SI and Relationships

Our relationships are struggling these days. Divorce is so common and the questions that are arising with all of my clients and friends, including my own journey, are so enormous that it's clear that underlying these issues in our culture is a phenomenal change of life as we know it, of the body and individual, and which is indicative of a more serious underlying issue of our times and culture. While these changes are enormously challenging for everyone I know, including our children, I think that what is happening is actually very good and very profound and might be the very thing we need to help change our ways of living on this planet and with each other.

In this article, I am going to delve into the field known as depth psychology. This implies that the psychology we "think" we know is actually a reflection of the body itself. I will take this one step further. The body itself is the vehicle of soul, an exact mirror of your spiritual self which exists as an energy matrix of Light. Our souls are here, in a body, almost one might say "on loan". By working with the body, we are not only addressing the basic fundamental reality of embodiment, the flesh, but we are touching our deepest layer of self, the soul, as well as our emotions, our belief systems, our child wound and familial patterns, our cultural paradigms and our religiosity and our spiritual awakenings. The body is the crucible of every thing, hence in my work I am combining many levels of work from straight-forward release work with connective tissue to highly evolved and skilled energy work with chakras and levels of spiritual awareness and structure far beyond the chakra system. Since the body integrates it all, by addressing our verticality and ease of movement and increase joy of lifeflow, we are able to help the body (YOU!) open to new areas of life, success, fulfilment and PROPER RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR LIFE PARTNER.

For many of us, we have not really "grown up". Our bodies went through some degree of puberty, we've become sexual and have been married or are married or living with a significant other or dating a girlfriend or boyfriend. We look like we might be an adult, but when we witness what we are really doing and how we are actually feeling and consider what is really happening in our relationships, we realize that we are caught in patterns from our past and often our parents which didn't really reflect two autonomous individuals who were mature and gaining in autonomy and maturity, and who were willing to actually come together to share an axis in life, a commitment to each other which we often call marriage. Before I delve into our physiological and psychological patterns, let me glance toward a very important spiritual truth about your life, my life and all the others whom you know. What is going on inside of you, that is, your inner relationship to self and your personal development of body and soul, is being projected outward onto reality. It's almost as if there is a movie going on inside of you. This movie is unfolding. As it unfolds as you learn important lessons and make important decisions, new things arise in your external life which reflect the exact new stage which is evolving for you. It's like watching my daughter in her quest this year to find "her college". We had plenty of brochures, interviews and letters. It wasn't until she found inside of herself what she really wanted that the college of her choice materialized. Of course, the acceptance letter packet was sitting there underneath stacks of papers -- she hadn't even showed me the acceptance letter! And then suddenly it clicked. It's the same way with relationships. You struggle and struggle to make something work and it just doesn't. Finally you give up and the next day the right Other walks into your life while you are standing at the grocery store, or walking the dog, or visiting your best girl or guy friend.

So this all begs the question of what REALITY really is and what is going on with the human soul. What are we doing as we sift through our transitions working deeply with our family patterns where love was more based on money and obligation instead of a true committed partnership and friendship based on shared interests, shared dreams, shared complementary gifts, and a strong sense of self direction and responsibility? What is going on as we transform darkness into light, our unknowing into truth, authenticity, more joy, more happiness because we feel at one and at home with our own self? Why are so many of us caught in deep transitions which are costing us sleep at night, tons of money we don't really have, children whose lives are stressed too because the adults are still struggling to be adults, and a lot of emotional pain because we ourselves aren't really living happy and meaningful lives?

