The Primal Knot

Working with our Belly Centre in Therapy

Introduction

Back at the beginning of the 2000s, when I started getting into group therapy at a neo-Reichian school in Holland, there was this phrase I heard a lot - The Primal Knot. I don’t really know where it came from, though at the time I assumed it was something to do with therapist Arthur Janov. I also don’t know where it disappeared to, for a quick google search revealed no trace. But I think it is a shame that it has, for now, dropped off the great map of stuff we’ve somewhere heard about. Because, to my mind, it is most definitely a very useful concept.

The idea behind this Primal Knot is that of our belly area being, on both a physical and energetic level, a highly contorted knot of repressed energy and stuck emotionality. Layer upon layer of it, onion-like, coiled-up inside of us - the home of the deepest and darkest stuff that has been repressed within us.

And that if we could somehow loosen some of this tension and contortion out, we would feel more natural and more alive.

This notion has hovered quietly somewhere in the back of my mind since those days. And it has stayed with me through the years where I’ve begun to work as a body-based neo-Reichian therapist myself. In the last few months, it has re-asserted itself in the front of my mind.

In my own personal journey with body-based therapy, I feel like it have gained a lot. I feel like I have passed through some of the outer layers of the great onion of stuff compacted within me. And, of course, there is more.

There is always more.

Seeking to go deeper, I have over the last two months turned my attention to my belly area and resolved to really “get in there” and loosen some more of that inner tension and control out.

It has been an immense journey and I am most definitely still on it. But I feel I have already confirmed a suspicion that I had when I had a spontaneous belly-breathing experience a few years back - if you can really get into your belly centre deeply, you will need no other therapy.

This is because our belly seems to be the main primate energetic centre in our body. It’s where everything connects up and different parts of our body and mind engage in free and easy communication. If we can clear out the holding patterns and blocks that have accumulated there, and start to really feel our belly, our life will just become so much easier. Because what most of us are actually trying to do in life is “work around” our lack of connection to our belly.

I am doing the 35-minute Belly-Breathing workout mentioned lower down every morning at the moment. At times, it definitely feels like a torture and all I want to do is to either stop or just space off into my thinking world. I try not to do these things. And the benefits in naturalness and happiness that the workout leaves in its wake keep me on track.

How do I know if I have this Primal Knot thing going on?

Let me describe some of the classic symptoms of the Primal Knot…

• a vague sense of there being an “inner hole” within - a hole which we are regularly seeking to fill with some substance or activity - perhaps snacks, shopping or keeping busy.

• a sense of neediness, which may assert itself strongly at certain times and at others recede more into the background. The sense is that we are just “not okay” and constantly need something from the outside to be okay. This neediness may be repressed and we may have developed sneaky behaviours, such as gaslighting or pleasing, to keep the people we need close to us without us having to show our neediness.

• a difficulty in holding safe boundaries for ourselves. We either let certain people or situations get too close, or otherwise have to exert excessive mental control over our world and become unnaturally tense.

• the sense of having a “sponge-like” personality, where we can easily feel invaded by other people.

All of the above are classic symptoms of having a considerable Primal Knot complex trapped within the area of our belly. In my personal experience, if you begin to regularly work at this level, you will soon notice both your neediness and your need to try to fill some “inner hole” reducing.

The Primal Knot as it relates to Character Structure

Reichian Character Structure is a simple and useful way to diagnose personality issues and both track them back to infant experiences and understand how to move forwards and resolve them.

Learn more about it here.

Take my Reichian Personality Quiz here.

There are five Reichian Character Types and these are often split into 2 groups:

• Pre-egoic - Leaving, Oral, Enduring

• Egoic - Rigid, Aggressive

What I find interesting regarding the Primal Knot is that it is a big component of each of the three pre-egoic types. These are the guys who acquired significant trauma before the age of about 2, the time at which our ego starts to form itself.

The nervous system of the Endurer type has typically encoded the experiences of being angry, of self-expression or of putting up clear boundaries as being dangerous, to a life-threatening degree. This happened when their parents or other care-givers came down a little too hard on them as they started to scream, shout and rebel aged around two years old. Their nervous system registered a risk of ostracism, and thus death, and so began to associated this outcome with any attempts to get angry or express oneself.

The nervous system of the Oral type has typically learned to stay open to connection at all times. They thus are fearful of anger, struggle to put up healthy boundaries, avoid confrontation and have tendencies towards pleasing. This usually relates to a lack of felt connection with the mother in the first year of life, resulting in a needy psyche desperately trying to fill this hole.

