Showing posts with label Somatic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Somatic. Show all posts

Friday, March 26, 2010

Three Basic Requirements of the Tantric Hands-on Healer and Why We Resist Healing


One of the reasons this work "works" is that nothing is ever rushed. It is not because I have too much time on my hands that I ask patients and students to carve out enough time from their busy lives to have a minimum of four completely unencumbered hours for their session. Without that much time, at least, one of the most important requirements of this work cannot be met.

There are three basic requirements of a Tantric Hands-on Healer and they are born talents, the same as a musical virtuoso is born with his or her gift. Just like the virtuoso, these talents must be practiced, honed and mastered or they are just so much squandered potential.* They are: 1) Technical skill and mastery of many different modalities of body work (the Alexander Technique, Trager Mentastics, Rosen Method Body Work, Esalen Massage, Reichian Therapy, Watsu, Rebirthing, Gestalt Therapy, Primal Therapy, meditation, Kundalini Yoga, Holotropic Breathwork and Authentic, Original Tantra Yoga, which has been transmitted to very few people - I know of only 6) and a natural feel for how the body interprets and responds to language and movement; 2) Absolute personal integrity, self-knowledge and the kind of personal satisfaction, happiness and emotional freedom that enables the healer to allow his patients and students fully their own experience of healing and growth, bringing none of his own agenda, always intending and actively clearing himself in order to be the cleanest, widest, and deepest channel for healing energy possible, fully cognizant, attentive and responsive to every fleeting need of his patient's body, mind, emotions and spirit, as well as a clear channel for his guidance and The Creator to communicate with and heal his patient; and 3) The most important: Endless patience. The kind of utterly free and attentive patience that defines balance and inner peace and that I did not have, or have any way of accessing, until my infant son brought it to me from heaven the day he was born. I believe it is this absolute, utter patience that makes this work successful, that has resulted in the spontaneous remission of chronic illnesses that have defied medical science's attempt to cure them, then vanished during full-body orgasms, never to return again. It is Endless Patience that gives Tantric Hands-on Healing the "magical" feeling my patients and students describe.

So it may seem like a contradiction when I also ask them, once they make the decision to try this work, to make their appointment right away and keep it, without changing the date or time for any reason, "come hell or high water", even if they feel sick or get called for the audition of a lifetime. The reason is because of the power of the work itself and the body's amazing ability to sense when it is about to encounter major change, in the same way that a boulder thrown into a river downstream will send out concentric waves that rock a canoe before it has reached the site of the event. By the time my patients find me and Tantric Hands-on Healing, they have grown way past the concepts and philosophy of self-improvement and their spiritual journey. They are ready to bring the work into their bodies where they live. They are finally ready for life. Some look back on their progress at this point in their lives and see they've done little more than move from the bench to the sidelines. I get patients and students when they are motivated by some sort of reality check or wake up call. They may be down ten points with their backs on their own five yard line, knowing for a fact that it's over.

Win or lose, the pain of watching one more play from the sidelines is too painful to bear. They burn for the freedom they know is on the other side of that thin line in their appointment book, yet they fear it. They already know everything they are going to learn. They've heard all the words and most of the concepts. They know and their bodies can feel how life-affirming it is, how revolutionary in a very personal way. No longer content to live in their heads, they have already had the epiphany that the head is not where their happiness is, and they SO want happiness! In fact, they are inevitably in a corner they can't excuse themselves from. They are staring freedom in the face but cannot flee! Why? Why not? Opposite questions with the same answer. From now on when they flee, they have to take their body with them. They are now required to occupy fully their temple here on earth, where everything spiritual is physical and the myth they are opposites is revealed. Everything emotional, spiritual and physical happens in the body. So they have to go by the body's "playbook" and the body defines "happiness" with one simple, terrifying word: "Pleasure".

Why so firm, unbending, rigid about making that first appointment? Because the body knows everything I've just written. The body can feel it all as clearly as the born actor, ignored all his life, suddenly finds all eyes on him - as clearly as the gangly little girl, always awkward around men, suddenly finds them staring at her and, even more terrifying, knows what to say to them.

The body knows there is change afoot but only the brain knows the change is necessary. The body has been programmed for millenia to fear change because in the jungle and change as big as the one it is sensing at that appointment time, on that day, can only mean one thing: Death! Getting to that first appointment can - often does - literally feel like deat. I have seen bodies manifest full-on killer flu, complete with real vomiting, fever and chills, only to have all the symptoms disappear within minutes of arriving for their session!.

Because of the power of the work itself but also because my clients arrive so ready, it can take just a few sessions to fully manifest changes they originally sough, sometimes for years, and now whether they continue working at this level is fully optional.

Because of this, while teaching people to become ever more sensitive to their internal compass so they don't need a "guru" in their lives, so they can directly access heaven on their own, or in the company of lovers and friends, or under life and death conditions because we will all face those, it is not optional, I also have to occassionally remind them that the compass has not kept up with evolution and sometimes make rigid choices for them. One thing I always do is say what I am clearly and forcefully directed to say by their guidance or mine, no matter how uncomfortable it makes them or me. But interpreting primal signals in our modern world, where we are ambitiously taking back our power and tearing down the barriers to our own happiness that society's oppressors have erected because of their own fear or megalomania, often takes an outside eye because when we are in it, it is sometimes hard to see it.

We all face the task of interpreting primal signals in a modern world where the dangers are not the same as they were in the jungle. The body's response to any change, from centuries of natural selection, is to fear it because in primitive environments the odds were that such major change would be well - unhealthy! In fact, I have had clients experience instant remission of chronic illness just by identifying, working through, and releasing traumas from previous lifetimes during their Tantric body work.

So once the decision is made, it's best not to think about it. Take into account the body's natural tendency to resist change, knowing that at some point it could rebel openly. I don't have a complete explanation yet of why, but when faced with our core issues we feel like we are going to die - much the way people who suffer from panic attacks believe they are dying. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people manifest powerful reasons - viruses, complete with vomiting, fever and chills, I've seen this many times - at the moment they are scheduled to deal the final, killing blow to the demons they have been fighting for years, realizing the kind of success talk therapy is powerless to achieve, as Dr. Phil proves every day. No matter what the symptoms were or how powerful they seemed, they vanish within minutes of beginning their session. In Switzerland, I eventually had to add a day to our weekend workshops I was getting so many calls the day after the workshop from people who wanted to warn me that something was going around and had they heard from anyone else about this virus? I ended up driving from farmhouse to city apartment, spending ten minutes to set people back up on their feet after they had moved large amounts of material and phoned me from "death's door"! It is a real phenomenon that comes with this simple but powerful work we call Hands-on Tantric Healing.