The power of instinct

Instinct. It’s a thing we tend to ignore a lot in our culture, preferring reasoned thought, logic, and thorough consideration. We “have a bad feeling” about someone we meet, but we give them a chance…and then another. We know what our gut is telling us about a situation, but we second-guess ourselves. We’ve been this

Shakespeare helps restore the body’s story to prisoners

At the recent conference of INARS, the professional organization around Rubenfeld Synergy, we talked a great deal about the restoration of movement to the body, and how restoring movement can give us our sense of soul back. In an interview with Bessel van der Kolk, he spoke of how in trauma, the body gets stuck

Owning yourself fully: Bessel van der Kolk and healing trauma through the body

The big issue for traumatized people is that they don’t own themselves anymore. Any loud sound, anybody insulting them, hurting them, saying bad things, can hijack them away from themselves. And so what we have learned is that what makes you resilient to trauma is to own yourself fully. -Bessel van der Kolk In the

What was taken from you? Where do we get it back?

This weekend, we focused on soul: what feeds us, where we feel at home, how we connect to passion, to center, to power, to connection itself. As part of that, we talked about the thwarts to passion: what does your passion call you to do, and what gets our way?

An important learning from this was that most of the time, the thing thwarting us is not of us. We may have internalized it, sure, but it was something done to us. “Something taken out of my soul. Something I would never lose. Something somebody stole.” Or, something somebody put there, something that doesn’t belong, that we should never have been forced to carry.

Lovely day at the Theosophical Society’s Day of Healing and Insight

I wanted to take a moment this week to that Janet Kessenich and Carolyn Romano at the Boston Theosophical Society again for asking me in to do their Day of Healing and Insight last Saturday! I got to put my hands on some people, help them listen to themselves, bring some relaxation and calm, and

Listening to your heart may be more literal than you think

A man in Brazil, having received a cardiac implant, found – not all that surprisingly – that his body image shifted: he had the odd feeling off having a heart in his belly rather than his chest. But rather more surprisingly, the introduction of the implant “seemed to have markedly altered certain social and emotional

Two great videos about Rubenfeld Synergy Method

Since the Fourth of July weekend is coming up, I figured I’d blog a little early and leave you all with something inspiring to take you into it. In case you haven’t seen them yet, here are two great videos put together by the Rubenfeld Synergy Training Institute. The first, What Is RSM?, was filmed at the Omega Institute while

How can you keep those resolutions going?

Happy New Year! For many, coming out of the dark time of the Winter Solstice and into the New Year is a time of renewal. After the excesses of the holidays, we look back at the year behind us and make promises to ourselves. This year, we say, we’ll be better. Stronger, fitter, thinner, richer.