CranioSacral Therapy and Brennan Energy Healing in Wenatchee, Chelan, Leavenworth

Follow Your Bliss

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:30:34 +0000

“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn’t know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else. ”

- Joseph Campbell

As you may know, Joseph Campbell is the anthropologist and mythologist who brought to our consciousness the now familiar phrase, ‘Follow your Bliss’. Reading those three words lately on a bumper sticker I was reminded how foreign a concept that was for me the first time I heard it. Joseph says that by following our bliss, our rapture, we are actually propelled on a path that leads us to our life purpose.

This reminded me of something that happened to me many years ago when I was in college. When I was a senior and about to graduate I needed to fill one last elective and aware of my lack of culinary skills I decided to take Home Ec. 101. One of the requirements was to complete a 10 page term paper on anything having to do with food.

While I was thinking about possible topics I had the creative impulse to write about preparing food and recipes for backpacking and camping. This was before the internet and the many books written on this topic and when I looked at the library I found only 2 books on the subject. All of my fears came out about not being able to find enough information to complete my paper so I choose instead a common topic, yeast breads, and set about writing my ‘safe’ paper.

I did put a lot of work into the paper but while I was writing about kneading and rising yeast bread, my heart and my thoughts were with pancakes sprinkled with fresh huckleberries cooked over an open fire and golden biscuits baked in a homemade oven at a high mountain lake. When I received my A- the teacher wrote in the margin that it was thorough but not very inspiring. At that moment I knew that my inspiration was with my original topic and I felt sadness and loss about the paper I didn’t write.

This rather insignificant and minor life decision had a deep impact on me and I vowed at that time to always follow my longing and not choose the safe way. Unfortunately, my youthful longing and promise to myself was largely forgotten as the stakes in life choices seemed to increase significantly higher than a grade on a term paper. Now, as I am reconnecting with my longings and my bliss, Josephs Campbell’s words echo inside of me. “We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes. “ While it is difficult for me to imagine that the world would have been significantly changed by me selecting a different topic for my term paper those many years ago, I do know that if I had written on a topic that inspired me, that there would have been a different impact. At the very least my paper would have not been boring and I believe there is something heroic in that. As Joseph says, “We save the world by being alive ourselves.”

Being Yourself: Middle Ground Between Somebody and Nobody

admin — Sat, 29 May 2010 02:53:37 +0000

When I first read about British child analyst D. W. Winnicott comparing each one of us to a bubble, I became very excited. Here was a psychologist writing in 1955 using terms that described our energy field and how it operates and is affected. Referring to our early childhood experiences, he says if the pressure from outside of us adapts to the pressure within, then the bubble is the significant thing for the infant self. If, however, the environmental pressure is greater or less than the pressure within the bubble, then it is not the bubble (the infant) that is important but the environment, and the infant has to adapt to the outside pressure.

Winnicott goes on to explain, if a young child has too much to deal with, then she is forced into a reactive mode that removes her from her own experience, forcing her to cope prematurely with the needs of another. This interrupts the child’s own continuity, producing gaps or breaks that Winnicott calls “threats of annihilation.” The result is a disruption in the flow of the child’s authentic self , what he calls “going on being” and the child develops a caretaker self that responds to the needs of the parent. Instead of being free to have his own experience, his self-awareness, spontaneity and self-discovery is given over to reading the surroundings for signs of how he is supposed to be. He becomes good at figuring out what is expected of him, reading the environment for clues, but he has trouble staying with his own experiences.

I remember a healer once saying to me rather bluntly that I was like an empty house with vagrants that had moved in. I remember flinching at his words, feeling completely bewildered and dismayed. After a few moments I managed to question him, “Vagrants?” He replied simply that that is what happens when houses are abandoned, others move in. Years later I understand his analogy was a way of describing the disruption of my own going on being. Instead of my thoughts and awareness’s, I was allowing other’s thoughts and ideas to intrude and impinge upon my own sense of self. From my disrupted bubble of awareness, I had learned to be attuned to others and their needs and desires, at the expense of my own. What I wasn’t able to understand for several years was how early in life the abandonment of myself had occurred.

Another consequence of this disruption of being is that the infant ego, in trying to understand and manage this experience sees it as a choice of either being “something” or “nothing”. What happens when we think we are somebody is we react in one way and when we think we are nobody we react another way. This disturbed ego gets in our own way, interfering with healthy contact, leaving us feeling inadequate and unsure. When we understand the origins of these feelings of lack, they can actually become windows into our lost potential.

