Body Presencing™ - Healing the Root of the Matter

“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

“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 companions thought their friend had perished saving him and felt guilty for his life over the young leader. After a year or two in America, he heard that his friend was alive and in the camp in Nigeria hopefully awaiting passage to America. He decided to

“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, inside happy?  The answer is not often. The truth is we have to go into the stillness to know ourselves. I watched a 4-minute video called, Will You Marry the Wrong Person ( http://bit.ly/14EbPT0 ). It is a grea

“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 our need for control and need for comfort, and such. It is noticeable through our issues or places where we are stuck in our lives. When we are afraid to move forward for any reason, that fear is a guideline to an old

“The truth will set you free; but first it will piss you off.”                                                                                              - Gloria Steinum I love how our actions aren’t always how they appear. I watched a show last night where one of the main characters, certainly a flawed individual as are we all, spoke about an event that happened in his life which shaped him. He spent years afterwards protecting his daughter from knowing a truth, which he felt would be too hard on her, and he took the blame. This was a great cost to him. He let everyone believe that he was responsible for something instead of having his daughter know that his wife, her mother, had an affair. Many of us have done things and said things which aren’t really true in order to protect ourselves or someone else. I see how over time, these lies and partial truths really do not help.  Even though my father was a very flawed man, he told me a story, which touched me deeply and rem

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth,  but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”                                                                                  - Winston Churchill The rivers are flowing freely; our hearts are filled with love as this beautiful and flowery month shows us. It is the spring of our nature cycle, and a time to fill our own well springs. If we look at this analogy and connect it with our own growth in life from childhood through all the life stages: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, older adult, and crone, we can see many similarities. I learn so much from nature. In nature, when we don ’ t get enough rain in the spring months, our earth dries up at a time of planting. This affects our food bounty and also the very water that is so necessary for life. The same effects happen with our life growth. When we don ’ t have enough love, or our needs aren ’ t met when we are little, or we are a

“There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.” -Napoleon Bonaparte This year I have been focusing on BodyPresencing ™ issues as presented through my work, and as they relate to what I have learned from my family and my father. Our families are great feeding and learning grounds for us. They present as opportunities for us to learn and to grow; very rich soil. The more I work with people the more I see how in many ways the issues, illnesses of physical, emotional and spiritual nature, impact us. When one person is ill in some way, the whole family is ill; in some way. This is one of the reasons that families present as such fertile learning grounds. We can change how their illness and issues affect us when we are conscious in our lives, and that can be done with a lot of work. We can see this dynamic in obvious ways, as in when a family member has a mental illness, or when a family member has a chronic illness of some kind, like Cerebral Palsy, or severe rheumato