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Deep time healing


It is a good measure of my internal (and external) resources that despite being grounded by a hip sprain— due to an overenthusiastic ligamental stretch at my weekly embodiment dance practice— I am able to surrender, rest and still count my blessings.

I know I could have done without the pain but my body did need a good rest.

As I gaze inwards, listen and stop resisting, I rearrange, adjust and refocus, just like in a biodynamic craniosacral session.

Thanks to this interoceptive practice I notice how chilled and open to resting and idleness I have become.

It’s not that I can’t do stuff even when immobilised, the list is endless in fact. But it is rather new to me to just stop and trust my healing process.

I do ask for a little help from a good friend and long time homeopath. I take high doses of arnica and rhus tox regularly and they greatly help along the gradual magic.

I am in agony when I move at the onset and for about three, four days but then it subsides.

In the absence of a craniosacral practitioner nearby I hold my own space in patient resourcing presence.

And it so happens that the sun is shining and Summer warmth is here at last.

As I lie down in my back garden, I listen to my internal meanderings travelling around the sounds of my neighbourhood (and vice versa): I so long to re-wild myself says I mentally as the children are playing.

What does this mean really? How can I do it? How can I explore my feral, animal self?

I know this may sound quite strange coming from someone who just suffered an injury and is lying in a groomed back garden, shoving the odd insect creeping up her arms or legs.

But I know it from deep deep within and way way back that I hold this yearning to explore my indigenous self in connection with the wildness of other species and with landscapes; particularly untouched, untamed ones like the barrenness of a Burren, or a stern Connemara, or parts of melancholy Mayo around Leenane for example, that so impressed me when I was only 12 and visiting Ireland for the first time.

We were camping in a caravan and a tent back then and it was not easy at times to pitch it. I remember once that it even flew away and we had to run after it. I loved its unpredictability and freedom at the time.

It is in the unforgivable presence of these wild lands that I felt mine arise, that I could sense my wildly passionate life force course my being; longing to express itself creatively.

And that it did.

I remember many nights sitting outside the tent looking at the cliffs below while writing without thinking, just letting my pen, my fingers do their fluid thing, transported.

The holding of the land was so wide open, so free, so ‘sauvage’, so thick with presence, so strongly powerful that it awoke these very same qualities in me and I felt safe despite the roughness, despite the discomforts.

It was profoundly peaceful in a mystical, ancient and fathomless way.

Steeped in geological time, no longer in around-the-clock human time.

That definitely did something like alchemy to the soul.

Maybe this is what some refer to as ‘deep time’. Rob MacFarlane mentions it in an interview for the brilliant Emergence magazine: “But mountains”, he says, “they live in deep time. They occupy phases and scopes of place and time that make a mockery of language.” (https://emergencemagazine.org/story/speaking-the-anthropocene/)

Deep time is Long Tide or even dynamic stillness in cranio speak. It is the point when during a session, we penetrate through what feels like a magic portal and all we can say, indeed, is “wow”.

No language can faithfully translate the sense of wonder, the unpredictability, the freedom, the true nature of what is perceived.

This is where beyond human speaks in a language of its own.

So here I am almost 40 years later, lying in this mown back garden on the very landscaped East coast of Ireland, a grown up woman with a biodynamic craniosacral practice and a deep longing to reconnect with the untamed, the wild, the unconscious creative of her own nature within Mother Nature.

Well let's connect the dots shall we? Or maybe you already have?

The healing force at play in my system is that very Breath of Life that's everywhere in Nature; it is Wakan Tanka, the "Great Sacred Creative Power" of the Lakotas...

No wonder it is talking to me from that mysterious, magical realm and I am listening, responding.

Healing from a hip sprain, I keep counting my blessings.

PS: It so happens that the true indigenous meaning of wakan is not actually sacred as the English dictionary says but 'connected'. It refers to all things in nature says Jon Young as he heard it from traditional Lakota Gilbert Walking Bull. It also means "the ropes, the veins or the arteries or the strings…the waves where electricity moves in nature…"(https://soundcloud.com/more-than-human-858335539/the-meaning-of-wakan). So it would be very much about all connective tissues in the body.

This is just such a wonderful piece of the jigsaw that closes the loop in many ways: as the connective tissues of my hip are healing, they communicate on the strings of the greater wakan force in the natural world. So beautifully moving.

I owe this gem of an addendum to a reader: Dame-Hilary Stripp, thank you!


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