Radix®

Radix® is a body centred psychotherapy, body work-personal growth works. Radix sessions are a combination of group work, individual sessions, and workshops.
‘Radix’ means root or source and is a body psychotherapy: body work and personal growth works that look to facilitate the free flow of Radix life force throughout the body.
“Radix work revolves around the concept that there is a life force in nature that existed before there was life itself and out of which life arose. This is the Radix or life force…it is a bridge between psychic and somatic, between the emotion on one hand and body movement on the other hand, between subjective experience which is individual and personal…and objective reality”. Chuck Kelley
“Radix work is about surrender. It is about surrendering to this life force to be more fully alive and expressive in one’s daily life. It is also about trust that the natural cosmic laws are life enhancing and that when operating on the basis of these, one will be pursuing life enhancing behaviour. It is also about integration. An integration of mind and body into a harmonious, active, and ever-changing whole.” Narelle McKenzie
A Radix teacher looks at character structure, the postures/stances we take from experiences that we have had and how we have felt about them. Character is seen as solid function.
As we grow up from a baby to a child into our adolescent years we respond and form habits and posturing towards life, these can also be seen as survival patterns that the body takes on and has used to contract or restrict away from experiencing and feeling. These bodily responses may for a time have kept the body from feeling overwhelming feeling and sensation, and for that time they may have been life enhancing, but over time they become rigid parts of ourselves, outdated and prevent us making conscious choices from a multitude of possibilities that are available, the armouring keeps us in a restricted limited aliveness, with cut off areas of ourselves, parts of the body that we have little embodied access to, in an attempt to continue to keep us safe, avoid conflict, not feel pain, but our life bandwidth of experiencing our aliveness of being will also be limited.
Our character as solid function are experiences and felt experiences that have been unfinished or incomplete, not integrated, they become our unconscious responses to life, our tendencies to move towards or away, reach for.
If our response to a fearful situation was to draw in and away from our environment and contact from our primary care givers, we may have learnt that all contact is frightening and avoid relationships, or deep, meaning and vulnerable ones, fear withdraws the life force inwards, close to our core in a contracted state, if this is not a temporary response but held over a protracted period it becomes an unconscious response a self-limiting response to life, affecting our availability of choice and feeling, it forms our core beliefs about our own self-concept and what we feel about how safe or hostile an environment is, it gives us a lens to view the world through, that is not necessarily and in all probability isn’t accurate or real. If we are in a perpetual state of fear, we limit in turn our capacity to trust to be trustful.
It is the same with many other emotional responses, as a society emotions are not seen as important, or are not explored, they are often seen as manipulative or not something to be displayed publicly, we are told to get on with it, that we are grieving too long, our anger is unacceptable, we cry in bathrooms or away from others, we don’t voice our anger, especially if we are women. If you have seen a person who cannot harness her anger appropriately you see helplessness instead. As a child we may have held back our tears ‘stop that crying’ held back our tear glands from secreting, braced our necks to stifle sobs, clenched our buttocks. As mothers we are told our children are being manipulative when they don’t want to stay in a strange setting, to just walk away.
People struggle with separating feeling and action, if I feel angry, I then must do something about it, do my arms need to punch, my legs to kick, my mouth to bite. If I am attracted to someone sexually and am open about it, do I then feel I have to progress into acting on it? We have become unaccustomed to allowing for ourselves and others to have process, we feel we need to then do something with that process when in reality we don’t. Often, we don’t act on our feelings, but being aware and allowing for our process of felt experiences is valuable is vital for keeping our aliveness and movement. Radix works with containment as well as expression of emotions, giving space for our processes and learning when to contain as well as release, to tolerate sensations and charge in our bodies.
The character postures are body armouring, bands of muscular constriction at the deep and superficial levels of the body, contractions that are unconscious to us now, but affect our life force, our choices, and limit the emotional spectrum we have capacity to feel.
Armouring restricts our life force, restricts our breath, and interrupts our contact, both with ourselves, and the contact we make with another, and also changes how we feel about our connection and contact with our environment.
Radix work looks at the pulsation and charge of the radix/life force in a person’s body, where it is getting stuck and where there are interruptions, sessions grow a person’s self-knowledge and awareness, of how they make contact, the subconscious made more conscious of the armouring they hold and how they restrict life, working together towards discovering what needs to happen to re-establish the pulsation and life force to flow more freely more harmoniously.
The decisions you make in your life are looked to be made from choice rather than stuckness, rigid or tendency to and are looked to be made from an integrated body mind and consciously made, and are life enhancing, being alive to our moment-to-moment experience helps this. Your emotional, spiritual, physical, your heart and body and mind embodied and working as a unified whole.
Radix work is underpinned in the belief that the body and the worker hold the wisdom and capacity that is orientated towards health and aliveness.
Our society, our culture does not cultivate aliveness, does not cultivate sensitivity to the body, does not trust in instinct in intuition, celebrates the mind and separates it from the body. Emotionally supressed, some expression is tolerated and not others, many emotions are seen as weakness, we categorise them as good or bad and judge what is acceptable and the tolerance for each is different depending on whether you are a man or a woman. A healthy anger/aggression transformed into a man as a virtue as a go getter, as knowing what he wants, as having drive, as a woman these same expressions are seen as a difficult woman, as being hormonal, unhinged, emotionally fragile, as hysterical. Inequalities in our society, socially constructed oppression in class, race, sexuality, gender, ableness, neurodiversity are held in the body, in our postures, oppression is in the body and is seen in our posture and gait, is held in our muscles, runs in our blood, and seen and felt in our bodies, we move, shrink, take up space, won’t take up space, puff up our chests, stand tall, clench our jaws, lock our knees and feel able to respond in the world, have a voice, move in it with ease, limited by our history our experiences held in body. Many of these oppressions are felt as we are growing up in our early developmental years, developmental stages that were supported or not supported. Micro aggressions accumulated and held in the body over the years that form character structure and body armouring and counter pulsation to our life force.
Radix work looks at growing awareness around our body structure, our tendencies our habits by tracking and growing sensitive to our internal sensations, feelings and responses are impulses to or our resistance to.
With Radix work we learn to feel, to be present to, be accepting of, to be responsive to, to be receptive to, to increase our tolerance our capacity of feeling our aliveness, we learn to allow for all feeling, feeling pain and sadness, grief, anger and in doing so we create more space to feel, to give and receive, love and joy, to feel contentment, peace, and satisfaction in our lives.
Radix works on the energetic viewpoint of psychological and physical dynamics and their interrelationship, the functional identity between mind and body and the role of the body in the process of healing and personal growth.
This is not work that is available much in the UK. I am 1 of 6 who are working towards becoming a certified Radix teacher. It is deep and beautiful work that is important. Come and join me and a small group of others in increasing our ability to be fully alive with the intensity of life. This is my second group in pure Radix approach, and I am excited to be bringing this work to you all.
Who is this work/group for?
Anyone who wishes to deepen their own personal development and personal awareness through a body centred approach. I provide an environment for exploration, openness, and learning. For anyone interested in the healing role of the body, allowing for their bodies to speak, with the stories they hold. This way of working is for you. It can be used as a stand-alone therapy or is often useful alongside some more traditional therapies.
If you are interested in joining the Radix group, please feel you can contact me to meet and discuss. Tessa Fergusson on 07717790944 or send me an
email: info@tessafergusson.co.uk