Crossing the Forbidden Highway Quotes

“In the 1930s, Reich began to measure these energetic shifts in therapy. He noticed that real arousal causes the skin’s electrical charge to rise, especially in the sensitive areas of the body.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Reich developed methods that help people find their way back to feeling. He taught deep breathing, free movement, and expression through sound. These approaches make space for the blocks to soften. Anger can arise without shame. Grief and fear find their own voices. As tension releases, a sense of ease returns. A more natural self has room to come forward.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“The body speaks in tremors and collapses—a language no cognitive therapy can decipher.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“The mind repeats what it knows. The body remembers what it survived.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“The flesh alone can translate the unspoken anguish of our deepest selves.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Where CBT adjusts the mind's dialogue, Reich's legacy demands we listen to the flesh.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Unlike Reich's work, which excavates trauma stored in the body's armor, CBT cannot penetrate the subconscious terrain where pre-verbal wounds, shadow selves, and somatic imprints reside.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“The body is the subconscious made visible. To ignore its whispers is to mute the very core of human suffering.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Through focused breathing, we foster emotional release, ease stress, and cultivate self-awareness.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Most of you likely recall the old spiritual: Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, where the Hebrews marched around the city walls, blew their horns, and shouted until "the walls came tumblin' down." What a vivid analogy for the breath's power to disintegrate even the strongest muscular armoring we carry in our bodies, a deceptively simple force demolishing barriers we've built over years.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“For example, a monk’s celibacy might armor the pelvis. It blocks orgasmic release and reinforces emotional numbness. Reich’s solution was orgastic potency. This is the ability to fully surrender to orgasm. It dissolves armor and restores vitality.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“While mystical channeling might feel transcendent, Reich saw it as bypassing the body's real needs. This leaves energy pent-up and leading to chronic anxiety or dissociation.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“For Reich, the true life force was orgone. It is a tangible, biological energy that flows freely through the body and nature.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Reich described the redirection of unmet desires as sublimation, in which natural libidinal urges and raw bodily drives for connection and release transform into abstract spiritual ideals. For him, such ideals suppress rather than liberate.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Wilhelm Reich, on the other hand, saw mysticism as a symptom of unresolved sexual energy and a key driver of neurosis. He argued that mystics channel repressed libido into spiritual pursuits. This creates a cycle of emotional blockage and physical tension.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Yet, as Ayn Rand’s philosophy entered his world, a turning point followed—a moment of revelation that shifted both his thinking and allegiance. By 2004, Kelley had crossed to Rand’s side, reimagining muscular armor not as a cage of repressed emotion, but as a fortress of virtue—a shield for the self-reliant soul.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“In his writings, particularly Life Force: The Creative Process in Man and in Nature (2004), Kelley expressed admiration for Ayn Rand and her “armored” heroes.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Charles Kelley, in developing Radix during the 1970s, integrated Reich's breathwork principles into his educational and therapeutic framework, focusing on intentional breathing patterns to restore the natural flow of life force energy, termed "radix.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Reich’s therapy aimed to release these blocks through breathwork, body percussion, and orgasmic discharge, restoring natural vitality.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Breathwork isn't for quick fixes, it's reclaiming power, one breath at a time. Practice makes it a daily ally, disintegrating armor to enrich creativity and connections. Like nature's steady pulse, breath affirms our strength.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof's Holotropic Breathwork, born from 1970s psychedelic restrictions, uses rapid breathing, music, and bodywork for unconscious exploration and trauma healing, echoing ancient Yogic Pranayama (Rig Veda ~1700-1100 BCE, Upanishads ~800-500 BCE) and Sufi Dhikr ceremonies (from the 12th century).”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Reichian breathwork hinges on a profound truth: shallow breathing entrenches emotions in rigid segments, while deep breaths mobilize them like a gale clearing debris.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Reich delved deeper, developing Reichian breathwork as a therapeutic method using conscious techniques to dissolve emotional and physical tension.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Through breathwork, a cornerstone of Reichian practice, I discovered the untapped space within me.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Reich’s genius birthed tools we’ve yet to fully grasp: his character armor and muscular armoring concepts seeded ego psychology, body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy (Fritz Perls), bioenergetic analysis (Alexander Lowen), primal therapy (Arthur Janov), and the Radix of Charles R. Kelley. Beyond these, his mind-body vision ripples through newer somatic therapies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Somatic Experiencing (Peter A. Levine), healing trauma via bodily sensations; Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), merging somatic and cognitive trauma work; Core Energetics (John Pierrakos), blending bioenergetics with spirit; Hakomi Therapy (Ron Kurtz), mindful body-centered discovery; Bodynamic Analysis (Lisbeth Marcher), trauma through body-mind interplay; and Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®, David Berceli), freeing tension with neurogenic tremors.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“In the vast silence of creation, two streams of orgone flowed. They were the primal dance of life itself, vibrating with a rhythm as ancient as the cosmos. These streams oscillated, throbbed, and surged with a pulse that whispers of eternity. This movement of expansion and contraction is woven into the very fabric of existence. When these streams meet and overlap, they form a harmony that births something greater—a unified force, a living system. This is superimposition, a coming together, a layering of one essence upon another.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“The Somatic Unconscious underscores the interconnection between mind and body, suggesting that psychological content inaccessible through cognitive means can be accessed via physical sensations and somatic interventions.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“For more than two centuries, seekers across cultures and disciplines have tried to name and understand a single elusive phenomenon. At its heart is the animating principle that breathes life into all things. In the late eighteenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer introduced the idea of animal magnetism, describing an invisible healing current flowing through living beings. Almost simultaneously, Charles von Reichenbach explored similar effects, calling this subtle force Odyle. Both men sensed a current that moved beneath the surface of ordinary perception, a current that could restore balance and health.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“This notion of a vital force knows no single home, no lone epoch. It resounds in the ancient East as the breath of being, in indigenous rites honoring the earth’s spirit, in the quests of early thinkers to name the spark of life. Wilhelm Reich, a seer across psychology and science, reframed this timeless thread, naming it orgone and tying it to the body’s silent rhythms, to the pulse beneath our skin.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion

“Kelley also marked 1965 as a turning point for another profound reason. That year, he discovered the work of author Ayn Rand. She was a figure who embodied the inner fortitude he lacked. Her writings struck him with the force of lightning. Rand's fiercely armored heroes ignited a fierce resolve in Kelley. It was a fire that mere introspection could never spark. This was no longer a time for lingering in emotion. It demanded action. He abandoned drinking. He embraced a rigorous exercise regimen. He revolutionized his diet. He dropped twenty pounds.”
― Laurence Galian, Crossing the Forbidden Highway: The Untold Story of Orgone, Body Therapy, and Suppressed Emotion