The parts of me that are postponed

The Palm House Photo: Matthew Andrews

When we find ourselves overwhelmed, we have an amazing capacity to partially remove ourselves - like a force field, buffering us from the worst of the heat and impact.

This act allows us to survive and continue, but we still have to absorb and process the experience somehow, in order to integrate it. So what we do in the meantime, is to freeze it and submerge it. And there it lives, a frozen cargo rolling around in our unconscious, turbulent and bothersome beneath the surface of awareness.

Sometimes or often, a past experience will surface from the river and mostly, the dread of it makes us push away again, rather to sink it again than face it.

It takes a lot to host these parts within ourselves. It requires energy to contain them and the more of us we hold locked in the past, the harder it is to be present for life. It’s difficult to respond well because we can’t be fully resonant with the world as it unfolds in the moment.

When we so suspend parts of ourselves, we might feel we have blocks or can’t express in some way, or we may feel we are over reactive or too sensitive or can’t move on…. we feel, postponed.

The work of Biodynamic craniosacral therapy is to gently bring the past back to the present by warming the river. When we learn to witness from a new perspective, that’s able to bring wisdom, compassion and maturity to the act of the re-experiencing, integration is possible.

And then a re-action from the past is transformed into an intelligent and creative response to the present, and life moves on…...