You now know how emotional release and on-the-ground work fit within Phase I of the healing process.  Generally speaking, this work is usually new to my clients, but it fits well enough within the realm of emotional healing to where most are able to start trying it out so they can test out its impact.  Connection work, which is the third part of the work my clients need to practice, tends to need a bit more explaining for some. 

People in this culture don’t tend to link up emotional healing and creating a tangible connection with a power source that’s greater than themselves.  For them, Life, whatever that means to them, tends to be a religious issue, and is often something they feel needs to be taken on faith.  Others tend to have reservations about opening up the issue of God because they’ve found conflict or problems with some part of their experience with it.  Because of all of this, the idea of stepping into connection work can feel a bit uncomfortable for some.

Connection work is grounded in the understanding that the earth is a living being that’s infused with Life.  What’s nice about this testable reality is that it doesn’t matter how you define what Life is.  You can call Life God, you can call it the power source that comes from the living creature that is the earth, etc.  What Life is doesn’t matter for our purposes.  The only thing that matters is that there’s a power source that’s infused within the earth, and we need to be plugged into it so we can use it’s voltage (its current) to optimize the potential of our emotional system’s ability to heal.  That’s why connection work is necessary for the core healing process.

In previous posts (06 Life with a capital ‘L’, 07 To find solutions, you must understand problems), I’ve explained how, because we’ve figured out how to divorce ourselves from a functionally intimate relationship with the earth, we’ve created a practical problem for our emotional systems.  Just as we are meant to be in a healthy, balanced relationship with the sun so we can generate Vitamin D, in my experience, we have the same type of need to be in balanced, intimate relationship with the earth.  Because we’ve cut ourselves off from this experience, I’ve found our emotional systems are functioning at about 85% of their capacity.  This level of operation allows us to still function emotionally in a general sense, but 85% can’t handle the burdens that come with healing at a core level.  For that level of healing, the emotional system needs to be plugged into a power source that can increase its capacity to at least 90%-95%. 

As with everything that I share, for me connection work is a purely practical issue.  When I was a young practitioner trying to figure out what my approach for helping others needed to entail, I didn’t want to add connection work into the mix.  Core healing is difficult and demanding enough, and so I only wanted my clients to need to do what was minimally necessary to achieve the results we were seeking.  My connection to Life was a big part of my own life, and had clearly played a pivotal part in me becoming a healer.  But I was hoping my clients wouldn’t need to establish a tangible connection to the earth to heal at a core level because that wasn’t why any of them were calling me.

To clarify connection work’s place within the healing process, I ran an experiment early in my career.  I had my clients practice release and on-the-ground work while I had some practice connection work while I allowed others to not practice it.  The results were clear.  Without connection work, people could heal at a core level to a point, but they became less and less able to meet the building needs of the healing process the further they took it.  With connection work, I found my clients were given all of what they needed to take the core healing process as far as they wanted. 

At this time, my hope had been that I could use the songs of Life to help my clients find and use this power source so it would give them what they needed.  This didn’t work for a couple of reasons.  First, to heal at a core level, you need to be invested in becoming more and more independent the more you heal, and having my clients depend solely on me to find a connection to Life worked against this need.  The process of building one’s own connection to the earth allowed them to learn things that shaped them in some critical ways that didn’t occur when they just received song.  Also, in Phase II and III, my clients need to learn to use their connection to the earth to help them navigate the challenges that emotional release work offers.  This means that, in the end, connection work is more than just about percentages.  It’s about building relationship that tangibly helps my clients meet the challenges that the deeper parts of core healing shares with them. 

Once I proved the need for the presence of connection work, I then set out to figure out how to share it so my clients could find what they needed in the most efficient and streamlined way possible.  I looked towards my own training to figure out how I could accomplish this.  My training with the earth had been divided into two parts—what I call passive and active connection work.  The passive work allowed me to learn how to slow down and so I could simply meet and establish what I would call an intimate but basic connection with the earth.  You could think of this experience as sitting down with a dance partner so you could learn how to meet and engage with them.  Then the active dominant connection work builds on this.  It involves actively engaging with parts of the earth by practicing different primitive earth skills.  This is equivalent to stepping out onto the dance floor with your partner so you can deepen and broaden your connection by learning to find connection and flow with them.

I’ve created and honed a structured process to connection work that gives my clients everything they need within the connection work side of the core healing process.  It starts with passive dominant connection work in Phase I, and then builds into active dominant connection work in Phases II and III.  As with emotional release work, it’s critical that you do more than simply walk through the steps of what you’re being shown how to do.  You need to be able to take ownership of the process so you can understand why it’s necessary for you, and ideally find a hunger to be a part of something that nourishes you.  This will allow you to take a general process designed for many and to adjust it where needed so it fits and works for your needs.