I have been reading an excellent book called ‘Waking the Tiger’ by Peter Levine.  It is about healing trauma and is part of the reading list for my craniosacral training.  I wanted to share some jewels from it with you, you will see why as you get to the end.

Most people have some level of trauma – it is a pervasive fact. And when we are traumatized, there is an eventual disruption in the way that we process information....

Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the ‘triggering’ event itself – they stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and discharged; this residue remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and spirits.

Humans suffer when we are unable to discharge the energy that is locked in by the freezing response. Rather than moving through the freezing response, as animals do routinely, humans often begin a downward spiral characterized by an increasingly debilitating constellation of symptoms.

We must pay attention to our animal nature to find the instinctive strategies needed to release us from trauma’s debilitating effects.

In response to threat, the organism can fight, flee or freeze.  When fight and flight responses are thwarted, the organism instinctively constricts as it moves towards the last option – the freezing response.  As it constricts, the energy that would have been discharged by executing the fight or flight strategies is amplified and bound up in the nervous system. 

What happens with humans is that the intense, frozen energy, instead of discharging, gets bound up with the overwhelming highly activated, emotional states of terror, rage, and helplessness.

Why don’t we move in and out of the different responses as naturally as animals do?  It’s because our highly evolved neo-cortex (rational brain) easily overrides our instinctual responses of discharging this energy.

The drive to complete the freezing response remains active no matter how long it has been in place!  The drive to complete and heal trauma is as powerful and tenacious as the symptoms it creates. The urge to resolve trauma through re-enactment can be severe and compulsive – we are inextricably drawn into situations that replicate the original trauma in both obvious and unobvious ways.

Re-enactment represents the organism’s attempt to complete the natural cycle of activation and deactivation that accompanies the response to threat in the wild.  In the wild, activation is often discharged by running or fighting.

Conscious awareness accessed through the felt sense provides us with a gentle energetic discharge just as effective as that which the animal accesses through action. 

I would hope by know you are thinking about how important recapitulation is! For any of you who do not know the discipline of recapitulation, read Castenada! 

It is probably as we have been surrounded by exquisite crystals of snow that I have been dreaming with the work of Masura Emoto.  I am sure you are all aware of his work which demonstrates that if human speech or thoughts are directed at water droplets before they are frozen, images of the resulting water crystals will be beautiful or ugly depending upon whether the words or thoughts were positive or negative.  He has shown that this can be achieved through prayer, music or by attaching written words to a container of water.

So I have often come upon people with bottles of drinking water with the word ‘love’ written on the side, or similar.. yet something struck me today that takes this to a whole new level.  If we imagined ourselves to be like a bottle of water (as we mostly are made up of water tonally), and as a simple start, wrote ‘love’ or ‘peace’ or ‘freedom’ on ourselves – either physically or through prayer of intent – what a grand bottle of water we would be for all the worlds of the grandmother.  We have to remember that we are not sealed systems that keep our water in (while I am not!); it is distributed out into the world – in sweat and tears etc – which means those intent charged molecules of water are then affecting everything around us.

And from an anatomy point of view, every cell communicates with every other cell in an organism – so the potency of your crystalline waters when offered up to Spirit or absorbed in another two-legged or animal – has a huge potential energetically to transform.

It is no surprise that we often talk of the river of life, for it is a continuously flowing thing, through each and every one of us.  There is no point becoming overwhelmed, thinking we cannot make a difference, that everything is hopeless and too much – this is the not so nice ‘gift’ you are giving out all around you.  The message strong and clear at this time is to remember that our own waters offer unique opportunities for prayer and transformation; to remember that we are indeed subtle beings with an incredible reservoir running through us.

Have you ever sat in a circle of people and talked about what each is passionate about?  It’s a beautiful thing to share.

For me there are many things I am passionate about – being a mother, making a better world for the children,.... I could go on!  But what I find myself passionate about right now is stillness.   Maybe it’s the time of year, maybe it’s that I have started this craniosacral course, maybe it’s my age (!), but I find myself from a very deep level calling for stillness.

So what is stillness?  Some may think it’s about doing nothing, about sitting still.  Yet why does it have a depth of energy to it that goes way beyond anything we experience?  For me, I find it hard to bring the words to describe my sense of stillness – it’s like a note of music that has a rich tone that echoes out into infinity; it’s like a Presence, a Being, with its own heart beat; it’s like the grace of the Stars gently enveloping my very atoms; it’s like being connected to the whole of creation. 

But wherever we find it, it feels like a place of deep, deep healing, a place of returning home and being nourished.

Two great Beings also bring words:

In stillness the world is restored

Lao Tzu

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form

Eckhart Tolle

So there is an invitation to each of us to find this place within ourselves; to remember the stillness so that we may heed the messages from the Stars over the Winter.

I have gotten very excited about embryology (having just started a craniosacral therapy (CST) course) and am the child in awe of the process of life.  At conception, we each already have a midline – that grows into the central nervous system – that the body organises itself around. 

