June Body Tip: Make Friends With Your Inner Child
By · CommentsBring your awareness into your belly area. Breathe into your belly… long, slow breaths. Now, with your mind’s eye, imagine you are with your inner child while keeping your awareness in your belly. Really feel your inner child in your belly. Once you have made contact, give your child a gentle hug (just as you would an actual child or a small animal) and ask him or her what s/he would like? What “playful” thing would be fun to do together? Then… go and do it. (If it’s something that is not feasible to do in “real life”, come up with something together that you can do). You will be amazed at the level of trust, cooperation and flow that develops within you as you do this exercise over time.
Give this a go, and let me know about your experience! Post a comment or send me an email at tarnie@bodyfreedom.com
Meet Your Inner Child… The Key To Reclaiming Your Power
By · CommentsI am always talking about the importance of being connected to your body and tapping in to the wisdom and information that is stored there… for a happier & healthier life of freedom, success and fulfilment. People often ask me, “What do you mean?” ”What kind of information is in the body?” ”How do I do it?” Here are a few examples from recent sessions with clients to describe what I mean when I say that real transformation happens through the body.
Recently, two of my clients had major realizations about why they were feeling powerless and trapped in their lives, stuck and unable to move forward. Both were struggling with the direction of their career and relationship issues. Both described how lost and directionless they felt, and how they didn’t know how to break out of this cycle. Both yearning for the self-confidence to be able to enjoy their life, step into the career that is right for them and find the relationship they truly desire.
The first client (I’ll call her Suzy) shared about how she feels she cannot move forward with her career, and that she is always sabotaging relationships. As she was speaking, I asked her what she was feeling in her body. She described feeling tight and tense in her belly and chest area.
The other client (I’ll call him Joe) was very angry about his life and that he did not have a father figure “like everyone else”. His father had been an alcoholic and now he was visiting him in a mental hospital and feeling very bitter about doing that. Again, I asked him to feel into his body and tell me what he felt. He also described a tight and contracted feeling in his belly.
Together, we delved more deeply into the body sensations and we discovered something critical! What we found was a young part of them (the inner child) who felt abandoned, ignored, and desperate to be loved. For both Suzy and Joe, this was a part of them that they had completely forgotten about and neglected… and who is actually the key player in their search for fulfilment in career and relationship.
By bringing awareness into the place inside your body where you hold the tension, pain, and feelings, you are able to access the incredibly important “information” that your body is holding. Both Suzy and Joe found in the tense part in their belly a part of them that was forgotten. What do we do when we find this? I often use the analogy of walking into a room and there is a part of us shrivelled up in the corner, forgotten and abandoned. Maybe this is where you suppressed your dreams, or stored some earlier trauma or pushed aside something you were yearning to do.
How would you approach this part of yourself that has been pushed into the corner? Again, think of how you would approach a scared or timid child, or an animal that is cowering. Think about how you would walk into the room and be with this part. Would you rush up to it and grab it or try to lecture it or punish it? Most likely you would sit down and just “be” with it. It would take some time to let it get used to you and slowly begin to build a relationship with it.
When we enter the body and discover these new parts of us that have been long forgotten, it takes some time and patience to get to know them, to start listening to them, and to integrate them into our lives. It takes time and a committment to re-inhabit our body, and to trust what it is telling us. I continue to work with this on a daily basis myself. However, if we are looking for the joy, the juice of life, the passion to live our dreams, then we must bring our awareness into our body and learn what it has to say.
The Inner Child is very real and lives in our body. And until we become aware and conscious of it, it runs the show! Often in ways that are anything but what we want. The good news is that by finding this part of you in your body, acknowledging it, and then beginning to build a different kind of relationship with it based on love and trust… your entire LIFE can change for the better on every level.
Check out the BodyTip for this month… it’s a simple exercise to connect to your inner child in your body and to then start to build a different kind of a relationship with it. This process is so key to our feeling of power, confidence and happiness in life.
Let me know what you think! Ask a question! Share your experience! Leave a comment below or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you.
May BodyTip: Befriend Your Resistance!
By · CommentsSpend some time breathing into your body (which hopefully you are doing every day by now!), moving to some music (again a great daily practice), and spending time within. Next, become aware of any resistance, tightness, contraction, uncomfortable feeling in your body. Now… just be with it … “hang with it”, embrace it, befriend it! When we surround our resistance with attention, when we include it in our sense of feelings (rather than push it away or try and get rid of it) or even love it (what a thought!), something amazing happens. You will find that the resistance often dissolves! Or, it reveals what it needs so that it can let go.
Try it! Post a comment below and let me know how this goes for you and what you discovered!
Sacred Descent Into the Body
By · CommentsOne thing I have come to notice in my somatic body work and movement work practice is the discomfort many people experience when they are asked to move into their body. While there often is a willingness or a knowing this is “what I need” there is always resistance and a difficultly sustaining the connection into the body. It can vary from very subtle to a great discomfort.
