Where Do I Begin?

Where do I begin? A single cell begins my life as a unique individual. Two cells, sperm and egg, meet to ignite this process. Knowing by mysterious bio-intelligence and millions of years of experience to let go of what is no longer needed and combine what is. We begin with the essentials of life.

How do I begin? Am I just a cell? The cell that begins me emerges complete with its experience from within mother, father, and cosmos. We might say that three sets of consciousness come together at the moment of conception: maternal, paternal, and whoever/whatever I may have been or experienced before. Call it karma, destiny, fate, miracle or just plain mystery. I am here. Can I celebrate this truth? Can I even acknowledge it?

We know from research in the field of prenatal and birth psychology that the conditions of our conception may affect our ability to embrace our lives, and new life, as it emerges. Our first transition is the transition into life, beginning with conception, reinforced by birth and later events.

Who am I? We may spend the first years of our lives trying to be like our parents and the remaining years attempting to be different. In the midst of that, who are we? Are we ever ourselves? What did I bring with me into this life? The question emerges again: nature vs. nurture. Obviously, both are important.

Watching a fascinating TED talk recently by medical doctor Siddhartha Mukerjee, I am reminded of the importance of both our beginnings as a cell and the environment we find ourselves in. Mukerjee points out that medicine has been influenced by the discovery of antibiotics 100 years ago to focus on finding a medicine to cure dis-ease. Sometimes that works and often it doesn’t. More recently he notes medicine has shifted its attention to the immune system as an important factor in dealing with illness. A step further takes medicine to concentrate on the cell and its environment. Returning to our source.

Returning home to our beginnings. We are cells. Communities of cells that have grown from the one cell which began us, within the environment it began in.

I am touched by this talk because it underlines the intentions of all the work I so passionately engage in: Continuum Movement, Craniosacral Biodynamics, Prenatal and Birth Therapy, Somatic Mindfulness…

My mentor, Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement, spoke of “moving medicine.” A primary intention of Continuum as I understand it is to support movement in creating a different environment, a medicine involving a different context, for our growth and development. We use breaths, vocal sounding, fluid movement and mindful awareness to inquire into what might lie beyond our patterns and habits. How can we let go of whom we think we are, how we have always functioned, our habitual behavior, allowing something else to emerge?  How can we soften the inhibitors we have developed through our life experiences, returning to our essential fluid nature and its inherent resilience?

Altering our cellular environment for health. This could describe both Continuum and Craniosacral Biodynamics. Biodynamics is a gentle hands-on therapy derived from osteopathy, designed to facilitate slowing down, deepening under the conditioning of our lives, and returning to our slow, essential subtle energetic pulsings of life. The Breath of Life. Again, as we support clients settling under their reactions to the speed and stresses of life and past traumas, the context or environment within which their cells are suspended begins to change. Instead of growing in relation to conditions, cells and tissues can re-orient to the original universal or “Biodynamic” forces, which guide our early formation as little embryos in the womb, providing an ongoing energetic map beyond and prior to the conditions of our lives. Melting on the treatment table or through Continuum loosens the hold on us of the forces of our history, traumatic memories, deviations from our essential nature.

The awareness developed through Prenatal and Birth Psychology and the holding field of prenatal and birth therapies can also create a new, healthy context in which to dissolve and re-form. Therapy can be a form of re-parenting. As well as developing insight as to the early origins of our issues, we can shift our relationship to those primal conditions in which we formed. Guided in therapy to slow down, orient to resource, and attend to our current, more supportive environment, the overpowering effects of our past begin to diminish. We return to the love and intention we came in with, letting go of our attachment to what may have occluded them along the way. Our cells can shine again as we embrace life anew.

Where do we begin? Where do we begin this time?

What Else? Addressing Trauma with Continuum Movement

I have been inspired lately reading Bessel van der Kolk’s recently published book, The Body Keeps the Score. Highly readable, this specialist in working with trauma describes his journey involving surprising discoveries and research into the neurobiology of trauma and how to effectively work with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). One of the chapters most fascinating to me is on how profoundly helpful yoga can be for those suffering from PTSD. I would love to see similar research done with Continuum Movement. 

