Holding the Space for Healing & Growth
I see myself as a facilitator of a healing process that is naturally wired and ever-occurring within you. I hold the space of healing. There are daily practices of meditation, Presencing, and metaphysical study, that I engage in to keep my mind, body, and energy, attuned. My skills are supported in the intellect but based in the sensory, e.g. I am adept at tuning into where the blockages are in your energy, where the contradictions are in your approach to life.
My practice of facilitation has been informed by certain movements in the fields of psychology, meditation, trauma, addictions, childhood development, sacred sexuality, and evolutionary spirituality.
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As therapist, I see myself as a facilitator of the intrinsic orientation to healing and growth of your inner process. From the time you were a fertilized egg, you embodied a process that created more cells, with specific functions, all miraculous, from vision, hearing, tactile, auditory, olfactory, to digestive, cardiac, breathing, etc. functionality. In other words, you are in Essence, a vehicle of Creation, the life force ever creates and supports life through you.
It is this intrinsic force towards healing and growth that I facilitate you aligning with.
I went to graduate school at the University of Paris 1973-’75, to pursue a study of “l’anti-psychiatrie”, a movement of psychiatrists, (Thomas Szasz, Ron Laing, and others) who saw a ‘nervous breakdown’ as part of a healing process, and opportunity for breakthrough. The ego breaking down that a more authentic self could emerge. Since mainstream psychiatry viewed it as a pathological process that had to be stopped through the use of powerful medications, shock therapy, and other interventions, most people who’ve had a nervous breakdown experience it as a nightmare they live in fear of ever happening again. The ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement considers the view of the practitioner as determining whether the therapy ‘facilitates’ the intrinsic healing process, resulting in a deeply transformational experience, or increases the disconnect between ego and intrinsic resulting in a traumatic experience and lifelong disturbance.
It was in 1990, through a series of profound experiences at Kripalu, that I came out of the closet with the spiritual piece: my gift is my ability to see the Light (the working of that intrinsic orientation towards healing and growth) in you, and my commitment is to facilitate your courage in living in your Light. At that time, mainstream psychological practice made no recognition of the spiritual dimension of well-being. Indeed, for that reason there was an animosity between the 12-step movement and the usual practice of psychotherapy, while the work with me augmented the gains of 12-step involvement. Today, because of the strides in the fields of trauma, cancer, addictions, and others, spirituality is embedded in a wide range of cutting edge healing treatments.
From the spiritual view I hold that whatever discomfort arises within you, arises because it needs to arise in order for healing to happen, but for it to be healing you need to let go of the ‘story’ your ego has around it, and just be with the sensations of the discomfort, that those sensations are the language of ‘spirit’, and will lead you on a journey of releasing what needs to be released, and opening to a deeper truth.
There is a brain-chemistry view, that parallels this understanding, well cultivated in the writings on trauma of Peter Levine, and the healing modality of somatic-experiencing he has founded and continues to develop. In this language, for us to be physically well and mentally robust, our Central Nervous System has to be regulated, and is constantly seeks to regulate itself; certain egoic confusions can interfere with that orientation towards regulation and leave us in traumatized functioning. Symptoms reflect an interference. The treatment is to work with the sensations in the body which are considered ‘activations’ of the central nervous system, letting go of ‘story’, and simply using tools that complete (dissolve) those activations, bringing the CNS into alignment. These activations are the domain of the reptilian brain (fight, flight, submit, freeze), and to the extent we are in our reptilian (autonomic) brain, we cannot access fully the clarity of thought, range of possibilities, that are the domain of our executive functioning, i.e. the frontal lobe/neocortex.
The basic filters I work through are the metaphysical, consciousness, physiology of the central nervous system (trauma), the understandings of the Addictive Process, Sacred Sexuality and Evolutionary Partnership, the Paradigm Shift called for in our time, and of what promotes well being in our children. Although these filters are diverse in their offerings, they have in common tapping into the intrinsic orientation towards healing, which through whatever filter, is what creates the changes, I say miracles we seek.
Call 203-550-2111 or email me: Sandra@sandraeagle.com