Category: Blog

Stressful times affect everyone including the fetus inside you. Research shows that even prior to birth the fetus can suffer consequences from the stressful events and situations it experiences. Your baby in the womb is experiencing whatever you are experiencing. Because fetuses share their mothers’ bloodstreams, what their mothers eat and drink affect them, emotions their mothers feel affect them, although differently because they do not have words or thoughts to help them identify what they are experiencing, and health hazards, such as the current  pandemic and the stress it has produced, impacts them as well.

So what can you do if you are pregnant during stressful and turbulent times such as this one. It is most important to free yourself from stress, fear, anxiety, and negativity using whatever means you can. Research results show that a healthy diet, fresh vegetables and fruits in particular, yoga, exercise, meditation, prayer, and self-care have helped pregnant women in other stressful periods give birth to healthy babies. So if you like listening to podcasts, enjoy watching funny television shows and movies, or love to exercise, engage in as many positive experiences as you can to balance out the stress you are under. Don’t stop yourself from dancing around your house wearing pajamas, talking to your baby or telling it stories, or taking long bubble baths. Tell your baby how much you love him or her and work on your relationship with your partner as well. You need your environment to be positive. If tension exists in your relationship, stop arguing, give your partner what will make him or her happy in order to change the vibe in your house. Have love in your heart as much as possible. Stop each hour of the day to feel your heart and experience gratitude for the person growing inside you and for all that is.

 

Your body tells your story. It holds your entire history within it; it can even remind you of parts of your life you don’t consciously remember because you were too young or too traumatized. My goal is to help you understand what your body is telling you about your past — in order to support you in letting go of aspects of your childhood or young adulthood that may be holding your back and getting in your way. I teach you to read your body in order to discover the hidden aspects of yourself that sabotage you and make it harder for you to attain your dreams and your goals. By teaching you how to change the way energy flows through your body, you can reach your highest potential and live the life you desire.  

If you were shy as a child, or frightened, or aggressive and quick to anger, those are your past stories, but on a cellular level they may still be affecting you now, since the body holds onto experiences and events that happened to you in the past. That is not in your interest. You are living in the present and moving toward the future, so you don’t want to be shaped by the past. Through energy work with your body, you can release the old patterns and stories that get in your way. I will be reading your body to see which stories you hold onto so you can change them.

 

Aylee Walsh found this article I wrote a while back comparing Core Energetics with other Approaches,

The first part of this article is excerpted from an article by Karyne Wilner https://www.coreenergetics.org/about-core-energetics/articles/a-therapy-of-bodily-energy-and-consciousness/

 

“Differences exist between Core Energetics® and other schools of body psychotherapy, and between Core Energetics® and other spiritual schools of counseling. Examples include focusing, a method developed by Gendlin (1981), which requires clients to experience sensations in their bodies through deep concentration. This technique does not use movement to unblock energy. The Rubenfeld synergy method integrates Gestalt therapy and the Alexander method, emphasizing the identification of here-and-now feeling states and therapist manipulation of the client’s body (the client lies on a massage table), but it does not acknowledge or work with energy per se (Simon, 1997). The Hakomi school (Kurtz, 1990) recognizes sensations and currents in the body but fails to stress strong physical release unless it erupts spontaneously from the client. Hakomi practitioners are trained to be extremely accepting and nonjudgmental, so as not to elicit resistance. In contrast, Core Energetic therapists welcome resistance, using confrontational techniques to bring it to consciousness to release the strong emotion repressed behind it. Holotropic Breathwork (Grof & Grof, 1990), another body technique, emphasizes breathing to resolve spiritual emergencies. However, unlike Core Energetics, it is not based on a comprehensive model of personality, nor does it use the body to diagnose underlying problems. Holotropic practitioners generally work with energy in a group format, using a form of breathing, with music in the background, that produces a state similar to hyperventilation. Finally, spiritual schools such as Jungian psychology and pastoral counseling rarely emphasize action methods or focus on the body. Instead, they use strictly verbal interactions between therapists and clients, emphasizing dreams, thoughts, metaphors, allegories, values, principles, and myths.”

