Body Love

Animism, IFS, Presence, Holism

After being an acupuncturist for a few years, I began learning a form of bodywork popular in Europe that was mind-blowing. Working energetically—sometimes without even touching the body—the Ortho-Bionomists were getting trauma to release and profoundly shift tissues. They didn’t contextualize it as non-materialist; they just taught it because it worked. I remember being gobsmacked by nearly every class. Every time someone’s pain disappeared or bone cracked into place or organ began to function better my little left-brain twitched and thumped. WTF was going on here?! Why wasn’t this in the news?

Otto Dix’s incisive portrait of allopathy.

I was still trying to figure things out when I encountered the Integrative Manual Therapy world. The techniques in that brilliant modality rest on a deep understanding of our interconnectedness, though, again, they don’t spend any time digging that out, but just showing results. It wasn’t until the pandemic, when I began trying to translate what I’d been learning and living, that I realized that the paradigms espoused by people like Lynn McTaggert and Rupert Sheldrake—and spiritual traditions going back eons—fit. We are immersed in a living informational field—and the sooner we can embrace that shift in medicine, the healthier we’ll be.

From the perspective that consciousness is the prima materia, we have to agree that attention is all we have to give. Medical interventions, homeopathics, bodywork maneuvers, psychedelics, pharmaceuticals, listening—these are all forms of attention that could be what your particular bodymind, immersed in your particular circumstance, might need to receive in order to relinquish its burdens and shift into a new story. The resonant attention that heals (plus an attitude of allowing or resource) will always be characterized by a cessation of symptoms and a regaining of functionality. “Side effects” are complications, not true healing.

The perception that Resonant Attention instigates healing is just one implication of the living field paradigm. It also accounts for animist interactions with the body. Sometimes, when I move my attention into someone’s torso, their liver will start speaking up, or their right atria. I’ll never forget the day I overheard a whole conversation going on between someone’s vertebrae. “You’re in the wrong place!” “I can’t go over there until you move first!” The other day, I facilitated a conversation between an earnest fellow and his right testicle. I f’ing love my job.

I certainly didn’t start out being able to hear the whispers of the body. I used to be a rattly left-brainiac walking around on a twisted spine. On my first trip to Peru, I remember watching the Q’ero shamans picking up stones and putting them to their ears, obviously receiving messages that way. When I tried that, all I heard were my personal demons telling me I looked even stupider than I felt. (Hey, important distinction: The field is made of love and will never insult you.) But over time, with practice and perseverance, my right brain functionality grew stronger, and the aliveness of the world became obvious again.

Animism in medicine is a an old idea whose time has returned. It underpins the perceptions around ‘parts’ that characterizes the Internal Family Systems method developed by Richard Schwarz, in which psychologists help people identify different aspects of their personality and make space for them to be seen and heard. But IFS has recently come under fire for creating complicating dramas between personality aspects.

Instead of identifying parts, I just work with the body, which has ‘parts’ that manifest all the way down to the level of the physical body, ie/ organs, bones, systems, etc. To me, this just seems grounded and practical—because the ‘issue informs the tissue.’ Whether the trauma is emotional, belief-based, or some other purely energetic phenomenon, it will have a physical manifestation or holding pattern that can be discerned and worked with in the physical body, which is always the densest layer. So helping the body to finish metabolizing trauma in the physical tissues is metabolizing at the root.

Again, true healing is characterized by a complete cessation of symptoms and a shift in the tissues towards more circulation. So if you’re doing any kind of off-the-body therapy that doesn’t liberate your physical body, then you haven’t gotten the root. It’s very common for me to work with people who say, “What? Still? I’ve worked with that issue for so long! Why is it still there?” Because you haven’t metabolized it out of the tissues yet.

Sometimes I see people doing resonant attention getting really into their head space, not using their hands, not reading the tissues, but just whipping through whatever impressions pass through their mind. Please remember that, at its core, healing happens when we’re present with what is actually there in the physical body. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s not just being present with the emotions (or physical trauma, past life, belief, etc), but being present with them while fully inhabiting the body.

The shift away from materialism is not the abandonment of the physical body. Instead, we’re looking to be inclusive and embrace the true fullness of our experience. The physical body is part of the field, too, and can’t be ignored in a ‘holistic’ paradigm.

Love,

Stella