Befriend Your Bodymind, A Journey of Embracing Vulnerability, Transmutation and Reclamation
Re-Imagining Healing Together
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Befriending Your Bodymind is advanced bioenergetic somatic therapy, trauma informed, to tend to your soul and alchemically meet your wounds to reveal it’s gift, blessing and wisdom. The wholeness of you is accessed through exploring what seems to be the tender fragments of you and your hurts. This is about unshaming and cultivating kindness to consciously embrace dissolution, liberating you from the narrow lens of which you may be viewing yourself and others in this life. What happens when we step courageously into the fierce wildness of our hearts with the power of creative imagination and loving presence? When we honour the mystery of life with the context of our history digested and alchemized, we have resources to create and come fully into our aliveness and vitality.
What dreams can you dream again? What space can we move from when we touch the fullness of that which we previously caged and liberate by means of being with, embracing and loving? When we meet ourselves in a space free of judgement, misunderstanding and knee jerk rejections, when we step into curiosity, we may not like what we find initially – herein lies the opportunity to befriend all aspects of ourselves, to listen and feel, to weep and to grieve. On the other side of control, rejection or spiritual cocooning, we reclaim our fullness and flexibility to live into life in evermore creative ways. From hiding in insecurity to the rich spectrum of abundance, our play, our songs, our dreams and the wisdom of the innocence of a small one arises in connection to what seemed to be something that needed to be shunned into what’s often referred to as our shadow.
Laying down the endless cycle of self-improvement and the exhaustion of moving from a place of there must be something wrong or broken with me aka self-abandonment, we can embrace the opportunity given in this life, its gift, a plethora of possibilities can be witnessed.
What if pain and struggle was the intelligence of your bodymind calling you to listen deeper into and embrace your essence?
Matt Licata sums up the essence of the core of Befriending Your BodyMind and is one of many sources of inspirations behind this offering as well as most of my work, allow me to introduce you to him, if you haven’t already met, with his writing titled Let Love Do It:
Contemporary research in the fields of neuroscience and trauma have revealed that suffering and chronic states of struggle are not ‘caused’ by what happened to us in the past. What is most important is our perception of what happened, and how in the present we organize the experience in our minds, brains, and sensitive nervous systems. From this perspective, there is no past. There is only the erupting aliveness of the here and now.
While it can be difficult to allow in the implications of this discovery – and while doing so can trigger all sorts of feelings, emotions, and sensations in the body and in the heart – it is a radical message of hope. It is profound good news for we cannot change the past. Healing is not dependent upon changing the past. But we can come to reorganize our experience, with the guiding hand of love.
Thanks to the wild realities of neuroplasticity, we can transform the context in which we hold, organize, and make meaning of what has happened to us. Even if our early environment was mired in disruptive attachment, chronic empathic failure, and overwhelming dysregulation, it is possible to create new neural pathways, and to give birth to more cohesive, flexible, and integrated narratives.
This creation… this rewiring… this birth… the activity of wild, reorganizing love as it emerges out of the unseen and into this world through you.
While this work is not easy – and requires just about everything that we have – there is hope. I know I do not speak all that often about hope, as I am a great fan of hopelessness, as a wrathful and transformative companion on the path. But this is not some disembodied, theoretical, philosophical hope. It is embodied, untamed, creative, and utterly alive.
I have been honored to witness this unfolding, illumination, and transformation in many over the years, who have been kind enough to allow me to accompany them into realms of dark and of light. Into the rich emotional and somatic landscape, where there is no map, no guidebook, and no clear assurance that it will all turn out according to our plans, wishes, and dreams.
While the raging activity of love will never conform to our preferences – for it is far too creative for that – it comes offering aliveness and wholeness, which may be what you have been longing for all along.
Don’t let anyone tell you that you cannot allow love to reorganize your life. It’s simply not true. Don’t ever give up. Love will never, ever give up on you.
How well have you loved? From the caged unlived and unloved to the sanctuary of your being, feeling, expressing and living fully to embrace the full spectrum of the richness of you, this is your invitation.
When you address the dense morphogentic fields of emotions it enables the heart-brain to function normally, offering harmony in the bodymind. Not only in the physiological functions, but also in the psychological and emotional functions including all the factors of being able to relate to yourself and all the people around you.