 

 

I love this poem by Rami, it reminds me of why we are all here, the lessons to be learned on planet earth. We learn them when we are humble, not when we are special. Picture of Rami receiving his two year diploma from the Core Energetics Academy.
Life is not Mundane

By Rami Nagel

Doing the laundry,
Washing the dishes,
Taking out the trash,
Driving your kids to school.
You hope that one day you will be recognized for what you do.
And you pray for the day when you finally will be seen for the song that you are.
And you wait.
And you wonder.
And you continue about your daily routines, looking forward to that exciting
Future while trying to move away from your unfulfilling past.
But nothing happens.
Is this all life is?
Is this all life has to offer?
And then one day you surrender and let go….
You accept that you
Are not just picking up the kids from school,
Are not just washing the dishes,
And you are not just doing the laundry.
As there is no longer any point to waiting for that magical event in the future
Where you can live, and where you can be free. Because you realize that you no
Longer need to wait to be recognized.
At that moment you stop holding back what wants to burst through you,
And you decide to forgive the past,
And you forget about the future
You let go of all that you strive to become
And
At last
You can drink from the nectar that the angels have been pouring into you.
And you remember that you are here to shine,
To live, and
To love.
In forgetting who you’ve become, you remember who you are.
Remembering…
You drive your beautiful angels to school,
You marvel at the laundry
And kneel before the sacred dishes.
And as the water pours out, it refreshes you and it reminds you, that life is not
Mundane.

 

 

 

Life is not Mundane

By Rami Nagel

 

Doing the laundry,

Washing the dishes,

Taking out the trash,

Driving your kids to school.

You hope that one day you will be recognized for what you do.

And you pray for the day when you finally will be seen for the song that you are.

And you wait.

And you wonder.

And you continue about your daily routines, looking forward to that exciting

Future while trying to move away from your unfulfilling past.

But nothing happens.

Is this all life is?

Is this all life has to offer?

And then one day you surrender and let go….

You accept that you

Are not just picking up the kids from school,

Are not just washing the dishes,

And you are not just doing the laundry.

As there is no longer any point to waiting for that magical event in the future

Where you can live, and where you can be free. Because you realize that you no

Longer need to wait to be recognized.

At that moment you stop holding back what wants to burst through you,

And you decide to forgive the past,

And you forget about the future

You let go of all that you strive to become

And

At last

You can drink from the nectar that the angels have been pouring into you.

And you remember that you are here to shine,

To live, and

To love.

In forgetting who you’ve become, you remember who you are.

Remembering…

You drive your beautiful angels to school,

You marvel at the laundry

And kneel before the sacred dishes.

And as the water pours out, it refreshes you and it reminds you, that life is not

Mundane.

This work comes from a long history in psychology. It started with Freud. His student Wilhelm Reich showed that you could understand and analyze the personality by looking at the body. My mentor, Dr. John Pierrakos, a student of Reich, passed on the technology of reading the body to me. You can look at a person and understand his or her personality dynamics, behavior, and potential of change. Not just for therapists, body reading can be used for jury selection, sales calls, persuasion, improved communications, and greater understanding between people.

When clients comes for therapy, we need to assess them, so that we can help them by identifying the underlying issues. Some therapists use paper and pencil tests and others the Rorschach ink blot test. Somatic therapists get their information directly from the body: posture, facial expression, muscles, and energy flow. When you tell people about themselves on the basis of what you see in their bodies, they are motivated to work on themselves. When the client hears his or her story and see it in his or her body, it motivates that person to change. For instance, if you know that you give up too easily, but someone else can see it too in your posture, that is a call to action.

When I first started to assess the body, I was afraid to ask clients to undress, so I tried to look at them with their clothing on. However, when I got past my shyness and asked people to change into workout clothes, I could see changes in their skin color and body weight, I could see scars and tattoos. I was able to give a truer analysis. Clothes make it hard to see the more vulnerable parts of the body.

A lot of people say: “Well this is my body. It is just the way I am. I can’t do anything about it; this is me.” This is not true; research from the field of genetics and epigenetics shows an interplay between events and circumstances in a person’s life and one’s genetic heritage. For instance, posture is affected by lots of things: emotional trauma, angry parents, children raised in fear, lack of food, humility, and testosterone. When I look at posture, it tells me about the life wound. For instance the shoulders may roll forward to protect the heart or to help carry the burdens of life that weigh the person down. Your shoulders may have a certain width due to genetics, but how they are positioned, whether they sag, are raised up around the neck, are injured, hunch forward, or thrust back, is determined by life events.

