Unwinding

Posted on May 8, 2012 by admin

One of the things I enjoy the most about Wholebody Focusing is how it has helped me learn to live with deep appreciation and honour for Life and my own naturalness as I move through life. There is something about this practice that enables us to return to our natural rhythms. The deep listening that it calls us to enables us to unknot the tension energy that gets trapped in our bodies from the messages we receive about when and how it was not okay to simply be ourselves. This practice also helps us unwind the tension that creates energetic knots in our bodies from the times when we simply didn’t know how to be in a situation, especially in a situation that elicited the fight or flight stress response. That stress energy, if it didn’t find a way to be released, remains trapped in the fibres and tissues of the body. This trapped energy then creates a ‘holding pattern’ for stress. One such example would be stiff, tight shoulders. Many of us carry our stress across our upper backs and our shoulders. This holding pattern becomes a way of being and it simply demonstrates how we hold situations and information that overwhelms us, or we do not know how to be with.
The gift of Wholebody Focusing has been learning how to honour my natural rhythms and to give myself the time and permission to feel my own experience, from the felt sense place, of my life situations. Allowing my experience of a situation to be what it is, while offering my experience the support of my grounded presence, allows the tension energy associated with the experience to unwind itself in its own right way. This life that is trying to move through me, knows what to do, if I don’t shut it down. If I simply allow it space to be there as it is, then the life experience knows how to integrate and to find its own way forward.
As a colleague of mine expressed it “I am learning to only go as fast as my slowest part”. Wholebody Focusing enables us to learn to set a pace in life that is in alignment with who we are. The more I use this practice, the more I understand my natural pace in life and I become gentle and stop forcing and pushing myself to go faster and do more than my slowest part is comfortable with. When I honour this natural rhythm, life begins to flow with more ease and grace.
I have been practicing Wholebody Focusing for a number of years now and I notice the subtle shifts that have occurred within my being. I no longer hold my shoulders up around my ears. All that tension energy has dissipated and I have integrated the life experiences that caused me to be holding the world on my shoulders. I no longer have to go to the chiropractor for adjustments to my hips and lower back. The information I have been holding in this area of my body is unwinding and I am releasing this holding pattern.
Wholebody Focusing helps us realize that the aches and pains we feel in our bodies are aches and pains for a reason. These aches and pains are information and life experiences that are trying to get our compassionate, wholebody presence to listen to them. These areas begin to find relief and release when we simply offer them the support of our grounded presence and our willingness to listen, from the felt sense, to what they have to say. Pain at the physical level is often pain that has been held at the emotional/spiritual level and has not been processed or fully integrated. It is literally stuck or stagnant energy that has created a blockage in the natural flow of life through the body/mind.
As I practice Wholebody Focusing, I have discovered a way of living that is deeply honouring of myself, and others. This has become a way of being that invites deep, compassionate listening, not only to my inner world, but to the life and world around me.

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Change in Perception

Posted on April 30, 2012 by admin

The Course in Miracles describes a miracle as a shift in perception. The Discovery Circle process helps us see the world in another way and it creates shifts in perception. It helps us peak around the obstacles on our path and discover a new trail to follow. This process helps create openings where we believed there were none. This is how the process works to help us move past our limiting beliefs. It helps us see the possibilities we couldn’t see before.

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Walking through Transitions with Action Learning

