Heart and Targus

On my way home from co-teaching a post-graduate Craniosacral Biodynamics seminar in Switzerland with my husband, Franklyn Sills, I feel inspired to write about an insight I had during the class. The seminar was entitled Awakening the Heart. At one point, as I was introducing the class to a presentation on the embryological development and energetic ignition of the heart, I spoke of how the presentation was not entirely in chronological order. I invited the class to enter a time machine with me. Someone commented, “The Targus!” This remark delightfully led me to a new way of looking at the heart and it mysterious functions. I heard myself explaining that the heart, like Dr. Who’s Targus, was in some ways bigger on the inside than the outside.

The physical heart in the adult is about the size of a fist. Its effects, however, are so much bigger! The heart rhythms are now known to affect a person’s ability to regulate emotions, to be healthy, socially relational and intuitive. The research of the Institute of Heartmath (www.heartmath.org) shows that when the heart rhythms are coherent or chaotic, the entire system tends to follow suit. The heart produces important hormones and has its own nervous system, sending more neural information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. There is much more inside the heart than the blood and muscle we can feel and see!

When we look at the embryology of the heart, we begin to understand its remarkable relational ability to sense and be connected with what is far outside its walls. The blood and cells forming the heart begin developing on the outside of what becomes the actual embryo body, within the structures that become the umbilical cord and placenta. From the beginning, these cells are reaching out to make relationship with mother, to connect with her blood and glands in order to receive nourishment necessary for survival and growth. These cells travel through the embryo, feeding primarily what will develop into the brain and nervous system, pausing at the cranial end before returning to their extra-embryonic source. Where this pause occurs, the heart begins to form. In the fourth week, the faster growing nervous system expands as the embryo folds forward. In this process, the heart meets the energetic heart center. An energetic ignition occurs and the heart begins to beat.

In the little embryo, the heart is huge. This “heart bulge” can be viewed in the very center, or heart, of

the embryo. The rest of the body grows around it, and eventually it seems smaller as it rests within the chest. It remains through life, however, an essebtuak influence on our physiology and relational presence.

While the physical heart in adults is not huge, the energetic field of the heart is the biggest of any organ in the body. The heart’s bio-electrical field has an amplitude about 60 times greater than that of the brain. The bio-magnetic field generated by the heart is over 5000 times greater in strength than the field of the brain. It can be sensed several feet away from the body. We might say the heart is much bigger on the outside than it is on the inside! Perhaps, it is an inverted Targus…

Apparently involved in intuitive processes, evidence suggests “the physical heart is coupled to a field of information not bound by the classical limits of time and space,” and has been found to receive and process information about events before they actually occur! (from 2014 article by founders of Hearthmath, Rollin McCraty and Doc Childre, The Intuitive Heart, p. 11).  Like the Targus, the mysterious heart seems to have abilities to reach forward in time, or at least to be receptive to what the future may be offering. The work of Heartmath shows that such abilities are supported by simple acts of heart awareness, like breathing into the heart or feeling it beating. When we listen to the heart, we are more likely to receive its wisdom. We begin to settle into more coherent heart rhythms, which we can also enhance by orienting to what we appreciate or feel grateful for. We might begin by appreciating our hearts, which have been beating since four weeks after we were conceived!

If the fields of the heart are so big and so connected with other fields, it is not much of a stretch to see that tending to your own heart can benefit not only you, but also all those around you. Heart coherence can enhance our empathy, compassion and understanding of others. In the seminar last week, we explored the effects of early history and the profound healing possible when we establish safety within the relational field between two people with an intention to deepen together. As the little ones within us begin to perceive safety, we can settle under the old wounding, emerging into presence. We can settle into resonance with universal formative forces and re-create ourselves within an infinite field of love.

Death, Birth and Living: A Continuum of Being

Emerging from a three-day Continuum “dive” into fluidic being with a group I was facilitating, along with similar groups around the world, I feel inspired. This kind of dip into the depths of fluid being often stirs my creative juices. I feel moved by the resultant surge within. I feel touched by the challenges, as well as the healing and epiphanies, of those moving together in this powerful group field these past three days.

I found myself explaining to the group about the importance of death in Continuum. The snake or serpent informs us. Letting go, dying to the past, is essential for meeting the present. Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, in whose honor this three-day event occurred, would remind us that a molting snake needs to drink plenty of water for its skin to fall off. In Continuum, we deepen into liquidity, where the effects of the past can melt away, leaving us free, naked and fluid to meet what arises.

