Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

I love to write. Writing helps me to work with my feelings. Some people need to take time for them and withdraw into a place inside which feels safe to sort through their feelings quietly. Others need to or choose to go out and be with others to get past their feelings or to change their feeling tone. Others need to talk out loud to someone or just to talk out loud to hear their own voice describing what they are feeling. There are many types of people and many ways to deal or not deal with our feelings. For me, I feel things deeply, and writing helps me to identify my feelings and to even work through them. A common feeling we all feel at times is dejection, rejection, feeling not good enough, and even feeling what we want to do may not happen, which can make us feel discouraged. The question is, what do we do with these feelings when they come up, and how do we deal with these feelings? Most of us have times when we wake up in the middle of the night when our s...

If someone asked you what was a defining moment of your life, how would you answer? For many of us, we have more than one defining moment in our lives, just as there are many phases in our lives. Our defining moments are based on the stories we carry inside of us; good and bad, and old and new. They are also based on beliefs we carry about us, our lives, our abilities and possibilities, and hopefully, they are changeable or evolving as we change and evolve. That said, defining moments occur almost in an instant. And in that instant, a decision was made by which we reacted to nearly instantaneously. Who said that IN THE MEANTIME moments last a long time. These moments can be instantaneous. In that second upon which we make an important decision which is reflective of how we think of us and others at that moment in time, it lasts both a second and an eternity. That second not only lasts an eternity, but its effects can also be very long lasting. This is also an example of the elastic...

Astrology is making a resurgence in today’s society. I was recently asked a question regarding what we can learn from astrology by an interviewer. There are many things we can learn through astrology, and what I find fascinating me presently is how we can learn about our health through knowing how to read certain aspects in our birth charts. Nothing is written in concrete from our birth charts. It is merely a blueprint of our lives, how we think, what motivates us, what our weaknesses are emotionally and psychologically as well as physically, how we may experience life in different phases of our lives, what our strengths are, and also what gets in our way and what helps to propel us forward into the realm of what is possible. As a blueprint, it is like a map and a direction; it is not dogma. There is no right or wrong, and so it is not the directive of our lives. The more we learn about us, and move into a higher consciousness of us, the more we have free will. So, it is merely a...

When I was in Chiropractic School, I knew I was in the right place doing what I was supposed to do and yet had many moments where I wanted to quit. Just like with any intense schooling or training, the commitment is significant. It takes dedication, discipline, desire, and even self-respect to finish such a program when the experience itself is very challenging and not fun. In fact, during the first three trimesters of school, I was so tempted to quit so many times I couldn't count how many. My ability to complete my education continues to amaze me. I used to say that I had over 22 years of formal training and yet I hated school. That is still true today. I love to learn and do not like formal training. I am a very independent-minded person, and the whole school experience feels very restricted to me. What kept me going was the genuine thought that if I didn't become a chiropractor, then what would I do for a living? I never had a different answer that was good enough than ...

No Sound Deep in my meditation in the recesses of my mind Came the single bird call Came the single bird song, solo Assisting me to go deeper, to let go Enter the twilight zone of my mind I am not alone His call at once soothes me and guides me Soothes me and guides me Where I hear no sound No sound

When people talk about astrology, most people have an association with that which makes sense to them. They might associate astrology with a study of the stars configurations or a way of understanding their selves, or even just as related to their sun signs. What is medical astrology, though? How does medical apply to the stars in our charts? Medical astrology is a particular field of astrology which does use the information that is gleaned from one’s birth chart as well as from what is going on in their charts at present and in the near future. Most people who ask for a medical astrology reading have a specific reason like they are presently ill and just can’t shake it, or that no one can figure out what is wrong with them, or even they had a sudden accident and want insight as to what is going on in their lives presently that they can learn from. They might also like insight as to what herbs, medicines, and treatments that would be most helpful or effective for their recovery. ...

I have many clients ask me about what they should do as they are integrating new insights they gained and have yet to implement them into their outside world. It takes time for all of us to incorporate new understandings into our lives. As we are thinking about, and working on new insights internally how do we go about our lives relating to those we care most about without making our old reacting patterns? That is such a good and important question. The comfortable, simple answer is that we don't. We do react in our old habitual ways as they are almost automatic; they are so familiar. What I find happens most of the time is we respond habitually, and then we think about what we did and why we got triggered the way we did. Our immediate response is automatic, and then we can have the leisure to work out what just happened. I wish change were more immediate, but most often it is not. What I can do, however, is give someone some suggestions as to how they can stave off more aggres...

