The constant permutations of reality can get uncomfortable, to say the least, in proportion to how adamantly we cling to the familiar. What we cling to is completely arbitrary, by the way. The more you think about the more you'll realize that every tradition is the product of its times, just as our times are birthing other traditions. Think of a father or a grandfather wearing the same style of shoes or dress for their entire lives. There's nothing inherently wrong with groping for certainly, unless it limits your life experience.
We're indoctrinated into rhythms that repeat, the same yet different. Sea waves, seasons, moons, classes, etc. And through those experiences, we eventually learn that “The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change ", as Heraclitus put it. Most people don't fathom it as a visceral reality. They sort of intellectually waft around it, still blindly clinging to the things they refuse to change.
It is liberating to know that countless cells are dying and being reborn every second; that we are literally showing up to a new moment, and certainly a new year, with a body that is mostly new. And yet we think we are one way because we showed up that way in the past. Or maybe someone told us we were one way, though we've never set foot in that way of being, and we take it on as part of our identity.
Free yourself.
Strategies for Living More Fully, Awakening, And Breaking Free of the Past
Everything we do revolves around one premise: how to orchestrate the most dramatic breakthroughs within the shortest timeframes possible. We are obsessed with it.
At a glance, I can tell where you are abound up in your body and mind, and we set to work within minutes. I'm sometimes guilty of flying through the formalities to get down to the deep work. I hope that is ok with you... time is precious.
I've gathered much of my understanding of life and consciousness through an awakening experience that occurred a decade ago, and that has been nourished by other experiences that followed. I don't go about to convince anyone of my worldview conceptually, as that has severe limitations. We can't live by concepts. We live by experiences. And so I set about to develop a system in order to demonstrate the experiences that have enriched my life by a thousand times.
Some Reflections on Healing old Wounds Somatically
During this somatic work, you'll feel pieces of yourself for the first time.
Who touches the inside crest of the pelvis, or the ribs alongside the torso, or the point just under the collar bone? To feel a physical place for the first time, is to feel a place in the psyche that had been in shadow. To feel fully it is to reconnect to it, and to complete a loop, freeing the body and mind from whatever pattern has been arrested there.
Case Study: Healing Feminine Wounds: Reclaiming Trust in the Masculine
As an intellectual practice, forgiveness is a slippery concept.
The mouth lies constantly. The mind convinces itself of outrageous fictions. It doesn't matter how scandalous or absurd the story is when mind is the judge, jury, and executioner. It's a rigged game.
The body never lies. A skilled practitioner can see and touch issues that the client isn’t even aware of, and guide them into that awareness. It’s like holding up a mirror to the vast, ineffable ‘self.’
Our goal isn’t to merely reconnect the leg. Reconnecting the leg awakens the pelvis and all of the digestive and sexual organs. Our goal is awakening; enhancing aliveness. Our goal is expanding intimacy, and deepening love.
Later that night, she goes home and makes love to her partner in an embodied way, for the first time in her life. As she relays it to me, her eyes are ablaze. She hadn’t known what was possible before. Now she’s opened a whole new frontier… the waning art of rising to the touch with a fullness, and touching in the same way.
In a world full of vacant stares, empty promises, and detached bodies, the final frontier isn’t the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space… it’s the body, and the consciousness trickling or surging through us all in this and every moment.
Case Study: How An Unconscious Judgement Created a Lifelong Shoulder Pain
As I was working on a client’s shoulder, by simply rotating it slowly, he kept noticing an inner voice chiding him. You’re worthless, it was saying. Pathetic. I saw it in his face so clearly that I could almost hear the voice.
I narrowed in on the motion, and it seemed something like a throwing motion, the arm over the head, arcing down. Is that familiar? I asked. It seems to me like throwing something. As I said that, he saw a vague image that slowly came into focus… it was the laces of a football, lamely wobbling through the air. This shoulder pain had plagued him since high school.
And then it came to him; the origin story of the condition. Time stopped.
Disease Burrows in the Unknown Places; the 'cure' Is to Radically Increase Presence; Healing.
Disease burrows in the unknown places. It’s a fiction that relies on other fictions; a fragmentation that requires seeing only pieces, at the expense of the whole.
The ‘cure’ for this fiction is always to flood the darkness with light, and to fill the unknown with presence.
Where you are most ‘absent,’ that is where a disease is most likely to take root. (Most people are most ‘absent’ in their lower half, and particularly in the pelvic / gut region, the seat of most disease).
Case Study: Finding your Feet Means the World Changes
I had a client who, during our conversations, kept hiding her feet. Especially when we broached difficult topics. As I questioned her, she eventually confessed.
‘I hate my feet. They are so masculine. They remind me of my father’s.’
So she never wore sandals, and took great lengths to hide her feet. So, hiding her feet was a way to hide from me, and the world. Hating her feet was a way to hate her father.
Case Studies: Radical Strategies for Healing Chronic Relationship Patterns Quickly
Most of our relationships suffer because of our tethers to the past. I wrote in my Flow Training Manual about Lucy. She was bound up in her shoulder, physically. As we gave a gentle pull, while taking the time to connect her to the emotion, we realized that, on some level, she was still ‘holding her father’s hand while she crossed the street.’ This was long ago, as a toddler, and the body had not let go.
Her father had passed away years before, and she was unable to mourn.