With our scars melted, their stories may emerge. As our tissues soften their guard, we may feel the pain they have been protecting. Our grief, fear, anger, resistance to life in its many forms, our deepest beliefs, patterns, habits, addictions all may come to the surface as the waters clear.

Here, I am informed by my many years of Vipassana meditation. I was trained to understand that clarity, purification and our deepest essence of love become available when we observe all that arises, pleasant or unpleasant, with equanimity. Our tendency is to yearn for pleasant sensations and avoid unpleasant.

In Continuum, which I see more as an exploration in mindfulness than movement, we practice being with what we experience. We call this “open attention.” We do something to stir the waters first, a vocalized sound, a breath, a subtle intentional movement, and then we listen. How does the body receive the gift we just offered it? Usually, the gifts are aligned with fluid’s natural expression through waves, pulsations and spirals. For example, we might move our elbows, like wings or fins, in a slow pulsatory fashion, while making a soft sound. The vibration of the sound in the tissues can loosen them a bit. Where they have become tight and dense due to the speed and focus of everyday life, compounded by unresolved trauma and shock from the past, they begin to move. We begin to emerge from a frozen, paralytic state into the movement of life.

As we begin to thaw and melt, the past may haunt us. Our frozenness may even present itself more clearly. Somewhere along the path of deepening into being, we undoubtedly will encounter a sense of death. We may find ourselves lying in a stillness we craved or avoided unconsciously for years. Where it may have been associated with danger in the past, our terror may arise. We want to run out of the room, go listen to music, answer emails, watch television, do a quick text, run for a mile, dance madly, anything to get away. We might ask, “if this is a movement workshop, why am I just lying here?”

Sometimes, the deepest, most important movement is in stillness.

What emerges from the stillness? Can we let the fear go enough to be in curiosity? Even for a moment? This is a sign of mindfulness. Witness state gives us space to be. Being with rather than being our fear or our past enables us to move on. Movement arises. Life arises. Like the phoenix arising from its ashes, something new is born.

Nothing can be born without something dying. A new baby is born when the pregnancy dies. Life in

the womb must end for life outside it to begin.

Even if we long to return to the womb, or to have had a better time there, our mission and purpose is beyond it. We will not be happy until we have let go of the placenta, for only then can we fully embrace life after birth.

Letting go can feel like hell! When pain and discomfort arise in Continuum, it can be surprising and

confusing. The slow, subtle spirals and stretches arising as our tissues melt can be so delicious! How can something that feels so good also include such unpleasantness? The important question may be, how can it not?

Years ago, I studied with body-centered psychotherapists, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks. One of the many lessons I learned from them was about what they call “The Upper Limits Problem.” The idea is that we all have limits to how much of a good thing we can allow ourselves to experience, because of various influences. When we get too close to our limit, we tend to sabotage ourselves. We might become ill, go blank or foggy, have an urgent crisis arise in our lives, suddenly remember an work deadline we must attend to, discover we don’t have enough money to do what we were about to do, or our back goes out and we can’t move. Whatever form the sabotage takes, it stops us from going beyond the limit. It keeps us in our familiar comfort zone.

I have seen these kinds of events arise so often for people wanting to attend a Continuum workshop! Within a workshop or a dive, I have experienced in my own body and seen in others, on a more somatic level, how we can interrupt the pleasure of a deep flow by focusing in on what arises within it.  

Perhaps the biggest, most important challenge in Continuum (and in life) is to float what we experience within the larger ocean of being. Can we be with what arises? Can we be? Can we allow? Can we be curious? Can we ask ourselves in the moment of questioning, “what else is possible here?”

In that moment, through the very act of wondering, our pattern can die a little more and something else is born.

We emerge into life in a way we probably never have before. Welcome!

Mother Loss

My mother died on July 21^st. There is finality to that statement. At the same time, I have such a strong sense of the continuity of my mother, or at least of something that relates to her being and her life.

I had been prepared for her death, as much as one can be. I had been expecting it. I had been trying to gage when it might happen so as to be present with her in that important moment. In the end, the most challenging aspect of her passing was that it happened as my flight was leaving London Heathrow to take me to be with her in Vancouver, Canada. It felt like all my attempts to be the perfect daughter, and to be with her in significant moments, were in vein. She left before I got there, before I could have possibly have gotten there.

