“When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don’t feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go you will carry unease with you”
— Eckhart Tolle
Meditation
I have had a meditation practice since I was in high school, and have explored many different styles of meditation that have called to me at different parts of my life, providing me with needed nutrients for where I was. I have done mantra meditation, qi gong, yoga, loving compassion meditation, mindfulness meditation and shamanic journeying. I appreciate how different meditative practices can help you open in different parts of your being, thereby unwinding outdated protective patterns and increasing the depth of experience in your life. In 2020, I discovered the Realization Process, a series of gentle but precise interoceptive movements and attunements for realizing your own nature as unitive consciousness and releasing trauma-based constrictions from the bodymind, and this is what I must often integrate in my work with clients.
A fundamental difference between the Realization Process and typical mindfulness meditation is that we are not just observing what is happening within ourselves, we are actually there. We are not observing our hands from somewhere above ourselves, we experience ourselves as the internal space of our hands. When applied to psychological healing, this is transformational.
How our past limits us
As Judith Blackstone, who developed the Realization Process, says:
“Our fixed grasp on ourselves and the world is not just mental but also somatic. There are rigid holding patterns throughout the whole body, limiting our capacity for cognition, emotional responsiveness and physical sensation. We created these constrictions in childhood in response to painful or overwhelming events in our environment… Also, the memories, childhood mentality, and emotional charge that are bound in our somatic holding patterns continue to exert their influence on our present day awareness. For example, a fearful cringe held in our body, along with the memory of danger, will keep promoting a sense that the world is dangerous, no matter how much we try to open our mind, or divorce ourselves from our childhood “story.”
Embodied Meditation and Therapy
The exercises of the Realization Process can both help us directly unwind these rigid holding patterns that obscure our deepest connection with ourselves and others, and that also keep relationships locked in rigid patterns. They also can help us uncover at deeper and deeper levels a sense of power, love, understanding, sexuality and authentic expression that seems to already be within us. They can help us experience a ground of our being that has never been harmed. In this ground of our being, we experience that which we have been seeking outside of ourselves as our own true nature, there to be uncovered. Practically speaking, it becomes very hard to think of yourself as a bad person when you actually experience love emanating from your chest. Or to think of yourself as powerless when you feel the unchanging ground of your innate power. Or to think of yourself as stupid when you feel your own understanding and intelligence.
Also, this uncovering of a ground of your being that is already free and has never been harmed becomes a deep inner resource that makes it possible to approach frozen experiences that would otherwise seem overwhelming so that you can release them, and become free of their continued influence over your present day experience.
Experience a Richer and More Satisfying Life
This is an incredibly rich practice. Gradually, you find yourself more and more able to stay present to parts of your experience that would have overwhelmed you in the past. Times when you would have shut down. Or lashed out. Or turned to food or substances. Life becomes increasingly rich, complex, and satisfying, and you feel a sense of homecoming, of returning to yourself in ways that are hard to put into words. You become more real, and as you become more real, the whole world and everybody around you also becomes more real, more alive.
“A warrior knows that the ends do not justify the means. Because there are no ends, there are only means…”
— Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light
