Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

“Fate is like a strange unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.” -Lemony Snicket We all come from dysfunctional families and we all come from families who carry secrets. The problem is that the secrets come back and haunt us. They haunt us in ways that cause illness, or failure to succeed, the vague and not so vague fears we carry, and the way we often are compelled to repeat patterns that don’t suit us. Think about how often we find ourselves doing the same things and saying the same things and making the same mistakes even though we don’t want to. This is the definition of crazy: doing the same thing and hoping for different results. There are many reasons for this phenomenon. One of the blind reasons is that we often live the same fate as our parents, their parents, and on down the line. We have trouble succeeding if our parents didn’t, we divorce or separate or fight like our parents, we are a

“Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing.” -Rick Riordan Last month I wrote about one aspect and dynamic of feeling entitled. This month I am writing about another dynamic of feeling entitled. This dynamic involves how it can manifest and where it comes from. Even the best of us with our limitations, are not able to provide fully for anyone. We can want to and intend to, but their needs may be such that in combination with our limitations or weaknesses, we aren’t able to give them something basic to what they feel they need. As a young child, ideally, we are given enough so that we can flourish and feel loved and lovable and valuable. Life isn’t fair, so many of us feel like we didn’t get enough, and we feel wounded. That then becomes our work; to heal, to plumb the depths to get to the root of our wounds and to make them our friends and our strengths so we can know how wonderful we truly are. We have to earn our inheritance, so to speak. What can happen and doe

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”                                                                                                           -Winston Churchill How many of us know folks in our lives who act entitled to things? We talk about it, and so, in some ways we probably all have some feelings of being entitled to something or someone. Yet, some folks carry that feeling with them a lot of the time. There is an aspect of entitlement which is helpful for us to have; feeling entitled to loving parents, to being and feeling loved. Parenting is one of the most difficult jobs there is. Not only is it so very important, it also brings up much of our unfinished or unresolved issues with and within us and our caretakers. In addition, we carry within us unresolved issues across generations that get passed to us in the womb and live in us as if those tra

“Find a place where there is joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”                                                                              Joseph Campbell I went to an event for a Jewish holiday called Roshashanah. This holiday is part of what we call, the High Holidays. These holidays consist of Roshashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. RoshHashanah is a time of letting go of all the negative thoughts and actions we have accumulated from the past year and it is a time of celebration. I celebrated this Jewish New Year with thousands of other people of all religions from all over the world. Have you ever celebrated something, not including a sports event or concert with thousands of people? If you have you know it is quite an experience. Not only was I part of this event, but this event itself brings people together for the purpose of ending our pain and suffering individually and throughout the world.  Can you imagine yourself living absent the pain and suffering you us

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”                                                                                              - Kahil Gibran The other week a friend had suggested I be kind to myself. That word stood out to me; kind. I think and talk about nurturing ourselves. We read and talk about loving ourselves. I don’t often hear about being kind to ourselves. It sounds good. When I think it or say it, it feels good too. What is being kind? Kind is like being gentle, but different. Being kind involves an action and doesn’t just mean going easy on our self judgments. When we actively love ourselves we are being kind to ourselves. To be loving to ourselves carries with it the weight of how we were loved in our lives and so can be hard. Being kind feels so light. It involves how we take care of ourselves through baths and spas and pedicures and taking rest….but it is also so much more. It doesn’t carry comfort with it, like with

“To truly laugh you must be able to take your pain and  play with it.”                                                                                                                                                                -Charlie Chaplin Many of us think about our life’s purpose and know we have one, and don’t always know what it is. Sometimes our purpose is to shed light on something. Sometimes our purpose is to meet and be with our soul mate….sometimes our purpose is to break a pattern that has been repeating….and so on. Sometimes, what we think is our purpose really may not be. On that same line of thought, sometimes what we think we want and what we think we are here for consciously is not really what makes us more of who we are in our essence. Sometimes, our eyes are bigger than our stomachs and we want something that really isn’t in our best interest. Sometimes, the opposite is true where we play it small and don’t really stretch into who and what we can be.  I

“The only gift I have to give is the ability to receive. If giving is a gift, and it surely is, then my gift to you is to allow you to give to me.”                                                                                                      - Jarod Kintz As a Chiropractic physician I work with many people in different degrees of pain, dysfunction, and even illness. I look at my patients through the lens of finding the cause of their pain. The cause is not only on the  physical level, but also the spiritual and metaphysical levels. Almost every physical complaint is tied to a spiritual cause. We often don ’ t listen to our internal issues until or unless we are in some kind of pain. As this year also ties me and my work with the influence of my father and his life, good and bad, I am taking the time to relate my father and his beliefs to mine. He is a child psychoanalyst who believes in the power of the mind over the body and in the body/mind connection. He liked t