Roll The Head

This is a soft exercise. It you do this exercise and it does not produce any feelings, simply put off the exercise until later in your work when your brain/body is ready for it.

Here the head is rolled side to side. It is the same motion you make when you shake your head "no." The difference is that the range of motion should be as far to each shoulder as your structure allows. Don't toss your head, just any easy rolling of the head from side to side as far as your range of motion allows.

This rolling can be either just on the exhale or on both the inhale and the exhale. The IMPORTANT issue is that on the exhale you vocalize a word or phrase. Don't just speak the word or phrase, try to put some "feeling" into it as though you were an actor.

There is no set group of words or phrases. Use any word or phrase that seems appropriate at the moment and to which you seem to have some reaction. Here are some suggestions, but they are only suggestions. You are free to choose anything and also free to change the word or phrase at any time during the exercise.

no

please

help me

why

I won't stop

go away

I can't

when

how

it can't be

Editorial

This is a good place for an author's editorial.

One hundred years ago when Freud was developing psycho-analysis, the disowned part of the human being was sex. In Europe of the late 19th century and early 20th century the great naughty was anything sexual. Not that there was not a lot of sex, as long as human beings have been around there has always been a lot of sex. That is why we are still around. It is only that sex was the great not-talked-about subject and any overt sexual expression was taboo.

Now there is a new taboo. It is anger. Boys are feminized in our schools as any fighting is forbidden. Even verbal aggression is forbidden. States like New York and California make it nearly impossible to have a gun to protect oneself. Washington, D.C. has the most restrictive gun laws in the country which is why Washington, D.C. is the murder capital of the country.

Footnote 30. Actually, I could extend this discussion to include all "unpleasant" or all "insensitive" or all "offensive" statements or behaviors. We are currently in an age of mass bigotry where only approved statements may be made. Where once we proudly said "Man is the measure of all things" we now say "Man is the destroyer of all things." A country or civilization bent on self-destruction will get self-destruction. It deserves no more than that.

But aggression is as much a part of the human being as is sex. Actually the two drives are equal and opposite. There are circuits in the brain for aggression (anger) just as there are circuits in the brain for sex. There is another close connection. Sex is the procreative drive, anger is the creative drive.

At this point I have to draw a distinction between a drive and the expression of that drive. Sex can be creative as in love or it can be destructive as in rape. Anger can be creative as in productivity (more on this shortly) or it can be destructive as in murder. This is true not only of sex and anger, it is true of all human needs and drives and all human behavior.

Even seemingly benign things can be creative or destructive. Water can keep you alive or it can drown you. Food can keep you alive or it can produce obesity and a consequent fatal heart attack.

Playfulness (another human drive) can yield pleasure and enjoyment or it can yield cruel hazing. And so it goes for all human needs and activities. But however much a need and drive can be misused, it is certain that the suppression or denial of the need and drive will produce destruction.

Suppress food and you get starvation. Suppress playfulness and you get hard, unyielding, dour, hateful adults. Suppress sex and you get the dark periods of Christianity and the 7th century religion of Islam. Suppress anger and you get docile people who only look to some magically powerful government to tell them what to do and where hate should be directed.

But productivity and docility are opposites. Why does someone redecorate, create a new product, work hard to accomplish a goal, do anything creative? The answer is simple: he doesn't like things the way they are now. It is displeasure at the current state of something that supplies the energy, the drive, to change that state. Without anger, creativity dries up. To say "I don't like" is to say "it angers me." It is anger that we draw on to give us the drive and the determination to change something. Anger is the emotion of creation. It is a measure of how decrepit the "western" world has become that we define anger as only destructive and as something that has to suppressed.

Man split against himself can not long survive. As long as we can cannibalize the still smoldering anger of people from other cultures (China, India, etc.) we can continue. But that can not last long. The cannibal food of today is the cannibal master of tomorrow. Anger can not be denied entirely. If anger is not permitted to be expressed outward in creative change then it will be expressed inward in self-hatred.

Footnote 31. As the essayist Norman Podhoretz notes, Islam is World War III. China will likely be World War IV.

It is not likely that you can change the culture of self-hatred that now permeates much of the western world, but you can change your own disavowal of the humanness of your anger. We are getting to the exercises that will recover your anger and make it available for your creative use. The Mussolini jaw exercise is the first of these, others will follow later in this book.

Footnote 32. Actually the growl exhale and the express anger in the eyes are the first exercises, but why be so technical.