Cherionna's Blog

Transition

2017-03-01T04:44:00.001-08:00

Please note that this blog is now being posted on my new website at: http://www.birthingyourlife.org/cherionnas-blog/

All things change! I have appreciated being able to communicate with you via this blog. Now, I invite you to join me in a slightly different context, where I continue to intend to support you in your own challenges and transitions in life...

Thank you for reading my blog. I look forward to hearing from you in the future and hope my posts can continue to be beneficial for you.

with gratitude and newness,
Cherionna Menzam-Sills, PhD

Living in Interesting Times

2016-11-11T13:38:00.000-08:00

I have heard there was an ancient Chinese curse that went, “May you live in interesting times.”

In researching the origins of this saying, I came across not only some doubt as to how ancient or authentically Chinese it is, but also, remarkably at this time, a reference to Hilary Clinton having used it in her autobiography! (http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/12/18/live/ accessed November 10^th, 2016)

"There's an old Chinese curse, 'May you live in interesting times,' that became a running joke in our family. Bill and I would ask each other, 'Well, are you having an interesting time yet?'"

What seems indisputable is that we do, indeed, live in interesting times, not necessarily in ways you may have hoped or expected them to be interesting!

As I write this, people across the world are reeling in shock at the outcome of the American elections two days ago. It seems that no one, not even Trump supporters, expected this outcome. Whatever your political leanings may be, it is possible that you are part of this international shock wave!

We have entered a new phase of the unknown. How does that affect you? A common reaction to the unknown is fear, but other feelings may accompany it.

For me, there have been powerful waves of sadness, as well as shock. I feel I have witnessed a loud exclamation of the fear impulse through this election process. Living in the UK, I am only too aware of this coming on the heels of another shocking event, when the recent referendum here initiated Brexit. How much change can we tolerate?

In the midst of the news shocks, I observe an unexpected flowering of the plant in my kitchen. I return to my ongoing enquiry: How can I meet what arises with an open, compassionate heart? I share this question with you now.

As the unknown raises its face before ours, we are forced to see what may have previously been in shadow. We must find our balance again as the waves of political or other storms increase their force. How firmly can we rest, even in these moments, in a resilient foundation of love and compassion?

For me, my Continuum Movement practice and meditation practice help me maintain or access equilibrium. I return to the stillness at the heart of the storm.

As I observe the voices of bigotry, ignorance, fear, violence and hatred rising, I am reminded of advice received many years ago. You may have heard it, too. It goes something like this: If you are faced with bullies, powerful or potentially abusive or dangerous people, try seeing them as toddlers in diapers.

We were all little once. Our little ones continue to live within us. They may or may not have received the support, protection, love, reflection, acknowledgment and appreciation they needed back then. Where they were not adequately received and held, their needs persevere, continuing to seek what they need in every interaction. This is true for the big, powerful politicians, as well as everyday people just doing our best to live our lives. How can we acknowledge and meet these little ones now?

I find my little one resonating with the fear in the larger world field in these times. Remembering that I have already survived my childhood, I acknowledge her fear, hold her tenderly in my heart, and feel the love hormone, oxytocin, growing within me. From this place, I can breathe more easily into my heart, and send the loving, healing intentions out to those on the planet less able in this moment to access this natural, essential state of love and being.

I can only hope this practice benefits the world, facilitating peace, health and happiness for all beings.

How do you cope with these interesting times?

* Please note that this blog will be moving to my new website at www.birthingyourlife.org. Please visit my new site and let me know how you find it!

Heart Softening in an Upset World

2016-09-28T07:24:00.001-07:00

Sadness welling in my heart

Being with compassion, present to lives so squeezed by old and new pain, breath is barely possible.

Each day, more sad news streams through the world.

Can I soften my heart even in the midst of these streams? Can I rest in trust, in love, in knowing, this, too, shall pass, and humanness continues as it always has? And if it doesn’t, what can I make valuable with this one and precious moment of aliveness?

This is life, this moment. This is all I know.

This emerged in my daily writing the other day. In the midst of so much upheaval and change around the world, so much meaningless violence, so much hatred, racism, bullying, and resistance to immigration, how can we be?

I feel the tension around my heart as the daily news stimulates fear. With some effort, I remember. My practice is to soften my heart in relation to whatever may arise, intending heart-centered presence, just being.

Then I remember more. I recall what happens in a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy session. First, as practitioner, I support the settling of our relational field through orienting to the health, the sense of resource and support, and how that feels in the body. In the midst of all the challenges, disappointments, illness, death and loss, etc., etc., can I find a way to rest? What supports me in being with what is? I ask my clients this question. And so I ask myself.

I have a strong practice that supports me in being able to be

present. I have learned that I can be with just about anything. Even as I receive the news that yet one more person in my life is dying of cancer, I can breathe, remember my body, sense the support of mother earth under my feet, recall the love I feel, share and receive with those close to me in my life, remember how I have survived, and even thrived, in reviewing past challenging events in my life.

With all of this, it becomes easier to soften my heart, but this requires feeling it. I must listen, and be willing to listen, to what my body is telling me. The squeeze in my heart has a message for me. I cannot deny the pain, the sadness it carries. It cries. I cry. I allow the tears to flow, even while feeling the containment of the earth. I allow my body to move in flowing ways, offering it the breaths and sounds I find so helpful from my Continuum practice.

Any of these ways of resourcing not only support me in being able to be with challenging moments, but can also enhance my clients’ ability to be present with what arises, including with our relationship within the field of the treatment session.

A Craniosacral Therapy session can be intensely intimate. The client may feel like a tiny infant or child lying supine on the treatment table, with the therapist hovering over. It is essential to acknowledge and respect the vulnerability of this position. It is too easy for a therapist to assume the client knows this is a safe relationship. Isn’t it obvious? I’m here to help! And it may be obvious on a conscious level. For the little one within, however, there may be fear. There may be unconscious, shadowy memories arising in the body. There may be old emotions being touched by the current moment, like the depths of sadness I feel upon hearing about another person I know dying.

This is not just about this moment. It touches on other losses I have experienced, not only recently, but even as far back as when my twin died in the womb. Even beyond that, I am aware of the sadness and fears my mother carried along with me in her womb. Generations of loss, fear, violence, etc. due to cultural conditions trickle through as cellular communications. My little body grew within my mother’s womb fed by a toxic mix of ancestral terror. How do I find trust in this moment with that cellular trail still informing my consciousness?

The question really comes down to how willing am I, or any of us, to be with what is present? I don’t need to understand it all, although insight naturally arises as we are present with what is. What I do need is to be able to yield into the fields within fields of support that are available to all of us, balancing the influence of fields of trauma and challenge.

I could go on at length in this vein. For now, I want to invite you to join in this investigative journey. What is present for you as you read these words? How is your breath? Does it need your attention? How is your heart in this moment? Can you feel it? Is it tight and achy? Is it soft and full? And if it is aching, what would it take for it to be able to soften? What needs attention, holding, support, in order for you to be able to settle more fully into the gifts this moment has to offer?

An Experiential Enquiry into the Energetic Nature of our Bodies

2016-08-16T06:49:00.001-07:00

I am intensely focused just now on completing editing my book, The Breath of Life: An Introduction to Craniosacral Biodynamics. As part of this writing process, I have realized that I am writing as a female in a field lacking female authors. I have challenged myself to consciously write from a feminine perspective, which I have come to see as including intuition, creativity, and direct body-based experience. The book includes experiential explorations, largely inspired by my other passion - Continuum Movement. Please enjoy this excerpt, and I'd love to know how it affects you!

It is not unusual to experience the body as a solid, physical structure. This is, after all, what we were all taught in school, if not before. We cannot walk through walls, and it can hurt to try. At the same time, we live in a world where the mind of science is shifting. While we have all learned about the rules of gravity and how to operate in a Newtonian state, we have also been exposed to revolutionary declarations from the world of quantum physics assessing all things as being aspects of one continuous whole. As David Bohm wrote, “relativity and quantum theory agree, in that they both imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality. In this totality, the atomistic form of insight is a simplification and an abstraction, valid only in some limited context.” (Bohm, 1980, p.13).

We seem to be beings of light and space, rather than the solid forms we tend to see and feel. For example, cell biologist Bruce Lipton points out that we can only see each other because light photons bounce off of the energy of the otherwise invisible human body (Lipton, 2015). Apparently, our bodies compose themselves from used stardust, that has arrived on earth after stars have died or galaxies exploded (Schrijver and Schrijver, 2015).

Clearly, there is some mystery involved in our bodies in that they appear physical but consist of energy and light. Rather than attempting to explain further this phenomenon, which we directly perceive in Biodynamics, I would like to guide you in a brief exploration of this matter (pardon the pun) through your own body experience. If you are curious, please settle yourself in a comfortable position and lets begin the journey! You may want to record these instructions in your own voice to enable you to explore with your eyes closed, if you find that helpful, but this is not necessary.

Take some time to get comfortable in your seat. Notice what sensations inform you in this process. Now, let yourself include one hand in your awareness. Take a moment to squeeze and open this hand three or four times, really letting yourself feel the muscles working and the tissues contracting and expanding. What are those sensations like? Does it feel hard or soft? Warm or cool? Tight or loose? Tense or relaxed?

Now, slow down the movement. Let yourself orient more to the sensations involved in moving than in the end goal of making a fist or opening your hand. As you slow the movement down, how do your sensations change? Do you sense them only in your hand, or do you sense anything being affected elsewhere in your body? You may begin to have more of a sense of flow, of ease, of fluid wholeness, where more of your body is involved. There may be a sense of energy elsewhere in your body, or perhaps a wave moving from your hand up your arm and through your chest. Your head and neck may begin to want to move, or even your feet. Let yourself be curious, slowing the movement down more and more.

After a few minutes of exploring this more fluid state, let the movement slow down even more, so it becomes more about stillness than movement. Let your focus be more on the space between your fingers and around your hand than on the micro-movements of the hand, itself. What are the sensations like now? It is not unusual in this slow state, with a wider field of orientation, to begin to feel like your hand is not so physical. It may begin to feel more like energy, suspended within a larger field of energy. Notice how it is for you. When you feel done with the process, or no longer interested, come back to the sensation of your physical hand and body, and look around to orient yourself.

Chances are, if you explore this repeatedly, you will find yourself experiencing increasingly slower movement, with an enhanced energetic awareness. If you stay with this, you may even begin to find some familiar aches and pains dissolving, as a kind of inherent treatment plan spontaneously emerges and healing ensues. We have entered now the mysterious realm of Biodynamics! Welcome!

Healing Power of Presence

2016-05-18T05:06:00.001-07:00

Every time I sit with a client , supervisee or student, for therapy or mentoring, individual or group, in person or via Skype, I am touched by the power of simple presence. I do have years of training in various areas, but the most important tool I use in my work is being present.

The relationship between therapist and client has been shown years ago to be the most essential element in determining therapeutic effectiveness. As the practice of mindfulness has spread, I see the potential of our presence enhanced.

For me, the there have been several essential portals into presence emerging from my training and personal therapy over the years. Talk therapy enabled me to begin developing insight into my own reactions to what I encountered in my relationships. With insight, I began to be able to step back and make new choices, or at least be more aware of what I was doing.

Studying Somatic Psychology and Dance/Movement Psychotherapy enabled me to start living in a more embodied way. Along the way, through my own somatic therapy experiences, I encountered limiting, traumatic aspects of my personal history that had been held in my tissues to protect me. Working through these wasn’t necessarily easy or pleasant, but I began to find myself emerging from a life-long state of dissociative mentality. This process had started, interestingly enough, through having suffered a brain injury while engaged in my then favorite hobby of folk dancing. One would think this to be a safe activity, but when my partner and I were tripped by a stray foot and my head bounced on the concrete floor, my life changed.

I had always been highly intellectually and verbally accomplished. I used to love word games like Scrabble and Boggle. After the concussion, the words simply didn’t flow as they used to. Sometimes, they seemed to be hiding behind a foggy screen, inaccessible and useless to me. What’s more, my memory for details seemed to have smashed on its collision with the floor that day. I could no longer buffer my ego with my intellectual prowess. From my writing you might conclude that these skills have returned to me, which fortunately is mostly accurate. My way of being in the world, however, permanently shifted when I could not function as I was accustomed to.

During my time in graduate school for Somatic Psychology, I attended a class with a remarkable woman called Dee Coulter. I remember gratefully hearing her explain that most of us at Naropa University, the Buddhist inspired school I was attending, were trying to achieve a way of being which is natural to people with brain injuries. She spoke of our gut sense and how, without being able to depend on our brains for information, people with brain injuries follow their guts.

Indeed, I found my intuition developing dramatically after the brain injury. I also began to return to the creative, artistic talents I had largely ignored since starting university at eighteen. Finding my work as an Occupational Therapist taxing for my newly struggling brain, I took two years off to take a Commercial Ceramics course, eventually becoming a studio potter.

How does all this relate to presence? Well, have you noticed that intellectually analyzing others often doesn’t do much to enhance your relationship? Mentally figuring things out can make us less present, and this is felt by whomever we are with. Our relational connections depend more upon our heart and senses than our intellectual brain.

As Stephen Porges, originator of the polyvagal nerve theory, elucidates, we sense each other through what he calls the social engagement nervous system. Things like eye contact, the tone of a person’s voice, and facial expression communicate directly to important brain centers to inform us about the people with meet. Are they safe to be with? Is there a sense of resonance between us, or dissonance? Through mirror neurons, we can have a felt sense in our own bodies of the other person’s emotional or behavioral experience. Thinking about what is happening may be less helpful than sensing it. This is non-mental form of receiving the other, and is considered a likely basis for empathy.

My brain injury seemed to support me in letting go of my intellectual mind enough that I could start to listen and respond on other levels. I don’t recommend this particular method of letting go, but for me the results have been highly supportive of being present. Fortunately, there are gentler ways of liberating ourselves from oppressive thought patterns. Mindfulness practices are particularly helpful in this journey.

Mindful Presence

For me, I embarked on an intensive practice of Vipassana along with somatic therapy, which helped

me to come into body-centered awareness. Vipassana is a meditation involving attending to breath and body sensations with an intention to develop awareness and equanimity. I didn’t know the word equanimity when I started Vipassana, but I have since come to revere this quality of being with whatever arises. I see equanimity as a way of considering everything as equal, rather than judging one experience as better or more desirable that another.