In the next paragraphs I am going to offer a theory based on my daily work for over 14 years now as well as my years as a teacher of adolescents and based on my own experiences as a mother and as a friend with other parents. These theories also are derived from my own journey, with years of therapy of many types mostly body-centric, well over 150 sessions in Structural Integration, well over 500 sessions of other energy related work, years of reading and watching and struggling . . . as well as an innate motherly sense about life -- including a degree basically in Classical Studies in Liberal Arts, from St. John's College, Santa Fe. I am going to use that as I discuss the Oedipus Complex, that is, Oedipus walks into a situation blindly where he marries his mother. We are going to look at how this is actually happening below the surface of many of our lives or where other facets of rejection of the mother are creating such intense disharmony with our mates and its correlating struggle for women. This is quite a PANDORA'S BOX so I will try to make it simple. I am sure that as you read it you will see yourself and your friends. And my friend, awareness is the first step to being able to make a change and want a change. And that's where my work really steps in. I help people make changes, quickly and easily, for your betterment and for finding a way for you to live with greater inner harmony and life joy.

It starts here. Most of us have not fully grown up into adulthood. The body is immature. If you glance at yourself in the mirror or at a friend or loved one, you will notice often that the legs are splayed outwards instead of going directly downward and touching the ground firmly. Ankles are weak, feet turned outwards in funny ways, arms dangle as if they don't quite belong to the body. Often the chest, even in our big stately men, are sunken, shoulders rounding forward, the core sunken back and the stomach protuding in a rounded distention, the lower back cruched down and immobile, the head jutting forward and the spine having lost its natural curve. The body itself often has this soft-baby-fat roundedness which is different than that mature sleek look of a well-honed body. Now not all bodies are svelt or even lean . . .yet there is a leanness even in a more full body that does not suggest this certain childishness. If you simply look around you and at yourself, you will notice what I am speaking about. It's no different than looking at little puppies and watching them grow up through their pudgy playful stages, into adolescence and then become more substantial and firm in their adulthood.

Now why is that we think that this should happen without any real muscular work or strain to the body? Why do we have an education system which forces our children into a mostly sedentary abstract way of learning, a lot of material which is mostly unnecessary for true adulthood success and mostly irrelevant based on our current lives, in thought that this will produce a mature body and self? Why do we think our adolescents are so angry when the truth is we hardly give them what they really need to grow up properly . . .because we as adults have not yet properly grown up? The important point is that your psychological maturity is a reflection of the body's physical maturity. When muscles have not been developed, when the posture is weak and pulled out of alignment due to injury, emotional stress, psychologocal abuse and issues, malnutrition or any other problem, there will be a corresponding lack of maturity and dependency onto others because true uprightness and self-autonomy has not been achieved.

I suspect that there is a reason for this . . . briefly those who are not fully grown and independent and who remain as children . . . can be used and manipulated. Perhaps we have not come as far as we think since the Feudal System? Perhaps capitalism is a reflection yet again of a parental entrapment to enforce childhood psychology so that we will continue to buy more and more to fill our emptiness because what we really needed as an infant was not given? What if the authority-over of religion has been a crux on which others with a stronger power drive have used others and by keeping women split off from their children (I mean really, should we be putting infants into childcare and young children into preschool? And why do we wean puppies before they are ready? Isn't it nice when our dogs don't achieve full maturity and instead bond with the homo sapien person as the juvenile dog who is still in the happy-unconditional love phase and will spend the rest of its life in that state of juvenile devotion? I'm not opposed to this, I'm just suggesting that you consider what is really at stake here and why we might have the parenting and educational and governmental systems which we do, both for our betterment and also as a way of subverting actual maturation into true individualized selfhood?)

Ok I need to put aside my soapbox. Let me return to clarifying my theory.