As the body holds all experiences and our emotions it can be quite daunting to “delve” inside ourselves and uncover the wealth of information that is held inside. More often than not there is a sense of “falling apart” which makes sustaining the attention into your body even more difficult.
The sacred decent into the body means we are going to travel past the mind, the ego and the personality that “thinks” it has us held together. Most people have been disconnected from a deeper awareness of their body for a long time, so it takes some unwinding to open up to the body. Our sense of not holding it all together comes from the mind. I have witnessed in private sessions, classes and workshops how uncomfortable and distressed participants become.
One thing I will say, and I have also noticed in my practice of supporting clients to reconnect to their bodies, is that those who access their courage, willingness, determination to keep working through what comes up, are richly rewarded. The body opens up willingly to reveal the treasures and the joy inside. However, because of the resistance the mind has to letting go of control, we often have to go through some angst, upset, anxiety, frustration, feel our fear and maybe even experience some depression, hopelessness, emptiness, or loneliness. The good news is that all of this is temporary.
When we do “give ourselves permission” or “allow” ourselves to delve into our body and we meet the resistance, the angst, the contractions, the old way of being, we discover something amazing… these things fall away and underneath them we find the flow, the fluidity, the pleasure, the connection to the universe. We, our mind, our ego, our thoughts, or whatever is in the way, gets out of the way and we “find” ourselves. In other words we wake up and start to feel what it feels like to be fully present in our body, on this earth, connected to all while doing our individual human dance.
We find our true expression, a new point of reference, a new way to veiw life, our vulnerability, our strength and we FEEL ourselves. We know what we want, we can move through our resistance, judgments and upset, we can express ourselves authentically.
Expressive freeform movement has been one of my greatest resources finding my way back to my body and to my Self. It has been an exquisite journey as I surrender more and more to “letting go” and being led. My life has become richer, more fulfilling, more delicious and I am aware of more love and support being present.
So, may this be a message of encouragement for those of you on this body-mind journey. Keep going and stay present no matter what shows up (especially resistance!), embrace what comes up and ultimately it will dissolve and open into greater connection and a peace you may not have thought possible.
I would love to hear from you and hear your thoughts on this. What do you do when resistence comes up? Drop me a note and tell me what’s going on for you. I have lots of support information for you at my website so please visit it or be e-mail me.
Boost the Brain, Heal the Body
By · CommentsDid you know Dance is one of the top ways to boost your brainpower? Daniel Amen MD author of Magnificent Mind at Any Age cites “few activities stimultate as wide a variety of brain systems as dancing does”. In fact, Dance is in his top 10 boosting-your-brainpower tips. How fabulous is that??
So dancing or moving is not just for connecting to our body or for personal expression, but it also assists us in our brain function and reverses the anti-aging effect of time on our mind and body.
Not that this is a great shock to those of us who love to move and dance… we already know we feel alive, restored and more connected when we dance! But something about this “scientific” validation of the effect that dancing has on stimulating the systems and connections in our brain… I found this fascinating and important.
When I talk about “dancing”, I mean dance/movement, free-form dance, moving with deep body awareness, the movement of the soul through the body. In my classes and workshops we use dance/movement combined with somatic (or, body) awareness to come into very deep states of healing and spiritual connection. It is clear that the dance, the movement, has a profound effect on the brain, and all our systems for that matter.
Often I find in class/ workshops/working privately with people when they start to move their body it feels very foreign and unfamiliar at first. They might feel stupid, awkward, silly, like they are not doing it “well enough”. We often hold a lot of judgement about how we are moving and what it looks like. The beauty of the movement form we use is that it is not about “how” you look but how you “feel” as you move that is important. It is about finding your own self expression through the movement.
One of my students in class said the other day that as she kept turning up and doing the work she started getting flashes of what it is like to really be inside the body. It takes time to connect in and to listen to what is present inside. Through the practice of movement, of conscious dancing, we get glimpses of our TRUE self. And slowly but surely we get to stay there longer and longer. Eventually (and sometimes right away!) there are longer moments of feeling the bliss of “coming home”, the ecstasy of being with ourselves, the peace, the joy, the surrender, the trusting, the knowing of our divine connection.
For me, it is so delicious to find my own flow and expression of my true self and I feel this deeply whenever I move, teach or do a healing session. As someone said in a session the other day, ”I am amazed, you just keep asking the body and the truth keeps rolling out.”
And apparently, in addition to all these priceless benefits, we are also boosting our brainpower, maybe getting smarter or at least, slowing down the aging process. I call that a win-win.
So why not move, to save your body, your brain, and heal your life! Whether you come try one of our classes http://www.bodyfreedom.com/classes.html) or turn on your favorite song at home, close your eyes, and DANCE like no one’s watching for 5 minutes (check out the April BodyTip) … let’s heal ourselves and heal the world through dance!
Happy dancing this April! Would love to hear your thoughts… Let me know how your 5 minutes of dancing goes. Please leave a comment below.
