and move energy. Researchers believe that babies babble sounds from every known language, only gradually reducing their range as some sounds get reinforced by people around them and others receive no echo or response.
Your infant self did the equivalent with your physical being and evolving mind: You touched, tasted, felt, looked at, listened to, smelled, and attuned with objects, people, and energies. You explored both your instrument and the world around you using movement, gesture, facial expressions, and all your senses.
You also perceived and communicated energetically. You knew instinctively even then how to react to unspoken tension, to differentiate between heavy silence and calm loving silence, and to recognize authentic attention versus rote action on the part of your caregivers.
Most infants can see or otherwise perceive energies. We recognize that in some ways. We say: “Little Michael really reacts when his dad is stressed,” or “Alethia is comfortable with some strangers and not others.”
Because many of us in Western culture don’t tend to believe ourselves capable of directly perceiving subtle energies or of telepathic, energetic communications, we dismiss the uncanny stares, unexplained responses, and prescient comments made by young children as imagination. Over time, most children learn to filter out their inborn abilities to perceive energies in favor of perceiving what the shared belief systems will affirm.
SENSORIMOTOR
Developmental psychologists call the first two years of life the sensorimotor stage. It is our time to explore, investigate, experiment, sense, and discover our instrument and build up an understanding of the world around us. This understanding is as much a part of the language of energy as the particular words we eventually learn to speak. If I have no experience with a ball, then I can learn that word in several languages and still not understand it. If, on the other hand, I have direct experience with a ball — I have felt it, smelled it, tasted it, rolled it, banged it, and so on — then that becomes my energetic baseline understanding.
Like many people, you may find that this early phase of learning concepts was also fraught with learning fear, caution, negative blowback, dismissal, stress, or restriction, depending on what was going on in your childhood home. The body chemistry that arose from that energetic learning is coded into your mind and nervous system and creates a level of stress that your logical mind can’t calm with thought or words. Your energies need direct energetic communication — tapping, stroking, crooning, bathing in a soothing color, sound, shape, gesture, or smell — in order to calm.
Your healing may require a return to a sensorimotor style of interacting with the world.
You may need to be willing to return to direct encounters with energies and to build up new, cleaner concepts of the world on a visceral level, piece by piece. Illnesses arise from accumulated stresses if, as a child, you learned a baseline distrust of the physical world, other people, or your ability to perceive a situation and respond appropriately.
Maralies was a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. Her mother’s mother, Elsa, spent a number of years in a concentration camp as a young girl (Maralies never knew many details), and she married one of the American soldiers who helped to liberate the camp. Elsa moved to the United States and did her best to put her life in Germany behind her. She embraced American culture to an almost exaggerated degree. Maralies’s mother, Bettina, described Elsa as a terrified-perfectionist-Betty-Crockerwannabe.
Money was tight, but Elsa and her husband scrimped and saved so Bettina could go to college. Bettina and her husband were both lawyers, and Maralies felt she grew up with almost too much support: She had music lessons, art lessons, math tutoring, and expectations that she would engage in sports, get great grades, and basically perform well in everything. Maralies was very accomplished. But she described life growing up with her own mother as never being enough. Every achievement was a prelude to the next great achievement. There was always this sense of the unseen enemy or danger and the fear of a misstep, which was probably passed down to her from her grandmother Elsa.
When I met Maralies, she had a diagnosis of Crohn’s disease and a tentative diagnosis of lupus. She had turned her considerable talents to figuring out how to manage her diet, exercise, rest, activity, and every other aspect of her life to keep her symptoms at bay. She wanted to see if energy medicine could clear the Crohn’s and lupus from her energy field. She was treading water with her management plan and felt exhausted from constant vigilance.
I spent a few moments feeling my way into Maralies’s energies, and I realized that I was communicating with a being who was on constant red alert. Although Maralies seemed calm on the surface and seemed to be practicing excellent self-care, underneath was a siren going WAAAH WAAAH WAAAH every time we discussed what she was doing for herself. It was as if I was dealing with an unheard infant, wailing because no one was responding to her cries.
I asked her about that sense of an inner alarm, and her grandmother Elsa’s story emerged. She said: “I feel like I am somehow still reacting to her experiences, even though I never even heard details!”
We talked about this and experimented a bit. We interacted with several of her energy systems using energy testing and found they were disorganized. Then I handed her a teddy bear to hug. She hugged it, and several of the energy systems we had pre-tested now had become organized. I asked her what associations she had with teddy bears. She said: “None. I think I had one as a kid, but I don’t remember being that attached to it.” So I invited her to imagine she was a preverbal infant and to explore that teddy bear as if she were seeing it for the first time.
Maralies had a good sense of drama. She rubbed the teddy bear all over her body, even lifting her shirt to feel it on her belly. She put one paw in her mouth and sucked on it. She gazed into the teddy bear’s eyes. She put it over her nose and inhaled deeply; she hugged it and made baby sounds, cooing and squealing with delight.
After about ten minutes, she said: “I’m not sure what I’m doing here, and this is extremely weird, but I felt my gut unclenching and the pain in my intestines went from six to three on the pain scale.”
We retested her energy systems and now they were all even stronger. We tried the same thing with a few other objects sitting around my office: a water glass, a pen, a toy porcupine. With each experiment, doing some basic sensorimotor exploration caused the energies to strengthen and her gut to feel better. After about twenty minutes, her gut was no longer hurting her.
Energetic responses to the world are often passed down from generation to generation, which is one reason addictions, illnesses, and psychological problems seem to run in families. Part of what was happening for Maralies was that a learned level of danger and stress (probably from her grandmother Elsa) was built into whatever other understandings she had gained of the world. Because it was built in at a preverbal, unarticulated level, it was nearly invisible to her.
Although she could explain that her grandmother had been a terrified perfectionist, and her mother was a get-ahead perfectionist, she never realized that her own relationship to the world included those same stresses, coded into everything she did. The focus on getting ahead that was pure survival for her grandmother, and that was emotional survival for her mother, translated for Maralies as a need to push through and quickly master experiences, rather than relaxing to just live them. She had racked up all kinds of accomplishments but did not give herself permission to just be with things and let go of expectations.
That became her self-care task for a while. To let herself have sensorimotor time. To put aside the notion that she needed to heal her gut and immune system, and instead to just listen to her gut reactions as she directly encountered the world around her. She needed to provide safe explorations with no ulterior motive or goal: just experience for the sake of experience. She decided to do this both
