Your relationship is not the product of what you do; it's a manifestation of what you believe about yourself. So the only effective strategy for transforming a relationship is to transform yourself. Otherwise, it's like shuffling around the furniture in a house with a foundation built on shifting sands.
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.
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.
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.
“A fight is going on inside me," said an old man to his son. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other wolf is good. he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you."
The son thought about it for a minute and then asked, "Which wolf will win?"
The old man replied simply, "The one you feed.”
Here are some tips for feeding the right one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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).
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.
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.