Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

“The truth will set you free; but first it will piss you off.”                                                                                              - Gloria Steinum I love how our actions aren’t always how they appear. I watched a show last night where one of the main characters, certainly a flawed individual as are we all, spoke about an event that happened in his life which shaped him. He spent years afterwards protecting his daughter from knowing a truth, which he felt would be too hard on her, and he took the blame. This was a great cost to him. He let everyone believe that he was responsible for something instead of having his daughter know that his wife, her mother, had an affair. Many of us have done things and said things which aren’t really true in order to protect ourselves or someone else. I see how over time, these lies and partial truths really do not help.  Even though my father was a very flawed man, he told me a story, which touched me deeply and rem

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth,  but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”                                                                                  - Winston Churchill The rivers are flowing freely; our hearts are filled with love as this beautiful and flowery month shows us. It is the spring of our nature cycle, and a time to fill our own well springs. If we look at this analogy and connect it with our own growth in life from childhood through all the life stages: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, older adult, and crone, we can see many similarities. I learn so much from nature. In nature, when we don ’ t get enough rain in the spring months, our earth dries up at a time of planting. This affects our food bounty and also the very water that is so necessary for life. The same effects happen with our life growth. When we don ’ t have enough love, or our needs aren ’ t met when we are little, or we are a

“There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.” -Napoleon Bonaparte This year I have been focusing on BodyPresencing ™ issues as presented through my work, and as they relate to what I have learned from my family and my father. Our families are great feeding and learning grounds for us. They present as opportunities for us to learn and to grow; very rich soil. The more I work with people the more I see how in many ways the issues, illnesses of physical, emotional and spiritual nature, impact us. When one person is ill in some way, the whole family is ill; in some way. This is one of the reasons that families present as such fertile learning grounds. We can change how their illness and issues affect us when we are conscious in our lives, and that can be done with a lot of work. We can see this dynamic in obvious ways, as in when a family member has a mental illness, or when a family member has a chronic illness of some kind, like Cerebral Palsy, or severe rheumato

“Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.”                                                                                         -Groucho Marx To me, life is often felt as a poem might be felt. Life is poetry in motion and I often feel poetry in my heart and soul; as I feel life. How about you, and how do you feel life? Often my morning time as the remnants of night is still with me, is a time when I feel poetry move within me. I have what I call my morning window, an east facing window overlooking my yard and trees and the neighborhood. I sit there first thing in the morning as I watch the sun rise or move on its path across the sky, and I meditate, or write, and spend time communing with my soul. I look out my morning window and depth of feeling; usually inspired by nature wells up in me. An example of what wells up in me is below. The Golden Morning: The sun’s rays roll over the leaves and branches casting golden hues through

“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