Posted on April 26, 2012 by admin

When we feel blocked, stuck or unable to see the next step we are to take to move our life forward, we are often sitting in the middle of a place of transition and don’t know it. These feelings of being blocked or stuck are signs that life is changing and what once was, is no longer working for us. Change is happening and it begins with this feeling of discomfort. What once fit us, is no longer fitting. The old is dropping away and we can’t quite see what the new situation is holding out to us. We often call this place a ‘problem’. We feel like we are experiencing a problem and we want to discover how to ‘fix it’ so that we feel better, so that we feel at ease again.
These times of transition are times when we are discovering that what was once our comfort zone is no longer our comfort zone. Life is calling us to expand, to change, and to grow in some way. What can often feel like the ‘problem’ is that we do not recognize the clear direction we need to move in so that we can grow.
What happens when we are in a place of change and transition takes us into the place of chaos theory. Chaos is the place in time when the old way of being is falling apart, is too constrictive and is giving way to something new. It is natural for us to feel a sense of discomfort in this place. Change is often uncomfortable because there seems like nothing certain that can be held onto. This place where we are letting go of the old in order to enter the new is a very dynamic place, but it can also feel messy and unclear. In the book The Other Side of Chaos, Margaret Silf describes this place of chaos as being overflowing with potential.
Action Learning has been designed to work with chaos theory in a way that takes us through change and transition in a manner that enables us to keep one foot on solid ground and one foot in the change. Action Learning is a process that enables us to move forward to find meaningful movements to help bring us to the other side of a change or transition in a manner that feels integrated and whole. This process helps us deal with fear and to find the next forward moving step that will take us in the direction that we want to go. We suddenly find ourselves flowing with life rather than being buffeted around in the current and the undertow. Action Learning creates the context for Inspiration to flow through us and move us forward in meaningful and helpful ways.
We cannot experience breakthroughs into a new way of being without letting go of some aspects of our old way of being. For example, we cannot lose weight without letting go of the weight! We cannot change our financial challenges without letting go of old habits and embracing new ones. All change requires a form of breaking free from what is holding us back and limiting us, so that the new can emerge. Action Learning creates a sense of spaciousness so that a clearer understanding can emerge. It is like it moves us to a higher ground were we can survey the landscape and discover the next right steps to take.
People often ask me how, exactly, action learning works. I do not have an answer for this. The process itself creates a container to hold us while we step into uncertainty and chaos and come out the other side with new information that sets us free to live a new reality. It does this by offering a context in which we can break out of the moulds of our limiting beliefs about what can and cannot be done. It also does this by helping us see that what we thought was the issue, is not, in fact, the whole issue. This process reveals new aspects of our challenges which makes it so much easier to step forward in the appropriate direction. This process works with life as it is unfolding, it creates a safe, non-judemental container for examing an issue that is important to us. It is not a linear process that comes from a Newtonian frame of thinking. This process works with the new sciences that focus on emergence and with the new physics, such as chaos theory.
I can never explain why the process works, I can only say that it works. Its secret lies in its capacity to break down limiting beliefs in order to break through to a new level of awareness, understanding, and, ultimately, action. For me, action learning as always helped create a path to freedom from my challenging issue. It helps to clear the way. It helps create break throughs.

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Life as Flow

Posted on October 19, 2011 by admin

TatamagoucheI spent the weekend at Tatamagouche and was touched, once again by the beauty of nature and was inspired to allow nature to be my teacher. As I watched the river ebb and flow, carrying logs, leaves and sea life in its current, I could hear the words ‘let the river carry you.’ I knew this meant the river of life. I stood there and watched two different logs, one was entrenched into the river bed and was not moving, the other was floating freely, bobbing along the top of the water. As I sat in meditation and watched the river, I began to write this:
As soon as you let go of needing to grasp onto and hold things, you are in flow. You are in the place of appreciation. When you simply stand back and appreciate, there is no grasping, holding, strangling or struggling. This is the place of non-attachment and it is the place of freedom: not attached to outcomes, not attached to anything – yet appreciating everything. This is the place of curiosity. Being able to observe life, be carried by it and to let it flow in, through and around you.
Let go of your many worries, fears and fights, and let the river of life carry you safely between its banks. Simply let go.
This is living life as flow.

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Wholebody Focusing and the Shyness of the Soul

Posted on July 13, 2011 by admin

Chickadee

I have been reading A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer recently and in the book, he uses the metaphor of the soul as being like wild animal. He is saying that the soul is strong, tenacious and it knows how to survive even in the toughest of circumstances, yet the soul is also gentle and shy. Like a wild animal, the soul will not make an appearance if we go tromping through the woods looking for it. However, if we sit quietly in the wilderness and settle into our surroundings, our soul will show up, just like the animals do in nature. The soul will come out of her hiding places and will allow herself to become known.
I love this imagery and how it connects to the approach I like to take to inner healing. This metaphor points to the importance of walking quietly along the forest floor if we are to let our wounded, hurt, betrayed, and ignored aspects of ourselves come forward in order to re-integrate and become part of the whole. There is a shyness to the soul that will only come out when we are in a place of safe, quiet, grounded, inner stillness.
For me, the metaphor of sitting quietly in the forest and waiting captures what happens when I am doing wholebody focusing. The practice of coming to grounded presence, feeling all of me here, in this moment and fully connected to the aliveness in my body creates the space for something new to appear. This act of coming to grounded presence and allowing my awareness to simply gaze inwardly and connect to the sensations within my body in a non-judgemental, open, spacious way, allows more consciousness to emerge. This way of being and of gently allowing those parts of myself that may have gone into hiding because of some past hurt, trauma or unprocessed experience suddenly feel safe enough to be seen. As these parts allow themselves to be seen, felt and appreciated, they awaken to their own sense of being part of a greater whole. Suddenly, these hurt parts no longer feel isolated, they recognize that they are part of the larger forest, the step back into alignment with the wholeness of my essential self, my body, my soul.
Wholebody Focusing, is a means of allowing my body to create the container for my inner wisdom to emerge. When coming to grounded presence and allowing the felt-sense to come forward, more life begins to happen. Insights come forward and the next forward moving step begins to make itself known. Life just knows what to do to come to a place of healing, integration and fullness.
Every time that I do wholebody focusing, and I sit with my attention focused inwardly, I awaken more and more to the fullness of who I am. The parts of my being that have been frozen, or locked down, or seen as unacceptable for whatever reason, experience the safety and the love to begin showing up, opening up and making space for the river of life to flow again. The places in my body that held pain, discomfort and unease respond to the invitation of my grounded presence and they begin to move again, flow again and return to a normal pulse of life. Just like the forest goes completely quiet when I first enter it, the longer I sit in quiet, un-intrusive stillness, the more adventurous the inhabitants of the forest become. They venture out and some step forward for a visit. Eventually I make friends with some of the creatures and always, I hold a respect for them.
When we sit quietly in grounded presence, connected to the felt-sense within our bodies, we are creating the invitation for those parts of ourselves that feel stuck, frozen, forgotten, and hurt to step forward and recognize that they are connected to the whole of us. We become friends again with these parts that have been hiding and this allows them to return to the rhythm of the natural pulse of life within us.

