Wholebody Focusing and Zen Buddhism

Fusako Nakamura is a long-time Wholebody Focuser who experiences an essential connection between her spiritual practice of Zen Buddhism and Wholebody Focusing.  On the evening of the filming of this video, a monk from the local Buddhist temple came to chant at her door just as we were about to start filming.  We get to hear his chant as part of the video and feel the integration of Fusako’s spirituality and WBF practice in real time.

What she shares with us is how the importance in Zen Buddhism of honoring ancestors is enlivened by her Wholebody focusing practice.  Please enjoy the aliveness in Fusako’s spiritual practice and how Heartfelt Conversation helps her to feel connected to others and allows her to feel less lonely.

Find Your Favorite Intunements!

For those who would like to use the Audio Guiding Suggestions/Intunements that Kevin has provided to the blog for their practice,  here is an easy way to find them on the blog.  Below you will find an index of the three albums of intunements that are available.  The three albums have different themes:

  1. First Intunements is for anyone who wants to start or become more proficient at Wholebody Focusing;
  2. Coming Home is for anyone who has some basic understanding of Wholebody Focusing and wants to deepen their practice; and
  3. Exploring the Unexplored is for anyone who wants to extend their practice in ways that they may not have yet experienced.

These Audio Guiding Suggestions/Intunements are here for your free use and enjoyment.  Our greatest wish is that they bring healing into the lives the people who listen to them.

Please find the Audio Guiding Suggestion/Intunement you are interested in below. This list will be on the home page for three days.

After a new blog appears on the home page,  you will be able to:

  • Use the  “Search by Theme” menu and click on “Audio Guiding Suggestions/Intunements.” This index will be the first page that comes up.  Just click on the links on this page and it will get you to the intunement  for which you are searching.
  • You can also access this list on the Home Page menu option “Audio Guiding Suggestions/Intunements Index.”  Once again, click on the name of the intunement, it will take you to the page where you will find it.

Below is a list by album of all the intunements.

First Intunements Cover

Painting by Kevin McEvenue

First Intunements

Beginning Intunement
Intunement # 1 Finding Me
Intunement # 2 We Need a Physical Connection to Find Me
Intunement # 3 What Feels Alive in Me Right Now?
Intunement # 4 Gravity: Accepting Life Itself Unconditionally
Intunement #5 Tuning into a Direct Experience Awakens a Connection with the Embodied Self
Intunement # 6 To Feel Good about Myself is Desirable
Intunement # 7 The Experience of Something that has a Consciousness all its Own!
Intunement # 8 Finding a Safe Structure to Experience Life Fully Inside Me as Me!
Intunement # 9 Explore the Power of Listening Silently to the Alive, a Force, in side of all of us!
Intunement # 10 From a Solid Base of Me Here I ask, “What is going on in Me Right Now?”
Intunement # 11 Looking for the Life Support to Move Forward the Complexity of a Growing Me?
Intunement # 12 Meet that Inner Power in each of US: It Knows How to Put us Together Again!

 

Coming Home LayersPainting by Kevin McEvenue

Coming Home – Intunements to Deepen your Practice

Intunement # 13 Something in Me Hurts!
Intunement # 14 The Felt Sense of What Feels Alive and the More that Emerges from that Alive
Intunement # 15 Asking, What is There in Me? Just Noticing the Different Body Responses!
Intunement # 16 A Shared Body to Body Listening & Understanding Beyond Trying to Think
Intunement # 17 An Active Meditation to Welcome What Wants to Present Itself for your Attention
Intunement # 18 Me & Planet Earth That Sustains Me & More
Intunement # 19 Life just ‘Moves’. Just ‘IS’. That is what it is to say ‘I Am’!
Intunement # 20 An Active Meditation to Invite a Question: “What is Alive in Me Right Now?”
Intunement # 21 Holding Both with Equal Positive Regard!
Intunement # 22 An Inner-Directed Experience
Intunement # 23 Active Meditation with the Breathing Self as “Me Here!”
Intunement # 24 The Power to Pause and Wait For!

Explore 3

Photo Credit: Michael Lux – Mohonk Preserve

Exploring the Unexplored

Intunement # 25 Felt Sense Naming and Reflecting a Body Experience
Intunement # 26 Coming Home to Me Again
Intunement # 27 The Arm Raising Exercise
Intunement # 28 A New Way to be with Pain
Intunement # 29 The Basic Elements of Wholebody Focusing and the Not Knowing
Intunement # 30 Active Meditation to Inform Me about Me
Intunement # 31 Listen to the Warm
Intunement # 32 To Discern & Unpack What is There
Intunement # 33 What do I do When Something Feels Right?
Intunement # 34 Something Is Not Right!
Intunement # 35 Asking for Help!
Intunement # 36 Who Am I?
Intunement # 37 Asking: Who Are You?

The Very Bad Habit of Trying to Make Things Happen

I already exist
Rather than make myself Be Someone
or Be Some Way
Just notice me-here.
I’m here!
No need to be someone else.

The Great Good already exists.
Rather than trying to manufacture It,
to prove Its existence to someone else,
or to convince It to Do Something.
Just notice It-Here.

Can you sit quietly and Notice It?
Can you capture a glimpse of It
now and then?
It’s Here!
No need to Make-It-Happen.

Elizabeth Morana

Something against you – or me? / Jotain sinua vastaan – vai minua?

