Breath, Surrender, Attention and Re-Dok
Breath
“Student, tell me, what is God?”
‘It is the breath inside the breath.”
Kabir
The constant rhythm of breathing in and out maintains an intersection with the Ground of Being,
a sense of interconnectedness and Nowness.
The Experience of Our Existence
What amplifies bodily awareness?
In her book, “The Grace of Dying”, Kathleen Dowling Singh focuses on terminal illness.
Are there other circumstances or experiences besides terminal illness and meditation practices
that can amplify mindbody awareness?
I can answer that in the affirmative. My response is based on my life experience in walking
an unconventional path in the world of medicine
into the Unknown and Beyond.
My ‘conscious breathing’ sometimes takes me into a mindbody awareness that creates a shimmering sensation
similar to the vibrating frequency of my infra-red laser light probe as it gently touches my face and affects
the quality of the pain sensation that pierces my throat and palate.
How do you ‘feel’ a pulsating light that is neither cold or hot? What is this?
Walking in the Unknown.
The Path Within to the Beyond
The Presence of MindBody Awareness and the integration of body and ego –
a remapping of the previous boundaries between mind and body.
Primal repression loosens as the boundary between mind and body fades.
This process explores and integrates the Ego.
Exploration and integration produces an expansion – of being, of awareness and of identity.
The Cathartic Catalysts
Contemporary language uses words like somatic experiencing, trauma therapy, bodywork, post-traumatic stress.
Recognized leaders in the field today are Peter LeVine and Bessel van der Kolk – both men born during the early 1940’s.
“The body remembers”
I became familiar with Bessel van der Kolk in the 1980’s and his ideas of ‘the body remembers’.
My ‘falling into the rabbit hole’ of osteopathy in the cranial field in the 1980’s led me into SomatoEmotional release,
another term not as recognized today as trauma release or somatic bodywork.
I certainly was unprepared for these occurrences that happened to me – and in me –
during and after treatment as my ‘body remembered’.
Manual therapy – bodywork – can amplify mind-body awareness.
This work is cathartic. Pain, fear, anxiety….and much more…
can surface and be released. This experience is beyond words – and more powerful than words.
Language and understanding arise only from the physical and emotional experience of sensations and feelings
that overpower the psyche and body as they bubble up from the realm of the unconscious
into awareness – beyond suppression and conscious control.
And in that awareness change slowly evolves, in bits and pieces.
And the counterpart – joy, gratitude, freedom, relief….
is as unrestrained and unrestricted as the recognition and release
of the pain, the fear and the anxiety.
Change and Impermanence – a total appreciation of dharma
Healing.
For me this experience has come through the Osteopathic community
These happenings are Beyond Words –
a “must be experienced encounter” in order to grasp
the unfathomable communication of ‘attention’ and ‘awareness’
in an “in-between” relationship that can exist between two people.
The potential of humanity
– in our Hands.
SURRENDER
‘Not my will, but thy will be done.’
Jesus of Nazreth
I always had trouble with the word surrender. A vivid childhood image of the cowboy on a horse pointing a gun at someone and saying, “Surrender” was an immediate reflexive reaction to the word. I had to create many different words to circumvent this image and finally settled on “Let it Be” – which was always accompanied by the melody of the infamous Beatles song drifting in and out of my inner hearing!
I also had an ongoing argument with the word ‘hope’ and had to invent other words to avoid the collision of hope with expectation. This became a balancing act, stemming from an on-going family experience with estrangement. For me, Cynthia Bourgeault’s “mystical hope” was another word for Trust. Emily Dickinson, however, helped me “see” differently with her images of ‘a door ajar’ and ‘the little thing with feathers.” My door ajar replaced hope and I would be witness to the little thing with feathers flying in at most unexpected times with gratitude that would cover me and seep within. My door ajar enabled me to Trust with mystical hope.
And then, unannounced, my door ajar was flung wide open by a life happening. I was powerless as my “door ajar” swiftly transformed into a limitless, infinite, boundless space, catapulting me into simultaneous overwhelming sensations, emotions and thought. I was on the crest of a wave, travelling at the speed of light.
And I momentarily traveled Beyond
as I was
embraced by
and engulfed into Surrender.
My only recourse was
‘Thy will be done’….intermingled with ‘what happened?”
And then I encounter Pema Chodron with her combination word for hope and fear – redok: a feeling with two sides
…as long as there’s one, there’s always the other. If hope and fear are two sides of one coin,
so are Hopelessness and Confidence.
