There is a natural, organic structure in reality. When we listen to that, we touch the essence of the thing.
Everything organic grows from a seed. Cells begin as tiny drops of life, expanding outwards, growing layer by layer. Trees grow from acorns, shoots pushing out, leaves unfurling. There is a natural structure, and it emerges from the core essence of the thing into its full manifestation.
This is what it means to grow from the inside out.
When we don’t understand the organic biological process of growth, we might look at a tree and see its structure. We see the roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaves. We think: to create a tree, I must have roots, and a trunk, and branches, and leaves. We go off to find each of the components, and bring them together. We stick roots into the soil, plonk a trunk on top, and glue branches onto it. We may end up with something that looks like a tree. We may even end up with something that looks like a beautiful tree. But the tree itself is not living – there is no essence of tree, only the shell of a tree.
If we’re only looking from the world of form and structure, this might seem sufficient. It looks like a beautiful tree, we say. Look how bright the leaves are. But from the world of energy, the tree is all wrong. It doesn’t breathe like a tree, it doesn’t have the knowing and the feeling and the energy field of a tree. It may even hurt to be surrounded by so many tree-like things, none of which have the nourishing energy of tree.
And this is how we approach many, many things in the world.
The Reichian types talk about ways that we configure our energy to protect us from the ways that our needs weren’t met as kids. The rigid type learns to focus on external outcomes rather than internal feelings, to compensate for the experience of not having their own feelings recognized, seen, met, and shown to be important. In Western society, our culture is extremely rigid.
The thing with the rigid is that you focus on the forms rather than the essence. Because to be in contact with essence is to feel all of the heartbreak, pain, grief, anger, that you didn’t get to feel as a kid. And to be in contact with the form is sterile – efficient, unfeeling, object-like. “It” rather than “you”. It’s the person saying “I’m sorry,” when you don’t feel them in contact with their emotions.
You can see the symptoms of outside in, of focus on forms over essence, of the rigid, in so many places.