Lesson 1: Zooming

When you put your hands on your body and try to allow, either by activating your peripheral vision, or siting behind yourself, or getting still, you may feel like the tissues have engaged, but they’re not processing really well. It’s kind of like your body is telling you that, ‘Yes, there’s something here,’ but you haven’t really met the trauma.

As I’ve explained before, it might be that you’re in the wrong place. But it’s much more likely that you just need to get a little more specific with what you’re intending. You need to resonate clearly with the somatized trauma in order to release it. Increasing the specificity seems akin to Eugene Gendlin’s Focussing method, which is ‘finding the exact right word.’ We’re trying to find the exact issue that has become somatized. When we bring to light the specific trauma that has been somatized, it can emerge into the conscious mind and be fully integrated or metabolized.

For the moment, let’s put aside the question of ‘Why?’ and dive into ‘How?’ Becoming more specific can be as simple as identifying exactly where in the tissues you’re paying attention. Instead of just the general knee, you might try to connect to the tendon or the patella or one of the ligaments. You might be drawn to work in the liver, but to get processing really going, you have to think about a particular lobe or backed-up gallstones. As you can see, becoming more specific could also be about pathology. It’s not just the patellar ligament, but a tear in it. Or the presence of mercury or Lyme disease. You might be holding attention on someone’s lungs and figure out that their mother was smoking in utero. And holding attention on that is what’s needed to regain functioning. This part of the process is by far the most fun, instructive, and generally amazing. It also relies heavily on intuition, which there’s a whole module one.

One way to think of this is as, “Zooming In,” or “Zooming Out.” Do you need to step down or expand out with your attention. You’re being creative with your attention so that you can meet with greater specificity what’s there in the tissues. Depending on how your individual attention works for you, you may have to get very creative indeed. But remember that you’re trying to trigger the body to process and get palpable responses. As soon as you feel processing pick up, you’re golding. You just go back to holding attention and allowing until you’re done.

From the perspective of materialism, it doesn’t make sense that you could do this with your mind. But you can try it an experience for yourself how identifying the exact issue can cause more tingling, more heat, more movement, etc. And when the processing is completed, you’ll have more range of motion, more flexibility, sometimes the tissue tone or color will improve, and sometimes you’ll have really big an obvious improvements, more of the scale of miracles. Those are obviously the most fun, but even the little improvements can add up.

I think it’s fair to say that finding the exact right trauma is, in some sense, confirmatory. If you’re holding the idea of Lyme disease in the tissue and that gets it to unwind and resolve, then you can surmise that you’ve hit the mark. As I’ve mentioned previously, this allows us to build etiologies in reverse, because the traumas will often unwind in reverse order out of the body. It’s fascinating to watch the body fix the first little joint pain, let’s say, and then perhaps it opens up to processing scar tissue in the abdomen. And that, in turn, allows you to be able to resolve an emotional issue that began when you were twelve. You get a gorgeous sense of the body’s resilience and adaptability. And you also get liberated from some very old patterns. It’s quite a beautiful journey.

Join me for the next lesson, in which we’ll talk about whether or not you need anatomy in order to practice this way.