New Beginnings: Letting Go

As we move into this new year, I must admit that 2014 was a challenging one for me. The year had an undertone for me of loss and letting go, as both my mother and my dear mentor, Emilie Conrad, were dying. Every time I saw my mother, I felt the pain of witnessing her condition and her mind deteriorate. I felt a similar sense of loss and helplessness as Emilie’s amazingly young, not quite 80-year old body suddenly was overcome by cancer. A shock wave passing through the community of Continuum teachers and practitioners continues to leave its mark as we explore what fluidity and resilience mean in this unexpected situation.

In the midst of these losses, my life provided some wonderful new experiences and people. I loved teaching Continuum in Ireland and my first trip to Italy. I was blessed with time to write over half of a book, which I hope to send to the publisher in 2015. My new studio/office was finally built in our garden. I felt myself deepening into my new life, relationship and family in the UK, finally feeling this become my home, after having moved here and married in 2010.

Yet, after my mother passed in July, I realized my entire time in this new country had been characterized by death and dying. Not only had I let go of my life in North America, including many belongings and habits, but my father who was very ill when I moved to the UK, died in a year and a half later. My mother’s inability to function became apparent once my father was gone, and I became responsible for her life and well-being. I let go of being the child and became the parent in our relationship.

When my mother passed, I realized on a new level how significant one’s relationship is with mother, regardless of how that relationship has manifested. Mother is a reference point from the very beginning of life. At conception, we are inside mother. Even before that, we are inside mother as a tiny egg, when she was just a tiny fetus herself. We were inside mother inside our grandmother! When mother passes, that reference point is gone.

Now, the year has also changed. Another reference point has changed. I’m aware all of this could sound quite depressing, and certainly I still feel some sadness writing of my losses. On the other hand, letting go makes way for what is new. As we let go of 2014, something else can arise in 2015.

This is the time of year people make resolutions. We are encouraged to focus on setting new goals. In an odd way, I feel strangely free. My life is no longer about taking care of my parents! I miss them, but I am now more available for other pursuits. All that I have let go of has also nourished and enriched me along the way. I enter this new phase of life with an open heart and curious mind. I move through yet another birth into a new life.

I imagine that as you let go of this past year, you may also have some sense of loss, even if it’s just of time. Another year has passed. What have you accomplished? What have you experienced? What has been important to you of this time? This is a good time of year to review our lives and orient to what we want to create and experience next. What do you want to birth in your life now?

May this coming year be a rich, peaceful, nourishing, creative and heartful time for all of us!

Embryo Earth and Cosmos: Cultivating Resonance and Resilience

 In our natural state, we are resilient, fluid beings, full of potential, like the early embryo. In the beginning, as simple cellular creatures, we consist primarily of fluid. One fertilized egg cell, the largest human cell due to its enormous amount of cytoplasm, will somehow, miraculously, develop into a very complex human body. What guides and directs this miracle remains mysterious. Research is beginning to demonstrate, however, what has always been understood by healers and intuitives. Our formation is informed by subtle energetic communications. We apparently form in light or quantum fields first and then in our physical bodies. These fields seemingly inform the cells and tissues, guiding their activities. For example, scientists observing frog embryos were surprised to witness the frog face forming energetically before it was visible in the physical embryo. You can view this yourself on You Tube at: http://youtu.be/0VULjzX__OM. Scientist Mae-Won Ho also discovered that simple unicellular organisms have a quantum field with a quantum midline, which reacts to changes in the environment before the physical organism does. She writes about this in her book, The Rainbow and the Worm. Other researchers, like the Austrian “water wizard,” Viktor Shauberger, and medical science researcher, Arthur Winfree, noted that everything in nature is organized within an energetic torus-shaped field or fields, each with a central mid-line. We humans are similarly organized within energetic fields.

 The late Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement, recognized through her almost fifty years of inquiry into our fluid nature, that all fluids resonate with each other. In introducing Continuum, she speaks of fluid in our bodies, fluid in the planet and fluid in the galaxy being “engaged in a resonant stream of bio-cosmic nourishment”(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAacwbfveys). Our human expression is continuous with the fluidic expressions of the earth and cosmos. As embryos, our resonance is relatively clear and unobscured. The embryo is in direct communication with the cosmos, and apparently with the same organizing fields of energy guiding the formation of stars, galaxies, rivers, iguanas and human embryos. We can, therefore, benefit from returning to an embryonic state, where we can remember once more that clarity of being.