While we do need to live with preferences, it can be helpful to be aware of where these come from and make choices based on that awareness. Without awareness, we tend to act unconsciously and habitually, often re-enacting our trauma history or acting in ways to avoid it. You may say, of course I don’t want to re-enact my trauma! Why shouldn’t I avoid it? I agree that re-enacting trauma isn’t useful, but avoidance often means we shut down the flow of life energy. In terms of presence with another, it translates as withdrawing or reacting if the other person expresses something that reminds us, even if not consciously, of the trauma. We are then that much less present, as well as often feeling miserable within ourselves.

Practicing awareness and equanimity enables us to be more aware of what is arising for us and to not have to react in our habitual ways. Recent research suggests that we are actually rewiring our brains through this kind of mindfulness activity. We stop reinforcing old, destructive pathways and establish new, supportive ones. Being less reactive, we can be more present with whatever comes our way.

Coming Into Being

The final, essential aspect of this journey for me has been Prenatal and Birth Therapy. I was introduced to Pre- and Perinatal Psychology through my studies in Somatic Psychology. I learned that we are unlikely to come into body awareness without encountering our earliest experiences recorded within the body. For many of us, these primal, pre-verbal events were overwhelming and traumatic, at least in part because of modern, western birthing practices.

Little ones in the womb and later are astutely sentient beings. They sense and marinate in their parents’ emotional lives during these highly formative early years. Historically, babies have been considered as cute objects (e.g., medical jargon refers to “the product of birth”), to be kept clean and fed. In the process of taking care of physical needs, however, the emotional, psychological needs of the pre-born and newborn infant have been largely overlooked.

That little ones have an immature nervous system doesn’t mean they are unaware or not learning. It indicates a need for slow pacing allowing them to process and integrate their experience. Although they do not speak, babies clearly understand tone of voice and often the content of what is being spoken. Addressing them with gentle sensitivity helps them feel safe so they can settle and arrive more fully.

For those of us who were not welcomed with that kind of sensitivity, new learning can happen through prenatal and birth therapy, emphasizing presence, recognition (vs. denial) of what happened, reassurance, and unconditional acceptance. Within a safe, reflective relational field, such as was needed back then, we can learn about being received in the way we physiologically expected as little ones.

Our neurobiology shifts with this therapeutic experience, helping us emerge from a defensive mode of being, feeling like running away or finding ourselves dissociating before we know what has happened. Personally, I had learned to live in my head. My intellectual prowess had protected me from feeling the painful feelings from my early years. As I descended into my body, the feelings arose.

Fortunately, trauma therapy has evolved in recent years, in large part thanks to Peter Levine’s work with Somatic Experiencing. We now understand the importance of slowing down our pace in being with trauma, touching in with it from a resourced state of presence, rather than diving in a getting lost. Again, this slower, gentler approach changes our neurobiology, so that we don’t have to cycle through our trauma patterns again and again.

This is the basis of my passion for all the forms of work I engage in, including Continuum Movement. This mindful movement practice is characterized by slowness, designed to interrupt old patterns and enable new, creative responsiveness. Similarly, Craniosacral Biodynamics involves slowing down, settling deeper than our everyday activity, resting into the support of universal forces supporting us within a ground of dynamic and alive stillness. These practices inform all the work I do, where I settle myself and support my clients or students in resting into the present moment.

Slowing down is an important key to presence. When I move or act with speed, I am more likely to act by habit, unconsciously. Slowing down brings choice, generated by awareness. This is the essence of therapeutic presence and its healing potential.

Shedding Skins: Letting Go and Opening to the New

2016-04-12T06:01:00.001-07:00

This morning I had my cast removed. This was an exciting moment! After five and a half weeks,

what I most longed for was to submerge my arm in warm water. I was surprised by the intensity of emotion accompanying this transition from cast to cast-less, from bounded to free, from immobilized to mobilizing. As I observed the cast being cut open and taken away, I felt a familiar sense of immense vulnerability.

Seeing my bare arm, protected only by dry, flaky skin and weak, unused muscles, I felt the visceral sense of fear that has nothing to do with my cognitive understanding that I am safe. The little one in me emerged. As we drove home from the hospital, we passed a sign, which I read as something like “Terrors ahead!” I don’t remember what it actually said, but I was impressed by how the little one feelings in me interpreted what I saw.

As soon as we arrived home, I poured a hot bath with healing arnica oil and embarked on the dive I had been dreaming of since having broken my wrist. Ahhh!

My first impulse was to stroke and massage the skin I had been unable to reach for so long. It felt like touching a newborn baby for the first time. Like a newborn, the skin was sensitive, not accustomed to this kind of contact. It needed slow, gentle touch to give it time to integrate and accommodate to the new interaction. Again, the feeling of vulnerability arose.

Being with that sensation in a mindful way, I became aware of layers of my early history arising and releasing. The terror related to the violence of that early time, when being vulnerable was dangerous. Listening to and reassuring my arm and my inner little one, I could almost feel my nervous system changing, knowing that the brain was rewiring itself with each stroke. Where the amygdala had been screaming “Danger! Danger!” my consistent, accepting awareness enabled the middle prefrontal region to slow down and evaluate the process, integrating other aspects of my history and experience (see Being a Brain-Wise Therapist by Bonnie Badenoch). Instead of fear, I began to feel gratitude for the opportunity I now perceived to heal more layers of my history as they were stimulated into action by my current feeling of getting to know my naked arm.

Shedding

As I touched my arm where the cast had been, the old skin gathered over five and a half weeks flaked off. I suddenly realized I was shedding a skin! The cast, itself, was like an old skin, now removed. Beneath it were revealed layers no longer needed. Like a snake shedding its skin, I, too, was letting go of my past, preparing for the unknown ahead.

This concept of shedding skin is frequently discussed in relation to Continuum Movement. Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, noted that true fluidity involves letting go, dying to the past, like shedding a skin. Where we are holding on, we are more rigid, less flexible and less resilient in meeting what arises next.

Of course, Continuum is not the only way to shed old skins, to die and be reborn. Therapies of many types offer this possibility, perhaps without using the same metaphor. As we bring old issues and memories to consciousness in a mindful way, our brains reorganize, engendering new neural pathways, liberating us from unconscious patterns and habits, and enabling us to more readily engage in what presents in present time.

Being submerged in warm water supported this shedding. I let the tears and fears flow out as I enjoyed the feeling of support and holding from the watery womb-like bath.

I had been given exercises to practice to increase the strength and range of motion of my wrist and

hand, but I was fascinated by how these exercises occurred spontaneously as soon as I began some Continuum sounds. While I had been instructed to practice repetitions, I noticed the Continuum working as it does, in spirals, rather than repetitions. Emilie Conrad taught that repetition creates density in the tissues, producing a less flexible and resilient kind of strength. My wrist, as well as my inner little one, seem to appreciate the more fluid, spiraling path I choose.

With each spiral through my arm, I could feel the tissues expanding, reaching out to their full capacity. My mind and heart, too, expanded in the process, holding the pain, the vulnerability and fear, the little one, the curiosity that had been squelched by fear when I was little, and the commitment now to embody fully my original potential.

As I write these words, using both hands to type (!!!), my heart offers the intention and the hope that they will support you, too, in embracing whatever challenges may present for you as portals to access that potential. May we live our fullest potential, knowing the fluid potency every embryo carries, living more completely who we truly are.

(Photo Credit for neuron photo: By Wei-Chung Allen Lee, Hayden Huang, Guoping Feng, Joshua R. Sanes, Emery N. Brown, Peter T. So, Elly Nedivi [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Gifts of Injury: Unexpected Part 2

2016-03-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

In my last blog post, I wrote about the gifts of awakening and awareness I was receiving following a fall where I injured my wrist. I mentioned that bruised bones, like mine, can take up to six months to recover. On the six-month anniversary of that fall, the unimaginable happened. I fell again! It was as if I had begun forgetting the gifts as my bones healed. The universe conspired with my intentions to ensure I really received the gifts. This time, I broke my radius, the large bone of the forearm, just above the wrist.

For some time, I had been saying, I’m too busy! I need to slow down. I’m seeing too many clients!” Well, they say to be careful what you ask for! Suddenly, I had to cancel all my Craniosacral therapy sessions for at least six weeks. While I have continued teaching Continuum and seeing my other clients and supervisees, I am blessed with a freer schedule. I am also blessed with the potential gifts this new injury offers!

I hesitated to write this blog post. It could be embarrassing to admit this has happened again, but what is it in me that is embarrassed, and can the gifts and lessons here be useful for others? Can I put aside my ego, any needs to be admired as a healthy, fit Continuum teacher with fluid bones, and just get on with receiving what is here?

To be clear, I don’t see this fall as an accident! Yes, I was doing a stupid thing, standing on a folding chair to hang something up, but when I went back to the corner of my office where it happened, I was amazed. There was just a tiny spot of floor available for my hand to land in, which is what it did. The rest of the available floor space was covered by a big, thick cushion! If I had landed on that cushion, I probably would not have been injured at all! It was almost impossible for my hand to have found that tiny spot of bare floor, but that’s what happened! This was not an accident in the usual sense of the word. This was an offering, a wake up call. I didn’t receive the one six months earlier as fully as I might have, so I was being showered with gifts once again!

So many gifts. So much potential. I could reject the gift, choosing to hold on to something older, or I can enquire, receive, and share. I choose the latter.

What gifts?

The most obvious gift here is of slowing down. I was asking for this! Now, having not slowed myself down enough using all the tools I have gathered over the years, I have temporarily lost the ability to do anything quickly! The subtle attention required for performing with one hand the simplest everyday task – washing, dressing, eating, cooking, even walking – slows me down, preventing me from escaping this moment!

I am challenged to practice what is most important to me in life: to accept and appreciate what is, with equanimity, simply being present with what is.

I must listen on a deeper, more subtle level, which is what have I strived for for years.

I have a rich opportunity to study the tissues in my body in relation to injury and health. As a Continuum Movement teacher and Biodynamic Craniosacral therapist, I have been fascinated observing the densification occurring in my wrist with the shock at the moment of the accident and the first moments following it, and then watching the shock and trauma in my system dissipate and integrate over time. I have observed waves of shaking, trembling discharge and enjoyed exploring the powerful effects of using Continuum sounds and micro-movements, allowing the inner wave to dissolve the density.

I am having ample occasions to observe, accept and be with my feelings, including gratitude, pain, and frustration. At one point, I announced to my husband, “I’m going to have a tantrum now, and I’m going to observe my sensations during it!”

I am learning to more readily ask for and receive help. After flying to New York last week, I have considered in the future wearing a sling every time I travel, in view of the abundant the kindness and support I have received from so many strangers!

Finally, unable to function habitually without pain, I find myself creatively engaging with the moment. Life has become like an ongoing mindfulness meditation or Continuum Movement practice!

Dying to Each Moment

Recently, I watched a video (https://vimeo.com/158838428) of a favorite somatic teacher, Camille Maurine, with whom I studied in California, between classes with Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum. Camille has written a wonderful book called Meditation Secrets for Women. She reminds us that each breath can be perceived as a birth and a death. Emilie Conrad saw true fluidity as being able to die again and again. She wouldn’t make someone a Continuum

teacher until she saw that they had died enough times, like a snake shedding its skin, letting go of the old and beginning anew in any and every moment. When we hold on, we densify in a familiar pattern, becoming less fluid and responsive for the next moment. This is true for both our tissues and our psyches.

(Image of snake shedding skin: By Sean Gagnon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons)

When I consider the moments of real change in my life, they generally relate to something not working out as expected, or facing a serious challenge, often involving health. Perhaps, this is such a moment.

An important principle of development is that growth does not occur without challenge. For example, every stage of embryological development involves meeting a challenge, like implanting and developing the beginnings of a placenta and umbilical chord when needs for nourishment grow beyond what can be taken in from the uterine fluids by osmosis.

What is dying for me just now? What needs to die? Perhaps, it is time to let go of any remnants of needing to be perfect. Believing I’m not good enough just the way I am. Living with more speed than I want or is good for me. Ignoring messages from my body to slow down. Living according to the limitations of time.

Emilie Conrad used to ask, “If we were not bound in time, would we be susceptible?” meaning would we be affected by our outer world. A major intention in Continuum is to deepen beyond the bounds of time, submerging ourselves in a more fluid, primordial state that precedes time. We find that, indeed, in this state we are less dependent on the outer environment for our needs and more resilient in interacting with its effects.

In the moment of the accident, I was very much bound in time, just trying to quickly get something done in the 15 free minutes I had. I was trying to squeeze this task in before doing my Continuum practice! From now on, I do Continuum first!

Since the accident, I cannot function in that urgent way. I am supported in living in this moment, because I can’t do things quickly. I can’t multitask. This means I can’t be planning or thinking about future moments while engaging in this one. I can only be in this moment and then the next.

Ahhhh! I feel grateful. I am less bound in time. In an odd way, I feel freer.

What is dying, trying to die, or needing to die for you? I hope my words here support you in being able to let go and allow this death without having to break a bone! Please let me know by leaving a comment or sending me an email at cherionna@cherionna.com.

Gifts of Injury

2016-01-30T07:50:00.002-08:00

It’s been almost five months now since I tripped while walking down the street. The gifts of that uncomfortable event continue to flow. I don’t recommend injury as a method of becoming more present, but, if it happens, it can offer remarkable opportunities for practicing being more aware than usual.

The fall fortunately didn’t result in any broken bones. I suspect this is due to my Continuum Movement practice, which keeps my bones fluid and resilient, even as I grow chronologically older. Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, used to talk about how people worry about osteoporosis and take calcium to make their bones stronger. She considered it much more effective to practice Continuum, where, instead of further rigidifying dry bones, we stimulate the fluid within them, facilitating them in returning to or living in their natural fluid state.

I was amazed when I first viewed images of bone, looking like sponge, or even like the coast of the

ocean! When I practice Continuum, I experience this spongy fluidity. It is as if my bones well up, nourished by a mysterious inner wellspring.

Rather than being broken, two of the little bones in my wrist, as well as my knee, were bruised. Bruising in the bone is similar to bruising elsewhere in the body in that there is an injury in the tissues and, as a response, blood or other fluid fills whatever space it can penetrate. Swelling and pain result.

