“People say that what we are all seeking is the meaning of life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” said famous anthropologist and professor Joseph Campbell in an interview with Bill Moyers.
I would say that 'being alive' is a deeply sensual, sensuous re-connection with our selves and our surrounds.
It is congruent with being present now.
Deeply anchored presence within ourselves in space and time affects how we perceive them in such ways that they no longer matter.
Presence shifts and elevates our awareness, our aliveness and enriches it a thousandfold.
Presence is abundance in motion.
Many of us live in what I’d call des 'soubresauts de presence' (jolts of presence).
Through daily meditation, yoga, tai chi or dance... we attempt to re-connect and the more we learn to ‘re-source’ through what brings us joy, helps us soften and relax, makes us feel more supported in life, the more we feel we can trust and settle in the present moment instead of running away from it.
Craniosacral therapy facilitates this moment to moment being and aliveness.
I love hearing my regular clients revealing changes in their lives after a few craniosacral sessions.
Out of the blue, a client recently told me, “I’m eating more fruits and vegetables now.” I asked her why and she replied “because I felt my stomach needed it.” I was so very happy for her because she was now able to connect with and befriend her stomach.
Craniosacral biodynamics helps the body to come into more and more presence. As it meets resistance it may jerk, shiver and jolt, before eventually melting and revealing spacious vibrancy.
The dynamic stillness that can then emerge gently brushes past all patterns and bathes the whole anew.
Presence is listening in.
To hear words like “I feel I am better, calmer, more able to deal with difficulties in life,” is such a gift; even the space between us fills with sparkles of potent aliveness at such revelations. They walk you through the open doorway into life’s flow.
Presence is seeing through
Have you ever talked to a tree, a plant, an insect? Looking from deep within, from your heart space have you ever been able to reach and touch them at an emotional, physical and spiritual level without judging them or yourself?
Seeing the ladybird, the birch, the beech, the spider… in such a neutral present manner you can feel their alive radiance shining through. Can you see the common thread too? The common axis around which we all spin?
One of the wonders of craniosacral therapy is our ability as practitioners to literally perceive past the skin into the fascia, the muscles, the organs etc...with sheer presence from our whole being. It is absolutely magical and such a privilege to witness and sense the aliveness, quality, shape and motility of a liver, a heart, kidneys, a whole set of organisms playing their part…
Presence is remembering.
“Do not be afraid of the empty place. It is the source we must return to if we are to be free of the stories and habits that entrap us,” Charles Eisenstein in The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible.
This means letting go of our conditioning, of our layers of wrapping paper and present ourselves as we are, as we always have been, essentially.
In our relationship with Mother Earth it is, as Eisenstein puts it in the same book, reconnecting with the “three seeds” of “wisdom lineages” (accumulated by Sufis, Zen masters, Kabbalists, Taoist…), the “sacred stories” of myths, legends, fairy tales, folklores that enliven Archetypes of our collective unconscious and “indigenous tribes” because “they are keeping alive something that the planet and the community of all being needs.”
“To receive this seed” —indigenous culture, “it is not necessary to participate in their rituals, take an animal name, or claim a Native ancestor, but only to humbly see what they have preserved, so that memory can awaken.” Charles Eisenstein in The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible. (…)“Now that converging ecological and social crises reveal the bankruptcy of our ways, we have the eyes to see the way of others.”
Presence is non doing and paying attention
It is contemplating the empty spaces in between, the gaps.
It is daring to meet the darkness and walk through the eye of the needle with pure innocence and free of any expectations to meet the still point on which Life itself hinges.
It is anchoring in that 'everything is possible' place we sometimes call home.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home"
William Wordsworth
