Return-ing

The tracks have been rattling, in the last few years we have all experienced profound change and, perhaps, a renewed sense of possibility. May 2022, I packed my car and quietly paused my practice. I crossed the country to participate in a 3-month Karma Yoga program in the mountains of British Columbia. In mid-September I bought a one way ticket to Europe that wound it's way to Guatemala. 

Traveling is an exhilarating disassembling of parts, of appearances and disappearances, of lost and found, chaos and rest, foods, currencies, tongues, bit lips and missed trains, and ultimately of movement ~ change. We know there are lots of ways of moving - writing is movement, sitting still is a going in a staying, thoughts have wings. Movement reminds of impermanence, of knowing and not-knowing, of the many and the one, of the conceivable and the inconceivable, the hidden and the seen, the taking apart and the starting again.   

I enjoy the space of not-knowing, there is truth in deferring to the mystery. And there is a subtle distinction in choosing to trust the mystery and hoping that good behavior aligns with someone or something else who will answer the questions. Maybe it's the difference between going out to sea with a rudder, a sail, and two oars or simply pushing a raft out into the waves. 

How do we trust and accept that we secretly want things to unfold in a particular way? That there's something we can do about it, and, well, all I can do is wait and see. There's work to be done and nothing I can do. Where’s the connection that nourishes the trust? Or captivates the senses? The connection has long been for me in practice ~ in meditation, yoga, writing, with our time in the studio, the bloom. 

 In truth, it has been a gradual path: 9 years of yoga at our beloved Studio 72, 8 years guiding Cranio sessions, 4 plays, countless drawings, thousands of hours of our conversations. In our complex world, rich with opportunity and paradox, it isn’t easy to know what it is we want or how to shape what is we have, talents and limitations alike.  My hope is that we continue to create places of access, entrances to beauty and mystery, with a deep reverence for living. Writing this letter and you reading it is one of those places of access. We might call it healing. And we might call it, as my dear colleague and mentor Johanna Franzel reveals, permission. All of this and without knowing where or how the raft is going, we continue to see what's here and listen for what's possible.

Yours in play, 

with Love, 
Molly   

  

 

Make Sense: from inside complexity

“Miracles are the only thing that make sense.”  This jumped out at me from a film I watched last week. I've been trying to make sense. To make sense, I mean really, wouldn't we need to engage all of the senses? What would that look like? Sound like? Taste like? Buddhism identifies mind as a sixth sense alongside sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Surely there are others. Language is a sense… What about the speed of psoas? Or the key to masseter? It's tempting to create order by working sensation in around some murky presuppositions. And is that we are taking about - order? 

 a prayer 

possible, impossible 

 

While writing this note, in a tab in another browser I was scrolling through the movie to find the line again. I thought I remembered it precisely, the angle of the character's face, the energy with which it was said, the light. But I couldn't find it. It's like a dream. [The movie is 5 hours long and took 20 years to make so the material is dense. Also, it's title is ‘Until the End of the World’, you get the picture]

 

What about intuitive sense? A knowing which mysteriously includes that which can not be seen but is present. We feel it. We experience it. But we can't capture it. In trying to make sense of a world that is constantly in motion and seemingly so fragile that it might crumble into chaos, at once immediate/urgent and removed/at a distance [-life behind screens-] is there an invitation to make sense by Embodying our very own senses? 

 

Despite our best efforts, our knowing isn't fixed but exists in a perpetual state of becoming; there is actually very little to hold on to. But before hurling ourselves into the abyss in an ecstasy of self abandonment, is there something closer to home? Simple but not spare.

 

Sensation is perception. It is awareness. And sense arrives as a collaboration, just as alignment in a posture is not stationary, but an active listening in. In Cranio we listen for midline - where purpose is clear, unmuffled, and identifies with itself as the source. It takes practice, a lifetime of practice. It is one of those very obvious miracles - something so ordinary that we forget to realize it's extraordinary. Something before we knew the word miracle. 

 

There is a process then of tenderly nourishing an intimacy with something I do know ~ the question falls away inside a very particular connection to, as elusive and vital as desire, the desire for it all to be something else or for it to be just what it is, revealing both reality and imagination: sacred territory. 

 

Inside Space, feeling latitude, thinking longitude, we reimagine, we reimagine what we think we know and realize a fiction: that we participate in reality with imagination. We make sense. 

This spring (isn't that a welcome thought) I will be offering a series of yoga classes: Making Sense: Practice Notes which explore the movement of the present sense - presence of sensation. This is subtle work where we weave stillness and movement around the the static of anxiety, through galaxies of knees. And, of course, we continue our work on the table with Cranio sessions, now more than ever. 

 With love from the midline,

 Molly 

 

Freedom - and not knowing

I've been working on a Musing on the theme of not knowing. At least in part my musing on a musing has delayed this announcement, and that's not separate from the theme. At present I am writing to you from that little island off the coast of Rhode Island where I come to work and be with friends. The wind has been blowing since Friday and the boats have been canceled while shutters bang and shop signs twist around their hinges, gutters get lifted up and set down. Here wind makes our choices and exaggerates the space where we just don't know - which in some ways makes the going about our days easier, no boats nowhere to go, and in other ways it makes it harder, no boats, nowhere to go. There is a clear force outside to reconcile. Of course, this is always true. And force outside is also inside.

It feels like I could write forever on this theme of not knowing- it's central and takes so many shapes. It has many names and many applications and I have lots of remedies and counter postures to assert myself against the wind! Again, we are not separate. And we are not going to either unearth nor are we going to bury our theme all in one sitting. But to start the conversation, to study the colors - ahh this is beautiful, this is living, this is practice, this is desire, this is friendship.

A friend recently shared with me something a friend had shared with her, it hit me like an arrow, she asked: What if the not knowing is freedom?


