For the last 25 years, I have been asking myself this question: What does it mean to be a healer? I have never wanted to call myself a healer. Why? Was I uncomfortable taking on that much responsibility for another's well-being? What if I failed to help them make the changes they desired?
Letting go of Hierarchies
When a person comes to me as a Unergi body-psychotherapist, I know that she seeks help of some kind. How do I tell her that I am here to study how to heal myself, and that I appreciate the opportunity she is offering me to do that by sharing her healing journey with me?
As soon as I place my hands lightly on a person's body, I am introducing myself. Her nervous system receives direct information of my intention. The quality of my touch conveys the whole spectrum of nuances of who I am and what I bring to this moment of healing opportunity for both of us.
If my “agenda” is to make her well, to heal her, to fix her, to change her, I fall into the trap of telling her that I know something, can do something, make something happen that she can't. No matter how well intentioned I am in this process, I am claiming that my input is going to make the difference.
She will respond with some level of resistance or compliance, neither of which re-educates nor helps her to integrate the new learnings. Rather it tells her that somewhere in her physical, emotional or spiritual self she is defective and she needs me to point out her mistakes and set them right. This creates a hierarchy of healer and healee and it places a tremendous amount of responsibility and therefore burden on me, the “healer”.
If, in addition to this, I touch her quickly and intrusively, she will send a message to her muscles to brace herself against incoming information. Instead of trusting me to respect and honor any kind of resistances that stand guard, she will dip into her memory bank with lightning speed, and I will be added to the list of people who criticized her, devalued her, or even abused her. Even if I touch her with a great deal of support and use extensive knowledge of anatomy, the deeper message is that I am interfering
How, then, can I avoid setting myself up as the one who knows more? How can I stay open to remembering that we each know something about ourselves that is unique, sacred, powerful and absolutely enough in this moment? That I, for once, am not addicted to seeing health and healing as a desirable state of the absence of pain and problems, but also as a place of vast possibilities and adventures, a place of accepting what is and a place of not making something happen but letting it happen?
This is very subtle, but also infinitely rich in its potential. I enter her energy field by standing at her head. I place my hands on the sides of her head. I walk to her feet and touch her ankles. I slip my hands under her hip joint or cradle her leg and gently move it from side to side. I visualize her organs or bones and sense her energy directions. I listen to the story of her body, and she dialogs with different aspects of herself and the people in her life. And I allow this contact to teach me about me!
The essence of my work, then, is to communicate through words, touch and movement, a memory of wholeness, of universal mind, of unlimited potential. And I need to be willing to go there myself. If I set myself up as someone who knows more, we get into trouble. This is tricky because, yes, I studied all these techniques of how to stimulate and motivate the human organism into wholeness, but I must never forget for a moment that I have studied it all, and continue to do so, because I want to live an expansive life. The bottom-line truth is I do it for me. If I get hooked into believing that what I do is for the other person, that I want to make her well, that I need to rescue her from her pain, then I may re-stimulate her early life training that Mom, Dad, teachers, etc. have the answers. I seduce the person into becoming dependent on me and rob her of her own powerful healing resources. I re-route her inner knowing of the deeper connection with her own natural organic design, and she will not be able to remember and see her reflection in nature.
The Healing Forces of Nature
After years of stalking simplicity, it seems to me that I found it. Or at least I allow myself to catch a strong glimpse of it, again and again. Recently, I awoke to a bright blue-skied summer day, a few days after my birthday, with a feeling of joy. It was a “workday”. I drove to my office in Philadelphia with the windows rolled down in my old Saab, the summer breeze playing on my skin and hair. Nature looked luscious and inviting and I was drawn to play my favorite “nature in the car” game. I imagine that a particular tree is my Unergi teacher giving me a Unergi lesson. While driving, I keep a tree in my peripheral soft vision for a length of time, approaching and passing the tree.
My eyes observe the shape, form, lines of this tree and I sense its quality in my own body. What if I was this tree in its uprightness, in its length, width and volume? What if its trunk became my spine and its branches flowed through my shoulders, arms, hands and fingers and could reach out and radiate into the sky, into my environment. What if its crown could be my head open to sun and rain? And what if its roots could be my feet reaching deep into the earth. Curiously my gas pedal foot seems to then connect straight to the powers of the car’s engine, while the whole car seems to respond to this experiment. I am being driven lightly by the car, or the tree, or creativity and creation itself.
With that awareness of connectedness, I arrive at my office. Karen, my first client of the day walks in with a radiance of her own. This is the 3rd time she has come. Referred to me by a yoga teacher, she has “unexplained” pain in different parts of her body, particularly in her knees. She has been to various medical practitioners. She is now on painkillers, which she hates to continue to take. When I look at her with my physical eyes it seems a mystery why this young woman should be in pain so much of the time. At first, her body seems well aligned, her skin glows of summer sun, she moves easily. She does not sit on a chair but prefers the floor. As her head looks up to me, while I sit in a low chair, I have noticed that her chest stays collapsed and she is making an effort to bring herself into uprightness again and again.
