Body Language:
An Excursion Through the Alphabet in Somatic Terms
by Thomas Myers

The letter K was originally called kaf, and is still so named in Hebrew. It had a simple and relevant meaning to the bodyworker - hand. Attentive readers of earlier columns in this series will remember that both I and J originally had the meaning "hand" as well, so what gives? Well, besides pointing to how interesting the hand was to the ancients - no real surprise there, considering the hand’s intricacy, usefulness and relation to non-verbal expression—the two letters were designed to indicate different parts of the hand. Although the hieroglyph that led to I, Y and J (named yod) depicted the whole forearm and hand, the meaning focused on the 14 phalanges that make up the fingers themselves (see Figure 1A). The kaf, on the other hand (ouch!), even though it originally started as a stylized picture of a whole hand, was meant to indicate the palm (see Figure 1B). 

In English, we have the common benediction, “May God hold you in the palm of His hand” - a perfect image for the letter K, the kaf, the palm. In moving from the original hieroglyph to the Hebrew alphabet, kaf acquired other meanings, most notably give and take, with subsidiary meanings of exchange, trade, to bless and to cover.

In form, the letter went from the original hieroglyph depicting a handprint in the sand to a stylized hand with the fingers pointing up, in the proto-Sinaitic alphabet, showing up as early as the ninth century B.C.E. (see Figure 1C).¹ The hand became more and more stylized, until the central arm had only three fingers, and then the fingers bent away from each other (see Figure 1D). This came into Greek as the letter kappa, and subsequent alphabets retained this shape, although it of course changed direction when writing shifted from right-to-left to left-to-right, yielding our modern K (see Figure 1E).

That these two parts of the hand should come down as totally different letters, totally separate concepts, is unexpected and interesting from a bodywork perspective. In my own work, I can definitely feel a distinct separation from the use of my exploratory, manipulative, structure-specific fingers, versus the less-specific, reassuring caress or resilient pressure of the palm. The yod shows the hand as the manipulator, the curious and dexterous fingers; the kaf shows the hand as a softer palm, one that offers and receives, succors and shields. When Jean-Pierre Barral, developer of visceral manipulation, passes his hand just above the torso, doing his manual thermal diagnosis, to gather the state of the organs and their fasciae, it is his palm which registers the subtle changes in emanating heat, not the more neurologically-dense fingertips.²

The body as the center of one's self
Our bodywork pioneer for the letter K is Stanley Keleman, an "old hand" at parsing out the emotional anatomy of body-centered psychotherapy (or somatic psychology, or, as I prefer to term the field, biopsychology).

As we delve into this arena, we do well to remember that psychology, as a profession, is less than 150 years old. Before this there were the alienists and, of course, armchair psychology goes back to the dawn of time…but Freud, who organized the field under a coherent theory, first published in 1886, and did not publish The Interpretation of Dreams until 1900.

Although Freud started with the body, like most medical researchers (and Wilhelm Reich continued his work in this direction³, psychology came down firmly on the psyche side of Descartesä psyche/soma split. Recent discoveries about psychoneuroimmunology, as investigated by Candace Pert, Ph.D., among others, have made the seamless integration between psyche and soma clear to even the most materialistic of scientists.⁴ This has produced a renewed interest in the somatic side of psychological practice. With such research into neuropeptides and other linkages between body function and brain function, we can expect the efficacy and scope of body-centered psychotherapeutic intervention to increase over the coming decades.

Ahead of the research, however, a few of people have been working in this field for a number of years, and one of the most prominent and prolific is Keleman, author of Emotional Anatomy (Center Press, Berkeley, 1985).

Kelemanäs interest in the body-mind connection began as a high-school athlete in Brooklyn, New York, where he won medals as a shot putter and in track and field. His interest started in looking at the bodyäs capability for extending performance via training and discipline. This led him to study the bodyäs mechanics by earning the degree of Doctor of Chiropractic in 1954, but in practice what interested Keleman most was the relationship among emotional conflict, organ movement and body posture…the emotional dimensions of the somatic self. Herman Schwartz was the chiropractor who whetted his appetite, and deepened his understanding of emotional reactions relating to adjustments. Keleman did house calls so that he could see clients in their emotional environment, acting like an athletic coach to release the effects of negative emotion on performance.

