Wayne Schroeder Craniosacral Therapist

19/07/2024

Just love what this man writes 🌸💝🤗

It’s an act of kindness to take a few moments each day to slow down, rest our minds and downregulate our nervous systems, re-attune to the feeling-body and the earthy ground, and give ourselves the space to metabolize what it is we’ve been experiencing.

If we aren’t able to do this, our experience will remain undigested, or only partly digested, which can end up depleting us over time – our physical bodies as well as in more subtle ways, our emotional and energy-bodies.

Experience which is overwhelming and not properly assimilated gets held in bodily and subcortical circuitry, located into our cell tissue, muscles, organs, and patterns of breathing, and stored into the underworld of the somatic unconscious.

In our increasingly frenetic and dysregulated world, it can take some devotional effort to cut into the trance as it requires a shift in our psychic center of gravity, as well as an experiential differentiation from the collective, which is dense and seductive.

It’s not going to be possible without a conscious, embodied, compassionate relationship with our own unfelt grief, buried shame and rage, and other ghosts of our unlived lives.

To take a few conscious breaths, ground into the earth, sense the aliveness in our hands and feet, and soften our bellies. To come back into center and reconnect with the nonconceptual intelligence of the heart.

To take a break from the ongoing commentary about our experience and return into embodied, sensual immediacy; into the empty cup and to the wisdom of not-knowing.

Over time, these micro moments will start to encode new circuitry, updating grooves in our neural network, cutting into billions of previous moments of self-abandonment, self-aggression, and disembodiment, strategies that were once adaptive and necessary to keep us safe.

To see if they are still required or if there are new resources available – from the seen and unseen worlds – that possess the mercy and grace to rewire the pathways, organizing them around empathy, embodiment, spaciousness, and kindness.

And in this we can become a more transparent, open vehicle or vessel for these qualities to incarnate and embody here, which it seems our planet could really use about now.

12/02/2023

Amazing 🤩

TRAUMA, THANK YOU FOR PROTECTING ME

Here’s the main thing you have to understand about trauma:
It wants to keep you hidden.

Why? It’s trying to protect you.
It’s only ever trying to keep you safe.

It imagines threats where there are none.
Stuck in the past, it wants to keep you close to what you know, close to what you can control.

And away from death.

When you begin to leave your comfort zone, take that brave step, express yourself, assert a boundary, try something new, separate from the known world, it will assume, based on past evidence, that YOU ARE IN DANGER, and it will do everything it can to get you back to safety, convincing you to be small again - in order to protect you from failure, ridicule, abuse, further shaming.

Your mind will scream.
Your body will shake.
Your muscles will tense up.
Your heart will race.
Your breath will quicken.
Everything will feel… wrong.

We can’t destroy this conditioned fear.
We can’t get ‘over’ it.
The more we resist it, turn against it, judge it as bad or wrong, or fight it, the worse it gets.
The more we reject it, the more we reaffirm to it that the world is TRULY unsafe.

We cannot delete the fear but we can turn towards it. Understand it. Have compassion for it. Have a more loving conversation with it:

“Thank you for protecting me, trauma. You’ve served me well. But maybe the danger has passed. Maybe I don’t need your protection today. Maybe I am bigger, stronger, safer, than I knew…”

Then, the very same energy that repressed your authentic self, starts to work for you. Liberated, it begins to express your authentic self, helping you play, be creative, speak up, take up space, and take those courageous steps into the Unknown.
The very same energy that suppressed you, now works to express you.
The energy that used to shut you down from life, now spends its time trying to open you up to life.

You learn, IT’S SAFE TO BE ME.

This is the greatest thing of all. It really is.
To feel safe within yourself.
To know that your nervous system is always working for you.
To love your body, and to know that you are not your body.

Trauma is condensed life energy, that is all.
Stuck, constricted, it longs to be liberated.
It longs to be seen, known, felt.

When it's met with love, it can blossom, YOU can blossom, into pure creativity.

- Jeff Foster

22/12/2022

How touching for my wee little one to read this .
🎄⛄️🥰🍪🔥

Bring your attention to your feet as they touch the floor, your energy and awareness dropping downward, toward the ground, into the earth, into the womb.

Imagine sitting in a living room on a comfortable couch, at sunset with a warm fire in the fireplace, the smells and sounds of an early evening in the mountains, as you hear a soft knock at the door.

Hesitatingly you walk over to the door and open it… a child is there, a little one – shaky, frightened, alone, and tired from a long journey.

There is something familiar about them but you can’t quite place it… just see them now, receive them, sense them, open to them. Things are never quite as they appear.

At times they seem anxious, heartbroken, scared, and confused, unsure of why they have come, where God is, if they belong, if it’s safe enough to be here with all of their feeling, vulnerability, and sensitivity.

In the face of this anxiety, worry, panic, and shame, would you refuse entry to the little one? Would you first demand that his fear dissolve, her anxiety be healed, his confusion clarify, or her heart be mended?

In your most authoritative spiritual voice, would you urge the little one to first "get over it,” accept everything the way it is, urgently forgive those who have harmed them, or quickly “raise their vibration?”

Or would you provide sanctuary and safe passage for them to rest as they are? A safe, contained temple in which the stories, feelings, and images can emerge, unfold, and be held?

Inside the heart of this little one, the beloved is at work, spinning out worlds of experience which are soaked with intelligence, sacred data, and saturated with both sweet and fierce grace. Somehow, love is making its way here through the shattering, through the mercy of this one.

With your presence and your warmth, help them to feel felt and understood and that they are safe now, that you will be a companion through the dark night, and that they are no longer alone.

Look carefully at them and see who and what they are. If you want to help a little one – whether they are on the inside or outside – help them to feel safe.

