A feeling of our own self-nurturing and support can now become an embodied experience when tension and unconscious fear are no longer perpetuating the chronic holding of a defensive bodymind state. As held trauma releases, our true feelings and needs can once again be lived openly and the negative bonding (i.e. brutal criticism) can be replaced with new feelings of compassion and understanding. 


Case example

Let me illustrate these beginning tools with a psychotherapy session. "Laurie", a 34-year-old business consultant, entered therapy with intense anxiety, depression and sexual abuse issues. She began this particular session "feeling pretty irritable." Laurie reported, "I felt as if everyone was getting under my skin."

I asked her if she could notice her breathing and give form to this experience. I sensed it to be a feeling of invasion.

She replied, It's like a big, formless darkness." When I asked how this felt in her body, the awareness she had was of feeling "very tense and constricted."

I wondered if Laurie could imagine someone or something that would protect her or give her a sense of feeling safe with this darkness. An image of a globe came to her. I asked her to describe the globe and she said it was made of "clear, thick plastic" which allowed for her to see out of it but be protected when in it. Her image included grass inside, as well. I suggested that she had the right to put anything outside the globe that gave her the feeling of being invaded and told her that this is called forming a boundary. As she later shared with me, this experience was probably the first time she began to have a feeling in her body, or felt sense, of "boundaries" Ð or, as she noted, also of her lack of boundaries.

Laurie also began to have a deeper intellectual understanding of the purpose and need for boundaries. "The concept felt pretty foreign to me and really came up against my childhood beliefs." She had developed a cognitive belief system that became a second nature perspective on when it is permissible or appropriate to say "no" to others. She had learned to see herself as selfish if she didn't feel open to attending to someone else's spoken as well as unspoken need of her.

As she could now image, breathe, and feel the globe surrounding her and have my support in her having this "globe" boundary she experienced a new feeling of safety. Her feeling of constriction relaxed and her anxiety and irritability dissipated. Laurie's awareness expanded regarding the cognitive and physical ways that she had compensated for having her boundaries "smashed" as a child. She was learning to feel permission now to say "no" to others. She was developing a new feeling of compassionate understanding for her own needs as well as for the fears that had held her hostage since her childhood, making it so difficult to say "no."


The journey of transformation

Transformation from held trauma to embodied aliveness and spirit travels a path that has little to do with the time frames we might wish to impose on our journey. Bringing light and love to our hidden pains, deepest terrors, and dysfunctional thought processes has a schedule that often defies our truest convictions to change. The creativity and commitment of both the healer and the individual walking the path of their healing journey can form a dynamic relationship for creating the tools and holding the many shapes that can promote healing.

One of the gifts, often unexpected, that arrives when one walks their own healing path is a more developed ability to sense energy and receive information regarding someone else's experiences. Perception through the five "physical" senses as well as those typically considered "extrasensory" expands when one's spirit is more fully housed within one's body. Letting go of characteristic patterns of tension, letting go of defeating or limiting beliefs that are based in past hurts and fears, and letting go of the corresponding altered physiological and neurological activities, enables deeper access to all of our body's "organs" of reception.

A most powerful example for me of such unexpected gifts was my developing an ability to bring healing energy through my hands. I began to be able to both access information and offer information in a therapeutic style not previously available to me. All the work I had done to create the opening back into my own body brought me connection to my spirit and an expanded ability to perceive that had not even occurred to me as a goal for the development of my clinical skills. We deepen our abilities to see, hear, and feel as we heal. We can also develop our channels of clairaudience, clairvoyance, clairsentience, and claircognizance through building the bridge back into our body. 


Conclusion

Why do the work of the body? Why focus on the body in therapy? If our life's journey is propelled by the desire for deeper integration and healing, then remembering the past merely with our intellect isn't enough. We can hold memory of those things that were hurtful or destructive toward us with our intellect, while still holding tightly defended in our body against feeling the "old" fear and hurt. Intellectual awareness in itself does not translate to letting go of the past's impact on us. Softening our places of tension, deepening our breathing, and surrendering into our forgotten and/or feared places of emotional and physical pain is what can move us into letting go.

It is in allowing the memory in our bodies to open and feeling the impact of the old wounds that we find the parts of ourselves that we buried and re-claim them. In this way we can release ourselves from the past. Our health on every level of our being can strengthen. The benefits are evidenced in our more relaxed muscles, our less stressed organs, our more potent immune system, our more fluid energy body, and our overall experience of greater vitality. We can feel more youthful, open, loving, alive, and "home" by creating the possibility for embodiment of our spirit. Tightly defended bodies cannot be open containers for housing our spirits.

The process of which I speak is not easy and does not unfold perfectly. It is, however, deeply meaningful for anyone choosing to engage in bringing love and acceptance to their own places of pain and vulnerability. It is profoundly powerful to make the commitment to oneself to come forward with what has been veiled and face and heal what feels unbearable.

Following the cues from our body can direct us to every next step on our path toward integration, healing, and personal transformation. Moving forward in this way can be achieved as we work to separate from the limiting aspects of our past.

It is our bodies that make us of the earth. It is the beating of our hearts in harmony with our spirit that connects us to the meaning of life here. To live honoring our own body naturally translates into consciousness that extends beyond us to an understanding of how all life deserves honoring. This is not an easy path to walk but we all have within us exactly what is needed to take each step. It requires trusting oneself and knowing that we hold within us the power and love to go exactly where we are supposed to go. 



Diane DeArmond's Report

I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. I scheduled appointments with Stuart Alpert, Naomi Lubin-Alpert, and Sherry Osadchey. In my first session, with Naomi, she asked me if there was any image that came from the lump in my breast. I saw a baby screaming mad in the lump in my right breast. The baby wanted me to take care of her, which meant I had to stop taking care of my deceased father. In the next session, which I had with Stuart, the angry baby moved into my root chakra and I felt my lower back come together in support of my connection to myself.

In my healing session with Sherry, she told me that she saw a tear in the lump in my breast, and I could see the relief of the baby who had been left alone for so long. Sherry's words were: "you are not alone." As Sherry kept her healing hands on my shoulders, my father appeared and expressed his regret at not understanding how heart connections are so much more important than accomplishments. He apologized for having driven me so hard. During the healing, I felt a reunion with my father and an acknowledgment of his betrayal of me that seemed to me to integrate the two therapy sessions I had had with Naomi and Stuart.

Throughout the healing session, as the warmth from Sherry's hands traveled down through my shoulders, chest, solar plexus, legs and feet, I could feel the presence of my spirit guides holding me in love. I was able to let go of any resentment for how my father and mother responded to me when I was an infant/child. I could begin to feel a me that felt separate from the me that was formed in response to their demands. A sense of freedom began to trickle through my body.

The diagnosis has been very recent so I do not know the physical effect of these sessions on the breast lump. However I feel more accepting and interested in the meaning of the cancer rather than feeling a victim of some disease. I attribute this to the work I allowed Naomi, Stuart, and Sherry to do with me.  


Sherry L. Osadchey, MA, LMFT, is a psychotherapist in private practice in West Hartford, CT. Her original training is in Body-Centered Psychotherapy with additional influences from animal imagery, past-life regression, hands-on healing, and her current training process in Somatic Experiencing. She can be reached by phone at (860)313-1112 or via email at sherrylosadchey@sherrylosadchey.com.