IT'S AN INSIDE JOB

This is a recording of a class I taught as an opening class to the winter Foundation Training series of 2024. I talk about why I have decided to start the 2024 winter courses with a class purely on self-regulation tools before getting into any of the physical practices. I share personal stories of self-regulation in some heated moments, all about each practice, and how these practices can really increase our window of tolerance, help shift us from being primarily in sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic where healing can happen, and how they can put us at the center of our own health, healing, and journey. In the end there is a guided experience through three practices. 

I share three practices: 

• Orienting 
• The Felt Sense
• Resourcing

I hope you enjoy this! Please reach out to let me know if these practices impact you positively or if you have any cool experiences with them!

This is a recording of a class I taught as an opening class to the winter Foundation Training series of 2024. This episode starts with the class settling in and getting all the comfy blankets and supplies out to really sink in together. Then I talk about why I have decided to start the 2024 winter courses with a class purely on self-regulation tools before getting into any of the physical practices. I share personal stories of self-regulation in some heated moments, all about each practice, and how these practices can really increase our window of tolerance, help shift us from being primarily in sympathetic nervous system into the parasympathetic where healing can happen, and how they can put us at the center of our own health, healing, and journey. In the end there is a guided experience through three practices. 

I share three practices: 

• Orienting 
• The Felt Sense
• Resourcing

The one thing I didn't say about resourcing in this recording, is generally not to use another person or an animal as a resource because sometimes when you think about them, you can also remember something really challenging about them. For the resource, pick somthing that is just solidly & purely easeful, pleasurable, or comfortable.

I hope you enjoy this! Please reach out to let me know if these practices impact you positively or if you have any cool experiences with them!

In this episode I talk about what the structure of a Shiatsu treatment is currently like when you come to see me! 

1. Check in - What's alive in life right now?
2. Coming into the "Felt Sense"
3. Resourcing
4. Reflecting back:
   1. What I hear from an elemental perspective
   2. What organs / channels I think I may treat and why
5. Getting comfortable
6. Guided meditation to settle in
7. Holding diagnostic areas
8. Working the channels

In this podcast I link our ability to let go with our relationship to uncertainty and our sense of self worth. 

1. Where we are in the cycle of 5 elements
2. Uncertainty
3. The nightmare
4. Bringing consciousness to the unconscious
5. Worry
6. Fear and anxiety
7. Becoming present
8. Opening up to possibility
9. Letting go
10. Past Failures, rejections, abandonment
11. Value
12. Good enough
13. Re-defining failing
14. Re-defining winning
15. Kobayashi Maru
16. Open up to next layer of evolution

TRANSFORMING RESISTANCE TO STABILITY:

In this podcast I talk about the opportunity inside of feeling resistance. How resistance can be a door opening instead of a door closing.

• The role of the nervous system
• The breath
• Creating a bullet-proof nervous system
• The process of training ourselves to allow and to relax into discomfort
• Working with fear. The parts of ourselves... the part that is sort of hysterical and the other part that is present, open, curious about what will unfold and creative / working with what each moment brings. 
• Developing willingness... not forcing or oppressing ourselves but being curious and open, willing to feel
• Letting go of preferences
• Getting out of the way of our life moving forward
• The process

IN THIS PODCAST I TALK ABOUT:

– Our difficulties are our best teachers, but only if we know how to learn from them. 

– Wounding in Childhood, being disliked

– Conscious engagement with our pain

– The heart and the mind

– How to use experience as fodder for the work

– Taking the lessons from our practice out into life

– Resistance, preferences, acceptance, allowance, process & the pillars of practice

– Enduring the long journey

– Opening up to our true nature

NOTE: Near the end of the podcast I talk about two students who are confronting resistance to difficulty.  When I listen to myself, I heard irritation in my voice and I took the podcast down, worried they would hear that instead of the passion I have for the pivot point they are in. I took the podcast down to edit it and make it right but through great urging, from those who had a chance to listen, to put it back up, un-edited and raw, I am re-posting it without any edits. I want everyone who listens to know that the moment these two students are in is the moment I live for. It's the pivot point. The tone in my voice is about that passion, it's what gives meaning to my teaching. If you hear irritation or rushing in my voice, it's my own irritation and rushing with myself within this exact moment that I am connecting to, it's the work I have yet to do for myself. Their lesson is my own. I cherish these two as students, friends and fellow travelers who share a commitment and fire for self study that matches my own!

I am re-posting it, unedited and raw, largely because my acupuncturist urged me to put it out there saying that it's my job, as a teacher, to be slightly irritating, that it can bring value, movement, and growth in places of stagnation, if students choose to take it that way. 

DISEASE: IT'S AN INSIDE JOB.

In this podcast I talk about realizing that the locus of control is on the inside and how we can affect our health and life through emotions /  internal conditions. I explore how we can affect things like cancer, disease, and sickness through emotional processes by linking emotions to cellular health. I explore the importance of developing a practice and a process to develop a relationship with our emotions and the power of that. 

In this Podcast: 

1. Feelings have a beginning, middle, and an end.
2. Exhaustion can come from a feeling that hasn't been fully felt.
3. Our body is our unconscious, any good practice will reveal what is there. 
4. When the unconscious comes up to the surface it is an opportunity for healing.
5. We often experience resistance to feeling this stuff and develop strategies to avoid it.
6. We can also develop a process of being in engagement with the encounter and through that, heal and develop a sense of stability that is not dependent on the outer world of circumstances. This is a special type of strength.
7. Stories to illustrate the transition from resistance into acceptance and allowance. What we resist persists.
8. Developing a process and what a process is.

CRISIS AS OPPORTUNITY: 

In this episode I talk about working with resistance in a way that can put us in touch with the feelings that keep us stuck and feeling dead in our lives. These feelings can keep us stuck in suffering or they can be a flood gate into coming alive. Learning to feel things we "don't want to feel" can put us in touch with our truth and living in alignment with ourselves. 

In the Chinese language the word for crisis has two meanings, one is crisis and one is opportunity. 

PAIN AS A BRIDGE: WAKING UP

• Reacting and responding
• What's under the story
• Inside and outside
• Experiencing the pain
• Becoming sensative
• Resistance and Acceptance
• Pema Chodron on Warrior Slogans
• Ezra Bayda on the "Substitute Life"
• Sealskin / Soulskin 
• Using pain to bring ourselves back home