We were talking about preparing, all the notes and outlines and books and rehearsals that get collected when one is readying something to deliver, getting ready to share something with others. All the nervousness, all the wanting something to illuminate and be useful, and all the not knowing what it will be or what will be there when it is sent and when it arrives:

What if the not knowing is freedom?


Wait, freedom? Wait, hold on..I thought.. wait, - Do I really know what freedom is? What it looks like? What it requires?


What if this place occupied by the dizziness of not knowing is ***freedom***.

The example of preparing to teach is lovely, tender in it's reach. Not knowing can show up in other, less friendly costumes -the anxiety of needing something to be a certain way, a plan to go as planned, a person to act a certain way. We want to know the weather, the traffic patterns, the time, the schedule, the answer, the right way......that's a lot of lining up.

Yet, at the edge of all these efforts, which are really vulnerable tremblings, vibrations of hope, there is a place (it might be a precipice) where we walk out onto the field and meet, both life and death - we meet what might call Reality. Autonomous.

So what if we say, there is freedom inside not knowing. All these places where we don't know what something is or we don't know when we will get there or we don't know who we will meet or we don't know what the thing we make or say will become. We stand there/here inside the great unknown and offer it to the great unknown. Like setting the table again and again and never knowing if the guest will come, laying down the napkin, putting the spoon top.

Come explore these places where our bodies live, where we come to meet ourselves and the world in which we live, listen to what the heart wants. Maybe there is an answer, maybe not. The studio is open and the table is there, I hope to see you soon.

With big Love,


Molly

Production. Permission. And 3 minutes.

I was talking with a friend recently who shared that he felt like he had 1 week where he was able to get things done, start and finish projects, only to be followed by 2 weeks of not. I smiled listening to him, comparing his rhythms to my own. I feel like I have 1 day, I said, followed by many more before there is one day again. Or maybe it’s 3 hours in one day followed by many hours that… But wait a minute, before we go on, let’s inquire into what it is we are measuring. 

Looking at our shared calendar, summer has just ended. We are starting to feel it in the bones. We know the shift - we anticipated it while it was still August! Schedules changed and we were asked to move in different ways. It’s darker in the morning. Lights get turned on. Windows need to be closed and then opened and then closed again. The garden is spilling out its fruit but we know, because we live here, these are lasts, things are turning back towards the roots, back towards underground. Our bodies know. The mind has other ideas, there are things that need to be done. It’s true, there are things that need to be done. 

But what are they? How do we know? I might say something about alignment, here, but not yet, we might get to that and we might not, a word like that can be a little like a word like mastery. I want to start sooner, I’m not ready. 

Days and weeks get sewn together with relationships, with responsibilities, with work, with families, with friendships, with weather - with desire. The thread is desire - at some point, if not now, something was connected with something else with the hope that something would ………. right there…. peer in… right here… what was that, what is that… it’s dark and hard to see…the stitch is on the underside…. I can’t remember or I never knew, not really… is it ok not to know? Is it ok not to know where to put the needle in? Is it ok not to know what it will become? Yes, of course it is! But wait, slow down again, what does it feel like not to know?… where does it feel? The heart, the belly, the head - inside your mouth?

When body knows that cold is coming or that rest is needed or that something or someway or someone you loved is leaving, has left; What there? Here? Where? How?

Is there ever not a desire to be connected with what is beautiful? to be linked to what it is you love? and there are so many hours where (it feels like) we are not - life is long and short, things take time, it’s not 3 hours in a day, it’s 10 minutes  - where what? Where I feel close to the thing that eludes me. The dinner well made, the communication well executed — the satisfaction of listening to what your own soul wants, and answering- 3 minutes and never in the same order or the result of a certain combination - born of chaos - with everything outside of these minutes longing for that union and tightening the stitch.  

Healing (we could interchange healing with the word “change”) is a process of being with presence and absence, the presence of the creative fire (call it anima, shakti, karma) and the absence of that which it desires - and there are moments where we know both at once. I can say I want things to be like this, or for this, so that they might come together to include me, grant entrance, permission, a feeling of being with, companionship, love and devotion, trust. 

Practice, then. And never always, or yes always, devoted to that unseen, unknowable, and always not quite. 

We practice. And there is grace, forgiveness, the empress rides backwards on her horse. 

With love,

Molly 

Carpeting

MUSING 

When there’s so much……. so much…… I’m wondering if perhaps it isn’t the work of our days to…. let me start again… 

but with what words? you see the words carry meaning. If they’re clever or cleverly placed there can be multiple meanings. But often we strive for clarity, even when clarity isn’t anywhere on the shelves. So then it’s just striving...for other? for a way out? for change? for flour?

Change isn’t always what we want. Acceptance? Maybe it’s sentimental and we want the thing to be what it was, even if it was never that. Or we want it to stay still so that we can rest in it for a moment or study it or try it on or wash it… Is the striving an effort in the direction of stability, asking things to settle down where they are? And when they do, because we all have magic powers, and everything is sitting there on the rug, asking to be fed - that’s far too much!!

So what is it - how is it that there is too much? Why isn’t it just enough? Do three bears live here? Too many tabs, too many feelings, too much good, too much bad - is that why Durga has so many arms? Who says

And now there’s too many words and not enough time, ah yes, there we go… not enough time…. or money… Well isn’t that interesting. Scarcity lies there - whereas everywhere else is spilling over, baskets, buckets, drawers, dreams, landscapes, buildings, sidewalks, houses, wagons. 

I was going to say the work might be to find a balance. But balance.. an organizing principle, then….. the work is to get it done and off to the side…. but there isn’t ever done…nor is there a side.. something else comes in…with corners.  I’m in trouble… within minutes I’ll be kneeling at the ganges with a pitcher, wondering if it’s clean enough. I don’t have enough drawers or chairs or rugs or shelves or houses or days. Who says? 
Do I get to say? 

