Moola bandha offers an infinitely powerful technique capable of breaking down the rigid barriers that have been built up in the mind over the years, thereby expelling deep unconscious conflicts and complexes that are not easily accessible to modern psychological techniques.

This is because of moola bandha’s action on mooladhara chakra, and the pranas of the body. Psychiatry, on the other hand, relies on drugs and other physical processes, or psychotherapy, which cannot get into the depths of the mind.

Even abreaction therapy could not help some people, such as severe depressives too inhibited to release the required amount of emotion to break up the depressive condition. Perhaps this was because these more severe and long-term conditions had become cemented into the body and mind and thus were no longer amenable to abreaction, because abreaction only allows free unconscious material to rise and be expelled, not concentrating on the physical aspect of anxiety.

Wilhelm Reich’s work with repressed sexual energy exemplifies the above concepts. He formulated the concept of ‘character armor,’ or muscle tension and posture rigidity, which he says makes itself felt as ‘character resistance’ — instinctual desires and defensive functions of the ego.
Character armor, for Reich, represented layers of defense mechanisms which had been psychosomatically transferred into the physical body and could be pictorially schematized similar to geological or archaeological stratification. As such it represented the ‘solidified history’ of the patient, the deeper tensions being the oldest.

Reich states that conflicts which have been active at a certain period of life always leave their traces in the character, in the form of physical and mental rigidity. Each conflict forms a layer in the individual’s character. Each of these layers in the character structure is a piece of life history which is preserved in another form, that is, physically, and is still active.

He demonstrated that by loosening up these layers, the old conflicts could — more or less easily — be revived. If the layers were particularly numerous and functioning automatically, if they formed a compact unit which was difficult to penetrate, they seemed like an ‘armor’ surrounding the living organism. The armor may be superficial or deep-lying, soft as a sponge or hard as nails. However, in each case its function was to protect against displeasure.

[…]

The technique of moola bandha had been a closely guarded secret for millenia. By contracting the mooladhara chakra we have a more powerful technique than all the modern psychological techniques put together. They look like child’s play compared with a technique offering infinite bliss, knowledge and enlightenment.

We have seen many cases of severe depression clear up quickly and without emotional or psychic trauma through the practice of moola bandha, even though the individuals concerned were close to suicide. They experienced old memories, emotions and experiences, but because of training in detached awareness, the memories passed into consciousness and out again, like bubbles floating harmlessly to the surface and bursting.