Dancing into the Bewilderness
Opening to something good.
One of my favourite things about Biodynamic craniosacral therapy, is how every session reveals itself in a new and surprising way – like a dance. Every moment is seeded, and if we can feel it, honour it and allow it, space opens up all around for something expansive and good to unfold.
Bewildered means ‘confused and uncertain’, and Wilderness can be described as a region ‘uncultivated by humans’.
I like this amalgam of meaning - ‘bewilderness’, as a metaphor to describe the terrain of the adventure; whereby we must consciously journey into the unconscious. It says something about the dark and tricky neighbourhoods of our own internal worlds, where the usual maps for reference don’t work so well. It may feel somewhat unsafe, unpredictable and we generally don’t like to go in alone.
Wild and beautiful.
It also implies that if we can summon the courage to go there and commune with whatever we find, we could find something wild, untouched and beautiful too. Because the purpose of the journey of course, is to make the move to accept and integrate the exiled parts that limit us, and so remember who we were always meant to be.
So this is the essence of the work – holding space for the dance we each have to make into the landscape of ourselves, in order to gently move in and alongside the parts of it we habitually bypass, or try to forget.
How do we then, remain oriented and calm in the midst of uncertainty, to what do we hold?
Navigating.
I’m not sure what the difference is between a conversation and a dance – both are a wonderful metaphor for how we might focus our lens of attention when navigating a relationship. A dance is a conversation that sees and honours the other. There is a mutual witnessing, validation and holding space for the next thing, without expectation or agenda. Each part honours it’s own authority to speak it’s own truth.
There is something extraordinarily powerful about the vitality of dance – by it’s very nature it seeks to turn towards, to open to and know the other, in order to simply connect and move as one. What dance describes, is the ‘radical antidote to fear’, or otherwise known as ‘love’. And as we know, fear can’t live without the fear of it. So if we can move into relationship with the wounded parts of ourselves and bring the dance with us, something transformative can happen.
Home
The work we do in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy is a bit like training to dance into the bewilderness. We spend time working with the dancer self. We work with balance, centre and ground in order to become stable and true. We experiment with what’s it’s like to feel discomfort and stay connected. We lean in a little and come back, many times, before we do the full dance. We also do work to map out the bewilderness as best we can before we go. We do this by practising listening and feeling the tones and textures of the landscape of experience of being alive in the now. And we begin to foster the familiarity that will eventually give way to the idea of home.
The beautiful thing is that neither the client nor the therapist is the choreographer of this dance because given the right circumstances the field of health knows how to untangle and integrate itself in the most kind and intelligent way – we don’t need to know the steps – we just have to stay present and trust.
If you feel called to begin the dance into the bewilderness, I’d love you to get in touch.