Growing Upward

I have recently had a breakthrough with a regular client of mine. Breakthrough may not be the right word because it seems to have the connotation of an identifiable moment where there was an observable shift. This was more like an experience of riding through the darkness and only being able to realize how far you have traveled once the sun has come up.

I have been working with this client for over a year now. We have had over 30 sessions together, which has been a combination of both SET and EERT, or as we like to say body- and breathwork. This client came to me without any major painful conditions, only a desire to experience the transformative effects of the work that someone close to him had shared about their experiences.

When we first started to work together I wondered if I was giving him enough pressure with the bodywork; his body was releasing, just not overtly like I had seen in other clients or in myself receiving a treatment. He assured me that he was feeling the shifts, but without the concrete information of decrease in chronic pain (because he had none) I will admit I was slightly concerned that the work was, well, working. Despite the absence of any major obvious changes, he enjoyed the work and continued to see me.

It wasn’t until we were working together for several months that I started to realize how his body was responding, which was more of what I would call an energetic response. At the beginning of each session he would bring me news of the changes occurring in his life. As a university professor, he was starting to prepare for the tenure tract which sounded pretty demanding. Until this point, he saw that becoming a tenured professor was his only option for career security. When you have a PhD., you want to use it. But it was becoming clear to him in our sessions that this was taxing his body and spirit perhaps more than it was worth.

So he started to return to what he really loves to do. Music. It started by playing guitar more often, then by purchasing some equipment to record himself and has since released a debut album with plans for another on the way. He began to play gigs around town and was getting wonderful responses from the audience and shop owners, and started to heavily supplement his income by playing music. Though he became really busy, he was often doing what he loved to do and combined with taking time for himself twice a month to see me he has been able to avoid major burnout.

In addition to playing music around town, my client has also begun to explore sound healing. He now conducts sound healing journeys and is enrolled in a training program to enhance his skills in this new healing modality. His outlook on the world, reality, and his life has had a major shift in the past year and a half. Some of it has to do with our sessions but also his willingness to open himself up.

Now, he accepts the reality of tenure and the whole of academia for what it is (which is a sharp contrast to the major stress he was feeling at the time he was preparing for it) and has become more open to other opportunities. He is able to see that those fears were supported by a belief that he had to find acceptance within academia to survive and now he knows there is a world of options. I do not want to bad mouth the academic institution, but I believe it is important for us all to know we can do what we love, even if that doesn’t fit into the story we are told about what it means to grow up.

I feel like I have got to watch this man grow up. Even though he came to me as a grown man (and I didn’t ever see him as otherwise) looking at him now I can see how he has come more fully into being who he really is. The more he sought that which he loved, music, the more opportunities opened up for him, including recently traveling to a world music conference in another continent where he had been invited to speak.

Our body work sessions the past month have gotten more intense for him than before. I am doing some deeper work, but it is more than that. He has let down some of his armor, old baggage that was holding him back, and allowing my touch to penetrate deeper. I don’t think either of us knew it was there until it had gone.

I suppose it is like our youth. We are not sure what it is when we are in it, because it is all we have known. But once we start to get older, we can see that things have changed and suddenly we are no longer young. We cannot get younger, but we have every day until we leave this earth to expand our capacity and openness to life. Though you may be grown up, but you can still grow upward.

Spiraling Up

I don’t know how many of you caught this inconsistency in identity, but thought I would take the opportunity to clear up what could be causing some confusion. When I began this blog a few months ago, I wanted to use this forum to reflect on my business, which is essentially about providing my clients with specific therapies to aid in their personal transformations. In the spirit of evolution, my business has since then gone through its own transformation.

Shortly after I began this blog, I had an unexpected business meeting with a friend of mine who owns a successful business. She explained to me some very important things that I was previously ignorant to and brought to my attention many business related things that I was just not doing. First off, she showed me a very easy way to create a website by myself (which you can check out at www.upwardspiraltherapy.com), and we planned to meet again in a week or so to talk about some other things.

So I did my homework and started creating a website to show her when she came over. Hoping for praise when I showed her my site in progress, I got something quite different. The title of the homepage at the time was my original business name of Health through Healing Massage. She asked me if that was my tagline, and I said, “Well, no, that’s my business name,” and my friend did me a big favor by responding with, “That is really not a good business name.” I will admit at the time I was slightly crushed. I had become a little attached to this name as it had been my business identity for close to two years and I felt that it adequately expressed my belief that health only begins with the process of healing.