I have been consistently impressed by how valuable Continuum can be as part of one’s journey in healing trauma, both in classes and, perhaps more surprisingly, in Skype sessions. In my workshops and classes, I am touched by how participants begin to relate to their experience differently once they’ve had a chance to deepen into the practice of Continuum. For example, they might comment on how the old familiar fear or pain came up but, instead of being overwhelmed by it, they were able to acknowledge it was there, remember an important question in Continuum of ”What else?” meaning “What else is possible here?” Being in the slow, fluid pace of Continuum, with enhanced space around their experience, they were more in a witness state, and were at choice about how to interact with their experience. They could then remember and try some of the breaths and sounds of Continuum that are particularly useful in shifting patterns and habits.

This freedom of choice is a key aspect of healing our trauma. Whatever happened to us happened. We cannot change that. We all have the history we have. It has influenced us and will continue to be available to us as part of our perspective and understanding of life. We do not however, need to be at the mercy of our history. Our trauma doesn’t need to rule us. Once we begin to create space around it, our relationship with it can begin to change.

This is where a mindfulness approach is so helpful in working with trauma. Research shows how mindful observation changes our neurobiology. Trauma often leaves us with an over-active amygdala. This important part of the limbic brain acts like a sentry, always on guard for any hints of the next attack or threat. When it detects danger, it signals other parts of the nervous system to prepare, setting off a stress response. Our sympathetic, fight flight system is activated, ready for the worst.

Image by BruceBlaus. Blausen.com staff. "Blausen gallery 2014". Wikiversity Journal of Medicine. DOI:10.15347/wjm/2014.010. ISSN 20018762. (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This reaction is of course useful when there is actually danger present. The problem occurs when the amygdala and associated sympathetic nervous system are repeatedly or continuously activated, so that the person is hyper-vigilant and unable to relax. With this defensive system active, it becomes difficult to accurately perceive friendly social impulses. For example, a child I treat immediately reacts violently if another child accidentally brushes her shoulder. Once she has recovered, she feels ashamed of her outburst. In that activated state, she is unable to differentiate between friendly or accidental gestures and actual hostility or threat. This requires a different part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex, which can calm fear, regulate emotions, and stimulate the social engagement nervous system. Without its support, it becomes almost impossible to have friends.

Mindfulness has been noted to settle the amygdala and activate the pre-frontal cortex. This effectively brings the person more fully into present time, where it is possible to accurately access friendly vs. threatening approaches.

I consider Continuum to be a mindfulness practice. We begin each session with some time in a “baseline,” where we observe our starting point in relation to our breath and ground. We note the qualities of the breath, where it moves in the body, how easily our tissues move with the breath. We also attend to the places where our bodies make contact with the surface we are on. To what extent are we able to rest or yield into the support of gravity, or do we resist and pull away from that support? How much of the body is resting or making contact? This quality of mindful observation can shift our neurobiology.

This, however, is just our beginning. We then enquire with various breaths, sounds and movement, practicing being aware of the sensations they invoke in our bodies as we explore with them. Can we sense the vibrations of an “O” sound, for example? Where do we sense it? How much of the body is resonating with it? This is an indication of how fluid or densified the tissues are. After practicing, we return to our baseline to check how things may have changed. Often, we find our tissues have softened. We have melted more into the floor. Our breath is slower, easier and fuller. We feel remarkably alive, refreshed and relaxed.

Our practice of Continuum has a major effect of slowing us down. When we are drawn into our trauma patterns, we tend to accelerate. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, has referred to the “trauma vortex,” where we are pulled into the trauma history or pattern quickly, often before we even realize it is happening. Slowing down can help us to be more at choice in this process. Our perception widens. We can remember what supports or resources us in the midst of our conditions. In Continuum classes, I advise participants to notice when their movement speeds up or is familiar or repetitive. These are times to intentionally slow down, ask “What else?” and apply certain sounds, breaths and movements that can interrupt the pattern.

These kinds of tools can be empowering. Not only do we come more into presence and present time as we mindfully observe our experience; we also can operate less on automatic and habit. We have more freedom to make different choices, which can lead to different outcomes. The result includes changes in not only the nervous system, but also our tissues and our lives.

Emilie Conrad, Founder of Continuum Movement

Photo by Cherionna Menzam-Sills

Birthing Ourselves

It is spring. Baby chicks and bunnies have presented themselves as symbols of birth through the Easter holidays. Tulips and daffodils have been pushing their beautiful heads up through the earth to make their appearance in our gardens. The vegetable gardens are being planted with great care and enthusiasm. The earth is turning green again.