“I’ll never forgive that person” may be one of the deadliest things a person can say. For many of us, having to say sorry was something that was presented as mandatory in childhood, which can lead to these words feeling empty or like a never ending guilt trip. We can easily misinterpret forgiveness and attach wrong doing to it. If it’s disempoweringly seen as having fault, it feeds our victim and tendency to blame naturally follows. These sorts of entanglements, even the seeming strongholds, can make it challenging to sense and connect to ourselves and others with trust and intimacy.
Could you ever be comfortable in your own skin?
You may have learned, like many others, at an early age (from family, friends, tv, magazines, culture, society, inherited trauma) that you or your bodymind is unacceptable, deficient & lacking, that it needs improvement, that it’s too much, not enough or perhaps both are present despite their seeming contradiction.
Befriending Your Bodymind is a workshop that invites you to alchemize and artfully tend to the discovery of your essence, underneath the indoctrinations of your upbringing and your early childhood experiences. Redeeming that which has has been shamed or has been judged as a difficult experience, so its wisdom, purpose, meaning and roles in healing are illuminated. Re-imagining, re-imaging your relationship to this bodymind, to you.
During Befriending Your Bodymind you will be led through a series of exercises designed to artfully explore the masks you’ve learned to uphold & portray. All the energy you use to maintain this self-image is energy that your body could use to boost your immune system, reset your nervous system & connect you to what’s always been underneath it all, your natural vibrant essence. This energy is known in Chinese Medicine as your sexual energy, our source of vitality, creativity, productivity, wellness and capacity to take aligned aware action.
Befriending Your Bodymind has evolved from the rich traditions and developments of psychotherapy, bioenergetics, and eastern tradition. I’ve expanded the principles to create an empowering and transformative workshop where the participant can experience, recognize and garner new information that guides new ways of being around body centered issues, all forms of trauma and mental health support
Befriending Your Bodymind has evolved from the rich traditions and developments of psychotherapy, bioenergetics, and eastern tradition. I’ve expanded the principles to create an empowering and transformative workshop where the participant can experience, recognize and resolve body centered issues, all forms of trauma and abuse as well as nervous system dysregulation,
Befriending Your Bodymind participants explore self by stripping off the mask of coping. The “Coping Mask” is a matrix of fears, judgments, beliefs and behaviors that seem to carry a weight and limit an individual from embracing and loving life.
Naked Beneath Our Clothes article written by Dr. John Veltheim, exposes the conditioning, experiences, and environmental influences that contribute to the distorted view of an individual’s sexuality/sensuality.
Being Naked Beneath our Clothes is an attitude of self acceptance so that life can move beyond the restrictions. The resulting opening of the heart and trust in ones own essence supports therapeutic integration and personal evolution.
- Befriending Your Bodymind is explored in a safe, confidential environment free of
anything sexual in nature. - Eligibility is based on your application, please register to start your application process. No other pre-reqs besides your commitment to live fully are required.
What’s most exciting about taking Befriending Your Bodymind? The pros are plenty and range from offering the unique opportunity of learning techniques such as Advanced BodyGenics work, Wei Qi work and understanding the energy of the nervous system to consciously experiencing self-imposed limitations to cultivate vitality within every aspect of life. A unique experiential workshop unlike any other, Befriending Your Bodymind enables a deepening of knowledge as the work becomes embodied and ignited. Spacious honesty, grace and gentleness deepen the practitioner’s ability to listen; strengthening the scope of their sessions by broadening possibilities through personal experienced.
The invitation to authentically and vulnerably step into our lives, being more present and alive, creating new perspectives of the entangled ball of what we thought was true but wasn’t becames clear. With our self-deceit visible, we can step out of the tight spot between the rock and the hard place, touching possibilities that can now abound where before you thought there were none. The intellect surrenders, the heart and pelvis synchronize into animating the body, providing the means to more and more sensually feel. A freshness animates the body as you consciously experience your living belief systems. Taking accountability for a life lived as it was, you complement an experience of yourself, one of truth. Having addressed the external behaviors, the mask of self image, the need to protect the inner turmoil (the false self) falls away as you’ve found the inevitable peace the comes in vulnerability and cultivate new ways of being, inside of yourself and in relationships alike.
Come explore with curiosity the crossing of the abyss from ‘knowing better’ to being, to welcome and rekindle the spark of holism.
Come, Live Fully.