The disappointment and sense of failure softened over the days. Help came from kind offerings from supportive others, like the thought that she may have intentionally left before I arrived to make it easier. People often die in that moment when their loved ones leave the room for food or to relieve themselves. It is said to be too challenging for some to leave while in the presence of those attached to them. As someone who had loved and was loved by many of the caregivers at the care home where she lived, my mother died peacefully in solitude during the night, discovered at 2 a.m.

Did she leave, however? When I arrived 11 hours later, I felt compelled to lay my head on her shoulder and hold her, as I had wanted to, perhaps as I had yearned to all my life.  I was startled to feel her body moving. I sensed a rhythmical movement, similar to that of breathing, though more subtle. As a Craniosacral practitioner, accustomed to sensing very subtle, slow rhythms, this did not feel so subtle to me! When my father had passed, two and a half years earlier, I had sensed subtle energies and rhythms receding as I held him shortly after his death. This was different. I checked visually to see if my mother was indeed still breathing. She was dead. Her body was getting colder the longer I stayed with her, but there was an undeniable sense of breath. Others, too, had thought they had seen her breathing as they sat with her body.

Perhaps even more surprising was the story of the night nurse the night following her death, when her body had been removed. Apparently, the call bell from my mother’s now empty bed rang repeatedly through the night. Each time the nurse turned if off, only to have it call her again later. Finally, she went into the room and said, “Hello Ruth.” After that, the call bell was silent. The irony is that my mother didn’t know how to work the call bell. Perhaps she had figured it out finally and wanted us all to know!

Death is a gateway, reminding us of the mystery from whence we come.

Death and Birth

Being with my mother’s dying, I was acutely aware of an intense longing to be with her. I just wanted

to cuddle in with her, to support her in passing through the gateway peacefully. Seeing her face 11 hours after the fact, I could see the peace had been there. Her friends and attendants assured me she had been peaceful the last few days of her life. I was grateful for that.

Still, the craving to hold her and be physically close with her haunted me. From my extensive studies in prenatal and birth psychology, I recognized my feelings. They were what every newborn wants and needs in relation to mother. When I was born, I was whisked away from my mother and kept in a nursery for several days, as was the custom in the fifties. My mother used to tell me how she had been given a “whiff of something” and did not remember anything of the birth after that. We had both been essentially unconscious for the big moment of my arrival. Years later, I understood that potential source of the challenges we had experienced in our relationship.

As my mother lay alone in her bed after my birth, unable to get to know her new baby, she felt lonely and longed to be with my three-year old brother, Gary. When I was three days old, she cried with what she as a nurse recognized as the usual post partum blues, and spoke to Gary on the phone to soothe herself. We now understand that new mothers become depressed after being separated from their newborns, their bodies reacting as if the baby has died. There is a natural physiological grieving, often without understanding its source. Interrupted by this separation, bonding may be difficult when mother and baby reunite.

On this day of my mother’s depression, she asked the nurses how her baby was in the nursery. She was told her baby was crying non-stop. My mother convinced the nurse to bring the baby to her, even though it was not a scheduled feeding time. She fed the poor baby, wondering at how much her face had changed in such a short time. Baby was returned to the nursery until the official feeding time. When I was brought to my mother at that time, she eventually realized she had been brought a different baby earlier. The main point of the story when she used to tell it was that she had had enough breast milk to feed two babies. Super mama!

For me, however, the story had a different point. My mother, three days after my birth, didn’t even know what I looked like. How could we bond under those conditions? I felt as if we finally bonded just nine years ago when we danced at a family reunion. Since then, my sense of repulsion for my mother diminished, replaced by a growing desire to be close to her.

The longing I felt as my mother was dying, far away on another continent, resonated with the feelings of the newborn, desperately needing her mother, who felt as far away as the 5000 miles between London and Vancouver. All I wanted then, was to nestle into the mother I had been with all my life before birth. Nothing could compare with that familiarity, just as nothing ever will again in this life.

All of this came to me as I sat with my sadness on the plane. There was nothing I could do. Like the baby in the nursery, I was completely dependent on others to take me to my mother. I was surrounded by strangers, however kind, all of us in a artificial environment, high above the earth, perhaps comparable to the ungrounding effects of anesthesia my mother and I had both been recovering from back then.

Being with my early history with my mother in the days before I was able to get to the airport, I was shocked to hear the nurse explain that my mother was now on Scopolamine to enhance her comfort. I had already been wondering about my mother’s gradual decline in function through dementia as reflecting her own drugged birth process. Her mother had been given Scopolamine, then used in combination with morphine to induce “twilight sleep” in laboring women. I had learned many years ago that we tend to die as we are born. The resonances here were amazing! My mother and I both seemed to be re-living our births through her process of dying.

