Place Holder

Summers are busy.

I love that I get to spend time with my nine-year-old granddaughter - even if it's mostly as her chauffeur. We sing. We talk. We eat snacks together as we zip along Berkeley and Oakland freeways between day camp and home or sit stuck on the road in terrifICK traffICK. Her company makes everything sweeter.

Writing that I promised myself to do still simmers on a back-burner of my brain while I write place-holder pieces to keep my foot in the door.

Away all weekend at a family wedding in Truckee, California, I did place-holder yoga and place-holder meditation. Even an abbreviated practice in a tiny cozy rental house with two young cousins and their mama gives me some comfort and greater ease in the world. So, though it's not the complete, thorough practice I usually  create every day, it supports continuing the habit of doing the routine once in 24 hours so I don't lose my place or lose my Self in the over-busy-ness of life.

Place-holder writing is this blog... a commitment to show up once a week for myself as a person writing. Sometimes, I write what I want to be working on. Sometimes, the subject has no particular thrust or intent. It's just writing to keep the chops polished. I don't expect anyone who stumbles upon my ramblings to get anything from it. Perhaps like watching warm-ups for any physical art form; the stuff of barre work for ballerinas or spring practice for baseball teams, this is just to keep limber enough for the work ahead.

Today is one of those times.

Writing parts of this book, Emergence, puts me in a quandary. It feels like trying to catch moonbeam motes and nail them to prose on the page. Elusive, inconclusive and requiring me to be reclusive, these images of work I've done in the shamanic realm with clients has got me stymied.

In recent interviews about his new book, How to Change Your Mind, covering his various guided psychedelic journeys, Michael Pollan discusses how relating these experiences can sound just plain stupid. Yes. This is what I'm up against as I try to capture the essence of supporting a client during the re-negotiation of a life-changing traumatic event. Those big owies that each of us endures in a lifetime tend to offer us some take-aways; some more useful than others. The earlier in life the challenge descended, the more pervasive its potential negative effect - simply because we don't yet have the hardware to perceive life-threatening events as anything but a commentary on our right to be here on the planet.  I chose to specialize in resolving birth trauma, helping to free up little ones from the residue of Fight, Flight, Freeze in their Nervous Systems, because working with them is particularly rewarding. "...one robin unto its nest again..." I also chose this work because it's what I knew intimately and my career was the byproduct of healing myself - with the support of some pretty fabulous practitioners.

When unresolved, those earliest imprints send out nets that snare us every which way - hobbling us in confounding and pervasive sticky strands. Working in the shamanic realm can help change our mind, and our body, and emotions - allowing our spirit to soar again. I've always considered it a privilege to witness the ordinary miracle of healing. So many of my colleagues and I love our work, but are concluding that in our current world we are creating trauma faster than it can be healed one person at a time.

The purpose of writing this memoir at this time after working in the field for over thirty years is to name the possibilities for resolving birth and early trauma so we can move forward in life as a human family with less entanglement in the load of garbage we all got handed.

While not a short-cut or substitute for traditional therapy, journey work without drugs of any sort, has a place in the pantry of ingredients to simmer a client in alternate realities different from the limiting one that has been dogging her/him since birth. Shifting perspective often gives the "AHA" moment necessary to make permanent, if incremental, changes in how we view ourselves in the portrait of the human family... not as the rug for humanity to rest its feet, but PART of and EQUAL to the whole.

Under the attuned guidance of a bodyworker or practitioner skilled in supporting a hypnogogic state, an adult client may enter the realm of conjoint reality on a different plane, viewing her/his trauma as a drama in need of re-write. From a higher perspective we look at the events and what was happening around our personal experience and gain lasting perspective that it wasn't our fault; that we were not singled out to be punished, but rather were given the ubiquitous and familiar load of poop on our plate to digest and assimilate in a way that yields a particular gift unique to us, which we can then share with our tribe.

In my early life, I faced many challenges. The privileged opportunity I had of turning those particular poisons into nectar is what led me to offer support to babies similarly challenged by early life events. Left untreated,  those early imprints can be overwhelming and persistent in their effect on every aspect of our lives.

At camps for children with medical challenges where I'm one of many volunteers, we see two ways of reacting to the loss of a child. When death takes a child, some walk away and never speak of it again. Others reach back a hand to families on the same path behind them. Seeing the result which the latter approach yielded, strengthened my resolve to work with babies and families traversing the territory I know so well.

Would that there were a short-cut to resolving the world's collective traumas. Perhaps returning to some of our tribal elders's wisdom is not a panacea, but rather a rich opportunity to heal individual hurts in community. What happened in isolation is best healed in community.

Humans can only do so much on our own when we truly need at least two to carry our stretcher. When our injuries are of such magnitude that we cannot get up and go home to lick our wounds in private, but need the support of others in order to regain functionality, then each of us lending a hand is crucial to keeping the tribe functional.

We call it co-mmunity, not co-mutiny for a reason. We cannot thrive if we abandon our principles of securing the best out-come for all. Being adrift in inhospitable space on this life-boat Earth, the human tribe must band together for survival. Each of us has a task.

The thrust of this memoir (working title is Emergence) is to offer an accounting of my self-assigned task to have empathy for those who have been hurt early and often and to offer hope for reclaiming functionality... or at least restoring the FUN to dysFUNctional.

What I recount here are stories of dear humans of differing ages reclaiming their foothold on a path of upward trajectory. These are stories of the ordinary miracle of humans healing with a little help from their community.

While I have endeavored to be painstaking in conveying the truest version of the facts of what happened as I could possibly convey, I have also disguised my clients completely for their privacy. 

May the stories you read here engender hope for humanity reclaiming its own humanity!