Envy of Aliveness

Aliveness is what makes us human. Being alive means letting the inner forces work outwards, expressing themselves and connecting to the feelings inwards, going beyond boundaries and withdrawing, etc. The life we are takes different forms – if it is allowed. For aliveness can be limited from an early age on. We can assume that any deep hurt or childhood trauma resulted in the loss of a piece of vitality that was replaced by anxiety and tension. This would mean that the more difficult and burdened a person's history has been, the less energy is available for aliveness.

In addition, traumatised parents pass the limited form, in which they have learned to live their lives, on to their children. This transference does not happen consciously, but expresses itself in many unconscious reactions to the expressivity of their children: "Don't be so loud, don't walk around, stop crying, screaming/laughing, behave appropriately...". Children express their liveliness through their feelings, starting at the beginning. They react with intense and strong emotions when they experience lack or overflow, when they have to deal with frustration or when they are in full joy. Motivated by these feelings they start to explore their mobility, more and more and further they draw their circles according to the development of motoric skills.

The uncensored and unrestricted flow of feelings, the elixir of life of children, reminds their parents of their own lost aliveness, and this memory triggers feelings of longing and fear: Admiration of and wishes for this free form of aliveness – and the fears connected with denial and punishment, which were the consequences of expressing feelings in their own childhood. As many parents have learned to suppress emotions and wishes as a child and to cope with the fear of punishment with adaptation, they pass on this message to their children: Liveliness is dangerous, for you and for others. Joy and exuberance lead to suffering. Dampen your excitement. Thus, you will succeed in the world of grown-ups, which is about adaptation, sacrifice and self-limitation. You will not prevail when you are directed by your feelings but when you learn to suppress them.

In not too distant times, the Christian churches in our regions were the moral advocates of the oppression of liveliness. They have done much to establish this pattern as the social norm: You have a right to joy only if there was privation before. Joy is not a birth right, but something that must be earned through suffering, effort, or good actions. Moreover, full happiness was not connected with life, but with death: Those who die in the right way, that is, free from sin, have the prospect of an eternal enjoyment of life. Protestantism has added to this distortion of human nature with the view that not even the effort and achievement of life is enough to earn access to eternal joy, but that grace is only an unpredictable gift that cannot be claimed.

Functioning and Flipping Out

The consequences of this ideologization: a society divided into two, with people divided into two in themselves, who on the one hand have to perform without joy and on the other have to maximize joys in their leisure time. Is it any wonder that we have forgotten or minimized laughter? Researchers have found that 70 years ago people spent 14 minutes a day laughing and now only 2 minutes. Liveliness has disappeared and been replaced by "activities" - purposeful doing, performance-oriented being driven. Dutifully, we are stressed from morning till night and thus underline our importance, constantly in motion, but without reference to our vivacity. Guilty of duty, we dedicate ourselves to our leisure programmes in order to maximise relaxation needed for our performance.
Functioning and unhampering, adapting and sinking into senseless pleasure, like an English snob standing in front of his Bentley and saying: "Here (at home in the luxury villa) I only say morning, a good morning it's only on my yacht off St. Tropez." Often the pleasure is only to get rid of the burden of deprivation. There is hardly any room left for relaxed enjoyment and quiet happiness.

The Cultivation of Leisure

These spaces and times must be created. The conscious cultivation of leisure - something that the "old societies" had obviously somehow managed - becomes the question of survival for the industrialized societies. If our society really develops in a way that only a minority of people are still in paid employment, because otherwise a large part of the necessary work is done by machines, then we should already have created our ability to enjoy the big and small things of life and to develop creativity out of these pleasures in order to express our self, for the delight of other people. This will only succeed if we restore the inner connection to our liveliness. 

The recovery of aliveness

The repossession of one's own liveliness can be equated with the reconnection with one's own body. The organic self-regulation processes that have controlled our development and growth from the beginning of our lives have become unbalanced at some points over time and as a result of insufficiently mastered challenges. They have been replaced by regulations that are based on the expectations of others: How should I behave so that nobody takes offence? How much of my aliveness can I allow before something bad happens?

We can understand this revision as re-incarnation in the literal sense: To become flesh again, i.e. to return to the body that we have partially left and to reconnect ourselves more deeply with our own vivacity. The habits of splitting off parts of our self must end for this step, fears of our own energy must be overcome, then the organic self-regulation process can be put into its own right and receive the recognition it deserves.

Conscious breathing connects us with our aliveness in the moment. By breathing, we experience ourselves as living beings. We can also use our breathing to "revive" our energy and emotional body - where something has died, life should return. By breathing, we find the way back to wholeness. And if we rhythmically contract our diaphragm while breathing, it could happen that a spontaneous laugh comes up - welcome back to pure vitality.