Everywhere I go, my eye is surprised by color bursting through the earth. It is spring. Flowers emerging remind us of what we may have forgotten during the darker winter months. It is a time when it is relatively easy to perceive birth, hope and newness all around us. What would it be like to orient to this potential all the time, everywhere?
Wait, you say, I thought this blog was about Biodynamics, not spring flowers! It’s true that Biodynamics is not about flowers blossoming everywhere, but, in a way, it is.
Biodynamics, Flowers and Wholeness
In my last post, I wrote about orienting to wholeness. When we see flowers, we may forget the dreariness we have just passed through. We may not acknowledge the dirt and rain that enabled this flowering. Similarly, in the midst of long snowy days (or perhaps cloudy, rainy days, like where I live in England), we may forget how the moisture feeds the roots underground, enriching the earth, preparing the ground for flowers we will eventually see. Biodynamics teaches us to remember.
When I hold a client, I am aware of places of holding, density, patterning, unresolved traumas from the past. These often jump out to be seen upon first contact. If I don’t acknowledge them with my awareness, they will often reassert themselves throughout the session, preventing the settling needed in order for deeper healing work to proceed. If, however, I acknowledge them by allowing my focus to be pulled into them, falling into the drama they may present, being sucked into what Peter Levine has termed the “trauma vortex,” I am no longer available as a bridge to wholeness.
Even with the most severe trauma, there is still health at work. There is always wholeness, even when the person cannot sense or remember it. When I hold the pain within this larger, wider field of wholeness, it becomes available as a source of support within which the trauma can begin to be resolved. Hidden flowers can begin to push through the compost, displaying their full beauty.
Wholeness, Flowers and Life
Life is also like this. How many times do we meet someone we immediately pass a judgment on? How often do you complain about your partner, close friend or someone else in your life? I like to remember the advice I learned from body-centered psychotherapists and couples specialists, Gay and Katie Hendricks. For every complaint we must provide at least seven appreciations. Apparently, relationships that work well have a ratio of 7:1 appreciations to complaints. Try it! It works!
This is a cognitive way to shift perception from what is bothering you to the larger field of health within which it presents. You may be really annoyed at what your partner has just said or done, but that actually doesn’t erase all the things you love are have been attracted to about that person. Those qualities are still there, even if you are not attending to them.
The same applies to ourselves. I remember teaching classes where almost everyone was raving about how much they learned or gained from the experience, with all kinds of positive feedback. If one person, however, had an issue with one thing, this is where my attention would wander, often for days afterwards. Perhaps, you have had a similar experience.
For me, that one criticism would resonate with my history of my father’s judgment. Working through it required recognizing the resonance, acknowledging my own projection of that childhood experience onto the current criticism, and, perhaps most important, remembering my wholeness. Remembering all the positive feedback and all that I already knew about my abilities and what I had to offer was just as important as remembering the historical developmental context within which I was receiving the criticism. This involved a shift in perception, from the specifics to the whole.
Over the years, working with feedback in this way, the painful response has lessened. I can embrace even the most challenging feedback as offering useful information I can learn from. Compost for a flower yet to bloom. Attending to my inner garden in this way facilitates the flowering.
What we attend to grows. Our thoughts clearly affect our experience. Looking for particles results in measuring particles. Looking for waves reveals the presence of waves. In life, as in Biodynamics, we can focus on the problems or we can embrace the problems as part of the whole. We can get lost in the rubbish or appreciate how it provides compost for flowers…
What do you choose?
