I gifted this painting to somebody I adore yesterday.

The man who week in and week out… has taught me to move through pain and fear in brand new ways.

Who has taught me not to ‘go into the reflex’. (the body tensions, the fears, the beliefs, the predictions, the emotional patterns) through the body work and healing we do for my neck, throat, voice.

He is a holy man. A bona fide healer. The most powerful gifted one I think I have met yet, and I have met maybe 3 who were the real deal. His gifts that came to him when his boxing career was shattered in an injury… and the ancestral healing gifts of his lineage found him when he was in the depths of despair.

I realized recently that he was of course more than my ‘physical therapist’.. more than the healer he so obviously is.

I began to see him as a kind of surrogate.

The man that I learned to trust so deeply even in the midst

of pain that made me sob, all the while helping me to soften it, to not go into the reflexive pushing against it…

Every week I notice how my ability to trust being held, being able to receive, being able to feel… in the midst of pain that sometimes takes my breath away as we move thru the layers of stored trauma, mostly from the years of my Dad’s illness and dying when I was a teen. The years when I would leave on a date while hearing my dad vomiting violently from the chemo.

That was a rough mix.

Early adolescence and the wanting to be alive and free, mixed

with death, dying, the loss of freedom in my father, the gravitas and the weight and the ugliness…

The knowing something bad was going to get worse.

Mixed with the not wanting to see, to know, to feel.

Oh boy. Did I stop feeling.

Developed an eating disorder instead and all sorts of other

inadequate ways of coping.

And my fear of loss.

Of losing men.

Of them dying, leaving, losing power.

Going through it yet again watching my beloved youngest brother Sam die 10 yrs ago.. Younger than my Dad even, pancreatic cancer which wiped him out in 4 months flat.

I honestly had NO idea what was being held in my body

until my voice went last summer and I started to explore

a deeper kind of body work and healing.

And felt what was stored in this organ, this muscle, this bracing in my body across my diaphragm, deep in my neck, the inability to take a real breath despite thinking I was.. despite years of yoga and dance and meditation and the rest. My body was bracing… for loss and in deep fear.

Every week… I let myself be in the pain, in the vulnerability, in the sorrow, in the release and the tears as it releases. Sometimes I don’t let the tears.. because not going in to the reflex, sometimes means letting it move through in a less predictable way.

It dawned on me a couple weeks ago, how deeply I trust this man. With my body, my pain, my trauma, and also my gifts.

I also laugh harder during those sessions than anywhere else. The laughing.. also sacred medicine, of course. The best. That kind of laughing such a true part of me.

You have to get into the BODY. It’s in the body. The laughter, the grief, the joy and possibilities.

My art is prolific b/c I keep so much moving…

Normally the day after PT w S… I have a brutal emotional hangover. Deep sorrow, a day of darkness. All the dammed up emotions that I thought I had felt and moved…that I hadn’t.

Today is the first day in months that I haven’t had it… the ‘morning after’ grief.

It takes time to empty it out.

It takes time to not go into the reflexes.. and to build new

connections, to find the breath, the heart, and the divine

in us.

Yesterday, when I was trying to thank him and telling him how big my trust in him is (after the very hardest session I have had yet)… Steve said to me when you trust the god in me, and i trust the god in you…it is a communion.

And this is what it feels like to me.

I believe in that. I know that. I am living that.

And so my painting Spring Portal… to this man who has changed my life and who is such a blessing in my life.

I am so so deeply profoundly thankful.

Receiving this healing, and also being able to work

so intimately with my own clients albeit differently.. is and has

been one of the gifts of my lifetime.