Photo by Nato Pereira

12/12/2022

Thanks Jeff, just love it 🥰

I WANT YOUR ANGER. I WANT YOUR FIRE.

Don’t be spiritual with me, my love.
Be honest instead!

Get angry with me. Tell me how you really feel.
Tell me how pi**ed off you are.
Shout. Or cry. Show me your vulnerability.
Express what’s on your heart.
Say the wrong thing. Make a mess.
I don’t care. We can clean up later.
I just want to meet you. Now.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect words.
Don’t wait until your precious fire has gone out.
Or your tears have dried up.
There’s no shame in being a mess.
Anger is not ‘unspiritual’.
It is beauty. It is power.

I want to meet you beyond the mask.
Beyond the nice little boy, the good little girl.
The well-trained spiritual student.
The expert. The calm one.
The one who was never allowed to raise their voice.

I want to feel your fu***ng flames!
I want to feel your truth!
Your passion! What you need! What you desire!
Your unrequited longings! Your frustrated hopes!

Don’t worry about hurting me.
Just let life speak through you. Now.
I will take responsibility for my own pain.

Please. I’d rather receive your pure anger NOW
than years of stories, blame, resentment,
and passive aggressiveness.

Drop the spiritual bu****it.
Just tell me how I fu**ed up.

Get everything out in the open.
I will not shame you.

And we can go from there.

- Jeff Foster

12/12/2022

What a brilliant article. This is what craniosacral therapy talks to. 🥰🤗🌸

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through the questioning and reorganization of patterns of thinking. In other words, we can’t think our way out of trauma.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, undigested pieces of experience are held subcortically and in our cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.

Encouragement to “just get over it, that’s totally irrational, you can’t really believe that, you know that’s not true” and so forth is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of violence and aggression.

It’s like an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory, and only contributes to re-traumatization, in personal, cultural, and collective networks.

In addition to shattering and unendurable experience – which is painful and terrifying enough – there is a profound sense of aloneness that goes with this, the sense that no one can understand, that there is no companionship into the dark night. I am alone in this. This is devastating to the soul.

When that raging alive little boy or aching little girl cries out longing to be held, to be known, to be felt, to be heard, to be remembered… peeking their little heads out as if to say, “Is it safe now? How about now? I’ve been waiting for so long for a companion and friend. How about now?”, they’re really not all that interested in our clear cognitive analysis, rational inquiry, powerful spiritual insight, and thoughts on the matter.

They’re yearning for something else… for you, for your heart, for your holding. To know that you will stay near, that you will not abandon or shame them, that you will do your best to provide sanctuary and safe passage for them to come Home, to be allowed to come out of that frozen state and live once again.

In this way they don’t even want or need to be healed, but to be held. And to feel safe.

Photo by Lisa Runnels

25/11/2022

Folks this really valuable inter generational organisation is having its funding cut. Please sign and support it.
It brings together the young and old so so needed.

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/scottish-men-s-sheds-call-for-men-s-health-support …. it has STARTED - 8 week campaign to change their minds for next years budgets and the future.

Please sign this very important petition – it takes less than a minute – to improve men’s health and wellbeing in Scotland. With an alarming rise in su***de amongst Scottish men - 75% of the people who died by su***de in Scotland last year were male – and with already-stretched resources and...

24/11/2022

Thanks Jeff love it. 👍😊🌸🤗🥰

WHEN YOU TRY TO FIX ME

“When you try to fix me, when you play the infallible ‘expert’ or ‘guru’, you unconsciously send a signal to me, to my nervous system, that there’s something wrong with me, that I’m broken and do not have the inner resources I need. That I can’t hold what I’m holding, can’t bear what I am bearing. That I am smaller than you, weaker, needier. That I know less. You play the expert to my beginner, the guru to my disciple. Even if you have the best of intentions, which I know you often do, when you try to fix me, and give me your answers, you treat me like a child. You don’t listen. You don’t trust. And that’s scary. I feel more alone than ever when you try to fix me. You split us in two.

Yes, when you try to fix me, you don’t trust me. But I am stronger than you know. I can bear more than you realise. I am more capable, more wise, more courageous than you give me credit for. I am shocked by my own courage!

When you stop trying to fix me you give me the space to grow. You give me the space to feel, to hurt, to tolerate and to process that hurt, to move through my pain into a deeper healing.

When you simply hold space for me, I can relax to fill that warm space. I can breathe more freely, held in your safe and loving arms. I can touch into my deepest trauma, find my courage, push myself a little bit into the scary places, start to tolerate the seemingly intolerable, bear the seemingly unbearable, and survive the intensity of the moment. I can start to prove to myself how strong I actually am.

When you simply stay present with me, I can move through my healing crisis, I can fall and be caught, break and be held, and I can learn to hold myself too.

When you simply listen, I can better hear myself. I can learn to trust my deepest intuition, my authentic feelings, my own body - and fill even the scary places within me with loving awareness.

My words are not drowned out by yours. My feelings are not replaced by yours. My dreams become clearer. My gut learns to speak up for itself. When you drop all your clever concepts, philosophies, answers, advice, fixes, and you just love me, I can learn to love myself, and trust myself, and hold myself as you hold me.

When you stop trying to fix me, I actually start to feel less broken! Here is the paradox of love, and the paradox of healing - two sides of the very same mystery.

So stop trying to fix me, and please, love me instead, be present with me as I heal…”

- Jeff Foster

09/09/2022

Thanks Jeff

if abandonment is the core wound

the disconnection from mother

the loss of wholeness

then the most potent medicine

is this ancient commitment

to never abandon

yourself

to discover wholeness in the whole-mess

to be a loving mother

to your insides

to hold the broken bits

in warm open awareness

and to illuminate the sore places

with the light

of love

- jeff foster

03/09/2022

More great ness

03/09/2022

Great