Deepening into Resonance

When we slow down and listen deeply, we discover waves, spirals and pulsations move within us as within earth and cosmos. We resonate with a profound intelligence forming and supporting all of us. This is a common experience in Continuum Movement. Emilie Conrad was fascinated by the Schumann wave. She believed our everyday activities accelerate us, and that the breaths, sounds and subtle movements of Continuum slowed our human rhythms down, returning to resonance with natural waves of earth and cosmos. The Schumann wave is 7.8 Hz. Conrad suspected those practicing Continuum could resonate with this and eventually even slower frequencies.

Traditional peoples lived in harmony with the earth and valued their relationship with earth and cosmos. The Navaho, for example, practiced ceremony to communicate with the cosmos, which they saw as essential to their well-being and that of the earth. Native Americans speak of their drumming as “the heartbeat of the earth.” Drumming and dancing to the rhythms of the drums apparently takes the participants into resonance with nature, and has been used by peoples all over the world for healing.

Our modern western life style takes us far from these natural rhythms. Conrad perceived our tissue anatomy as changing consistency and function with the speed of daily life. She described three tissue anatomies. The cultural anatomy, present in everyday “fetch wood, carry water” activities, involves our reaction to speed and stress. Our tissues become denser. Our focus narrows. Our sympathetic, fight-flight nervous system is activated. We are designed to be in this state for short periods of time, to escape the saber-toothed tiger, perhaps, or to run after our prey. We are meant to then return to a more relaxed state, where our parasympathetic, rest-and-rejuvenation nervous system can be more active, supporting our immune system, digestion, sleep and other rejuvenative functions. This involves slowing down, which shifts our frequencies.

As we decelerate, Conrad found our tissues begin to soften, melt and become less dense. Our perception widens. We can experience more of the whole, rather than focusing in on one urgent goal. We enter what Conrad termed the primordial anatomy. In this more fluid state, we may feel like a little embryo floating in nutritive amniotic fluid. We find ourselves accessing our early potential as embryos, deepening under our life patterns. Here, we may re-form ourselves within a different, more supportive context than the family or environment we may have actually grown in prenatally. Conrad often spoke of the embryo, like the cosmos, being made of spiraled water. Water is a highly resonant element. As fluid beings, embryos resonate directly with the cosmos. When we slow down even further, we enter the third tissue anatomy, the cosmic anatomy. Here, in direct resonance with cosmic bio-fields, we experience ourselves more as energetic beings, suspended in space. From my work with Craniosacral Biodynamics, I recognize these three tissues anatomies as parallel to the three bodies we perceive in Biodynamics, each expressing different subtle rhythms: physical, fluid and the field of radiance of the long tide. Other practices  and traditions also describe similar fields within fields.

If we look at the cosmos, we see remarkably beautiful, radiant spirals. Images of human anatomy alsoLife on Land,

reveal spirals throughout the body. Our muscles spiral out from the midline represented by the spine. The connective tissues and fascia enveloping the muscles and connecting the whole of our bodies can be seen as spiraled lines spanning the entire length of the body. We are not so different from the cosmos! We are still spiraled water, like the embryo. As Conrad declares in her book,

“We are not separate from the fluid that spirals us as embryos. We are that spiraled fluid. Pulsating waves create the ocean behind all human activities. We are water beings destined to live on land on a mission that is unknowable.” (p. 293).

Healing Humans, Planets and Galaxies

In healing work like Continuum Movement and Craniosacral Biodynamics, we find that slowing down and returning to more natural, essential rhythms of life support health and well-being. While this applies to the Continuum mover or Biodynamic client, the benefits seem to extend well beyond the individual. If we are fluidic resonant beings, how can we even for a moment consider ourselves as separate from all other fluidity? If a butterfly flapping its wing in Japan can set off a tornado across the world, as the butterfly effect proposes, how can the speed in our lives, our breath and our bodies not affect our planet?

Our modern, western world is based on attitudes of individuality, isolation and separation, all of which are wreaking havoc on our planet as well as her inhabitants. If our resonance is as extensive as it seems, our unbalanced way of living may also be affecting the larger environment including the space we send our space ships into, other planets, and even other galaxies. It may be our responsibility to begin taking care of ourselves in basic ways that can counter this tendency for imbalance. Is it not time for us to acknowledge our connectedness to all things? And cognitive acknowledgement is not enough. If we do not return to an embodied state of connectedness, there is no ground for believing it is so. Without our bodies experience to inform us, we are simply talking about ideas of connection without knowing what this means.

In support of our embodied knowing and return to resonant connection with all beings and all things, I am facilitating a new Continuum Movement workshop emphasizing our resonance with nature and the inherent bio-rhythms we share with a continuum of being. More information on the workshop is available on my website at: www.cherionna.com.

For more information and to register for my workshop Embryo, Earth and Cosmos: Resonance and Resilience with Continuum Movement, happening this weekend in Totnes, Devon and in April in Vancouver, BC, please check my website at http://www.cherionna.com/classwrk.html

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!