From the author: Body-focused therapy, work with the body. Stories told by the body as important information for diagnosing psychological problems and suppressed desires. The story of an abandoned body or the Mighty Oak This is a story about a journey, about a journey body to freedom and strength. The story that I observed, in which I participated and which brought me another awareness of the importance of the body as the brightest indicator of our mental picture of the world. The story is about the importance of the body as our identity, as our Self. I got the opportunity to come into contact with it about a month ago during a retreat on body therapy and practices of conscious attitude towards the psyche and body. Every day we wake up, open our eyes, stretch, get up, We wash ourselves, have breakfast, get dressed, and so on. Every morning we devote more attention to our appearance, our clothes or makeup, our stomach and brain. We quickly throw food into our stomachs, swallow breakfast, often without noticing its taste, in order to fight off the feeling of hunger, and wash everything down with morning coffee to turn on the sleeping brain in a quick way. I often communicate with people and have long noticed that for a huge number of us the body is limited to the stomach and brain. They remember the body when the stomach wants to eat. Or something hurts. Many of my clients live or have lived exclusively on the mental level. The head, the mind, is the Self for them. The body is a certain object that consciousness possesses. The body is not-I. A very alienated, and sometimes even completely alien, object. However, such an attitude incredibly limits us and leads to alienation from ourselves, from our Self, from our true needs. When we don’t hear our body for a long time, we don’t hear ourselves. And then we wonder where the fatigue, lack of energy and joy of life come from, where the illnesses come from. In addition, our body stores the experience of experiences we have experienced in the past. A trace of once unconsciously made decisions that continue to influence us to this day. Decisions that were once correct, but no longer work and cause inconvenience. Our bodily self, our body, tells us a story that clearly shows what is NOT so and what can be done to make it SO. But everything in order... The guy was unhurried , a little awkward, at the same time tall, the main “weight” of the body went into the torso - into the stomach, sides and hips. The image that arose in my mind was an Oak tree with which something wrong happened. One of the features of working in a body-oriented approach is my own emotions and bodily experiences that arise when interacting with a client. I looked at this young man, and his body told its story very eloquently. I felt that it was grieving. And I knew for sure that it wanted to be heard, that it wanted to tell its story. The body itself looked somewhat twisted. It seemed that something had once made it twist, twisted it, and it tried to straighten out again, it tried, but could not, it had to grow just like that, in a twisted state, and it grew as best it could, twisting inward. It simply could not straighten out, unwind and release its power. The image of a young oak tree that had been twisted by a hurricane appeared more and more clearly before my mind’s eye. An image of an oak tree that was crushed by a rock and squeezed in a stone vice. An oak tree that could not grow as it was supposed to. When I looked at my shoulders and neck, I felt heaviness and fatigue, as if something had been weighing on them for a long time and habitually. I felt as if I had come to terms with this heaviness. For all my height and impressiveness, my torso, shoulders and chest seemed weaker than they should have been, like a child’s. The hands, feet, forearms and legs seemed boyishly thin, as if they had never grown. As if they stopped growing at some point. Perhaps in some important and traumatic way. It was as if the body was maturing unevenly. It seemed to be the body of a grown man, a teenage boy, and a chubby baby all at once. This body seems to have taken.