by Louise Barrie


Huma Transpersonal Bodywork is a hands-on method which facilitates and follows the client's own process of inner unfoldment without imposing the practitioner's point of view. Huma integrates both gentle physical and gentle verbal modes of communication. It takes the orientation of the Western body-based traditions of psychological work with their focus on the holistic synthesis of physical and psychological health and combines it with Eastern mystical approaches to inner development, with their focus on reaching for and surrendering to the deeper self, the inner guide.

I have come through several different phases in this work. Each of these phases was integrated into what has become the present form of Huma Transpersonal Bodywork, and has also served as the foundation for the next level of development. When I studied Bioenergetics, Neo-Reichian, and Rosen Method, (and co-developed and taught the certification program of the latter for several years) the theory and thrust of those methods were based on the idea that repressed memories and feelings are stored in the body. One worked for relaxation in the body, helping the client to explore their flow of awareness as this occurred, and access to these unconscious memories and feelings would be restored. Though each of these methods has somewhat different techniques for accomplishing that aim, the goal is essentially the same ... a pretty straightforward psychological style which can have a tremendous amount of richness and depth.

For example, a woman whose neck and throat have been tight for years begins to relax these areas, exploring with the practitioner the images that emerge. She re-experiences being in the hospital at age two. Her brother is in the crib next to her's and their father is there with them. He picks her brother up and takes him home. As she watches them leave, the words "What about me?" are in her thoughts, but she doesn't say them. She believes that they (her parents) have decided to keep him and not her, and assumes that she had been found unworthy of their love and commitment.

Sometime after the session, the woman asked her parents about that situation. They confirmed that, yes, they did take her brother home a day early because she still had a fever that day and the hospital didn't want to release her. Throughout her life, she had always had the sense that her brother was a 'real person' and that she somehow wasn't, that he was three-dimensional and that she was, in some way, less than that. With the integration of this experience, she was able to re-experience herself as worthy of love, and to claim her own personhood more fully.

This type of session is very valuable and is often encountered in Huma Transpersonal Bodywork. But over time, I began to feel that there must be more than this to the mystery of our unconscious depths, more than just the products of painful experiences, put away because they were too difficult to process at the time they occurred. Also, the point of view informing this kind of work was, and is, very much the sense that as you work with someone, their life becomes more resolved in a material and psychological sense, that they 'get it together' in these realms. There is the sense that one can become actualized in this life, that this possibility, this transformation is a visible phenomenon, a kind of actualized ego. There is a sense that people are perfectible by their own efforts.

In the mystical poem, "Song of the New Life," there is something that haunted me for years:

Let despair and disappointment ravage and destroy the garden of your life. You beautify it by contentment and self-sufficiency.

Initially, I related to this as some very abstract thing; so, we'll suffer and suffer, and then eighty million lifetimes down the road, we'll feel contentment. But then I began to think that the key word is "let". "Let" despair or disappointment ravage and destroy the garden of your life. Despair or disappointment is ravaging and destroying the gardens of our lives, anyway. But, when you "let" the gardens be ravaged and destroyed, when you don't struggle against it by thinking, "There's something wrong if I'm suffering", when you don't become focused on managing the circumstances of your life to try to adjust the suffering out of it, then the contentment comes in. The feeling of contentment comes in simultaneously with the head bowing to suffering. A wise old woman friend of mine, Kitty Davey, said that the difference between happiness and joy is that joy has the suffering in it.

I began to think that what really creates the deepest level of muscle tension, the holding, the resistance in the body and in the psyche, is the resistance to the experience of despair and disappointment. The human potential movement claims to have a cure for that condition. I don't think there is a cure- no cure for the state of unresolvable duality we live in. The spiritual master, Meher Baba, says, "I ask you to stand up and sit down at the same time." And I think most of what we do in our lives is try to worm our way out of that predicament. When we do allow the impossibility of it, that having to stand up and sit down at the same time, when we allow the unbearableness of that dilemma, without walling off some part of it, it feels like a crucifixion. And it brings us face to face with our own helplessness. All we can do is reach out to God, offer ourselves to God in that moment. The suffering brings us into relationship with God. Therefore, looking for a cure for the circumstances of our lives, materially or psychologically, is monumentally futile, forever doomed, and irrelevant. What has been established in my work as I have assimilated this insight is the sense of surrendering to, rather than trying to get rid of or managing, the suffering in our lives.

