Where is health? (2)

“It helps me to remember that full aliveness, full embodiment is about connection - with ourselves, with the world of wildness and spirit, and with our kin.”

Susan Raffo

Where is health in you today? Where do you feel vibrant, vital, more alive?

Common questions preceding a biodynamic craniosacral session. When I as the practitioner, ask this question I invite the person to tune in and connect with their body as an expression of Health and notice where their ‘resources’ are, or what feels good, safe, comforting is in them. Once the person can orient to resources within their body or in their lives, the safety of this anchoring allows Health to express itself more freely in my experience. Health in this context is a primeval organisational force that as James Jealous DO beautifully says, “can never be diseased”.

Photo by Michael Emberley

Health is a blueprint constantly interweaving with imprint, with conditioning and this begins before conception when our ancestors met and mated. This ancestral imprint carries with it a whole load of non human imprints and blueprints relating to microbes, plants and animals. Storylines, multistranded histories pass on through our connective tissues, our blood, our health signature. How we heal differs from one individual to the next yet this same organisational and creative force breathes all of us, heals all of us. But its particular style and the ‘content’ of its imprints vary and makes us, the manifestation of our life forces unique. These vary through time too. Our lifestyle, diet, relationships, conditions of living, life events, age, gender, ethnicity, place etc…will affect their drive, impact, portent. Our social, economic and cultural currency and fluency also majorly impact this expression.

I’m more and more hearing stories of uprooting from one’s internal home, a disconnect with one’s own sense of a body never mind the surrounds. The global breakdown of ecosystems mirrors this and vice versa, the rupture of this awareness and relationship with our inner health mirrors the planetary polycrises experienced by all living communities.

Words like ‘existential dread’, rage, feeling stuck, anxious, depressed, lost, isolated, terribly fragile, inconsistent, float and respond to one another as person after person comes into my biodynamic craniosacral relational field.

These crippling feelings, a sense of not being fully here right now and an inability to fully connect with others and the ‘world’ around you. Just going about one’s routines without real meaning or purpose. Dissociated. Incarnated, alive, conscious yet absent, ‘omitted’, invisible, forgetful, frozen and numb.

Health is always there, always present, even if tied up like a knot within compact densities. This dimming is also Intelligent, it protects and keeps alive.

Listening, coming into presence with another, with a sense of place can bring us back in a safe relationship with ourselves. I see eyes wide open with alert vigilance and anticipation at the beginning of a session which then close as I begin to make contact or sometime after the settling process unfolds. This act alone shows so much trust. I honour and am in awe of this letting go. Health is there, within and beyond the two of us, beyond both of our entwined biospheres, within and beyond the clouds of our biomes, with all its enlivening tendrils sparking up, within and beyond our combined awarenesses, it’s all there.

Health is there, apparently disabled by trauma, by medications, by drug(s)… but present, with dimmer potency waiting to be ignited and gently, slowly drawn back to vibrancy and presence. 

I feel it in your frightened, hesitant tissues, in the disconnected fragments of your loss, your grief, your anger which in time dissipate as Health draws us deeper in and the whole of you, the “Whole’ emerges from the fabric of stillness underlying life, underpinning all. It takes time to calm the sympathetic drive that keeps us alive through doing and thinking to relax into trusting the whole, what connects to our heads that we don’t quite feel yet, to reach a safe engagement with oneself and our autonomic nervous system, this healing, breathing, resting and digesting mode we take for granted yet operates 24/7. Until the moment when you notice you’re being breathed and your wielding mind no longer resists. That’s when and where you can sense Health take over and unroll its magic and all of you remains quietly exquisitely spellbound.  

I also feel the pains in your shoulder or hip, your tense jaws and neck, your Health says ‘hi’ straight away as I greet you and make contact: wow, some life power here! Such outspoken fluid tissues. They’re saying out loud via our field connections, our intertwined awarenesses: “I know what I’m doing and I feel you supporting me so here we go, let’s unpack and reorganise together”.

“I slept so much better, the pain in my shoulder is gone”. Thank you Health.

Supporting the Health of many individuals will ripple out in their communities, hopefully also impacting the collective expression of our broken down ecosystems.

Health is always there, however deeply buried under the rubbles of all that’s happened and is happening. 

Pic by Michael Emberley

Where is health when health is everywhere even in apparent inertia. To find it is like finding a soothing salve in the profoundly disturbing world we live in.

I know I’m also coming back to that question because I sometimes need to be reminded. I doubt you Health even though I feel and sense you, because I  also listen  empathically to much turmoil, much hardship, much despair. The entanglement is real, and so is the struggle.

I notice how plants in my allotment grow differently some will take time and stay quite small, small Kale leaves, small but with sturdy stalks. Others will vivaciously bloom and shout out their presence.

I feel the stunted growth of my Jasmine bulb on the window seal straining towards sunlight, all leaves and hardly any blossom. Are we like this sometimes as we push and pull our way through, burning through our resources? 

What’s in a seed when it responds so differently to the same conditions? Different histories.

Some came from France, transplanted in ‘foreign land’, others grew here, indigenous to this unique soil mix, here for years, self seeded, they grew quickly and strongly supported by a very familiar soil where relationships have already been forged. The conditions for growth are optimal there. No toxins, no artificial fertilisers or chemical pesticides of any kind. The soil was nourished with Nettle tea, compost, horse manure, seaweed. 

Health is right here, right now, and particularly in the love I feel whenever I spend time with the soil and the plants that love to grow here.