“How did you get into this field?”

-Steven Budden

I stumbled in, not without some divine intervention.

I was an artist in a 'past life.' I rushed through college, earning an MFA from SFAI when I was 23. After years of representational painting, I felt like I was merely wrestling with my own ego in a quixotic enterprise. I studied 'spiritual painting' via abstract imagery. I ached to make paintings that could somehow 'enlighten' people, including myself. I suffered in the uncertainty of it all, and read Watts' 'The Wisdom of Insecurity.' During this time, I was meditating intensely, in the Zen tradition.

While walking on a beach with my father soon after graduating, I experienced 'enlightenment' on a beach in Northern California. A pacific wave swept in, and everything that was false and forced was swept away. There was this pure lightness of being, which seemed to me to be quintessentially human. The other colors of the 'human experience' were distortions, mostly self-perpetuated.

I changed profoundly, but my life didn't.

Three years later, I needed another wake up call. I got it when another Pacific wave swept in, this time carrying me with it and breaking my neck. This was a sort of initiation. A call to shamanism is often launched by a blow to the head. Reportedly, there are churches in France where there are images of Christ with a hammer, and various esoteric illusions to the blow to the head. As well as stories about the blow in Native American shamanistic traditions.

It's interesting too that, in the tarot cards, the Fool is the first card, and one of the symbols of the fool is that he's carrying a stick that cuts across the neck, severing the head from the body. This is the first major card, signifying the beginning of the journey. We set off as ignorant fools, and this is the initial journey back toward wholeness. For me, I'd been living in my head, and needed to come down into the body, and live more 'completely,' with more of myself. As the Armenian mystic Gurdjieff would say, from more of my bodily, spiritual centers (similar to Chakras). So the whole process or healing for me was this journey to the body.

I didn't quite know how to live with the experience. I stumbled around. I knew that I needed a more fulfilling relationship; I knew that I needed a more aligned livelihood. Bodywork seemed like a viable option, so I started training at a very eccentric school in San Francisco. It was 86 miles from where I was living in Elk Grove, California, about an hour and a half of driving. I did this 5 to 7 days per week.

I wasn't impressed by massage itself; as it seemed like an endless treatment rather than a cure. However a curious thing happened. I found that as I touched people, they kept bursting into tears and reliving old memories. In the clearing, they sat up 'as new'. They had brushed up against enlightenment. I couldn't explain it at the time, but I think that my experiences made this possible; I had opened up my energy circuits in some way, and this laid the groundwork for other people to open up. So I rerouted my training in that direction.

The eccentric founder of the school, Patricia Cramer (who recently passed away of breast cancer), was one of the world's foremost experts on healing trauma, in a holistic, even a spiritual sense. As far as I could tell. She'd studied birth Trauma with another master, William Emerson. She 'listened' for energetic blockages, and moved limbs and tissues until the vibration changed, and the blockage cleared. She danced around a body like she was playing a cello. However, she was so mired in wounds that it may have limited her own effectiveness. She was easily triggered and would often fly into a surreal rage at seemingly slight offenses. It reminded me of the way certain Zen masters or Gurdjieff related to his disciples. She was influenced by EST and worked personally with Werner Erhard, who she seemed to respect. I became one of her apprentices for a few years, as well as the apprentice of one of her closest proteges. I took every course the school offered, bartering for much of my education with the graphic design and copywriting services, while I barely survived.

During the program, I experienced my own body for the first time, as well as models of being that I'd always knew existed, but had never dreamed I'd discover. I felt my feet for the first time, and cried tears of joy. I honed in on many of my limiting stories, and they were vanquished.

For whatever reason, a few people came through the program with me, and of them, I'm the only one who practices the work to the full extent of its potential. The others fell back into 'massage therapy' or other careers. One of the reasons was because it was so difficult to market. I've spent the last 8 years wrestling with that conundrum, and it necessitated a crash course in marketing and copywriting. I was engaged in the fiery contradiction of financial compensation and the 'spiritual path;' a similar contradiction I lived through during my days as an artist.

Because my own core energetic seems to influence the work so strongly, I consider myself the only practitioner of this modality, which I refer to as FLOW or BLOOM, depending on the context. I've traded with others that practice the work that we studied together, and what they do is completely different, almost staggeringly different.

The sessions, for whatever else they were, became an alchemical laboratory through which I began to understand the world through direct experience. Embodiment is a key theme, which is all but lost in our culture. Trauma is misunderstood. Life is more 'holistic' than most ever dream. A client and I processed a session about his grandmother, who he'd never met. He'd only heard about her death by fire, literally. The next week, his sibling emailed him a picture of her out of the blue, the only picture they'd ever seen. Could be coincidence, though stories like this have become so commonplace, it's too unlikely for them all to be coincidence!

When I converse with licensed psychotherapists and doctors in various specialties, it's my experience that they've been limited by their training in some way. While good-intentioned, they learn to be committed to 'treatment' rather than 'healing'. They learn of the body as a machine that malfunctions on a whim, and they learn how 'incurable' everything is. If they don't learn this directly, they learn it indirectly, through the experience of others in the field.

Vitality and real healing are exceedingly rare. Those that facilitate this transformation are exceedingly rare. We must stumble in the dark and find our own mentors among the masses.

Anyway, I was birthed into the 'delusion' that humans are designed to thrive, and that anything can be healed. I've never been able to convince myself that this may not be completely true. Though I try to approach each client 'as an empty vessel', I can't help but carry this, my quintessential 'delusion' with me into every session. Anything can be healed. HEALED. It's just a question of tearing away from the unnatural, negative influences.

A potential origin story for this: my mother healed herself of crippling arthritis by dietary shifts and fasting when she was in her 30's. Though I was very young, this transformation, of the foundational figure in my life, influenced me profoundly. It's a long story, but the woman that supported her in healing, my great grandmother, was named Albina. A Bulgarian woman that really deepened by dietary healing regimen Albena, the Bulgarian version of the name, which means 'white' or 'light.' Often, these synchronicities arise that shed light on life events.

After sessions, which were 2 and sometimes 3 hours, many clients were, for a limited time at least, 'enlightened.' I loved the feeling of communing with 'awake' people, such a rare phenomenon in the contemporary world, due to our lifestyles. This is the most difficult piece to market and explain, and I rarely try... mostly I use the gateway of 'practical healing' into the work. Transform this or that element of your life. The 'awakening' piece simply occurs alongside that work. I also both hesitate to charge money for facilitating something so 'priceless,' and realize the necessity of it; one must make a tangible investment in order to get the most reward. I've delivered many complementary sessions in my career, and they are never as effective as the paid sessions.

So, now I work with a handful of clients at a time, in intensive engagements. I've refined the process, and the phases, but the approach is mostly bespoke, and based on the mystical constellation that makes up the individual.

I initially founded Budden Enterprises as a vehicle for delivering these strategies. Explore the avenue that suits you best.

Sincerely,

Steven Budden