Kevin McEvenue's Wholebody Focusing Blog
“When a part of me is able to feel loved, it awakens to its own healing!”
Photo Credit: Eddie Nunns
I don’t have to solve that problem.
………………………fix
I don’t have to solve that problem.
………………………fix
I don’t have to solve THAT problem.
………………………fix
I don’t have to RESOLVE that question.
I don’t have to.
and then…
Just because it’s sometimes fun for me to brain-storm with mySelf
doesn’t mean that I’m obligated to.
Something in my body is recognizing the ways I storm my brain.
I don’t have to do that.
Welcome to the third video blog of a heartfelt conversation between Kevin McEvenue and WBF trainer Addie van der Kooy. In this part of the conversation both share their excitement and experience of the practice of “Holding Both” – an inner dynamic that naturally comes alive when you not only make space for a body sense of your suffering, but also include the bodily felt connected-ness and aliveness of “Me Here.” This inner core muscle of Holding Both opens up new possibilities of deep healing and even transformation. Enjoy,
Addie van der Kooy (email: avdkooy@outlook.com)
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:
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:
Below is a list by album of all the intunements.
Painting by Kevin McEvenue
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!
Painting by Kevin McEvenue
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!
Photo Credit: Michael Lux – Mohonk Preserve
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?
I’ve listened to this intunement today—more than once, as there’s so much.
Kevin says that there’s a vast body of information available to us. And it’s accessible! Something rises up in me, and it says, Yes, that’s true! Somehow, I am very, very sure there is a vast-universal-awareness-of-knowing, and that we can know it.
Then he adds, And it’s not me making it happen. A lot of energy rises in me when I hear this. He’s sharing this from his Whole Self—like a grass fire that spreads, and awakens in me a memory.
And there’s so much more—he noticed he can awaken that in someone else—and it wasn’t just him doing it! Hearing that, this comes: There’s this flame in me, it receives from beyond-me, and it speaks.
Elizabeth Morana
The Arm Raising exercise is something I created. It helps me move forward when a desire to do something is stopped by an equally powerful feeling of “I mustn’t”. There is always something in me that needs to take control of life at all costs. When I desire something there is an equal desire to stop that from happening. This is a very physical mind-body exercise to find a way to awaken a third option beyond control and letting go. It invites a quality of movement beyond thought and understanding in a focusing modality. It offers a physical pathway to move us beyond what we know.
It brings us to the very crux of the discomfort at that edge between the two. By being present to both, holding both with equal positive regard, we wait and see if something new appears beyond our expectation. That is the purpose of this exercise to explore something in us that knows how to move us beyond our stoppages in a way we think we can’t. And yet discover something in us can. And it feels like a very, very different experience that emerges which is very clearly something not only desirable but something that is not of our own making and yet it is just what is wanted beyond our expectations. Good luck.
Kevin McEvenue
This intunement is the last one in the “Coming Home” series of intunements that is the simplest and most gentle guide to grounded presence. All that is needed is a desire to be with Kevin in grounded presence. It is also a transition to the next series of intunements that support a deep level of being with all that is present in our lives. Being able to pause is essential to being able to hold whatever comes. The pause allows these parts to find their own way home when they are ready.
Repeated use of this intunement can lead to the deeper sense of self that supports our ability to observe and hold, with equal regard, all our felt senses and body wisdom that emerge.
This intunement is especially suited to those of us who have learned to live our lives moving ahead at all cost without enough time for reflection or observation of what is there for us. This intunement can be bookmarked on your computer and/or mobile devices in order to be easily available whenever there is a need to pause with a guiding voice as support for us to connect to our own “Me Here Now.”
Diana Scalera
Are you in need of some lighthearted play? Here is an intunement that will move you into an inner-directed body experience without narrative or particular intention other than to experience movement that is generated by your body alone. Kevin narrates the experience of asking his body to stand from a sitting position merely by relying on its own body wisdom sense of standing.
We can be partners in this game. If we invite our bodies, they may want to share the same experience with Kevin, something that takes longer than our own ability to stand and has many nuances that one might not expect.
So ask you body to stand, allow all necessary movement to emerge and let go of any need to create meaning or narrative out the experience.
What will come for you?
Diana Scalera
Holding Both with Equal Positive Regard is the essence of Wholebody Focusing. It is here that the most benefit will be experienced. Kevin explains how “holding both” can be supportive of your body’s sense of the next positive or negative event that you will be experiencing. He also shares his experience of being in grounded presence with the planned events happening for him soon and how his body responds to each event–with pleasure or anxiety.
While holding all that is there for him, Kevin asks his body which, among all these events, needs his attention most? At that point, he feels the expansion of his experience of himself and he can relax into that feeling. As the expansion grows, he also becomes aware of the resistance to that expansion. A part of him does not want to expand so quickly.
Kevin feels his hands massaging his thighs. The words come “You’re okay. You’ll be okay. It’s okay.” His hands have a function that is separate from his thoughts. Kevin holds onto that comfort he receives from the movement of his hands as anticipation resurfaces of an event that could possibly be uncomfortable.
His body is expanding into that spaciousness of being okay and he is aware that while the discussion may not be comfortable, there will be some space to accommodate that discomfort. He will be okay regardless of what comes.
Diana Scalera