For much of the time I have been doing this kind of work, my primary focus with respect to its physical aspects has been on the breath and the ways it is impeded by muscle tension. This gentle, hands-on method follows the breathing as an expression of the client's inner state, and the easing in the breath and the body indicate and support that which is authentic in the client's experience. However, I have also long been aware of a deeper rhythm which I help the client to get in touch with in a fuller way. At a certain point I had occasion to briefly study Cranial-Sacral work and as soon as I felt the rhythm of the cerebro-spinal fluid, I realized that this is the deeper rhythm I had always been working on in addition to the breath, contacting this deeper rhythm through the pacing I had always maintained in my hands. This realization initiated a long period of interest in and curiosity about the aspect of the person which corresponds to that rhythm.

There are many rhythms in the body, (Circulatory, lymph, breath), but the rhythm of the cerebro-spinal fluid is a very slow one, the slowest one in the body. And wherever my hands are, they spontaneously move in that same rhythm, which helps the client to become aware of the deeper aspect of their being that corresponds to it, and tends to establish contact between me and the client at that level. When consciousness reaches that level, it has a very deep, ocean-like quality that engulfs both the client and practitioner so that together, the two of you begin to float out to sea. And from this place of moving out to sea, of being and floating in a boat together in the middle of the ocean, it is easy to see anything that appears on the horizon from any direction.

Over time in working with the body and reaching for this rhythm, at certain points we would reach past the psychological, to a more universal or archetypal part of the person. When this would happen, the body would ease and expand and totally support this place. This has seemed a turn in the road, a confirmation that 'Yes', we must "Let despair and disappointment ravage and destroy the garden of our lives", and that beyond that despair and disappointment is a place untouched by it. And sometimes, in the midst of being pushed and pulled by the contradictory demands of our ego lives, it's possible to drop down to this other, more universal place, to take a dip in that pool and refresh ourselves. And by doing so, even when we return to the reality of the ego-life we can carry the knowledge and memory of that more universal place, even if we are not currently in the experience of it. And it can relativize the experience of our normal ego-life in duality.

One experience of such an archetypal place happened with a middle-aged male client who had grown up in an emotionally and physically abusive family and who had developed a sense of himself as fragile. As an adult, he had been unable to have sustained intimate relationships and had spent years in therapy, trying to "work out" his chronic sense of fragility. During one of our Huma sessions he began to ease in his core as that slow rhythm became more pronounced and moved throughout his body. During this process, the word "courage" kept occurring to him.

At those moments when I would feel him tighten again, I would ask him what was in his awareness and each time he would have returned to that sense of himself as fragile, or to some memory of abuse. From the physical response it became clear that there was no support in his true self for this sense of himself as fragile as a result of abuse. When he would return to that state of courage, that same deep expansion and ease would physically recur and he would realize again that all sense of fragility was ungrounded, in fact wasn't real.

During the session it became clear that the deeper, more universal place of courage is who he truly is. The rest of it is an overlay, something put on top, casting a shadow over and concealing this broad archetypal place of courage in him. "Courage", is his way of symbolizing this place in his being which is transcendent, which remains unaffected by the polarities of experience that he goes through, the rise and fall of his emotional and material fortunes in the world. That experience was deeply restorative and healing for him. It put the happenings of the world in their place and provided a perspective from which he could re-orient to them in a less vulnerable manner.

Experiences such as this help the client, however briefly, to experience the concrete reality of their deeper self. By doing so, they tend to effectively reorient the client's values and to help him or her to begin to make the transition from the ego to the self as the seat of identity. (Even if he or she had been theoretically in favor of this transition, a true experience of the self greatly energizes this process and provides deep existential insight into its nature that no abstract understanding can offer.)

What seems to happen in that more universal place is that the problems which are so demanding and all encompassing in our everyday lives appear irrelevant, in fact not real. This isn't to say that we don't have to handle the circumstances of our lives in a responsible way, but that having the glimpse of that other place is something that we can carry with us, like a pearl in our pocket, as we meet the requirements of our ego-lives ... that the world, inwardly, gets turned right side up, instead of up side down. There is a resonance, a vibration that comes with this place that goes all through the body and psyche as well. This is a healing, coming from the deeper self. Each time a person revisits this place, that resonance, that vibration, that flow of healing occurs again, and slowly it begins to seem more and more like one's natural home.

Footnote:
Since the publication of this paper, I have come to believe that there is a level which is deeper than the rhythm of the cerebro-spinal fluid. It is a place where the physical gives way to the energetic. While this energy can be felt anywhere in the body, there is a central channel in the core of the body which feels (under the hands) like the place of its fullest and deepest manifestation. The experience of the client when this full flow of energy is there is always tranquil and without worry. It is this for which I am ultimately reaching with my work.