Why healers, so often, bring what they need the most

(If you have an aversion to “about me & what I offer”, like I do, skip ahead now)

I’ve been encouraged to talk about the work & I for a second, & I’m gonna follow that, though it’s grossly self referential, & truly uncomfortable to point back at self instead of at the wisdom of an injury or at the “work” in it’s un-selfconscious, pure, even ecstatic movements & knowing. (Actually, it’s pretty cringe-worthy, I WON’T be doing it again. Even my egoic center is lookin’ at this piece, like “really?” My only hope is that some of my challenges are resonant with some of yours, & it rings some bells in your own healers halls.

Lets get to it.

In my daily life, I am a fan of fancy over foundational moves; Air, fire & water before Earth, and the extreme ends of things over a moderate, (& the risk of a mundane), middle point. Some of my shadows, (gasp if any of these are your favorites too), include over-extention, over self-sufficiency, sacrificial service with almost no ability to structure time off for self, (is this too much? Gawd, we just met) and a secret holding of tension and contraction with a feeling that I won’t be able to do what I need to do without heroic doses of green tea caffeine….caffeine which creates secret tension & contraction.

The phrase “It’s not about me” has soothed many a pre-sesh anxiety. Seriously, try it on. It’s a staycation. It’s a nanosecond by nanosecond unforced, effortless effort of following of what is happening in this other; THIS individual; THIS moment in time & space, even as the past reveals itself in tension points that we, the healer on the table (for a person actively engaging in their own healing IS a healer), and myself, introduce and unfold these stuck and fearful places to the present now, even as the now slips, mutable and magic, into this now, and this now, and this now.

It’s funny that the medicine I bring is, in some ways, so opposite to how I roll as a person. Don’t get me wrong, I fully follow what I offer, and I LOVE how I roll as a person.  But these techniques are authentically SLOW; focus based and foundational superstars. They are the kind of foundations that other foundations lean on. The whole point of these techniques is a relaxation back into a homeostatic, homeofluidic sense of belonging in the cradle of the natural world, while being fully seen, whole and raw, by the larger consciousness………Whereas the material me leans WAYYY more naturally towards a gritty, profound but punch line affectionate, flambouyancy.

For this work, the foundations are NOT a masculinized open square, (valid in its own right and very effective. Nothing beats a good stem wall made of cement and footprinted into the Earth below the frost line), but the foundation HERE is a softening and relaxing back in, to source point; Drawing the trumpet flower of our attention away from the outside, and letting it pull back, slide down, & narrow to the nadir, re-homing & restructuring in center, stem and the seed that thrives and pulses in its own eternal rhythm outside of time, scarcity and challenge.

It is outside of gravity, outside of how much we got done this morning, if we are late to an appointment, who spilt the tea and if we used the counter sponge or the good sponge to clean it up. 

Everything on the table, I gotta always keep an eye out for not being too fast, self-flagellating or skittish when stressed. Understanding and identifying where I am contracted or collapsed keeps me softly vigilant. Like any dedicated emotional/energetics alchemist and functional embodiest, I balance the satiation of service against exhaustion, scarcity mind-set, self-worth issues and negative thought against deep embodyment and a purpose led life.

Healer or Human, these are things that I still struggle with, and it’s this very struggle that brings me an overspilling treasure trove of techniques in kindness, neutral tenderness, auric strengthening, separation & connection, and large, overarching compassion for self and other.

I do all that I can to pour this into my daily life, observing myself and other people through the lens of compassion; I mean, it takes a lot of empathy to watch the confusion and agony of divine souls work through the mud & blood of this bounded, divided and reconstructed, often unethical earthly experience, where we’re made to endure things like GRAVITY! And shame, deeply unfair circumstances & a fair spectrum of bodily fluids……

So the work & I are both big fans of:

accepting what is, exactly as it is,

allowing the dark parts of us to tell their story as they know it,

Holding a response to a past event with empathy and truth. It just does a lot more good than pushing it away.

and gravity? We’re comin’ around to it.

