John Pierrakos Core Energetics Pdf Download
Genciana Haggins
was created by John C. Pierrakos in the 1970s. Pierrakos was a student of Wilhelm Reich and worked closely with Alexander Lowen. After jointly creating Bioenergetics, Pierrakos split with Lowen to create his own unique way of working with his patients. Influenced by the work of Carl Jung and his wife, Eva Pierrakos, CE evolved to include not only the roots or Reichian theory, but also an eclectic mix of energy psychology and consciousness theory.
In CE, healthy functioning is characterized by a balanced flow of energy through the five fundamental levels of being: the body, emotions, mind, will, and spirit. This energy is similar to the chi of traditional Chinese medicine, the Indian prana energy, and Reichian orgone energy. In fact, Pierrakos was the first Western scientist to bring together energy, spirituality, physics, and psychiatry (Chubbuck).
When energy flows evenly and unobstructed, there is health and optimal functioning. When the energy is weak, or blocked, health is lacking. Such deficiencies can be seen in areas of the body where there is too much or too little energy. Affecting not only the body, energy dysfunctions can also impact psychological functioning, and result in character structure types found in the work of Reich and Lowen (schizoid, oral, masochistic, psychopathic, and rigid).
Another integral concept to CE is the belief that we are made up of layers of energy. At the core is our life force, the energy of life that moves, evolves and creates. As already mentioned, when we are aware of and allow this energy to flow, we are in balance and find health. Surrounding the core is the lower self, formed when we are unable to express negative and/or painful emotions. This defensive layer, the shadow self, serves to protect us from the potential consequences of authentic emotional expression. This layer of unexpressed emotional energy becomes fixed, and hardened and literally shapes our physical structure (Chubbuck, 1999).
CE interventions focus on working with energy blocks and deficiencies in the body via physical exercises and breathing techniques. The goals of such interventions include increasing or decreasing energy in various parts of the body, grounding energy, and clearing blocked energy. Interventions include hitting pillows, kicking, and role play.
CE also uses specific equipment to work with the body. The roller, for example, is a tool that is used to work directly on the body. Basically, a large and thick rolling pin, it is used to smooth out muscles on the feet, torso, and large muscles of the legs.
Touch and massage, both by the therapist and by the individual, are used extensively in CE, again to work with the body and energy. Locations throughout the body common to blockages, including the eyes, the jaw and the diaphragm, are often the focus of this bodywork.
One primary intervention common to CE is the use of staccato breathing. In his observation of newborns, Pierrakos noticed that while nursing, babies tend to breathe in short nasal sniffs. He hypothesized that by engaging in this primal, nurturing breathing method, one might reconnect with a lost sense of connection and love. He thus created the staccato breathing technique which served to release multiple muscular blocks as well as optimize the flow of energy through the body, balancing both active and receptive capacities (Wilner).
There are two ways energy moves through the body. Active energy occurs when we engage with something, when we act on something. It tends to flow posteriorly from bottom to top. Receptive energy, flowing anteriorly, allows us to receive love and engage spiritually. If the posterior flow is stronger, we tend to be less able to be compassionate, and feel things superficially. When the converse is true, we tend to struggle with doing, planning and completing thing (Wilner).
Common to Reichian and Bioenergetic theory, the body is divided into seven segments which include ocular, oral, throat, chest, diaphragm, abdomen, and pelvis. Staccato breathing simultaneously brings a flow of energy through all seven segments, in a figure eight pattern, crossing at the diaphragm (Wilner).
Staccato breathing is broken into three stages which include expansion (active), contraction (receptive), and pausing (relaxation). During expansion, the person lies down on their back with their knees bent. The back is arched as they close their eyes and take in five short, strong breaths through their nose. The person then holds their breath on a count of three and then exhales. During the exhalation stage, the person exhales forcefully through the mouth, as they allow their back to relax from the arching. The shoulders are raised and the tummy is tucked, as their body moves into a contracted posture. During the third phase, the body is allowed to relax for several seconds before the entire cycle is repeated (Wilner).