The nervous system of the Leaving type has typically learned to dissociate from the felt sense of the body when any form of emotional triggering takes place. They cannot cope with average levels of human emotional intensity. Intense emotions are invariably mediated at the level of the belly. This condition is believed to have its origins as early as our time in the womb. The developing nervous system registered a sense of unsafety and learned to keep consciousness away from the feelings in the belly and up in the higher mind.

Thus it can be understood that one thing that distinguishes egoic from pre-egoic character types is precisely this Primal Knot and the accompanying lack of sensation in the belly area. The classic egoic traits of drive, functionality and health - being able to move forwards in life with personal agency and good feelings - are largely due to us no longer having this knot inside of our belly.

Treating the Primal Knot

We have seen that our belly is actually central to us being able to access drive, good health and good feelings in life. And that this Primal Knot is the primary block that needs to be worked on if we are to restore these qualities to our lives in a natural way.

So how to go about it?

What we need to do is to get our whole abdominal area moving, both physically and energetically, on a regular basis. No amount of thinking, imagining, affirming or visualizing is going to cut it here. We have to be willing to get really physical and to go into this deep, dark area which in many ways is the pit of our psyche.

It’s like the “Hero’s Journey” concept in traditional mythology. We are undertaking to go on a journey into all that has been repressed within us, facing our fears and finding the courage and support to keep going until we reach our goal.

Within the context of Body-based therapy, there are actually many ways that one can approach the Primal Knot and begin to loosen it. Bioenergetics, Reichian Therapy, Breathwork - all will help free us up and begin to create a release from this area.

But what I’m going to focus on in this piece is the most direct, and thus most intense, way that we can get into this knot - through two specific techniques of pranayama, done back to back. Pranayama is a school of traditional Hindu belly-breathing practices.

I want to really make it clear that this is the most direct path I know of but that it is by no means the only path. I say this because it is likely that, for many people, the workout that I’m about to describe will be prove to be too intense for them to usefully utilise right now. It will bring up too much repressed energy and emotion and they will find themselves unable to stay present whilst in the practice. Alternatively, they may find themselves overwhelmed with nausea or strong negative emotions in the wake of the session.

There is absolutely no shame in this. I’ve been doing this kind of stuff for over two decades and I absolutely find this specific practice super-challenging and regularly find myself filled with resistance.

But I want to put this practice out, both for those who are ready to use it now, and for those who wish to work towards it with less intense practices.

Medical Issues

If you have any history of abdominal or intestinal issues, such as hernia or diverticulitis, you absolutely need to get a professional medical opinion before attempting this practice.

If you experience any physical pain in your abdominal or intestinal areas whilst doing this practice, or afterwards, you need to stop and to be willing to seek professional medical opinion as to why this might be.

The Technique

We are going to utilise two different styles of belly-breathing back-to-back - one fast and one slow. We will be doing a minimum of two reps, meaning Slow - Fast - Slow - Fast.

Doing these different techniques one after the other stops us getting into too much of a track with the movements and this is a necessity. One technique alone will not achieve anywhere near as much.

Body Position:

• You need to be sitting upright with your back unsupported. Doing this on the floor, cross-legged, is perfect. Otherwise, on a chair with the soles of your feet flat on the floor is great.

• You should keep both your back and your head upright throughout. Do your best to not point your head down or hunch your shoulders - a common, nervous-system-mediated defence against feeling.

• You should keep your eyes closed throughout. If you should get fearful during the practice, it’s okay to open them for a while. But it is actually better, if this happens, to really feel your body which will allow stuff to process.

• You should rest your open hands gently upon your knees, palms facing down. Resist the temptation to move your hands around during the practice and especially do not touch your head. Touching the head is again a way that the nervous system uses to release building cerebral energy and we actually want to allow that to discharge by breaking through inner blocks.

• Throughout the practice, do your best to keep your body stable. It is common to find yourself rocking rhythmically, especially during the faster breathing practice. This again is nervous-system-mediated defense against feeling. And whilst it does allow a low level of release, it is far better to gently stop doing it and to feel more deeply into your belly.

Pranayama Technique 1 - Slow

• This technique is done to an alternating drum beat, with one beat roughly every three seconds. There is a soundtrack for this whole exercise, which I will link to later on.

• With the bass drum beat, fully inflate your belly, ballooning it out as far as you can, and at the same time inhale as deeply as you can.

• When you hear the snare drum beat, fully deflate your belly, compressing it as far back into the body cavity as it will go, whilst exhaling fully.

• With the next bass drum beat, begin the inflating and inhaling again and continue the cycle, doing your best to stay focused on your belly and the sensations happening there.