There is one AI sentence in this blog. Chat has been really good to me and I hope you don't mind that I put it first. CHAT gave me this:

My work is informed by craniosacral listening and stillness practices, adapted into an integrative embodiment format rather than offered as formal craniosacral therapy.”

It wisely informed me to describe what I offer as “informed by & drawing from” traditional practices and techniques. Though it chafes, it's a pretty good cut for someone like me who is certified in many modality techniques, is trained in more, and isn't licensed in a single tradition. This fits with who I am and how I roll.

I honor traditional practices by practicing them in a diligent, disciplined, sometimes rigid, fashion. But I stand for, speak for, reach for the PRESENT moment, and I believe the age we inhabit NOW responds really well to, enjoys and asks for technique FUSION, integrative practice & path coelescensence.

This work thrives on the intuitive employment of techniques and practices of many traditions, with a firm yet nuanced discernment of what techniques work in the moment for each person, and accurately perceiving what barriers or collapses exist counter to a fluid harmonization of that singular person inside of and separate from, the collective.

The fusion of medicinal modalities, alchemized through center, source & channeled knowing, with embodiment, observation and acceptance at the root and foundation, IS, as far as I can tell, the oldest, most wild, medicine. As ancient culture received their knowing through channeled information, so now, we can also engage the ancient magic of asking & allowing. This idea that regular people don't have the medicine now is destructive. I bow to the encompassing & enourmous, humble, gritty, holistic and hyperreal magics that will never be mine. I don't long for that lineage any more than a warbler asks to be a wombat. long may it thrive pelucid and true to its source, uncorrupted and rich with meaning & connection. Surely, we would have perished before this without it.

Every person, no matter how chaotic, jaded or damaged has a medicine person inside of them. I've seen it over and over. When a situation demands a person rise to the occasion, to take care of another, their healer comes. So the idea that only traditional or ancient culture, only a certification board can grant us the connection to our truth. It divorces us from the individualized perspective truths of our divinity and from the belonging that is our birthright.

We are not separate from the medicine.

If you see the longtide sweep through the natural world cohesing and expanding every ripple on the water, the log that you lay on, every needle and leaf, all bird song; that is the medicine coming to you. If a person allows themselves to be vulnerable for the first time, learns to receive love and compassionate touch only when their physical heart gives us out. That is the medicine. If I untuitively speak ha a pono pono as a landscaper connecting with delicate, astronomically, beautiful and complex little plants, and then pulling them. That is the medicine.

In all of the heartbreak and forgetting that comes with being in a material mud and blood matrix, otherwise known as a body, we have a more-than-life-line into the etheric space. We can both be in the garden in our root and our creative growth in the lower chakras and also in the line of communication and knowing from the lighter, higher chakras and the larger consciousness. And if the cenerline were a staff and we did not judge the handle better than the foot that grounds us in the silica, the heart would still be known to balance and alchemize both. And that sweet navigator would still want to touch earth, AND be expressed on high, held as a supporting structure, talking stick, wand and wayfinder. And in its more feminine form, a dowsing rod.

It's one of the consolations of being fragmented into separate bodies. We receive the sometimes joy, sometimes challenge of being unified, and the aching liberation and clarity of being separate. And everybody forgets over and over. So we are bound to rinse & repeat.

Again and again we come to this. Will we make our godhood through the bridge of another? Will we each have our own line? I hold that everything is inclusive. Why NOT both? Let people come together in a powerful collective, using the voice of another, a healer, a spiritual leader, a channel, a guru. And by all means, let's take our individual energetic tendrils back is solely ours inside of our sovereign & autonomous skins.

When we separate, embodying the etheric through our own chemical and sensory systems; Alchemizing through selfsource knowing & noticing, what comes through for others can be so clear; But working on self is different. As creators of our own resistances & obstacles, it can be difficult not having the lights of another, and It can be hard work, tarsing apart the quiet truths from the louder stories.