I’m afraid I could go on like this and then there’d be even less time and nothing in boxes and no ribbons. An audience, a miasma, an ocean, a puddle. All at our fingerprints… finger tips… 

A lot of these things are dreams - we can’t hold out an arm…. 

or we could, we might

it depends 

on the

system. 

Not the system out there - the one in here - that I swim around in my whole life. The one I am learning to live with, or is learning to live with me - am I to say who I am? I may have bias as to how it turns out and certain expectations and cloaks that get hung up on statues, torn as I turn… So then there’s a synthesis. It’s 12 signs and an infinite number of combinations - at every moment. A lot to drink in, a lot to find homes for… After some time lying in the steamer trunk in the attic we can lift the lid and there’s something there with feathers…. 

Occupancy, she called it. That’s a word. And a feeling. 

and a place to be 

with limbs.

Desire + the Art of the Difficult

MUSING

I’m finding it difficult. 

Mostly we want to be happy.. or unburdened, liberated, useful…engaged…  And a lot of the time something other than this is occurring. It’s difficult. There are lots of hours in a day and lots of minutes in which we are trying to steer ourselves, thought to thought, through those hours. We might, consciously or not, fuel our energies in the direction of acquiring the elusive missing piece.  And this effort may or may not be an intelligent expression of our energies or faculties, it also may or may not be an effort. We might sit with what is gnawingly uncomfortable and we might beg off and find some mask to try on, or… 

Today I find myself asking: what is it that makes something difficult? Simply that the thing that’s here is not what we want to be (here)? What is it that’s here? What is it that isn’t?  

Is it difficult because we care? Because there at the feet of difficulty is a deep investment in …. in …. our own lives…in the lives of others….in living. There is something living there that wants…wants something from living. And it isn’t just one want, though we might try to distill it to one. To be loved, that is a big one.  Every being constellates a unique pattern of desires. With every shift of light, every leaf that drops, every rising breath, every burrowing ache desire is expressed through the channel of my being - my being an extension of all being.  

Maybe the heart wants something other than what the shoulders want? Does a poem want something other than what an essay wants, than a painting? Is all this desire my responsibility? Some of it I see, some of it invisible.  Perhaps the responsibility is part of what makes it difficult, the reverence for horses, for insects, for boxes and winds. And maybe it’s not so difficult, it’s the wanting that makes it so, the thinking.. that fear that what appears next is more than I can see or carry, or isn’t, isn’t anything at all. Am I feeling something that isn’t here? Even this is an expression of something that I carry, or carries me.

Today the wind will blow every leaf from the japanese maple at the back of the yard. Today the last tomato from the garden will have rotted before I could add it to my dish. Today I am not an animal that can stand still in the wind. Today this house is smaller than me. 

And so…. remember that life is a friend, and that we continue on sweetly, without knowing.  

Next weekend we will have another round of Cranio clinic in Portland. I will be in working in NY the following week if any of you have friends in NY who might like a session. I enjoy giving cranio sessions almost more than anything I do… I don’t know why this is. There is something in the journey that takes us both into the constellation. 

Lots of love, 

Molly 

Take Your Time

This feels like a special one.... they all do, I can leaf back and each time the feeling of being at the edge of something comes through, simmering. What's that - there? We might call this a perspective. 

Our next Clinic is on the calendar for Fri June 15 + Sat 16  [you can book sessions here]

and then again in August, a New Moon Clinic on Aug 10 + 11. There won't be a clinic in July because I'll be in Colorado. This came on like a big splash. I'd been pulling the judgement card out of the tarot deck over and over again and then along came a note: there's a spot for me in the Teachers Intensive, a month long intensive immersion into the philosophy, practice and meditation of ashtanga yoga with two remarkable teachers, Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor.  This invitation changes the current daily into what feels like a grand teton, there's something ocean echoing in those mountains. There's an integration happening, out of what was and into... showing itself in the world. 

The phrase that keeps coming is "take your time". The phrase is really a reminder that this is, after all, your time. It doesn't belong to anyone else. No one else can answer how to use it, at what rate, in what order. Take it, it's yours. Time is a complexity that is personal and emotional. Part of our work is creating a relationship to time. July will be a deep immersion into study and reflection and a re-orientation to the process of time - a reorientation to the process of self and the process of interrelation with other. 

The art of craniosacral, the art of yoga, the art of writing, the art of being, the art of health are all processes in relation to beauty, intuition and imagination. We are constantly relating to things known and unknown, starting from the inside. Both Cranio and Yoga are teachers, each time we get on the table we take our time - we listen, we fall to our knees at the sight of butterfly. What a thing to be alive in a world that is constantly waking and what a place to take rest. 

I am ready and available for Cranio sessions throughout June  (away from July 7 - Aug 5). You can check my online calendar here, alternately you can text/call to book and we'll find something.  

I look forward to seeing some of you soon, continuing to work this edge of beauty, rest and waking. My commitment to these practices is equal to the honor and humility I feel in being able to do so. 

I'd like to close with a link to an interview that I enjoyed recently - I've listened to it 3 or 4 times and get something different from it each time. Carlo Rovelli a physicist is interviewed by Kristin Tippett here. One of the themes of the interview is that the stuff of the world is not heavy matter or things, it's interaction. In the 18th century we understood the world in terms of matter, in the 19th century we said it was energy, today in order to think in terms of quantum gravity we describe the world as something that is made of interactions - it is relational; the world is not things that remain through time, rather it is made of "happenings".  That makes sense to me. 

 

Sending Lots of Love, 

Molly 

A cabin in the woods

I’ve been watching how moments change. It seems obvious, obvious to say, obvious to see. But there is something that comes with the watching. And it’s not all that comfortable or that obvious - it asks for watching, too. 

