Breath of Life
My approach to Craniosacral Biodynamics has its roots in the osteopathic tradition of Andrew Taylor Still, MD D.O., the founder of Osteopathy, and in the conscious health building system of Dr. Randolph Stone, the founder of Polarity Therapy. This work is based on the awareness of the body as a subtle field of conscious light and that our inherent health and happiness blossom in a life attuned to Spirit.
This very subtle form of 'touch' is done fully clothed on the treatment table. It is a gentle 'hands-on' way of encouraging balance in the cerebrospinal nervous system. It is gentle and suitable for people of all ages. It is often appropriate when other therapies feel unsafe, such as during pregnancy or after an operation, trauma or injury.
The craniosacral system consists of cranial nerves and bones, the spinal cord and sacrum and the fluctuating “stream” of cerebrospinal fluid that ebbs and flows inside it like the ocean tide, protecting and nourishing the brain and nervous system.
The Recognition, Realization, and Manifestation
Of the Spirit Within Us
The Breath of Life, also called Natural Intelligence, Prana, "Life-Force" or Spirit, is our bodies underlying revitalizing phenomena contained within the cerebrospinal fluid, deeply influencing our health and well being. Craniosacral Biodynamics can open doors to our heart & soul profoundly changing our life.
Everything in the universe has a purpose. Indeed, the invisible intelligence that flows through everything in a purposeful fashion Is also flowing through you.
"Health is not merely of the body, It is the natural expression of the body, mind and soul when they are in rhythm with the One Life. It is not merely a question of physical fitness, but rather is a result of the soul finding free expression through the mind and body of the individual."
Unrestricted Flow of Life Force in the Body
All energy is the life breath of a living universe. The soul swims in cerebrospinal fluid. When the energy fields of the body are balanced, they are receptive to the free expression of Spirit.
“The soul contains no fewer puzzles than the universe with its galaxies. Our psyche is built in harmony with the structure of the universe; what happens in the macrocosm also happens in the infinitesimal recesses of the soul.”
― Carl Jung
Feel Your Way into Being
Chronic and repetitive stress is accumulative, often undermining our lives as we become overwhelmed and our health and vitality begin to break down. Stress, anxiety and fear 'eat away' at our health and well-being every day of our life. The solution is to let go, relax and create space in our lives to embody a state of calm as often as we can. By learning how to relax during stressful times and by cultivating a state of calm, we can invoke a healthier mode of functioning. Our prior to mind -- true nature.
Our increasingly speedy and fragmented culture has come to pathologize valid human experience such as grief, melancholy, anger, and uncertainty, giving rise to a psychiatric and self-help community determined to “cure” or “transcend” dimensions of the psyche that contain important (and even holy) data for our unique paths of individuation, creativity, and meaning.
We're Human, Not Machines
Society pushes us to be in a chronic state of fight or flight. Rush to school. Compete for good grades. Compete in sports. Achieve. Perform.
Our nervous system needs: Stillness, quiet, play & creativity.
"Trauma is resistance to grief."
- Gabor Mate, MD
In Order to Love Who You Are,
You Cannot Hate the Experiences That Shaped You
Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Contracted Hyper Vigilance
"Trauma shocks the brain, stuns the mind, and freezes the body".
- Peter Levine, Ph.D.
Talk therapy doesn’t always work – especially when the nervous system is still operating from a place of fear. This is because Broca’s brain area - responsible for speech production - often shuts down upon memory recall of the trauma, causing talking to be largely ineffective (Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, 2014).
Trauma imprints itself on our body and nervous system, which is why talk therapies are often unsuccessful. According to trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, verbal therapies that rely on recounting traumatic events may cause retraumatization, hindering the healing process. The term 'somatic' means "relating to the body, especially as distinct from relating to the mind." Somatic therapies and techniques work directly with the trauma-effected nervous system to help safely release trauma from the body and promot groundedness and self-attunment.
Feel Your Way into Being
Respect your body when it's asking for a break. Respect your mind when it's seeking to rest. Honor yourself when you need a moment…
…Feeling the need to be busy all the time is a trauma response and fear-based distraction from what you'd be forced to acknowledge and feel if you slowed down.
"Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies."
"Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time ... When we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations (fight/flight), the person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system".
—Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger
"I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening".
- Peter Levine, PhD
Love Lives in the Here and Now
Love is what we are, prior to 'social face' and the endless repetitive fear driven thoughts, patterns and conceptual identities that keep us in an unnatural state of contracted separation and fear-based isolation.
Our inherent natural state is a shift from thinking to awareness -- prior to mind-based "points of view." Life's own energy freed from thought, which transcends the karmic conditional realm of divisive, reflexive "ego" patterning.
Love is the Sea Where the Intellect Drowns
“There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of spirit on the body. Seawater begs the pearl to break its shell. And the lily, how passionately it needs some wild darling!
At night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine. Breathe into me. Close the language door and open the lovers window. The moon won't use the door, only the window."
