A Continuum of Being

It has been some time since I have written in this blog. I have been taking time to honor my relationship with my dear mentor, founder of Continuum Movement, Emilie Conrad, who passed away two weeks ago on April 14^th.

You may have seen the beautiful tribute to Emile on the Continuum website at www.continuummovement.com or with my own tribute on my Facebook page. If not, please take a look.

Having had some time to be with the waves of grief and gratitude of this sacred time of transition, I find my feelings still arising and passing away but with less intensity. It has been such a rich time for me, and many other teachers and lovers of Continuum. 

Personally, I have been amazed by the sense I have had of Emilie’s ongoing, yet changed, presence. It is as if she need no longer squeeze her brilliance into the small body she had traveled in for almost 80 years. Now, her spirit is free to interact with all of us, no longer bound by the time-space continuum. I am haunted by her question, “If we were not bound in time, would we be susceptible?” Would we be susceptible to the influences of our environment, our history, our mindset, etc. Would we be affected by germs, dis-ease, genes, and such?

It was shocking for many of us that such a vibrant, fluid, flexible, strong and resilient being as Emilie could become ill and die. What does it mean? What does it say about Continuum? Emilie worked so many years to live, and teach others to live, beyond the constraints of time. Yet, in the end, she, too, was susceptible.

It is not so simple, however. Emilie had an illness anyone else would have died of months or maybe years before she did. I am reminded of my own experience with a malignant melanoma several years ago. As my wonderful doctor cut out the melanoma, I wondered aloud why I had gotten it when I had been Macrobiotic for many years. Macrobiotics has been touted as the anti-cancer diet. She responded without hesitation, imploring me to think how it might have been if I hadn’t been macrobiotic all those years. We might have been doing much more complicated surgery, not just limited to this bit of skin.

Similarly, Emilie amazed many by how well she could function with her illness. Until shortly before she passed, Emilie was graciously teaching classes. Her brilliant mind and fluid movement continued to astound her students. How did she do that? What may be a more important question is, can we do that? If I can be half as brilliant as Emilie when I grow up (?), I will be ecstatic!

It is not really about measuring our brilliance. Each of us is magnificent in our own way. I, like many others, was particularly attracted and attached to Emilie’s particular light, and remarkably, I still feel guided by it!

Continuing Wave

As a somatic practitioner, it is my habit to sense my bodily sensations, even as I do other things, like write this blog article. Since Emilie’s passing, I have frequently felt a specific sense of tingling on my skin, into my tissues. I feel it particularly strongly when I practice Continuum, and when talking or writing about Emilie and Continuum. I think of it as the wave of Emilie continuing to move me.

In Continuum, we work with a sense of waves moving through us. We use different breaths, vocalized sounds and movements designed to soften the cultural inhibitors and patterns, allowing our inherent wave motion to resume and flourish where it may have been previously stunted. As Emilie has noted, water moves as waves, pulsations, and spirals. In Continuum, we seek to generate such movement as we slow down, deepen under our cultural, ancestral and historical conditioning, and return to our essential fluid nature.

It seems that Emilie, or the wave of Emilie, is no longer limited by her conditions. Or perhaps the condition of death has freed that wave to do its work in a bigger way.

On Monday, April 14^th, I was on a train on my way home from teaching a Continuum workshop in Brighton. I was enjoying the opportunity, in the inspiring wake of the workshop, to work on the book I am writing, inspired primarily by my time with Emilie. I found myself working on the final chapter, which relates to death and dying. I wrote quite a bit and felt pleased with the flow of the writing. A few hours after arriving home, I received the email notice of Emilie’s passing. I realized she must have died while I was on the train. The next day, I returned to the chapter to write more. Reading over what I had written, I was struck by the synchronicity with Emilie’s passing. I found myself writing about the sense that Emilie was still contributing to the book.

It is sad that Emilie has passed. Her wave, however, continues.

Love and Attachment

I first went to study with Emilie pushed by an urgent sense that I would die if I didn’t.  In retrospect, I remember Emilie insisting I get my huge mole checked by a doctor. She literally may have saved my life with that advice. In less obvious ways, however, I believe I was dying, lacking the juiciness I found waiting for me in Continuum. The night after I met her, I had a dream. I was giving birth and Emilie was the midwife.

