Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

“The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.”                                                                                   - Nathaniel Branden Have you ever spent time with an elder, an elderly parent, someone with a stroke or other disability? Have you noticed that being with them involves us slowing down to their movements and their rhythms of thought and expression? If so, have you also experienced that when we are present with them in our thoughts and feelings and movements that it also takes us in a different dimension of time where things that used to matter don’t, and other things do? When events in life slow us down we become more open to feelings, thoughts, and perceptions which we ordinarily only allow in small moments and increments. As we age and find our minds slowing down or becoming less agile, or we are dealing with life changes such as a stroke, things which we were too much in a rush to pay much attention to become more i

“ No legacy is so rich as honesty. ”                                                                  - William Shakespeare There are so many ways to look at faces. We can look at the color of our eyes, the shape of our lips, and the length of our noses. We can also look at our coloring, our ethnicity, the shape of our faces, and the pallor of our skin. These are all literal ways to look at each other. The Chinese and Japanese have ways of analyzing our health through the lines on our faces, the marks on our skin, the colorizations in our eyes, and the shape of our lips. There are many other ways to see each other through what our faces reveal.  Have you noticed that we know when someone is sad without saying or hearing a word? We know through a feeling and what our faces reveal. There might be downturned lips which usually are slightly curved upwards. There might be a sad caste in the eyes. There are ways to know each other at a deeper level through our faces.  I have

“ Truth is generally the best vindication against slander. ”                                                                                    - Abraham Lincoln How often do we look for opportunities to be alone unless we are completely overwhelmed? It seems that most of us have a great fear of being alone. We stay in stagnant relationships or we make bad choices in roommates or we emotionally blackmail people or children to stay with us. Being alone is a great fear many of us carry.  If we look at the word, alone, we can see that in taking it apart in two syllables, it is “ al ” “ one ” . We know that in our heads we are really all one, but feeling our oneness and connection while we are by ourselves is another matter altogether. Many times this comes from the impact on us of imperfect parenting experiences. Many of us had aloof, or distant, or depressed, or sad mothers. Many of us were raised by one parent, or an abusive parent or suffered a great loss of a caretaker o

“When in doubt, tell the truth.”                                                                      - Mark Twain The summer is heating up and secrets heat up our lives, too. Last week, I wrote about The Good Lie , and secrets are part of the lies; usually of omission. Occasionally, we tell little white lies and at times, they can be appropriate or helpful. I can’t think of a good reason to keep a secret for a long period of time. Yes, at times we need to hold onto an idea or a secret someone told us carry for them. However, to carry a secret to our graves is not a helpful thing to do. In my work as a facilitator I see many ill effects from such secrets.  There are so many examples of how secrets distort the past and hurt our future. In the Family Constellation work I do, which is a group oriented experiential process where people “stand in for” or represent family members for a member of the group in order to see important dynamics in a person’s life which had not been s