I find myself questing and dreaming with Freedom and the question "do we really know its full essence?" The dictionary tells our minds that:
“Its the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.” AND “Its the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.” Yet someone might claim ‘freedom’ and be committing atrocious acts; the definition can call to ego and to selfishness. True Freedom feels to be an interconnectedness with all beings. It is not a singular occupation. Many of us assert our ego and our ‘right’ to be. If I sit with Freedom, it feels at its core as an internal state of being – to start with. It is not necessarily related to external happenings. Sure financial freedom is nice and physical freedom is a huge bonus yet without freedom at your core, they become meaningless and less potent. So do I feel free to be honest with myself, with my dream, my family and loved ones? Do I imprison parts of myself to fit in to society or do I revel in the jewels of myself? Can I resonate this place of Freedom with all that are around me? As Mandela said : "For to be free is not merely to cast off one`s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." He also said that "There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires." May we each find our path to Freedom. There is an excellent book called ‘Waking the Tiger’ by Peter Levine that talks about healing trauma:
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. Craniosacral therapy is one of the ways we can release ourselves from this endless cycle. Never before has there felt such an urgency to revisit our ‘scripts’. We all have one, whether conscious of it or not. It’s usually a result of our early experiences in childhood. Unfortunately, as we get older and get new experiences, we don’t tend to update the software!
This is the scenario of the person, old enough to be a grandmother or grandfather, blaming their parents for the way they are today – instead of claiming the journey that they themselves have made. A really good self assessment is to see what your script is with a person you have never met before. What parts of your story do you tell, what parts are you most attached to? Imagine going to see a new therapist and having to give an emotional, spiritual and physical overview of how you are now. If you were asked the question ‘is there a part of your story where you’d like to begin?’ what would be your response. This is a revealing process of your script. Would you list all of the bad things that have happened to you? Would you claim the good things that you have created this lifetime? What would be the title of your life movie? ‘I have to do it on my own.’ ‘The lazy little bastard.’ ‘Life is a struggle.’ ‘Everyone is out to get a piece of me.’ ‘If I hide, I’ll be safe.’ Holding onto these scripts is anchoring us in a past that no longer exists. Here we are in 2015. What kind of world will we call in if we haven’t updated our software? And if you did update your software, your script - what would it be? Write it, pin it on your fridge, on the mirror. Remind yourself constantly and subtley so that it goes in without you trying. Make a future free of past stories that hold you back. One of the things I love to do is find out what people are passionate about. It’s a beautiful experience to hear the fires that sparkle in us human beings and to take time to feel the source of our own fire – which changes over time.
For me there are many things I am passionate about – being a mother, making a better world for the children, medicine work.... I could go on! But what I found myself incredibly passionate about is stillness. I can feel 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. Wherever we find it, it feels like a place of deep, deep healing, a place of returning home and being nourished. And is one of the greatest gifts of craniosacral work. 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 |
May you walk in Beauty
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Copyright of Ri Ferrier 2024
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