I attended classes with Emilie regularly, even moving to Santa Monica to dive in deeper with her into the mysteries Continuum revealed. I found myself falling deeply in love with this remarkable woman. My heart opened and opened in ways I could never have imagined possible. I had called my work “Living from the Heart” for years and had taught ways to listen to our hearts, but I had never encountered anything that connected me with the heart the way Continuum did. As part of this opening, I felt completely enamored of my mentor, Emilie.

I had never been one to search for or even desire a guru or teacher. I had always had a strong sense of inner guidance and valued that source. Interestingly, Continuum was designed to provide just enough structure to enable us to listen to and follow our own rhythms. Emilie disliked external direction even more than I did and Continuum was testament to that attitude. I loved it!

I loved what I felt in my body as the tissues dissolved, spirals lifted me off the floor, my arms and legs floating effortlessly in cosmic space. I found something coming alive in me as I listened in every class to Emilie speak. I felt lit up, inspired, my mind eager as my body to embark on new, unfamiliar pathways, making unlikely connections that everyone delighted in.

As I dissolved into the field of Emilie, I found myself wanting to be close to her, like a little child with her mother. In the closeness, I found myself reflected, heard, discovered, seen, and something in me was seeded and grew.

Emilie wouldn’t have liked the mother image. In my work in prenatal and birth therapy, however, I had realized I had missed an important aspect of relationship with my own mother growing up. Around the time I started working with Emilie, I went to a family reunion where my mother and I danced together. It was, according to my mother, the first time she had danced since marrying my father. Hearing her say that, I suddenly understood what had been missing all my life. 

As a very somatic individual, I had never been met and reflected on that body level by my mother until we danced together over half a century later! I felt as if I had never attached to my mother until that moment when we danced, finally gazing into each others’ eyes like mom and babe. Emilie, on the other hand, reminded me of whom I was in body and in mind. I was received, welcomed, celebrated by her eloquent expression of her own somatic experience.

There are many of us who fell in love with Emilie. Her sparkle was enchanting, enticing us to listen. Listen to the depths of our fluid being.

I feel as if I can never thank Emilie enough for the gifts she has imparted. The best I can do is to remain committed to carrying and passing on this powerful work she has brought to the world. I commit to living the love I still sense within the wave that was Emilie. As she would say as the final words to a workshop, “May a thousand kisses fall upon your lips and keep falling and falling and falling.” May the wave continue and continue and continue and may we all be open to receive its glow.

Resurrecting Your Life: New Beginnings

Resurrection is a strong word. I was surprised, myself, when I saw it emerge on the page. Resurrecting your life implies it has been dead. Is it true?

Of course, you say, I must be alive or could not be reading this page. Well, on one level that’s true. On other levels, it may be that aspects of you have been dead or as-if dead for a long time. How do we resurrect what may have been dead, when we may not even be aware of its deadness? Or its existence?

These are important questions. Just as significant may be the question of how aspects of us may have died or shut down in the first place.

In previous blog entries, I have referred to various early prenatal and birth events that may have left deep imprints on our personality, attitudes, beliefs, relationship styles and tendencies, as well as other habits and patterns in our lives. This is a common focus in the field of Prenatal and Birth Psychology, but, to me, it is important to also acknowledge and learn to access the potential of this early time in our lives.

When we are affected by very early trauma, we often lose touch with our earliest, most essential potential. Today I would like to talk about that potential and how it can benefit you now.

Enthusiasm and Potential

When little ones first come into being, they are propelled by an inherent life force, a kind of

enthusiasm for life. When we are not traumatized through our arrival process, we engage our lives with this attitude, strengthened by curiosity, playfulness and an urge to fulfill ourselves, whatever that may mean.

If you have ever attended a natural birth, where birth attendants acted only in support of natural birth process, rather than intervening out of fear or need to prevent distress, you will know what this inherent embracing of life can look like.

I remember the first birth I attended. Maya, the little girl so named because she was born on the first of May, shocked us all by immediately lifting her little head and looking around the room at each of us, almost before the rest of her body emerged. We were all deeply touched by her sweet eye contact. We felt an equal eagerness to meet this new little being amongst us.

