Gratitude-It Lives in Your Body
December 6, 2011Healing the Heart
April 13, 2012When life’s stressors seem to take over, the body’s feeling tones are the key to wholeness
You’re so frozen with fear or grief or some bodily hurt. You can’t function well. You’re not even aware that you’re in fear or grief. You know something is wrong, you’re overwhelmed and your body hurts. Your work life feels as though it is slipping away. Relationships are faltering and yet you feel powerless to effect change. You’re not truly home, truly present in your circumstances and in your body. You’re not in reality, you’re in your head.
Over the course of many years I have observed this tendency of fear to take us away from the feeling tones and sensations in our bodies. Patients who have come in with all kinds of functional health problems-headaches, neck and back pain, digestive problems, insomnia-all have a basis in not being able to access frozen parts of themselves. Parts that had been traumatized physically or emotionally and were walled off from consciousness.
Resolution came for these clients when they were able to experience themselves directly through their body, during the course of a Biodynamic CranioSacral therapy session. Once they could “feel” themselves and perceive the attendant sensations and emotional tones and feelings lodged in the body, they were on their way to healing.
I believe that the critical piece for healing of life’s stressors and traumas is providing a proper holding field in order for this to happen –a relational holding field where you feel contained, acknowledged and most of all safe. Where it feels safe for you to drop down and rest in your body, without anything or anyone impinging on your system.
Life is movement. The discovery of CranioSacral is the discovery of tidal movements within the body. The CranioSacral therapist isn’t manipulating, but only holding a wide field of awareness, attuning to this motion or any restrictions to this motion within your body, so you can eventually come back into your body. You can begin to differentiate the present adult healthy consciousness that is distinctly separate from the overwhelmed part and hold that with warm-hearted attention.
The CranioSacral therapist holds the larger Field, a neutral place, that is safe and loving, so you the client can begin to feel yourself, come back into your body and feel the sensations and feeling tones that are underneath the trauma. So that you can access true Health and release and reintegrate the traumatized part of you. This Universal field is a loving holding field that can hold you in all its expanse, like the ocean. You can rest in that field, settle, breathe, feel and come back into yourself.
When you come back to yourself and your body’s felt sensations and feeling tones, you feel alive again, reconnected to the stream of Life. I have helped clients take this journey of healing, and it is inspiring to me to see this reawakened connection. And I have taken this journey myself.
When you connect to the felt sense in your body, then you know what to do, because your Intuition is functioning again. You’re connected! To yourself, to your fellow human being again, to Source! And you’re connected to your natural knowing. It takes being held—and held in a safe holding field, a connected holding field with another present human being to reconnect to yourself. To know yourself from the body, from within, as Buddha said. A deep knowing.