As I write this, I am on a train heading to the little town of Stroud, UK to teach a Continuum Movement workshop, inspired by the developmental movements of the birth process. I cannot help but perceive them occurring all around me! The baby coming through the birth canal senses the uterine and vaginal walls pressing against her delicate skin. Her time of simply resting and growing in the watery world of the womb is quickly passing. Her little head pushes and reaches into the opening in front of her, as waves of contractions meet her little body, washing her out into the unknown. Whether that time in the womb was entirely pleasant or overwhelmingly traumatic, what lies ahead includes unknowns.

How often do we encounter a similar sensations in our lives? I watch the children I work with, as well as my step-daughter, moving towards the end of their school year, accompanied by fears and anticipatory excitement about the unknowns of moving to a new school, a different college program, entering the work world are soon to bring. It is as if the waves of their lives are propelling them forwards, in concert with their own hopes and ambitions.

As a Continuum Movement teacher, I witness and participate in the enormous transition as we completed last month one year since our dear mentor, Emilie Conrad’s, passing and explore what and how we can co-create within this new field of the unknown. Like a serpent shedding its skin, we find the old form dry, tight and sticking in some places while we fluidly slither into naked being in the mystery.

Just one week ago, I returned home from sorting through the last bits of my mother’s life after her passing in July last year. Another wave of grief combines with the one from losing Emilie, as well as the relief that my time of working hard to take care of her affairs from 5000 miles away is essentially done. A new phase of life seems to be replacing the more familiar one of the last few years. I wait upon the threshold of this new life, letting go, letting go, letting go. No need to fight the forceps, the doctor’s timing, or the anesthesia with this birth. Skins upon skins are being released. I remember Emilie speaking of how snakes need to drink a lot of water when shedding their skin. I drink. I practice Continuum to deepen into fluid being. I observe the shifts as life morphs once again.

It is spring. Dare we to believe we know who we are? Do we want to carve ourselves in stone in this way? Or do we take the risk of letting go of what we know so well (and perhaps complain about so often) to make room for the new, the unknown. The promise awaits us, beckoning as the days lengthen and the flowers bloom. Can we have the courage, like the flowers emerging from underground darkness into the sunlight, to give that important push against the earth? That push that frees us, differentiates us, determines us from all we have known in the past? What is it you would create or welcome into your life if you were not so burdened with that one thing (or more) you hold so tightly onto?

It is Spring!

It is spring! The bulbs in front of my studio are presenting their colorful flowers for the first time since the studio was completed just as the darkness of winter was descending.

A few days ago I received an email from a Continuum Movement teacher, acknowledging the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. She wrote that it was just before Passover officially began last year, that our dear mentor, Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum, passed away. In our modern calendar, the date was April 14^th. The teacher pointed out that Passover marks the passage of the Jews out of their life of slavery in Egypt. The waters parted for them to cross over the river into the wide open future of the unknown. This is freedom! She noted that the Hebrew word for Egypt implies narrowness. Liberation from slavery opened previously unavailable possibilities, a true widening of potential.

As I read the email, I began to think about Easter, as Good Friday was about to happen. I thought about how Jesus died on that day, and how on Easter Sunday a great miracle followed, as unexpected, unhoped for life came forth. This is spring!

We think of spring as being about new beginnings, new growth; yet, each birth involves a death. Spring can only come forth when winter dies! When we are born, our life in the womb ends. When a dear one passes on, we grieve and our hearts potentially open in new ways.

Perhaps, at this time of year, we can be reminded of our original potential, still waiting to be tapped. Anything is possible. It is spring! New birth is everywhere; why not in ourselves?

As I move into spring, I notice my tendency to try to do too much, threatening my health and well-

being. As much as I love all my work, I am reminded of the need for rest, for practicing what I preach! I am so fortunate to be immersed in a life of teaching people how to slow down and be present, reminding me repeatedly of the need and possibility to do the same.

Every time I give a Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy session, I am supported by the presence of what we call the Breath of Life in meeting the miraculous nature of our being. Every time I teach a Continuum class, I am blessed to feel the cells in my body breathing, the tissues letting go, the spaciousness and fluidity of being welling up within me. With every client session and workshop addressing early prenatal and birth trauma, I feel grateful to have this awareness of how our early wounding can occlude our potential, and how we can return to it through awareness.

This ode to spring is sounding like a Thanksgiving note! How can I not be grateful? Will you join me? Happy Spring!