Marti's CranioSacral time-traveling
Staying Me by Marti Matthews
Cranial Sacral Treatment
With Nancy Paul, March 21, 2014
(Background)
Cranial Sacral Therapy is a gentle way of helping the body release what it itself is trying to release. The therpiast senses where the body is doing this and puts light assistance there there to help the body's effort.
Before coming today I had just read a short review of a new book by Eugene Gendlin on using the body to interpret dreams.
I had also just discussed briefly with my friend M.P, about both of us still feeling unfinished with our sisters-in-conflict and unclear about how to resolve these unfinished businesses in our hearts.
Then when I arrived with Nancy, she shared briefly that she’s finishing a book by Brian Weiss, well-known past life regressionist.
Much of my World-View is based on the writings of an Entity who calls himself Seth, channeled through Jane Roberts. Seth has dictated 12 books on his view of the nature of reality, and these have all made more sense to me and matched my experience more than any other world view I've found.
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I lay down comfortably on the very warm table. Nancy asked me if there was anything particular on my mind that I wanted to explore while we did bodywork. I shared about my conversation with M.P. about our sisters, family, people who “haunt” us.
At first I shared what I was experiencing, then after awhile I went silent and just went into the experience. I appreciated that Nancy didn’t ask me to continue talking. She was very active with my body, moving herself around as she sensed my body changing.
I saw some of these haunting people – my sisters Terry and Mary, both of my parents!, a guy from my high school class who's been in my awareness lately. I saw myself with a giant eraser and tried to erase Terry and see what was behind her, what would I be/feel like if she were truly absent. I did the same with the others. This put me in a beautiful scene but alone. I realized that these people were like markers that kept me in my life, in my identity. Also my house and my many “projects” that feel so important, all the people positive or negative and all the experiences positive or negative – they were all like a fence, a corral, which enabled me to stay familiar to myself. Out here in this very large landscape all by myself, I still looked like myself though my back felt straight, my body slender, but I’m dressed exactly as I was in the room with Nancy. (black pants, black shirt with ¾ sleeves, long hair –flowing in this scene. I looked the same but lovelier).
The landscape was a very big valley in front of me with a wide mountain range behind it. The sun was shining, the grass was green everywhere, it was all lovely, though unfamiliar to me having “grown up in the Midwest” (I quote this because it’s part of my personal story, part of the corral by which I feel familiar to myself.)
I wonder about my being alone. Then presently I sense someone beside me. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it seems to be an “angel;” the being actually has wings (seems like a stereotype). She feels loving and she takes my hand and we slowly begin to float upward. Still holding her hand all the time, I begin to sense how to move myself around a bit by my own intention. She leads me downward into the valley. It’s an interesting sensation but now I can’t see the sun. I say “It seems darker” and so she brings me back to where we were. Then she leads me higher up and over the mountain ridge.
On the other side is an even larger view. Gorgeous, expansive. I see several little villages below, none that I know about, just villages. In front of me is the very large sun, brighter than I’ve ever seen it though I can look right at it. The Sun is beautiful, the scene is beautiful. My guide is still beside me.
Eventually we rise up and go backwards over the mountain ridge again, back to the area I came from. I see the corral and slowly, softly, float down and lie flat on the ground in the middle of the corral.
I’m aware of the posts of the corral. They are the people who haunted me – Terry, Dave, etc. I realize I can take a hammer and pound them flat into the ground if I want. They may pop up part way and if I want I can leave them there or pound them into the earth again so I can’t see them. Now I know what it feels like to be me without them defining me.
Still lying flat, I’m aware of Nancy working my body gently, helping it release tensions held in different areas. I begin to be aware of some of my past lives that I know about. I’ve learned these over time, seen some in dreams several times, a couple were dreams leading into day awareness, one was encountered under hypnosis. I feel that I’m in their bodies, one by one. They are experiencing lying on the table here being worked on. The men, in particular, find it odd and wonder “What’s going on?” But every one of them seems flexible and willing to have a positive experience of this.
I’m esp. aware of the wrestler, a short stocky, quiet, black-haired man whose life is particularly connected with mine. He’s surprised to find himself on this table with someone moving his body here and there, this way and that. I allow myself to feel his strong back, his largeness, though I can’t quite feel my arms as muscular and large as his. He doesn’t move as freely as I at all, but he allows himself to be moved some. I realize that because of me several of my other lives have body problems related to mine that are mysterious to them. He also has psychic experiences and vivid dreams and doesn’t tell anyone about them. He’s looking, waiting, for the right person (probably a woman) with whom he can share about all this. He’s a semi-professional wrestler, in addition to some other kind of work. He could be professional if he wants but he doesn’t want to.
Nancy does some energy work over my throat chakra (chakras = energy centers in the body). Immediately I’m aware of my life as a very large, quiet shy man in Iceland. I know the ending of his life after an accident, and because of Nancy’s work here his experience changes. He’d had to pay more attention to people after his accident, because he needed help. During this chakra energy work, he finds himself talking more. First he listens to what others say more attentively (he’s fixing fishing nets), then after listening a lot he begins to talk more and more, to his own surprise, and others find his thoughts helpful.
I’m aware of a life I had recently as an actress in Shakespeare’s time. I was beautiful, blond, and had quite a few children (4?) I, too, go with this physical experience of someone working on my body on this table. This isn’t hard for me, this woman. But I Marti am aware that in this life as an actress I had a lot of flexibility in my personality. I never felt as defined by others as I do in this life as Marti.
Then I feel myself as one of my Probable Selves. I’ve heard this hypothesis that no energy dies. When we make a difficult choice in this life, the energy that wanted to go the other way, does! This is an aspect of what we simply call “past lives” but a larger world view in which Time doesn’t really exist, all things are actually happening at once and affect each other. Probable Selves are aspects similar to “other or past lives”, closely related to our own conscious experience, but moving along the path we think we didn’t take. I seem to have a Probable Self who is a university professor of literature here in the Midwest, same birth name, and we share the same history up to a point. As that person, I find this cranial sacral experience esp. helpful, having similar problems with my back.
To my surprise, I find myself Father Peter Clifford of Ballykissangel, a fictional character I’m watching these days on DVD and identifying with immensely. I feel my body tall, as he is, strong in a natural way and then able to give a strong punch as he does to his own surprise in the story. He’s a strong male and feels helped by this experience of healing work, as he’s been in much pain of spirit and neglect of his bodily self. I think he represents symbolically a true part of my experience as Marti in which I feel betrayed by God after my son’s death.
I wonder if I don’t have a life as a dancer? It hasn’t shown up here. It has seemed to me a “future” life. Then I feel that dancer in me. She’s able to bend her back forward and backward over and over, slowly feeling her spine, vertebrae by vertebrae. She loves to spread her legs and leap, jump, run. I feel her flexibility in my own body and it’s so healing to me. She’s very aware and careful of her body because of all I’ve learned living in my difficult body.
I think of a couple other lives as women to whom this Cranial Sacral Treatment is nothing particularly strange to them. For me, all of this large experience with other lives with whom I am connected on an eternal timeline gives me much greater flexibility in my identity. It seems like I’ve experienced what the dead must experience – a larger sense of themselves. I realize what an enormous amount of memories I have here within all these many lives, even these few other lives I know. The memories of this particular life now, feel more temporary. They have less power.
I awaken with my back feeling very different, more flexible than my body has been in ages. And I am more powerful in spirit. I can even hear it in my voice! The corral seems more illusory, less infuential.