The weekend before this one I had the great honor to be at a training with Peter Levine in California. It is called Eye of the Needle, and it is about near death experiences (NDEs), including anesthesia and other altered states. With this new learning, the work becomes new (again!), and my understanding of Somatic Experiencing (SE) takes on yet another dimension.

I have more of a sense of working with the whole being, stitching together the fragmented parts into coherence, and new understanding of my own and my clients’ experiences of such states. I’m feeling grateful for the practice (good and not so good) that I got to have while there. I have a new sense of my own growing resilience and skill, and the amazing resilience of humans, as well as my own patterns of trauma and all of the defenses and adaptations that have carried me through to the present.

I just can’t believe it was only last Monday I was sitting in the sand on the beach in Encinitas at the end of D Street, swatting giant sand fleas, and feeling the thunder of the pounding surf reverberate through the ground into my sitz bones when the sudden awareness struck of a new and indescribable sensation of being more like a whole organism than a collection of parts, thoughts, emotions and experiences. It was so unbelievably striking and unexpected. After feeling into it for a bit, I could sense the pull of it, something in me wanting to lean even further into it, and started to seriously wonder:

Can I really let go into this life?

Can I let it take me and pull me into it in the way the ocean waves reach out and take every thing from the shore into itself?

Can I let myself become one with the gigantic expanse of fluidity that is experience itself?

Can I learn how to play on the shore, surf the waves, creep along exploring its dark silent floors and perilous reefs, and float on the surface, as though it really were my home, this thing called life, called ‘existence’?

Can I really allow myself to fall into this being a human being?

And each time I check inside, there’s that spark of knowing that is saying,  ‘yes’, I probably can. I keep checking to see if the feeling of being more whole is there, and yes, there it is. I know that in a little while – days, maybe weeks – it will no longer feel new, and so will have seemed to vanish or be lost, but that is only because it will have become more integrated into my whole being, readying a home in me for the next expansion.

I look forward to discovering what it brings next.