Pranayama Technique 2 - Rapid

• This technique is done to a faster and more basic drumbeat, consisting of bass beats only at a rate of roughly 100 bpm.

• This time you focus solely on the exhale and allow the inhale to “take care of itself.” On each beat, you pull your belly vigorously back into your body cavity whilst exhaling fully and sharply.

• You simply continue like this, checking now and again that you are still fully moving your belly inwards whilst exhaling, for the whole of this stage.

Completion Phase:

• When you have completed 2, 3 or more reps of the above 2 stages, back to back, you move into the Completion Phase, which is done to gentle music.

• You gently stop paying attention to your breath or belly movements, no longer controlling them and allowing them to simply be however they are in the moment.

• At the same time, you keep your eyes closed and continue feeling into your belly.

• It is common for all sorts of deep emotions and bodily sensations to arise in this stage, so make sure you really stay present whilst doing it.

And that is all that there is to it. These are not complicated breath techniques. But because they are so evocative, you will need to really focus on the movements and your belly area in order to stay present and get the benefit.

Important Information

Let me now list some stuff you should know, before trying this exercise out, such that you can optimise your experience.

• You will need to focus especially hard on each technique during the first rep. This is because, when we start to open up our belly in this way, a lot of repressed energy and emotionality will begin to be mobilised. This will usually trigger unconscious, nervous system defenses and, unless we are really present, we will easily find ourselves drifting off. There is most definitely a “resistance bump” for most people with this type of practice. So really focus hard each time you begin. After 10-15 minutes of focused effort, some level of healthy entrainment to the techniques may set in and we will now find it easier to maintain them, meaning we can go deeper.

• A whole variety of healthy bodily reactions can take place whilst we’re doing this practice. I will list them as some can initially be scary but are actually normal and fine:

  • Physical contractions, coughing, burping or farting. Allow these phenomena, if they happen spontaneously, but try to not control or direct them. If they take you over for a few seconds, allow this, but then return to the technique once complete.

  • Strong emotions. Allow these to happen as simply a sensation in the body, trying not to let your mind get lost in interpretation. You can do that after the session if you wish. All human emotions are embedded in our sense of the body. So those that have been repressed will start to become conscious as we start to increase this sense. All you have to do is to stay focused on the feeling of your belly and processing will occur naturally.

  • Strong tingling or cramping in the hands or feet. These are classic effects of increasing the level of ventilation in the body. Tingling especially may also happen all over the body. These effects can feel scary at first. But rest assured that they are entirely normal. If you find them too much to bear, then you can reduce the speed and depth of your breathing, and they will slowly fade away. But, if you can bear to, keep going through the discomfort.

  • Rhythmic rocking of the body. This typically can start later on in the session and particularly with the faster of the two techniques. It is a way for our nervous system to create a sense of comfort to offset the uncomfortable feelings that are being evoked. Try, without getting too rigid, to hold your body in the posture - head and backbone upright, hands gently clasping knees - allowing only the belly and lungs to move. In like manner, if you find yourself leaning forwards or your head dropping, try to bring them back up.

• In addition to the effects that can take place whilst we’re doing the practice, there are typical effects that can happen later in the day, after the session is complete. I will list these:

  • Nausea, diarrhea, burping and flatulence. These are all common and the nausea can be especially a drag. My pet theory is that the nausea relates to the inner relinquishing of mental control. So is invariably a healthy thing even though it feels bad.

  • Emotional roller-coaster. You find that your emotional reactions to daily life are much stronger than normal. Typically more anger and more feelings of vulnerability. Try to allow this and to be willing to go back and explain things to anyone you realise you became inappropriately angry with. And remember that spending time simply feeling the body without interpretation will allow things to process naturally.

If the experience itself, or the effects that you experience later in the day, are too much for you, remember that you have options to dial the intensity down. You can choose a shorter version of the session, do it less often, or stop altogether. It is important to honour where you are personally at.

If you wish to work at the belly level in a less direct and intense manner, you could check out the following exercises from my YouTube channel:

• Belly Activation

• Right-to-Exist exercise

• Belly Breathing masterclass

Following Along

To support those of you who would like to give this practice a go, I have created some resources:

• You can download a full introduction plus six versions of this practice for £5 from my website here. All are mp3 audio files and I give supportive encouragement along to the drum beats and music.

• I have uploaded two follow-along versions of this belly-breathing session to my YouTube channel. There’s a full introduction plus 35 minute version online here. There’s a short introduction and entry-level, 22 minute version here.

Thank you for reading. I would love us to all work together to loosen our Primal Knot and make our own belly area, and that of the world, clearer, happier and healthier.

Good luck!

Devaraj, August 2023