In my undergraduate days as a student at Barbara Brennan School of Healing, I often saw and felt this duality as my fellow classmates and I struggled with the painful images that we were either somebody or nobody. The consequences of thinking we are nobody is that we annihilate ourselves and thinking we are somebody energetically kills others off.

This tendency to see ourselves as either great or utterly worthless, needs to be addressed in order for our spirit to become free to allow our authentic self to shine through. Our freedom depends on awareness but awareness can be cultivated, and it can be used to examine both our feelings of nothingness and our grasping to be somebody.

When we learn to retrain the patterns of response and reactivity that we learned so early in life, we find a middle way where we can use our spontaneous being-in-the-moment to recover our true capacity for being. We begin to take possession of ourselves, to inhabit our energetic body, our bubble, not through identification with being somebody or nobody but through acceptance of who we are right now. Instead of reading the environment for signs of how we are supposed to be, we begin to be ourselves. We stop identifying with the gaps and holes that disrupted our ‘going on being’ and start to dwell in our own awareness’s; we learn to be ourselves. When we are attuned to our own awareness’s we become free to discover ourselves anew as life unfolds moment by moment. And, as in my own personal case, we can finally move in and inhabit our own home.

The Path – Inward Journey to your Divine Core

admin — Mon, 17 May 2010 20:15:49 +0000

It has been called many things: the path, journey of transformation, evolution of human consciousness, awakening and even enlightenment. Most of us have heard of at least some of these phrases but not as many know what it really means to be on a path of personal transformation. I know I didn’t. What I wanted was instant enlightenment. I was soon to learn that what I desired was not going to happen, at least not how I had expected it anyway.

In actuality, since we are on earth, every one of us is on this journey to some extent. For certain people though, their longing and purpose in life is for transformation and transcendence, they are on what I would call an accelerated path. Most people get started on this journey when they begin to ask themselves some fairly simple but profound questions. How do you feel about yourself, do you find your life meaningful, fulfilled and rich? Or perhaps you are feeling unfulfilled, disappointed or resentful about your current life or circumstances? These uncomfortable feelings can be interpreted as your soul’s longing, a message from your spirit and higher self that can ultimately propel you forward onto a path to discovering your real self.

If you can stay with your longing and not abandon the sense that your life could be much more than it currently is, you will begin to build a life based on your own wisdom and gain real inner resilience, contentment, and security. When you learn to cultivate and understand these longings as signposts on your journey, you will find those attitudes in yourself that have prevented you from experiencing life in a meaningful way and you will begin to follow this inner path to your core. This is possible because this place of peace and security is already within you and it unfolds organically as a result of going through the dark spots within, those pockets of frozen energy that need to be reclaimed and converted back into their original state.

Our images are formed in childhood. The places where we do not mature remain hidden in the unconscious and we refer to it as child consciousness. Most of us on this planet are not as mature emotionally as we are intellectually, as evidenced when we find ourselves in a temper tantrum or emotional reaction. Whenever you experience one of these events, you can actually feel the 2, 3 or 4 yr old within, taking control of your life. It can be a humbling and stunning experience when we realize our ‘ruthless infant’ may be running our lives. When you face those places within yourself of ignorance, selfishness, and immaturity, your subconscious will gradually bring into your awareness more and more of your wrong conclusions about life. The human soul contains infinite wisdom but our wrong conclusions cover this up. By making each false image or belief conscious and working them through, you will uncover your inner voice of wisdom that is able to guide you according to your personal plan. You will become free and independent.

This path asks for truthfulness with the self and honesty with your current state. If you truly wish to find your real self you must pay attention to those areas within yourself that are negative, destructive and not in alignment with truth. You must learn to drop your mask and pretenses and open to your vulnerability. It is a journey into the inner universe of your internal experience. The result is your life will begin to unfold in a natural and organic way that leads to peace and wholeness. You will begin to meet life without fear because you will no longer fear what you will find inside yourself. The difficulty arises on this path when we do not want to face a negative attitude in ourself, fearing that if we go there we will discover we are all worthless or bad.

To the degree you make a commitment to be in truth with yourselves, the difficulty on this journey vanishes. You will begin to find life, even with its problems, a joyful challenge. You will feel your spiritual self flowing within your entire physical and energy system, your thoughts and your decisions, and you will begin to come from your core where peaceful, joyful, creative living is a normal state of being. You will be activating the greater consciousness that dwells within each of you. Once you are on this path, the results of your work will be evident by the expression of your life. Exhilaration, enthusiasm, joy, excitement and peace, are all a result of inner truthfulness. When these states are absent, then truthfulness within is absent, it is that simple.

