Please Note: Winter Blooms is an educational website only and is in no way meant to replace experience with a trained EFT practitioner, counselor, or therapist. To find an EFT Practitioner, visit the AAMET website, the EFT Universe website, the Tapping Solution website, or contact Jane at 802-533-9277 or jane@winterblooms.net for EFT coaching support.
Since the body is the holder of our secrets, sometimes gentle, sometimes vigorous bodywork can bring hidden issues to the margins of our consciousness to signal new work to be done. This can be a surprising process, especially when we think we’re just going out for a run but during or afterward find some troubling past or current issue has surfaced for our attention, seemingly out of the blue. Potentially challenging experiences can be turned to advantage by inviting our bodywork to be a full partner in our EFT/Tapping sessions. Dance, Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Yoga, walking, swimming, or running become vital components of our spiritual, emotional, and intellectual evolution when we consciously invite our movement experiences to contribute to the deeper truths we are seeking about the Self and our current stage of growth.
In my own experience, serious, prolonged childhood trauma remained hidden throughout my teens and early adulthood until the day I laced up my runners and hit the street for a run. Before I began this bodywork, I was conscious of a free floating anxiety and of a cramped, compacted feeling in my body. In the years before beginning my running habit, I had taken up a Hatha Yoga, a practice I could do at home while my young children napped. My running routine developed when I awakened at 5 and, rather than focusing on the anxiety, could get out into the early morning while my husband and children slept for another hour or so.
I did not anticipate the great dividends this bodywork would do for my emotional well being. Initially, my goal was to reduce my anxiety, brought on by what I believed at the time to be my growing awareness of life’s complexities and paradoxes as I moved more deeply into the joys and responsibilities of mothering. Many years later I came to understand what my running and stretching were doing for me, but at the time, I only knew that I had entered an accelerated period of growth in which all manner of early wounds surfaced for attention.
Now, some thirty years later, I consider dancing, walking, running, and stretching essential to my continuing evolution. My body continues to be my wisest guide regarding my emotional and spiritual health as I strengthen my commitment to being present to myself and others. Slumped posture tells me that there is a specific burden I need to consciously address if I am to return to my desired upright position in the world. Anxiety sends me to my journal and my Tapping routine to invite insight into its causes. An ache or pain in a joint, muscle, or organ reminds me to tune in to my Energy Medicine knowledge, to better understand my body’s messages. Fogginess, self righteousness, anger, and fear remind me of the value of Beginner’s Mind, that superbly innocent point of view that replaces all judgment and expectation with a benign and tender curiosity.
In the classroom and the EFT session, I suggest bodywork as a reliable method of moving forward when students and clients feel stuck. Many of us equate bodywork with massage, but all movement and stillness, when consciously applied to our growth processes, is bodywork. Rubbing the gaits – those often tender webs of skin between our fingers and toes – makes room for insight when we self-massage in conjunction with inviting such insights into our over-scheduled lives. A five-minute stretching session along gallbladder meridian by bending the torso gently first to one side and then the other can help us to make important decisions or calmly express the appropriate anger a situation warrants.
The body is always available to us as an evolutionary partner as soon as we tune into its various voices. Our flesh speaks eloquently when we eat something that does not resonate with our current needs. In much the same way, our thoughts let us know when we are entertaining harmful ideas, sometimes consciously, often unconsciously. Anxiety, fatigue, hunger, satiety, restlessness, fear, grief, and physical pain are our constant and wise teachers. Thanking the body for its amazing steadfastness as our first and best teacher is a ritual that expands our dynamic capacity for peace and love.
Until next week
Jane
Jane Buchan, MA, AAMET Advanced Practitioner, jane@winterblooms.net, 802-533-9277