In conclusion, Core Energetics is a form of somatic psychology that brings together body, mind and spirit. At its core is the premise that all beings are born to give and receive love, and evolve to limitless capacity. Love, here, is life force, the core, authentic self that was covered over and protected early in our lives. Through the body-focused, cathartic interventions found in CE, the shadow, or lower self, which has restricted our movement, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, is removed. When the core, or authentic self, is no longer overshadowed by the destructive characteristics of the mask, or lower self, love is free to nourish people and help them transform their lives (Wilner).
This is the classic text on Core Energetics, a body/mind/spirit therapeutic process developed by John C. Pierrakos, M.D. It stems from the work of Wilhelm Reich and Bioenergetics, with a deepening spiritual frame from the Pathwork. The focus of the work is to open the "Core" to a new awareness of how body, emotions, mind, will and spirit form a
I went on to found the Institute of the New Age incorporating the spiritual dimension into my work through the influence of the Guide Lectures given through Eva Pierrakos. With the help of many of our colleagues, Eva Pierrakos and I established a community called the Pathwork.
At present I am Director of the Institute of Core Energetics, which is devoted to the development of the human capacity to love and to heal. This work is rooted in the rich legacies transmitted through the ages by philosophers, scientists and physicians who taught about the existence within us of a creative essence as a source of healing.
In ancient Hippocratic medicine the patient was called asthenis, meaning a person who lacked strength or vital energy; the doctor was iatros, which means the healer who reestablishes the sthenos or vital energy in the person. The field of medicine has moved away from this model toward the pathology of life omitting the source of health, which is the vital energy of the Core manifesting as pleasure, joy and love.
John C. Pierrakos M.D. and I met in 1981. At our first meeting I presented him with an outline for a book I wanted to write, which would connect therapy, the body and spirituality. Reading the layout, John exclaimed: this is exactly the book I am working on! In this moment our minds and hearts met and we worked together for the next twenty years, until his death in 2001. I collaborated with him on the finalizing, editing and publishing of this book and worked with him years later editing and publishing his second book, Eros, Love & Sexuality.
John C. Pierrakos and I also shared a deep affinity in our research on the emotional energy fields. I have been able to expand and substantiate this work by cooperating with medical practitioners and physicists in implementing modem diagnostic devices to document the psychosomatic interrelations and effect of psycho-emotional processes.
This book has been and is still a landmark for many people. John C. Pierrakos sowed many seeds by having the courage to formulate insights and experiences, which were not popular with the therapeutic and scientific communities at that time. We see many of these seeds flowering now in therapy, healing, consulting, and other teaching arenas.
Three main theses are woven together in the therapeutic approach that I am developing, which I call Core Energetics. The first is that the human person is a psychosomatic unity. The second is that the source of healing lies within the self, not with an outside agency, whether a physician, God, or the powers of the cosmos. The third is that all of existence forms a unity that moves toward creative evolution, both of the whole and of the countless components. In a sense, I am just saying the same thing in three different ways, but I will speak of them separately in order to build toward a central conviction in core energetics. As Chapters 23 and 24 will elaborate, I believe that humankind stands on the threshold of a new age, an era when we can propel ourselves beyond the tragic wastes of destructive conflicts, beyond even the constructive endeavors to correct harm, and can focus our lives on creativity.
Over my first twenty years of psychiatric work, developing through the bioenergetics approach, I found myself more and more concerned with the nature and innate functioning of the life force itself. I wondered: What is this energy? Is it both substance and attribute, as yogic theory and the early Greeks saw it? Is it universal spirit, individualized somehow in matter, as viewed by the sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus and the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman? Is it essentially material, either a self-contained electrodynamic system, as the Yale biologist Harold Burr and his colleagues defined it in the 1930s, or else a variation of what Reich called the common functioning principle? Is it essentially spiritual, as religious thinkers and healers from Buddha through Jesus to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have conceived of it?
First, the work with patients demonstrated that every part of the human person, from the structure of the body to the clarity of the perception, is molded by internal energy. Genetic inheritance, family background, societal conditions and many other influences affect us. But we create our lives ourselves through what we do with our energy: where we decide to go with it and how we direct it. A person is vulnerable to circumstances only so long as survival depends on them, as during infancy. In maturing, we have the choice of whether to fuse our energy internally or block it, and whether to move into or withdraw from the outside world.
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