It’s interesting that moments of discomfort seem to bring in walls and sofas, shingling up the exterior - what’s it gonna take to get out here when clearly, obviously, there’s no way out! That thought: there’s no way out - I call them visions of impossibility, there’s a clue in there. Someone has been living here for a long time, a cabin deep in the woods, no keys, too dense for sunlight, except in a certain corner at certain corner of a day. I know this place well, probably have for lifetimes. 

And then there’s something else, wait a day, an hour, a week and the mind takes up residence somewhere else. There are flowers and open windows and sunlight and plenty to eat. Doubt and grief and shame have left their coats on the bed in the guest room and are out in the yard watching bumblebees land on violets. Is there a totality here, too? A reminiscence? Is it fleeting? Perhaps. And the fall to follow, also certain? More clues here.  

There’s talk of a place called the middle-way. In Cranio we call it the mid-line or the mid-tide. There something mysterious about this place of no-thing - that doesn’t bubble with euphoria or simmer with despair, it just is - mysterious and deeply familiar. What’s there, who’s there, who’s home, who isn’t? Here we work with our energies, our OWN energies, we work to recognize them, listen to them, we practice ease. It’s sacred ground for sure. Keep returning, keep coming back, it’s never not there, but sometimes we aren't, sometimes it’s simple, sometimes it’s not. Everything is welcome - the coats on the bed, the shingled box. I am host and learn to take care. 

See you this week for Cranio Clinic Sessions: Fri May 18 + Sat May 19   

to schedule: www.mollyhunt.com

And Happy Mother’s Day to all - mother takes so many forms and includes us all.  

Lots of Love, 

Molly 

Emergence + A New Organ

MUSING

Transition is a suitable topic for this month’s musing. Seasonal transition. I think we know that the thinning of layers, the traveling up from depths, is not just something that happens to the plants, trees and worms. It is occurring inside us. It is, I think, one of the gifts of living in a place that has seasons: we’ve bundled up and layered in and we too get to emerge, to unfurl, we are not separate.  

As spring emerges through the thinning layers

so do I. 

It has been a long winter, we can all agree to that, and it is hard not to get a little bit impatient with all the blankets. Add to that, before spring is beautiful, it is ugly, it reveals the residue of what’s been hidden, there’s angst and anxiety, exposure, discomfort. 

So what is being offered right now? I wrote a little about this the last time I included a musing in the clinic announcement. I will probably always write about this - there is something in the transition that allows us to see what has been and feel the shade of what might be, what we know has been before and will, in all likelihood, though we can’t be certain, come again - the lilac tree at the back of yard. 

So, in a time of transition we receive a reminder of impermanence and fly in a piece of longing on memory. Those are stations where I spend a lot of time. And still, even if the platform is familiar and there are some things we can depend on [I hope] something feels different, unseen, hidden. The emphasis here is on feeling. The cold air on my skin, damp clothes. This knowing that change is underfoot might make it easier to immerse oneself - to head down the steps in the dark without a coat or shoes because we know this place only exists for a moment. So we might encounter a being-in because of brevity, because we know this will not last. Fascinating how they require each other. 

Still, it’s difficult. Transition is difficult. To emerge is difficult. There is the presence of physical and emotional discomfort and there is the response to that presence. We are probably not emerging to a place that will be free of those difficulties. Rather we emerge to an awareness of them, those that were there when we arrived and the response placed atop. Possibly within that awareness there is a place where our existence and all the hopes we have for this existence can share space with difficulty, a place where there is room not only to receive the world but to create it. 

Liberation is tricky soil, the embodied experience is hard work, every day. Important then to be be kind to the being, yourself, who trembles as the breeze blows through. And then there are those stories that remain in the body even while we know. This is what sessions are, we spend time resting in the basin of the boat, not in turbulent waters but floating while the body remembers and renews, finds again. 

For this month’s clinic poster I chose a drawing and notes made by Leonardo Da Vinci. The description is Recto: The mesentery of the bowel and its blood supply, with notes. Verso: The brachial plexus c.1508. I chose this to show that we’ve been asking questions about our experience for a very long time. And there is some very recent, present day news about new organ called the interstitium. It’s been here all along. We might see the context a little differently, in Cranio, I think, we've sensed the presence. If you're curious there is more about the interstitium here. 

 

Lots of love, 

Molly 

In time

Musing:

Happy New Year, my friends. I’m glad that we have more than one day to offer this greeting. A single day isn’t long enough. Not these days. And change arrives in unrecognizable forms. During the ice storm that came through just before Christmas- remember that? sliding over sidewalks on the last shopping day. That night I lost power in my house for a couple of hours. A tree snapped under the weight of the ice and fell on a line. I was brushing my teeth at the time the transformer blew, it sounded like a gunshot, I saw a flash of light outside the window and the house went dark. One reality was replaced with another. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it. 

Except call CMP. Minutes later a fire truck rolled down our dead end street and I could see a fireman walking the road with a flashlight, his voice sounded different in the darkness. He found the tree limb and confirmed what I already knew: all we could was wait. Who’d called the fireman? The piece that interests me about this story is how easily what we know can be replaced, highlighting how much we didn’t know, how much we’d forgotten to notice. What’s all this that was here all the time? Now there’s just blankets and sleep. I drifted off and was woken by a truck outside my window. A bucket truck rising toward the limp limb. It felt like a dream, everything that was happening - what world do we live in that someone arrives to care for these things? Incredible. What systems, what sophistication! They knocked the limb down and I watched it fall into the street. The truck drove off and 10 minutes later the lights clicked back on, the heat returned, the washer started washing where it had left off. The limb was still there in the road the next day, everything else had fallen back into place. 

