Core healing is daunting.  It can feel impossible to achieve—like trying to move a mountain with your bare hands, especially if you’ve been stuck in your issues and struggles for years, if not for most of a lifetime.   But just because something feels impossible doesn’t mean it is. 

My basic goal with the beginning of someone’s work is to infuse care and respect within their process by sharing it as we get started with their Phase I challenges.  This means helping them get started with their release work in a way that meets them where they’re at and puts them in a level of challenge that gives them a chance to succeed.  This usually means starting at the shallow end of the pool with release work, and sometimes in the baby pool, and giving them the time, support, and guidance they need to successfully build into the work.  Along the way, it’s normal to find challenges with this in some way, shape, or form. 

I had one client who started his sadness release work, and it opened up beautifully, but he couldn’t handle the success that was very clearly occurring because he was convinced that he was a failure and inherently broken.  This meant the success was almost like a taunt.  To his core, it felt like a little success was guaranteed to be followed with a whole bunch of failure because his core already knew how this story was going to play out.  With him, we needed to keep the progress slow and steady while we engaged with the core truth that he had around being a failure so I could help him work with it with the help of song.  His on-the-ground reality was showing him that he wasn’t a failure, but we needed to help his core heal so it could start to accept the possibility that just because it felt like a failure didn’t mean he was one.

I had another client who had a lot of fear and shame around the presence and impact her anger had had on others in her life.  She was willing to try doing anger release work because she found the need to practice it to be logical, but she didn’t know how to deal with her resistance.  She was inclined to just charge into the work so she could override her resistance and get things done.  I disagreed with this approach because I knew it was being driven by her core debilitation, and I knew it wouldn’t be sustainable and would ultimately generate more resistance.  I asked her to take her anger release work very slow so she could try to honor how her core felt instead of trying to push past it while I used song to help ease her through this challenge.  This ultimately allowed her to start opening to some sadness about how she had caused some damage in the relationships in her life.  This got her started with her sadness release work, which ultimately allowed her to gain a foothold within the work that she could then build on.

Then you look at me and how I couldn’t access, let alone evacuate much of my torn up emotional water until Phase III of the healing process.  Imagine me coming into the modern experience of my approach and not fitting in with the basic structure of how things should unfold, and worrying that there’s something wrong with me, and that I’m simply never going to feel core level contentment in my life.  I would have needed to pivot towards what was working—my anger release work—and allow my lack of potential with emotional water to sit for the moment until my process showed the way forward. 

In the end, what 30 years of work with myself and others has shown me is that my approach, which is grounded in the use of the powerful tool called the songs of Life, works.  I’ve learned that the most efficient way forward is often the one that’s slow, steady, and patient in the beginning when there’s no trust established because everything is so new, and a person’s past experience with core healing is often mostly grounded in failure.

I’m a horse person, which means I ride and work with horses.  One time a really skilled horseman was using a technique that required a lot of patience and slow, steady progress with a horse that was struggling to get into a trailer.  The person who owned the horse the horseman was working with was stunned at how patient the horse person was with the horse, and so he asked him how he could be so patient.  The horseman responded by saying that it was easy to be patient because he knew that what he was doing with the horse would work, so he had no concern with taking the time it takes to successfully get there. 

That’s how I feel about the challenges I find when helping clients get started with their Phase I emotional release work.  I want to be efficient and effective, and yet I know that slow and steady is often the most efficient way of navigating these challenges in a way that builds trust not just in me and my approach, but also within my clients themselves.  This is all grounded in the care and respect I share with them from day one.  Because I’ve used my healing process to move through all three of its phases, my care and respect is grounded in a trust (Phase II) I and others can get behind because it’s grounded in integrity (Phase III) that’s been repeatedly tested under pressure.  That’s what I’ve learned it takes to achieve the level of effectiveness that that horseman had.  This doesn’t mean I have all of the answers.  It means I’ve learned enough to know how to meet the known and unknown skillfully, and to know that we’ll find our way through your challenges if you allow me to help you navigate them.

The more success you generate with your Phase I emotional release work, the more emotional strength and skill you’ll build.  When you’re dealing with a core healing process, you always need to start with the internal work because it allows you to change at a foundational level.  But emotion isn’t just an internal experience.  It’s always linked with your on-the-ground life.  For example, you don’t just feel love.  You need that capacity internally, but then you need to learn how to meet and find healthy experiences of fit with your world so you can have things in your life that you love.

We start internal with emotional release work, and then as you start to build emotional strength and skill, your process needs to move outward into your on-the-ground life so you can learn to apply your building strength and skill to the challenges you find there.  That’s where the on-the-ground work within my approach comes into the picture.