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Finding Joy: Surrendering to Your Body and to Life

By Pamela L. Chubbuck, PhD

Have we lost the key to simple joyful living? Many of us live lives that are flat, numb, unexcited. More than ever, we suffer the pain of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Physical symptoms such as headaches, colitis, and fibromyalgia are rising.

Joy is the antidote to suffering and reawakening the body is the only way to connect to our deepest joy. Americans are overwhelmed by fatigue, lack of enthusiasm for life, and lack of personal connection to life's meaning. Something vital is missing. There is no easy pathway to joy. However much we want the promise of plop plop fizz fizz, 30 second healing, it takes time and commitment to reclaim our life force. There are no shortcuts to healing. No magic. Although it takes a life-long commitment to continually surrender to your body and to life, starting today will render wonderful results. Surrendering to your body and your life force will give you joy, peace and vitality.

We struggle with what has been structured into our bodies and personalities by years of having to control feelings and restrict bodily movement. Our parents were afraid of free flowing life energy and tried to control us out of their own fear. We live with greatly diminished capacities to experience the fullness of life because of childhood traumas. Our symptoms – depression, anxiety, sexual dysfunction, the inability to love and be loved, drug, sex, alcohol and religious addiction – show how we have been crippled by our early experiences. We have lost a part of ourselves.

After years of contracting our bodies and energy a diminished way of being seems natural. Our inner /core self is buried beneath past experiences which squash our vital force. Our natural bodily impulses and deepest souls yearning to expand are sometimes hidden even from ourselves. Our joy is likewise buried beneath our physical structure that Wilhelm Reich, the father of all body psychotherapies, called body armoring. Having lost touch with our bodies we seek false joy in bigger cars, promiscuity, “Disney World” highs, and having more stuff. We become obsessed with “fun” to make up for the absence of true pleasure.

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