For the person I am the bridge for, the medicine I offer isn't about me. It makes it so much easier. So I too accept the medicine of others. I LOVE being a student and letting a teacher guide me into spaces created, colored, enhanced and expanded by their own perceptual and source medicine.

I’m a big fan of and long standing practitioner of martial meditation and discipline, breathwork & kundalini, traditional figurative & anatomic art, ancient traditional song and dance and yogic practice. But coloring ONLY inside of the lines of any tradition has never been my path. Some people shine as supportive strength in a congregation or collective. Some people must, in order to stay true to self, MUST alchemize everything through their own internal system.

I fall into the squarely in the second camp (AND, apon a moment of thought, cylindrically into the first) I AM a supporting structure. How could they possibly be exclusive? I also accept training and guidance so that I may open doors inside of myself that I hadn't seen before; It’s a delight to roll around in a skilled persons cauldron, relaxing everything but awareness and appropriate action towards what goals are asked for.

When guidance from another is resonant, it light us up! It Burns bright and illuminates another path to source that could only be created through the chemistry of people working together… Simultaneously, when things are challenging and feel off; It brings an amazing amount of knowing; Sometimes only to push us back to our own center having felt the awkward lean, sometimes breaking us open to let us see the broken edges of things we NEVER would've volunteered for.

So that's what I look for in the experiential arena of healing and people. It's never been the number of years they spent getting the diploma, but how they expand the one and only, ever-evolving moment of now. Accessing the living, breathing sacred is what I look for in others and what I seek in myself. So if you fall squarely or even cylindrically into this camp, let's see what is created, enhanced or challenged when we aquaint and orient our mutual energies towards support.

I really miss the time when we received the emotional tools of our generation. I remember being so excited! Myself & everybody I knew thought, in our newness, that we would FIX ourselves. In this age, I understand my only job is to create a safe place to be WITH the waves of challenge. To at least sometimes change the wear spot of pain so we don't rub the same place over and over, but steadily move from one pain to another to another to another. To observe over and over, and in that attention, ask for it to rebalance and reintegrate in its own way.

Now it seems, the counterintuitive unwinding is to attune to, augment, enhance and expand the acceptance for what IS. To listen too what poor experience, rich in disfuncion, injury and challenge brings, to any semi-conscious being. I won't say I'm not pissed about this. Pissed & exasperated.

It does bring a longer, wider, higher bridge for the medicine. But WWHHhhat a show to live through. Going darker and deeper with all the speed we can, only find out the road back up and out is exponentially longer and slower, often confusing and excoriatingly circular. Not at all like that slippery but straight dive down.

But the cause we come out with, the compassion for the blood we spilled, particular to our experience, is verifiably more focused; if we survive our crisis, many of us become a champion of that very crisis for others. There's a million to choose from inside and outside of the collective story of unlovablability, un-worth, and not enough-ness. So which causes are ours? Where you chubby? invisible? Controlling, controlled, parentalized? Did your parents, not receiving the tools that we seem inundated with, believe the cultural & “structure is safety & silence will save you” scarcity story, and how did this affect our own stories?

Every one of us is coming out of a postwar culture. The collective trauma obscured by the “I’m fine” culture, pacing restless and hungry inside of the collective unconscious; Lineage trauma hidden inside of the cysts and tumors of organs, willing to speak when we can’t or won’t; The inequality of the gender, race and cast, and inescapable pressure inside of the modern child. The modern kid, with no vote, often no voice and almost no rights, who is simultaneously offered addictive colors and movement, with the chance to escape their emotions, unchecked peer shame, and the same looping stories & self shame thoughts their parents had.

