This article is associated with a course offering. Click here to learn more.
Join us for an immersive program with Luchy Lopez Wisdom From Within: Embodiment of Ancestral Teachings. This program begins January 13, 2024 and meets monthly on the 2nd Saturday of the month for 6 months. To get a taste of what this program will explore Luchy shares a story of Senai, a student of hers who found profound healing through embodiment.
Senai began working with me because she had never paid attention to her body and felt the time had come. She had been through a very painful illness for years. At times, her condition had taken her to the point of imagining throwing herself out of the window. Working 14-17 hours a day, she hardly slept. In the morning, she suffered from intense anxiety and anguish from the very moment she woke up. For years, she had been under psychiatric medication and diagnosed with congenital depression that she was told would never go away.
On top of that, every week, Senai had to visit the physiotherapist to take care of a chronic inflammation in her hip that also "was going to bother her forever." At 45 years old, Senai has had a complicated relationship with her parents. After many years of psychotherapy, she concluded that they never loved her, and she accepted that. Drinking alcohol became her way to alleviate suffering.
We began liberating her channels of bodily expression, working through the six basic emotions. Gradually, Senai's vitality began to return. After each session, Senai discovered new possibilities of experiencing her life outside her constructed narrative.
Despite her progress, her relationship with her mother was still causing her intense suffering. Her most significant change came through a dancing session with her ancestors. In that session, she received information about how women in her family were not allowed to express joy, anger, tenderness, or eroticism. The ancestors showed her they had gone through life, switching from sadness to fear and vice-versa. They showed her how denying some natural basic emotions had limited their lives.
Basic emotions arise naturally inside us at the moment circumstances require them. Even if we deny, suppress, or want to manipulate emotional expression, they´ll be stored somewhere in our bodies. Without the “epigenetic authorization” to feel and express, the ones we accept tend to impersonate these emotions. Without permission to feel each of the basic emotions in a spontaneous moment of exchange with the world, we easily dive into an internal conflict with a high cost.
The wear and tear from this conflict may be so significant that it is hard to endure. Emotional internal conflicts can lead to despondency and create a profound loss of meaning, feeling “dead in life” rather than full of vitality. I think about basic emotions like a kind of “substance” that, on one hand, helps the animal we are to survive and, on another, is an anchor that allows our hearts to develop the virtues treasured in it.
Senai´s meeting with her ancestors continued until she developed a very intense headache, ending her dance session early. She had a significant insight when she surrendered to the fact that she needed to stop. She saw her mother when she was a child, complaining of severe headaches. Senai couldn´t stand her mother's grievance and harshly criticized her. She became convinced that her mother was either making it up or self-provoking it to manipulate everyone in the house.
Senai´s headache, which became impossible to overcome, was a tremendous limitation to continuing to explore her relationship with her ancestors through movement. Feeling the pain changed her perception of her mother. She heard the message from her ancestors: how, over several generations, they continued to deny their feelings and emotions. They told her about the dangers they had suffered. Senai had sensations and intuited scenes that vibrated this truth in her heart and body.
These traumas had created a core of belief in her family concerning what happens to a woman if she is happy, if she expresses anger, if she feels tenderness or if she dares to experience the terrible consequences of eroticism. Two years after we began to unclog the channels of basic emotions, and about five months after her encounter with her ancestors, Senai no longer recognizes herself.
With a doctor's approval, she stopped all the medication. She has started taking care of her diet. She lost weight, gained muscle mass, and can now work more efficiently. She sleeps 8-9 hours a night and no longer works 14 or 17 hours a day. Occasional alcohol consumption, but only for celebrations. She saves quality time for her husband and son.
She has not returned to the physiotherapist after the last check-up months ago, where she was permanently discharged. For the first time in her life, she feels that her mother and father love her underneath the surface even though they have no natural embodied capacity to express it. Their love was bound by unexperienced anger, tenderness, joy, and eroticism. If these emotions had been lived, they would have allowed them to defend Senai in situations of vulnerability and lack of protection.
Senai is now able to imagine a more hopeful future. The love she has felt from her ancestors makes her feel like she belongs to an ancient lineage and is part of something bigger. She feels validated for a broader exchange with the world and is open to contributing her knowledge and expertise for the greater good. Interdependence is still mysterious for her but also full of love and hope.
