Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

“ It is difficult to see the picture when you are inside of the frame.” Author Unknown The third Body Presencing™ Key that unlocks the secrets of health, wholeness and vitality is Forgiveness.  For many of us the hardest person or persons in our lives to forgive is our mother and father. They take the brunt of our blame. Their job, after all is to love us, keep us safe, introduce us to life and to the world. The problem is that we are not perfect and our parents, at best, can only be “good enough”. Fault lines live in our family trees.  In our lives tragedies occur, people leave, people die young, people take advantage of others, and on and on. These events leave repercussions for the future generations. These repercussions live as systemic fault lines that get carried forward and deepen with time unless and until someone or ones can witness and understand them, feel compassion, and ultimately forgive. February is the month of my mother’s birth. She ...

“Sometimes you have to go through a rainstorm to see the rainbow at the end.” Here we are deep in the middle of February and I am writing about choice again. I am writing about choice in order to get to acceptance. In life it is often true that it is easier to choose anger or guilt than it is to feel and accept pain or loss. We hide behind our anger; sometimes for generations. Yet, when we are able to let the rainstorm of feeling pass, we then can move forward into feeling acceptance and then to feeling full of life and joy. If we stay angry we can grieve or mourn a loss forever. If we move through the anger to the loss behind it, we are set free to see the rainbow. I have a client who lost his brother last year. He had died during a howling winter storm when his truck suddenly skidded and ran off the road. This man left two children, a former wife, three brothers, a sister, and more. He was my client’s brother and best friend. He had struggled with alcohol on and off for...

“The path to enlightenment is not a path at all, it’s actually a metaphor for the time it takes for you to allow yourself to be happy with who you already are, where you’re already at, and what you already have – no matter what.” - James Dooley People pleasing is a pattern that keeps repeating until we learn to unconditionally love ourselves and to love those in generations past.  It is essential that we come to see these patterns and see our part in continuing the patterns. This is a lot of what I do when I work with my clients. I first help them feel their feelings; which means feeling their pain and anxiety. Then I help them identify the repeating patterns that limit them for I believe we are a slave to whatever limits our freedom to live healthy and vital lives filled with passion and promise. Small Lifestyle Changes that Promote Big Results: Take a moment and look at your life. Is there a way that you try to please others instead of pleasing yoursel...

“Real love is accepting people the way they are without trying to change them.” -Don Miguel Ruiz How often we say we love someone and then in subtle (or not so subtle) ways try to change them. If we are honest we all feel like there is something we would like to change about our spouse, our partner, our parents or our children. Yet, when we want to change something about them we aren’t honoring who they are or where they came from. I have a patient whom I have been seeing for quite some time. She is an older woman who has been married for many years with two grown children. One of her issues is that she feels bad when her husband is verbally mean to her.  His meanness takes her to a place inside of herself where she feels bad about herself and doesn’t feel good enough, even though she knows intellectually that he is really mad about something else. She is working hard to change this in herself. And, yet she also wants to change his reactions to things an...

“Happiness is not numbing yourself from pain. It is the opposite. It is opening yourself to feeling all that you are.  It is pursuing your deeper self and living more.” - Judith Wright We are the key to our own happiness. While all of us want to change something about some aspect of our lives (be it about ourselves, our homes, our families, our work etc.)  sometimes we want to change things for the wrong reasons or in order to please someone or something else. In my practice I have found that usually when a client wants to make a dramatic change in their lives or is in a hurry with something to change it is best to slow down and look within first. We do that by asking ourselves, “Who are we actually trying to please?” Are we trying to please ourselves, and if so, what is that pleasing about? Are we feeling uncomfortable with something about ourselves? If we are trying to change something to please another, who are we being loyal to? Being able to...

“You can always see the little girl or little boy in another, if you but look. And then you can see that the mask they sometimes wear isn’t to inspire your fear, but to hide their own.” -   James Dooley The Power of Acceptance is this month’s Body Presencing Key that unlocks a life of health, wholeness, and vitality. I realize the word acceptance means different things to different people. Some people believe acceptance is about giving up and giving in. Others think it means indifference and detachment.  Some people believe acceptance means allowing someone to continue doing something hurtful or for a negative situation to remain as it is. Yes, there is power to accepting people and things as they are; just as they are. But not from a place of giving up or giving in or from a place of indifference.  The kind of acceptance I am referring to comes from a place  of authenticity. Is there something you have been avoiding seeing in yoursel...