One of my favorite quotes from Sasha Cobra, the best sexual/spiritual healer I have met, is about the problem of depending on therapies. (Her talks are often fully quotable: highly recommended, especially for men.)

In an interview, she says many people receive therapy sessions to boost their spirit temporarily, only to find themselves descending into their old habit quickly because their “cure” happens just inside their head (their mind). They neglect their body, and because emotions stay in our body, sooner or later the forgotten emotions haunt them back. In order to get out of this loop, they also need to release their issues that are trapped in their body.

If I summarize the core problem in one word, it should be “duality,” but for many people (including myself, I admit) that term automatically shoots this topic high into the spiritual realm, somewhere far away. So let’s say that our mind and body cannot be separated because they function as one.

One of this summer’s tentpole films is called Pacific Rim, a modern (and expensive) homage from director Guillermo Del Toro to Japanese monster and giant robot films. The robots are operated by two pilots who fuse their mind to act as the right brain and the left brain of the gigantic puppet. That structure—two smaller versions of us operating our physical body—is probably close to our mental picture of how we function. (It even explains our split personality.)

To pretend that going to a therapy will solve our problems is to assume we would be able to control ourselves if we only replace or retrain our inner pilots, the software. That sounds ridiculous if we are on the observer’s side: there must be something wrong with the body, the hardware, too.

The problem goes deeper than a simple pilots-inside-a-robot metaphor. There is a third pilot who is mostly invisible but as influential as the other two: the body. It is as if the giant puppet also has its own will.

Our body influences our mind as much as our mind influences our body. We become pessimistic when we are ill. We become emotional when we cut a lot of onions. On the other hand, we cheer up when we have a gorgeous meal. We become confident when open our chest. We become happy when we smile.

Likewise for our more serious emotional issues, we got to shake our bodies up to release what is trapped inside. Just lying down on a sofa and talking our problems out won’t be enough: we need to learn how to cure our body as well as our mind. The problem is that we don’t know how, because almost nobody teaches us or offers body curing practice outside physical restoration.

I don’t say therapy is redundant—we definitely need it—but how come so few of them offer cleansing for our body?