Most healing modalities engage just one or two levels of consciousness to support healing: talk therapy works mostly with the mind; energy healing like Reiki works mostly with energy; and many forms of body work focus entirely on physical structures. But the whole person includes all of these ...Most healing modalities engage just one or two levels of consciousness to support healing: talk therapy works mostly with the mind; energy healing like Reiki works mostly with energy; and many forms of body work focus entirely on physical structures. But the whole person includes all of these levels of consciousness – and more. How can the whole person be engaged for faster and more profound healing?
By using subtle movement explorations and guided awareness, you can engage all these levels of consciousness to heal quickly. There are four keys to doing this:
Quality of movement
Intention and attention
Exploration of barriers
Engaging your whole body and whole being
To explain these four keys, I’ll take the example of the movement of reaching for love – and how to do it in a way that uncovers and dissolves your barriers to connecting more deeply with others.
Quality of Movement
It’s easy to make a movement to reach for something. We reach for cups, door handles and light switches on a daily basis without even thinking about it. These movements are so automatic that we have no awareness of the quality of movement. However, if you slow the movement down, and reduce the amount of physical force, you’ll discover that your habitual movements are far from smooth and flowing. Try reaching for something. Now try reaching for the same thing, but taking 30 to 60 seconds to reach it. As you slow the movement down, you’ll discover that there are some places where the movement is easy and takes little effort. There are other places where the movement takes a little extra effort, or the movement takes a little detour from a direct line.
Reaching for an inanimate object like a cup usually has little meaning behind it, so the variations in quality of movement will probably be very subtle. As we add in more meaning-laden intentions to the movement, the variations in quality of movement will become more pronounced.
Intention and Attention
By adding an intention to a movement, you can focus your awareness on a particular topic. For example, turn your attention to the topic of receiving love. Now pick someone who you would like to experience more love with (this could be a person from your past, someone currently in your life, or someone you would like to meet in the future). Now create the intention that you are going to reach for love from that person.
First make a movement to reach for love. Now slow that movement down so that it takes 30 to 60 seconds to complete the movement. Try exploring the movement several times, each time increasing your awareness of the quality of the movement. You’ll notice that there are places where the movement takes more or less effort.
Exploration of Barriers
We call the places where it takes a little extra effort to make a movement ‘barriers’. Keeping the intention of reaching for love in mind, now start to search for the barriers to that movement. When you find a place in the movement that requires extra effort, press up against the barrier (like car tires pushed up against a speed bump, without going over the speed bump).
Barriers occur where we have internal rules against the thing we are doing. The internal conflict means that it requires extra work to make the movement. If you’re willing to gently push up against a barrier, without pushing through it, you’ll start to discover what those rules are about.
Engaging Your Whole Body & Whole Being
As you push up against a barrier, you’ll start to notice that more than just your hand and arm are engaged in the movement. The less effort and the more awareness you use, the more you’ll discover other things going on in your body.
By exploring a barrier in this way, you’ve gone beyond what was already accessible to your mental awareness, and you’ve started to uncover information from all levels of consciousness, including your mind, body, emotions and energy.
Some Examples
If you’re like me, you’ve probably read through this article quickly, without stopping to explore your barriers to receiving love. Here are a couple of examples of people’s experiences using this exploration to dissolve their barriers to receiving love.
Alison’s Experience
We’re sitting on the floor, eyes closed, and Mark’s voice is quietly giving us movement suggestions. This is my third workshop, so the process is becoming familiar, even if the results are unexpected every time. Mark reminds us to turn our attention inward, work slowly, and just see what happens.
“Pick a person from whom we would like to receive more love.” I pick my grown son. We have a good relationship, but I feel there is something that blocks me from receiving his love, and I don’t know what it is. That should be an easy place to start.
“Reach for that love.” My right hand starts to move slowly up and outward and absolutely stops. I’ve got a metal band across my chest and around the top half of my arms and my arm won’t move. I try again, slowly, over and over. Same thing, but all by itself, my face is turning toward the left and downward. It is a shame gesture! My face is turning away in shame!
Tears start to trickle down my face as the reason becomes clear. Years ago, when he was a teenager, I was not being as caring as I should have for this soul who I love so much. In the quietness of my body I am being reminded that I was not there for him back then. Did I have a reason why at the time? Of course! And it was a powerful reason at the time. I’m generally a caring person, and I love him. But my own shame is now in the way of the clean relationship I want with him. What a surprise! The depth of the feelings and the clarity of this 27-year-old experience are both available for me to examine and grow from. Wow!
That evening I tell my son about the workshop. We talk about that time, so many years ago. It is not easy to admit to shame, but as I try to make amends for that period in our lives I feel something shift between us. And as we wipe tears from each other’s faces, the “bands” are gone and I can raise my arms now to receive his hug.
My Own Experience
(This exploration later inspired part of the design for my Receiving Love home workshop video).
I had been frustrated for a long time by my patterns in intimate relationships. It always seemed when I was in a relationship that I wished I were with someone else, and that when a relationship ended, I wished I could rekindle the relationship I had just lost. Somehow the grass always seemed greener on the other side.
I decided to explore this pattern to see if I could change it. I held my desire to create a lasting, intimate relationship in mind while making a movement to reach for the relationship I wanted. As I reached, I looked for barriers to the movement in my body. I found one on the back of my left lung, near my seventh rib: suddenly I felt intense sadness there. At first I thought it was sadness about my mother's death (she died when I was 21), but as I explored more, I found that it's root was much younger than that.
When I was little, my mother worked long hours and I had a nanny. My mother was caring but not very warm and my nanny was very warm and loving. I discovered that somehow, when I was two, I had picked up that it would be disloyal to my mother if I received more love from my nanny than I did from my mother. The rule that I had discovered, hidden in the back of my lung, was that I was not allowed to receive more love from anyone else than I did from my mother. It was a very painful moment in my discovery.
As I explored the rule more, I realized that it had evolved as I had grown older. The childhood version was “I’m not allowed to receive more love from others than I receive from my mother – and I don’t receive much love from my mother.” The adult evolution was “The relationship I’m in isn’t as good as the relationship I could be in with someone else.” That evolution may not make much sense to the rational mind, but it's how the unconscious mind and the body work.
For the first time I understood why the grass always seemed greener on the other side. The woman I was with took on the emotional role of my mother, while the women I was not allowed to be with took on the role of my nanny. As I completed my exploration, it seemed that the pain and loss from past relationships were just floating up and out of my body.
Since that experience two years ago I’ve had a much deeper relationship with my partner. And I find that I’m delighted to be with her rather than wishing I were with someone else.
Everyone Is Different
One remarkable thing about these subtle movement explorations with guided awareness is that they are specific enough to be evocative, while being general enough to encompass the very different interests of different people. Alison used the exploration to deepen her relationship with her son, I used it to expand my relationship with my girlfriend, others have used it to build their relationships with parents, opposite-sex partners, same-sex partners, family members and friends. We all need love, but love means very different things to different people.
Mark Fiveman is the author of the Body-Psyche blog.