REGENERATIVE EMBODIMENT
PART 1. expressing without censorship

Why going towards your sincerest expressions can be the most courageous step you ever take. 
It also might be most rewarding, eventually.  

Showing up there for yourself and others brings you in the realm of regenerative intimacy with self, life and others... Do you entrust yourself, or those special others, with the most vulnerable yet precious aspects of yourself? Were you blessed to encounter people that could meet you there? Space holders who understand what it takes to facilitate you-meeting-you.
In places that somehow you always knew buried away within, yet where you have not gone before?

In my observation, as a professional body worker, most physical issues come down to this: at one point people have decided to close down to themselves.
Shut down to their actual experience, to the impact, to the natural feelings as a response to specific happenings and the meaning given to them. 
But especially: people have closed down to their full experience of being inside themselves, their expression, the natural language of the body and voice.

The reason to close down, or leave, which is another form of closing off, might have been a very good one. The protection mechanisms surrounding it are to be honoured. 
The truth or the assumption was:
My boundaries are crossed
There is no bedding
What I need, is not there
I don’t get a reflection that I can comprehend.

In the film ‘the Wisdom of Trauma’ from Gabor Maté mentions that the real trauma is not the painful event itself, but the lack of emotional bedding to process the human feelings afterwards; the space holding. 

I couldn’t agree more with such statement, and observe it subtly in almost every body under my hands. 
…How suspicious the body is for true connection. Suspicious and very thirsty at the same time.

The hurt might have a source that is more subtle than an obvious trauma. Like becoming so adaptive to what adults around you prefer and set a standard to, that you don’t even know what you need anymore. Because it might have never been asked, nor mirrored.

This is not to say that anyone is to blame. 
Yet it is totally possible to take the past out of the present, also physically. 
How? By showing up for yourself, in yourself, with yourself, in true connection. 
This takes courage, because you will bump into discomfort and into the fact that another might not be able to hold the space, or meet you just partially. Yet this is part of the journey towards discernment, learning to trust yourself and the other: notice the opening, notice the closing, be the safe space for yourself and others to let either movement happen. Stay away from stories. Just be in the experience. Listen deeper. Be radically transparent. Invite yourself to appear and express, fully.

The fact that (something in) your body feels ‘off’ is an indicator of your accurate perception. It is a sign that there is something there to discover, uncover. 

A first reaction often is: I want this unpleasant sensation to go away. But it’s not possible to push something away that is; it works counter effective. 
Another respons may be: ‘I don’t like this, let’s get out of here’.
People mentally leave their body, stop breathing, and feel alone and unsafe. But the true unsafely is not always merely the event itself, but the mechanism of closing off.  It’s the mechanism that needs waking up to. This ‘leaving ourselves’ or the going against natural expression then gets often covered up by secondary emotions, or distractions. These are even more painful, because they are pushing against yourself. This leads to an array of issues, illnesses, behavioural disfunction or its cousin addiction. 

Pushing against our sincerest experiences and expressions, makes some into people who can at best only cry during movies, a scored goal in a football match (me, age 15 - 20!) 
Sometimes when someone passes away, we cry for ourselves just as much as for the other.  All of a sudden the excuse is big enough, now you are allowed to cry. Thank god. Hidden feelings can rise from the depths of your being and you might not be sure exactly why. 

I truly believe the biggest trauma of humans in general is pushing against natural human needs-in-the-now, acting upon the sincerest impulses, and subtly aggravating that with internal pressure or ‘dying a little inside’ because of what we do in our own internal thought processes plus outer 'behaviour'.

To me what it means to be emotionally mature is to regulate that in a constructive way. 

This topic might very well be one of the most important topics of this time. My take is that when people would be well connected to their body wisdom, this subtle language and corresponding physical and psychological needs, they would function better. And every system carried by humans would function better as a result too. 

One part of tuning to these natural and physical needs is to uncover the huge physical (!) potential. 
I am sure this is experientially evident to you in the moments you feel great. When you feel the exchange between your own most natural ‘working-field’ (meaning creating - anything - from your own impulses and joy and having a response that makes you feel super alive). This can be in many shapes or forms. That is when you click with the interconnectedness, the regenerative nature of all things, that already always existed and will always exist.

How to make this part of every moment, every day, is the queeste, and not to loose track.