I wonder if it weren’t storming out today as I write - more than storming - blizzarding - if I would have chosen this subject as my musing. I had intended to write to you all with my New Year’s greeting a little closer to New Year’s day but the days filled in with… life.. There were other thoughts, they’re not gone, but in the tangle they’ve taken a different seat. All this might speak to the influence of environment on our being - it’s not just me and you but the room we are in. With this storm I’m remembering the one that preceded it. I’m remembering the fear of the cold when the heat and lights went out, staring into an unknown, the familiar stripped, the snap of anxiety. These things stay or return. Talk about sophistication! Our systems know. What intelligence!! And though we share an environment each one of us will have a different experience. Part of the process of healing, of awareness, is recognizing your own experience and taking care of the being that is feeling - your you or as Mary Oliver says: “the soft animal of your body”… 

What response? what is being asked, what is being prayed, what is being rejected, what sought… as the sheet of white drops outside and is replaced by dark, the silhouette of bare limbs, these questions are seen but not answered. Yet, the space of time seems to ask something of me, if only my attention and then to orient myself within it. More often I have other ideas - a timeline, a schedule, something that pushes, requires pushing. Just before the new year I had an insight into just how much of all that pushing started with me. And it was effecting everything. The last thing on the list was the thing I wanted to do most. How did that happen? 

The mystery of Cranio Sacral Therapy is that it teaches us about stillness. And from inside stillness there is a reorganization. What isn’t here is untied, unwound, a boat released down the river without regret. And stillness is that pause that helps us to see that living is living in relation to - the wind, the lamp, the person across the table. In that stillness in the space of a session I am reminded of the environment of myself, the equilibrium there, the calibration, the creation of time in my own time. And then we go out again and feel the snow on our face and my body answers. 

I’m available for Clinic sessions on Fri Jan 19  +  Sat Jan 20, next month it’s Sat Feb 10 + Friday Feb 16. Also by appointment on just about any other day with a little planning. 

I truly wish for you many moments of joy and ease in this new year. 

lots of love, 

Molly 

 

 

 

The Way In

Some of you may know a little about what brought me here. Not to Portland, Maine (I was actually born in Portland), I’m speaking more about what brought me to Craniosacral Therapy. I came through yoga, yes. And Cranio, like yoga, provided me with the experience of being with and working with my body, rather than against it. Before I was even a teenager, just at the edge of it, I got sick, a digestive illness, 32 years ago. I can remember in my 20s realizing that I’d lived longer with Crohn’s disease than I had without it. That marker meant something then. Chronic illness creates an interesting path, although I couldn’t speak to any other than this one - things seem at once urgent and vital and utterly inaccessible, far off. Perhaps we all feel that way. The urgency seems rooted in the awareness of vitality, of its ephemerality. Again, this is life, the seasons teach us this, and beauty is the most outrageous teacher, and doesn’t seem to give a damn as she flaunts her colors; they disappear and something else is created moments later - it’s almost too much. 

A dear friend and colleague said to me, speaking about Cranio, that we never know what the entrance point will be. In any one session there will be a moment where we are able to go in, to find and reach what we call the tide or the midline or that place where we suddenly realize we are where we need to be, the entire system starts breathing. It doesn’t just happen in Cranio sessions. Sessions provide a time and a place for deep attention and for safe touch, they are a container. But what I’m describing as connection or re-connection can happen in a sentence, it can happen in a conversation, it can happen in a walk, it can happen while washing the dishes. It seems the more it happens the more we build capacity for it, we build the internal rooms where we can connect with what feels right or true, even for a moment - a flower sticking up from behind a gate. And each one us has a different entry point and that point or way in isn’t going to be same every time - it’s living, just like we are, just like the world is. 

Back this up to a whole life, or a whole life up to Now, and we can use the same metaphors, the same language: we never know what the entrance point will be. I might say that illness for me was the entrance point to my life. It required something of me. And it’s confusing as hell. I was asked to work with something that didn’t make any sense at all, with permeable barriers, to make meaning from something that didn’t feel reasonable or safe - an obstacle that isn’t going away. Again, illness becomes a metaphor: what is being prevented? What’s missing? And all these round about (unconscious) ways we go looking for something that doesn’t have a name.  

At some point I decided that the emotional and the physical were linked. They weren’t two separate entities, the body a wild animal and the heart that lives inside it… We might take the time to talk about what we mean when we say heart - but not now. Linking the emotional and the physical becomes about making meaning, about telling a story. When do we know when the story is true? If I’m going to say something about my story, which is what I’ve started to do in this letter, I’d say the piece that was missing, the piece I was looking for was me. 

It seems that life is very much about learning to take care of the wild animal and the heart and the me, the human who has that job. All this comes clear through connection. Whether we connect to ourselves or someone else or to a tree or an ocean.. A cranio session will always affirm this for me, a cranio session has a very mysterious way of reorganizing what became confused, and of reconnecting what seems to matter.  And it’s not something that I was told mattered, it was something I already knew or had forgotten or knew just then for the first time in this watery alignment. We can call this clarity and capacity. It takes practice. It takes practice to resolve what is complex, what is confusing, to feel comfortable in a body, to love and be loved.  Our lives are very busy, very busy, complicated and complex. Through all the stress and strain it can be difficult to see. Through this work I offer to you what works for me. And a whole lot of love. As a side note, please always feel like you can talk to me about cost for a session, I offer that too, it’s part of where we are and what we do, it’s part of the way in. 

These days...

MUSING

“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?'
'Supposing it didn't,' said Pooh after careful thought.
Piglet was comforted by this.”    A.A.Milne

 

These days…. the list…. The list… these days… I’d like to try to describe something that came to me in a dream the other night.  Not so much the dream but what remains of it, a single moment that left an impression - a kind of imprint. It feels like it is something that might be helpful if shared, and if not, it is is at least helpful to me to try to try to share it, so thank you. 