The body is immature. The psychology of most people is immature, often stuck in various overlapping phases of infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Actually, many people are still in some form of gestational phase still inside the womb. I have also worked with clients for whom most of the soul has not yet "arrived" into the body. There is a difference in how the eyes look and how the fascia will melt or transition, as well as how sensitive the person is. Now the body is going to remain immature if you did not receive adequate touch and holding and basic nurturance like nursing by your mother. We live with a lot of isolation and alienation. It's part of our culture. One day in Mexico and you get a pretty quick sense that the latino way of relating has a lot more warmth, love and connection. I'm not saying that their culture is all good and ours bad. I'm simply gesturing toward a difference so you can feel how closed off to life we are and how many of us live in great need of love, emotional bonding, heart warmth, body contact. If your body did not receive what it needs, even at age 40, 50, 60 or older, you are mostly likely experiencing a daily lack of confidence, sense of insecurity and inadequacy, and sense that somehow you are not quite right. You might not be able to place a finger on what's wrong, but you might be depressed, need to drink alcohol frequently to calm your nerves, smoke or use some other form of addiction to try to meet this inexplicable desire for something that has something to do with your mouth, or you might be drawn to many other forms of finding a way to get something that nurtures you.

When the body has not had enough, you do not feel like you are enough. From this place, we often find ourselves in relationships which are based on the family triangle pattern in which one tries to get one's needs met from the spouse-mother or spouse-father. We all fall into patterns like father-daughter and mother-son. The inner part of you is trying to correct a deficiency through the relationship. You find that you keep falling into childish or adolescent behavior. It's even harder when one is really attracted to another and because our culture mostly lacks conservation and constraint, one is often in bed with this tempting other before one has really analyzed if this important other is a proper longterm commitment. What is drawing us into bed is actually the infant self who needs to go to bed with a mother or father surrogate. Or sometimes this relationship might mirror a significant sibling or other relative configuration, like the grandparent relationship to the child which often supports children more deeply than the parents. Hence we fall quickly into living out old deep patterns of wound and angst and unmet needs . . . and we are caught in each other's child neediness. It overwhelms the relationship with emotional material and drama which costs us countless anguish when in fact most of us are truly caring, giving and honest people. We get caught in old patterns that are running our lives and we are caught by our own body's need to get something it never got.

So . . . let's say our parents are one of these couples who aren't really true adult mates but who found each other based on their innate child/infant neediness. While they have grown to love each other and are good friends, or maybe not, one can feel that there is a certain "bargaining" going on. There is somehow an implicit trade underlying the structure of the marriage. You can feel that the relationship is not quite honest, that there are undercurrents of strain, that a lot of personal compromise has happened to negotiate the other needs and also hold everything together to raise the children and keep up appearances in society.

So what is happening then? Say that the wife is not really the woman the husband wanted to marry. Yet he couldn't quite figure out who he was suppose to be with and he never was quite man enough to not marry and he was stuck in the relationship and after awhile, neither man or woman can face the truth to each other? Sex usually becomes challenging because there is no more man-woman groove thing going on, you know. It's more like brother and sister, or father-daughter, or mother-son. The sexual relationship if it's not between two consenting adults, doesn't have that sexy groove thing going on, and while it might begin ok, a bit later it starts losing its spark. Now in a real man woman groove thing, it gets more and more deep because true sexuality and true eros is about the innate connecton of the heart between a man and his lady. The real sex intimacy and groove that every adult knows is inherent to their body and being starts with having a real groove thing with another person's heart.

Let me backup. So father doesn't really have a groove thing with his wife maybe or she doesn't have it with him. Somehow one or both of them is more like a child to the other. Yet father needs a wife. If his wife doesn't match it or if her heart isn't really open to him and she's hard because she absorbed that from her mother, the father will find that opening with a daughter if there is one. Or he will find it elsewhere--maybe a massage therapist, a dance partner, someone at his work, his housecleaner, who knows. For every man and every woman to live a sane life, we need to feel the give and receive that comes with the heart energy going on between a man and a woman. That energy exchange is a circle and it makes us whole. Women are not better than men, and men are not better than women. We are both beautifully wonderfully different and we fit each other like a good tongue-and-groove wood floor. Let's honor how beautiful this yin-yang of exciting energy is and how when it is flowing . . . ah yes, when life is flowing, it is good. Even the bad days are good.

