The Body Where We Don't See It.

In Ortho-Bionomy® this is referred to by many as "energy work."

I have been asked why I don't like to use the word "energy" in this context.  "Aren't we really just energy?" I am correctly asked.

I am going to set aside a rather technical discussion that I have written down elsewhere.

[If you care you can search out my essay What Is Energy? I think it's somewhere in this web book, if not it soon will be.]

I tell you what works for me and what you may want to do with that is none of my business. If it makes more sense to you to keep on calling it energy, then do so.

My big problem (apart from quibbles about grammar and physics and Occam's Razor) it tends to make people look in the wrong place for what's going on. It tends to make them look outside of themselves.

There is a Latin expression, Aliquem alium internum. It means something like "someone other within." The Stoics translated it as the god within. It is an expression of a commonly felt sense of not being alone 'inside' your body.

Much of my scatter-shot web book documents some of the many ways the boundaries of the Body can be extended.

[When I use upper case and bold Body it is a concept, it is Body in the widest possible sense, I could be synonymous with Person and World.]

Confining Body to its visible and tactile version, what you think of as your body (and all those complicated feelings that come with this) is a gerrymandered body, kind of Frankenstein monster, sliced apart and put back together with a bit of this, a bit of that, toss all that bit into the bin.

Studying the body schema, how it develops, how it functions, and how it evolves has been particularly educational for me. The Body is flexible into many dimensions. We can use other words besides dimensions; we can call them the phases of body, body domains, many possible words. This is another way to dissect the Body.

A lot of very good evidence makes a strong case that "self" is a collective noun, self is multiple. Somewhere inside we have a sense of that, of someone other interior, aliquem alium interium.

I have seen sensation defined as energy impinging on a membrane. I do not deny this energy, that there is something impinging. But when we sense something it is not the energy you know but your response to that stimulus. All you know is a change in your own state. This is basic sensory biology.

The central principle of orthobionomy is action by reflection. You change within yourself and allow the Other to be how they will be. You listen to the other by responding and observing the impact of that response. Dr. Pauls put great emphasis on what he called the Reflexes. The fattest chapter in his book, The Philosophy and History of Ortho-Bionomy, is Chapter 7, The Reflexes. It takes up about a third of the book. Before he coined the name Ortho-Bionomy, when he started teaching, he called it Phased Reflex Techniques (emphasis added). 

I recognize that this way of looking at things is less dramatic. No shooting of energy out of your hands, no being attacked by dark energy, these ways of thinking can be thrilling and exciting but not what we do in orthobionomy. It is not about imposing your will, no matter what you tell yourself about your intention (that well-paved road to you-know-where).

That kind of 'energy' may or may not be real and for me it does not matter. If it were possible to prove it is I would be happy at the proof whichever side it fell on. What I play with is different. My body is constantly taking in information. The boundary, the membrane, metbolizes something that impinges, transforms it into information.

Rather than trying to feel with all your might, something that may or may not exist,and being at great risk of pretending to feel