-Rumi
Life Breath of the Universe
Craniosacral Biodynamics reveals our natural state. The one life, non-dual transcendental reality -- timeless being. Not a condition or "object" of experience, but the all-pervading Life Breath of the Universe. Reflected in our body as a sense of oneness, unity and unconditional love -- a bliss with no cause. The wisdom of our body abiding in stillness.
The 'Breath of Life' is the pulse that expresses itself out of this stillness as it breathes infinite unconditional love, throughout our whole body.
How Does it Feel to Drop into Your Heart?
“Anyone who has experienced intense trauma in their lives can have a tendency to disassociate. It’s just a protective pattern that got put in place long ago—and for a good reason. So when you start to feel a little disassociated, gently and kindly remind your body that you aren’t going to hurt it and that it is not in any actual danger.
Then kindly and gently encourage your attention to rest in present time experience. It all needs to be done very gently and kindly because your body needs to know that it can trust you. The more your body realizes that it can trust you, the more it will allow your attention to remain connected and present. And by doing so, you are literally rewriting the script that got put in place at the time of the trauma. You could say that you are updating your program into the present time, into who you are now.”
"The more you can stay present for what's arising, without getting lost in or pushing away the emotionality of it, the more it releases. It doesn’t need your help in releasing. It needs you to be that intimate, warm space in which everything is allowed to arise."
”Simply rest in the felt sense of being. Don’t think about it—do it. That is the key. Grasp at nothing, push nothing away. Simply rest in the felt sense of being. Practice it every day.”
― Adyashanti
Being Here Now ...
Our Body as Consciousness
"Trauma is fundamentally a disruption in our ability to be in the here and now.
Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health: safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.
Trauma treatment is not about telling stories about the past. Trauma treatment is about helping people to be here now, to tolerate what they feel in the present".
-Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps the Score
Feel Your Way into Being
Instead of drinking it away, smoking it away, sleeping it away, or running from it. Just sit with it. Healing happens by feeling.
This work is very soothing and relaxing in nature and occurs on a deep unconscious level. The effects of a session can often be felt right away, although sometimes they are not fully apparent until hours, or even days later.
When the heart fasts and we don't pursue the world, the world begins to come to us.......
When we do not cling even to spiritual things, we find that we have fallen into the mystery beneath the beneath of life, underneath even the dark matter, beyond knowing and not knowing -- and at this moment life returns to us without its veils. Devoted attention sets us in relation to the source. Everything is born out of this silence -- grass, rivers, stars, children, animals, and love.
John Tarrant, The Light Inside the Dark
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shouts in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass and breaks into
tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death,
in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of
this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
RABRINDRABATH TAGORE
"In a culture that largely defines worthiness, sanity, and success in terms of how distant we are from our feelings, how far and fast we run away from our roots, how numb we are to the fluency of our bodies, daring to slow down... daring to be still is the most damning act of rebellion."
~ Bayo Akomolafe
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; You have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should ..
~ Max Ehrmann from 'Desiderata'
"In reality, nothing is lacking and nothing is needed. All work is on the surface only. In the depths there is perfect peace. All your problems arise because you have defined, and therefore limited yourself."
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, I AM THAT
''There's something within you that knows what to do. There is a power greater than you that knows how to take care of you without your help. All you've got to do is to surrender to it. Surrender your thoughts, your mind, your ego, to the current that knows the way. It will take care of you. It will take better care of you than you can ever imagine.''
-Robert Adams
The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One- “That art thou.”
Whoever is able to say this to himself, with regard to every being with whom he comes into contact, is certain of all virtue and blessedness, and is on the direct road to salvation.’
-- Schopenhauer, German Philosopher
The Shadow
“There is a special quality of stillness in a person who encounters the shadow wholeheartedly. Your body may relax in their company because it understands, in the subtle communications of their presence, that nothing is excluded in themselves, therefore nothing in you can be rejected. Such a person, who has given up guarding against the shadow, who has come to wear their scars with dignity, no longer squirms from discomfort or bristles at suffering. They no longer brace in avoidance of conflict. They carry a deep willingness to dance with the inconstancy of life. They've given up distancing as a strategy, and made vulnerability their ally.”
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
Open Heart Vulnerability
"The Truth that is God and Life is sufficient in and of Itself. We are not truly separate from That. We are happy only in ecstatic or self-released Communion with That. To release the entire body-mind into Communion with the Radiant and Unknowable Divine Reality is happiness. It is not that the act of such release produces effects in us that are happiness. Rather, the sacrifice, or Communion Itself, is happiness."
~ Bubba Free John, "The Enlightenment of the Whole Body"
Subtle Energy Body by Dr. Jean Klein
“The subtle body is completely free from the physical structure of the body. Its energy is completely unconditioned. It belongs to the real body, the energetic body. This energy is capable of burning up all the conditioning buried deep in our nerves and muscles. It purifies the physical body of the conditions and sensations imposed by the 'I am the body' idea, by the person who needs to feel himself localized and secured. This person acts through likes and dislikes, through fear, actions which in turn react on the neuro-muscular system creating the vicious circle of conditioning.