But I did see her point in that the name was not very descriptive. It wasn’t very visual and really too long. I had also wanted to drop the word “massage” because what I do is more rehabilitative than what the broad meaning of massage conveys to the general public. So after further discussion I sat down with many new ideas I had and decided on the name Upward Spiral Therapy.

I wanted something that connected with the unwinding of spirals that occurs in SET sessions, but also something that has room to evolve with the other healing modalities I have to offer. My long term passion has been for writing and I have a firm belief in the power of writing for healing and self-transformation. In addition to bodywork, I also want to start offering writing workshops beginning in 2010.

Though I was slightly taken aback when my original business identity was politely challenged, I am so thankful that I was able to take advantage of this opportunity to set up my business for further evolution. It was actually a really great lesson in knowing when to let go of something that is no longer working and allow the room for further growth I still do believe that health begins with healing, but I am now focused on encouraging my clients and readers of this blog to embody their potential and experience the evolution of their highest selves.

Our Bodies, Our Mansions

I saw a client last week that could be referred to as a SET veteran. She had been receiving the work for over 16 years, mostly from my teachers, and found that it was one of the most incredible therapies that effectively got her out of pain following a car accident. She had been going through some emotional discoveries lately and knew her lower back pain was related to her interior life. Knowing she needed to get in before she left for out of town the next day, she called her current therapist who was unable to fit her in that day, but instead gave her my number. That was how I ended up seeing her.

We began the session with the usual body reading – analysis of the body’s structure while weight bearing – and I immediately could see that she had received years of SET. For the most part she was reasonably balanced, though the area of collapse that was causing her back pain was very obvious. I shared with her that I could see all the years of bodywork she had gone through. The client commented that she could have bought a mansion with all the money she has spent on SET for herself. I reminded her that her body is her mansion, and she agreed. “My temple,” she replied, and added that there are many people who live in mansions in pain, how can they enjoy their large homes?

This has made me wonder about how much our culture values housing ourselves in luxury without buying for ourselves the right to live our lives without pain. The truth is, a pain-free life does not have to be a luxury and we all surely deserve it.

Still Opening

Recently, I came across this poem that I had written back in June. It was written on a scrap piece of paper tucked into my copy of poems by Hafiz, a fourteenth-century mystical poet from Iran. This poem follows the theme of the previous post, as well as the concept of Health through Healing, an ongoing process of becoming who we are. So I thought I would share…

Still Opening

This

still opening

seemingly unmoving,

though each day petals

grow fuller and more visible

the sepal, a steeple pointing

towards change. A message

distilled from heaven to open

the hearts of others, my own.

Growing older,

I am always surprised

at how surprised

I always am to find

that I’m in the same

place as before,

still.

Opening.

Unfolding Wholeness

In my first year as a graduate student, I was enrolled in a Women’s Studies class on women’s health with one of the most incredible professors I have had so far. This woman emanated love. If you went into her office to meet with her, you were met with a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. She always brought snacks to our three hour evening class, knowing that most of us needed some nutrition to stay attentive. Her first priority was that everyone’s voice got heard; her mind was open to whatever her students had to share and she would ask us questions even if she didn’t know the answer. These qualities were particularly important given our subject matter of disadvantaged and silenced groups of people and practices, though I have often dreamed of the day when all academic classes have this consciousness.

During this particular semester I was also in the second half of my training in Emotional Energy Release Therapy at the SET Training Center, meeting once a month for ten months. I have been incredibly fascinated with this work since I started practicing. The process of EERT is based on Bioenergetics and Reichian therapy and uses facilitated continuous breathing to charge the body to the point where it will then discharge excess energy that has been stored. After these sessions I always feel light and clear, and have been surprised by comments from others indicating that they can perceive the change in me as well. On more than one occasion someone, who had no idea I had recently had an EERT session, has told me I have a “glow.” Though I can’t explain it, I have experienced it and have heard similar experiences of clients and friends.

Based on my own experiences of both receiving and facilitating sessions, I find that when a body charges with the breath by continuously keeping it moving, the energy that is created meets with the blocks we have constructed (usually unconsciously) that essentially cut us off from the world. A great example is to think of an experience when you felt bombarded by a flux of unpleasant emotions. The first thing we will all almost universally do is to stop breathing because it seems to dull the experience. It may do so momentarily, but when we stop the flow of life in our bodies, that emotional energy cannot move through us and be released, so it gets stored. Recognizing this, I am able to notice moments in which I find myself reacting to present circumstances as if they are they are the same as experiences in the past where I have felt traumatized or rejected. The present moment always has the possibility to be bouncing off of old hurts; the more we have stored in us, the less likely we are to see this as it is happening and to react in a more explosive way to something that is really only minor and sometimes not really threatening at all. I have found that the more I peel away, the more I am able to appreciate each moment as it is. Even if it is unpleasant, I can more easily feel the pain fully which allows me to release it and move on.

