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 increm...

“ 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 li...

“ 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 fro...

“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 oriente...

“Truth is such a rare thing, it is delighted to tell it.”                                                                                                   -Emily Dickinson I saw a movie a few months ago called  The Good Lie . It was with Reese Witherspoon and is about a group of the “lost boys” from the Sudan. These young men made it through a purging of their villages, a trek to a camp in Nigeria, and a passage to America and their indoctrination and integration into American society. It is quite a moving picture. In this movie, one of the young men had to make a very difficult decision. A young leader of their surviving villagers did something during their trek to save his life, and it jeopardized the leaders own. He and his compa...

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”                                                                                    - Mark Twain A friend asked me the other day for some insight into why she drinks. The only thing that came to me that was both powerful and simple is that it is easier to drink than to be with the stillness. It is easier to drink or eat or go out or whatever than to be with our uncomfortable feelings. We don’t look to be still and to feel what is underneath our facades. We are taught to look for happiness and that something or someone else will make us happy. So we do that. We emulate our parents and those in our community. Does it work? Are we happy? Do we have good marriages, and do we feel truly, i...

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”                                                                                        - Soren Kirkegaard Watching older people during the last phase of this life is enlightening. Often, not always, they lose more of their short term memories and retain many of their long term memories. You can sit with them and they will talk about an old family story, probably one you have heard many times. Yet they can’t remember what time you told them you would come by to pick them up. Does this sound familiar? Most likely we all live more in our past than in our present, but it isn't so noticeable in this way. Living in our past is noticeable through our fears and our anxieties and our anger and ou...