Dear Clients and Friends,
It’s been nearly 7 months since I wrote a longer letter to you all.
So much has been evolving in my mind and heart because I've been engrossed in the study of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST) and Yoga in the Desikachar lineage.
These are esoteric paths and it is hard to describe their essence without drifting into a liminal space where we are at once the boundary and the thing to be bounded.
The cranio work feels like a traversing of deep inner spaces and then holding these new vistas away from the time/space continuum to allow them integrate into a larger sense of ourselves.
Every time I engage in the work, I am struck by the similarity between the natural world and our structure. When I hold the brain I feel a scintillating galaxy. When I sense the nerves, I feel the soft subtlety of eider down. When I perceive the peristaltic force of digestion, I feel the undulation of a serpent. When I contact the lymph, I feel the ferocity of floating fire ants.
We are part of the inner and outer world, inseparable from all that is.
Healing is a representation of that. It’s what we bring to the table and it’s what the table brings to us--time with ourselves, held by another to go into this vast landscape.
Yoga in the Desikachar lineage is the closest thing I’ve experienced to a physical manifestation of the cranio work. A teacher provides you with a personal practice to be done every day. The practices are not hard, in the way that lying on a table is not hard but the very unique requirement of daily discipline and heartfelt devotion brings one into the same kind of brackishness that the cranio work does. The structure of the sequence holds space for a personal journey to unfold that is at once mundane, mysterious and nourishing.
Doing both together has had a profound effect on my life. It’s a process that is both meditative and physical. It is carrying me into the imagination, but also into structure, into health but also pathology. I have witnessed many private miracles that are hard to quantify or rationalize, but impossible to refute. No amount of mentation can explain what is at play in the human under my hands or in front of my heart. It is the mystery laid bare.
I offer this quote from Krishnamcharya (Desikachar’s father):
"More than twenty thousand people and more than twenty thousand entirely different situations--but each asks in one form or another, "Can you help me?" And all we can answer, the only absolute guarantee each teacher can make is: "I can care."
As you can see, I’m evolving and thus the work is evolving. PIlates, Yoga, Cranio, IMT--these are all labels that point to something more essential and experiential about the ways our organic nature can be ever-more consistently tuned to the sublime.
I hope you will join me on this journey. Together we will become progressively more alive.
My very best to you always until we see each other,
Jennifer
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