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.

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.