It is important to understand that all of your thoughts and attitudes are powerful forms of energy that create your lives. Whether your feelings are loving or hateful, angry or neutral, fearful or peaceful, they create according to their nature. As you transform your false images and beliefs, you release contracted energy. To the degree you are willing to look at your frozen contracted places, you release pleasurable currents of life force energy, you rescue trapped energy. Your spiritual self cannot be freed unless you learn to feel all of your feelings and accept all of yourself, even your most destructive and negative aspects. No matter how destructive, cruel, and bad it may appear to be, the distortions must be reconverted into their original state in order for you to come into your creative core wisdom.

Ironically, when you are able to face the worst in yourself without losing faith, you will actually find your true value, for only then will you truly love yourself and find your true essence. If you are willing and prepared to summon the courage and humility to embark on this journey, the initial struggles will give way and become a gateway to immense beauty. You will begin to function from your core, from the center of your being, and you will experience security and joy from deep within yourself. This path is focused on finding this center, this deep inner well of spiritual reality that already exists within, your true potential for greatness.

Idealized self-image: Mask of our real self

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:22:54 +0000

Who among us has never asked the question, “Who am I?” or at some crisis point in our lives come to the shocking realization, “I don’t know who I am!” Where does this stem from, this not knowing who we are, or feeling as if we are not living our own life. Who is doing the living if not ‘us’ and how does one go about finding this ‘real self’?

I vividly remember when I first began to ask myself this question, “Who am I really?” At the time I described the experience as feeling like a bird who has hit the window. It was suddenly apparent to me that who I thought I was and how I operated in the world was not my reality anymore and it brought me up abruptly, leaving me stunned and dazed, trying to figure out exactly what had gone so decisively wrong. What I have learned since then is that what I actually ran into was the image of my false self; who I thought I needed to be to be loved and who I pretended to be to myself and others.

Our first experiences of love happen in relation to our families and for most of us this was an imperfect, flawed and disappointing experience. The truth is that even under the best of circumstances we were all imperfectly seen and loved as children. This inadequate love and nurturance when we were young directly impacts our sensitive nervous system, resulting in shock or trauma that affects us the rest of our life. In order to remove ourselves from the unhappiness and despair that this brings, our solution is to create a false self or mask self, the face we show the world. Believing we are unacceptable and unlovable as we really are, we create an idealized self-image, someone we wish we could be or someone that we think is worthy of love. Believing we must be perfect and good to be loved, our solution is to hide the unacceptable ‘real’ part of ourselves and build a false self to present to the world. Soon, the awareness of this false self vanishes as we strain harder and harder to become this person we think we ought to be. Our pride and ego demands that we be this false self and a sense of worthlessness comes over us when we fail to live up to our harsh demands, not accepting ourselves as we really are in the moment with our real human imperfections. Whenever we find ourselves experiencing feelings of failure, frustration, guilt, shame and despair, these are signs that our idealized self is alive in us.

The creation of this false self is actually an attempt to attain self-confidence but ironically it has the opposite effect. The more that you invest in this artificial false self, the more alienated and estranged you become from your real self. We can never be as good as we think we should be and we know we aren’t as good as we pretend to be, so the result is that we have even less self-confidence. Genuine self-confidence can only be established when you learn to come from your real self. This real self functions from who you are right now, not trying to be more or less than you actually are in any given situation. The idealized self wants to be perfect, right now! Your real self knows this is not possible, we are human and imperfect, and that is okay.

If we can shine warmth and openness into these dark tender places where we don’t know we’re lovable, we begin to build a relationship that embraces our humanness, which lets us appreciate ourselves as the vulnerable yet beautiful luminous beings we are. When we recognize that the absolute beauty within cannot be tarnished by our flaws, we can begin to drop the pretense that we need to be better than we actually are. Learning to live each moment of your life with self-acceptance of where you truly are moment to moment forces you to realize your human pains, flaws and imperfections, and you loosen the attachment to your mask. Honest self-acceptance creates genuine self-respect. When you muster the courage of becoming your real self, even if at first it may seem so much less than your idealized self, you will find out it is really much more.

Only when you recognize the damage the idealized self has brought into your life and begin to drop this pretense will you be able to grow your real self, becoming spontaneous, free, learning to trust your authentic feelings. You will learn to cultivate this place inside of you, the center of your being, and through practice begin to trust its wisdom and know it as your own. It is the only part of you that can actually live, grow, and guide you. Once you experience this you will find real security and lasting peace, for you come home to yourself.

