Having A New & Healthy Relationship With Everything!

By Sarah Puyans

It is our relationship to who we think we are, our perception of "self" that dictates to a large extent our level of happiness or unhappiness. Our habituated way of relating to our moment-to-moment life experience is through our thinking mind which has a reflexive tendency to hold on to a separate sense of self. Is there another way, another reality? The Buddha, great mystics, the Non-Dual school of psychologists all say there is, and I would suggest that  Rosen Method Bodywork, or Body-Listening as I call my work, has the potential to directly experience this more spacious reality, one which is dynamic and free. Having both an understanding and directly experiencing this more expansive reality provides the pathway to a healthy and vibrant relationship with everything!

I came to bodywork after many years practicing meditation in several different traditions and studying what the Buddha taught. Then, approximately twelve years ago, I received my first Rosen session, and everything came full circle. Following the session I clearly saw Rosen bodywork to be an extension of my meditation experience and visa versa. The experience of being present in my body moment-to-moment while receiving the touch of another human being who is compassionate and very present was and is awesome. In its simplicity this work holds the potential to be very profound, opening the door to a new way of relating to everything which is beyond that of the thinking mind.

But let me explain a bit more about this process of selfing, or the holding on to a separate, permanent, unchanging sense of self. Regarding the "permanent and unchanging" aspect, for most of us  there's this little voice inside that keeps saying, "I  know intellectually I will age and die, but maybe there's a chance I'll be different. I'm going to hold on to that possibility!"). And the "separation" comes from the continual reference to our selves as "I," "me" and "mine." As soon as we think of "me," we think of "other," and the separation is made, splitting us off from the rest of the world. It is this relationship to our "self," as separate, solid and unchanging that is the cause of all the problems we have. Out of this belief comes all of our defensive strategies. From this stance we start making the world into what we want, what we like, and if it doesn't work out that way, we get frustrated, angry. The problem is everything changes beyond our control, leaving us feeling helpless, having problems in our relationship with our body as well as our partners and friends. We become frozen in this limiting sense of who we are, often struggling with a chronic health problem or muscle tension. But maybe we've had some experience that leads us to question this more limited perspective.

We all have had moments in our life when suddenly we realize things are not quite what we believed them to be. Something is different than our ordinary way of perceiving, experiencing. It involves a shift in consciousness, and it covers a wide spectrum of depth and length in time. It may be an insight that lasts for only a few minutes, or it may continue for a more extended period of time. The most common characteristic of it is a sense of timelessness, as well as a quality of connectedness and great peace. And, yes, it is different. It's an opening into the possibility of a different reality, one that is vast, fluid, and open. It has the potential to transform our relationship to our everyday life.  A Body-Listening or Rosen Method session has the potential to access this consciousness.  Let me illustrate how it manifested in a recent session.

My client started the session talking about recently breaking up with her partner. She was planning to her again in a week for closure, and she came to me searching for a way of how to be with this. She was still very angry, and spent most of the session verbalizing the usual "she did this, and I did that" locked up in the struggle of her thinking mind, with her body very tense under my hands. Coming to the end of the session, I again encouraged her to come into her body, bringing her awareness to my touch. Although she had resisted my suggestions earlier, this time she surrendered to it. She was tired, tired of wrestling with it. She dropped into a deep state of relaxation. I stayed with her in silence, one hand holding her head, the other on her chest. After a few minutes she spoke softly, "When I'm in my body, I'm in forgiveness." In that moment, she had found her way.

The above example illustrates what I've come to know as a familiar pattern in my sessions whether it be my private clients having a wide variety of issues or a hospice client. Interesting as it bears similarities to Helen Kubler Ross's stages of grief. There's an initial emptying out of feelings, emotions around the holding. As the energy drops below the thinking mind, sensing into the body sensations, an exploration of the client's inner world takes shape. In the final part of the session there is often this shift in consciousness. With both the body and mind relaxed, spacious, the boundaries of self and other fall away, and before what appeared to be a struggle, fraught with "I can'ts," now becomes much simpler in its resolution.  

This final stage of the session with a shift in consciousness is a coming together of two realities—our everyday one of having a solid, permanent, unchanging self, and a much vaster one where there is no separation, only a fluid interchange coming from causes and conditions. Yet our life is not a fiction. We think, feel, perceive, have insights. We are not looking to annihilate this "self," but through understanding and the embodied direct experience of a more expansive reality give ourselves a wider perspective in which to hold our moment-to-moment experiences. This gives us choices of how to respond. When someone shouts at us, we can stop, drop into our bodies, remembering this other perspective, before proceeding out of our usual reactive patterning. This in itself is huge in transforming our relationships to more healthy ones. I remember Ram Dass saying you have to have one foot in spirit and the other foot in your zip code! 

The Buddha taught that for the purpose of awakening and spiritual freedom, everything that we need to realize about the world is found within the body. By being present in the body, watching the flow of experience from within, the tight holding to a solid sense of self lessens. This work speaks to the heart, allowing the shifts of a more inclusive reality to come in, and in this process our relationship to ourselves, others, everything becomes much kinder, easier. It is the understanding that comes from the direct experiencing of this more expansive sense of self that is the ground for our sense of aliveness, creativity, authenticity and joy. It is the path that we were born for, the path of freedom.