Open Heart, Healing and Biodynamics

Holding our clients with an open-hearted resonance, we may find ourselves sensing more than we imagined…

One morning, just after Valentines Day (the day of love) I woke up in the morning feeling a deep sadness in my heart. Where had it come from? I had been feeling good when I went to bed. I wasn’t aware of any changes in my life warranting this sudden welling up of grief. Then, I learned about the mass shooting in a high school in Florida. My feelings began to make sense.

It has been important to me for most of my life to live from my heart and offer what I can to humanity from that place. I remember having a slightly heated discussion with a friend a good thirty years ago where I spoke in favor of being open to feeling from the heart, even if the feelings weren’t always enjoyable. He argued that this was too dangerous. Exposing ourselves to pain was, well, painful. He had a point, but to me, feeling the pain is more valuable than feeling nothing.

I still believe as I did then that love includes all experience, all feelings, our connectedness with all beings. It is not about condoning anything, but accepting and being present with what is. Some years later, I began encountering Buddhist teachings, which seem to me to resonate with this attitude.

As this blog was brewing within me, I came across an article in the Buddhist magazine, Tricycle, entitled Buddha and Bullets. The author writes,

“Numbing and moral apathy are a great risk; walling ourselves off from the truth of suffering won’t transform the values of our culture, our society, or our own values. Yet most of us need a balance between overexposure to suffering and possible moral injury and outrage, and responsible, wise, and compassionate engagement, including sitting in the charnel grounds of this kind of tragedy. 

(from https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/buddha-bullets-shooting/)

My practice then is to sit and act with my open heart, to receive what arrives, to send loving kindness to all beings. I stretch myself to include not only those who have clearly suffered by being shot, wounded or dying, or those having lost loved ones in this shocking way, but also those who find themselves shooting, or otherwise hurting others. To me, they may need help and support even more than the survivors. I can only imagine that they have lacked the love, understanding, and embracing that they have needed. From my understanding of human development and psychology, I imagine it had been missing from a very early time in their lives, perhaps as early as prenatally.

Biodynamics in the Midst

How does all this relate to Biodynamics? How do we hold our clients from a place of resting in our hearts, regardless of how their experience may touch us? As a Biodynamic Craniosacral therapist, I strive to hold the whole of what presents within session work, with an open heart, accepting and being present with whatever arises. What presents may not be what I think should present! Perhaps the inherent treatment plan has very different ideas than I might have about what needs to be addressed. Perhaps the person has an intense history of abuse, neglect, violence or … What is it that rubs me the wrong way?

In supervising practitioners, I help them to explore their edges in being with their clients. We as practitioners are human with our own histories. No matter how we may excel in orienting to a deeper, more universal health and Intelligence, our humanness continues to also be present. My client’s history may resonate with aspects of my own. Where I have not been able to embrace my own history and offer love to aspects of myself, I will be challenged to do so with my clients.

Each client presents a gift, bringing their history, their experience, their perceptions, all wanting to be acknowledged, welcomed and tended to in some way. Can I hold the whole? Can I perceive the goodness and Intelligence where pain and woundedness persist in pushing their heads to the surface? Can I see what is deeper, softer, smoother, more expansive, more inclusive, more whole? Can I allow my own heart to be touched in the process?

 

Acknowledging, Accepting, Welcoming, Letting Go

When I acknowledged how painful I found the news of the shooting in Florida, I became more able to be with the intense grief in my own heart. I became more able to then perceive and hold from a place of loving kindness. I became more able to offer something to the situation.

Acknowledgment or awareness is the first step in healing. If we refuse to be aware because it hurts, we miss out and our clients also are neglected at some level. Our job as practitioners, and as humans within a global community, is to dare to let ourselves feel, even when feeling is painful. Acknowledgment frees us to then accept what is, perhaps even to welcome what it has to offer us, what gifts, what learning, what healing or growth might be available here. It is only when we have welcomed what is being offered that we can truly let it go.

When we can perceive without attachment what is arising in our clients, they are more enabled to do the same. The potency, or life energy, of the person’s system can make the choices it needs to make about healing. It is free to enact its profound Intelligence with our support rather than our interference.

Please consider these words in relation to your own reactions not only to world events but also to events in session work. To what extent do you allow yourself to be touched? To be present? To be open-hearted? To rest in your heart with an intention of unconditional acceptance at the level of being?

Your clients come to you to be received. In the process, you meet those areas you may not be fully receiving in yourself. Those places of challenge, those uncomfortable feelings that emerge, can remind you of what you may have forgotten or left out in loving yourself. There is no time like the present to practice loving more deeply, more fully, more unconditionally.

The Breath of Life may be another term for love. It does not differentiate between what we perceive as good or bad. It is not judgmental about what to support or not. The Breath of Life supports what is. What can we learn from this profound universal presence?

I leave you with these words attributed to Einstein (although not verified), which seem to me to describe what we sense in Biodynamics as the Breath of Life:

“There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.

 

This universal force is LOVE.”

(from https://suedreamwalker.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/a-letter-from-albert-einstein-to-his-daughter-about-the-universal-force-which-is-love/)