But I have also learned that there is no shortage of layers to peel away. Even though I have probably experienced close to 20 of these EERT sessions, there is always something new to “breath on.” I will say that following each time I am taken through the process, I find changes both internally and externally.

Internally I find that my landscape has changed, the rocky terrain of my insecurities has eroded a bit and that mountain of fear is now only hill (though often still a very tall hill). One of my most exciting observations is I can see how my capacity to hold the space for others has increased tremendously. Whether inside or outside the treatment room, I have found myself in more and more situations where someone else has some “stuff” boiling up to the surface and I am a witness to them, I can be fully there to validate their experience. What they bring up is less likely to bounce off of my “stuff” because it has been cleared away or is in deeper layers that have yet to come to surface, and so I can be there more fully for them. If an argument started to arise, I am less likely to engage in it as a way to prove I am right. I am less tied to this and more interested in remaining open to hearing this person’s point of view. I obviously still have my opinions; just as there is less stuff blocking my ears from listening, there is also less stuff in my throat that may have in the past cut me off from expressing my own truth.

I have also found that external circumstances in my life shift each time I go through a breath session. Unfortunately, we are at this point unable to construct an empirical study of whether or not those changes would have taken place without the breath session, but in my experience I am convinced that the energetic changes within myself have affected the world around me. Following breath sessions, I have had people reappear in my life when they had been absent for quite some time, new opportunities emerge from nowhere, and shifts in my relationships with the people I keep close in my life.

As with any graduate class in the humanities or social sciences, we had to write a term paper for this class I was in on women’s health. I took advantage of the research methods acceptable within the field of women’s studies (which in my experience is more open to the scholar reporting on their own lives than most other fields) and decided to write about my journey with the breath work up until that time. The subtitle of the paper was, “One Woman’s Journey to Wholeness through Breath,” and this is really the point of this post.

Recently, I sent this paper to a friend of mine, who had started to receive EERT sessions from another therapist. My friend had many questions about this unfamiliar process and so I thought I’d share some of what I had written on my experiences. Reading over the first paragraph of my paper, I was reminded of this idea of “unfolding wholeness” and feel it relates to my personal conception of health and healing.

Several years ago, in my linguistic fetish, I realized that the word “health” begins with the verb “to heal.” Reflecting on this observation, I realized that one’s state of health is entirely dependent on the healing journey one has traveled. I adopted Health through Healing as my business name because my services aim to bring this idea of healing into my client’s awareness. Our idea of good health must be prefaced by ongoing efforts to heal, physically, emotionally, and for me, spiritually.

The root of both health and to heal means “to become whole.” I am fond of this idea of wholeness, but as I state in my term paper, I do not believe that wholeness is a static state that can be achieved. I like to think of wholeness as a qualitative word, perhaps changing the form to an adjective, “wholly.” Adjectives are words that describe something else, and that something else is that which is in the process of becoming whole, a continuous manifestation of the subject’s inherent wholeness. In the paper, the subject was myself, but is real life the subject is all of us.

We are all immersed in this ocean of unfolding wholeness, how do you want to open?

Difference Made

After I ended the last post I realized that the next one would have to be about this little anecdote from last week. This idea of “making this life significant” to me means being one who works towards making a difference in the world.

I was working on a client who had spent the day before walking around a theme park for about 12 hours. Her body was not so happy with her and she was very glad to have made the appointment to come see me. About halfway through her session, she started to giggle and reminded me of a segment on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report where he talks about “Difference Makers.” The intro always includes a montage of people in difference-making professions: firefighter, doctor, police man, ending with a massage therapist. Colbert then shares some news story about someone who made a difference, ending the segment by saying, “Difference Made.” My client told me during the session that I am indeed a difference maker, and the next day she affirmed that her body had forgiven her and there was difference made. Experiences like this make me so thankful to be in this profession.

Apparently the universe really wanted to make sure that I got the message that day. After this session, I went into the SET office to take care of my responsibilities there. My mailbox is usually the place where I get phone messages or deposits for classes that have come in, but the only thing in my mailbox this day was a book. It had a note on it from my supervisor that said she had ordered several copies of this book back in 2007 (and that it must have been good since she ordered so many) but had misplaced them since then. She had recently come across them and wanted me to have a copy. The name of this book was Making a Difference with Compassion.

It is simultaneous events like this that make me believe.