Breath of Life
Craniosacral Biodynamics has its roots in the osteopathic tradition of medicine. 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.
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.
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 Breath of Life, also called Prana, Chi or "Life Force" 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. The "Breath of Life" is a vital link between our physical and spiritual existence.
Love is the 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.
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.
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
Trauma shocks the brain, stuns the mind, and freezes the body.
- Peter Levine, Ph.D.
I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening.
- Peter Levine, PhD
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. Open Heart vulnerability.
True love lives in the here and now.
True love is what we are, prior to 'social face' and the endless repetitive fear driven thoughts, patterns and superficial identities that keep us in an unnatural state of contracted separation and fear-based isolation.
Love is the sea where the intellect drowns. - Rumi
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.
“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
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
“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.”
”How does it feel to drop into your heart?”
― Adyashanti
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
Child of the Universe
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
One of the good things about the pleasure of inhabiting the body — how we feel the body from within, what we now call proprioception, our sense of the body as we feel it from inside — is that it’s an inherent pleasure that doesn’t have many stories at all.
A Place Where Time Stands Still
It is only when we go to the center of our souls that we enter the 'eye of the storm', the still-point of our existence. In the rush to get an education, to make a career, create a family, obtain material success, to hurry, to do, to survive, we often don't realize that in the midst of this modern-chaotic life that we lead every day, there exists another life, an unseen life that moves like a silent river beneath a city. A place where time stands still and we experience a softly euphoric sense of awakening, the feeling of breathing and falling in love in harmony with the universe.
by 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 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.”
Feel Your Way into Being
“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
“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."
Truth is Silent
In The Midst of Movement & Chaos..
Keep Stillness Inside Your
"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.”
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