Take a moment now, as you read this, to consider how you feel reading about this birth. Do you feel a resonant kind of enthusiasm for life? A curiosity? Amazement? Or do you have some other kinds of feelings? Doubt? How could a newborn have lifted her own head and looked around the room like that? Babies can’t lift their heads on their own. Newborns can’t see. This is nonsense. Babies can’t feel enthusiasm. Babies’ nervous systems aren’t developed enough to respond to a situation like this. It was just reflexive. These, by the way, have been the responses of otherwise sensible scientists and researchers who have not believed in the sentience of little ones.

What is your response? Do you feel awe? Do you feel anger? Sadness? Delight? Stress? Do you feel your feelings? Do you feel your body? How does it respond to this story? Is there tension somewhere? In your shoulders? Eyes? Back? Feet? Are you holding your breath? Check out what you are aware of in your body in this moment. What is it telling you?

How we respond to birth stories and reports can inform us as to our own early experience. Not feeling in your own body may relate to a dissociative experience when you were little or to a somatic re-enactment of anesthesia given to your mother at birth. Anesthesia is designed to stop us from feeling pain. This involves not feeling. We may learn at birth to react to stressful situations by similarly not feeling.

Dissociative Tendencies

Dissociation may be considered a kindness of nature to reduce the suffering of animals in distress. If a saber-toothed tiger is about to eat you and there is nothing you can do, it may be helpful to leave the sensations of your body and not have to feel the pain. As little ones, we usually don’t have other options available to us when under stress. We can try crying for mom, but, if that doesn’t work, we aren’t strong enough to fight or fly. We need to withdraw into dissociation to prevent full overwhelm. Unfortunately, once we have learned to react to a situation this way, we may automatically react to life stress the same way.

No matter how long we have practiced this dissociative pattern, our life energy, our life enthusiasm, remains beneath it. We might even appreciate the intelligence of a system that is capable of protecting essential life forces by causing us to withdraw from overwhelming stimulation of the senses. If you have tended to dissociate in your life, consider that this has been a survival mechanism. It has enabled you to get this far in life. It may not serve you today the way it did when you were little, but it was an expression of your bio-intelligence. You made it through whatever terrifying, painful or otherwise intolerable situation you may have encountered before you had a mature enough nervous system to process it, or before you had other defensive strategies in place to deal with it. Can you possibly find an appreciation or gratitude for this dissociative mechanism that kept you from being completely overwhelmed back then?

It is possible that you don’t have a tendency to dissociate. I am writing this as if you do because we live in a highly dissociative world culture in this 21^st century. In the modern western world, we are taught early on to ignore or distrust our bodies in favor of mental reasoning. We learn to cut ourselves off from our first order of experience – our sensations – and to jump ahead to interpretation, or to the interpretations of others.

Even if we have some ability to sense and be with our sensations, how likely are we to stay with them in the speed of everyday life? For example, as you read this, do you have a sense of your body? The internet is a wonderful way for us to connect across the world, but it also speeds us up beyond our biological capabilities. I am reminded of a comparison I once heard, that our brain to brawn (body) ratio when driving a car is the equivalent of that of a dinosaur! Remember, the dinosaurs are now extinct. They were not able to adapt to a new environmental situation. We may need to find ways to counter this brain to brawn ratio if we as a species are to survive. Do you sense your body when behind the wheel of a car? Do you sense it when watching television, talking on your mobile phone, playing video games, or in any of your other daily activities?

Sensing the body is now known to change our neurobiology. Parts of the brain develop more fully when we practice mindful awareness. I believe this can help counter a dinosaur-like brain to brawn ratio, as we learn to interact with events from the present time oriented, socially adept pre-frontal cortex of the brain and its related social engagement nervous system, rather than reacting automatically from a past fear-based orientation of the amygdala, the sympathetic fight-flight nervous system, or the parasympathetic freeze/dissociation nervous system.

Take some time to sense your body and breath as you read this. Feel free to pause in your reading until you feel settled in your breath. Let yourself be aware of what you sense in your body. Which parts of your body stand out for you in this moment? Do you tend to be most aware of areas of discomfort, pain, tension, holding? Are you able to orient to what feels ok or even good in your body? Take some time to scan your body, head, neck, chest, breath, diaphragm/stomach area, belly, pelvis, back, arms, hands, legs, feet. What stands out for you? What do you notice that surprises you? What do you tend to be aware of habitually? Can you challenge your habits a bit and guide yourself to notice areas or sensations you are not accustomed to noticing. This might mean noticing any sensations at all. Or it might mean sensing that little space between your right index finger and middle finger. Or where your neck meets your head. Or the base of your left big toe. What can you sense in this moment that is new for you?