If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage
to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. Hopelessness is the basic ground. ” (When Things Fall Apart, p. 39)
Is Surrender the same as Groundlessness
where both Trust and Confidence are born and can reside
in the Ground of Being….
Where the vital force, the energy of life vibrates,
expanding and contracting as does our Breath?
2024
I was laying on the treatment table and my osteopath, a specialist in orofacial osteopathy, had just finished…
I thought.
Instead, reaching onto her desk, she said
“Wonder what would happen if you put this under that upper left canine tooth? Open your mouth and bite.”
A piece of dental articulation paper was inserted into my mouth and I bit down.
Her hands were immediately palpating my head as I held this articulation paper between my teeth.
“Oh my goodness. Your entire head just opened up!” she exclaimed in shock. “What a surprise! Do we need a dentist?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In the world of the cranial osteopath, this palpatory perception
was not only an unexpected but also a welcome response
…to a thin piece of dental articulation tape?
More Wondering.
This was September, 2024.
My mind was spinning backwards in time ‘on the way to San Jose’ …..back to 1977 and 1996…
other dental ‘adventures’ with this same ‘canine’ tooth.
I know the Way to San Jose – drive along with me.
I left her office at 3:30 in Santa Cruz to drive to the San Jose airport for my trip back to Phoenix. She told me to keep this tape hanging from my mouth on the trip home. The icepick, splinter pain in my jaw/face dissipated as I drove to San Jose. At 4:04 on the outskirts of San Jose, my bite shifted and my teeth occluded on the right side.
With a piece of dark blue tape hanging out of my mouth,
I returned a rental car, spent four hours in the San Jose airport, landed in Phoenix and got a taxi, arriving home at 10:30 pm.
The ‘block’ lasted through the next day – far longer than the 30-minute anesthetic sphenopalatine ganglion block
I had undergone two weeks previously in my ENT’s office.
Reverberations, Rebound, Reactions
Listening and Hearing
AWARENESS
“Would she have done this had I told not my story of how and when the orofacial pain began and was exacerbated by ‘dental canine insults?”
Her hearing continues to wrap me in a warm blanket of being heard.
Within 8 days of inserting dental articulation paper at this
‘canine’ location when the sharp sensation in the left side of my throat
and face overpowered me, an upper right molar (tooth #3) fractured.
“Was this ‘coincidence’? Or, is my body screaming at all of us,
showing us the way toward resolution?”
Unanswered questions.
My door ajar remains wide open. This ‘remedy’ works some of the time. The pain continues to assault every other day; my local osteopath has palpated this phenomenon that she experienced as well.
The both agree about the instability of my system
that responds readily to treatment and refuses to ‘hold’,
manifesting constant change.
There are no answers…yet;
both are wondering and amazed at this latest discovery, along with me.
Impermanence is foremost in my spirit
as I venture forward on a return trip to Santa Cruz on October 14.
It was only later that awareness creeped through my wide-open ‘door ajar’.
Insight arose from deep within. ‘Thy will be done’ was actually Surrender.
And later still, I could see Groundlessness as a doorway into the Ground of Being.
This happening, over which there was no control, overpowered me on the way to San Jose.
….a very special condition of psychospiritual transformation.
‘To let go is to lose your foothold temporarily.
Not to let go is to lose your foothold forever.
Soren Kierkegaard
1977
My dentist, concerned about a ‘cloud’ on the routine
bite wing x-ray, had referred me to an endodontist who ruled out a root issue with this left canine tooth (#11). My dentist gunned his drill a couple of times and the whirring sound entered my mouth as this tooth was ‘equilibrated’.
He had decided I was clenching and this was going to fix the problem.
The pain was immediate and electric, a bolt of lightening shooting through
my face. My body jerked and I screamed. The dentist, horrified, frantically asked me: “Have you had sinus surgery?” When I replied yes, he scolded me and said,
“You didn’t tell me you had sinus surgery!”
My response was immediate: “You didn’t ask!”
And thus began my five year dental saga, ending up
in the world of TMJ (temporomandibular joint) and dental appliances (splints).
Becoming infamous in dental offices and dental symposiums. I quickly acquired the label of ‘complex case’-a chronic orofacial pain patient…with no answers.
1996
On June 4, 1996 at 10:30 am, an orthodontic procedure in the office of my California craniofacial pain specialist triggered the onset of a bizarre orofacial syndrome by grinding the same left canine tooth (#11).
Little did I know that this was the beginning of more than
twenty-five years of puzzling symptoms……
complexity beyond the scope of specialization in dentistry, neurology, orthopedics and otolaryngology.
