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Mother nature threw a curve the
weekend of
March 16 - 18, the weekend of my third
annual Healing the Traumatized Heart retreat
at Kripalu. The only serious snowstorm of
this winter, a
Northeaster, began early Friday, creating
treacherous road conditions for the trek from
Boston to Lenox. The usually two to two and
a half hour drive became a four to eight hour
drive past car and truck accidents galore, as my valiant staff members,
Larry Cotton, John
Yep, Despina Moutsouris and Donna Grant, and
I discovered.
The good news is we all made it
safely to
Lenox, and a powerfully healing weekend was
had by all who braved the storm to attend.
The biggest gift that emerged from
the
weekend was the realization that it is time
for me to bring this Healing Heart work to
kids, and parents and kids together.
I can thank my eleven-year-old son
Alex, for
making this crystal clear. Alex participated
in the retreat with full embrace, and
contributed to a new depth of healing for
all--as an ambassador for the inner child, to
a catalyst for intergenerational healing. Who among us doesn't carry
with us emotional
healing work that could be done with our
parents, our grandparents and our children,
as well as ourselves?
Read on below to learn of my active
efforts
to put together EKP programs for kids and
parents and kids. And please give me your
feedback on the questions I am now exploring
to build these important and
ground-breaking programs.
In this issue, you will also find an
article
entitled "At Arms Reach: Instilling A Sense
of Rightness Through Loving Embrace," and an
excerpt from my blog a
www.heartspacecafe.com/blog/: "Love,
Addiction and 'Dopamine on the Brain.'"
If you want a more steady flow of
articles
than just this monthly newsletter provides,
you can find them at the HeartSpace Cafe. And please add your thoughts,
questions,
comments and add your own discussion topics. My webmaster has now fixed
the website so
you can response to my musings and start your
own.
I am currently organizing a session
of my 6
week coaching class, The Money Class,
which provides a wonderful opportunity to get
grounded, set and work towards financial
goals, overcome money obstacles and make
peace with money. The class will meet
Thursdays from 8:45 am - 10:45 am in
Newton.
And EKP apprentice Gretchen Stecher
is
working to organize a Healing the
Traumatized Heart retreat November 16 - 18,
2007 on the Cape. If you, a friend or
loved one would like to be part of an EKP
weekend retreat, please let us know. We
also welcome your ideas how to spread the
word to those who might benefit from an EKP
experience. It does take village--for
almost anything of substance to become real.
Heartfully,
Linda
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At Arms Reach
Instilling a Sense of Rightness Through Loving Embrace
Some of my happiest moments are watching my
11-year-old son, Alex, cradle our 8-month-old
Birman kitten, Flora, in his arms. He picks
her up with gentleness and care, and turns
her upside down like a baby. She melts. Her
angelic face beams. Her beautiful blue eyes
light up with animated joy. And so does
Alex's face. He beams as she beams. And in
seeing them interact, I beam as well.
Something is very right with this picture. With this kind of
loving care from her young
human (I can't bring myself to use the word
"owner"), is it any surprise that Flora is a
peaceful, happy presence in our home, on our
beds and in our lives? Having rehabbed 8
feral cats and kittens before my son was
born, I really appreciate the impact of
giving a young creature love, care and
respect from the very beginning of their life.
Being held in loving arms creates a sense of
safety and solidity from which to move out
into the world at ones own organic pace. When a creature has the
foundation of a
loving embrace, their energies can go to
growing, learning and exploring, rather than
being conserved and carefully rationed for
bare survival.
Being held in loving arms provides a sense of
welcome, acceptance and essential
rightness--that everything is really okay,
that the person is fundamentally okay and
whole, and that they truly can be free to be
who they are.
In her book THE CONTINUUM CONCEPT, author
Jean Liedloff speaks to this point. "Without
the sense of being right, one has no sense of
how much one ought to claim of comfort,
security, help, companionship, love,
friendship, things, pleasure or joy. A
person without this sense often feels there
is an empty space where he ought to be."
Sadly, all too often in our culture, infants
and young children grow up without this sense
of rightness. We suffer from an
intergenerational domino effect, where one
generation who was kept at arm's length,
lacks the relational, emotional,
developmental experience to be able to cradle
and embrace their own children. As a
consequence, we pass on a legacy of
emptiness, of anxiety, of pain, of feeling
all alone and powerlessness to get the things
we most essentially need.
In more than twenty years in practice as a
body psychotherapist, one of the most
poignant threads I have observed is how our
unmet early childhood needs reverberate
through and shape our lives. If we have not
been held, embraced, nurtured and cherished
emotionally and physically, a part of us
numbs out. We become distanced from our
basic human needs, because the pain of having
them go unmet is only bareable for so long.