In 1957 Keleman became a member of Alexander Lowenäs Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis and was, until 1970, a senior trainer there. During this time, he was also influenced by psychologist Alfred Adleräs ideas, and was mentored by Nina Bull, M.D., who developed a neuro-somatic theory of emotions and goal-oriented behavior. Keleman understood through these diverse experiences that catharsis-and-release was not the avenue that organized a person in a gestalt of wholeness. What you do to and with a body is precisely what the body learns. What was needed was not merely to cathex the buried material, but a systematic way of using the body differently during emotional relationships.

Pursuing this line, Keleman went to Europe for three years, studying existential psychology with Karlfried von Durckheim, who used the human form to reveal the relationship to the divine. This study led to central emotional experiences that confirmed Kelemanäs concepts of the body as the center of oneäs self.

Returning to the United States in 1967, Keleman began a private practice in somatic psychology in Berkeley, California, and was able to study and joust with some of the leaders in the humanistic movement…Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and others. In 1972 he initiated the Center for Energetic Studies, where he teaches somatic diagnosis and formative psychology.

Says Keleman, ÜFrom my earliest days I sought an image of mankind upon which to base my own life. I pursued the ideas of various disciplines that attempted to answer the question of manäs place in the universe. I was interested in psychology because it represented for me a hope for understanding the þlan vital in man, and an ideal of who man could be. But I became dissatisfied with psychological descriptions of human activity that did not take into account the body, the soul or manäs destiny.¹

Keleman put pen to paper after these many experiences and out came one of the most beautiful, rounded, profound, and fascinating documents of the somatics movement, Emotional Anatomy. Founded in first principles, Emotional Anatomy builds a human from the first shapes and movements of embryology into the many tubes, sacs and pouches that characterize our mature form (see Figure 2). Insults to the organism produce characteristic reshapings of these pouches that are recognizable as body types. Keleman shows these characteristic morphologies, and describes their psychological profile.

In the years since Emotional Anatomy was published, Kelemanäs work has undergone changes. He no longer touches his clients, though his interest remains in somato-emotional shape. "Each personäs shape is his embodiment in the world," he says. He uses small, innate gestures and body expressions, such as reaching out, grasping and shrinking, to see how individual somatic patterns are organized muscularly.

ÜWe are more plastic, mobile and remoldable than we have been taught to believe,¹ says Keleman. ÜA person who is capable of experiencing his inner process is capable of being in changing situations in a way that [is] not stereotyped.¹

What Keleman and other sensitive therapists of the soma demonstrate and educate is principally and at base just this: awareness in the kinesthetic sense (see Figure 3). How is your ancient and wise body talking to you, and what does it say? The cacophonous drumbeat of the computers, TVs, cars and petty obligations drowns out those 4 million year old signals from below. All of us in this profession are engaged, in one way or another, in bringing people back to awareness of the body, an awareness that has been numbed out of us by parents who don’t want us to play with ourselves or who "know what’s good for us"; by schools who cram us into one-size-fits-all desks and offer only repetitive and competitive phys-ed programs; and, finally, by the corporate world, which would prefer you did not pause to feel but instead work, work, work - either blue collar or white - so you can spend, spend, spend until you drop into the health-care mess.

The role of kinesthesia
Only by sensing ourselves will we come to our senses. Madness is the logical outcome of being out-of-touch. A feeling in my gut, a hunch, a release, emotional pains…all arise from the body, and we ignore them at our peril, slowly settling or freezing or swelling into one of those patterns that Keleman has delineated in his body typology.

