I was told once that doing bodywork is not the same as meditation. I disagree. I think we are walking on this path of realization by dropping any notions of a differentiation between our spiritual lives and our “normal” life journey. To me they are one and the same. The more attention we can bring to our everyday lives, the more powerful the transformation of reality. The more we can open, the more sensitive we become to our environment. We begin to truly realize the total connection to everything. There are many forms to experience the depths of Stillness that lie within us. And to me they are the “keys to the kingdom”. My belief after 30 years of practice is that the deeper the state we can achieve, the more profound our ability to sense the underlying patterns that are causing imbalances, both physically and emotionally, in our patients’ systems. Or in plain speak, the reason they are lying on our tables. Let’s explore the next step in creating a template to use as your portal. [Read more…]
Tools of the Trade: Integration of Tension Technique
Now that you have practiced releasing your own tension into the Earth everyday for a week or two, you are now ready to put this first new skillset into a practical form to catapult you to the next level in your ability to help others. The whole concept will be to do two things at once, like right and and left hand in playing a musical instrument. This technique can be applied to any modality you practice. If you haven’t practiced the first technique, I encourage you to do that now and then come back to this. Foundational teachings are very important and without a solid foundation there is a tendency for everything to crumble. In the case of practitioners of bodywork disciplines and massage, you will really being doing yourself a great disservice. There is no timeline with this teaching and no schedules or exams. If you practice the methodology I am teaching, you will see how wonderfully this begins to impact your ability to help your clients. I promise! No pressure! Buddha said that it didn’t matter if you fell off the path a thousand times as long as you got back on it a thousand times. Be Nike about this!
Tools of the Trade: Calming and Focusing the Mind
We are about to embark on an odyssey. Can’t really call it Homer’s or Judah’s because it’s steeped in all the Eastern mystery schools and is still practiced today!
If all it took to be a successful bodyworker was learning the original technique, everyone would be great. To improve you have to tweak your listening machines and in the ensuing posts I hope to elevate your skill set to an obvious new height. Not with new bodywork techniques, but by installing some new software into your lives.
If you have bought the cranial approach we offer, then you know about the practitioner fulcrum from which all the work springs forth. But, in those teachings we didn’t go too deeply into the concept because it would be inappropriate to inundate you with the deepening of the work unless you had done the footwork up to this point. One has to understand in their core how little control we have over our mental facilities. Anyone who does bodywork, or is attentive to their minds, is painfully aware of this fact. So, it’s my opinion that in order to elevate our capacities as healers, or whatever term you use, we have to ramp up the ability to rein in our wandering minds. Otherwise we are constantly disconnecting from our client’s field. [Read more…]
Tools of the Trade: Keys to the Kingdom
One of the most interesting observations as a teacher of Cranial Sacral therapy and Rolfing/ Structural Integration, is how people react to the knowledge they gain from a course and the expectations and frustrations that often accompany our educational systems. You have heard my mild rant about the “jack of all trade” syndrome before, so I will spare you. I was certainly guilty of that syndrome as well. At least until I knew exactly what I was most attracted to as a bodyworker, beyond my original training at the Rolf Institute. I honestly understand the frustration caused by how most of us were educated. A+B=C. Next!
The study of bodywork and especially cranial sacral therapy requires a very different mindset from how most of us were taught to learn. The best analogy and the one that I share with my students from the onset, is how long it takes to learn a musical instrument. It’s really a lifetime, and if you accept that, then you can relax and put one foot after another as you become more gifted at what you do. [Read more…]
Still Points: What’s The Point?
I am often asked about the elusiveness of the still point and its point in our work! Often stillpoints are the subject of great interest because students believe they have “accomplished” something when the still point is generated or the system is “paused”. In a more mechanical approach, the system is pushed into the still point. The student is aware of the success of their technique and they are on to the next technique, believing that by creating one successful technique after another somehow the system they are palpating is better off for it. This done without ever pausing to allow the system to potentially reflect its needs, and really feeling the outcome of their “technique”. Its like a dancer being led on to the floor and spun around and around before she ever got a chance to have a word with her partner. The outcome can have potentially unbalancing effects just as easily as a balanced effect. Much like a brand new practitioner without any skillset whatsoever, adjusting a sphenoid bone on his first day of cranial class. I have had some interesting sessions with students who have come into my office after their first 4 day training, sporting an uncomfortably disoriented feeling accompanied by a mean headache! Remember approaches to balancing the cranial sacral system can also unbalance it as well..it just depends!
I have cautioned many times before in our DVDs and in the blogs that the approach to this work from a biodynamic mindset as opposed to a mechanical one. And I have said many times how our educations systems have programmed us for outcomes. One of the most beautiful things about becoming a practitioner of this work is its effects upon us in our everyday lives after the sessions. How cool is it when you finally adopt the notion of what if I really didn’t have to have an answer to every system presentation? What would happen if I just had the patience to wait and allow the system to tell me its story? What would happen if in the first few sessions with a new client, I had the knowledge based on a felt sense that the system I was palpating was so under nourished, that its potential to be able to hold any work was barely possible? What would it feel like if I was really able to ascertain a life force “battery that was so dull that once a still point was created I could really feel a tangible outcome from that still point? But, to just execute one blindly in a literal sense, what will I have accomplished without some point of reference. Is it possible that wanting so strongly to create a still point, that I created some confusion in the system?
Ok if you still don’t get the point of this let me simplify it. Wait! Wait! Wait! Ask the system if its something thats needed. Or wait until you are prompted by the system. I teach to ask the system if a still point is needed, wanted or any word you chose to illicit a potential affirmative. It borders on magic when the system responds to the questions. Its really a beautiful thing because in reality, its my
believe system the thought enters my mind to ask, because the system I am palpating has created the need and it poses it into the field because it knows that with a little focus on my part, it will be facilitated more easily and effectively. The amount of change/healing isn’t about an outcome I determine. Yet, there is almost always a perceptible change in the system displayed by a more balanced rhythm or a larger scope of flow hydraulically. One might call that an obviously greater scope of movement in the fluids and the balance at the midline is often obvious to the practitioner. The more and more you develop the witnessing presence vision around the mechanics of this work, the more powerful and magical the work becomes! And I am willing to bet the more balanced, easy, and relaxed your life becomes. All this because you were willing to listen before speaking, to feel before doing, and to be unattached to every outcome. Riding the waves of the cranial sacral system is a profound journey that will change the world a little bit each time its observed and felt, because you begin to see how we are all connected on our Planet!
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