When we have our own children, we often
cannot recognize the most delicate, intimate
and essential parts of them. We love them,
but we cannot give them what we don't have
ourselves. Just as we have learned to
"tough it out" and "push on," we pass these
very messages on to them. Or, we can
recognize our short-comings and model what
NOT to do, but with a big question mark when
it comes to looking at viable alternatives. We lack the skills and
experiences needed to
create emotional and physical intimacy in our
friendships, with a partner, and in our own
self-care.
Liedloff reflects, "The infant (like the
guru) lives in the eternal now; the infant in
arms (and the guru) in a state of bliss; the
infant out of arms in a state of longing in
the bleakness of an empty universe. His
expectations are mingling with the actuality,
and the innate ancestral expectations are
being overlaid (not altered or replaced) by
those based upon his own experience. The
amounts by which the two sets of expectations
diverge determine the distance that will
separate him from his inherent potential for
well-being."
Sad and foreboding as our common reality is,
the good news is that it is truly "never too
late to have a happy childhood," in the sense
that within our hearts, minds and bodies
exist the state of consciousness of the
infant, the young child and all ages of
being, and when we access these states of
consciousness, we can get what we really
need. One of the gifts of EKP is that we can
create safety, make contact, and through the
pathway of the emotion-body interface, reach
into the "baby-back-there-then" and give him
or her what s/he really needs in the here and
now.
Many years ago, in a workshop I was leading,
a participant suggested that we create a
"cradling" ritual, where each member of the
group had a chance to be held and cradled by
all the other members of the group. Since
it's easy to pick up an 8-month-old kitten or
a 5-month old baby, in our own arms we have
the capacity to provide an embrace. But when
we have grown into adulthood and are bigger
than even a big person's armspan, it takes a
"village" to offer that same quality of
holding space.
In the workshop, as we took turns cradling
one another, many tears were shed. There is
something magical about reaching in to the
inner core--be it the adult-self or the
infant-self--and being cradled and embraced. I could feel a softening
in the room, as
years of tension melted away, replaced by
safety, rightness and peace.
Together, we helped restore our cellular
knowing that we are interconnected, that we
matter, and that there can be places of
safety and peace.
I have seen that this kind of deep reaching
in and holding--emotionally and
physically--is a powerful salve for
depression. I cannot even begin to tell you
how many people I have worked with who have
suffered depression have not gotten their
most essential early needs met. Helping
restore a sense of rightness fills the void
of emptiness and despair, and provides hope
and possibility that even if life has its
twists and turns, that fundamentally, we
really will be okay.
For
more information, check-out www.healingheartpower.com
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From the Menu of the HeartSpace Cafe
Love, Addiction and 'Dopamine on the Brain'
Tara Parker Pope is the Wall St. Journal's
Health columnist. Her article, "Is It Love
or Mental Illness? They're Closer Than you
Think," sure got me thinking deeply.
She opens by saying, "At some point in life,
most of us will face a potential major
mental-health crisis. It is called love." She notes that recent studies
of brain scans
"show that being in love causes changes in
the brain that are strikingly similar to
serious health problems like drug addiction
and obsessive-compulsive disorder."
"Falling in love" may be a kind of addictive
behavior, even though we have often not seen
it that way. The "falling in love" model
goes along with the image of needing another
person to make you complete, where 1/2 + 1/2
= 1 whole, rather than a union of two already
whol people, where 1+1=3 (partner 1, partner
2 and the relationship, being the third party
in the equation).
When we "need" another to feel complete,
"falling in love," becomes a way to fill the
void, just like the substances and processes
we become addicted to. Finding a love to
"fill a void" is a sad motivation really. Perhaps this is why people
feel so vulnerable
and anxious when they open their hearts in
the "falling in love model." In many ways,
they are opening their hearts into a void,
and that is dangerous.
I would rather open my heart into a space
that will hold me or to a person who I know
will be respectful, present, healthy and
loving in return. I like to reality test the
situation I am in as I open my heart. This
take time over time with a person, and
opening ones heart one step at a time, rather
than in the dramatic, sudden and complete way
of "falling in love."
"Falling" in love has always felt dangerous
to me. The "falling" image of a person's
heart standing on the edge of a high cliff,
and willfully jumping off into the potential
dangers of the valley below, has never been
appealing to me. When you fall like that,
you are likely to get hurt, if not killed. "Falling" in love also
implies a lack of
conscious participation. Something you
"fall" into is not a conscious choice, but
something that takes you or happens to you. Too, what you can "fall
into," you can "fall
out of."
Pope cites the work of Dr. Helen Fisher, an
anthropologist at Rutgers University, who has
researched "love's impact on the brain":
"Dr. Fisher has studied love by looking at
people's brain using magnetic imaging
machines...Compared with..neutral photos, a
lover's picture triggers the dopamine system
in the brain--the same system associated with
pleasure and addiction."
"Subjects dealing with failed relationships
showed activity in their dopamine
system--suggesting they maintained intense
feelings for their loved one. But they also
showed activity in brain regions associated
with risk taking, controlling anger and
obsessive-compulsive problems. Notably, the
scans showed activity in one part of the
brain linked with physical pain."