You might be asking at this point, where is the gift in this?

Well, as luck, or perhaps biomechanics, would have it, I bruised the bones in my right wrist, which is my dominant hand. Until you have had an injury to your dominant hand, you can’t quite understand how challenging it is to do anything! Every doing puts right in your face how habitually you tend to act in everyday activities. For example, which hand do you use to squeeze the toothpaste out of the tube? How do you hold the toothbrush? How do you hold the towel when drying yourself out of the shower? How do you roll over in bed, or get up from bed, or a chair, or the floor? When it hurts to do as you usually do, you suddenly become more aware of what you are doing, and begin, through this awareness, to find other ways.

I admit that, having a background as an Occupational Therapist (OT), did somewhat help prepare me for this situation. As an OT student, many years ago, I enjoyed practicing and experimenting with trying these kinds of activities of daily living with my non-dominant hand, or with one hand tied to my body, or with my eyes blindfolded, or from a wheelchair. I wanted to understand what it was like for my patients with injuries, malformations, or debilitating illness. Understanding from the outside, however, is quite different from learning from the inside.

Many years ago, I had fallen off my bicycle and broken two bones in my hand. This had given me some first hand practice in coping with injury, and its associated pain and disability. I found myself being creative but bravely pushing ahead in all of my activities. I even went on to teach a class in folk dancing a few hours after the fall, because I couldn’t find a substitute at such short notice. Somehow, I managed, even with my hand still shaking with the shock of the fall. Following the advice of a doctor friend in the folk dance group, I then made myself a splint and waited a week before going for x-rays and treatment.

Perhaps because I was younger then or perhaps because I have learned to slow myself down, this current injury seems quite different.

With my years of mindfulness practice, I have found myself appreciating the challenges. My life practice, including but not limited to Continuum, is about being present with what is, being aware, and coming out of unconscious habits and patterning. From this perspective, an injury is a God-send!

While I am grateful to have bruised, rather than broken, these bones, I am also aware that bruised bones take much longer to heal. Most fractures heal within six weeks; bruised bones can take up to six months. At this point, my wrist is much better and doesn’t often hurt, as long as I am careful. I can do most things with it, but here’s where the gift extends itself further! Because I don’t need to be so careful every moment, I am in danger of slipping back into habitual use and speed. I found myself unconsciously lifting my suitcase with my right hand the other day on a train. I was pleased that it didn’t actually hurt, but was surprised I had let down my guard enough to use that hand in that way, after protecting it so carefully for months.

This is the point in the healing process where my new level of everyday awareness can slip away. I have enjoyed being challenged the last few months to live my life as if I were on a meditation retreat, slowed down, attending fully to every action.

I am grateful that I can now lift a suitcase without pain, but I have a strong intention to maintain the gift my injury has offered. Perhaps, this is like enjoying a gift after the wrapping has been taken away to the recycling centre. The swelling is gone; there is minimal pain. I can move my hand well. There is no longer such a visible trace of the gift, but I want to keep it! I want to keep using it. I want to remember. I want to remember also the moment it was delivered. Where was my mind in that moment? How did the pavement rise up in front of my foot that way without me noticing?

I offer this gift to you now. I hope for you the possibility of being aware of each moment, each action, each body part, even without pain or injury. And if you already have pain in your body, or happen to be injured, I wish for you the joy of opening this gift, discovering the potential appreciation, even gratitude for what it may offer you. Having lived with chronic pain myself for many years, I know how challenging it can be, as well as what potential learning and discovery it can offer. May the latter be yours, if you so choose!

Wishing you ease, awareness and delightful discovery on this journey in the body.

A New Year, A New Birth

2016-01-02T08:17:00.001-08:00

Here we are at the birth of a new year. 2016. However you rang in the new year, you are part of a human field of beings entering into a new experience. So far, 2016 may seem the same as 2015. Who knows how it will unfold? If you are like many others, you have made or are making some new years’ resolutions. I liked an email I received recently suggesting that we reconsider our resolutions as goals. Rather than trying to do what we are making ourselves do, or feel we should be doing, how about pausing, looking inside, and listening to our hearts? What is your heart’s desire for this new year?

For me, I am holding the vision of completing editing and publishing my book, The Breath of Life: An Introduction to Craniosacral Biodynamics. I understand that, in numerology, 2016 is a year of completion. The digits in 2016 add up to 9. 20 + 16 = 36. 3 + 6 = 9. Or 2 + 0 + 1 + 6 = 9. No matter how you do it, the number is 9. In numerology, 9 relates to completion. The number following 9 is 10, which adds up to 1. Therefore, 9 ends a cycle. I don’t claim to know much about numerology, but I appreciate that these numbers somehow may be supporting me in completing this project, perhaps even in having this desire to complete this year!

While the number 2016 may be meaningful, what I see as significant isn’t really about it being a new year; rather beginning a new year represents for us the potential of any new beginning. From my experience with prenatal and birth therapy over the years, both as client and therapist, I am aware that our tendency in times of new beginnings is to revisit or re-enact our first new beginning in this life. How we experienced our birth, or even our conception, can profoundly affect how we embrace transitions, endings and beginnings in our lives.

How do you start your new year? How do you move into new projects or approach new goals? I

know I have had the tendency to get excited with blazing creative energy when planning something new. I can work very hard to get it going, but as the end nears, there is often a mysterious gap. Time has passed without my awareness and I find myself speeding up and struggling to get whatever it is done in time.

Through my own therapy, I have been able to develop awareness of this pattern, which enables me to make choices to support a different ending. I have also healed through learning how this pattern first developed. My mother used to tell me that, when I was being born, she was fine with the labor pain because she knew it meant the baby was coming. At some point, however, the doctor said, “I’m just going to give you a whiff of something.” She was completely knocked out by this drug, which of course affected me as well. The point in my process where I tend to lose touch with time relates to when the anesthesia came in to interrupt my birth process. Although I still sometimes notice this tendency, it is much milder than it used to be. I celebrate now when I am preparing for one of my too many trips away from home and find myself easily, spaciously getting organized and packed. The acceleration near the end rarely happens now. When it does, I have a different relationship to it. I acknowledge this is my birth pattern arising and reassure the little one in me that we are not being born right now and that there is no anesthesia coming in.

Prenatal and birth experience can affect us in different ways. A child whose conception wasunplanned and unwanted may find it difficult to find any authentic desire to start something new later in life, or may need to push through their fear of being judged and rejected in order to accomplish anything. Induced birth can also have the effect of interfering with one’s own sense of timing. Birth assisted by forceps, ventouse or caesarian section, while at times life saving, may also affect a sense of being able to complete on one’s own. There may be a feeling of needing to be rescued. Babies who have been stuck in the birth canal, may feel like giving up, getting depressed for no apparent reason. The obstacles seem like too much struggle to surmount.

What happens for you when you make new beginnings? How do you feel about this time of year? How do you set goals for yourself? How do you move towards them? This is a good time of year to observe ourselves and our tendencies in transitions. Awareness is the first step in healing, so just asking yourself these questions may take you a long ways! Listening to your heart can further help smooth the road ahead.

With all of this in mind, I wish you ease, creativity, happiness and delight in this new year! I’d love to hear how it is for you.

Surprised by Forgiveness

2015-11-21T11:19:00.000-08:00

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,

and so the door of my heart

can be left open,

the door of compassion.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

As I sat the other day to practice metta (loving kindness) meditation, I had a profound experience, which seems worthy of sharing, and hopefully of benefit to others.

Part of my metta practice is to forgive all beings that may have hurt or harmed me in any way. I also request forgiveness of anyone I may have hurt or harmed. To all beings, I wish happiness, peace, and liberation.

I began with sending metta to all those affected by the recent terrorism in Paris, including all of those suffering, sad or afraid.

Then something unusual happened as I intended to forgive anyone who may have hurt or harmed me. My mind returned to the Parisian scene of terror. I found myself thinking of those who bombed, shot and murdered so many people, and planned the attacks. As I considered the possibility of forgiving these intentional killers, I was astonished by a tingly warmth spreading in my heart. I understood suddenly that each of them had been acting according to his beliefs, doing what he believed to be good. This was a shocking thought to me, but my heart warmed with forgiveness.

Then, I thought of those responsible for 9/11, and a similar process occurred. Then came the Nazis! The Nazis? Can we possibly forgive the unforgiveable? Yes, the same warm feeling flowed through my heart. Finally, there were the Cossacks whose Pogroms terrorized my ancestors in Russia, leading them to flee to America.

Eventually, my mind included those responsible for promoting toxic pharmaceuticals, resulting in exacerbated illness and needlessly expensive deaths. Then the American pioneers cold bloodedly destroying the Indians and their land, colonials mistreating aboriginal peoples around the world, slave traders selling human beings for profit, the objectification of women, of children, of anyone who varies from “normal” or isn’t in power…

Was this different from the terrorist acts this week? Could forgiveness go that far?

The feeling in my heart was undeniable. My intellect needed to catch up.

Forgiveness is quite different from condoning. I do not in any way approve of destructive, violent or disrespectful behavior, and feel it is important to acknowledge what has happened and the pain it has provoked. Yet, without denying or overlooking these acts, I can forgive. I can pardon those who have acted out of their own suffering, ignorance or error.

In the process of being stunned by my own process of forgiveness, I remembered then Thich Nhat Hanh who wrote the following poem, inspired by his own anger about a twelve year old girl, a refugee raped by a sea pirate while escaping across the Gulf of Siam. The girl threw herself into the sea. The wise Vietnamese monk wrote,

“I was very angry, of course. But I could not take sides against the sea pirate. If I could have, it would have been easier, but I couldn't. I realized that if I had been born in his village and had lived a similar life -economic, educational, and so on - it is likely that I would now be that sea pirate. So it is not easy to take sides. Out of suffering, I wrote this poem. It is called "Please Call Me by My True Names," because I have many names, and when you call me by any of them, I have to say, ‘Yes.’”

Please Call Me by My True Names

Don't say that I will depart tomorrow --

even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving

to be a bud on a Spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death

of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing

on the surface of the river.

And I am the bird

that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily

in the clear water of a pond.

And I am the grass-snake

that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.

And I am the arms merchant,

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,

refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am the pirate,

my heart not yet capable

of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,

with plenty of power in my hands.

And I am the man who has to pay

his "debt of blood" to my people

dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm

it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.

My pain is like a river of tears,

so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,

so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up,

and so the door of my heart

can be left open,

the door of compassion.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

And, so, my mind continued on its journey. May I be forgiven by all those I may have hurt or harmed in any way?

Again, I was surprised. Usually, when I practice metta, my

forgiveness is directed to my parents and others who abused me in various ways throughout my life. Today, instead of intending forgiveness towards them, I found myself requesting forgiveness of my parents! I understood that, from their perspective, I hurt them by being whom and how I was, by following my own truth, as well as by my own unconscious, rebellious or defensive reactivity. My very aliveness was a threat to them.

Forgiveness is not easy. It cannot be forced. It seems to arrive when it is ready… or when we are ready. And readiness seems to arrive more easily when we have forgiven ourselves.

Can you forgive?

Please call me by my true names.

Please also consider calling you by your true names.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Where Do I Begin?

2015-10-30T08:39:00.003-07:00

Where do I begin? A single cell begins my life as a unique individual. Two cells, sperm and egg, meet to ignite this process. Knowing by mysterious bio-intelligence and millions of years of experience to let go of what is no longer needed and combine what is. We begin with the essentials of life.

How do I begin? Am I just a cell? The cell that begins me emerges complete with its experience from within mother, father, and cosmos. We might say that three sets of consciousness come together at the moment of conception: maternal, paternal, and whoever/whatever I may have been or experienced before. Call it karma, destiny, fate, miracle or just plain mystery. I am here. Can I celebrate this truth? Can I even acknowledge it?

We know from research in the field of prenatal and birth psychology that the conditions of our conception may affect our ability to embrace our lives, and new life, as it emerges. Our first transition is the transition into life, beginning with conception, reinforced by birth and later events.

Who am I? We may spend the first years of our lives trying to be like our parents and the remaining years attempting to be different. In the midst of that, who are we? Are we ever ourselves? What did I bring with me into this life? The question emerges again: nature vs. nurture. Obviously, both are important.

Watching a fascinating TED talk recently by medical doctor Siddhartha Mukerjee, I am reminded of the importance of both our beginnings as a cell and the environment we find ourselves in. Mukerjee points out that medicine has been influenced by the discovery of antibiotics 100 years ago to focus on finding a medicine to cure dis-ease. Sometimes that works and often it doesn’t. More recently he notes medicine has shifted its attention to the immune system as an important factor in dealing with illness. A step further takes medicine to concentrate on the cell and its environment. Returning to our source.

Returning home to our beginnings. We are cells. Communities of cells that have grown from the one cell which began us, within the environment it began in.

I am touched by this talk because it underlines the intentions of all the work I so passionately engage in: Continuum Movement, Craniosacral Biodynamics, Prenatal and Birth Therapy, Somatic Mindfulness…

My mentor, Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement, spoke of “moving medicine.” A primary intention of Continuum as I understand it is to support movement in creating a different environment, a medicine involving a different context, for our growth and development. We use breaths, vocal sounding, fluid movement and mindful awareness to inquire into what might lie beyond our patterns and habits. How can we let go of whom we think we are, how we have always functioned, our habitual behavior, allowing something else to emerge? How can we soften the inhibitors we have developed through our life experiences, returning to our essential fluid nature and its inherent resilience?

Altering our cellular environment for health. This could describe both Continuum and Craniosacral Biodynamics. Biodynamics is a gentle hands-on therapy derived from osteopathy, designed to facilitate slowing down, deepening under the conditioning of our lives, and returning to our slow, essential subtle energetic pulsings of life. The Breath of Life. Again, as we support clients settling under their reactions to the speed and stresses of life and past traumas, the context or environment within which their cells are suspended begins to change. Instead of growing in relation to conditions, cells and tissues can re-orient to the original universal or “Biodynamic” forces, which guide our early formation as little embryos in the womb, providing an ongoing energetic map beyond and prior to the conditions of our lives. Melting on the treatment table or through Continuum loosens the hold on us of the forces of our history, traumatic memories, deviations from our essential nature.