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Wholebody Focusing: Exploring Your Inner Landscape

Posted on June 8, 2011 by admin

When we stop looking outside of ourselves for what we need to look for within ourselves, we stumble into the arena of our inner landscape. Each of us has an interior world and the mystics have written about it for years. Teresa of Avila speaks of it as the interior castle. Meister Eckhart refers to it in his statement that when the soul wants to experience something, she casts the experience out before her and then steps inside of it.
What we experience in our outer world. The world we see, touch, smell and feel, is also resonating within ourselves.
Life goes on within our body. Every experience that we have is digested and experienced by the very cells of our body. Just as we see and feel the world around us, we need to become as adept at listening for and feeling the world of sensations and experiences that go on within us.
Wholebody Focusing helps us turn inward and begin to explore our own inner landscape. With this process, we begin to discover how, exactly, our body has held onto an experience in our past. We begin to experience, in a felt sense way, how it is on the inside of ourselves. When we begin to understand this, we begin to release and let go of tension, stress, anxiety and worry. These emotions are not life-giving to us. In fact, they drain our life energy. The mystics knew this. They knew that we sometimes have to sit with things, allow them to speak to us from the inside of ourselves and eventually the tension, worry and depressive thoughts begin to release themselves from our psyche and the tissue and cells of our body.
Emotions, experiences, and events that we were not able to process in the moment that they happen, literally get tucked away in the cells of our body. These ‘trauma’s’ or unprocessed emotions caused by the events create tension energy and physical holdings in our body. What the mystics knew, and what Gene Gendlin has discovered with Focusing, is that when we bring the quality of our PRESENCE to these stored experiences and allow ourselves to connect to the felt sense on the inside of our body, the stored tension and trauma begins to unwind and release itself in its own way. Life begins to move again in these stuck places in our interior realm because our compassionate presence sets the event free.
After creating a mandala that I came to call ‘Inner Freedom’, I heard the words ‘resting in the embrace of stillness and quiet is the key that unlocks inner freedom from its prison of doubt. The practice of Wholebody Focusing turns us inward and enables us to be present in that very stillness and quiet that unlocks and sets us free from the experiences that may have caused us pain and suffering, so we shut them down. This process helps us be with those experiences in a loving, compassionate way. Kevin McEvenue says that ‘whenever a part of me feels loved, it awakens to its own healing’. This is what wholebody focusing does, in my experience, it gently loves the experiences and parts of ourselves that may have been hurt, discouraged or traumatized in some way and allows them to awaken and discover a sense of release and inner freedom. The power of presence, sets us free, leaving more space on the inside of ourselves for life to move in a natural way.