Given that many relationships end abruptly
and dramatically, or very quietly, the result
of years of words never spoken, essential
conversations that have never taken place, it
is not surprising that the ending of a
relationship can evoke primal and irrational
responses.
We lack the skills to work with our personal
triggers, which inevitably arise in intimate
relationships, and we also lack the skills to
manage our triggers, both during the
relationship and once it has ended. And so,
the addictive, obsessive-compulsive quality
to our brain chemistry, our feelings and
sometimes our behavior.
Perhaps, if we gained more emotion-body
awareness, and could have the essential
conversations, feel our full range of
feelings, learn to articulate our human
needs, we would shift the dopamine pattern in
our brains. Love from this place might have
a different biochemical look and emotional feel.
I have grown to believe there is another way
to enter the chamber of love, that is a more
conscious and present progression. If two
people feel a connection, find they have
common values and interests, enjoy one
another's company, why not together embark on
a pathway of join one another in a space of
loving and being loved? No falling required. More of a gentle walking
forward--some on
one's own and some side by side, slowing
opening one's heart to the other, and
together, building a special space of mutual
love.
Doesn't sound as exciting as the sudden fall
into romantic love? Perhaps it won't give
you the "romantic hight" that parallels the
brain chemistry of the drug addict. But I
bet, if we studied the brain chemistry of two
people consciously co-creating a space of
mutual love, we'd see good things happening. If I can relax by
meditating, listening to
soothing music and being massaged, why would
I ever want a cigarette, a pill or alcohol?
For
more articles...and a chance to add your thoughts...
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Heart Work for Kids, and Parents and Kids
I have been feeling moved to bring the tools,
skills, concepts and experiences of EKP to
kids for several years now. So much of the
healing and learning we need to do as adults
comes from the hurtful and missing
experiences of our early life.
When my son was at his previous school, I
proposed developing a curriculum called
"Heartsmarts," helping kids learn about the
wisdom and power of their hearts to cultivate
emotional intelligence, self-knowledge, touch
literacy, and relationship and communication
skills. While the idea received an eager listening, sadly, the
administration did not
have the time/space to work with me to
implement such a program.
I would like to find ways to bring EKP work
to kids, and my experience is that middle
school and high school kids are very ready to
do this kind of work.
I would be very interested in your thoughts
about the following questions:
- What are some of the most
difficult
emotional, relationship and personal
development issues 11- 19 year olds are
facing today?
- What are some of the most
important
issues parents and kids need to address
together?
- What emotional and
communication skills
do you think are most important for 11 -19
year olds to develop?
- What emotional and
communication skills
do you think parents most need to develop?
- What kinds of settings might
be most
receptive to offering EKP programs for kids
or parents and kids? (i.e. Unitarian Churches, retreat centers,
high school guidance counselors, college
counseling centers, conferences, etc)
- Is there anyone you know in
such a
setting that I might contact to explore the
possibility of offering an EKP program for
kids or parents and kids?
- Would you be interested in
being part of
an advisory team who would provide feedback
on the development of EKP programs for kids
or parents and kids?
Please write to me at LSMHEART@aol.com with
your thoughts, comments and ideas.
Thanks for your energy and involvement!
Find
out more....
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Upcoming Groups, Workshops and Programs
I get lots of requests to speak or lead
workshops in different parts of the country. While my abiltiy to travel
is limited, when
someone has the energy and desire to produce
a program, I try my best to find a way to
make it happen.
Thanks to a request from Joshua
Tenpenny, I
will be teaching a class at the Mt.
Wachusetts Community College in Gardner, MA
about body psychotherapy and specifically EKP
in April.
And thanks to Babadez, I will
be presenting
at a Sacred Sexuality Conference in Sedona,
AZ in May.
Want to make peace with money? Take
part in The Money Class, a 6 week
coaching class in Newton, starting this
spring. The class provides an opportunity to
look at your relationship with money, define
your vision, work through blocks and
obstacles, reinforce good habits, and take
actions to realize your goals.
Class meets Thursdays from
8:45 - 10:45 am
in Newton.
For more information contact
LSMHEART@aol.com
or call (617)965-7846.
For those of you who would like to be part of
an EKP weekend retreat this fall,
apprentice Gretchen Stecher is organizing a
Healing the Traumatized Heart
retreat
November 16 - 18 on the Cape. Contact
LSMHEART@aol.com or gwild7@verizon.net for
more information.
EKP opportunities in Newton include:
- On-going Tuesday night EKP
Body
Psychotherapy Group
- On-going Thursday night EKP
Body
Psychotherapy Group
- On-going Sunday EKP Monthly
Process
Group
To
find out more....
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You may also want to visit
www.sexspirit.net to see the wonderful programs the Boston Area
Sexuality and Spirituality Network has put together for 2007!
Heartfully,
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