What the Reichian Structures Teach Us About Connection and Integration
Last week I attended the Gestalt Equine Institute of the Rockies training module: Somatic Processes for Humans and Horses. Like every module in this program, it was rich, layered, and deeply experiential. What stood out most for me this time was learning about the Reichian body structures—a framework for understanding how energy moves through the body, and where it can become blocked.
I’ve spent years learning to listen to my body, but this gave me another lens. It helped me see that what I sometimes call “patterns” or “protections” are not personal flaws; they’re intelligent adaptations—ways my system learned to keep me safe. Understanding that was both validating and liberating.
Energy and Protection
Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud, was one of the first Western psychologists to explore how our life experiences shape the flow of energy in the body. He observed that chronic tension—what he called armoring—develops as a way to manage emotions and sensations that were too much for us to feel at the time. Over years, those patterns of holding and contraction form recognizable body structures.
Each structure carries its own story: how it learned to stay safe, how it moves toward or away from connection, how it organizes energy and awareness. None are “bad.” None are fixed. They’re simply maps of imbalance, snapshots of how the life force adapts under certain conditions.
What I appreciate about this model is that it’s not about labeling or diagnosing. The goal isn’t to figure out which box we fit into, but to understand how our energy has been organized and how we can bring it back into balance. True healing is not about erasing a structure, but integrating all parts of ourselves, so that we can draw on different qualities of energy as needed.
In practice, that means reclaiming flexibility. The ability to ground when we need stability. To soften when we need connection. To take action when we feel inspired. In this way, the body becomes less of a problem to fix and more of a landscape to explore and befriend.
Energy Centers and the Language of the Body
Anodea Judith’s Eastern Body, Western Mind also points to the Reichian structures and energy centers within us that show both adaptations and gifts. In it, she bridges psychology and the chakra system, offering a way to understand human development through energy centers that move from root to crown.
Reich’s body structures and the chakra system both describe how and where energy becomes stuck or overexpressed. They point to the same truth: that the body holds the story of our lives. When we begin to sense where energy isn’t moving—where it collapses, hardens, or spills out—we start to see how our personal histories live in our posture, breath, and presence.
Both systems remind us that wholeness isn’t static. It’s not a perfectly balanced state we achieve once and for all, but a dynamic dance of opening and contracting, giving and receiving, rooting and rising.
A Colonized View of the Body
Something else we discussed in the training stayed with me. One of the facilitators named how even the term somatic therapy reflects a colonized view. In many traditional and Indigenous cultures, there was never a separation between mind and body—or between human, land, and community.
It’s only within Westernized societies that we needed to relearn embodiment, to invent entire fields of study to help us return to what was once natural. The very notion that “the body” is something distinct that we can “work with” points to the disconnection itself.
We live in cultures that have taught us to prioritize the intellect, to live in the head, to value productivity over presence. Many of us have learned to override our bodies in the name of efficiency or control. The same mindset that separates humans from nature also separates mind from body.
When I think of somatic therapy now, I see it not as a specialized technique, but as a form of remembering. A way of rejoining what has been split apart—within us and around us.
Body-Mind and Gestalt
This idea of wholeness is central to Gestalt therapy, which sees the person not as a collection of parts but as a dynamic organism always in relationship: with others, with environment, with the field as a whole. In Gestalt, awareness itself is healing. When we bring attention to what’s happening in our body, our breath, our sensations, our movements, we begin to reclaim the natural intelligence that’s always been there.
In this way, “body-mind therapy” feels like a more accurate description. The body and mind are not separate systems but two expressions of one life. When we soften the internal split, we also soften the external ones—the ways we separate ourselves from other people, from nature, from the living world.
Horses teach this so clearly. They don’t distinguish between emotion and sensation, or thought and movement. They live in the present moment of their bodies. When we step into relationship with them, they invite us to do the same: to settle, to breathe, to meet life as it is moving through us right now.
A Return to Wholeness
Learning about the Reichian body structures gave me a deeper respect for how our systems adapt. It reminded me that our bodies are not the problem; they’re the pathway back. When we understand our energetic imbalances, we can begin to bring compassion to oursevles, and to invite more movement, more life, more choice.
In a larger sense, this work mirrors what’s needed in our world. The disconnection so many of us feel from our own bodies reflects the disconnection between humans and Earth. As we restore relationship within ourselves, we also contribute to restoring relationship around us.
Healing, both personal and collective, is not about transcending the body, but coming home to it.
When I imagine what integration looks like, I think of the land itself: rivers that find their way around stones, trees that bend toward light, soil that holds memory and possibility. The body is part of that same ecology. It knows how to heal when given space, attention, and connection.
Maybe that’s what the work really is, learning to listen again. To our bodies, to each other, to the Earth. To remember that we belong.
If you feel called to doing deeper work, reach out below and let’s connect.
Resources and Acknowledgments
The concepts of body structures are based on the work of Wilhelm Reich and subsequent developments in somatic psychology. The chakra framework referenced here is drawn from Eastern Body, Western Mind by Anodea Judith. This post was inspired by my recent training at the Gestalt Equine Institute of the Rockies and Duey Freeman & Kimberly Rose.