These days…  What I want to try to describe is a moment in a dream when something went from being one thing to something else. I don’t mean a shapeshifter, one character becoming another, it was a feeling. The thing that changed was a feeling; I felt one way and then I felt another way about the same thing.  There was something occurring in front of me which I perceived as certain to be disastrous. It was certain. My eyes were wide in anticipation, my body was frozen in anticipation, my mind was wild in anticipation, ferociously flipping through ideas of what could be done or what shouldn’t be done so as to prevent what I did not want to occur. Skin pricked, quite literally at the edge of myself, searching for a solution, anything to slow down time, to divert momentum, to prevent what was certain, to prevent what was not wanted. The word we use for this feeling is anxiety. It might also be called the List. Devout attention so as to produce or prevent a result, an unwavering attachment to an outcome… We all know it well, very well. These days… 

And as I sat watching the scene in front of me I realized - wait, let me slow for down for a moment before we reach that word: realized. Realized comes second, something happened before I realized. The thing that happened before realized occurred in my body: I sat. I was already sitting, I sat back. I was able to sit back. And then there was the seeing. They were very close together, and could not do without each other, but first, I’m quite sure, first there was an experience in my body.  From somewhere, somehow, the me that I recognize was invited to take a seat. And my body became a place for this seat. 

I sat back and saw that what was criss-crossing in front of me was doing so on its own. I was not going to prevent, delay or divert. What was occurring was part of me, but did not require more of me than I had to give - there was no tax being taken, nothing was required except my presence. My whole being relaxed in it's seat and I held out my hand. The chaos continued, but I was no longer disturbed. The wooden benches, like bleachers in an auditorium, filled in- we were waiting for the singer to come. 

The message of the dream is not to remove oneself from action, or to step away from accountability - it is more a relocation of action. Sometimes the effort to avert disaster is the expression of disaster - things might be something other than they seem.  What moves me is the invitation in the dream that I received from my body. Let go, come home. And there was a place to come home. Every day we are asked to merge into oncoming traffic, to prepare ourselves for something difficult… But what if we were able to sit or walk or talk from within our bodies, what if we had this as well. We do.. 

You see, one of the reasons I love Craniosacral therapy is this experience of embodiment. In a session we remember our bodies, my own body. We didn’t know that we had forgotten, there was not awareness that we’d forgotten, but there was a return to remembering. Sometimes this remembering is difficult. And sometimes it is not something that happened, but it is a coming into a knowing that knows me.  

There was a sitting back, a resting and then the knowing, a seeing. The mystery, I think, lives in the sitting back; this is the imprint that changed the world. 

Dreams are interesting places to receive messages - the dream body, the unseen world, helping spirits. The thing that changed after sitting back has continued through my days. These days... are also beautiful. 

 

Prayer Flag

MUSING

What do you do when the path you've been walking isn't there anymore? I'm not talking about getting lost, though that could happen easily, I mean before getting lost: what do we do when we can't see the path, when there isn't one, yet? Phrased that way, and at the beginning of what has the tone of a missive, it sounds dramatic. It could be, dramatic, it is also seems to be one of the tenants of existence - it's very common, it comes with breakfast. 

Here, deep in the woods, it seems there's no more path. There was a vista, I turned and looked to see from where I came, up ahead more forest. How do we choose? How do we make our way when the way hasn't been made or isn't clear? 

I'd like to pause in the place before we have the answer, where there is the just question, hanging there on a branch, a buoy that once marked a way. It might not even be helpful to know where I am going, perhaps that's what caused the confusion, the seeming impossibility of here to there? What we have is this and inside this is everything and nothing. 

The last 3 weeks I've been traveling. It feels like more, years I've been traveling, but comprehensively the last 3 weeks, table in the car, inside houses and yoga studios, sometimes sheds and porches, back roads and open windows, giving Cranio sessions, ages 10 - 89. This work always feels like a privilege.  To be invited into homes to engage in discourse with our bodies, the woods of bodies.  

In Craniosacral sessions we find a space that feels outside of time. It might be the only space we truly have: our bodies.  And this space feels both deeply familiar and strange. Just like always. I'm not even sure how Craniosacral Therapy works, there is touch, attention to bones, a gentle manipulation of fluid, of time, and somehow it does work, I've seen it, almost a thousand times. 

And what I think I've learned is that when I can't see, when something aches, when something presses it's good practice to pause, exactly where I stand, not just over there, here, where I realized it, right here under this rock. And I try to listen for something that I do not know. How do I see something I've never seen before? How do I do something I've never done before? How do I cross an expanse where I've never been?

I don't have very many pictures from travels this time, more impressions - a yellow butterfly that lands for a moment on a purple crown of clover. 

This musing was written in response to something that arrived in a session and something that arrived in a day, I leave it here, frayed like a prayer flag tied to a tree. 

 

Lots of love, 

Molly 

the shelf

MUSING

Sometimes change happens suddenly, or it feels sudden - we’ve been going along, looking at things, stopping to touch the shape of something, the slope of a curve as we walk by, there's something on a shelf, an antler, keep going, walk by again, add a vase of flowers, daisies and buttercups, empty it after their heads begin to nod, bring in a lily, queen anne's lace, always walking by and looking. One day the shelf breaks. I wasn’t even in the room, I came home and there’s water spilled, daisies spilled, a book is wet and where there was a shelf there isn’t, in its place there is an opening.  

That didn’t happen, but it could. We could call that kind of shift disruption. It is the energy of chance, of change, it can feel abrupt, structures are pulled down and asked to be replaced. What do we do now? With a wet book? Is something missing or has something appeared?

Both, of course. 

Many of you know that I have a quiet dedication to the practice of ashtanga yoga, and much, including Cranio was rooted in those waters, for dedication is not about standing still.  It has come to be that my long time teacher and friend has made a change in her life which ripples a change in my life. Beginning Sept 1, with much love and support, I will be adding my name to the lineage of studio 72. Our friend Jennifer departs to Boulder and we are invited to carry on and contain, something is passed down, something is shared, something begins again. 

