WHAT IS RADIX?
THE PURPOSE OF THE WORK.
The primary goal of Radix work is the restoration of the life force underpinning, thinking, feeling and behaviour, the integration of thinking, feeling and behaviour and the capacity to do this whilst maintaining relationship with self and others.
Achieving this means restoring the rhythmic flow of the life force or ‘radix’ throughout the body – both on its inward movement, enhancing self-contact, and on its outward movement, enhancing contact with the environment and others. It also means assisting the client to become conscious of the many ways in which they facilitate or inhibit the flow of their life force. Only with this consciousness can they make the choices as to how to experience their aliveness in the world.
An initial focus in achieving this is ensuring that the client is actually embodied. We all walk around with a a body but that doesn’t mean that we fully inhabit our body and enjoy the fullness of its experience and expression. There are many reasons, why people disconnect from the experience of their bodies. The most extreme reason being trauma and abuse. Many people due to such events needed to withdraw their connectedness to their bodies. This is what enabled them to survive the trauma or abuse. It was a necessary thing to do. However, as life moves on, not inhabiting their body can make life more challenging. It is hard to stand your ground, if you have little sense of your legs and feet.
Other people have learned to dissociate from their bodies for other reasons. If they connect to their body they may connect to their emotions and they haven’t learned how to effectively experience and express emotion so it is easier to disconnect from their bodily experience. And of course this process doesn’t have to be chronic or habitual, it may simply occur as a more temporary process when a stressful situation emerges.
Regardless of the reason for the dis embodiment, Radix practitioners are trained to identify when this process is occurring. They can then assist clients to identify when they are not embodied and also teach them ways to stay more embodied.
Achieving this requires the Radix therapist to assist clients to become attuned to what enables them to stay present or conscious to what they are experiencing and what interrupts this process. This consciousness is more than intellectual awareness. It is a whole body knowing. It comes as a result of accurate tracking of a client's process by both the client and the practitioner and requires both to be very present in the here and now. It is possible in all kinds of therapy to work with clients so that they develop more awareness of what they do intellectually. Have more insight. However, in Radix work, clients experience what they do.
In Radix therapy, one is also not only concerned about developing the clients ability to be more conscious in the present moment but also to do this with an experience of aliveness. By this we mean being fully engaged with all of you, your mind, your body, your emotions whatever the task. To embody your vitality.
Most people come to therapy because something is not working in their life and they experience themselves as having no choice or power to change it. Assisting clients to understand their process at an experiential level in this way, gives them more choice about changing it.
If a client is dissociating in a session, a Radix practitioner’s first concern is not necessarily to stop the dissociation process. Rather to bring this process to the clients awareness and to explore what may or may not have triggered it. Dissociation is only a problem when it is unconscious and stagnant. Similarly, if a client is afraid of crying too much ('breaking down'), a Radix practitioner may help them become very aware of what they do to stop themselves from crying. Or if they find themselves chronically in their heads strategising and thinking, the Radix therapist may encourage them to more fully experience this to learn more about the purpose of this behaviour. When a client becomes fully engaged with this process and familiar with what they do with their musculature, and energy and breath to stop crying or to maintain a thinking process, they realise they have a choice whether to cry or not or whether to stay focused on their thoughts at the cost of their emotional and physical experience.
Working with this process of embodiment, consciousness and engagement, develops body mind integration. And for each client at each session this will involve something different. With some clients this is achieved by developing and building the client’s experience of their body as a container. At another time or with another client, this will be achieved by facilitating emotional expression or experience. At all times, we want there to be a congruence, a working partnership, between the body and the mind. The client and the therapist.
Historically Radix work was known for its emphasis on emotional expression and release. For some clients at some stages of their work, for them to become more conscious of what they do, think and feel and for them to truly engage with life with a sense of choice and body-mind integration there will be a focus on what they think and do with their emotions. In our society, the importance of emotions for fulfilled and functional living is still so poorly understood. This is however, not a primary goal of the work but rather a by product of what needs to be addressed to engage more fully with life.
© RADIX TRAINING AUSTRALIA 2024