Somatic Healing

I was discussing my active dreaming with a friend, Chris Mallman of the Wardrobe Workshop in Toronto. Chris suggested looking at Somatic Healing. I missed a workshop with David Quigley, of the Alchemical Institute, while on the Noetic Sciences Consciousness Cruise, but Chris managed to sit in on the workshop and thought it would probably help with my “RBD.”.

Somatic Healing is similar to what I do with freeform Qigong. You tap into your inner consciousness and use hypnotherapy, movement, and other techniques to unwind some of “soma” that are tying up the memories of old injuries. The way I’ve always described it, when you have a trauma, you subconsciously build a protective structure that keeps the trauma in a controllable stage. But old wounds have a way of working themselves out in other conditions a few years down the road. Hence, a limp becomes bursitis becomes arthritis. A bad memory becomes an avoidance pattern becomes a psychological manifestation … maybe even a REM Behavior Disorder (RBD) as described in my previous blog post down below.  Anyway, Chris is probably right (again, eh, Chris?) that there is at least an element of post traumatic “soma” involved in my active dreaming.

So, assuming that the old trauma of Vietnam, say, is being held in a subconscious avoidance pattern, maybe I can unwind some of that pattern, essentially healing part of the cause.

That, by the way, is the principal of classical homeopathy. Trace a condition back to its first cause, and prescribe a homeopathic dose of a remedy that will bring about the same thing result as that first cause, only in a microscopic does that will simply remind the somatic body about that original trauma, and help unwind the memory of it until it results in a healing crisis.

The body knows what it needs in order to heal itself. That’s also one of the tenets of health coaching. Sometimes it just takes the right question before one can find the right answer. Thanks to Chris, and thanks to David Quigley, I may have at least part of the answer to restless dreams.