Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

“Your face is marked with lines of life,  put there by love and laughter, suffering and tears. It’s beautiful” -   Lynsay Sands                       I am entering another phase of my life; one in which I am embodying my life’s work more fully, putting words to my healing modality, and inviting others to experience what I have spent a lifetime creating. In the book, Nature and the Human Soul , this phase is called The Grove of Elders. It is the phase of life in which we shift our focus and attention from doing more to being more; from innovating something new to stewarding our work in such a way that we care for the community and the Earth. It took me a whole year to wrap my mind around my turning sixty and what that would mean. To some sixty sounds old. To others sixty sounds young. To me, it is an exciting and potent phase of life in which I can embody my strengths, share my wisdom, and share my life’s work with others while I still have enough stamina and e

"Self-nurturing means, above all,  making a commitment to self-compassion,  to the creation of a loving and positive attitude toward yourself." - Jennifer Louden Nurturing ourselves is as not as easy as it sounds. On one level we all know what the word means, and yet on another level, it is a tricky word when it comes to applying it in our daily lives. For example, a client once shared with me what he thought was a nurturing decision and yet as we looked at what unfolded, it was anything but nurturing. My client was exhausted so one morning he slept in late.   He was tired and sleeping in appeared to be a nurturing choice. However because he woke up later than usual he left home with just enough time to get to an appointment. If all went just as planned, it could have worked out.   But what happened was that he was rushed and stressed, arrived over ten minutes late for his appointment, and felt terrible. When we take a closer look at his choice, we see rather

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” -Leo Tolstoy I woke up one morning, opened my eyes, and the mist outside my window spoke of the world crying.   The world is crying as we feel the pain. The world is crying for those hurt in the recent Boston episode, for their families their friends, the witnesses, the perpetrators, the patriots, the Country. The world is crying for the pain in Bosnia, Serbia, the Sudan, Israel, the Middle East, and, and, and. Through the veil of tears lives what is possible. If we could all be held in the bosom of our mother’s love, would all this pain and suffering be possible? The world is crying because there are a lot of tears to shed. Crying forever or crying as a catharsis are not the same as crying to express the care and love for ourselves and for each other. Unending crying speaks when we are unconsciously caught i

“ No matter the nature of your individuality, you can nurture a better identity and have a mature positively rewarding life.”                                                                                   Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha Last night I had people over for a bar-b-queue and I had a very interesting discussion with an older woman who is struggling with aging and how it changes her sense of self. My discussion with her led me to thinking about self-nurturing from a slightly different vantage point. Usually we think of self nurturing as a way of caring for ourselves through personal time, a massage, a health treatment, a good dinner, drinks with friends, a walk in nature, and so on. What if self-nurturing is also about coming to compassionate terms with who we are and our limitations? If we look at self-nurturing from the perspective of who we are today and not who we hoped or wished we would be, compassion becomes part of the nurturing equation. Compassion is an

               “Tell the world you are one of a kind creation who came here to experience                                                Wonder and spread joy”                                                                                                                 - Victoria Moran The word “selfish” has gotten a bad rap. There is selfishness and there is selfish.   Selfish means “about the self.” I personally don’t see anything wrong with being about one's self; unless we are always just about our self. Knowing ourselves, taking care of ourselves, and valuing ourselves are marvelous traits. If we don’t value and nurture ourselves, who will, and who will teach our children? The eighth key and the topic for the month of August is the Power of Self-Nurturing. During the next four weeks we will explore how by nurturing ourselves, we nurture our relationships and the greater community while also becoming more whole, vital and healthy individuals. In the wo