Photo credit: Maria Hakasalo

As I was working on my focusing book, I was listening to music–something random from You Tube. Next thing that I noticed was how I was criticizing the singer’s vocal technique. I had just written about some painful school memories when a sense of isolation emerged.  I also noticed how I was compensating for those feelings by thinking I was being better than others.

Suddenly I understood the connection between feeling isolated and compensating by finding fault in others. Instead of facing the something in me that didn’t feel accepted, I criticized the You Tube singer. I  compensated for my own pain by pretending to be skillful, successful and perfect.  This is what I did as a child who felt isolated.

As I sat next to the small child in me who was feeling the pain I said to her: “You can be as you are, small, painful, sometimes competent, sometimes incompetent. You do not need to be perfect or look like it..”

I sighed deeply and noticed that something in me released.

Do you want to get in touch with the part in you that is not feeling alright? You can listen to one of Kevin’s intunements at https://wholebodyfocusing.blog/2018/10/19/something-is-not-right/

When listening I could feel a firm lump in my stomach which softened after I listened to the following intunement. It helped me to be tenderly present with the felt sense in my stomach: https://wholebodyfocusing.blog/2018/07/19/an-active-meditation-to-welcome-what-wants-to-present-itself-for-your-attention/

***

Kun kirjoitan fokusointikirjaa, kuuntelen välillä musiikkia, tällä kerralla jotain satunnaista Youtubesta. Kirjoittamisen lomassa havaitsin arvostelevani laulajan laulutapaa. Olin juuri kirjoittanut kipeistä koulumuistoista, erillisyyden tunteestani ja kuinka pyrin kompensoimaan sitä näyttämällä paremmalta kuin muut.

Continue reading Something against you – or me? / Jotain sinua vastaan – vai minua?

The Unbearable Wound

I follow the MeToo movement closely because it addresses a reality that is central to my existence.  Sexual abuse trauma dominates my emotional life. I was never sexually abused, however, my mother was.  Her sexual abuse impacted her ability to be a mother to me. I recently became aware of the depth of this reality when I read a paragraph about what it is like to be in relationship with a narcissist.

A relationship with a narcissist is a desperate relationship where you
are always feeling vulnerable, worthless, hated, constantly explaining
yourself, silenced, punished, and traumatized. What is it that you are
actually doing wrong? Nothing!

This describes what it was like to be my mother’s daughter.  Extreme abuse can engender a particular type of narcissism–one that is based on an absence of self.  My mother, a victim of sexual abuse, needed to throw her own negative feelings about herself onto me in order to live with the unbearable wound of her experience. I experienced my relationship with my mother as always feeling a need to defend myself and the surety that there was no love or margin for error available to me.

The dominance of this felt sense in my life became clear to me one day while I was preparing for a medical test.   I was extremely nervous about the procedure and, try as I might, I could not find grounded presence. Thoughts of random moments in the past in which I felt traumatized by interactions with others kept surfacing.  There were so many from such a wide variety of different points in my life that I became completely overwhelmed. I paused with this sense of overwhelm. A new realization eventually emerged—it wasn’t about the fast shifting narratives floating through me.

Continue reading The Unbearable Wound

Asking: Who Are You?

Over several days, even weeks, I have listened to this generous Intunement. Each time something more has opened as if I listened on the first floor of a building and saw what was there and then the second and then the third and fourth taking in the new sights and sounds and developments. I wonder what more might come?

In this intunement Kevin offers us the sense of these words, “I want to invite This: that life in you, being now felt in me.” In beginning here I’ve gone straight to the heart of the matter he offers. As you listen, Kevin comes to this in steps and “recognitions” that open doors for me, for you. I am delighted and intrigued by the mystery of the words I and You as Kevin explores them and You and I listen and mutually participate in the felt sense of the Life in You and the Life in Me.

There is the Invitation and the what-happens-in-me-and-in-you with this Invitation. I notice the resonance, the essential Heartfelt Connection, alive in Kevin, alive in Me, alive in You. Nothing we have to do but just now it comes to me that I/We Can Claim something essential.

Laura Dickinson

The Palm Reader

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Morana

One night, I read something* about a prisoner during the holocaust who was in line with a group of men waiting to be taken to their death.  In the midst of this horror, one of the men jumped out of line, offering to read the palms of other prisoners, exuberantly telling them of their future wives, their future children, of what seemed to be their extinguished possibilities.  More and more of the prisoners asked to have their palms read.  The mood changed, for both prisoners and guards—and against all odds, the unexpected happened:  the guards loaded the prisoners back on the truck and drove away with them, taking them back to their barracks. 

I wondered about what enabled that solitary palm-reader to act.  The next morning as I awoke, a sentence came to me, and then more:

Please Let me also look at their palms and see their infinite possibilities!
And seeing them,
they glimpse themselves
As they really are!

Let us not be hypnotized
by modern day brutes
Let us look past all their dark thoughts
Let us turn again and again
beyond those dark clouds
to what is beyond their sight

Let us see our true pure being
and all our possibilities for Joy
for Love

Pull back our curtain of fear and disconnection
Open our ears to the truth of our being
Open our eyes to That Light
Me-here-Now
Not what they see
they do not define me!

Open my awareness
to
What. I. Am

*https://tinyurl.com/yder25lt

Elizabeth Morana