- It looked like,
seemed like
you did a lot of work.
Thank you for your hard work.
Did you find it difficult, easy, fun?
Challenging? Stressful?
What? Did you get stuck?
Did you what? - Joy.
- It was a joy!
- So I said, joy, fun, laughter, whatever.
The one word I wanted to add was connection.
- Connection. - Yeah. That's, I mean,
I find it's just such a
sharing space to be, to go through this.
It's like you're together
and exploring beauty, like,
well, not always beautiful things
'cause this can be, yeah, very difficult things.
But somehow in this context of this work,
I don't know, it's like they're being held
in a more beautiful space or something like that.
- You're creating a space of love
and caring, a space of honesty and openness.
It's a tremendous gift.
It's a tremendous honour
and a privilege to someone to share with you and trust you
'cause you shouldn't share
with people you don't trust, it's not a good idea.
You shouldn't share with everybody.
You shouldn't be vulnerable with everybody.
You shouldn't do that.
But with people you trust, it's a beautiful thing.
And you're dealing at a level beneath
the common everyday level of "how's the weather?"
which is a great level to be on.
It's important to have those kinds
of relationships in your life.
They make a big difference.
But this is a whole nother, what do you call it?
Kettle of worm. Whole nother category of fish. I don't know.
Whatever it is. It's a whole nother level.
It's this deeper, deeper layer of human connection.
The poignancy of feelings. It's amazing.
Yeah, thank you for saying that.
Yeah.
- For me, what was really amazing was like,
I felt the quite similar way to the Feldenkrais Method,
but with words.
So that was very interesting.
It was like, "Okay, he's telling me something about him.
What is it in my life which is an equal with this?"
So I can be in empathy with that.
And so I can say something about that,
and then I can be a support without being involved in it.
And this is a huge learning for me, also
for Feldenkrais Method,
because when we are touching people,
we are in the same time working on ourselves.
So this is a beautiful bridge between both for me.
That's very interesting.
- Yeah, I mean, we're, part of this is to do, for us
to do our own work
'cause we can't, I mean, you don't do Feldenkrais
on other people if you don't do it on yourself.
And because you have to know that it's safe
to be in connection.
You have to know it's safe to have emotions
and to express them and to encourage them in other people.
And it's a sacred trust.
And what I think what I heard you say is that
you see this in a similar way to
how Feldenkrais works, which is beautiful.
And also you're learning that you can do more
and include more things, particularly related to emotions
specifically that feels okay for you
that you thought maybe it didn't feel okay before.
Is that what I heard you say?
- Yes. And it's also because it's not only
to put somebody in his emotions
and to say, "Okay, you are in your emotions.
That's good. Bye." That's what was terrifying.
Very frightening for me.
I can use this because I know that
I don't leave the person inside this.
I feel like I can trust the tool.
- Trust the, trust the process.
- Yes, yes. I'm sorry for my English.
- No, no, no, no, no.
And I think Valerie was saying earlier that
she was saying in the exercise from this morning,
she said she felt straighter.
Right? Your posture felt straighter, more upright.
And you even noticed that in some other people.
Is that right? Because this work, people see it
and from the outside they say,
"Oh, this is all about anger."
No, this is about compassion. This is about love.
That's what this work is about.
And that's where we always go to.
That's what we're going toward.
We're using the anger and the guilt and the shame
and the fear to move through those to get
to compassion and love.
And that's what it's about. And that's why it's fun.
'Cause it's a beautiful thing to do that.
What we're gonna do now, there's one more clip
I wanna show you.
There's two clips, actually one today, I'll show you.
And then the next, the second part one
and part two, part one we'll do today.
Part two we'll do in the morning.
And it has to do with
going back to the past,
dealing with a traumatic situation from the past
and dealing with a variety of feelings, including, well,
all the feelings that we do, anger, guilt,
sadness, compassion.
And memory reconsolidation is a way of changing the past,
or changing not the past,
but changing the memories of the past
and changing the emotional memories of the past.
And one entree into this
that was shown, it's gonna be shown in this clip
is kind of what I alluded to earlier today, having
to do with locating a sensation in your body.
And so one of the things that I mentioned
that we'll see in this clip here is looking inside to
what you feel or where you feel something,
where there's tension or anxiety or discomfort
or an emotion.
And if you can feel that,
then you can be in relationship to it.
So now there's a part of you that's the feeling,
and there's a part of you that's asking,
"Talk to me, I'm asking you,"
and asking you as your deeper self, your inner self.
Why do we get pain? Why do we get fatigue?
Why do we get anxiety? Why do we get that?
'Cause our brain is trying to protect us,
help us, tell us something.
And oftentimes it's something that our brain learned how
to do when we were younger.
And it keeps producing these sensations as a guide,
as a message, as a warning, as a protection.
So that's not the problem.
We're not saying "Get out, I want to get rid
of this sensation."
Another way to think of it is, "I want
to befriend this sensation and learn from it
and see where it's guiding me."
And frequently it may guide me back to a time when
all this started.
And you can ask, "Oh, pain in the stomach
or anxiety in the chest,
thank you for being there. Thanks for guiding me.
I wonder if we could have a talk.
I wonder if we could discuss, I wonder if you could help me
to understand."
How old were you?
How old was I when you became prominent?
Oh, I was five?
Oh, maybe I should look at when I was five.
Maybe I can go back to when I was five
and help that 5-year-old
'cause that 5-year-old was not feeling safe.
Capeesh?
Maybe it's asking, you could ask it:
What would happen to me if I didn't have this?
What are you afraid of?
Why do you keep giving me this anxiety or this pain?
What are you worried about what would happen
to me if I didn't have this?
And the answer might be, "Well, you would overwork yourself
to death and I'm here to protect you from that."
If you didn't have this anxiety or this pain
or this fatigue, you might, you would just go out
and you'd be helping everybody else and neglecting yourself.
It's my way of helping you to take care of yourself,
a message to be with yourself and take time and rest.
"Oh, is that what this is about? I had no idea.
I thought it was just pain."
A completely different way of looking at it. Right?
It's amazing. And this comes from a lot of work.
(indistinct) does this kind of work.
Dick Schwartz or Richard Schwartz
and Internal Family Systems does this work.
There's a paper in the Google Drive of a article
that Dick Schwartz and I wrote,
along with Ron Siegel, one of our good friends about IFS,
Internal Family Systems and pain.
So you might wanna look at that.
And it also gets to this issue of who's listening.
Who's listening?
And the question is, do we have some internal beings,
some soul, some, some part of us that's sacred
or whatever.
And in IFS they call it your higher self.
And I just like that term.
It doesn't matter what you call it, but a higher self.
Your self that's-
'Cause they say you can never lose your higher self.
Your higher self is the part of you that's caring of you,
compassionate for you.
Courageous, creative.
They've got eight C's.
There was a whole bunch of 'em.
They all start with the letter C.
Can't remember 'em all.
I was with Dick Schwartz one time, he couldn't
remember 'em all one day.
It was funny.
Anyway, so let's just take a look at this clip
and you'll see that
how I'm working with this woman.
And it starts out,
the first section we're gonna do today has to do with
her father and how her father treated her
when she was young.