Bruna Blandino and Rosa Catoio Are Being Themselves. These Italian Wholebody focusers, met to discuss how Wholebody focusing and Heartfelt Conversation has changed their lives. Rather than being who society and their families want them to be, Wholebody Focusing and Heartfelt Conversation has given them a mechanism to live more fully in their own truth. Watch their video to hear how this has come about.
…You offer me Space for that encounter a couple years ago with the two does. As I have your words here it comes back so palpably, so viscerally that moment of going out the front door and finding the deer just across and up on the high side of the driveway.
We all stopped.
And from somewhere there was a becoming more as I somehow knew or it came to just meet them wordlessly yes but also deeply from my heart as though it were a sending and receiving directly.
As I “remember” this and re-feel this I am in there again and wonder what/how this relates with your experience.
My heart comes more alive. Yes that sounds right, the activity of my heart comes more alive to itself in this stopping in this way. I see/feel/give from my heart. And the piece that comes more to know itself is the receiving part.
I have to pause here. There are oceans of Benevolence to receive that I have been letting in by the dropper full. OMG
OK This one can go on the blog.
As I reread this having typed it here, a reticent bit comes, this is wide open and something worries about its safety.
It comes to me to pause back at the words that seemed to describe or point to something – oceans of Benevolence.
Letting this In.
A word comes further as I have the whole of this experience – Reception. Something satisfying in there, to have these words come. Oceans of Benevolence. Reception.
I look out of the huge windows that open to the sea in the retreat center at Punta de Tralca, Chile. It is the morning. The sea is quiet. The sky is looming pale and it is hard to see where the sea ends, where the sky begins. Yesterday red warning flags waved on the beach. Wild, foam-headed waves wandered loudly to the beach. The water was cloudy brown from the sand.
On the fourth morning of the Focusing Weeklong, during the bio-energetic movement group class, I move according to the sounds of nature in me. I become nature itself. It is not easy, because I am used to the fact that all the sound, which arises from me, should be wise, reasonable or right. I am now the wind, I am swinging in the breeze. I am a seagull skipping on the beach.
Then we settle in a circle. Everyone who wants can step into the middle, move and make the sounds their body wants to express. I step into the middle without making any sound. I look everyone in their eyes swinging my body from side to side. At some point, I feel timid. Is it acceptable to be silent, if we were asked to make sounds?
Is it acceptable to be silent if using our voice is what was asked? This question lives in me until the end. Only at the very end, a new thought sneaks into my mind: silence is a voice.
During the Weeklong I sometimes get tired of speaking English. I don’t understand Spanish at all, or just a word now and then. In the cafeteria, I start to think about speaking Finnish without waiting for anyone to understand me. In this way, nobody would be confused nor would they find it distracting or worry about the meaning, because that wouldn’t be my point. It would just be…my voice. With this thought in my mind, I try to listen to Spanish with the idea of listening to the “voice of another,” another person with a voice and language different from mine.
Maybe it has happened to you, too, that small secret moment of intimacy with a non-human creature. It’s a powerful experience yet easily dismissed by the mind. The one I want to tell you about happened on a trail in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in northern California. It is a rocky, spare place, steep and windswept and intensely alive. High on a ridge above a mountain lake, the trail weaves among pines and Douglas Fir growing singly or in small groups, huddled around granite boulders. On a hot late September afternoon, their combined scent rose like incense; the air was charged with it. I walked briskly, enjoying the vigorous motion and the give of the trail surface, changing from rock to needles to bare earth to patches of coarse grasses. I became keenly aware of an added dimension, the arrangement of bodies in the middle distance, so often lost in our habitual focus on panoramic views. I mean by that the sense of my body mass relative to trees and boulders, the way trees stood in twos or threes or alone; a pine and boulder together; or the way the boughs formed a screen so that only slivers of blue were visible, and then suddenly parted to allow a full view of distant peaks. My steps slowed to a walk as I absorbed this new pleasure. My hand reached to touch the furry patch of lichen on a granite boulder, the deep furrow of Douglas Fir bark. I put my arms around a Jeffrey Pine, maybe my age in pine years, glowing deep red in the late afternoon light. I laid my cheek against the bark and was enveloped in a light, sweet aroma, like vanilla, very different from the more pungent “conifer” fragrance that rose from the forest as a whole. (I read later that pines, and especially Jeffrey Pines, are unique among North American conifers in distilling this vanilla-like scent.) There we stood for a long while, the pine and I, in a timeless embrace of arms and branches, skin and bark, one breath.
In her book, “The Legacy of Luna”, activist Julia Butterfly Hill describes her relationship with the giant redwood in whose canopy she lived for more than two years in order to save it from being logged. Hill is positive that Luna knew Hill was there to save it, and gave her support in its tree-ish way. Similarly, with my arms around the pine, I felt very strongly, from the tree, a wave of – encouragement? Support? Was the pine hugging me back? These are human terms and they don’t quite fit. I felt that the pine and the land it sprang from were holding me up, wanted me to continue my work to save the Peace Valley in my home province of British Columbia from being dammed. I was being offered a gift – an experience of joy and unity, and something more: confirmation, confidence and strength to persevere in my work. Joy and gratitude buoyed me as I walked back to the cabin.
