This page is divided into two parts, the first section addressing my personal awakening to the wisdom of the BodySelf, the second with bodywork in one on one sessions.
The Transcendental Meditation (TM) courses of the 70's combined mantra meditation (soundwork), asanas (yoga postures), and pranayama (breathwork). We would begin with 10 minutes of asanas, 10 minutes of pranayama followed by 40 minutes of mantra meditation, spending three hours each morning and evening following this procedure, with twice daily sessions of group meditation, of up to several hundred or more at times, scheduled throughout the day.
Powerful transformative events were triggered in me (all of us there) that took years (decades) to integrate. In the section on light, I mentioned that during the course my body became increasingly agitated and heated. As a consequence of the arousal of energy in my spine, for days my head would rapidly and repeatedly turn side to side unable to integrate the energy in my body. One morning, I awoke with an extremely sore neck and was unable to move my head at all without experiencing extreme pain.
I sat up to meditate in bed, my body resting against the wall with my head nesting on a pillow, bemoaning my fate. As I sat in meditation and in pain, without my conscious knowing a process innate to the practice of yoga gradually took hold of my awareness. For several minutes, my neck had been moving side to side in the slowest possible way one could imagine, the complete opposite of what I had been experiencing for the past several days.
By the time I knew what was happening, my neck had already regained an inch or so of rotation on each side, with no pain involved. A natural intelligence of the body to heal itself, to 'unwind' the neck in this case, had emerged from nowhere, a movement moving within itself. Over the next hour, guided by this inner healing intelligence, still moving in the slowest way, with my attention now fully absorbed in the movements, a full rotation of the neck without pain was completely regained!
Before this my yoga practice was in retrospect a mechanical, routine, goal oriented, boring affair. I was mostly 'in my head' counting every second, every minute, wanting the whole thing to be over. Now, whenever I practiced yoga I simply surrendered to that healing intelligence allowing it to guide me into my usual postures as well as ones that were new to me. I was completely absorbed in the movements with no thought of time or outcome, healing and relaxing me more than I thought possible, even more than I had in meditation.
As with sound, a few years after the course ended, the practice of yoga gradually ended altogether but what I had learned and experienced then, resurfaced soon after I began to explore various hands on approaches to healing. The body itself became a teacher. I soon discovered that your body contains your entire personal history. And unlike the mind, the body cannot tell a lie.
Bodywork
After a few years of healing work, I had developed several approaches to working on the body, centered around light, breath, sound and touch. The energy of light along with that of breath and sound had upon contact with the three main body centers awakened a multiplicity of qualities that could only be described as virtues or essences. Buried beneath the injuries, wounds, traumas that were experienced in infancy and childhood, were deep pools of peace, joy, power, love, courage, beauty, and so on that clients began to access and integrate into their lives.
Both my clients and myself were experiencing these virtues during session. The tendency was for them to see it as a result of what I was doing. I saw it as a result of both of us relaxing and getting out of the way so that these naturally arising qualities could come into manifestation. I concluded that bodywork was a way to help them experience themselves more fully, which was all I was doing regardless of the method of healing the body. I saw them for who they really were and not for who they thought they were. Big difference.
I discovered that most of us are starved for touch, having been deprived of that since childhood. Consequently, people were out of touch with themselves, at the mercy of unconscious, unresolved forces that lay buried beneath the conscious activity of the mind which had split off from the body. Bodywork was a way of restoring the life of the body to a place equal to that of spirit. This was a total reversal of the spiritual statement that "I am not my body" as if the body were an impediment to spiritual growth. Instead people were discovering their bodies to be windows to the universe.
Curiously, clients were exhibiting a wide range of visions that were way beyond their normal experience. Sometimes the body would appear as a rainbow of color, at other times, it would be perceived as a deepening silence with breath arising in its midst, only to change again into a harmonic of sound. It all depended on what lens you were looking through, with all having equal value. Our bodies are literally a created from light, breath and sound which are intimately related to one another.
Light | Color ~ Breath | Energy ~ Sound | Voice ~ Touch | Movement
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