Feeling Your Way Through

How do I become enlightened? How do I find peace or balance in my life? How do I heal? What is my life’s purpose? How do I regain my function? How can I become happy? These are just a few of the questions you might have asked yourself at some time. The search for answers to these questions drives us to read books, take seminars, and seek healers and spiritual counselors, among many other approaches.
By uncovering your own truths and beliefs, and discarding those that aren’t yours, you uncover the wisdom contained within you. How do you learn to tap into your inner guide and wisdom? For one thing, you truly need to learn how to listen to and connect with the knowledge and the consciousness that are part of your body’s essence.
I have found the books and seminars that focus on thought are missing an essential element in the search for enlightenment, peace, and healing: the guidance and wisdom inherent in the body. Every cell in the body has consciousness, has the ability to communicate with the entire body, and can store memories. Our focus needs to include more than just the mind if we want to completely release trauma, negative beliefs, or negative patterns; we must feel the connection to these things in our body if we are to move into true healing. Feeling allows us to get to the root of our struggles and helps bring about change at the cellular level. Feeling through the trauma, the negative beliefs, the negative patterns, is essential if we want truly to live in the present, instead of always fighting triggers from our past.
To live fully and completely in the present, we need to be aware of our thoughts and also to become aware of the guidance from our body. There may be places in our body that are storing beliefs or emotions from the past. We need to know where such old beliefs or emotions are located in our body and how to release them from our body so we can truly be free. People often have problems implementing the ideas they find in books that focus only on the aspect of healing involving the thoughts or the mind; when they try to bring these ideas to bear on their lives, they still have the same triggers taking control again. No matter how hard they try, they still get triggered. They may be more aware of being triggered; they may be able to think logically about, and dissociate from, reacting to the triggers; but they are still being triggered. This is because the triggers and the triggering do not happen in the mind alone. Tissue memory in the body can be triggered, causing the automatic response that comes from the body and not from the mind. This book will help you learn how to truly communicate with the body, find tissue memory triggers in the body, and release those triggers from the body. There is a language of the body; once you learn how to free this language, you can fully connect your mind, body, and spirit.
Each person’s journey is unique. One thing common to all paths is that no one grows in his or her comfort zone. Growth takes going into your fears and may take going into chaos as well. To make real change in anything you are doing, you have to go into the uncomfortable feelings and sensations. This is why trying to achieve a state in which there is no chaos is actually counterproductive to growth. Given the ever changing, dynamic nature of life (which could be called chaos), going into the uncomfortable feelings is what leads to growth.
You do not need to have a particular belief, religious or otherwise, to benefit from uncovering your inner wisdom. All the teachings come from the same truths, from universal truths. Some of the terms I use in this book may be different from ones you use to mean the same thing; the richness is the same regardless of the terms each of us may use.
In this book, I offer tools, perceptions, and options to try out as you make your way along your path. This book can work along with any thought pattern or religious belief you may hold. Take only what works for you, what seems right for your path, and be willing to be open to new ideas and thoughts.
I have divided this book into the following sections, each discussing a broad topic.
• Section 1 is on losing ourselves, how we have lost ourselves throughout life.
• Section 2 discusses reconnecting to the body’s wisdom.
• Section 3 talks about applying universal principles to the physical body so as to help release physical restrictions from the body. Applying these principles as discussed will enable you to become aware of and to release not only the physical restrictions in the body, but also the fears and beliefs that may be trapped in your subconscious and preventing your growth. This section also discusses an excellent tool for releasing, a form of bodywork called The John F. Barnes’ Myofascial Release Approach.
• Section 4 is on awareness and choice. Once you become aware, you have to make the active choice to heal. Healing isn’t a passive event. It’s an active sport.
• Section 5 is about returning to your true self. This means uncovering your shadows, and your false beliefs and thoughts, all of which can keep you from growing and healing.
• Section 6 is about putting it all together and includes some final tips for healing and growth. I hope I have put these pieces together in a way that shows how everything fits together.
This book can help you clear your physical and emotional restrictions and open yourself up to your highest potential. Your highest potential may be a complete healing. Your highest potential may be that you do not heal completely in the physical sense and that you see your experience as a gift you can use to help others to heal and grow. To reach your highest potential, you may have to go through loss and trials to uncover strength you have yet to recognize.