So when father doesn't have what he needs, he might force daughter to act like or take the place of wife. This happens repeatedly in divorce especially if daughter stays more with father because the mother is unable to care for her young because she is too impecunious, emotionally unstable, etc. Likewise if the mother is not really mated to a man she wants to be with, she keeps closing and hardening her heart and she becomes hard and angry. Because women need a man's heart energy to keep themselves alive and happy, she will turn to her sons and use them in some way as the husband. Now we find that underlying the relationships, even in good marriages, we have incestuous taboo bonds which put an undue strain of the development of the physical and psychological maturity of our youth. This will show up in the body structure itself as well as in the hardening of the pericardium which surrounds the heart. The arms as well will show the strain pattern often of fight or flight as the child is under undo stress as are the parents. The patterns are encoded in the body itself, in its fascia, in the nervous system, in the organs vitality, etc!

Now when this child, you or me or your friend, goes out to date . . . we are pulled back into a pattern that is wired into your body. The woman who is still like the child or adolescent who never had enough mother (mother was hard and emotionally unavailable because she wasn't married to a man she wanted but she had to be with him for survival hence she had to sacrifice herself, body and life to survive . . . because she never quite grew up into adulthood so she is stuck) can't be with a man because she hasn't passed through true adolescence into true womanhood. You will find her somewhat angry or rebellious toward men. She might have that sort of ATHENA power-she feminist energy that says . . .I'll do it myself! . . . not a bad thing but it's a phase, a phase of adolescence independence and autonomy which precedes true womanhood. If she has not truly severed the internal ties to the father and actually claimed her own life for herself, she will not yet be able to know . . . KNOW . . .who the right man if to embrace with ALL OF HER HEART.

Our men have a similar journey. If the mother was using him in place of the father because of the problems, the man is now stuck in some undertow relationship with the mother which will actually not allow him to fully individuate into manhood. If he peels away the veneer of his life, he might find that he is acting out the "good boy" scenario because actually mother still has a hold of his heart and his balls . .. sorry to be rude. But it's true. If you are a wife, you might know what I mean. It's not that I am against the strong mother-son relationship. It's important. We are all meant to help each other and children help their parents into old age. It's more an issue of degree. If the mother has somehow not let go of her son's heart energy and keeps pulling him into her life to sustain her because the love energy flow no longer exists or never existed with the father, the son is caught in a child-bind that is actually an incestous Oedipal relationship. This will not allow him to move into a significant man-woman relationship with his wife or significant other. An energetic block will continue to arise when love exists. The woman might be mirroring the same if she has some sort of uncleared father bond or bond to another man which has not allowed her to cut ties and claim her own life.

Either way, as men and women, we are often caught in these incestuous undertows in which we have not truly moved into real adulthood and autonomy. It's as if you are still playing out some scenario for your parents. Every parent knows that we project our unfulfilled child self onto the child and it can often hamper the child of actually doing his or her own thing. It goes something like: I wanted to be a doctor so my son will be a doctor! We all do it . . . and in a way, we give to our children that which we so wanted and could not have. That's part of the joy and gift of parenting. The flip side to that is, however, that we sabotage the development of the child by projecting our own wound and unfulfilled and infancy/child/adolescent needs onto our children which entraps them as well. And so the cycle starts again.

What does this now have to do with Structural Integration?

The first 3 sessions are removing the strains, the veneer of social conditioning and parenting patterns to a great extent. These show up often as conflicting compensatory patterns within the body structure itself. It's as if the body is caught in a matrix of conflict trying to be itself but imprisoned with other incestous energetic ties that it cannot quite see or name.

The core sessions 4 though 7 delve deep into the pelvic girdle, one's center of gravity of structure and innate self. The kundalini sexual-vitality energy is released and moves up the spine, clearing oneself and aligning your personal will to the will of God within you. Fancy words that means something basic. Be who you really are! The spine gains more of its natural curve, the thorax releases strain and the heart begins to be freed, the lungs mature and even allergies can lessen, the head is moved to correct postural alignment on top of the cervicals. These sessions work with the core deep self and it is a deep restructuring.