The awareness developed through Prenatal and Birth Psychology and the holding field of prenatal and birth therapies can also create a new, healthy context in which to dissolve and re-form. Therapy can be a form of re-parenting. As well as developing insight as to the early origins of our issues, we can shift our relationship to those primal conditions in which we formed. Guided in therapy to slow down, orient to resource, and attend to our current, more supportive environment, the overpowering effects of our past begin to diminish. We return to the love and intention we came in with, letting go of our attachment to what may have occluded them along the way. Our cells can shine again as we embrace life anew.

Where do we begin? Where do we begin this time?

What Else? Addressing Trauma with Continuum Movement

2015-08-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

I have been inspired lately reading Bessel van der Kolk’s recently published book, The Body Keeps the Score. Highly readable, this specialist in working with trauma describes his journey involving surprising discoveries and research into the neurobiology of trauma and how to effectively work with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). One of the chapters most fascinating to me is on how profoundly helpful yoga can be for those suffering from PTSD. I would love to see similar research done with Continuum Movement.

I have been consistently impressed by how valuable Continuum can be as part of one’s journey in healing trauma, both in classes and, perhaps more surprisingly, in Skype sessions. In my workshops and classes, I am touched by how participants begin to relate to their experience differently once they’ve had a chance to deepen into the practice of Continuum. For example, they might comment on how the old familiar fear or pain came up but, instead of being overwhelmed by it, they were able to acknowledge it was there, remember an important question in Continuum of ”What else?” meaning “What else is possible here?” Being in the slow, fluid pace of Continuum, with enhanced space around their experience, they were more in a witness state, and were at choice about how to interact with their experience. They could then remember and try some of the breaths and sounds of Continuum that are particularly useful in shifting patterns and habits.

This freedom of choice is a key aspect of healing our trauma. Whatever happened to us happened. We cannot change that. We all have the history we have. It has influenced us and will continue to be available to us as part of our perspective and understanding of life. We do not however, need to be at the mercy of our history. Our trauma doesn’t need to rule us. Once we begin to create space around it, our relationship with it can begin to change.

This is where a mindfulness approach is so helpful in working with trauma. Research shows how mindful observation changes our neurobiology. Trauma often leaves us with an over-active amygdala. This important part of the limbic brain acts like a sentry, always on guard for any hints of the next attack or threat. When it detects danger, it signals other parts of the nervous system to prepare, setting off a stress response. Our sympathetic, fight flight system is activated, ready for the worst.

Image by BruceBlaus. Blausen.com staff. "Blausen gallery 2014". Wikiversity Journal of Medicine. DOI:10.15347/wjm/2014.010. ISSN 20018762. (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This reaction is of course useful when there is actually danger present. The problem occurs when the amygdala and associated sympathetic nervous system are repeatedly or continuously activated, so that the person is hyper-vigilant and unable to relax. With this defensive system active, it becomes difficult to accurately perceive friendly social impulses. For example, a child I treat immediately reacts violently if another child accidentally brushes her shoulder. Once she has recovered, she feels ashamed of her outburst. In that activated state, she is unable to differentiate between friendly or accidental gestures and actual hostility or threat. This requires a different part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex, which can calm fear, regulate emotions, and stimulate the social engagement nervous system. Without its support, it becomes almost impossible to have friends.

Mindfulness has been noted to settle the amygdala and activate the pre-frontal cortex. This effectively brings the person more fully into present time, where it is possible to accurately access friendly vs. threatening approaches.

I consider Continuum to be a mindfulness practice. We begin each session with some time in a “baseline,” where we observe our starting point in relation to our breath and ground. We note the qualities of the breath, where it moves in the body, how easily our tissues move with the breath. We also attend to the places where our bodies make contact with the surface we are on. To what extent are we able to rest or yield into the support of gravity, or do we resist and pull away from that support? How much of the body is resting or making contact? This quality of mindful observation can shift our neurobiology.

This, however, is just our beginning. We then enquire with various breaths, sounds and movement, practicing being aware of the sensations they invoke in our bodies as we explore with them. Can we sense the vibrations of an “O” sound, for example? Where do we sense it? How much of the body is resonating with it? This is an indication of how fluid or densified the tissues are. After practicing, we return to our baseline to check how things may have changed. Often, we find our tissues have softened. We have melted more into the floor. Our breath is slower, easier and fuller. We feel remarkably alive, refreshed and relaxed.

Our practice of Continuum has a major effect of slowing us down. When we are drawn into our trauma patterns, we tend to accelerate. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, has referred to the “trauma vortex,” where we are pulled into the trauma history or pattern quickly, often before we even realize it is happening. Slowing down can help us to be more at choice in this process. Our perception widens. We can remember what supports or resources us in the midst of our conditions. In Continuum classes, I advise participants to notice when their movement speeds up or is familiar or repetitive. These are times to intentionally slow down, ask “What else?” and apply certain sounds, breaths and movements that can interrupt the pattern.

These kinds of tools can be empowering. Not only do we come more into presence and present time as we mindfully observe our experience; we also can operate less on automatic and habit. We have more freedom to make different choices, which can lead to different outcomes. The result includes changes in not only the nervous system, but also our tissues and our lives.

Emilie Conrad, Founder of Continuum Movement

Photo by Cherionna Menzam-Sills

Birthing Ourselves

2015-05-21T04:55:00.000-07:00

It is spring. Baby chicks and bunnies have presented themselves as symbols of birth through the Easter holidays. Tulips and daffodils have been pushing their beautiful heads up through the earth to make their appearance in our gardens. The vegetable gardens are being planted with great care and enthusiasm. The earth is turning green again.

As I write this, I am on a train heading to the little town of Stroud, UK to teach a Continuum Movement workshop, inspired by the developmental movements of the birth process. I cannot help but perceive them occurring all around me! The baby coming through the birth canal senses the uterine and vaginal walls pressing against her delicate skin. Her time of simply resting and growing in the watery world of the womb is quickly passing. Her little head pushes and reaches into the opening in front of her, as waves of contractions meet her little body, washing her out into the unknown. Whether that time in the womb was entirely pleasant or overwhelmingly traumatic, what lies ahead includes unknowns.

How often do we encounter a similar sensations in our lives? I watch the children I work with, as well as my step-daughter, moving towards the end of their school year, accompanied by fears and anticipatory excitement about the unknowns of moving to a new school, a different college program, entering the work world are soon to bring. It is as if the waves of their lives are propelling them forwards, in concert with their own hopes and ambitions.

As a Continuum Movement teacher, I witness and participate in the enormous transition as we completed last month one year since our dear mentor, Emilie Conrad’s, passing and explore what and how we can co-create within this new field of the unknown. Like a serpent shedding its skin, we find the old form dry, tight and sticking in some places while we fluidly slither into naked being in the mystery.

Just one week ago, I returned home from sorting through the last bits of my mother’s life after her passing in July last year. Another wave of grief combines with the one from losing Emilie, as well as the relief that my time of working hard to take care of her affairs from 5000 miles away is essentially done. A new phase of life seems to be replacing the more familiar one of the last few years. I wait upon the threshold of this new life, letting go, letting go, letting go. No need to fight the forceps, the doctor’s timing, or the anesthesia with this birth. Skins upon skins are being released. I remember Emilie speaking of how snakes need to drink a lot of water when shedding their skin. I drink. I practice Continuum to deepen into fluid being. I observe the shifts as life morphs once again.

It is spring. Dare we to believe we know who we are? Do we want to carve ourselves in stone in this way? Or do we take the risk of letting go of what we know so well (and perhaps complain about so often) to make room for the new, the unknown. The promise awaits us, beckoning as the days lengthen and the flowers bloom. Can we have the courage, like the flowers emerging from underground darkness into the sunlight, to give that important push against the earth? That push that frees us, differentiates us, determines us from all we have known in the past? What is it you would create or welcome into your life if you were not so burdened with that one thing (or more) you hold so tightly onto?

It is Spring!

2015-04-04T10:15:00.002-07:00

It is spring! The bulbs in front of my studio are presenting their colorful flowers for the first time since the studio was completed just as the darkness of winter was descending.

A few days ago I received an email from a Continuum Movement teacher, acknowledging the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. She wrote that it was just before Passover officially began last year, that our dear mentor, Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, passed away. In our modern calendar, the date was April 14^th. The teacher pointed out that Passover marks the passage of the Jews out of their life of slavery in Egypt. The waters parted for them to cross over the river into the wide open future of the unknown. This is freedom! She noted that the Hebrew word for Egypt implies narrowness. Liberation from slavery opened previously unavailable possibilities, a true widening of potential.

As I read the email, I began to think about Easter, as Good Friday was about to happen. I thought about how Jesus died on that day, and how on Easter Sunday a great miracle followed, as unexpected, unhoped for life came forth. This is spring!

We think of spring as being about new beginnings, new growth; yet, each birth involves a death. Spring can only come forth when winter dies! When we are born, our life in the womb ends. When a dear one passes on, we grieve and our hearts potentially open in new ways.

Perhaps, at this time of year, we can be reminded of our original potential, still waiting to be tapped. Anything is possible. It is spring! New birth is everywhere; why not in ourselves?

As I move into spring, I notice my tendency to try to do too much, threatening my health and well-

being. As much as I love all my work, I am reminded of the need for rest, for practicing what I preach! I am so fortunate to be immersed in a life of teaching people how to slow down and be present, reminding me repeatedly of the need and possibility to do the same.

Every time I give a Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy session, I am supported by the presence of what we call the Breath of Life in meeting the miraculous nature of our being. Every time I teach a Continuum class, I am blessed to feel the cells in my body breathing, the tissues letting go, the spaciousness and fluidity of being welling up within me. With every client session and workshop addressing early prenatal and birth trauma, I feel grateful to have this awareness of how our early wounding can occlude our potential, and how we can return to it through awareness.

This ode to spring is sounding like a Thanksgiving note! How can I not be grateful? Will you join me? Happy Spring!

Re-Connection and Renewal

2015-03-01T04:20:00.001-08:00

“The body renews itself through its own dissolution, similar to the gel-sol phase transition of the cell. Paralysis can be seen as an uninterrupted manifestation of gel until the wind of breath, moving across and into the sequestered bound fluid, frees it into its vibrant potency.” - Emilie Conrad, Life on Land

photo from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADAPIMitoTrackerRedAlexaFluor488BPAE.jpg

Humans, unlike lizards, are known to be unable to regenerate limbs. What we are capable of in terms of healing and renewal is nonetheless remarkable.

I have had a few situations in my own life when I witnessed my own nervous system rewiring, as well as the honour of seeing this process in my clients and students.

My most dramatic event occurred immediately following a fall where I sustained a concussion. Lying dazed on the floor at the folk dance workshop where the accident occurred, I struggled to respond to the question being posed to me. There was doctor at the workshop, a friend of mine. Being employed at the time as an Occupational Therapist working with patients with neurological issues, I understood why the doctor was asking me the question. I also knew the answer. Responding, however, was another matter.

I have no idea how long I lay there trying to get my mouth and vocal cords to speak my name. It was as if every nerve in my body and brain had been singed by the shock of the concussion and they could not respond. It was possibly the hardest work of my entire life finding those pathways I had known so well for so many years. I could almost feel the electric wave traveling down my nerves, igniting each muscle, as if for the first time. When my name finally emerged from my mouth, I began to laugh. The whole room joined me. It was such a relief. I seemed to be re-connected.

I didn't know then how profoundly those moments would affect me and my life, and how many more subtler re-connections would happen over the years. The dissolution of my form experienced through the concussion, provided an remarkable opportunity to re-design my nervous system. My life changed accordingly.

My first, much less dramatic but equally educational experience with rewiring occurred the first time I tried to watch a movie with glasses on. I normally wore the glasses for driving, but being a young university student without a car, I rarely drove. For some reason, I decided to try my glasses on this movie. I was amazed by my experience. The colours and shapes flashing before my eyes were brilliant and fascinating, but they didn't make any sense! I didn't recognise them. Gradually, with great effort, I began to make out familiar objects. Faces came into focus and suddenly the whole scene fell into place.

I realised I had for a few minutes been learning to see again. I was reminded of stories of blind people gaining sight and having to learn to make sense of the visual stimuli coming in. That is exactly what I was doing. My brain was rewiring. It was learning to sort and organise the new sensory stimuli it was receiving into perceptions. Ah! Those lines and colours are a face. That shape is the branch of a tree. Once the connection was made, familiar neural pathways were again accessible and I could go back to just enjoying the movie.

My usual way of perceiving had been interrupted, facilitating a dissolution of patterning enabling renewed visual perception. While it is rare to have such clear experiences of rewiring, this kind of reconnection happens all the time. Being aware of the process is a great gift, which I believe also supports the connecting.

Interestingly, the day I woke up with this blog writing itself I my head, I later listened to an interview with one of my favourite speakers, cell biologist Bruce Lipton. He spoke of how bringing mindfulness to our everyday thoughts can interrupt early programming, supporting the change we desire.

Mindfulness has recently gained popularity and reputation as a valuable adjunct to psychotherapy. Research shows how it changes our neurobiology, assisting us in shifting from habitual defensive stances to more creative, present time oriented presence.

Lipton spoke in his interview of how cells can be either in protection mode or growth mode. One walls off the outside world. The other expands out it not it. We can make choices moment by moment as to which way to orient, but our cells cannot be in both modes simultaneously.

Mindfulness practices teach us to attend to the sensory input available to us, prior to the interpretations made by our minds based on history. Returning to this first order of experience enables us to be responsive to what is actually presenting in the moment, rather than being limited by our perception of it based on past experience. While remembring past experience can be useful, we are freest when it becomes part of the mix, rather than our overpowering master.

While I don’t recommend a concussion to anyone, those moments of re-finding my words gave me a remarkable opportunity to slow down and return to the basics of neural functioning. I remain forever grateful for that and other ways that concussion changed my life, interfering with my ability to operate on automatic.