So letäs think about kinesthesia for a moment, and parse out the various aspects of how we sense our body. Traditionally, there are five senses: two that tell us about vibratory levels outside our body (eyes and ears); two that tell us about chemistry in the immediate vicinity of our body (smell and taste); and the fifth, touch. This touch concept really includes several inter-related senses: kinesthesia (sense of movement); proprioception (sense of position); somesthesia (the senses of the skin…touching and being touched on our surface); interoception (the sense of the organs); and graviception (the perception of gravitational pull, felt in the vestibular system of the inner ear and confirmed by proprioception in certain joints).

So I am including all of these, improperly perhaps, within the word kinesthesia, just for the purposes of this discussion…because all of them depend on movement to be felt.

By far the largest number of nerve endings within these various "ceptions" are stretch receptors. We have spoken about the particular receptors in the fibrous body…the muscle spindles in the muscles and the Golgi tendon organs in the sinew…at length in earlier columns.⁵ These endings communicate the state of the bodyäs structural and contractile fibers' stretchedness to the neural net, including rate and degree of stretch, and the amount of load involved.

These stretch receptors are also insinuated into the organic body. What you see referenced as baroceptors in discussions of blood pressure are simply stretch receptors in the arteries, which record how much the wall of the blood vessel is stretched. Your feeling of hunger, the need to visit the loo, and the pain of a gas attack are all perceptions of stretch receptors located all over your gut. Stretch receptors have also been found in the sutures, in the meningeal coverings around the brain, and in the perineural coatings around the spinal nerves. In short, perception of stretch in the biological fabric is something the body has decided it needs most everywhere.

Although there are plenty of stretch receptors in the skin, the nervous system requires more information from our surface than mere stretch. Meissner corpuscles detect texture; Krauss end bulbs and free nerve endings detect temperature; Merkeläs discs help us with edge detection; and Pacinian corpuscles, like little onions, listen for vibration and deep pressure.

All of these senses add up to touch…but they add up to more: our sense of orientation, our sense of place in the world and our perception of inner subjective space. We have been so displaced as a species from the natural world, and so displaced as individuals from our natural sense of self, that it is small wonder that the kinesthetic sense is a little lost. Kinesthesia, according to the neuro-linguistic programming people, is one of the three major tracks of learning, but it is trained out of us by schooling…or, rather, lack of schooling. It is for the hands-on therapists (and those others who skillfully guide movement and perception through words, like Moshe Feldenkraisä awareness-through-movement lessons or Peter Levineäs somatic experiencing, which may not involve actual hands-on work⁶) who are now charged with reviving the kinesthetic, inner sense of self in our society.

I started my practice 25 years ago with the idea that I had to do something, and that my hands were actually going to effect healing by pushing or pulling something "wrong" from here to there to make it "right." I now have a much more humble perception of my own work: I simply observe, to see what needs waking up. What thing or area or process is unperceived by the client? Can I help them, with my hands or words, become more aware of the missing bit?

Get in synch with clients' inner healing process…intimately linked to this inner sense of space…and they do the healing by themselves, via the vis mediatrix naturae, the healing power of nature.

References
1. Mysteries of the Alphabet, by Marc-Alain Ouaknin, 1999, Abbeville Press, Paris, France.
2. Manual Thermal Diagnosis, by J. Barral, 1996, Eastland Press, Seattle, Washington.
3. Body Language: B, by Thomas Myers, Massage Magazine, September/October 2000.
4. Molecules of Emotion, by Candace Pert, 1997, Scribner, New York, New York.
5. Body Language: C, G, by Thomas Myers, Massage Magazine, November/December 2000, November/December 2001.
6. Body Language: F, by Thomas Myers, Massage Magazine, July/August and September/October 2001.

Editor's Note: With this installment, Body Language resumes regularly. The column will run in every other issue of Massage Magazine.

Thomas Myers studied directly with Ida Rolf, Ph.D., and Moshe Feldenkrais, Ph.D., and has practiced integrative bodywork for more than 25 years in a variety of cultural and clinical settings. He directs Kinesis Seminars, Inc., which develops and runs international training courses for manual and movement therapists. Myers served as a founding member of the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork and as chair of the anatomy faculty at the Rolf Institute. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and he is the author of Anatomy Trains…Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists, published in 2001 by Churchill Livingstone.