Shadow work: Reclaiming soul from our dark side

admin — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 22:56:10 +0000

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Carl Jung

I vividly remember my first known encounter with shadow, it was in a dream. I didn’t have my own garbage service so I was secretly dumping my garbage into other people’s dumpsters. I was very frightened someone would find out, so I carefully went through my garbage ahead of time to remove items with my name and address on it. I didn’t want anything traceable back to me. Unfortunately, on one occasion, two men saw me dumping my garbage into a dumpster. I was terrified and took off running but they ran after me and caught me. I begged them to let me go, promising I would never do it again, that I would get my own regular pick-up garbage service from now on. They relaxed immediately and said, “Why didn’t you say so, that’s all we wanted”, and then they turned and walked away. This confrontation with my shadow left me a little stunned and shaken but also intrigued. I began to get curious about this ‘garbage’ that I was not owning and dumping onto others, so I set out on my journey to discover and uncover my shadow.

Everyone carries a shadow. It is what makes us human. It contains all the parts of ourselves that we have tried to hide or deny. Whatever doesn’t fit into the idealized image we have of ourselves, or the expectations our family and culture has for us, we banish into shadow. Poet and author Robert Bly calls the shadow the “long bag we drag behind us.” We spend the first half of life deciding what parts of ourselves to put in the bag, and we spend the last half trying to get them back out again. Most of us fear if we look closely into that bag, or ultimately, at what lies deep within us, we will find something horrible. But instead of trying to suppress our shadow, we need to learn to seek it.

Shadow work refers to the process of healing the split between who we think we ought to be and the trapped life energy caught in the pretense of trying to hide and conceal what we can’t accept about ourselves. Shadow work is soul work, it holds the essence of who we are. It includes all of ourselves, our darkness and our light, our meanness and our greatness. By facing and embracing all of our parts, we begin to cultivate freedom to choose how we want to be in this world. Until then we have no choice, we are bound by our shadow, and again and again it will sabotage our best efforts, destroy relationships, kill our spirit, and keep us from fulfilling our dreams.

When we start to realize that what lies beneath the surface of our consciousness is not evil but simply unresolved thoughts and feelings that can be healed and integrated, we begin to relax, we breathe easier. When we no longer have to prove we are someone we’re not, we no longer live in fear of being found out, and our shadow becomes less scary. Our shadows exist to teach and guide us and when we allow all of these parts of ourselves that we have hidden to come to the surface, we begin to see our true personality, our real authentic self.

Many of us are so disconnected from our shadow that the only way we see it is by reflection. We can’t face this darkness in ourselves so we project it in the world onto our family, friends, and even strangers. If we can muster the courage, we will find that the more of our self we own, the less we will need others to embody our disowned darkness. It takes a strong, positive adult ego to do shadow work.

You may wonder how we can see our shadow if it is hidden? Since shadow shifts and changes in the light of our ego, we cannot gaze at it directly, we need to know where and how to look. There are clues that lead us to our shadow. Shadow weaves itself through our dreams, we find it lurking in our secret shames. It embarrasses us with our slips of the tongue, it thrives in our cruelty. We can unearth shadow in our judgment and criticism of others, it hides in our illnesses, we see it erupt at mid-life, and it can wear the disguise of addiction. These are all clues to uncovering our dark side and the emotions and traits that we fear the most in ourselves. As demonstrated in my dream, shadow knows its purpose; it seeks to make the unconscious conscious, it tries to tell us its secrets. Our job is to learn how to listen and to discover our shadow’s purpose.

For anyone wanting to do shadow work, an excellent book to begin is Debbie Ford’s The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. Another great resource and more in-depth study is Romancing the Shadow by Connie Zweig, Ph.D., and Steve Wolf, Ph.D. Romancing the shadow means listening to the voices that have been silenced and honoring what they have to say. In this book the authors say that when shadow work is attended to and invited into our life, our soul comes alive and becomes aroused with passion; we awaken to the sacred.

So the question is, what stories do your shadow characters have to tell today, what secrets do they whisper? What parts of your soul long to be retrieved and integrated back into your life? Or as the psychoanalysist Carl Jung in his exploration and development of shadow asks each one of us; “Would you rather be whole or good?”

Holding on

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:49:58 +0000

Several months ago my teachers in the Adv. Studies program at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing asked me in my student feedback, ‘What will allow you to hold on to yourself and the other?’ My initial response was, ‘What does that mean?’ and three months later I am still unsure what they are talking about. I don’t know how to do that or even what it looks like. All I know is what it isn’t, which was my old way of operating; grabbing, grasping, demanding.

Two days ago I had the impulse to share one of my current real life struggles with my classmates. Quickly the voices in my head came in, “They don’t care about that, they aren’t interested in your problems”, “What can they do about it?”, and “Just buck up. There are a lot of worse things in the world. Your problems aren’t that important.” This time I decided not to listen to these voices. I have done enough inner work so that even though I don’t know what ‘holding on’ looks like, I feel confident in the direction I need to go. So, I shared with my group, from my heart, my vulnerable places.