The paralysis I experienced gave me a taste of the potential of dissolution. As Emile Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement notes in the quote above, allowing our form (gel) to dissolve into a more fluid sol state, enables us to access renewed vibrancy. Conrad often referred to how most of us are in a state of paralysis, solidly ensconced in our habitual ways of being. Dissolution and its associated renewal is a major intention of the slow micro-movements, breaths and sounds of Continuum. Personally, I prefer these gentle, mindful, fluid movement inquiries or the similarly subtle work of Craniosacral Biodynamics to having to heal from a concussion, but we all have our own ways of returning to and discovering our origins!

New Beginnings: Letting Go

2015-01-01T08:20:00.000-08:00

As we move into this new year, I must admit that 2014 was a challenging one for me. The year had an undertone for me of loss and letting go, as both my mother and my dear mentor, Emilie Conrad, were dying. Every time I saw my mother, I felt the pain of witnessing her condition and her mind deteriorate. I felt a similar sense of loss and helplessness as Emilie’s amazingly young, not quite 80-year old body suddenly was overcome by cancer. A shock wave passing through the community of Continuum teachers and practitioners continues to leave its mark as we explore what fluidity and resilience mean in this unexpected situation.

In the midst of these losses, my life provided some wonderful new experiences and people. I loved teaching Continuum in Ireland and my first trip to Italy. I was blessed with time to write over half of a book, which I hope to send to the publisher in 2015. My new studio/office was finally built in our garden. I felt myself deepening into my new life, relationship and family in the UK, finally feeling this become my home, after having moved here and married in 2010.

Yet, after my mother passed in July, I realized my entire time in this new country had been characterized by death and dying. Not only had I let go of my life in North America, including many belongings and habits, but my father who was very ill when I moved to the UK, died in a year and a half later. My mother’s inability to function became apparent once my father was gone, and I became responsible for her life and well-being. I let go of being the child and became the parent in our relationship.

When my mother passed, I realized on a new level how significant one’s relationship is with mother, regardless of how that relationship has manifested. Mother is a reference point from the very beginning of life. At conception, we are inside mother. Even before that, we are inside mother as a tiny egg, when she was just a tiny fetus herself. We were inside mother inside our grandmother! When mother passes, that reference point is gone.

Now, the year has also changed. Another reference point has changed. I’m aware all of this could sound quite depressing, and certainly I still feel some sadness writing of my losses. On the other hand, letting go makes way for what is new. As we let go of 2014, something else can arise in 2015.

This is the time of year people make resolutions. We are encouraged to focus on setting new goals. In an odd way, I feel strangely free. My life is no longer about taking care of my parents! I miss them, but I am now more available for other pursuits. All that I have let go of has also nourished and enriched me along the way. I enter this new phase of life with an open heart and curious mind. I move through yet another birth into a new life.

I imagine that as you let go of this past year, you may also have some sense of loss, even if it’s just of time. Another year has passed. What have you accomplished? What have you experienced? What has been important to you of this time? This is a good time of year to review our lives and orient to what we want to create and experience next. What do you want to birth in your life now?

May this coming year be a rich, peaceful, nourishing, creative and heartful time for all of us!

Embryo Earth and Cosmos: Cultivating Resonance and Resilience

2014-12-10T07:46:00.001-08:00

In our natural state, we are resilient, fluid beings, full of potential, like the early embryo. In the beginning, as simple cellular creatures, we consist primarily of fluid. One fertilized egg cell, the largest human cell due to its enormous amount of cytoplasm, will somehow, miraculously, develop into a very complex human body. What guides and directs this miracle remains mysterious. Research is beginning to demonstrate, however, what has always been understood by healers and intuitives. Our formation is informed by subtle energetic communications. We apparently form in light or quantum fields first and then in our physical bodies. These fields seemingly inform the cells and tissues, guiding their activities. For example, scientists observing frog embryos were surprised to witness the frog face forming energetically before it was visible in the physical embryo. You can view this yourself on You Tube at: http://youtu.be/0VULjzX__OM. Scientist Mae-Won Ho also discovered that simple unicellular organisms have a quantum field with a quantum midline, which reacts to changes in the environment before the physical organism does. She writes about this in her book, The Rainbow and the Worm. Other researchers, like the Austrian “water wizard,” Viktor Shauberger, and medical science researcher, Arthur Winfree, noted that everything in nature is organized within an energetic torus-shaped field or fields, each with a central mid-line. We humans are similarly organized within energetic fields.

The late Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement, recognized through her almost fifty years of inquiry into our fluid nature, that all fluids resonate with each other. In introducing Continuum, she speaks of fluid in our bodies, fluid in the planet and fluid in the galaxy being “engaged in a resonant stream of bio-cosmic nourishment”(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAacwbfveys). Our human expression is continuous with the fluidic expressions of the earth and cosmos. As embryos, our resonance is relatively clear and unobscured. The embryo is in direct communication with the cosmos, and apparently with the same organizing fields of energy guiding the formation of stars, galaxies, rivers, iguanas and human embryos. We can, therefore, benefit from returning to an embryonic state, where we can remember once more that clarity of being.

Deepening into Resonance

When we slow down and listen deeply, we discover waves, spirals and pulsations move within us as within earth and cosmos. We resonate with a profound intelligence forming and supporting all of us. This is a common experience in Continuum Movement. Emilie Conrad was fascinated by the Schumann wave. She believed our everyday activities accelerate us, and that the breaths, sounds and subtle movements of Continuum slowed our human rhythms down, returning to resonance with natural waves of earth and cosmos. The Schumann wave is 7.8 Hz. Conrad suspected those practicing Continuum could resonate with this and eventually even slower frequencies.

Traditional peoples lived in harmony with the earth and valued their relationship with earth and cosmos. The Navaho, for example, practiced ceremony to communicate with the cosmos, which they saw as essential to their well-being and that of the earth. Native Americans speak of their drumming as “the heartbeat of the earth.” Drumming and dancing to the rhythms of the drums apparently takes the participants into resonance with nature, and has been used by peoples all over the world for healing.

Our modern western life style takes us far from these natural rhythms. Conrad perceived our tissue anatomy as changing consistency and function with the speed of daily life. She described three tissue anatomies. The cultural anatomy, present in everyday “fetch wood, carry water” activities, involves our reaction to speed and stress. Our tissues become denser. Our focus narrows. Our sympathetic, fight-flight nervous system is activated. We are designed to be in this state for short periods of time, to escape the saber-toothed tiger, perhaps, or to run after our prey. We are meant to then return to a more relaxed state, where our parasympathetic, rest-and-rejuvenation nervous system can be more active, supporting our immune system, digestion, sleep and other rejuvenative functions. This involves slowing down, which shifts our frequencies.

As we decelerate, Conrad found our tissues begin to soften, melt and become less dense. Our perception widens. We can experience more of the whole, rather than focusing in on one urgent goal. We enter what Conrad termed the primordial anatomy. In this more fluid state, we may feel like a little embryo floating in nutritive amniotic fluid. We find ourselves accessing our early potential as embryos, deepening under our life patterns. Here, we may re-form ourselves within a different, more supportive context than the family or environment we may have actually grown in prenatally. Conrad often spoke of the embryo, like the cosmos, being made of spiraled water. Water is a highly resonant element. As fluid beings, embryos resonate directly with the cosmos. When we slow down even further, we enter the third tissue anatomy, the cosmic anatomy. Here, in direct resonance with cosmic bio-fields, we experience ourselves more as energetic beings, suspended in space. From my work with Craniosacral Biodynamics, I recognize these three tissues anatomies as parallel to the three bodies we perceive in Biodynamics, each expressing different subtle rhythms: physical, fluid and the field of radiance of the long tide. Other practices and traditions also describe similar fields within fields.

If we look at the cosmos, we see remarkably beautiful, radiant spirals. Images of human anatomy alsoLife on Land,

reveal spirals throughout the body. Our muscles spiral out from the midline represented by the spine. The connective tissues and fascia enveloping the muscles and connecting the whole of our bodies can be seen as spiraled lines spanning the entire length of the body. We are not so different from the cosmos! We are still spiraled water, like the embryo. As Conrad declares in her book,

“We are not separate from the fluid that spirals us as embryos. We are that spiraled fluid. Pulsating waves create the ocean behind all human activities. We are water beings destined to live on land on a mission that is unknowable.” (p. 293).

Healing Humans, Planets and Galaxies

In healing work like Continuum Movement and Craniosacral Biodynamics, we find that slowing down and returning to more natural, essential rhythms of life support health and well-being. While this applies to the Continuum mover or Biodynamic client, the benefits seem to extend well beyond the individual. If we are fluidic resonant beings, how can we even for a moment consider ourselves as separate from all other fluidity? If a butterfly flapping its wing in Japan can set off a tornado across the world, as the butterfly effect proposes, how can the speed in our lives, our breath and our bodies not affect our planet?

Our modern, western world is based on attitudes of individuality, isolation and separation, all of which are wreaking havoc on our planet as well as her inhabitants. If our resonance is as extensive as it seems, our unbalanced way of living may also be affecting the larger environment including the space we send our space ships into, other planets, and even other galaxies. It may be our responsibility to begin taking care of ourselves in basic ways that can counter this tendency for imbalance. Is it not time for us to acknowledge our connectedness to all things? And cognitive acknowledgement is not enough. If we do not return to an embodied state of connectedness, there is no ground for believing it is so. Without our bodies experience to inform us, we are simply talking about ideas of connection without knowing what this means.

In support of our embodied knowing and return to resonant connection with all beings and all things, I am facilitating a new Continuum Movement workshop emphasizing our resonance with nature and the inherent bio-rhythms we share with a continuum of being. More information on the workshop is available on my website at: www.cherionna.com.

For more information and to register for my workshop Embryo, Earth and Cosmos: Resonance and Resilience with Continuum Movement, happening this weekend in Totnes, Devon and in April in Vancouver, BC, please check my website at http://www.cherionna.com/classwrk.html

Heart and Targus

2014-11-02T09:35:00.001-08:00

On my way home from co-teaching a post-graduate Craniosacral Biodynamics seminar in Switzerland with my husband, Franklyn Sills, I feel inspired to write about an insight I had during the class. The seminar was entitled Awakening the Heart. At one point, as I was introducing the class to a presentation on the embryological development and energetic ignition of the heart, I spoke of how the presentation was not entirely in chronological order. I invited the class to enter a time machine with me. Someone commented, “The Targus!” This remark delightfully led me to a new way of looking at the heart and it mysterious functions. I heard myself explaining that the heart, like Dr. Who’s Targus, was in some ways bigger on the inside than the outside.

The physical heart in the adult is about the size of a fist. Its effects, however, are so much bigger! The heart rhythms are now known to affect a person’s ability to regulate emotions, to be healthy, socially relational and intuitive. The research of the Institute of Heartmath (www.heartmath.org) shows that when the heart rhythms are coherent or chaotic, the entire system tends to follow suit. The heart produces important hormones and has its own nervous system, sending more neural information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. There is much more inside the heart than the blood and muscle we can feel and see!

When we look at the embryology of the heart, we begin to understand its remarkable relational ability to sense and be connected with what is far outside its walls. The blood and cells forming the heart begin developing on the outside of what becomes the actual embryo body, within the structures that become the umbilical cord and placenta. From the beginning, these cells are reaching out to make relationship with mother, to connect with her blood and glands in order to receive nourishment necessary for survival and growth. These cells travel through the embryo, feeding primarily what will develop into the brain and nervous system, pausing at the cranial end before returning to their extra-embryonic source. Where this pause occurs, the heart begins to form. In the fourth week, the faster growing nervous system expands as the embryo folds forward. In this process, the heart meets the energetic heart center. An energetic ignition occurs and the heart begins to beat.

In the little embryo, the heart is huge. This “heart bulge” can be viewed in the very center, or heart, of

the embryo. The rest of the body grows around it, and eventually it seems smaller as it rests within the chest. It remains through life, however, an essebtuak influence on our physiology and relational presence.

While the physical heart in adults is not huge, the energetic field of the heart is the biggest of any organ in the body. The heart’s bio-electrical field has an amplitude about 60 times greater than that of the brain. The bio-magnetic field generated by the heart is over 5000 times greater in strength than the field of the brain. It can be sensed several feet away from the body. We might say the heart is much bigger on the outside than it is on the inside! Perhaps, it is an inverted Targus…

Apparently involved in intuitive processes, evidence suggests “the physical heart is coupled to a field of information not bound by the classical limits of time and space,” and has been found to receive and process information about events before they actually occur! (from 2014 article by founders of Hearthmath, Rollin McCraty and Doc Childre, The Intuitive Heart, p. 11). Like the Targus, the mysterious heart seems to have abilities to reach forward in time, or at least to be receptive to what the future may be offering. The work of Heartmath shows that such abilities are supported by simple acts of heart awareness, like breathing into the heart or feeling it beating. When we listen to the heart, we are more likely to receive its wisdom. We begin to settle into more coherent heart rhythms, which we can also enhance by orienting to what we appreciate or feel grateful for. We might begin by appreciating our hearts, which have been beating since four weeks after we were conceived!

If the fields of the heart are so big and so connected with other fields, it is not much of a stretch to see that tending to your own heart can benefit not only you, but also all those around you. Heart coherence can enhance our empathy, compassion and understanding of others. In the seminar last week, we explored the effects of early history and the profound healing possible when we establish safety within the relational field between two people with an intention to deepen together. As the little ones within us begin to perceive safety, we can settle under the old wounding, emerging into presence. We can settle into resonance with universal formative forces and re-create ourselves within an infinite field of love.

Death, Birth and Living: A Continuum of Being

2014-09-04T01:16:00.001-07:00

Emerging from a three-day Continuum “dive” into fluidic being with a group I was facilitating, along with similar groups around the world, I feel inspired. This kind of dip into the depths of fluid being often stirs my creative juices. I feel moved by the resultant surge within. I feel touched by the challenges, as well as the healing and epiphanies, of those moving together in this powerful group field these past three days.

I found myself explaining to the group about the importance of death in Continuum. The snake or serpent informs us. Letting go, dying to the past, is essential for meeting the present. Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, in whose honor this three-day event occurred, would remind us that a molting snake needs to drink plenty of water for its skin to fall off. In Continuum, we deepen into liquidity, where the effects of the past can melt away, leaving us free, naked and fluid to meet what arises.

With our scars melted, their stories may emerge. As our tissues soften their guard, we may feel the pain they have been protecting. Our grief, fear, anger, resistance to life in its many forms, our deepest beliefs, patterns, habits, addictions all may come to the surface as the waters clear.

