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!

Re-Connection and Renewal

“The body renews itself through its own dissolution, similar to the gel-sol phase transition of the cell. Paralysis can be seen as an uninterrupted manifestation of gel until the wind of breath, moving across and into the sequestered bound fluid, frees it into its vibrant potency.” - Emilie Conrad, Life on Land

photo from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADAPIMitoTrackerRedAlexaFluor488BPAE.jpg

Humans, unlike lizards, are known to be unable to regenerate limbs. What we are capable of in terms of healing and renewal is nonetheless remarkable.

I have had a few situations in my own life when I witnessed my own nervous system rewiring, as well as the honour of seeing this process in my clients and students.

My most dramatic event occurred immediately following a fall where I sustained a concussion. Lying dazed on the floor at the folk dance workshop where the accident occurred, I struggled to respond to the question being posed to me. There was doctor at the workshop, a friend of mine. Being employed at the time as an Occupational Therapist working with patients with neurological issues, I understood why the doctor was asking me the question. I also knew the answer. Responding, however, was another matter.

I have no idea how long I lay there trying to get my mouth and vocal cords to speak my name. It was as if every nerve in my body and brain had been singed by the shock of the concussion and they could not respond. It was possibly the hardest work of my entire life finding those pathways I had known so well for so many years. I could almost feel the electric wave traveling down my nerves, igniting each muscle, as if for the first time. When my name finally emerged from my mouth, I began to laugh. The whole room joined me. It was such a relief. I seemed to be re-connected.

I didn't know then how profoundly those moments would affect me and my life, and how many more subtler re-connections would happen over the years. The dissolution of my form experienced through the concussion, provided an remarkable opportunity to re-design my nervous system. My life changed accordingly.

My first, much less dramatic but equally educational experience with rewiring occurred the first time I tried to watch a movie with glasses on. I normally wore the glasses for driving, but being a young university student without a car, I rarely drove. For some reason, I decided to try my glasses on this movie. I was amazed by my experience. The colours and shapes flashing before my eyes were brilliant and fascinating, but they didn't make any sense! I didn't recognise them. Gradually, with great effort, I began to make out familiar objects. Faces came into focus and suddenly the whole scene fell into place.

I realised I had for a few minutes been learning to see again. I was reminded of stories of blind people gaining sight and having to learn to make sense of the visual stimuli coming in. That is exactly what I was doing. My brain was rewiring. It was learning to sort and organise the new sensory stimuli it was receiving into perceptions. Ah! Those lines and colours are a face. That shape is the branch of a tree. Once the connection was made, familiar neural pathways were again accessible and I could go back to just enjoying the movie.

My usual way of perceiving had been interrupted, facilitating a dissolution of patterning enabling renewed visual perception. While it is rare to have such clear experiences of rewiring, this kind of reconnection happens all the time. Being aware of the process is a great gift, which I believe also supports the connecting.

Interestingly, the day I woke up with this blog writing itself I my head, I later listened to an interview with one of my favourite speakers, cell biologist Bruce Lipton. He spoke of how bringing mindfulness to our everyday thoughts can interrupt early programming, supporting the change we desire.

Mindfulness has recently gained popularity and reputation as a valuable adjunct to psychotherapy. Research shows how it changes our neurobiology, assisting us in shifting from habitual defensive stances to more creative, present time oriented presence.

Lipton spoke in his interview of how cells can be either in protection mode or growth mode. One walls off the outside world. The other expands out it not it. We can make choices moment by moment as to which way to orient, but our cells cannot be in both modes simultaneously.

Mindfulness practices teach us to attend to the sensory input available to us, prior to the interpretations made by our minds based on history. Returning to this first order of experience enables us to be responsive to what is actually presenting in the moment, rather than being limited by our perception of it based on past experience. While remembring past experience can be useful, we are freest when it becomes part of the mix, rather than our overpowering master.

While I don’t recommend a concussion to anyone, those moments of re-finding my words gave me a remarkable opportunity to slow down and return to the basics of neural functioning. I remain forever grateful for that and other ways that concussion changed my life, interfering with my ability to operate on automatic.

The paralysis I experienced gave me a taste of the potential of dissolution. As Emile Conrad, founder of Continuum Movement notes in the quote above, allowing our form (gel) to dissolve into a more fluid sol state, enables us to access renewed vibrancy. Conrad often referred to how most of us are in a state of paralysis, solidly ensconced in our habitual ways of being. Dissolution and its associated renewal is a major intention of the slow micro-movements, breaths and sounds of Continuum. Personally, I prefer these gentle, mindful, fluid movement inquiries or the similarly subtle work of Craniosacral Biodynamics to having to heal from a concussion, but we all have our own ways of returning to and discovering our origins!

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