'I'm listening': Let the body be your guide

Recently, I attended an advanced training seminar with Dr. Donald Epstein. Dr. Epstein, the founder of Network Spinal Analysis and Somato Respiratory Integration, has become quite renowned in circles of healing and wellness over time. As you may know, the application of Network is applied with a very light force/contact held at an area where the body has rapport, which means an area where the nervous system is willing to accept input. The contact is always held until there is a loss of rapport or the body says “you're done.” One of the things I enjoy most about Dr. Epstein's teaching technique is his use of analogies to illustrate his ideas, and he used the analogy of female energy to describe how long a practitioner should hold the contact.

While there are, of course, exceptions to the rule, men and women approach things a little differently. For instance, when a woman is communicating in the relationship she may just want to talk to her partner without looking for any particular solution. Generally, men want to know what the problem is so that a rational, logical solution can be arrived at as quickly as possible. The woman (or person with female energy) may really just want to vent. She doesn't necessarily want a quick solution; she may simply want someone to listen to her. In fact, the only answer she may want to hear is, “I'm listening; tell me more.”

While holding the contact points during the seminar, we would silently be saying “tell me more, tell me more” and using the male/female energy model Dr. Epstein had proposed to help determine the duration of the contact. In addition, we did Somato-Respiratory Integration - exercises designed to enhance the connection to internal rhythms — as a group. As I connected to my body, I remained open and said “I'm listening. Tell me more,” over and over again.

It was not too long after returning home that I had the opportunity to put this principle to the test in my own life. Those of you who know me know that I have, at times, experienced some significant joint pain and swelling in my knees, feet and wrist. The normal progression starts with one joint and moves to another after a few days. I have become keenly aware of what it feels like just prior to its manifestation. I had an experience with this not to long ago which I thought was very interesting and worth sharing.

Usually when I feel this developing, my thought process is “Oh no, please don't do this. I can't miss another day in the office.” This time I decided to take a different approach and instead of dreading it, I welcomed it as a message from my body and not just a painful nuisance. I placed my hands over my stomach and the area that was hurting and breathed in my nose and out my mouth silently repeating, “I'm listening,” over and over. As the pain intensified, I moaned and I cried and even laughed because it hurt so much, until finally it got to the point where it hurt so badly that it didn't hurt anymore. It became, for me, a spiritual experience. Even though I was in extreme pain, my mind was at ease and I surrendered to the moment until I eventually passed out.

This experience illustrates the concept of stage one in the healing process, “suffering.” It's very common for people to do the stage one SRI exercise in order to escape their suffering. The interesting thing here is that it doesn't work. You actually have to get into it in order to get out of it. In other words, instead of trying to avoid the experience, we need to truly experience the stage to gain whatever wisdom it has for us. This is contrary to our cultural story which tells us to avoid suffering at any cost.

From my past experience, I fully expected that I would have to cancel all of my appointments in the morning. When I awoke, I tentatively placed my foot on the floor. I felt a little stiff and slowly pulled myself up and put weight on my foot. To my surprise I could actually stand. In fact, the pain in my foot had almost completely resolved. The reason this was so surprising was that each time I had experienced this in the past, and it has been numerous times, the experience consisted of two to five days of pain, swelling, and couch time.

In the wellness or healing paradigm, I advise clients that symptoms are the body's call for attention and change and to listen to what message their body is trying to give them. All night I said to my body, “I'm listening, what do you want?” I never did get an answer. What I realized from this experience was that maybe sometimes we simply need to listen to our bodies, not to find an answer but rather to just simply listen.