During our first two sessions we have explored her story. She has laid on my bodywork table while we have listened through touch, talk and movement to her story. Early emotional abandonment by her father seems to be a strong theme for her, and we have looked into how this still plays out in her life today.
After a few minutes of talking about her experiences during the past week, I invite her to lie on my table again. As I begin to touch her left side, I become aware that I am responding to what my hands perceive, differently today. The tree exercise in the car has put me into a receiver mode and I am still in it. Now I imagine Karen’s “treeness”, her own core support, her connectedness to sky and earth. With each touch of my hands on her body I allow that information to flow into my own body. She is giving me a lesson about moving into harmony with myself. My body easily flows into an exquisite lengthening, deepening, widening, extending into the surrounding energy field. I am including the room we are in, everything in it and the huge maple tree outside my window whose large crown is encouraging me. Something that I continue to search for is once again utterly apparent: We are connected — as simple as that. My kinesthetic discovery is further collaborated by Karen’s response. Her muscles are letting go of holding patterns; her skeleton is released to find its natural supportive place. When I ask her what she experiences she says
“I feel like my left side is like mercury, fluid and spreading out.” When I ask her how her right side feels about that and what it would say to the left, she answers: “I am ready to come along.”
I encourage her to sense her right side and what the left side could teach her about this mercury feeling of spreading out. While I continue to tap into our core support touching her left side, her right side is quickly willing to join us. However, now she feels an icy chasm in the middle of her body and the fear of not being able to join the two sides of her body is strong. I ask her if she could have a closer look at the chasm, sense its depth and iciness while at the same time sensing the two sides of her body. In a short time, she sheds a few tears, tears of acknowledgement of her fear and relief that she can look at this fear with deep internal support.
She now begins to dialogue with various people in her life who she has unfinished business with. She is able to confront each one with a certain ego strength needed to feel like an equal partner. An important exchange of ideas takes place in which the differences and aspirations between her and another person become more and more apparent. I ask her to also take the role of the other person, talking to herself, Karen.
Deep moments of “Ahas” how she has internalized the conflicts on physical and emotional levels become available. I feel her muscles respond, letting go of the “gripping” so that her skeleton takes up its natural form and space again. She is finally allowing the support of my hands and the whole table underneath her body, while at the same time confronting difficult situations in her life. She finds new options to deal with them through an enlarged understanding of humanness, her own and that of others in her life.
I am struck by the simplicity again and knowing that, when I dare to receive the gifts of my natural environment, life and everything in it can flow and rearrange itself into harmony and balance.
Guiding and Following
I have no agendas because I am not fixed on the outcome. My intention is simply to invite the person into change. As she is lying on my bodywork table, I offer my words, my touch, my body movements to join her body movements. We create a “dance” together of guiding and following, letting spirit and our expanded selves take the lead.
I am working with touch that reflects my whole self, my intention, my body's coordination of length, width and depth, and my ease. I offer my sensitivities to what her body tells me. I offer a direct experience of respect; respect for if and how far she is ready to move. I encourage her when she wants to confront unresolved issues, or slow down when she needs more time to first feel her strength before she is ready to do so. I keep checking in with her as to how she experiences my touch. Does it feel supportive, or does it stimulate a memory of where touch became dangerous for her. Does she want me to back off and stop touching because she needs time to process first?
This delicate work requires fine attunement within my own body. While she gives me feedback through her body and voice, I have to be willing and able to listen and read both of us simultaneously. I sense when muscles are enlivened and when they ask for more input. Or I sense when they contract and need time to allow a new feeling to surface. She is able to remember that she has choices now and can be her own best ally. No one forces her to make changes.
We are now re-recording her history. She dares to look at, feel, and come to terms with events and people of the past that have shaped her life and her body. She processes these traumas or influences from the past. While feeling and sensing, she is simultaneously supported, encouraged, and witnessed by me, the Unergi practitioner, one of her allies.
All the while my intention is to remember that my studies are showing me that I am not here to heal another; that I am here to heal myself. Period. And when I offer that state of consciousness to another person she is free to explore her own power of healing, she starts to remember wholeness in mind, body, emotions. Together we create an opportunity to join in spirit, and both of us, simultaneously, can experience our larger potential.
So, the reason I love being a Unergi body-psychotherapist is because it challenges me to find a way to fall in love with myself again and again. It opens the door to the intention of a much larger love and thereby creates a field of energy that envelops and penetrates every cell of our being. It relieves me of a responsibility to fix, heal or treat another human being, deepens my listening skills and takes me to love, life, death, passion, creativity, nature, tears and laughter. To celebrate this state of awareness, I have created a school for Body-Psychotherapy I have called Unergi: Unity and Energy.
And here is the bottom line: A healer is someone who dares to go on a healing journey for her or himself, thereby creating a rippling effect which informs and radiates into other people's lives.
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