I try not to overwhelm the person whose body I am assessing with information. I don’t want to keep secrets from them. So I only hold back what I consider superficial and I tell them the important things. Because people can handle only so much information, I share what I want someone to think about and work on. Body readings show parts of the personality that are unknown to the person being read. That the body tells their life story and that someone else can see it too, is very meaningful to them. Bodies show what people have experienced so far in life, where they have been, their past histories. Reich wrote that the body holds the frozen history of the person, that life wounds are frozen or fixed in the body, and that what a child has experienced even in the womb can be seen in the body years later. The body tells your life story. I suggest that the body will also expose your future and you can change it to attain a better future if you are so minded.

Karyne Wilner, PsyD 4/25/2018

 

 

After I make several phone calls to say goodbye, I board the plane. The aisle seat reserved for me on British Air does not exist. Instead I draw the second seat of four in the middle section of the Boeing 747. Sandwiched between two gentlemen, one American (who asks why I did not reserve an aisle seat), the other Austrian, I view a movie screen. My flight experience, a floating movie theatre. The American is friendly, attractive, and not wearing a wedding ring. He scores by storing my backpack in the crowded compartment above.

Ready for bed, my contacts out and my black leather shirt removed, I fall asleep in tights, T-shirt, and a floral thigh length robe, a piece of cheese between two slices of bread. Awakened twice, once for a salmon dinner and once for breakfast, I prepare to deplane. Ground control has another idea. Circling and circling, we land 30 minutes late. The bus that transfers me from Terminal 4 to Terminal 3 at Heathrow arrives in the nick of time of me for me to catch the United flight to Berlin. However, I am not allowed to board because my suitcase is still in transit. I am told to go back to Terminal 4 where I came from. When I refuse, the lady from United takes me over to a lady from British Air.

United: Its your fault she missed her flight. Your plane was late. What are you going to do about it?

British Air: Its not our responsibility. She was not booked all the way through on British Air

United: I thought you would say that. If it were us, we would give her a free ticket.

More barbs were exchanged. I offer to purchase a ticket. The cost is $200.00 for a one-way ticket. The ticket turns out to be first class, which I would not have purchased knowingly. My plane will not depart until 12:45. It is 10:30 pm Eastern time and 4:30 am British time. I see a duty free shop. I start to glow. My favorites await: Hermes scarves, Lladro figurines, Royal Daulton Mugs, Bally shoes, Yves St. Laurant purses. I select a wonderful bird sculpture for Saul’s birthday present. In my mind I convert pound to dollars. I go to pay.

Sales Clerk: Where is your boarding pass?

Me: Here.

Sales Clerk: But this plane has left.

Me: Well, I should have been on it. But I missed it.

Sales Clerk: You can’t use this boarding pass.

Me: Here is the ticket for my new flight.

Sales Clerk: That flight is from Terminal 1. This is Terminal 3. You can’t use it to buy this.

Me: Well, I guess I can’t buy this thing.

Sales Clerk: No you can’t. I don’t know why they tell you that you can shop here. They think they can get away with it.

Me: Nobody told me.

Sales Clerk: Oh.

I leave Terminal 3, walking a winding mile through olive colored walls. My ride to Terminal 1 on the transfer bus is peaceful. The only passenger, I read, think, and relax. Having received a new boarding pass from a handsome agent, I am directed to the security checkpoint. My knapsack fails the radar system and I am shuffled to one side, a security risk. A guard goes through my knapsack and I think he is looking for my knife. However, when he finds it, he opens it, closes it, and replaces it in my bag. Now, I am confused. What could I possibly be carrying? When the weapon comes to light, it is mace innocently attached to my key ring.

Guard: Gas is illegal in this country. It must be confiscated by the police.

Me: You can just have it.

Guard: No, we need the police.

Waiting patiently, I make myself a cracker and cheese sandwich, leftovers form the plane. A lady police-person arrives, pushes a paper in front of me to sign, and removes the mace in a plastic bag.

Moving to the lounge to await the Berlin flight, I am told to wait in the section for business travelers. My luxury ticket entitles me to comfortable tables and chairs and two long bars stocked with wine, champagne, juice, coffee, tea, biscuits, cookies, and fruit. I eat two chocolate cookies with my cup of tea and relax. When my flight is called, I sleep most of they way, with one interruption for a cold poached salmon meal. We arrive at 3:30 pm Berlin time, 7:30 am Eastern time. I feel relieved when my suitcase is unloaded. Customs moves quickly and soon I am on the sidewalk outside the airport. Bus 109 is recommended by my guidebook as the cheapest way to travel to the center of Western Berlin. It is waiting, and although the driver does not speak English, I pay and with his help decipher the correct bus stop.

I am here. Now what will I experience?

Next blog, My first Core Energetics Teaching Experience in Berlin