Return to Potential

As we inquire as to what is new, as to what is in this moment, we begin to return to the potential of the little one. Coming back to Maya, everything in the room was visually new for her! She had not seen us before! She had not seen a room full of people, colors, shapes and forms before she was born.

In this newness, there is infinite potential. As we develop and mature, we make decisions. Our cells change in certain ways, even in the embryo, establishing that they will become heart cells or liver cells or skin cells, etc. Throughout life, we make choices and change in response to our life conditions in ways that tend to set us on certain paths. Other pathways become less apparent or available to us through this process. The more we repeat our same choices and decisions, the more rigidly we become set on our path.

Returning to the newness of each moment is one way to recover our early potential. We can do this through making conscious, aware choices, rather than acting automatically out of habit. Various mindfulness based practices support us in being present to each moment in ways that facilitate this kind of awareness in life.

If you know me, you already know that I tend to mention Continuum Movement as I find it such an effective and accessible practice for dissolving our patterns and coming into presence in each moment. Returning to the concept of resurrection, Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, has compared the fluidity we are capable of to a snake shedding its skin. Each skin represents a life or period of life being let go of. In order to resiliently meet each moment as it arises, we must relinquish each past moment. We must die and be resurrected again and again. Otherwise, we try to meet the current situation from a stance established for the past and not necessarily appropriate or helpful for the present.

Continuum is of course not the only way to practice death and resurrection. Any practice that really brings us into the moment will facilitate our ability to be present and will take us that much closer to our original potential.

And in this moment, are you still aware of your breath? Your body? Your sensations? If you stay with them, what changes? How does the room look? What is new? How are you being resurrected in this moment? What is new? What is your potential?

After the New Years' Resolutions- Dissolving Your Manifestation Blocks

 As I write this, it is mid-February. New Years’ and its resolutions have come and gone. Winter gloom abounds. Here in Devon, non-stop rains have turned farmers’ fields into lakes and railroad tracks in junk piles. The dark days could be depressing, but the days are getting longer and occasionally the sun comes back out to remind us of what is possible.

In the light of winter, how do your New Years’ resolutions look today? Did you even set any? I’d like to talk today about how our goals and plans, like New Years’ resolutions, may run into roadblocks on their way to manifestation, and how these blocks may relate to our earliest history.

Many years ago, I took and then taught a course called DMA, later changed to Technologies for Creating. Through this course, I changed my life in many ways. Robert Fritz, the founder of DMA, had applied his experience as a musician to the phenomenon of creating what we want in life. He described three stages of the creative process: germination, gestation, and receiving. Years later, through doctoral studies in Pre- and Perinatal Psychology, I learned how our very early experience in the womb and birth can affect our ability to move through these stages. Lets look at how they may be affecting you.

The Path of Least Resistance

The first step in changing anything is awareness. If we are unaware of the problem, we won’t take action to change it. With increasing awareness, our options multiply. In his book, The Path of Least Resistance, Fritz described how we tend to follow the same path repeatedly. In automatic mode, we take the path of least resistance, leading us to where we are used to going. To create something new, we need to establish a new pathway. This requires paying attention and making different choices.

My current mentor, Emilie Conrad, states “the nervous system is a pattern addict.” It needs to establish patterns to enable us to function in our world. If I had to stop to create new neural pathways for each word I write, this blog would never reach you! It reminds me a bit of my efforts to speak French with a friend this morning. After years of not traveling that path, it now seemed quite overgrown! I had to weed out my newer Spanish vocabulary to find the dusty French. My brain was quite tired after twenty minutes of sorting through the mess for every sentence!

Our lives can be a bit like this. We know we are not happy. We decide we want something different. We are determined to have it be different, but the path of least resistance takes us back again and again to what we already know.

In this vein, New Years’ resolutions can become too much work very quickly. They fall away as we continue down the old path. The question is, how do we do something else?

In Continuum Movement, we practice slowing down, which enables us to become more aware and make different choices. We even ask the question, “What else?” What else is possible here? If my body always moves in the same way, what else could happen?

We may make supreme efforts in our lives to be more aware, to make different choices, to take a different path, but we keep finding ourselves back where we were. We might give up and say, I’ll try again next January!