What happened as a result took me by surprise. My classmates wrote back such touching words from their own vulnerable human experiences and their compassionate hearts. It has been incredible what I have felt from their support. Each one of their words touched me deeply and felt very important for me to hear. I thought back to what I had said I was working on, holding on to myself and to the other, and I realized each one of their experiences and their kind and loving words was something I could hold on to.

I was reminded of an experience my husband and I had a long time ago on a whitewater rafting trip. My husband was behind me paddling and we were going through raging whitewater rapids and one minute he was there and the next moment he was flipped into the water. We recovered him without incident but the river guide said something that stuck with me. My husband has a fused back from a paragliding accident and the river guide said it was her experience that people with stiff backs from physical issues, or those that are the most afraid and frozen with fear, are the ones that get flipped out of the raft. She said they aren’t flexible, they are stiff.

My classmates’ words put me back in that raft. I pictured all of them beside me paddling away, offering me their tips on how they maneuver through the rapids. It was as if they were saying to me, ‘I find it helps to put my foot like this’, or ‘Ya, I’ve been tossed around, it’s crazy!’, or even ‘I’ve been thrown out of the raft too, it’s a wild ride’ No one can stop the uncertainty but they all offered something for me to hold on to; we are on this ride together. And all we can do is hold on with all our courage and soft flexibility to cushion the ride and stay in the raft.

Opening your Chakras – Pathway to Inner Wisdom

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:19:47 +0000

Chakras are distinct areas on your body that bring energy or prana into physical and energetic form. When these energy centers are open and healthy, it creates your full capacity for living and feeling. When the chakras are closed, it shows the degree of unreality and distortion that you are dealing with in your life, and the resulting discord, difficulty and numbness that you come to know as your reality. Living a joyful, fruitful, meaningful life means you have obtained a certain degree of openness in the chakras. When the chakras or energy centers are open, you are inwardly and outwardly in a relaxed state in which there is no distorted or dissonant energy.

Many spiritual paths discuss these centers and give practices to foster awareness of and help to open them. Usually these practices are physical such as yoga, meditation and breathing exercises. These are important skills and techniques and can be effective to increase the power of the energy flowing into our bodies and energy systems. But what is generally overlooked yet vitally important in order to create permanent opening and lasting change is to confront your negative feelings and concepts, and then to eliminate the false ideas and images which created these negative emotions and experiences.

During real life struggles, your state of outer and inner tension becomes so normal that you become numb; you are no longer aware of what you think or feel. Any self-development or personal growth therefore must always consist of increasing your sense of self – what do you think, feel, and experience on all levels. After you have attained awareness of your outer thinking, feeling, emotional and physical states, the inner awareness begins to grow. You become trained in a new direction of attentiveness; more attuned to yourself, your thinking processes, your emotional responses, and your body state. Once outer relaxation and awareness has become your usual state, your inner awareness will follow quite naturally and will grow and become more accessible.

Inner blocks of tension and distortion only cover another state in which you are already free, flowing and joyful. Your wrong ideas, false beliefs and unnecessary defenses create the tension and the pain in your life. Every state of emotional strife consists of subtle, invisible life matter being in error. This error was created by us and must be eliminated by us. What are the misconceptions that make you close up against life, that make you adopt unproductive and often detrimental attitudes? It is necessary first to know what you feel and think about something in order to know if the thought is untrue or the feeling destructive, and whether you want to change it or not.

To the degree that you are capable of self-observation that recognizes both the unhealthy, distorted state and the healthy and joyful one that already exists underneath, you move from one sphere of consciousness and existence into another. This will loosen up previously blocked and frozen energy and help you make contact with the greater wisdom in yourself.

Every disturbance and trial you encounter offers the best opportunity for this growth, for when your intention is to know the truth; the truth will make itself known to you. You will reestablish the connection from the outer awareness to this inner divine knowing, which is necessary to create a fruitful, joyful life.

Once the blocks are transformed, you will feel pleasurable energy flowing through your entire being. You will begin to experience the presence of a greater reality and intelligence within you. This contact becomes constant and real, its guidance reliable and wise and its voice becomes more and more distinct and discernible. The difficulty in accessing this greater intelligence within you is not that it is not always available; the difficulty is that you don’t use it or know how to access it. Your inner wisdom provides down-to-earth, workable, realistic solutions and inspirations that neither deny your humanness nor let you get away with believing yourself to be special. This is how you open up your energy life centers and let the life force surge through your entire being.