Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

“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

“Your face is marked with lines of life,  put there by love and laughter, suffering and tears. It’s beautiful” -   Lynsay Sands                       I am entering another phase of my life; one in which I am embodying my life’s work more fully, putting words to my healing modality, and inviting others to experience what I have spent a lifetime creating. In the book, Nature and the Human Soul , this phase is called The Grove of Elders. It is the phase of life in which we shift our focus and attention from doing more to being more; from innovating something new to stewarding our work in such a way that we care for the community and the Earth. It took me a whole year to wrap my mind around my turning sixty and what that would mean. To some sixty sounds old. To others sixty sounds young. To me, it is an exciting and potent phase of life in which I can embody my strengths, share my wisdom, and share my life’s work with others while I still have enough stamina and e

"Self-nurturing means, above all,  making a commitment to self-compassion,  to the creation of a loving and positive attitude toward yourself." - Jennifer Louden Nurturing ourselves is as not as easy as it sounds. On one level we all know what the word means, and yet on another level, it is a tricky word when it comes to applying it in our daily lives. For example, a client once shared with me what he thought was a nurturing decision and yet as we looked at what unfolded, it was anything but nurturing. My client was exhausted so one morning he slept in late.   He was tired and sleeping in appeared to be a nurturing choice. However because he woke up later than usual he left home with just enough time to get to an appointment. If all went just as planned, it could have worked out.   But what happened was that he was rushed and stressed, arrived over ten minutes late for his appointment, and felt terrible. When we take a closer look at his choice, we see rather