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May the Path Rise Up Before You

Posted on February 22, 2011 by admin

PathThis is such a beautiful blessing when we really come to understand what it means. The words came to me today as a way of understanding that when we find ourselves standing in a place that seems foreign, or a place that we didn’t expect to be, when the path we have walked comes to an end, then a new path will begin to appear. This path appears as we walk it. With each footstep we take, the path is illuminated. The path is being created in real time, we couldn’t see the path before because we were caught up in what has always been, so we weren’t even looking for the path that is emerging.
I recognize that when I am doing the Action Learning process in a Discovery Circle, the rising up of new paths is what happens. As we learn to inquire into our thoughts, as we learn to enter into a space where we allow ourselves to be guided toward new insights, new pathways are being created. The path is opening up to us in our minds and it shows up in our lives. The things that we couldn’t see before suddenly begin to appear.
The blessing, May the path rise up to meet you, is a wonderful way to say, may you be able to step out in faith and recognize what you need is here for you. May you feel the solidness of life supporting you in each moment, may you feel that you are supported by life and that there are always new possibilities opening up in this world that is in a continual process of creation.
When we feel stuck, it is because the old path has taken us as far as it can and it is time for a new path to appear. Relax, listen, and receive the first step to take and then the next one will follow. This is what walking the contemplative path helps me do. When I begin each day in meditation, I see what my steps are to take that day. When I run into a road block, I move back into meditation and this enables me to open up to being shown the next step. Clarity comes to me through meditation and prayer. This rhythm of being and doing, is helping me to walk the path that is rising up to meet me in each moment.
One of my mentors once said, ‘Do what you know to do in the moment you know to do it’ and I now recognize that is how the path appears. Simply take the step that I know to take, in this moment. The path emerges out of the fog when I take the time to meditate in the moments that I feel stuck, then I can take action on the clarity that has come from my time of silence.

I am reminded of this gaelic blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

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The Golden Shadow

Posted on February 18, 2011 by admin

RainbowThe quieter you become, the more you are able to hear. ~Rumi.

I read this quote by Rumi the other day and it reminded me of how often, as a child, I would come home with report cards that said I was too quiet. I was always discouraged by this because I loved to listen and learn from what I was hearing. I had thought I was merely being observant and was hurt to discover that my quietness was not encouraged.
Over the years, I have had to recognize that being quiet and listening are two of my greatest qualities. It is precisely because I am able to bring myself to a place of internal quiet that I am able to hear the forest speak and I am able to sense into the subtle undertones in the space around me. This capacity to be quiet and to listen has helped me be a good confidant for my friends and it is what makes me a good Life Energy Coach.
I now realize that the quieter I become on the inside, the more available I am to hear the voice of my intuition and the guidance that is always there for me. I am able to take leaps of faith because I know that there is something guiding me, something I can count on and I know that when I quiet myself and my mind, I am able to hear this guidance much more clearly.
This aptitude that I have always had to be quiet and to listen on deeper levels for the subtle is now serving me well in my live. However, I have had to go through a healing process to accept my quietness as a good thing because it was so often judged as ‘an area that needs work’ through my years in school. I went through a period of disliking my quietness intensely because it didn’t seem like an acceptable way to be.
Over the years, I have learned that many of us have disowned parts of ourselves because of the judgements others have made about us and we have to go through a process of reclaiming those parts in order to find our true wholeness. This quality of quietness that I so badly wanted to get rid of became part of my golden shadow. The golden shadow consists of those parts of ourselves that are good and wonderful and perhaps someone we admire or consider as an authority teased us about it or made negative comments about it, so we tried to disassociate from the quality in order to be ‘acceptable’. Some people may have been told that they try to help others too much and are not doing their own work, or they might have been told that they shouldn’t color outside the lines and now they don’t think they are creative, or they talk too much and now they don’t share their ideas. These comments that shut down our own naturalness and beauty are what create the golden shadow.
I was able to go back and see that in school I was told I was too serious, quiet, thoughtful, or introverted and to bring this golden light out of the shadows and embrace it. Now, I make my living because of these exact qualities. I help people learn to be quiet so that they can hear their own intuition, their guidance, and the wisdom that is within and around them.
What attributes do you need to reclaim about yourself? Perhaps you are funny, thoughtful, graceful, creative, kind, considerate, giving, or a natural leader. For each of us, there are attributes that are just part of our naturalness and it is time to reclaim them, bring them home to yourself and use them as the gifts that they are.

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Feeling Beauty From the Inside