What you call your body is only an envelope in which lives the subtle body. This inner body is subtle energy, the life-force which supports the physical body. All our sensitivity depends on this life-force. Paradoxically, although the subtle body resides in the physical body it radiates beyond it and encounters the surroundings. So the body in its wholeness has a much greater extension than is generally realised. As the physical body throughout life grows increasingly conditioned by striving it becomes a knot of tensions and contractions and the subtle body is paralysed in its expression. Its radiation is hindered and the physical body is isolated from its environment.
When this life-force is obstructed (contracted) there is a premature ageing of the physical body which manifests first as a diminution of sensitivity and energy. In the natural healthy body each cell is penetrated by life.
Our approach is therefore to bring the energy body back to its full expression as it is in infancy. In being aware of it, it comes to complete functioning. Thus, the first thing we do in our body-work is to awaken the energy body, to make it an object of awareness. This energy is felt, it is a sensation. It is this that I call body-feeling. When the sensation of energy is fully alive it brings about a modification of the physical structure. Any other attempt to alter the body comes from will, the mind, and is violence. In any movement it is the energy body, the vital body, which moves and takes the physical body with it.
The emphasis in our teaching on this level is therefore not on the posture or physical structure but on this body-feeling. When the vital body is awakened, all the muscle structure is relaxed and a reorchestration of energy takes place. Each sense is no longer limited to its physical organ but expands to the whole body. In this global sensation all the senses participate. Being in expansion automatically takes you beyond the idea of being a separate entity. The body-work is one way to bring you to oneness with all beings.”
When you become more sensitive to the body you have the impression that the inhalation-exhalation is no longer localised. It is all around you.
It is Important to See How We Live Mainly in Our Heads
Think with your whole body, feel with your whole body. In the whole feeling, the global sensation, you go into your room and touch your whole room. You go outside and touch the clouds, the trees, the water. You do not live in isolation. In your radiation you are in communion with all things. In this expansion there is no place for the ego because the ego is a contraction. Love is expansion, a feeling of spaciousness.
Silence is Our Real Nature
Be knowingly silent as often as you can and you will no longer be a prey to the desire to be this or that. You will discover in the everyday events of life the deep meaning behind the fulfillment of the whole, for the ego is totally absent.
Silence is our real nature. What we are fundamentally is only silence. Silence is free from beginning and end. It was before the beginning of all things. It is causeless. Its greatness lies in the fact that it simply is. In silence all objects have their home ground. It is the light that gives objects their shape and form. All movement, all activity is harmonized by silence.
Silence has no opposite in noise. It is beyond positive and negative. Silence dissolves all objects. It is not related to any counterpart which belongs to the mind. Silence has nothing to do with mind. It cannot be defined but it can be felt directly because it is our nearness. Silence is freedom without restriction or centre. It is our wholeness, neither inside nor outside the body.
Silence is joyful, not pleasurable. It is not psychological. It is feeling without a feeler. Silence needs no intermediary. Silence is holy. It is healing. There is no fear in silence. Silence is autonomous like love and beauty. It is untouched by time. Silence is meditation, free from any intention, free from anyone who meditates. Silence is the absence of oneself. Or rather, silence is the absence of absence.
Sound which comes from silence is music. All activity is creative when it comes from silence. It is constantly a new beginning. Silence precedes speech and poetry and music and all art. Silence is the home ground of all creative activity. What is truly creative is the word, is Truth. Silence is the word. Silence is Truth. The one established in silence lives in constant offering, in prayer without asking, in thankfulness, in continual love.”
-- Jean Klein, Subtle Energy Body
The Way of Liberating Insight
“When all forms of self are abandoned, then the thing we perceive is the thing we are. We perceive everything from inside everything.”
~Adyashanti
"Is it possible to start to feel, in this very moment, that our bodies, our minds, and even our personalities are ways through which our spiritual essence connects with the world around us? That these bodies and minds are actually sensing organs for spirit? Our physical forms are the vehicle through which spiritual essence gets to experience its own mysterious creation—to be bewildered by its creation, shocked by it, in awe of it, and even confused by it. Spirit is pure potential that contains every possible outcome. From the standpoint of our spiritual essence, nothing is to be avoided. No experiences need to be turned from. Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.”
"Think of the light of the sun flowing through a stained-glass window. All sunlight is the same, but is perceived as different colors as it is flows through the stained-glass window. Your body-mind is the window which colors how awareness is perceived. But ultimately your “I Am” is the same “I Am” as my “I Am.” That revelation is unity.”
~Adyashanti, "The Way of Liberating Insight"
Loves Secret
“Today I’m flying low and I’m not saying a word. I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I’m taking the day off. Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.”
~ Mary Oliver
Breath of Life
“We are travelers on a cosmic journey,
stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity.
Life is eternal.
We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.
This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”
― Paulo Coelho
A softly euphoric sense of awakening, the feeling of breathing & falling in love, in harmony with the universe.
A Divine Comedy
