I have a few opinions about what I do. Just a few.
If I am working with your physical body, I feel that if I can change the way you stand, I can change everything.
Some people try to change the way you sit, the way you think or the way you feel.
All these are good and valid entry points to make significant changes.
Nothing wrong with those approaches.
But if I am going to help you with your physical body, I believe that if I can change the way you stand, I can change everything.
Why is this so important?
As humans, we progress from developmental movements as babies. We lift our head to look up. We roll over. We crawl. It’s a big day for our parents when we can stand on our own two feet and walk.
Once we have made this major accomplishment, the act of standing and walking is usually taken for granted.
And because it’s taken for granted, so many of us tend to disconnect from our bodies. We go into our heads, as Western society is very mental. We walk with headphones and jog down the street wearing knee braces, not really noticing that our hips, knees and feet may actually be screaming in pain.
Just recently, I was listening to a client talk about how she gets when she is working a lot. She forgets to eat, and when she does eat, she overeats. She had injured herself, probably because she wasn’t aware in the first place of a basic weakness in a certain area of her body. She focuses on her job and works 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week at times.
As I listened to her, I thought, “She is not connected to her body.”
Many people in our society live a short distance from their physical selves.
Oh, the body is there to be dressed up, put on a scale and weighed, trotted off to exercise class to whip into shape, then set aside to be ignored as the major tasks of life take precedence.
Here is the way I feel about it.
If I can change the way you stand, I ground you.
If I can change the way you stand, I can get you out of pain.
If I can change the way you stand, I reconnect you to all of you.
If I can change the way you stand, I rewire your entire nervous system.
If I can change the way you stand, I root you.
If I can change the way you stand, I open up your energy channels so that your own energy can connect between heaven and earth, you stand in your power, you feel light but invincible. You will know when you are tired. You will know when you are hungry and when you are full. You will know when you are doing some activity that hurts you. You will know what helps you and what hinders you.
And when all that happens, you will be able to connect to your deepest intelligence. You will be able to connect to your body intelligence and your spiritual intelligence, your cave woman/cave man instincts stretching back millenia as well as your highest self.
Nobody will be able to push you around.
And believe it or not, I believe that if I can change the way you stand, getting you fully in your body, I can help you be more intuitive even if you don’t think you are very intuitive simply because you will be more in tune with your entire self.
I know all about what it’s like to be ungrounded because I am a prophetic. Prophetics access psychic information way outside themselves – such as in other countries, for example.
My cranio sacral therapist, Shyamala Strack, tells me that when she first started doing healing work with me, she couldn’t find me.
Oh, I had plenty of excuses. Like I spent two years in a support group for battered women. If you are being physically abused, a good place to hang out is out of your body. At least it seemed that way to me at the time. But trauma is just one way that people disconnect from the physical.
Being prophetic, that means that I have the most rare psychic gift. Or so say the healers who are my healer grandmothers, the dear ones I have spent years studying with. I access information from the chakras well above my head.
When I first studied medical intuition, my teacher at the time told me, “Don’t go up, only go down.”
Other people she was teaching needed to extend their energy up to access information. I needed rooting.
I understood instinctually that when I began studying the body, both from a fitness point of view and a health point of view, that it was very important for me personally because I needed to make this connection.
I spent years wishing I didn’t have a body.
It felt easier to float away.
And today I listen sometimes to other psychic, spiritual people talk about what a hard time they have being in the here and now and I understand where they are coming from. However, I do not agree that being in outer space is preferable. It also doesn’t make them special, I feel, it’s just an excuse or rationalization for other problems.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience and that includes making friends with our human animal.
Because so many people have very complicated relationships with their body, finding healthy individuals who are fully grounded and spiritual at the same time is a rare occurrence.
Women often hate their bodies and wish they looked like the emaciated waifs in fashion magazines. Men often work themselves to death, driving their body like a car. They feel like if they lose a part or two, they can just drive up to the doctor for a few replacement parts – a knee, a hip, a heart valve or two – and carry on as if their body doesn’t really matter.
How you really feel about your body may be a very long conversation.
But if I work with you to ground your feet, pulling your inner groins back, lifting your spine from the base of your sacrum and reaching through the crown of your head, all kinds of magic can happen.
And what is the definition of magic?
The power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.
All of a sudden, if I can get you in your body, everything that I am writing about in this blog will make sense to you, even if you have never thought of it before and even if we never have a philosophical conversation about it.
You will grok it. And the definition of grok?
To understand intuitively.
Once you are fully in your body, you may discover all kinds of things about yourself. Some of these may actually be funny.
I remember, as I was working with Shyamala Strack to receive regular cranio sacral therapy and continuing to practice my yoga, qi gong, weight training and posture work, one day I felt more grounded than ever before.
I remember standing up in my bathroom one morning. My feet felt the cold tile under my tootsies and I thought to myself, without looking in the mirror, “Oh God, I am so short!”
Here is a photo of me after Lillah Schwarz, founder of Lighten Up Yoga in Asheville, worked with me one day on my posture. She put a yoga egg between my feet. It felt wonderful! Just by having me stand in this way, Lillah helped alleviate the pain in my shoulder, which I had recently injured. Although ostensibly and to the undetected eye the feet and the legs have nothing to do with the shoulders, magic happened.
Practice standing straight and just see what happens. How do you feel about yourself? Has your self definition changed? Do you look at least five pounds lighter? Does it suddenly feel more fun to be alive?
Pull your energy 100 percent into your physical body and discover the joy of being fully alive.
