiger Qigong, which will give you a wonderful practice and a deeper understanding of the healing potential in this style of qigong.
See all of John Du Cane’s qigong resources.
Posted by james at February 20, 2006 5:11 PM
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