It’s not quite like a vase falling off the shelf, it’s not quite like falling out of pasasna, but it is a little like what we meet in our craniosacral sessions. The sun goes behind a cloud and we feel a breeze. There’s change. I write into it, kneel down, carry on and work. There will be more, that I promise. 

Then, what to do with a wet book? An imaginary wet book? Wander out into a field and find a tree, it’s still summer, the ants will find my feet, listen. Listen for the shape of what is here, what was, and what’s to come, while the sun dries the pages. 

Lots of Love, in daisies,

Molly 

And for your listening pleasure on all those summer drives. I nearly had to stop the car and run around for listening to this one, so good! 

https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-how-trauma-lodges-in-the-body/

xoxo    

Feeling

Musing

“The essence of trauma is disconnection from ourselves. Trauma is not terrible things that happen from the other side - those are traumatic. But the trauma is that very separation from the body and emotions. So, the real question is, “How did we get separated and how do we connect?” 

- Gabor Mate, from an interview [why are so many adults today haunted by trauma?]

We've arrived at summer and have been invited in to sip from the splendor. There are a few things on my mind as I compose this note. When I began studying Craniosacral therapy and giving sessions (we're in our 3rd year now) it was one of a few moments in my in life that occurred with such totality that things were ever changed from there. I could also look at this that I am calling a moment and say things had been developing beneath the surface to create something that did not yet have a name or a way but that what arrived was a name. Both perspectives are true; a moment requires hard work.

When we talk about purpose or meaning what are we really talking about? And is it something that stays, or, like most things, is fluid? How do we know when we've found it? The thing is that I'm not sure that we do know - what happens is more a choice than it is a knowing. 

What I have come to recognize is a feeling, not so much an emotion, but a feeling where we feel  a "connection". When, how, where to do learn to love and protect the feeling body within us that communicates connection? We can call in intuition and instinct as guides, stillness, practices of yoga, meditation, Cranio, writing or drawing.   

What I've begun to see, just the tiniest edge, is there is a Being that lives within me that is me and asks that I love and serve it as if it were an other; it is through my body that I experience existence. Jung would call this the process of individuation, Wallace Stevens might say the "Neccessary Angel", Hinduism would say Atman, we could say the animal, the organism, the Buddha... 

In the quote at the top of this musing Gabor Mate describes trauma not as something that happens from the outside to me, but something that happens inside - in me. Trauma is the animal speaking, we are asked to meet the being that is me and asks for me. We have been invited to explore those places where we connect and where we disconnect. In these spaces we find healing and we feel the sharp edges of the cracks. Here we get to ask and answer for ourselves or not answer, listen, watch, float, settle. 

It is here that Cranio leads --  

Please join me for sessions this summer - private sessions or clinic sessions. We can expect some changes - transformation - both in the world and in our bodies. 

Lots of Love, 

Molly 

Ours.

To garden is to weed. I've let my gardens grow a little wild. As much from over-busyness as from a hesitancy to edit, especially anything that flowers - weed or not. I think there is a metaphor for over-busyness in the clematis, which wasn't supposed to flower, but did and demanded ownership of the fence. 

The garden that I inherited 11 years ago has lost it's shape. The pathways are peppered with violets, false oregano, timothy and much that I can not name.  This wildness protects the possibility  of ---- is it not an interruption to pull? What looks like chaos is a deference to mystery, to unknown, to doubt. What's happened to form? Where is the body?

Last month I wrote a little bit about alignment, agreement, connection, luck: to be in agreement with existence - there we acknowledge and are acknowledged, we know that we are included, and loved - we are ourselves and part of something greater. 

This agreement is connection - wherever that is found. And imagination is another way of talking about mystery. Imagination connected to the body is form - we have a container. This is what we do in a Cranio session: acknowledge our aliveness and return it to purpose. Every cell has a purpose, yes? And no garden is ever the same as another. Where is that vital force we call heart, which invites us to choose a path and care for it?

This inquiry led me to Cranio - and it arrived first through writing. And this is why I have to share with you another play: Ours., home is an inner play with a distant chorus. Both the act of making a play and the content are in service to the unknown that we work with, that is working on us, a collective - something shared that asks for individuation, for participation. Here we make sacred by bringing into form, we shape the garden.   

There 's a lot of Cranio in the play, it is a ultimately a healing and it is pure magic, just like existence. You are invited to join me for the clinics this week and then as part of PortFringe 2017 Ours, to be performed at Geno's June 17, 20 + 22. 

http://portfringe.com/

As always, LOTS of LOVE

 

Molly 

Luck

In the last past month I've been up to a little something different, I been working as the "teacher's model" for Anatomy Trains up the coast, just north of Damariscotta. There a man named Tom Myers and a bunch of extraordinary people continuing this work have developed a schema based on Ida Rolf's Structural Integration protocol called Kinesis Myofascial Integration (KMI). My participation in this 12-series program I credit to good luck. Good luck and a some paying attention. I think it is the feeling of connection that I'm calling luck. 

I realized that what I loved was the studio, the study, the experiential learning room, the theatre, the lab - this was the sense I was following: an interest in, a love for, keep an eye out - a lazy eye and that alerted me to respond when an email drifted into my inbox.  

KMI hasn't disappointed. This modality diverges from the work we do in Cranio Sessions with an emphasis on movement. I climb on and off the table and change positions 6 or 7 times or more in a 90 minute session. What it shares is intelligence, subtlety, a profound respect for the human body and the human experience. I'm learning a lot.

As I leave the table at Anatomy Trains and move to our table the conversation expands - the tension and release that I experienced and that I have participated in with you in Cranio Sessions is organized. It is organized around fundamental questions: individuation and ultimately, consciousness. Here we might complicate, but to keep it simple we can say the body is a self-regulating system, each one of us has our own unique mechanisms responding to and expressing health- well, that's amazing! All of you have had this experience on the table. 