Posted on January 21, 2011 by admin

BeautyToday, I feel like I have discovered what it is to live inside beauty. This is a whole new relationship to beauty for me. It is like living beauty from the inside out, rather than just appreciating beauty.
For many years now, my life purpose has been captured by the words ‘to unveil beauty by being a guide toward healing and inspiration’. Today, I felt like I was inside the process of beauty being unveiled. As I sat with someone using whole body presence and acted as a listener to their focusing process, I could feel the field around me begin to shimmer and sparkle. I was experiencing the felt sense of beauty unveiling itself as the shifts in consciousness were taking place within the focuser. I was very aware of my own field and my grounded, whole body presence as well as the container of the focuser’s field. Yet as shifts were happening within the focuser, the space that we were holding together was shifting and coming more alive with an essence that was so beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. I have come to realize that beauty is the recognition of aliveness. Beauty is not something to just look at and take in through the visual senses, beauty has a presence and a quality to it that sparkles and dances like a celebration of life.
I am so grateful for this new understanding of what it means to unveil beauty, it means helping people open to more life, to create space for more life and more life is an allowance of beauty to live within and around us. Beauty is an essence, an expression of life. Beauty is a quality that we can step right inside of and allow it to fill us with its dance. When we do this, the places where we hold ourselves separate from life begin to shift, the veils begin to lift and we are able to hold beauty within the very core of our being, we no longer have to hold ourselves separate, as if the beauty is so intense that it is too painful to hold or to allow it to touch the heart. Unveiling beauty is about engaging with aliveness, vitality and the essence of that which sustains life.
I know that I hold myself apart from beauty at times because the intensity is so great that I am afraid that it will hurt to really drink it in. The beautiful things in life can seem so rich and so deep that a fear can rise up that I may drown in this beautiful presence and so I maintain a thin veil between myself and beauty as a means of self-protection. I believe that this is why so many accounts of the encounters with the holy that come to us in through scripture begin with ‘do not be afraid.’ The intensity of an encounter with the Sacred presence fills us with awe, it is almost more than we can take in. Today, I really felt that beauty is so giving and nurturing that there is no need to be afraid of it. I can step right inside of beauty and will feel it dance around and move like calming, loving, energizing waves of vitality through my whole being.
May you find yourself engaging in beauty this day. May beauty enter your heart, your core and fill you with its vitality and aliveness.

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Discovery Circles Lead to Inspiration

Posted on January 20, 2011 by admin

The action learning process used in Discovery Circles, provides the context for inspiration to flow. The process is the container that allows us to step into uncertainty SAFELY. We often feel stuck because we think that we don’t know what to do in order to move forward. This feeling of being stuck happens when we are disconnected from inspiration. Inspiration is the place of standing ‘in Spirit’, it is the place of remembering that we partner with the divine and that we are supported in more ways than we know. When we enter the flow of inspiration again, we enter the place where we can be ‘informed’ of the next step to take.
This place of standing in the flow of inspiration is the place where innovative thinking can happen, it is the place of feeling motivated and suddenly feeling the AHA of knowing exactly what we need to do next. It is the place of being guided and trusting life and then we KNOW what our answers are. We suddenly meet the person who has the exact information we are looking for, we have dreams that give us the theory of relativity like Einstein experienced, or we see an ad for a program we just KNOW we are supposed to take.
Discovery Circles create the context for the mind to take a back seat so that our soul and our spirit can be connected once again to inspiration. It moves us to the place where inspired thought lives. Inspired thought and inspired action are the place where we are connected to the field of consciousness that some scientists are now naming the ‘mind of God’. We become connected to the field of all potentiality, in essence, we are once again tapped in to the Source of all Creation.
We become stuck in our lives because our mind cannot comprehend Spirit. Our mind can observe and witness Spirit, but it cannot comprehend it. We all have inspired thoughts all the time, but because the mind cannot comprehend the thought, it disregards it. An inspired thought might be to drop by a friend’s house at 2:00 in the afternoon. Our mind knows they are not usually home at this time, so it disregards the thought and we later find out our friend was at home having a bad day and could have used our company. Inspired thought does not follow a rational or logical pattern, yet it is what can move us to the place we are meant to be precisely because it is not logical and does not follow a pattern. I have heard that Reg Revans, one of the founders of Action Learning, once said that if you want to build a bridge, you don’t invite an engineer. It is the engrained certainty of feeling like an expert in a certain area that blocks creativity and inspiration. In the energy of expertise, the mind feels like it knows all it needs to know and it blocks inspiration.
When small groups of people, who may even be strangers, gather together to problem solve and no one is an expert in how to solve another’s problem, then the setting is ripe for an exploration that leads to inspiration. This is what Discovery Circles create; the perfect atmosphere for inspiration, AHA moments, and fresh perspectives because it creates the context for shifts in consciousness to occur and opens us up to more possibilities.
Action Learning puts mind-in-heart awareness into action. When the mind knowledge is held within the power and love of the heart we are in the place of being open to inspiration. Mind in heart awareness allows inspired thought to lead and we suddenly discover the grace within which we are held. We get our answers, we move forward, we feel connected to ourselves and to the greater web of life that holds us and loves us all of the time. We feel like we just experienced a miracle. We open ourselves to the power of grace-filled moments and it feels like something magical just happened, because it did. We stepped forward into change and uncertainty in a safe and inspired way and discovered exactly what we needed.

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