HEALING:  “These [RP] practices approach the healing of trauma in two ways. There are practices that directly facilitate body-mind integration through inhabiting the internal space of one’s body, attuning to the unified ground of fundamental consciousness and the inherent qualities of one’s being that emerge as we know ourselves as this ground. And there are practices that utilize our attunement to fundamental consciousness in order to precisely and lastingly release the trauma-based constrictions in the body.”

DISENTANGLE / RELEASE: “Contact with the subtle core of the body … helps us disentangle from fixed beliefs, traumatic memories, and it refines our focus so we can more effectively and precisely release the trauma-based holding patterns from our bodies. All of our holding patterns contain the movement into the constriction and therefore the exact pathway of their release…. As you begin to release these organizations in your body, you may discover that the areas in your body of bound fascia contains your child mind (your childhood mentality at the time of trauma), the memory of what happened to you, and the emotions you felt during the trauma. “

PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALING: “Psychological healing requires the ability to reflect on your situation, to see the big picture and make your peace with it. It requires balancing emotion with awareness. This awareness can be gained, in part, simply by talking about the circumstances that have caused you pain. Felicia and I spent many sessions looking at the events that had made her so angry and sad, so needing of support and yet unable to find it. Very gradually, she began to develop some perspective; she was able to look at these early situations and relationships and make sense of how they had affected her. I taught Felicia the exercise for balancing her emotional depth with awareness and physical sensation.” Belonging Here …

SHAME / VULNERABILITY: “To experience the quality of power in one’s body goes a long way toward healing the feelings of shame and vulnerability that we may harbor from having been overpowered in our childhood.” Belonging Here …

CONFRONTING ONE’S ANGER TOWARDS ONE’S PARENTS: “She finally confronted her anger toward her parents for never understanding her sensitivity. I listened as she thrashed through her painful feelings of anger and shame, and as she began to find a sense of compassion for herself and for the world around her. There was no way to separate the psychological for the spiritual in this deep healing of herself. She had to retrace the lines of her personal history to her earliest memories of recoiling from the abrasive environment in order to understand and cease her automatic recoil from life today. She had to become aware of the very unpleasant sensations that she had held in her body since childhood, such as disgust and helpless overwhelm, so that they no longer motivated her responses to the world. It slowly dawned on her that it was not anyone’s fault that she felt so different from other people, and she began to turn back to a world that she had rejected. Her gradual acceptance of her environment, with all its loudness and brashness, allowed her, in turn, to feel more accepted. She became less vigilant, less ready for attack. Finally, she began to accept and value her sensitivity. She was able to appreciate the vivid, nuanced, vibrating world that her sensitivity revealed to her, and even to begin to describe it to others.” Belonging Here …

ATTUNING TO THE SPACE PERVADING US: “As we continued to practice the Realization Process exercises, Shana became adept at attuning to the space pervading both of us without leaving her own body. She reported that she was starting to bring this same attunement into her psychic readings. ‘It feels like the space itself is revealing the images now. I don’t have to move at all. I just receive whatever is there. In a way, it feels more subtle than the way I used to do readings. And it definitely takes much less effort.’ Psychotherapists and bodyworkers have described feeling this same ease in their healing roles as they open to this subtle dimension of their consciousness. Instead of making an effort to be empathic and to say the right thing at the right time, it feels like the healing process unfolds spontaneously. They can receive both the client’s communication and their own responses to it in the open space. The uncontrived openness to the moment is now an accepted aspect of therapeutic technique even in fairly conservative quarters of the psychotherapeutic field. Inhabiting the body and attuning to fundamental consciousness can facilitate this open-minded, open-hearted approach to the healing encounter.” Belonging Here …

PERSONAL MATURITY: “In the Realization Process, psychological healing and spiritual awakening are considered to be two intertwined and inevitable aspects of our progression toward personal maturity.” Trauma and the Unbound Body …

HEALING: “To heal means to become whole. Trauma fragments and limits our wholeness. Trauma separates us from our boy, it disrupts the unity of body and mind and the oneness of self and others. We can resolve this separation. When we embody our wholeness, our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions occur as a unity. Our senses function as a unity. Our actions spring from a single source of understanding, emotion, and physical sensation. Even the smallest movement of our body, as we turn our head or gesture with our hands, carries the full breadth  of our human capacities. So, for example, we can experience love and intelligence in our arms or our legs; we can hear with our whole body, heart, and mind. To be in contact internally with our body is, at the same time, to be open to our environment. Everywhere that we are in contact with ourselves within our body, we are alive and responsive to the world arond us. This provides a lived experience of continuity and connection with everything and everyone that we encounter. Yet, even though this fundamental, unified ground of our being is right here, as simple to reach as living within our own body, most human beings never experience it. Even though our basic nature is wholeness, somehow we become divided. This is because the traumatic events that occur in all human lives cause us to fragment and diminish our ability to life fully within our body…. In reaction to traumatic events, both big and small, we constrict and fragment our body and withdraw our consciousness from those parts of our body. We organize ourselves in ways that dampen the impact of intolerable experience or that restrain those aspects of our own behavior and personality that have brought us harm.” Trauma and the Unbound Body …

BODY-ORIENTED APPROACH: The Realization Process is a body-oriented approach to healing from trauma because of its emphasis on the psychologically-based, bound patterns in the body. Most of the popular methods of body psychotherapy today focus on the flight, freeze, or fight functions of the nervous system that may become chronically activated in reaction to extreme stress and trauma. In contrast, the Realization Process focuses on the shaping of the whole body in reaction to trauma, even the relational trauma of ordinary but painful, repetitive childhood events. In this way, we can uncover the exact pathways with which we constricted ourselves and gain insight into the psychological history that shaped us.” Trauma and the Unbound Body …

PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY “I believe that healing does not occur, or last, without psychological history. We need to know our history in order to find and release the exact pathway of our trauma-based constrictions. We also need to become conscious of the unconscious memories and beliefs that color our perceptions of ourselves and our environment, and that influence our choices.”

RELATIONAL THERAPY: “Finally, the Realization Process is a relational therapy because it understands that we fragment and limit ourselves, mainly in childhood, in relation to the first people we love and rely upon. Healing these fragments necessarily recalls the challenges of these early relationships. Like most relational psychotherapies, it views that cultivation of our capacity for authentic connection with others to be one of the hallmarks of psychological health. But it diverses from most other relational models because it seems the ways we have limited ourselves as not just mental events, but as patterns that are bound within the tissues of our body. Also, it specifically applies the realization of fundamental consciousness to helping people heal their relational wounds. Because this consciousness is experienced as pervading ourselves and others at the same time, it can open us to the pleasure of experiencing oneness with another person without losing the safety of inward contact with ourselves.” Trauma and the Unbound Body

INHABITING THE BODY AS FUNDAMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS: “Inhabiting the body contributes to healing by providing internal unity, self-possession, resilience, and grounding. … Fundamental consciousness is vitally important for healing from trauma because it cannot be injured. It has neer been injured, no matter how severe our traumatic experiences have been. When we realize ourselves as FC, we know that we have not been irreparably damaged. We can actually feel that who we really are, who we have always, deep down, known that we are, has always been there, intact. This fundamental ground of ourselves, the ‘near side of our subjectivity’ has been there to witness our shattered, traumatized state, without being shattered itself. We are basically whole, and that underlying wholeness cannot be fragmented or diminished. Only our access to our wholeness has been obstructed. Also, because life flows through this pervasive space wi