Love Heals All

A day or so after my mother passed, I began to feel her essence around me. I had been feeling upset, as I engaged with the shock and grief of her death, and having arrived too late. Suddenly, a wave of soothing love surrounded me. My upset shifted into peace. I was surprised, as I had been when sensing my father and brother after their deaths, at the form in which I experienced my mother’s presence. Actually, there wasn’t much form this time. I had the sense of my mother as pure love. Form was no longer important. This is what I had witnessed as she had deepened into dementia. As aspects of the personality I had known faded away, I experienced the loss and death repeatedly at different levels. All that remained towards the end was love.

As I was about to begin my Continuum dive this morning, I felt compelled to open the book of my beloved mentor, Emilie Conrad, who passed just three months before my mother, in April. The book opened to a description of the memories of pogroms and Nazis coloring the field of Emilie’s family. Having spent time stroking the bag of my mother’s ashes, sensing how these burned cells seemed to still hold some aspect of her, I was particularly struck by a quote in the book of how the Nazis had used the ashes of the Jews “as fill for swamp lands, as thermal insulation between the walls of wooden buildings…phosphate fertilizers; and… to cover the paths of the SS village located near the camp” (Conrad, p. 42).

The horror of the past can haunt us through what our cells and tissues absorb, even as they are forming in the womb of our mother. Accordingly, it seems different to lose mother, with whom we are so physically intimate from the moment of conception, or even as an egg many years earlier. Father loss is a slightly different story.

The wave of love I experience as my mother seems to transcend all this history. I read on in Emilie’s book as she writes,

“Movement behavior develops as we take on the history of our family nexus. Information is passed from generation to generation not only through stories, but also at the silent level. The imprints of wars, strife, prejudice, sexual events, meanings, and values are all registered and carried in our ‘field’ – recorded in the intrinsic somatic arena of breath, touch, and certainly the parameters we put around our ‘bodies’ and sensory responsiveness. The internalized inhibition of our movement and sensory domains is complex and far-reaching. We are shaped by our time, space, and condition. Our arrival becomes a continual layering of impressions and messages, both verbal and non-verbal, that becomes the implicate ambiance of all that we inhabit.”

                                                            -Emilie Conrad, Life on Land, p. 42

I am aware that my ambiance has changed. Engaging in my Continuum “dive” today, I sense the tissues softening their hold on the past. The tears flow. The diaphragm releases. The pain of holding in my back softens. I return to the fluidity of being, like the little one first encountering mother. I literally sense the ambiance of ancestral history melting as something new emerges. The love of that maternal wave, what I had longed for all my life, now free from historical bonds, embraces me, holds me, supports me. The path ahead awaits, offering more mystery. Welcome.

All Love, No Force

I had never before seen a religious person so radiant. The nun exuded joy and love, indicating to me true spirituality. One morning I exclaimed to her my appreciation of how joyful she seemed to be. Ah, she responded with an even deeper smile, I just came from praying. All love, no force. That’s what we say. I was amazed. That’s exactly what we teach! I told her.

The scene was a beautiful convent and retreat center in Italy where my husband, Franklyn Sills, and I taught a post graduate seminar last week in Craniosacral Biodynamics. Not far from where we landed in Bologna, we had driven up a winding road through a tiny village to emerge at this remarkable center. A joyful, heartful priest greeted us with his bits of English. The nun arrived soon after. I was immediately taken by her playfulness, as she smiled at us and hugged the priest. Each day, she greeted me with hugs and kisses. I may have never felt so loved and welcomed in my life!

Awakening the Heart

This seemed like the perfect context for our seminar, entitled Awakening the Heart. As I witnessed the clerics each day, I had no doubt that they lived with awakened hearts! The nun had expressed to me the essence of this practice. All love, never any force. I discovered this wise advice came from the teachings of St Francis de Sales, a mystical monk in the 1500s.

Love seems to me to be primarily about being with what is. Mindfulness is a practice of love. The nun reminded me of another nun I had befriended years earlier through month-long Vipassana courses, where we would sit in silence for thirty days at a time. The intention in these courses was to be present with whatever our experience was, directly observing the arising and passing away of thoughts, sensations, and feelings. Through this extended observation, I came to understand within my body, not just as a concept, the transitory nature of all things. My attachments became less important as their objects shifted in and out of reach.