Early Imprints

How might all this relate to our early history? I find it interesting that Fritz used the terms germination and gestation to describe the first two stages of creating. Germination refers to when we get an idea for something; we conceive of it. We may have abundant energy for it, bursting with enthusiasm as we begin down our new pathway. Some people, however, get stuck in their creative process right here at the beginning. They have trouble conceiving of what they want, of setting goals, of allowing themselves to even feel a longing for what could be. Fritz taught techniques for discovering your visions and defining them in practical, measurable terms. This can help us get over that first hump, but why does the hump occur?

We may have tried before to do something different and concluded after our failures that it isn’t possible. Some people, however, do not make this conclusion. I am reminded of holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who managed a positive attitude despite all odds in a concentration camp. I don’t know what Frankl’s conception, birth or early life were like. Based on years of experience working with prenatal and birth trauma, I imagine he was a wanted, welcomed baby who enjoyed some healthy bonding within his family.

Where we have suffered in our first creation, coming into this life, our early imprints tend to express themselves with each new beginning in our lives. Planned conception is a relatively rare event. Most conceptions are unexpected, even if the parents want a baby. There may be feelings of ambivalence, questions as to one’s ability to parent a child at this time, thoughts of abortion, or abortion attempts. Conception may have occurred through rape or within a fearful, violent environment of war or mental illness. How we relate to new beginnings, including setting new goals in our lives, can differ, depending on if we experienced rejection or warm welcome when we were conceived, when the pregnancy was confirmed and our presence discovered, or when we were born.

Even if we were conceived intentionally, we might not sense ourselves being welcomed for who we actually are. It is not unusual for couples to try having a baby to solve relationship problems, to manipulate a partner into marriage, or to try to have a boy or girl if they already have a child of the opposite sex. Children are also wanted to ensure continuation of the family line, take over the family business or fill in some other kind of gap. Children born into this field of expectation may find it difficult to be themselves and determine what they really want.

The subsequent stages of the creative process, gestation, and receiving, can also reflect your early history. Gestation refers to the time after conceiving your vision of what you want, when you may not notice much progress, like the bump of pregnancy that is initially too small to be seen. At some point, there is a quickening, when you begin to realize you are making progress. If you did not feel held and welcomed when your pregnancy was discovered, or through your time in the womb, you may not recognize signs of progress toward your goal. Or you may be plagued by feelings of hopelessness, self-judgment, and worthlessness. Do I really deserve to have this? Or you may unconsciously sabotage your own efforts, as a way perhaps to avoid the kind of pain you experienced when you were rejected or judged as a little one.

This theme can continue into the third stage, receiving. This relates to the time of birth and just after when the baby is received. How the parents or family receive the baby is not always joyous. For example, I remember being told many times that my father looked at me and declared how ugly I was! Babies with visible deformities are often met by shock, rejection and judgment. A girl born to parents wanting or expecting a boy can feel like a failure and may never feel able to be or have what she really wants. Babies can also be conceived through a secret affair, to be revealed by how the baby looks at birth. Even if the baby’s looks don’t give away the deceit, the fear, shame, guilt, or dissatisfaction they represent may follow them throughout life.

How we are received can affect our own ability to receive what we manifest in our lives. The perfect job or partner or opportunity may present itself to us and we don’t notice, are too busy or don’t allow ourselves for whatever reason to take it in. Or, we succeed in reaching our goal and, instead of celebrating and feeling satisfied, we focus on how it isn’t quite perfect, or we don’t deserve to have it, or we move on to the next thing so quickly we never really take in what we have accomplished. Sounding familiar yet?

Dissolving the Blocks

A first step in dissolving this kind of block is to be aware of it. Taking time to consider your early history, asking your parents about it if possible, recording it for yourself or telling others about it as a coherent story can help you to recognize its echoes in your life. It can also facilitate acknowledging this as your past, rather than who you are.

It is important to differentiate what has happened to you in the past from who are and what you are capable of now. Having the attentive reflection of a practitioner experienced in prenatal and birth therapy can be extremely helpful in sorting your history out while establishing on a somatic, cellular level a different kind of relational field, where you experience being welcomed, supported, acknowledged, celebrated for who you are.

There is so much to explore in this area. Please stay tuned for my next blog entry to continue on the journey!