How does it work? There is a science and there is an art. As one partial art, I find it helpful to perceive the science of tissues and fascia and bones and systems as something that contributes to the art. Whereas the art is the listening to the individual, the knowing that is already there. 

We live in a world where we are constantly being invited to respond to stimuli far more than we are invited to digest it. This alone is reason enough to climb on the table, and as the body settles, shifts, changes, releases what we encounter there I believe informs the "luck" I was talking about in the beginning of this note. It is not so much the feeling of being in the right place at the right time but of being where and who you are, in conversation with your body, in agreement with existence. 

Please join me at this month's clinic or in a private session, and as we celebrate Mother everywhere we celebrate living. 

 

Lots of Love, 

Molly  

A clearing

A clearing -  a place of respite, a field between forests.  There is something in travel, in retreat, in stillness where we can see where the connections have been made, and where, perhaps, we might want to build something else or come in another way. These insights don’t come easily. They are hard work, they can be uncomfortable and they require trust. Trust in what? In a process? In one’s self? In something beyond oneself? In a collective? There is a moment when trust is a choice. And then there is the experience that follows. Who do you meet there: what shade? what prophet? 

More often we are not conscious of these transitions, this aligning and realigning. Even if we do see it happening, it can feel like absence. This, especially when working the grip of compulsion or repetition, trying again and again, wanting so much for things to go our way - a vague sense of what that even means, or the desire that preceded it and brought us to this place we are calling an edge. When, where, how is the discovery made? With patience.. with acceptance, with curiosity - acceptance to look at the thing that appears, and not to arrive before it does. Ultimately, with imagination. Travel forward with the momentum of longing and we are met with retreat.  What we learn is that alongside the rapid pulse of urgency there is an equal invitation to pause, to watch the preference fall away, to watch what it does: how it behaves without you, how your own heart responds— THIS is the place where you take your time, where we find the connection and the break, where we keep looking. 

After five days of 7.5 hours a day with head bowed in Cranio Sacral sessions, I’ve learned something. It’s not easy to go through, there is much to be untied, unhooked, re-made, re-visioned, beginning with my own expectations. How else, where else do we confront these desires, these ideas? How do we find our way to the very center of our lives? 

We practice. From ashtanga yoga Pattabhi Jois is quoted as saying “practice and all is coming”. I think I’ve misunderstood this — it is actually quite simple — all is coming — not that we arrive someday,  but that with practice there is a continuous coming, everything rises to meet us where we are - what is required is looking about, inserting oneself, participation in your own life. 

I feel more strongly than ever the power and potential of CranioSacral therapy. Not only is at an encounter with the mystery of existence, it is more than ever an encounter with our position in it. This psychic awareness is soul-making. In Cranio we enter through the somatic experience of the body - our very special container. Our one and only, our unique expression of being. 

With Spring arriving next week we are invited to renew, to keep what feels important and to discard what does not. How do we know? Lay down and listen, ask. What, when emptied, arrives - again? In this act we honor our selves and the world.

with much love, 

Molly  

 

Hello Friends, 

Announcing our next Cranio Clinic: Friday, March 24 @ 12-6pm + Sat, March 25 @ 12-4pm

This is feeling like a special one: 

1.  We are rounding the corner to a well-deserverd Spring (listen for lambs);

2. I've just returned from a 5-day Residential Intensive Training (7.5 hours/day of head bowed in sessions, hands so alive we can wake rocks);

3.  And, it's our anniversary (3 cheers, 3 years of Cranio sessions!!!)

Upcoming Clinics: March 24 + 25 //April 21 + 22 //May 12 + 13  (Mother's day weekend)

Leo Love

Friends,

It's February. On this we agree. Culturally, we give this month to Venus in the form of Valentine's day - a pledge to romantic love - courtly love, specifically, which if you peer under the covers is actually a tradition of pledging undying love to someone or something unattainable. Courtly love wrote long letters, made beautiful paintings, teased by the switch, the sting of Romance with a capital "R": impossible love. Ah, sigh..

In the Zodiac, February belongs to Saturn. With Saturn we are less about pleasure, ornament and sips of Maderia and more about hard work, Aquarian hard work. But it is not so simple, is it? And these are stories, a mythology which provides  us with some structure to work within collectively. They are the dramas of gods and humans, birds and beast - multidimensional, interstellar.   

This February, 2017, we encounter both a lunar eclipse on the the full moon of feb 10 and solar eclipse on the new moon of feb 26. Eclipse - just like its sounds - are agents of change - transformers of energy.  

I've been wrestling with this month's announcement. Things are shifting underground.  We hear: what's the plan? what's the course of action? - or wait, even before that - what's the feeling? A roar! 

What are we talking about when we say "healing"? Is healing a trajectory, out of alignment with a past toward a future? Or is healing a present tense?  

On what do we agree? Is agreement essential? Is there the suggestion of division? And what does all this have to do with bodywork?   

What happens when we agree to lay our bodies on the table? Or wait, back up again, what happens BEFORE we get on the table? What happens to our hearts? What are we seeking and what is the promise? To ourselves, to others, a promise from? To look at these questions as places, landscapes that inspire, before instruction, and before we are moved to action - 

It is this filament, this tornado of dust that so irritates - but is US - is human. It is impossible love and something very close to home.  

For me, a session is an an experience of an "is". The questions I've asked continue to exist, but the confusion is suspended -outside time. And with this comes courage, comes strength, comes capacity. To each our singular purpose and collective gift. Steeped in Love, Bhakti. 

Please join me for "Clinic" sessions on FRI Feb 17 +  SAT Feb 18th orANYTIME for "Private Sessions"

Book a Clinic Session

Book a Private Session 

I'm here in Maine most of the time. At the end of this week and early next I'm in Providence RIgiving sessions - please share if you have any RI/CT folks who you think might like to work. Come March, with a little luck, I'm hoping to spend a few more hours in New Mexico.  

Lots of Love, big Leo Love, 

Moll