Ooma was a companion in this observation. A petite nun originally from Cambodia, she donned tiny children’s thongs on her feet that were too small for adult shoes. I laughed to see the colorful Daffy Duck image peeking out from under her Buddhist robes. Ooma didn’t speak much English, but somehow we communicated through our hearts, laced with a bit of French. We seemed to recognize each other and felt a closeness on our shared path. Like the Italian nun, Ooma oozed of joy. Her heart was open to the passing of life. Her love was tangible.

The Deepest Prayer

In Italy, I was reminded of the place where I believe all religions meet. Those committed to deep spiritual practice, whether it be observation of sensations or praying to the Madonna, begin to loosen their hold on the everyday identity of personality, expanding into wholeness, oneness and truly loving being. This is a state we also aim for in Biodynamics. Can we be present with ourselves, our clients and whatever arises between us, opening to the guidance of the source we call the Breath of Life? This is a term coined by William Sutherland, founder of cranial osteopathy, whose work became more being and less doing in nature in the later part of his life. In his book, Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy, Sutherland declared:

 

“Visualize a potency, an intelligent potency, that is more intelligent than your own human mentality … You will have observed its potency and also its Intelligence, spelled with a capital I. It is something you can depend upon to do the work for you. In other words, don’t try to drive the mechanism through any external force. Rely upon the Tide”

In our Biodynamic seminars, we guide our students in settling their thoughts and  nervous system, intending to deepen and widen their awareness beyond everyday personality. In this less personal state, we can meet and hold our clients within a welcoming, accepting relational field. We practice being aware of our own reactions to what arises with an intention to be present in a supportive and compassionate way, rather than in a way we may think we are supposed to be. In short, we practice love. There are times when we sense our hearts cast open as we simply be with our client in the presence of the mystery of life.

Perhaps not surprisingly in the context of a seminar on the heart within a heart-centered spiritual community, I experienced this casting open last week. I was demonstrating a session in front of the class. As I put my hands on the demo client’s head, I suddenly felt such intense joy I found myself laughing out loud! Explaining my giggle to the client, she acknowledged also feeling a burst of joy as her heart opened in synchrony with mine. Many others in the room were also touched by this apparent wave of the Breath of Life caressing our hearts.

This transformation did not happen through any effort or force on my part. I simply settled into my heart with an awareness of me, client, and class being held and suspended within much larger, wider energetic fields. A similar heart opening tends to happen in Continuum classes and practice. After making a few sounds, breaths, and movements, I often sense my heart softening and expanding. It begins to feel as if it spans the entire length of my trunk, which is bathed in delicious indescribable sensations.

I have heard Continuum movers comment that their experience is better than making love. Perhaps, it is making love! Making love to ourselves and the planet, all at once. We are, as founder of Continuum, Emilie Conrad, noted, extensions of a planetary process. What we do with our own bodies both expresses and contributes to the planet. As we slow down, we resonate with subtle planetary rhythms. If we make love to ourselves, we must similarly be making love with the planet. If making love is really about being present with, accepting, welcoming and being with, Continuum, Biodynamics, and mindfulness are all about making love! Mama Earth may benefit from our practices, for how could we demolish her when we are in love? And could she be replenished with our loving care, her dead forests coming back to life, like paralyzed tissues in Continuum, or potency held within inertial conditional fulcrums in Biodynamics? There is a saying that love heals all.

Love Heals

When we arrived at the center in Italy, we were told there was a painting there of the Madonna that people came to for healing. Sitting with this powerful painting, and a beautiful sculpture of the Madonna outside, my heart opened again. I sensed exquisite radiance beaming through my body, igniting my heart, dissolving my personality. As I beheld the image of the miraculous mother, I realized I was taking in a powerful symbol of birth and rebirth, the mystery of the creative forces of life and love. The religious context became less important than the deeper symbolism.

I was reminded of Emilie Conrad’s teachings on the importance of being able to die, to shed our old skins like a molting snake, to let go of who we think we are in order to truly embody fluidity. Whenever we hold on, there is an element of rigidity. Letting go, we melt into what the next moment offers. Embracing the miracle of each moment, we equally welcome the arising of old traumas or other unresolved history, or the bubbling up of joy and laughter. All love, no force. Being without expectation. Welcoming what is. The mystery stretches its wings, emerges from its shell, and flies directly into our hearts.