I share Senai's case, not only with her consent but also with her joy of being helpful. It wouldn't have been possible at the beginning of her journey. The sessions I propose for our online class are an opportunity to expand your vitality and create an exchange with the environment. They may also help you recover and strengthen your sovereignty over your life experience, feeling part of what precedes you and what is to come. This brings us naturally closer to an ecosystem experience and our desire to find cohesion and harmony.
In my approach, psycho-corporal imagination is not treated as fantasy, and space recreation is not just for children. Here, imagination is a substance capable of creating reality and playing with space and free expressive movement, how it dialogues with us.
This article is related to an event, click here to learn more.
As a multicultural mother living in Madrid, an actress, and a professional group trainer, I experience much suffering from miscommunication. It’s not easy to have a significant exchange with people we find genuinely nurturing. I learned about Compassionate Exchange through Karuna and aspired to apply it. Due to unprocessed internal trauma and mental conditioning, it does not always work the way I would like it.
I found the Alba Emoting (AE) method after I studied Contemplative Psychology in Karuna Training. The AE technique, created by Dr. Susana Bloch, has deepened the work that Karuna started. The method is based on allowing basic emotions to be felt directly, liberating contaminating patterns that block direct contact with the experience of these emotions.
Dr. Bloch is from Chile and developed her scientific career mainly in France, practicing physiological psychologist and neuroscientist. She discovered the ways of six basic emotions; rage, fear, sadness, joy, tenderness, and erotism. She then founded the Alba Emoting method in the mid-90s. The AE method trains in these six basic emotions by releasing a pattern of breath, muscular activation, and facial gesture. Through specific exercises, we cleanse our emotional pathways to authenticity. We reclaim spontaneity in our body, speech, and mind - and clarify our relationship to the environment in the present moment. The work offers us a pathway to our transcendent nature.
Most miscommunication comes from a need for more access to our emotional experiences. Often we forbid certain emotions to be experienced due to past mental conditioning. For example, if someone approaches us with tenderness, we respond with erotism because tenderness is linked to a traumatic experience from our childhood. These mixed emotional responses can lead to unwanted situations without understanding what happened.
The AE method teaches us about the ‘effectors’ of different emotions. The training teaches us to ride emotional energies that would otherwise be avoided or conflated with other feelings. Another example is in allowing ourselves to embody erotism, without which it becomes a barrier to experiencing ecstasy. Erotism is the primary emotion where I can feel the transition from a dualistic to a non-dualistic perspective.
I’ve found that the AE method has a lot to offer in expanding the framework of practicing Maitri Space Awareness. AE enhances our capacity to develop the recognition of emotional faculties. The AE method plays with the intensity dosage, providing different sensations, corporalities, and adaptability of an emotion.
The work is about clearing these six emotional, functional conduits and removing the judgments and beliefs we’ve attached to them. Rage, fear, sadness, joy, tenderness, and erotism are not good or bad emotions; they are practical ways to survive. Feeling and recognizing these emotions offer us a rest from confused needs that arise from the mixed conditioned emotional states. It feels incredible to experience the pure expression of one of the six basic emotions.
Once we taste the non-judgemental experience of these six basic emotions, we find new emotional vocabulary. Susana's theory is that sublime (spiritual) emotions can only be experienced through the grounding that contact with these basic six emotions can bring. For example, it will be challenging to experience courage if we do not have access to anger, fear, or tenderness.
Every emotion has a purity that opens us to something more significant when touched fully and completely. Emotions connect us intensely to the force of life, which is why I’m passionate about this work. I feel ready to be playful with life, to dance with phenomena, and enjoy being alive. Of course, the fun part is playing with others; this is why I’m offering this workshop.
In the course, we will learn the effectors of two emotions per class. After a brief theoretical introduction, I introduce a main body of work. Through simple practices, we prepare the body to experience the day’s emotions in their purest form. Afterward, we use a step-out method to return to neutral, be silent, and contemplate. There will be sharing the microscopic truth and other insights in break-out rooms regarding our historical experience of emotion. When time allows, we delve into our physical memory through embodied visualization for information about how we learned to relate to each emotion. The work is about obtaining the permission and blessing of our ancestors to experience the emotions purely now.
Please consider playing together and learning about the possibility of embodied transcendence! Enroll here.