And then there is an indentation that happens along the midline – which grows into the heart and the diaphram.   Just sitting in silence and paying attention to one’s breath settles the whole person into themselves, how easy is that?

And in the silence of that breath, the connection to one’s heart – who are you, what is your dream?  With that silence of breath is the space for the answer.

We also just touched on resourcing – how as a therapist (and as a life skill) one needs to be able to pull on one’s resources to not shut down when a challenging situation happens.  From the CST training, they asked us to list the top ten things that made us feel good – be it your favourite slippers, sitting by a roaring fire, eating a good curry – and taught us to be able to pull that sensation into our body when we felt ourselves shutting down.  It’s a good thing to try – what butters your bread for you?  How does your body feel when you bring it in?  Can you maintain that when the shit hits the fan? 

The internet is such a huge part of the lives of the generations coming in, with whole new communication channels opening up.  I’ve been delving into Facebook and Twitter, so as not to get left behind – as these mediums are widely used by the younger generations.  Both social networking sites offer a great platform for social change, for inspiring other or for finding people to follow your cause.

It feels that there is a great teaching here for us as dreamers.  Twitter, for instance, restricts your posts to 140 characters – and it takes a lot of creativity to say something meaningful with that restriction! 

Twitter asks ‘what are you doing?’ so you can tell the world and probably appeals to the exhibitionist in all of us.  But it feels like we could take this model of the world of young ones watching and asking us ‘what ARE you doing?’  At the end of each day, what could you post on the site..... it very much helps to focus creativity, to focus on the present and be realistic about what is being manifested.

Over the Summer I have become more and more aware that with these quickening times, we have to be very conscious of what it is that we are calling in.  If indeed we will arrive at a time where thoughts are manifested instantly.......

My man and I have been having many discussions about addiction to suffering and what makes one person see things half-empty whilst the next sees things half-full. 

The question for all of us, in every moment, is are we investing our attention in what we WANT to manifest in our lives or is our attention on what we DO NOT WANT?  We all know that our attention creates our reality, yet this is such a blind spot for many, part of the great forgetting, maybe its very essence.

Do you know where your attention has been focused?  If not, just look at the results that you have in your life – for this is the sum total of your attention. A sobering thought, maybe for some.

But if this mirror sends you into despair and self pity then you are also forgetting that we are always freshly creating our reality. NOW. So if your attention is on how crap you are at doing this..............  What a cycle!

So there is an invitation to use this great gift of ATTENTION in a way of beauty, peace, grace, harmony, wisdom and freedom.

It is great to look at the world through the child’s eyes, to explore, be curious and to wonder.  Yet, there are many messages in society that try and still our curiosity. For instance, Saint Augustine wrote in Confessions, AD 397, that in the eons before creating heaven and earth, God "fashioned hell for the inquisitive".

John Clarke, in Paroemiologia, 1639 suggested that "He that pryeth into every cloud may be struck with a thunderbolt". In Don Juan, Lord Byron called curiosity "that low vice". And, of course, we have the proverb ‘curiosity killed the cat’ which speaks volumes about the dance between curiosity and instinct.

So maybe it is a good time to do a self assessment of your own internal scale of awe and wonder, magic and curiosity.

And here are some words from others on this subject that sang to me:

“I believe the most central function of the brain is to allow us a sense of wonder, which transforms itself into curiosity and awe.  Whenever we learn, we are confronted by the enormity of what we still don’t know.  This humbles us, but also challenges us to ask questions and to discover new truths, which would benefit all of humanity,” Clavier.

Here's what the biologist Lewis Wolpert suggests: “Try many things; do what makes your heart leap; challenge expectation; cherchez le paradox; be sloppy so that something unexpected happens, but not so sloppy that you can't tell what happened; never try to solve a problem until you can guess the answer; seek simplicity; seek beauty.”

"The most beautiful experience in the world is the experience of the mysterious."
Albert Einstein.

"One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests."
John Stuart Mills

"All thinking begins with wondering"
Socrates

“It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands

stuffed with our own devices. We will never know what is

out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to

the world and wait for the wonder to happen.”

Daniel Holman and Lonni Collins PrattSo praying that we are all open to the wonder of it all,

The revival of hope that Barack Obama brings is tangible; his speech an inspiration on so many levels.  I was touched at how he honoured the ancestors, stands for the children’s children – and recognised that only 60 years ago he would not even have been served in a restaurant.  Such change, in such a short space of time – what a beacon for the small steps we each take – and how they can contribute to a much bigger dream that we do not even see at this time.  And he has courage to go against the accepted norm/the consensus reality – already his first actions causing necessary ripples of change. 

Finally, I wanted to share something of my son, Alden, who is 7.  This morning, tucked up in bed, I had an urge to ask him ‘why are you here?’ he said ‘to learn to love’ and ‘to be friends with most’ and ‘to make the world a bigger place’.  And, in answer to ‘where are you going’ I got a big grin and a ‘I’m staying right here’.  A strong teaching on being in the present! (or attachment to hugs and warm duvets!)