Sessions 8, 9 and 10 integrate the core work back into the doing of life and the limbs. We are re-educating the body from Core outward so that your extrinsic life is reflecting a new core alignment.

While you go through the Ten Series, you will experience fast periods of change and growth. You will watch your own child responses dissipate. From the time you walk into the session to when you leave, you will dramatically change -- in good ways. Each session you will feel more and more LIKE YOURSELF. You often notice immediately that you have boundaries with others that you didn't have before. You stand up for yourself because you begin to know yourself, body deep and spiritual soul deep too. You are actually doing a lot of growing up physically and psychologically which you never did. Doing pilates or working out will greatly aid your transition as well.

Often the improper mother to son, and father to daughter, sexual ties that are inherent for most of us, are released during session 4. This session works the inner line and the inner thighs. It opens the heart. When the inner line which goes right into the heart chakra and heart tissue itself is opened and cleared, both men and women have an innate sense of if their current partner is truly right by CORE ESSENCE or if it is not quite right.

Many of us will not be able to change relationships. For many of us the relationship might work well enough, be too complicated with children, financial investments and more. I've known some very creative ways in which couples have chosen to stay together and yet have found new partners even to support a more true development of their autonomous mature adult self and find a real love, an adult love.

However many of us will choose divorce. It's hard. Or we will leave long-term girlfriend-boyfriend relationships that were quite good but didn't quite touch CORE ESSENCE ADULT RELATIONSHIP INTEGRITY. It is not easy what we are all going through. What seems to be the most basic of life . . . you know, the birds seem to do it quite easily every year !!!! What's wrong with us? We are warm-blooded mammals, you know. And despite many books contrary to the topic, as a woman I actually feel that I am monagamous, and the men I know more deeply really want to love, protect and provide for one very dear woman friend and lover. If you have ever been blessed to know a man and woman who are truly mated, when one of them passes away, the loss is deep and while another friendship might ensue, the loss of the dear beloved is truly like losing one's own self because we become part of each other.

My theory then boils down to this. If a man or woman has not properly matured into real adulthood, then one is stuck in some regressed form of infancy, childhood or adolescence. This stage of maturation does not allow for proper mating and relationship between a man and a woman. This then forces the pattern to be once again heaped upon the child and the familial system is passed down energetically both in the body itself and in the psychological development and in the nervous/cranial system. As age-adults we struggle to form real relationships but they are filled instead with sadness, drama and inability to actually committ to each other.

This reflects our inability to make a commitment to our own self. This is another way of saying that one has achieved true autonomy, self-hood, individuation, adulthood, self-realization . . . these terms all mean the same thing. That one has developed an inner sense of self, direction and maturity in which one is able to constructively create one's own life and live it, within the constraints and limitations of one's abundance, skills, children, societal patterns, etc. Many people are actually still living under the internal constraint of the parent even though they have long left home. They will still have authority issues, see others as the parent and not be able to take self-responsibility, they will have problems being successful.

I write this as if I have it all together. I don't. I'm working on all of this myself, which is why and how I can help others. My own journey has been hard, ruthless at times, and a struggle that crumpled me more than once. It's why I have compassion for all of us and why I reach out to help. This is my gift and how I can help. Because of my own life, this is what I understand and have had to go through and so I can help others.

...and this is why I tango. But that's a whole new article.

If my work interests you, if you are ready to really grow up, if you really want to make a change in your life to be who you are and enjoy maturing into your own inner commitment so that you can then share that with someone else who is very special . . . please feel welcome to call my office and talk. Evenings are best . . . or in the morning before I begin sessions. I try to actually talk with you and find out what's going on. I work in a different way, longer sessions, more than talk-therapy, more than bodywork. I help my clients make lasting changes so YOU can begin to live the life that is inherently your God-given life of Goodness, Honesty, and Truth.

Be blessed, be good, and be happy. You are all of that, anyway!