In our solar system, we periodically have planets that as they are orbiting around the sun and around us, look as if they are going backward. They are not going backward. They are speeding up and slowing down and crossing other planet’s orbits making them look as if they are going in retrograde, or going backward. I am sure that those of you who follow astrology have heard of these events, and most specifically of Mercury going in retrograde. Mercury appears to go backward about three times in a calendar year, and each time is lasting three weeks before speeding up and looking as if it is now going forward. As with all the planets, Mercury can be seen as an archetype and one that is about how our minds work, what we think about, how we think, how fast or slow our minds go, whether or not we can control our minds, and how we perceive others, events, etc. Mercury is a messenger. Where and how Mercury is in your chart depicts these aspects in yourselves. In other words, are you a ...

We speak the words, IN THE MEANTIME a lot. As I open myself to this process of being in this meantime, I become more acutely aware of how often we even say these words. I was speaking with a client recently, and this person was talking about the transition he/she is in currently in regards to a change or transition to a new career to represent the new phase they are entering. That made me think of a new phase I am entering and also the phases I have made in my life to this point. Life itself engages us in many transitions. We transition from infant to toddler, to small child, to child, to pre-teen, to teenager, to young adult, to middle age, to retirement. I like to think of retirement in terms of time to retire; put a set of new wheels on us to reflect the stage of life beyond raising children and beyond the normal work years where we are actively working to make enough money to support ourselves and our family. In this phase, we are rethinking about what has meaning to us, w...

I find the element of fire in the eyes of many people studying astrology can be misunderstood. When people who have a little knowledge of astrology hear that someone is a Leo or an Aries sun sign, or who have more than two planets in a fire sign think they know you in some way. Being someone with a sun in Leo and a moon in Aries, I frequently hear things they may think they know about me and they see that aspect through a narrow lens. I listen to stuff like, “oh, wow, watch out for you,” or things like that. It is easy to look at the astrological signs and their houses literally. There is nothing wrong with that. It just doesn’t take into account a myriad of dynamics at play in a person. Hearing that I have five planets in the 5th house in the sign of Leo, people often think I have a big ego, or a significant need to be heard and seen so that I can be loud and even obnoxious maybe even that I like to have things revolve around me. The truth is we all have some of those aspects wi...

It is often said that we have to hear something at least twice for us to remember it. There is a lot of truth to that. It goes into our short term memory, and if we don't repeat it or use it, we also lose it because the new information didn't have enough time to be integrated into our long term memory. There is another factor I find to be true. If we aren't fully engaged or interested in what we are learning the new material also doesn't stay with us. Sometimes even if we are genuinely interested, it is just too much for us to absorb. I find that dynamic often happens when we engage in deep personal work or a therapeutic environment. There is only so much we can take in at a time. I frequently get feedback after a session where much inner territory was covered that they can't remember much of what we talked about. I sense that, often, in those periods, we enter an  IN THE MEANTIME zone. This is a zone where we consciously remember a little of the session, and ou...

I don’t know if any of you watch television, but I saw a show the other day which spoke to me. The show is actually one that is filled with melodrama, but I view it anyway as I love medical shows. There was an episode recently where a psychiatrist heard the inner story which kept a young woman captive. The show is called Chicago Med. The psychiatrist is my favorite character in the show. He is at once very human with his own fallible and also very wise and intuitive and gentle. In this particular show, a young woman was brought in who her mother thought was possessed by a demon. She had scratches all over her, was out of control and so was restrained and was dehydrated and spoke in gibberish. The young woman’s father also came in enraged about how his ex-wife was treating his daughter. The psychiatrist interviewed the mother and father separately and received their stories and perceptions.  Here we are IN THE MEANTIME again, as he figures out what is going on with this yo...

As I was sitting up in bed and meditating the other morning, I tuned into my stomach area; my gut. It seemed to be talking with me by feeling stiff and wooden. I attuned myself to that area and got a sense that for me, the stiffness was a general feeling of a baseline fear I carry which is related to a fear of rejection. This understanding led me to realize that our guts, where many of our neurotransmitters live, have to break down and digest many things beyond food. Digesting a fear of rejection is a difficult task. It doesn’t digest well or easily. In fact, it shouldn’t digest it. Many of us try to digest feelings, emotions, beliefs, and ideas which are not ours or are not digestible. Digesting means to break things down so that we can absorb what we take in. Do we want to consume someone else’s feelings, or food that is not good for us, or someone’s ideas, etc.? I would say, probably not. Upon making this realization, for me, it is important to accept myself, so that even...

I love to learn new things. As a result, I have had the training for four different careers. Life is too short to find myself uninterested in what I do. I have to keep things interesting, or I lose my enthusiasm for life. We all spend most of our waking hours doing some sort of work. To me, it is therefore so important to at least like what I do and gets engrossed in my work. Learning something new though involves not only taking the time, or time out of my daily life to learn something new, but also the time to integrate the work into my knowledge base and then to integrate it into my work in some way or to initiate new work and services I offer. That becomes quite a lot of time and effort I expend without knowing the outcome in terms of how I can incorporate the new information into my existing work or start new work, etc. When I engage in learning new material, I take a significant risk as to how I can use this in my life. At those times I begin to enter that zone of time I call...