The bodymind approach is based on the understanding that our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual selves are integral aspects of a unified whole.
Therefore I believe in a therapy process that goes beyond talk and includes an awareness of how feelings and life experiences are held and manifested in the body. These manifestations can be seen as muscular patterns that effect how we perceive, feel, move, think and express ourselves.
The psychological defenses like rationalizations, denials and suppressions one uses to handle pain and the stress of life, are anchored in the body as chronic muscular tensions that inhibit breath, distort posture and impede the free flow of life energy.
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich considered the Western originator of the science of the BodyMind Psychotherapy. Freud and early psychologists discovered that there is a childhood development process that is now known to be the windows of plasticity in the brain where the developing child has their beliefs, feelings and attachments to parents, others, and objects influenced in a positive or negative way.
Wilhelm Reich explored, analyzed and the first proposed working archetypes of 5 key types of individual personality groups develop from this process, where developmental arrest occurs.
Reich explored how the early patterns of relating and attaching to others, if problematic, interrupted or subject to trauma, can get wired into the brain and the body, and than repeated as recreations in adulthood.
The literal posture, body shape, muscular and fatty deposits as held in the body, as well as sense awareness organ functioning (eyesights by example) are affected in this process, and there develops an outcome of a correlation body structure/shape to a personality with its emotional and mental defenses or adaptations towards life. This is what Reich called Characterology.