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Serving a community of private individuals and professionals
who have the desire to cultivate a life of clarity, compassion,
and creativity. We warmly welcome our new subscribers. Thanks
for joining! Your feedback is encouraged. Please feel free to contact us.
| Private Sessions with Charlie Badenhop
Washington, D.C.: July
17, 18, 19, 20, 21
New York City: July 25,
26, 27
Calgary, Canada: July 29,
30, 31
Atlanta: August 8, 9, 10
If you would like to:
Explore core issues, such as your current identity,
your health, or destructive habit patterns,
Feel more fully alive and emotionally balanced,
Explore the direction of your professional or personal
life,
A Seishindo in-person private session can prove to be
of great value.
Read
more about how you can benefit from a Seishindo private
session.
Read
what other people say about Seishindo sessions.
If you think you might be interested in a private session,
please contact Charlie directly at charlie@seishindo.org.
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1. A Story
It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is for me to lose contact
with the part of myself that generates my emotional experience.
Does the same happen to be true for you?
There has been a great deal of research that shows that many
people who work in the "helping professions" (and
this very much includes stay at home mothers) suffer from what
has become known as "Compassion Fatigue" or "Helping
Profession Syndrome." You can become so focused on helping
others that you lose touch with how important it is to also
help yourself.
I write about this now because of an experience I had yesterday;
that might very much speak to your experience as well.
My legs have bothered me since I was a young child. I often
have pain in my knees, and it is exactly this condition that
led me to become involved in my life's work. I am known as a
skillful bodyworker and yet I find that I rarely use my bodyworking
skills on myself. I seem to forget that the skills and sensitivity
I use to help others can also be used for ME.
Yesterday my left knee was bothering me, and I finally decided
to take the time to help myself.
I sat on the floor with my left leg fully extended. I then
took a minute to center as I felt my leg as it was at that moment.
Next, I used my hands to feel what my leg wanted to have done
to it. I felt for the sore spots and I began to gently and lovingly
massage my leg.
Breathing deeply, I massaged my leg slowly and tenderly, yet
firmly. I asked my leg to tell my hands what it wanted, and
I asked my hands to communicate a story to me of what my leg
was saying. I "heard" my leg say, "I am tired
and I don't feel like I am getting enough help in supporting
and carrying the heavy load I have to tend with."
My leg also said, "I feel somewhat neglected and taken
for granted. I don't really feel like I am fully appreciated
for fulfilling a challenging task."
"Hmm..." I thought to myself, "Doesn't sound
all that different from what the rest of me sometimes says!"
Next, I used my hands to reply to my leg. Through my touch
I communicated,
"I love you."
Then I said, "I am sorry for not being more attentive,
responsive, and appreciative." Through my touch I said,
"I really care about you and I am going to establish a
closer relationship with you from here on out."
Finally I said, "I very much want to hear from you, without
your needing to use pain to shout at me. I will be more attentive
to, and more appreciative of our relationship."
I sat there for a few moments, breathing loving energy through
my hands into my leg.
After a while I heard a soft whisper.
"I love you, and I have been very lonely, waiting for
you to show up. Thank you so much for caring about me."
And those words really moved me.
I came away from this experience with a sense of being whole
and healthy. I had become one with myself, in love.
The experience I describe does not require any learned skills.
All you need to do is take some time and have a heartfelt appreciation
for yourself and your needs. When it is all said and done, THE
most significant person to enter into a relationship of love
and service with is yourself! There is no more important person
to love, than yourself.
| Workshop Announcement
Join us to learn how to say "Yes" to life,
by tapping into the wisdom and intelligence of your
body, heart, and soul.
Embodied
Wisdom:
Use the intelligence of your body to change the way you think and feel
Seishindo Personal
Growth Workshop
with Charlie Badenhop and Dorothy Pietracatella
Washington DC, November 4-5-6, 2005
***
We are returning to Europe!
Balancing
Your Life:
Use
your body language
to transform the way you think and feel
Seishindo Personal Growth Workshop with Charlie Badenhop
Antwerp, Belgium, October 22-23, 2005
More info in French:
Une
vie en équilibre
Apprenez
le langage de votre corps pour transformer votre manière
de penser et de sentir
in Dutch:
Balancing
your life
Gebruik
jouw lichaamstaal om je denken en voelen te veranderen,
te verfijnen, te boetseren
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2. Seishindo Learning Theorem #8
We can consider each person to be a relationship. Leaving a
discussion about our "spiritual self" for a later
time, we can say that each person begins life with two minds
or "selves" - a somatic self and a cognitive self.
We can also consider each person to have four brains. One brain
(the neo-cortex) is devoted mainly to communicating with and
supporting the cognitive self. Our three other brains (the enteric
nervous system, the reptilian brain, and the limbic brain) are
dedicated to communicating with and supporting the somatic self.
(You can find out more about Integrating
The Body's Four Brains from my article published in the
2004 Annual Somatics Issue of AHP Perspective, which is a bi-monthly
magazine for members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology.)
The experience we generate and make meaning out of with our
somatic self is dependent on our pre-verbal sensing and interpretation
of the ongoing changes in our physiology and emotions, and is
archetypal / universal in nature. The experience we generate
and make meaning out of with our cognitive self is dependent
on the processes we use to translate and "fit" our
sensory-emotional experience into a rational framework that
can be further understood with the use of verbal language. If
we accept, respect, and synthesize the two different yet complementary
realities of the somatic and cognitive self, a "third self"
(the relational self*) is brought to life. In this sense we
can say that one plus one equals three. We come to experience
the self as a relationship.
As in any high quality relationship, we soon discover it is
crucially important to pay attention to and value the communication
and experience that each party to the relationship is expressing.
We need to meld the cognitive self and the somatic self into
one functional unit (the relational self) that acts from a place
of emotional and rational coherence. It is only when the whole
self says either "Yes," "No," or "Maybe"
that we are able to truly express the unique life force that
we are.
3. Copyright
Unless otherwise attributed, all material for the newsletter
"Pure Heart, Simple Mind"(tm) is written and edited by Charlie
Badenhop ©. All rights reserved.
You are encouraged to send our newsletter in its entirety
to anyone you think might like it.
If you would like to reprint our newsletter for other than
your personal use, you are invited to do so, provided you:
a. Receive our written permission (which is likely) b. Attach
the above copyright notice to our material. c. Do not sell
our material to others. d. Keep the content of our material
intact without any editing whatsoever.
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