Here, I am informed by my many years of Vipassana meditation. I was trained to understand that clarity, purification and our deepest essence of love become available when we observe all that arises, pleasant or unpleasant, with equanimity. Our tendency is to yearn for pleasant sensations and avoid unpleasant.

In Continuum, which I see more as an exploration in mindfulness than movement, we practice being with what we experience. We call this “open attention.” We do something to stir the waters first, a vocalized sound, a breath, a subtle intentional movement, and then we listen. How does the body receive the gift we just offered it? Usually, the gifts are aligned with fluid’s natural expression through waves, pulsations and spirals. For example, we might move our elbows, like wings or fins, in a slow pulsatory fashion, while making a soft sound. The vibration of the sound in the tissues can loosen them a bit. Where they have become tight and dense due to the speed and focus of everyday life, compounded by unresolved trauma and shock from the past, they begin to move. We begin to emerge from a frozen, paralytic state into the movement of life.

As we begin to thaw and melt, the past may haunt us. Our frozenness may even present itself more clearly. Somewhere along the path of deepening into being, we undoubtedly will encounter a sense of death. We may find ourselves lying in a stillness we craved or avoided unconsciously for years. Where it may have been associated with danger in the past, our terror may arise. We want to run out of the room, go listen to music, answer emails, watch television, do a quick text, run for a mile, dance madly, anything to get away. We might ask, “if this is a movement workshop, why am I just lying here?”

Sometimes, the deepest, most important movement is in stillness.

What emerges from the stillness? Can we let the fear go enough to be in curiosity? Even for a moment? This is a sign of mindfulness. Witness state gives us space to be. Being with rather than being our fear or our past enables us to move on. Movement arises. Life arises. Like the phoenix arising from its ashes, something new is born.

Nothing can be born without something dying. A new baby is born when the pregnancy dies. Life in

the womb must end for life outside it to begin.

Even if we long to return to the womb, or to have had a better time there, our mission and purpose is beyond it. We will not be happy until we have let go of the placenta, for only then can we fully embrace life after birth.

Letting go can feel like hell! When pain and discomfort arise in Continuum, it can be surprising and

confusing. The slow, subtle spirals and stretches arising as our tissues melt can be so delicious! How can something that feels so good also include such unpleasantness? The important question may be, how can it not?

Years ago, I studied with body-centered psychotherapists, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. One of the many lessons I learned from them was about what they call “The Upper Limits Problem.” The idea is that we all have limits to how much of a good thing we can allow ourselves to experience, because of various influences. When we get too close to our limit, we tend to sabotage ourselves. We might become ill, go blank or foggy, have an urgent crisis arise in our lives, suddenly remember an work deadline we must attend to, discover we don’t have enough money to do what we were about to do, or our back goes out and we can’t move. Whatever form the sabotage takes, it stops us from going beyond the limit. It keeps us in our familiar comfort zone.

I have seen these kinds of events arise so often for people wanting to attend a Continuum workshop! Within a workshop or a dive, I have experienced in my own body and seen in others, on a more somatic level, how we can interrupt the pleasure of a deep flow by focusing in on what arises within it.

Perhaps the biggest, most important challenge in Continuum (and in life) is to float what we experience within the larger ocean of being. Can we be with what arises? Can we be? Can we allow? Can we be curious? Can we ask ourselves in the moment of questioning, “what else is possible here?”

In that moment, through the very act of wondering, our pattern can die a little more and something else is born.

We emerge into life in a way we probably never have before. Welcome!

Mother Loss

2014-08-11T07:56:00.000-07:00

My mother died on July 21^st. There is finality to that statement. At the same time, I have such a strong sense of the continuity of my mother, or at least of something that relates to her being and her life.

I had been prepared for her death, as much as one can be. I had been expecting it. I had been trying to gage when it might happen so as to be present with her in that important moment. In the end, the most challenging aspect of her passing was that it happened as my flight was leaving London Heathrow to take me to be with her in Vancouver, Canada. It felt like all my attempts to be the perfect daughter, and to be with her in significant moments, were in vein. She left before I got there, before I could have possibly have gotten there.

The disappointment and sense of failure softened over the days. Help came from kind offerings from supportive others, like the thought that she may have intentionally left before I arrived to make it easier. People often die in that moment when their loved ones leave the room for food or to relieve themselves. It is said to be too challenging for some to leave while in the presence of those attached to them. As someone who had loved and was loved by many of the caregivers at the care home where she lived, my mother died peacefully in solitude during the night, discovered at 2 a.m.

Did she leave, however? When I arrived 11 hours later, I felt compelled to lay my head on her shoulder and hold her, as I had wanted to, perhaps as I had yearned to all my life. I was startled to feel her body moving. I sensed a rhythmical movement, similar to that of breathing, though more subtle. As a Craniosacral practitioner, accustomed to sensing very subtle, slow rhythms, this did not feel so subtle to me! When my father had passed, two and a half years earlier, I had sensed subtle energies and rhythms receding as I held him shortly after his death. This was different. I checked visually to see if my mother was indeed still breathing. She was dead. Her body was getting colder the longer I stayed with her, but there was an undeniable sense of breath. Others, too, had thought they had seen her breathing as they sat with her body.

Perhaps even more surprising was the story of the night nurse the night following her death, when her body had been removed. Apparently, the call bell from my mother’s now empty bed rang repeatedly through the night. Each time the nurse turned if off, only to have it call her again later. Finally, she went into the room and said, “Hello Ruth.” After that, the call bell was silent. The irony is that my mother didn’t know how to work the call bell. Perhaps she had figured it out finally and wanted us all to know!

Death is a gateway, reminding us of the mystery from whence we come.

Death and Birth

Being with my mother’s dying, I was acutely aware of an intense longing to be with her. I just wanted

to cuddle in with her, to support her in passing through the gateway peacefully. Seeing her face 11 hours after the fact, I could see the peace had been there. Her friends and attendants assured me she had been peaceful the last few days of her life. I was grateful for that.

Still, the craving to hold her and be physically close with her haunted me. From my extensive studies in prenatal and birth psychology, I recognized my feelings. They were what every newborn wants and needs in relation to mother. When I was born, I was whisked away from my mother and kept in a nursery for several days, as was the custom in the fifties. My mother used to tell me how she had been given a “whiff of something” and did not remember anything of the birth after that. We had both been essentially unconscious for the big moment of my arrival. Years later, I understood that potential source of the challenges we had experienced in our relationship.

As my mother lay alone in her bed after my birth, unable to get to know her new baby, she felt lonely and longed to be with my three-year old brother, Gary. When I was three days old, she cried with what she as a nurse recognized as the usual post partum blues, and spoke to Gary on the phone to soothe herself. We now understand that new mothers become depressed after being separated from their newborns, their bodies reacting as if the baby has died. There is a natural physiological grieving, often without understanding its source. Interrupted by this separation, bonding may be difficult when mother and baby reunite.

On this day of my mother’s depression, she asked the nurses how her baby was in the nursery. She was told her baby was crying non-stop. My mother convinced the nurse to bring the baby to her, even though it was not a scheduled feeding time. She fed the poor baby, wondering at how much her face had changed in such a short time. Baby was returned to the nursery until the official feeding time. When I was brought to my mother at that time, she eventually realized she had been brought a different baby earlier. The main point of the story when she used to tell it was that she had had enough breast milk to feed two babies. Super mama!

For me, however, the story had a different point. My mother, three days after my birth, didn’t even know what I looked like. How could we bond under those conditions? I felt as if we finally bonded just nine years ago when we danced at a family reunion. Since then, my sense of repulsion for my mother diminished, replaced by a growing desire to be close to her.

The longing I felt as my mother was dying, far away on another continent, resonated with the feelings of the newborn, desperately needing her mother, who felt as far away as the 5000 miles between London and Vancouver. All I wanted then, was to nestle into the mother I had been with all my life before birth. Nothing could compare with that familiarity, just as nothing ever will again in this life.

All of this came to me as I sat with my sadness on the plane. There was nothing I could do. Like the baby in the nursery, I was completely dependent on others to take me to my mother. I was surrounded by strangers, however kind, all of us in a artificial environment, high above the earth, perhaps comparable to the ungrounding effects of anesthesia my mother and I had both been recovering from back then.

Being with my early history with my mother in the days before I was able to get to the airport, I was shocked to hear the nurse explain that my mother was now on Scopolamine to enhance her comfort. I had already been wondering about my mother’s gradual decline in function through dementia as reflecting her own drugged birth process. Her mother had been given Scopolamine, then used in combination with morphine to induce “twilight sleep” in laboring women. I had learned many years ago that we tend to die as we are born. The resonances here were amazing! My mother and I both seemed to be re-living our births through her process of dying.

Love Heals All

A day or so after my mother passed, I began to feel her essence around me. I had been feeling upset, as I engaged with the shock and grief of her death, and having arrived too late. Suddenly, a wave of soothing love surrounded me. My upset shifted into peace. I was surprised, as I had been when sensing my father and brother after their deaths, at the form in which I experienced my mother’s presence. Actually, there wasn’t much form this time. I had the sense of my mother as pure love. Form was no longer important. This is what I had witnessed as she had deepened into dementia. As aspects of the personality I had known faded away, I experienced the loss and death repeatedly at different levels. All that remained towards the end was love.

As I was about to begin my Continuum dive this morning, I felt compelled to open the book of my beloved mentor, Emilie Conrad, who passed just three months before my mother, in April. The book opened to a description of the memories of pogroms and Nazis coloring the field of Emilie’s family. Having spent time stroking the bag of my mother’s ashes, sensing how these burned cells seemed to still hold some aspect of her, I was particularly struck by a quote in the book of how the Nazis had used the ashes of the Jews “as fill for swamp lands, as thermal insulation between the walls of wooden buildings…phosphate fertilizers; and… to cover the paths of the SS village located near the camp” (Conrad, p. 42).

The horror of the past can haunt us through what our cells and tissues absorb, even as they are forming in the womb of our mother. Accordingly, it seems different to lose mother, with whom we are so physically intimate from the moment of conception, or even as an egg many years earlier. Father loss is a slightly different story.

The wave of love I experience as my mother seems to transcend all this history. I read on in Emilie’s book as she writes,

“Movement behavior develops as we take on the history of our family nexus. Information is passed from generation to generation not only through stories, but also at the silent level. The imprints of wars, strife, prejudice, sexual events, meanings, and values are all registered and carried in our ‘field’ – recorded in the intrinsic somatic arena of breath, touch, and certainly the parameters we put around our ‘bodies’ and sensory responsiveness. The internalized inhibition of our movement and sensory domains is complex and far-reaching. We are shaped by our time, space, and condition. Our arrival becomes a continual layering of impressions and messages, both verbal and non-verbal, that becomes the implicate ambiance of all that we inhabit.”

-Emilie Conrad, Life on Land, p. 42

I am aware that my ambiance has changed. Engaging in my Continuum “dive” today, I sense the tissues softening their hold on the past. The tears flow. The diaphragm releases. The pain of holding in my back softens. I return to the fluidity of being, like the little one first encountering mother. I literally sense the ambiance of ancestral history melting as something new emerges. The love of that maternal wave, what I had longed for all my life, now free from historical bonds, embraces me, holds me, supports me. The path ahead awaits, offering more mystery. Welcome.

All Love, No Force

2014-05-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

I had never before seen a religious person so radiant. The nun exuded joy and love, indicating to me true spirituality. One morning I exclaimed to her my appreciation of how joyful she seemed to be. Ah, she responded with an even deeper smile, I just came from praying. All love, no force. That’s what we say. I was amazed. That’s exactly what we teach! I told her.

The scene was a beautiful convent and retreat center in Italy where my husband, Franklyn Sills, and I taught a post graduate seminar last week in Craniosacral Biodynamics. Not far from where we landed in Bologna, we had driven up a winding road through a tiny village to emerge at this remarkable center. A joyful, heartful priest greeted us with his bits of English. The nun arrived soon after. I was immediately taken by her playfulness, as she smiled at us and hugged the priest. Each day, she greeted me with hugs and kisses. I may have never felt so loved and welcomed in my life!

Awakening the Heart

This seemed like the perfect context for our seminar, entitled Awakening the Heart. As I witnessed the clerics each day, I had no doubt that they lived with awakened hearts! The nun had expressed to me the essence of this practice. All love, never any force. I discovered this wise advice came from the teachings of St Francis de Sales, a mystical monk in the 1500s.

Love seems to me to be primarily about being with what is. Mindfulness is a practice of love. The nun reminded me of another nun I had befriended years earlier through month-long Vipassana courses, where we would sit in silence for thirty days at a time. The intention in these courses was to be present with whatever our experience was, directly observing the arising and passing away of thoughts, sensations, and feelings. Through this extended observation, I came to understand within my body, not just as a concept, the transitory nature of all things. My attachments became less important as their objects shifted in and out of reach.

Ooma was a companion in this observation. A petite nun originally from Cambodia, she donned tiny children’s thongs on her feet that were too small for adult shoes. I laughed to see the colorful Daffy Duck image peeking out from under her Buddhist robes. Ooma didn’t speak much English, but somehow we communicated through our hearts, laced with a bit of French. We seemed to recognize each other and felt a closeness on our shared path. Like the Italian nun, Ooma oozed of joy. Her heart was open to the passing of life. Her love was tangible.

The Deepest Prayer

In Italy, I was reminded of the place where I believe all religions meet. Those committed to deep spiritual practice, whether it be observation of sensations or praying to the Madonna, begin to loosen their hold on the everyday identity of personality, expanding into wholeness, oneness and truly loving being. This is a state we also aim for in Biodynamics. Can we be present with ourselves, our clients and whatever arises between us, opening to the guidance of the source we call the Breath of Life? This is a term coined by William Sutherland, founder of cranial osteopathy, whose work became more being and less doing in nature in the later part of his life. In his book, Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy, Sutherland declared:

“Visualize a potency, an intelligent potency, that is more intelligent than your own human mentality … You will have observed its potency and also its Intelligence, spelled with a capital I. It is something you can depend upon to do the work for you. In other words, don’t try to drive the mechanism through any external force. Rely upon the Tide”

In our Biodynamic seminars, we guide our students in settling their thoughts and nervous system, intending to deepen and widen their awareness beyond everyday personality. In this less personal state, we can meet and hold our clients within a welcoming, accepting relational field. We practice being aware of our own reactions to what arises with an intention to be present in a supportive and compassionate way, rather than in a way we may think we are supposed to be. In short, we practice love. There are times when we sense our hearts cast open as we simply be with our client in the presence of the mystery of life.