As I pulled on her shoulder, the floodgates opened. Tears for her father poured out, and her shoulder released physically.
First, stand where you are. (Then, step forward).
First, stand where you are.
This is easier said than done. Somatically, there are pieces of us scattered in the past. We sit in quiet meditation, and a steady refrain begins to play softly under our awareness. Something about our mother or about our origins. Residual pain from an old injury flares up, and tugs our knee back into the fifth grade. If we breathed just a little deeper, we'd notice that fragment of the heart we broke twenty years ago, that hasn't quite been mended.
Rearranging the Constellation of Stories that you think you Are (for Healing)
I often say that a human being is a constellation of stories. Some of these stories we adopt passively; some we adopt consciously. There is no authentic story; so there is no authentic way of being, other than experiencing the moment fully, and acting out of that experience.
I distinguish between the personality and the essence, the terminology of Gurdjieff. The personality is what we present to the world; it is concerned with image fitting in. The essence is the part of ourselves that surfaces during peak or awakening experiences. It experiences being directly.
How Touching into your Essence Fundamentally Shifts Behavior.
How the Budden Process Works (Somatic Breakthrough Delivery); With Esoteric Anatomy of the Skull
While the benefits the Budden Process work are often very clear, the mechanics can be mysterious.
They are a mystery in part because we are working with consciousness, and consciousness is, almost by definition, a mystery. Many spiritual traditions that are based in mindfulness practices are studies of consciousness. We don't study it much in our culture. Scientists call it 'the hard problem.' For one thing, how does one observe oneself objectively, when even the most minute particles of matter seem influenced by the observer?
Certain principles show up again and again in Budden Process sessions. So we can use these to deepen our understanding.
Awakening Belongs to the People (coopting realities)
Organizations immediately move to co-opt everything real, profound, and quintessential to the human experience. As an example, direct experiences of awakening and oneness have been coopted by religions. These experiences of the purest freedom are then used to control. This is the supreme irony.
Here are a few guidelines for resistance.
Transformational Anatomy - The Abdomen
The body is a conduit for life force. This FLOW is hampered by tightening the abdomen. We learn, in our culture, to tighten our abdomen to fit into some programmed, artificial concepts of beauty. We also learn it through the unnatural postures we engage in regularly (sitting, for instance, and standing in certain footwear). We also may tighten the abdomen so as not to feel our deepest fears; our core wounds.
Honoring the entire spectrum of sensations, Flow and Non-Flow and the Transformational Anatomy of the Psoas)
Sensations are always arising and passing away... arising and passing away. We put a lot of energy into labeling these sensations.
Sensations don't create our reality; the labels do. The same sensation never shows up twice.
Included are the tools for making the most of this fluid state.
The Psoas: Esoteric Anatomy
The psoas runs from the lower 5 lumbar to the top of the femur or thigh bone. When it is congested, it can affect posture, digestion, circulation, sexuality, and the urinary system, to name a few.
Here are a few critical distinctions and tools for opening.
Gaps in Awareness (and how to fill them)
In day to day living, we are largely unconscious. We often behave mechanically, going from pattern to pattern automatically, moving through our days and lives. We live in the liminal spaces, looking forward to life events, or back with nostalgia on the past.
Here are some practical tips for bringing awareness back, using the body as a springboard. (Hint: this has nothing to do with meditation).
Holistic Postural Analysis
'We are all different. Still, standing in the way that the body was designed to stand becomes effortless. Living around our discomfort, (as our adapted posture is usually a way to avoid pain), is taxing to the entire system. Muscles suffer; bones suffer; organs suffer; we suffer. We drain our energy into a black hole, rather than pour it into creative expression, leadership, love... the building of dreams.
Standing in flow is a way to stand with whatever is, and to face it head on. I say we meet life with our whole body; nothing tucked away; nothing twisting to deflect; nothing collapsing so as not to feel.
Here are a few guidelines...
Soften the Belly; Meet the Moment, the Lover, the Ocean with your Whole Self
Soften the belly in interactions with the lover. Soften the belly in interactions with the ‘enemy’. Soften the belly in interactions with the crushing ocean or the dark forest. Something interesting happens… they soften too, as if on cue.
Your softening impacts the ocean, not because the ocean compromises her fierceness, (that would be to give up her nature), but because her fierceness was a projection of yours; and now the two of you are free meet in an entirely new world. Now her vastness and serenity can surface (projections of yours).
Deepening your Healing Practice
Faith is critical during this process, because healing happens outside of linear time. We weave in and out of childhood as though time didn't exist, welcoming back old abandoned pieces. Most of the tools we learn for measuring and quantifying in life do not apply here.
How do you measure the healing of the heart and soul?
How do you compare one moment to another, in a constellation where 'change is the one constant?'
The flowing forward calls upon an inner knowing; on following an inner compass that is uniquely your own.
The Paradoxes of Healing and Awakening
I think a well-lived life is a balance between the external happening and the internal reflection. When we spend too much time moving through happenings, without reflection, it can be difficult to discover meaning. There may be one or two experiences that require a lifetime of reflection to make sense. They inform and are informed by our life path.
The process of embodiment, coming back into the body, includes discovering where those experiences have fit into our lives, so they can fall into place; so that our life purpose continues to clarify.
"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Soren Kierkegaard