The process

Philomela Protocol - Reborn to your Own Life.

It's difficult to say what I do. That being said, here's an attempt, borrowed from an external source.

I remove distortions from a human organism.

In my experience, there is something like a 'divine' blueprint that each of us are endowed with, and when we get out of the way, the body begins to fall back into alignment with that blueprint, assuming that there is enough life force to sustain the shift.

Most of us do not get out of the way, physically or emotionally, and we run our most cherished 'possession', our body, into the ground.

For one thing, when we sustain a 'low vibration' way of living for long enough, that becomes our reality. We coerce and cajole until all fo the world around us fits into our personal paradigm.

Question every thought.

Most people live and die entirely by their assumptions, without ever really questioning their origins. You are a fluid constellation of stories. Refine the stories so that you are the hero rather than the victim. From this space, healing happens, love deepens creativity blossoms. It can't be otherwise. This is why incremental changes are sometimes harder to make than massive ones.

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. 

We are Stories (a meditation on transcending the stories that keep us stuck)

We are walking constellations of stories. Most of these stories are inaccurate, misunderstood, or the opposite of what is real. They are woven into our cells, our tissues, our organs. They reflect in our voice, our words, our actions, our posture. Our entire life becomes the 'singing of a familiar song.' We sing it in various keys, and in various styles, however it is the same song. 

Over the years, I've learned to see the stories that people carry in their bodies. This is not esoteric knowledge. It just requires tuning into another layer of reality. The collapse that is indicative of the early childhood trauma, the anger toward the father, the sexual betrayal, the broken heart. At a glance these things can be seen. 

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.

Physical Trauma as Emotional Healing. Case study of a 'broken heart' manifesting as a bruised sternum.

One interpretation: The core wound manifested as a physical trauma, because that was what it took to compel him to work on it… physical pain. The true wound was a broken heart. Healing one heals the other, and vice versa.

Losing and Reclaiming the Voice

A client had lost her voice. It is a familiar wound. I recognized it immediately as she spoke through clenched teeth, and her throat was a mass of energetic congestion. Likely a thyroid issue, too, I thought. As we talked closer and closer to the core of the wound, the issue of her father inevitably arose. Often, the masculine does play a role in the loss of voice. Because the masculine that many of us live into now is an epic distortion of an ancient, empowered archetype. 

Seeing the World Through New Eyes

After I witnessed her whole body clench and vibrate (the signs of trauma releasing from the tissues), her face went through every season. It darkened, it clenched, it lightened, there were tears, gasps, a smirk. In the aftermath, the familiar peace descended. The loop had been resolved. 

As she opened her eyes, they were shades lighter. She was gazing out into the backyard, blinking and rubbing her eyes. 

What is it, I asked? What do you notice? 

The leaves on that maple are extraordinarily red, she whispered. I thought I was hallucinating. They almost seem too red.  I think I just wasn’t seeing them before.

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. 

Most people don't actually want to heal.

You know, most people don’t actually want to heal. They are enamored of their wounds, hold them tenderly and gaze down at them lovingly. 

It can be a startling but liberating realization. Because allowing someone to cradle their wounds, for as long as they choose to, is loving unconditionally. It doesn’t mean you have to associate with them, necessarily, when they launch into a familiar song. It just means, we can now look at them knowing that their wound has become like their child. We can’t separate them from a bond that strong until the time is right. As of now, they wouldn’t even know how to conceive of life without it. It’s like a magical totem. It offers protection from falling in love, and all of the perils that might accompany that, or it offers a reason to stay in a relationship, without needing to brave the unknown. It becomes  evidence that supports a fear based worldview. It’s a shapeshifter, this wound… it becomes anything it needs to be. 

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. 

Releasing past 'trauma'; by accessing the layer of consciousness where it is stored

It’s common for people to underestimate their traumas. Some even shy away from using the word trauma. I simply use it to mean ‘something that the body is still holding on to.’ It could have come from something as extreme as  years of ritual physical abuse, or something as seemingly innocuous a harsh word from a trusted parent. It doesn’t really matter how it compares to the lives of others. All that matters is that we discover and honor our own experience; acknowledge where we’re stuck so we can move forward as gracefully as possible. 

This requires feeling the emotions fully. This sounds simple… it isn’t for most. 

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).

How your use of language can keep you from healing, and the transformational anatomy of bones

On the healing journey, be careful about the language you use about your ailment, because that is a clue about how the mind is functioning. 

‘My back is killing me.’ Your back is not killing you. It has been supporting you for a lifetime. It is sending out signals so you change your life path. If you don’t listen, it will send out stronger signals, like small waves before the tidal wave. Let it know that you’re listening. Find out what it needs. 

Can a bone ‘need’? Bones are consciousness. As alive as any other part of you. The plastic skeleton we grow up learning from is not anywhere near reality. Since ancient times, bones have been infused with divine meanings, and many of these have been corroborated by more radical osteopaths. 

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. 

I approach every issue in the same way: Discover and resolve whatever is Incomplete

People come to me with a business challenge, or a creative blockage, or a chronic relationship pattern. I watch their language, mannerisms, and posture as they tell their story, and within a few minutes, the origin of the challenge reveals itself. The right knee is clenching. What an interesting choice of words. They could have chosen any word, and they chose 'battle' to explain their condition. A wave of emotion fluttered through the room when they mentioned their partner, and they swallowed it. I saw exactly where it went. Did they notice that? 

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.

Habits can be changed by force, but it is not an effective approach. There is a lot of friction, and therefore a lot of wasted energy. It is easier to change behaviors through a fundamental shift in the nature of being, which shifts the perspective, which shifts the reality.