Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, and what can be the use of him is more than I can see.” -   Robert Louis Stevenson October is upon us. This is a beautiful time of the year in which the leaves have turned golden, yellow, and red as the weather turns cooler and fires begin to burn in the hearth once again. For some, October culminates in a celebration called All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, which I look at as a symbol of our shadow sides.   Once could say it is a celebration of our dark sides. Think about it.   During the month of October, we become enveloped in . beautiful colors as the leaves change from green to orange, red, then to brown.    I like to think of late autumn as a time to celebrate the beauty found within our dark sides which is why I have dedicated an entire month to exploring the power of doing ‘shadow work’ and why I have identified this process as one of the secret keys to health, wholeness, and vitality. Ironically it can

"Rest when you are weary. Refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind, your spirit. Then get back to work” - Ralph Marston Have you ever had the experience that you needed some spaciousness and some time in between the moments, events, or people in your life? Have you longed for time to recover, recuperate, or to process a challenging situation or relationship? I am sure we have all experienced these situations, but the real question is have we allowed ourselves time to rest, recuperate, process, and integrate? This needed time is a time of rest and of fallowness which actually serves to inspire and to motivate and to re-vitalize ourselves. There is a client I work with who is aware of this need intimately. At present, she is dealing with her aging parents.   She wants to care for them and yet she also realizes that she needs to take time off in order to rest and integrate her experiences with them in this new phase of life. Recently her fathe

“Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day  is the rest we take between two deep breaths.” -   Etty Hillesum                                                                                        Life is what happens as we are busy living it. Everything has a time and we never know what life has in store for us for us to learn. Sometimes after a difficult event in our lives, it takes a lot of rest and apparent fallow time before we can go back and look at the trauma. There are certain events in our lives that require tremendous rest in order to heal. When we push ourselves to fast and too much we can actually back slide. Rest and fallow times are very important for our health and healing as well as for the restoration of our vitality. I have a client who had a major life event about two years ago. She was in the shower and was stepping out while she “slipped” and hit her head and eye on a bathroom fixture and subsequently lost her eye. While she was at

“Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.”                                                                                     - Arthur Schopenhauer As a health care provider, it is important for me to make time to rest and rejuvenate. One of the reasons for burnout is a lack of rest and putting too much importance on others and pleasing others. There is something called “a balance of give and take”. Another phrase for this, which I have recently learned in Kabbalah teaching, is called bread of shame . When we are out of balance, within ourselves, in our work, in nature, it is easy to get ill, feel overwhelmed, have writers block, and feel fatigued. As I explore the meaning of the phrase bread of shame , I am learning to appreciate its deeper meaning and guidance for my life. How many of us feel shame from time to time (or even a lot of the time)? Have

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a Summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the Clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” -   John Lubbock September is here and the days are getting noticeably shorter. Even though the days are still warm in this part of the world, our bodies and minds begin to shift ever so slightly. No longer are the sultry nights filled with sitting out on our front porches drinking iced tea, taking long walks with our dogs, or watching a sunset at 9:00 p.m. If we pay attention to the sunlight and to nature, we find that September begins to initiate a time of rest and fallowness. A time in which we can get ready for what is next to come in the next season of our lives, in our psyche, in our very beings. In our Western society, we tend to over value work and we have created ways in which we work all through the long nights. This is especially true in the East coast an