Perhaps not surprisingly in the context of a seminar on the heart within a heart-centered spiritual community, I experienced this casting open last week. I was demonstrating a session in front of the class. As I put my hands on the demo client’s head, I suddenly felt such intense joy I found myself laughing out loud! Explaining my giggle to the client, she acknowledged also feeling a burst of joy as her heart opened in synchrony with mine. Many others in the room were also touched by this apparent wave of the Breath of Life caressing our hearts.

This transformation did not happen through any effort or force on my part. I simply settled into my heart with an awareness of me, client, and class being held and suspended within much larger, wider energetic fields. A similar heart opening tends to happen in Continuum classes and practice. After making a few sounds, breaths, and movements, I often sense my heart softening and expanding. It begins to feel as if it spans the entire length of my trunk, which is bathed in delicious indescribable sensations.

I have heard Continuum movers comment that their experience is better than making love. Perhaps, it is making love! Making love to ourselves and the planet, all at once. We are, as founder of Continuum, Emilie Conrad, noted, extensions of a planetary process. What we do with our own bodies both expresses and contributes to the planet. As we slow down, we resonate with subtle planetary rhythms. If we make love to ourselves, we must similarly be making love with the planet. If making love is really about being present with, accepting, welcoming and being with, Continuum, Biodynamics, and mindfulness are all about making love! Mama Earth may benefit from our practices, for how could we demolish her when we are in love? And could she be replenished with our loving care, her dead forests coming back to life, like paralyzed tissues in Continuum, or potency held within inertial conditional fulcrums in Biodynamics? There is a saying that love heals all.

Love Heals

When we arrived at the center in Italy, we were told there was a painting there of the Madonna that people came to for healing. Sitting with this powerful painting, and a beautiful sculpture of the Madonna outside, my heart opened again. I sensed exquisite radiance beaming through my body, igniting my heart, dissolving my personality. As I beheld the image of the miraculous mother, I realized I was taking in a powerful symbol of birth and rebirth, the mystery of the creative forces of life and love. The religious context became less important than the deeper symbolism.

I was reminded of Emilie Conrad’s teachings on the importance of being able to die, to shed our old skins like a molting snake, to let go of who we think we are in order to truly embody fluidity. Whenever we hold on, there is an element of rigidity. Letting go, we melt into what the next moment offers. Embracing the miracle of each moment, we equally welcome the arising of old traumas or other unresolved history, or the bubbling up of joy and laughter. All love, no force. Being without expectation. Welcoming what is. The mystery stretches its wings, emerges from its shell, and flies directly into our hearts.

A Continuum of Being

2014-04-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

It has been some time since I have written in this blog. I have been taking time to honor my relationship with my dear mentor, founder of Continuum Movement, Emilie Conrad, who passed away two weeks ago on April 14^th.

You may have seen the beautiful tribute to Emile on the Continuum website at www.continuummovement.com or with my own tribute on my Facebook page. If not, please take a look.

Having had some time to be with the waves of grief and gratitude of this sacred time of transition, I find my feelings still arising and passing away but with less intensity. It has been such a rich time for me, and many other teachers and lovers of Continuum.

Personally, I have been amazed by the sense I have had of Emilie’s ongoing, yet changed, presence. It is as if she need no longer squeeze her brilliance into the small body she had traveled in for almost 80 years. Now, her spirit is free to interact with all of us, no longer bound by the time-space continuum. I am haunted by her question, “If we were not bound in time, would we be susceptible?” Would we be susceptible to the influences of our environment, our history, our mindset, etc. Would we be affected by germs, dis-ease, genes, and such?

It was shocking for many of us that such a vibrant, fluid, flexible, strong and resilient being as Emilie could become ill and die. What does it mean? What does it say about Continuum? Emilie worked so many years to live, and teach others to live, beyond the constraints of time. Yet, in the end, she, too, was susceptible.

It is not so simple, however. Emilie had an illness anyone else would have died of months or maybe years before she did. I am reminded of my own experience with a malignant melanoma several years ago. As my wonderful doctor cut out the melanoma, I wondered aloud why I had gotten it when I had been Macrobiotic for many years. Macrobiotics has been touted as the anti-cancer diet. She responded without hesitation, imploring me to think how it might have been if I hadn’t been macrobiotic all those years. We might have been doing much more complicated surgery, not just limited to this bit of skin.

Similarly, Emilie amazed many by how well she could function with her illness. Until shortly before she passed, Emilie was graciously teaching classes. Her brilliant mind and fluid movement continued to astound her students. How did she do that? What may be a more important question is, can we do that? If I can be half as brilliant as Emilie when I grow up (?), I will be ecstatic!

It is not really about measuring our brilliance. Each of us is magnificent in our own way. I, like many others, was particularly attracted and attached to Emilie’s particular light, and remarkably, I still feel guided by it!

Continuing Wave

As a somatic practitioner, it is my habit to sense my bodily sensations, even as I do other things, like write this blog article. Since Emilie’s passing, I have frequently felt a specific sense of tingling on my skin, into my tissues. I feel it particularly strongly when I practice Continuum, and when talking or writing about Emilie and Continuum. I think of it as the wave of Emilie continuing to move me.

In Continuum, we work with a sense of waves moving through us. We use different breaths, vocalized sounds and movements designed to soften the cultural inhibitors and patterns, allowing our inherent wave motion to resume and flourish where it may have been previously stunted. As Emilie has noted, water moves as waves, pulsations, and spirals. In Continuum, we seek to generate such movement as we slow down, deepen under our cultural, ancestral and historical conditioning, and return to our essential fluid nature.

It seems that Emilie, or the wave of Emilie, is no longer limited by her conditions. Or perhaps the condition of death has freed that wave to do its work in a bigger way.

On Monday, April 14^th, I was on a train on my way home from teaching a Continuum workshop in Brighton. I was enjoying the opportunity, in the inspiring wake of the workshop, to work on the book I am writing, inspired primarily by my time with Emilie. I found myself working on the final chapter, which relates to death and dying. I wrote quite a bit and felt pleased with the flow of the writing. A few hours after arriving home, I received the email notice of Emilie’s passing. I realized she must have died while I was on the train. The next day, I returned to the chapter to write more. Reading over what I had written, I was struck by the synchronicity with Emilie’s passing. I found myself writing about the sense that Emilie was still contributing to the book.

It is sad that Emilie has passed. Her wave, however, continues.

Love and Attachment

I first went to study with Emilie pushed by an urgent sense that I would die if I didn’t. In retrospect, I remember Emilie insisting I get my huge mole checked by a doctor. She literally may have saved my life with that advice. In less obvious ways, however, I believe I was dying, lacking the juiciness I found waiting for me in Continuum. The night after I met her, I had a dream. I was giving birth and Emilie was the midwife.

I attended classes with Emilie regularly, even moving to Santa Monica to dive in deeper with her into the mysteries Continuum revealed. I found myself falling deeply in love with this remarkable woman. My heart opened and opened in ways I could never have imagined possible. I had called my work “Living from the Heart” for years and had taught ways to listen to our hearts, but I had never encountered anything that connected me with the heart the way Continuum did. As part of this opening, I felt completely enamored of my mentor, Emilie.

I had never been one to search for or even desire a guru or teacher. I had always had a strong sense of inner guidance and valued that source. Interestingly, Continuum was designed to provide just enough structure to enable us to listen to and follow our own rhythms. Emilie disliked external direction even more than I did and Continuum was testament to that attitude. I loved it!

I loved what I felt in my body as the tissues dissolved, spirals lifted me off the floor, my arms and legs floating effortlessly in cosmic space. I found something coming alive in me as I listened in every class to Emilie speak. I felt lit up, inspired, my mind eager as my body to embark on new, unfamiliar pathways, making unlikely connections that everyone delighted in.

As I dissolved into the field of Emilie, I found myself wanting to be close to her, like a little child with her mother. In the closeness, I found myself reflected, heard, discovered, seen, and something in me was seeded and grew.

Emilie wouldn’t have liked the mother image. In my work in prenatal and birth therapy, however, I had realized I had missed an important aspect of relationship with my own mother growing up. Around the time I started working with Emilie, I went to a family reunion where my mother and I danced together. It was, according to my mother, the first time she had danced since marrying my father. Hearing her say that, I suddenly understood what had been missing all my life.

As a very somatic individual, I had never been met and reflected on that body level by my mother until we danced together over half a century later! I felt as if I had never attached to my mother until that moment when we danced, finally gazing into each others’ eyes like mom and babe. Emilie, on the other hand, reminded me of whom I was in body and in mind. I was received, welcomed, celebrated by her eloquent expression of her own somatic experience.

There are many of us who fell in love with Emilie. Her sparkle was enchanting, enticing us to listen. Listen to the depths of our fluid being.

I feel as if I can never thank Emilie enough for the gifts she has imparted. The best I can do is to remain committed to carrying and passing on this powerful work she has brought to the world. I commit to living the love I still sense within the wave that was Emilie. As she would say as the final words to a workshop, “May a thousand kisses fall upon your lips and keep falling and falling and falling.” May the wave continue and continue and continue and may we all be open to receive its glow.

Resurrecting Your Life: New Beginnings

2014-03-30T07:58:00.001-07:00

Resurrection is a strong word. I was surprised, myself, when I saw it emerge on the page. Resurrecting your life implies it has been dead. Is it true?

Of course, you say, I must be alive or could not be reading this page. Well, on one level that’s true. On other levels, it may be that aspects of you have been dead or as-if dead for a long time. How do we resurrect what may have been dead, when we may not even be aware of its deadness? Or its existence?

These are important questions. Just as significant may be the question of how aspects of us may have died or shut down in the first place.

In previous blog entries, I have referred to various early prenatal and birth events that may have left deep imprints on our personality, attitudes, beliefs, relationship styles and tendencies, as well as other habits and patterns in our lives. This is a common focus in the field of Prenatal and Birth Psychology, but, to me, it is important to also acknowledge and learn to access the potential of this early time in our lives.

When we are affected by very early trauma, we often lose touch with our earliest, most essential potential. Today I would like to talk about that potential and how it can benefit you now.

Enthusiasm and Potential

When little ones first come into being, they are propelled by an inherent life force, a kind of

enthusiasm for life. When we are not traumatized through our arrival process, we engage our lives with this attitude, strengthened by curiosity, playfulness and an urge to fulfill ourselves, whatever that may mean.

If you have ever attended a natural birth, where birth attendants acted only in support of natural birth process, rather than intervening out of fear or need to prevent distress, you will know what this inherent embracing of life can look like.

I remember the first birth I attended. Maya, the little girl so named because she was born on the first of May, shocked us all by immediately lifting her little head and looking around the room at each of us, almost before the rest of her body emerged. We were all deeply touched by her sweet eye contact. We felt an equal eagerness to meet this new little being amongst us.

Take a moment now, as you read this, to consider how you feel reading about this birth. Do you feel a resonant kind of enthusiasm for life? A curiosity? Amazement? Or do you have some other kinds of feelings? Doubt? How could a newborn have lifted her own head and looked around the room like that? Babies can’t lift their heads on their own. Newborns can’t see. This is nonsense. Babies can’t feel enthusiasm. Babies’ nervous systems aren’t developed enough to respond to a situation like this. It was just reflexive. These, by the way, have been the responses of otherwise sensible scientists and researchers who have not believed in the sentience of little ones.

What is your response? Do you feel awe? Do you feel anger? Sadness? Delight? Stress? Do you feel your feelings? Do you feel your body? How does it respond to this story? Is there tension somewhere? In your shoulders? Eyes? Back? Feet? Are you holding your breath? Check out what you are aware of in your body in this moment. What is it telling you?

How we respond to birth stories and reports can inform us as to our own early experience. Not feeling in your own body may relate to a dissociative experience when you were little or to a somatic re-enactment of anesthesia given to your mother at birth. Anesthesia is designed to stop us from feeling pain. This involves not feeling. We may learn at birth to react to stressful situations by similarly not feeling.

Dissociative Tendencies

Dissociation may be considered a kindness of nature to reduce the suffering of animals in distress. If a saber-toothed tiger is about to eat you and there is nothing you can do, it may be helpful to leave the sensations of your body and not have to feel the pain. As little ones, we usually don’t have other options available to us when under stress. We can try crying for mom, but, if that doesn’t work, we aren’t strong enough to fight or fly. We need to withdraw into dissociation to prevent full overwhelm. Unfortunately, once we have learned to react to a situation this way, we may automatically react to life stress the same way.

No matter how long we have practiced this dissociative pattern, our life energy, our life enthusiasm, remains beneath it. We might even appreciate the intelligence of a system that is capable of protecting essential life forces by causing us to withdraw from overwhelming stimulation of the senses. If you have tended to dissociate in your life, consider that this has been a survival mechanism. It has enabled you to get this far in life. It may not serve you today the way it did when you were little, but it was an expression of your bio-intelligence. You made it through whatever terrifying, painful or otherwise intolerable situation you may have encountered before you had a mature enough nervous system to process it, or before you had other defensive strategies in place to deal with it. Can you possibly find an appreciation or gratitude for this dissociative mechanism that kept you from being completely overwhelmed back then?

It is possible that you don’t have a tendency to dissociate. I am writing this as if you do because we live in a highly dissociative world culture in this 21^st century. In the modern western world, we are taught early on to ignore or distrust our bodies in favor of mental reasoning. We learn to cut ourselves off from our first order of experience – our sensations – and to jump ahead to interpretation, or to the interpretations of others.

Even if we have some ability to sense and be with our sensations, how likely are we to stay with them in the speed of everyday life? For example, as you read this, do you have a sense of your body? The internet is a wonderful way for us to connect across the world, but it also speeds us up beyond our biological capabilities. I am reminded of a comparison I once heard, that our brain to brawn (body) ratio when driving a car is the equivalent of that of a dinosaur! Remember, the dinosaurs are now extinct. They were not able to adapt to a new environmental situation. We may need to find ways to counter this brain to brawn ratio if we as a species are to survive. Do you sense your body when behind the wheel of a car? Do you sense it when watching television, talking on your mobile phone, playing video games, or in any of your other daily activities?