Looking back, a year and a half later, I see how this moment marked a turn in my work on the Peace River campaign. I felt invigorated, emboldened and supported. My health and energy improved and I was able to take on tasks that would have daunted me before. At the same time, I remained very much aware that the ultimate outcome is beyond my control. I was not “saving” the Peace – not by myself, not even all of us together. We cannot save anyone or anything. The Peace river has its own path. That path, like the path of other beings, may include wounding and suffering. All any of us can do is allow the land to become alive in us, and then act from that place.
In a culture less rigidly dualistic than the one that dominates our time, I believe experiences like this would be accepted by the society at large as valid and true. I feel gratitude that moments like these are still able to shine through the cultural conditioning that has been instilled in western peoples over generations, dividing nature from spirit and denying spirit to other creatures. What an impoverishment! Experiences like these bring incredible abundance and depth to our lives. They are our true birthright.
@Ana Simeon
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That was the awakening: My prayer hears your prayer. Perhaps for you, too. And then something in me said that’s enough! That’s all I need to do—holding a sense of me and being aware of a sense of you. And you’re different!
Painting; Riverdale Park in Cabbagetown by Kevin McEvenue
This is in response to Elizabeth’s “It Is for This.” It is the power of her voice, the tone of the sound that is so healing to my soul. My body instantly awakens to her tone of voice even before the words are felt.
I am just allowing Elizabeth’s prayer to be heard and to be felt inside of me. And the words that seem to awaken something deeper in me is this expression that she keeps repeating: it is for this. It is for this. It is for this.
And each time I hear that repetition, it touches me even more deeply because I know that sound. I can feel that sound and I can feel me.
That is what Elizabeth has awakened in me too—that sense of me that knows who I am. What I am.
And I love the feel of it. I love being awakened when I hear someone else is there too. It gives me a sense of myself that feels totally satisfying. It is a feeling of love.
I am Love.
I live love in my body as a whole.
It is me.
This is who I am.
Amen.
Something more came for me listening to Elizabeth saying what was there for her and how deeply that awakened something in myself about me. It is as though her sound, her voice, her expression, awakened a sense of myself from inside–like awakening a tuning fork of who I am.
Can I even risk being seen that deeply, seeing that deeply. The thought of that scares and excites me.
Photo Credit: Gabrielle Clark
Who am I?
I ask and ask many times and I step back, but nothing comes.
I stay and say it is okay.
I drift off and remember something I have read yesterday – ‘we must defend your dwelling place in us to the last’, so I come back. I ask again.
Then I remember a lovely note from a friend – ‘its okay and enjoy life’ he says – This makes me smile. Enjoy life – yes! The smile keeps growing. I think this is enough and I finish.
I come across a poem and I am moved by the line – “Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home.”
I pause again and follow my breath – a feeling is coming in my body. It’s big! It is like a feeling of ecstasy, it is scary and nice and I am allowing it.
I remember the support of the chair.
It feels like I am allowing life to flow in me and it is so beautiful and light and uplifting. I can still feel it now, it is tingling and buzzing with life. “Let life happen to you” says Rilke.
Perhaps I am the vehicle for the life that is longing to live in me. Or am I the life I felt moving in me.
I don’t know.
Who am I beyond the conditioning that has been imposed on me?
Who is the one that looks out from behind my eyes?
Who is the one that looks out from behind your eyes?
Can I even risk being seen that deeply, seeing that deeply. The thought of that scares and excites me.
I hold both, as a hopeful possibility.
Note Authors of my inspiration in order: Etty Hillesum, Rainer Maria Rilke and Teresa of Avila
Kevin begins by asking us to “find ourselves once again together.” It is a most luxurious invitation to take the time to explore who I am separate from all the normal static that is part of my life. To be with Me, I make room for the life in “what wants to be heard” and to help this part become aware of itself. This part is always functioning within me, however, it needs my consciousness to become aware of its own existence. I take all the time I need to find and spend time with Me as Me.
A critical block can be the emotional pain of the fear of not being loved or wanted. This type of despair might be a compelling presence in our lives.
Me & planet Earth sustain me. Out of nothing, something new emerges. Kevin connects us to one of his influences, Pierre de Chardin, who believed that we have a role to play in the expanding universe. We are a part of planet Earth, and it sustains life–even our lives. For example, we can sense the laws of gravity that help us function at every moment of our lives. This intunement is about the experience of our sense of self-connected to the Earth in grounded presence. More importantly, we need to know what might get in the way.
Not Planet Earth
A critical block can be the emotional pain of the fear of not being loved or wanted. This type of despair might be a compelling presence in our lives. If we make room for fear of nothingness, more comes. We need to endure the sense of nothing to allow something not of our own making to emerge.
Me and Plant Earth
In this intunement, Kevin takes us through how these ideas have an inherent connection to our Wholebody Focusing practice and how Kevin uses them to take what he learns about these connections to a new level. These nuances can enrich your practice of Wholebody Focusing.
Enjoy what emerges today listening to Kevin’s journey in connecting to planet Earth.
Photo Credit: Mohonk Mountain, NY at sunset Diana Scalera
