About Core Energetics

When we talk about Core energetics, there are three parts we need to understand. First, we need to understand that everything that happens to us happens on five levels: our body level, our emotions level, our mental level, our will/behavior level and our spirit level. These are the levels that we are tracking when we are working with a person and looking at a person as a whole and this is what differentiates us from other approaches. Second, we need to understand the process from stimulus to belief system, and how energy binds images and images bind the energy that we work with. Third, we need to understand how the mask and lower self are formed from our essence.  I discuss each part in detail below, starting with the Five Levels of Core Energetics.    The Five Levels that we talk about are separate entities and function independently but at the same time are informed by one another and all together make up the whole person. Body, emotions, mental, will and spirit levels are affected by genetics, epigenetics, culture, our family history, personal experiences and especially our early life experiences. However, these levels can be influenced and changed in therapeutic work. When we talk about body level, we talk specifically about muscular skeletal aspect of the body. For example, when something scary happens to us we contract our muscles and hold our breath. And when something scary happened enough times the same muscles tighten and then block is formed and our life energy doesn’t flow there freely and we just walk in the world with that imprint on our body every day. The next level is emotions level. Our emotions are chemical level of the body. It is our endocrine system that creates the chemicals, our hormones, and they impact our nervous system. Basic emotions people have are mad, sad, glad, scared, disgusted, surprised and shame. And if we don’t express them, they stand in our system and get triggered later in a situation where similar emotions get activated. The mental level is our neural-network system in our brain which helps to make sense of what is happening on the outside world and internal world which is whatever is perceived by body and emotions. For example, a person wants to be rich but has a belief, based on their early experience that everyone who is rich earned their fortune by being involved in dirty business and it is not okay, so they won’t get rich. Will level is our actions and behavior, what we do. But very often what we do is not what we say or what we think we believe, so it is not congruent with our thinking patterns. Will level is always tied to previous three levels body-emotions-mental and often times our true intentions may be out of our awareness. My teacher Aylee Welch often uses here example of someone who says they want a relationship but rejects them whenever they meet someone. Spirit level is where our belief systems reside. It reflects what we believe about the world and how we fit into it. Our capacity to feel a connection with life and capacity to love and appreciate life leads us to our creativity and there is a sense of possibility that we are a part of something bigger when this level is in balance. The second part in explaining Core Energetics is understanding the process from stimulus to belief system, and how energy binds images and images bind the energy which is the energy that we work with. In short, the following is diagram of how it happens: Stimulus (experience) à Reaction à Imageà Mass Image à Belief System. However, note that the formulation of belief system is applied to young children and is not relevant to us as adults, where we simply react to our old belief systems even if the situation is different. When something happens to us (Stimulus) we react to it with contraction. Contraction happens on the body level and it is a mobilization of energy in order to do something, to act on behalf of ourselves. Our feelings dictate how we make sense of and respond to the situation and that is a reaction.  Based on that reaction we create an image of it and it binds energy from that situation into our memory. Then, when something happens enough times, the situation gets generalized to other things, a mass image is created. The wiring between all of the levels becomes the belief system. Belief system is not in the brain (mental level) it is in our whole system. Our belief system happens on all five levels and that is our consciousness, our mind. It is not what we tell ourselves it is what happens in our system, it is what happens on our chemical level, in our body, will level and all those levels work together. With that in our system we cannot perceive present day full reality, it becomes our attitude about life.