Sensing the body is now known to change our neurobiology. Parts of the brain develop more fully when we practice mindful awareness. I believe this can help counter a dinosaur-like brain to brawn ratio, as we learn to interact with events from the present time oriented, socially adept pre-frontal cortex of the brain and its related social engagement nervous system, rather than reacting automatically from a past fear-based orientation of the amygdala, the sympathetic fight-flight nervous system, or the parasympathetic freeze/dissociation nervous system.

Take some time to sense your body and breath as you read this. Feel free to pause in your reading until you feel settled in your breath. Let yourself be aware of what you sense in your body. Which parts of your body stand out for you in this moment? Do you tend to be most aware of areas of discomfort, pain, tension, holding? Are you able to orient to what feels ok or even good in your body? Take some time to scan your body, head, neck, chest, breath, diaphragm/stomach area, belly, pelvis, back, arms, hands, legs, feet. What stands out for you? What do you notice that surprises you? What do you tend to be aware of habitually? Can you challenge your habits a bit and guide yourself to notice areas or sensations you are not accustomed to noticing. This might mean noticing any sensations at all. Or it might mean sensing that little space between your right index finger and middle finger. Or where your neck meets your head. Or the base of your left big toe. What can you sense in this moment that is new for you?

Return to Potential

As we inquire as to what is new, as to what is in this moment, we begin to return to the potential of the little one. Coming back to Maya, everything in the room was visually new for her! She had not seen us before! She had not seen a room full of people, colors, shapes and forms before she was born.

In this newness, there is infinite potential. As we develop and mature, we make decisions. Our cells change in certain ways, even in the embryo, establishing that they will become heart cells or liver cells or skin cells, etc. Throughout life, we make choices and change in response to our life conditions in ways that tend to set us on certain paths. Other pathways become less apparent or available to us through this process. The more we repeat our same choices and decisions, the more rigidly we become set on our path.

Returning to the newness of each moment is one way to recover our early potential. We can do this through making conscious, aware choices, rather than acting automatically out of habit. Various mindfulness based practices support us in being present to each moment in ways that facilitate this kind of awareness in life.

If you know me, you already know that I tend to mention Continuum Movement as I find it such an effective and accessible practice for dissolving our patterns and coming into presence in each moment. Returning to the concept of resurrection, Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, has compared the fluidity we are capable of to a snake shedding its skin. Each skin represents a life or period of life being let go of. In order to resiliently meet each moment as it arises, we must relinquish each past moment. We must die and be resurrected again and again. Otherwise, we try to meet the current situation from a stance established for the past and not necessarily appropriate or helpful for the present.

Continuum is of course not the only way to practice death and resurrection. Any practice that really brings us into the moment will facilitate our ability to be present and will take us that much closer to our original potential.

And in this moment, are you still aware of your breath? Your body? Your sensations? If you stay with them, what changes? How does the room look? What is new? How are you being resurrected in this moment? What is new? What is your potential?

After the New Years' Resolutions- Dissolving Your Manifestation Blocks

2014-02-15T08:09:00.003-08:00

As I write this, it is mid-February. New Years’ and its resolutions have come and gone. Winter gloom abounds. Here in Devon, non-stop rains have turned farmers’ fields into lakes and railroad tracks in junk piles. The dark days could be depressing, but the days are getting longer and occasionally the sun comes back out to remind us of what is possible.

In the light of winter, how do your New Years’ resolutions look today? Did you even set any? I’d like to talk today about how our goals and plans, like New Years’ resolutions, may run into roadblocks on their way to manifestation, and how these blocks may relate to our earliest history.

Many years ago, I took and then taught a course called DMA, later changed to Technologies for Creating. Through this course, I changed my life in many ways. Robert Fritz, the founder of DMA, had applied his experience as a musician to the phenomenon of creating what we want in life. He described three stages of the creative process: germination, gestation, and receiving. Years later, through doctoral studies in Pre- and Perinatal Psychology, I learned how our very early experience in the womb and birth can affect our ability to move through these stages. Lets look at how they may be affecting you.

The Path of Least Resistance

The first step in changing anything is awareness. If we are unaware of the problem, we won’t take action to change it. With increasing awareness, our options multiply. In his book, The Path of Least Resistance, Fritz described how we tend to follow the same path repeatedly. In automatic mode, we take the path of least resistance, leading us to where we are used to going. To create something new, we need to establish a new pathway. This requires paying attention and making different choices.

My current mentor, Emilie Conrad, states “the nervous system is a pattern addict.” It needs to establish patterns to enable us to function in our world. If I had to stop to create new neural pathways for each word I write, this blog would never reach you! It reminds me a bit of my efforts to speak French with a friend this morning. After years of not traveling that path, it now seemed quite overgrown! I had to weed out my newer Spanish vocabulary to find the dusty French. My brain was quite tired after twenty minutes of sorting through the mess for every sentence!

Our lives can be a bit like this. We know we are not happy. We decide we want something different. We are determined to have it be different, but the path of least resistance takes us back again and again to what we already know.

In this vein, New Years’ resolutions can become too much work very quickly. They fall away as we continue down the old path. The question is, how do we do something else?

In Continuum Movement, we practice slowing down, which enables us to become more aware and make different choices. We even ask the question, “What else?” What else is possible here? If my body always moves in the same way, what else could happen?

We may make supreme efforts in our lives to be more aware, to make different choices, to take a different path, but we keep finding ourselves back where we were. We might give up and say, I’ll try again next January!

Early Imprints

How might all this relate to our early history? I find it interesting that Fritz used the terms germination and gestation to describe the first two stages of creating. Germination refers to when we get an idea for something; we conceive of it. We may have abundant energy for it, bursting with enthusiasm as we begin down our new pathway. Some people, however, get stuck in their creative process right here at the beginning. They have trouble conceiving of what they want, of setting goals, of allowing themselves to even feel a longing for what could be. Fritz taught techniques for discovering your visions and defining them in practical, measurable terms. This can help us get over that first hump, but why does the hump occur?

We may have tried before to do something different and concluded after our failures that it isn’t possible. Some people, however, do not make this conclusion. I am reminded of holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who managed a positive attitude despite all odds in a concentration camp. I don’t know what Frankl’s conception, birth or early life were like. Based on years of experience working with prenatal and birth trauma, I imagine he was a wanted, welcomed baby who enjoyed some healthy bonding within his family.

Where we have suffered in our first creation, coming into this life, our early imprints tend to express themselves with each new beginning in our lives. Planned conception is a relatively rare event. Most conceptions are unexpected, even if the parents want a baby. There may be feelings of ambivalence, questions as to one’s ability to parent a child at this time, thoughts of abortion, or abortion attempts. Conception may have occurred through rape or within a fearful, violent environment of war or mental illness. How we relate to new beginnings, including setting new goals in our lives, can differ, depending on if we experienced rejection or warm welcome when we were conceived, when the pregnancy was confirmed and our presence discovered, or when we were born.

Even if we were conceived intentionally, we might not sense ourselves being welcomed for who we actually are. It is not unusual for couples to try having a baby to solve relationship problems, to manipulate a partner into marriage, or to try to have a boy or girl if they already have a child of the opposite sex. Children are also wanted to ensure continuation of the family line, take over the family business or fill in some other kind of gap. Children born into this field of expectation may find it difficult to be themselves and determine what they really want.

The subsequent stages of the creative process, gestation, and receiving, can also reflect your early history. Gestation refers to the time after conceiving your vision of what you want, when you may not notice much progress, like the bump of pregnancy that is initially too small to be seen. At some point, there is a quickening, when you begin to realize you are making progress. If you did not feel held and welcomed when your pregnancy was discovered, or through your time in the womb, you may not recognize signs of progress toward your goal. Or you may be plagued by feelings of hopelessness, self-judgment, and worthlessness. Do I really deserve to have this? Or you may unconsciously sabotage your own efforts, as a way perhaps to avoid the kind of pain you experienced when you were rejected or judged as a little one.

This theme can continue into the third stage, receiving. This relates to the time of birth and just after when the baby is received. How the parents or family receive the baby is not always joyous. For example, I remember being told many times that my father looked at me and declared how ugly I was! Babies with visible deformities are often met by shock, rejection and judgment. A girl born to parents wanting or expecting a boy can feel like a failure and may never feel able to be or have what she really wants. Babies can also be conceived through a secret affair, to be revealed by how the baby looks at birth. Even if the baby’s looks don’t give away the deceit, the fear, shame, guilt, or dissatisfaction they represent may follow them throughout life.

How we are received can affect our own ability to receive what we manifest in our lives. The perfect job or partner or opportunity may present itself to us and we don’t notice, are too busy or don’t allow ourselves for whatever reason to take it in. Or, we succeed in reaching our goal and, instead of celebrating and feeling satisfied, we focus on how it isn’t quite perfect, or we don’t deserve to have it, or we move on to the next thing so quickly we never really take in what we have accomplished. Sounding familiar yet?

Dissolving the Blocks

A first step in dissolving this kind of block is to be aware of it. Taking time to consider your early history, asking your parents about it if possible, recording it for yourself or telling others about it as a coherent story can help you to recognize its echoes in your life. It can also facilitate acknowledging this as your past, rather than who you are.

It is important to differentiate what has happened to you in the past from who are and what you are capable of now. Having the attentive reflection of a practitioner experienced in prenatal and birth therapy can be extremely helpful in sorting your history out while establishing on a somatic, cellular level a different kind of relational field, where you experience being welcomed, supported, acknowledged, celebrated for who you are.

There is so much to explore in this area. Please stay tuned for my next blog entry to continue on the journey!

The Power of our Stories 2: Gifted through Conditions

2014-01-07T09:26:00.001-08:00

In my previous blog post, I described an experience I had many years ago with a concussion that changed the direction of my life. Today, in the wake of New Years’ celebrations around the globe, I would like to discuss the power of this kind of review of our life stories, and the gifts available to us when we are able to witness these stories without identifying with them.

The turn of the year seems like a potent time to examine our lives, or at least the events of the passing year. Based on our year review, we set goals, intentions or resolutions for the year being born. This process, like any transition, can echo our original experience of being born into this life. We often do it unconsciously, with an abundance of numbing substances like alcohol or too much food. This can be a reflection or re-enactment of a birth process involving anesthesia or other drugs. We often feel at the mercy of time, as it moves too quickly or too slowly, emphasized by the passing of another year. Similarly, for many of us, our birth was taken over by the speedy intentions of those attending our birth. It is not uncommon to lose our sense of our own timing in this process.

As January rolls along, I have been with many who are finding themselves feeling heavy, depressed, resistant to embracing the promise life offers them. This is not unusual when we have found ways to evade what is most meaningful for us, following more popular distractions or promises from loud advertisements, or people around us. We may be tired from overeating, partying, or even buying or receiving too many Christmas gifts. What happens to the depths of us in all this activity? I find my clients arriving this time of year feeling worn out, deflated after all the excitement and adventure of the holidays.

For myself, I am aware that the holidays offered not only rest and heart-warming family gatherings; they were also marked by grief and loss. My mother, whose health has been gradually deteriorating, went through a sudden decline at the end of November and seems to have endured a small stroke. I feel sad as I witness her new challenges with walking, talking and orientation. I feel grateful that her sweetness remains and everyone seems to still love her as much as ever, but my mom as I knew her, is not quite still here.

Life or?

At the same time, numerous friends and colleagues are meeting cancerous invasions in their bodies. I witness and support as best I can their valiant attempts to find health in the midst of this embodied chaos. I understand cancer as an expression of cells gone astray, isolated and no longer in resonant communion with the whole. Weakness, weight loss, pain, as well as cognitive effects seem to take over the scene, while the essence of who this person really is strives to express itself. Choices are made about embracing life more fully or embracing death and dying.

I can relate to these challenges. Some years ago, I was diagnosed with a malignant melanoma. I was confused that this happened shortly after I felt I had made for the first time a strong choice to live. This cancer seemed to be a way for my body to quickly express my earlier ambivalence for life. I had always said that, if I were ever diagnosed with cancer, I would only use alternative treatments. When the moment came, however, there wasn’t time to refuse the surgery. My dermatologist told me I needed to get to her office that very day. This was serious! This was life threatening! In that moment, even with the fear of what this all meant, I had no ambivalence. I got myself to her office and had the surgery.

This was a wake up call like no other in my life to date. It is too easy to fall into survival mode, just taking care of what needs to be taken care of in life, rather than deepening into essential presence and intention. After this emergency surgery, the ongoing pain of the scar served to remind me of the choice I had made. I chose to be here. I had the opportunity to leave but I chose to stay. I see this choice being played out by those I know who have been ill or overwhelmed by other life circumstances. They, like me, are being asked to make a choice. I suspect that their choice will affect them for the rest of their lives, just as mine has.

What Do You Choose?

In view of this, I would like to invite you to take a moment now to consider your own past year, and

the life that led up to it. What events stand out for you? What have been your greatest challenges? What has been overwhelming for you? When you consider these experiences, how familiar are they, or the feeling they evoke for you? If they are familiar, chances are you are in some way re-living an aspect of your earlier history. In this case, you have a special opportunity here to revamp your history, if you will. You can make choices now that may not have been available to you back then. Perhaps your situation is about more fully embracing life, as mine was. You have the chance here to really commit, to acknowledge what is most important to you deep down, and choose that.

Take a moment to reflect on this. It may take much longer than a moment, but allow yourself, if it feels right and useful to you, to be with this within yourself. If these challenging situations were offering you a gift or a lesson or a message, what would it be?

If you find yourself opening to new possibilities here, or re-visiting old ones you had forgotten, make some notes for yourself to remind you later. This is important. This is about touching into your original potential. This is about what you are here for.

Whatever it is, welcome to this life you now find yourself in! Welcome to this moment. May it feed and nurture you in whatever way you may need just now.

I would love to hear from you about how this little exploration has affected you. Please feel free to leave a comment below or to contact me to let me know.

Wishing you ease, grace, happiness, peace and embodied potential for this new year!