So when I hear “I’m scared for kids today”, like people can't believe the choice that they're making, I guess I can believe it. This is the other thing. Kids today are coming in super savvy to the natural world and the imbalance it's already in. They have more intuitive knowledge about the effects of climate change, exploitation & inequality, and maybe, really soon, they will also have an exponentially larger set of emotional tools. I hope so. We're gonna need ‘em.

If we were to survive a bit longer as a species, and bring back the the animal, plant, feral human & other survivors of our white hot species youth & the extinction jag we’re on, there would have to be a relatively immediate unwinding of the contracted untruth of our post ag, people, animals and land as enslaved and exploited resources. That or the algorithm would have to change….translation: Alien intervention is as good as anything else, ‘cuz It just doesn't seem like that big astrology is coming in fast enough to save us.

Unfortunately, we're probably not going to change the age-old rule of destruction fast and healing slow. I've kind of put down the superhero fantasy of people hustling up that healing hill, putting our spandex/bamboo suit on and saving everything in the nick…my thoughts have turned away from saving humans/the planet and towards the eternal nature of things, and the beauty of change. Like any mature relationship, I'm starting to let go of the potential of humans, and starting to accept that what we have now is what we get. Seriously, look who's in line to speak next…Dolphins, whales, bonobos & the great apes. Hell, most every monkey you ever saw has genius, even if it's a jackass genius. Jackasses are grumpy and stubborn, but smart, sweet and made for survival. the tarsier, in its spooky wisdom, looks like a great candidate. We're so proud of our opposable thumbs. Have you seen an octopus lately? They use tools like they were born to it. And they are. Raccoons? Thumbs and super smart, but probably just as destructive as we are.

What if the next incarnation of genius was SOFT! Looked different, thought different, felt different & has a different response to their PAST! Maybe they don't make the story that being inside of nature makes our lives and nasty, brutish & short, (I do not thank you Hobbs, for that little line).

What if the new incarnation doesn't explore separation, but stays in the waves of belonging? What if it doesn't build megolith structures, housing religions who sole purpose seems to be to put an authority between people and their divinity. Sexuality and thoughts controlled by sin shaming from another? (Seriously, that was always gonna go wrong) How could it not? And all, ALL, driven by the story that we can never go back to the garden. That we must dominate it instead.

So if the ones who come are not so ravenous, don't try to push away from the natural community and so, are not deathly frightened of love scarcity. Seems silly, now, that we would lose all of our belonging just so we could attempt to re-create it. With us on top, coincidentally.

I LONGED to see human consciousness survive this, and now my only question is if the consciousness of an aardvark or a buttercup are really any less than the thoughts & desires of an astronomically creative, loving, super cool, but bloody minded, unhealthy, dominating, and unbalanced manifestation called human. Our choice to explore the wrong way so young in our growth may mean that, like so many is other species, we just don't make it through our youth. It's gonna be nip & tuck.

I'm so grateful for our language and the poetry, the songs we sing back to the universe. But a non-human expression is just as valid, and aardvarks and buttercups are still in their evolution and we don't know what they will become, or who will speak beauty into the void next.

although every minute seems immeasurably crucial, maybe we don’t change the speed of our healing. Maybe one of the best things we can do is to change our understanding of being IN our healing.

In our intent, at the axis…..we don't fix it…..Translation, “humans might not make it”….Can we be okay with that?

When I was younger, I would've turned away from this page now. Probably disgusted. I am not giving up on humans, but my path is acceptance. And uncomfortably close to that is non-attachment; The validation, the truth, that other species, life on earth, is worth the loss. Worthy of life and growth; The ability to see their children succeed and change to adapt to a changing climate. I hope we are among the survivors, and I hope there's not too much blood for it. Maybe in this second evolution we will entwine again with other creatures, the waters, Earth, the elements in the garden and the truth of connection to divinity. Maybe we put down this exploration and myth of singularity, superiority and solitude.

Coming back into the garden may be arduous, but it's the right way, and we’re gonna need as much empathy as challenge ever gave us.