All sickness is homesickness

Following the article we published earlier about healing on a cellular level, Whispering Cells… Happy Cells, Navanita recalls here some interesting case studies during her work as a therapist.

To know the body

During a recent group in St. Petersburg, one medical doctor said, “As a doctor, I assumed I knew the body. Then I did some groups where I learnt about the body through emotions, then a group where they taught me about the body through energy, and with you for the first time I am discovering my body through the body!” She was willing to experience it ‘out of her concepts’.

On the second day she struggled because she could see her old concepts were trying to hold on but she could name it and said, “I need to let go into a place of not knowing.” We established her resources, orientations that would support her while stepping into this place of not knowing. First thing she said was that it was important to her that she could name the fear of going into not knowing. By becoming conscious of it, the old unconscious protective mechanism did not take over. When she first began to fight and play it out onto me she was then able to see it. Through this she understood this was a way she had previously used to protect the fear of not knowing. By fighting she was actually holding on. She was really happy that she had a name for it, could name her warrior as a protector, and what was needed was a new way of welcoming the unknown.

To establish clear orientation, she sat down so she could watch the group and hence get a distance and connect with her own ‘watcher’. The felt sense of being a consciousness or a ‘watcher’ was re-established. I suggested she physically lean into the wall, couch, any other furniture, and by doing this she got a sense of support, containment, boundary and orientation of where she was physically.

The experience of “feeling the support” of the leaning is a perception in the body that affects the mind. Normally we talk about mind affecting the body; through embodiment the understanding is also that the body equally affects the mind. That empowered her, gave her a sense of orientation, of support, even when at first her head didn’t understand what was going on. To support this process, we let the body and head know what is happening so that the mind can be included as part of the experience as the body-mind become friends and are reunited as one on this journey.

Our education says you “should know”, and you are acknowledged when you “know”; you are not encouraged when you “don’t know”. Reprogramming is needed, big scale. This woman was an immunologist, a doctor for the immune system, which is the defense system. She said she was finding a new way to defend herself without fighting. She was very grateful. This year when she returned to participate in the next group, there was clearly a shift in her, being less defensive and heartfully open.

The lightness of being

When we went into cellular work, another participant, a writer, could not enter the cell. I played a game with membranes on the floor and played moving in and moving through and out of the cell. However, he became very frightened to move into the cell. I asked him if he remembered what happened when he was in the womb and he suddenly contorted his face, and exclaimed, “YES! My mother was one of those who took Thalidomide, a drug that had been given to pregnant women and had damaged and destroyed many embryos.”

I said, “OK let’s put a name to it, that is important and then the fact that you actually made it and are healthy means you must be very resourceful.” He slowly began to approach the body as something which was not so unconsciously threatening and began to step back into his body and feel comfortable in his own skin, through the understanding that even with that pill that had threatened and damaged so many children, he had made it. Through orienting on his health capacity and strength, the body-mind system found comfort in what had been once an unsafe place to inhabit.

We then played musical cells (like musical chairs): we move in and out of the cells; when the music is playing, we dance around in the interstitial fluid (or tissue fluid, the solution that bathes and surrounds the cells). When the music stops, everybody runs back to their cell (everyone has their own safe place which is only theirs) and the last one in is ‘out’. Those that are out then become the lymph system, the ones who guard the cells.

Before we played the game, we resourced in his playfulness where he could express and find a playful way to integrate and feel his strength of being a winner, not a loser, and to shift consciously to something new. By actually winning the game (with our own flexible rules) the whole group acknowledged and included him as a ‘winner’. Being successful in moving in and out of his once unfriendly and dangerous cells reprogrammed a previously unconscious belief.

Something reconnected in his system while he was playing; he described it as “the lightness of being.” Then there was very soft moving inside the cells, in and out of their membranes, very slowly. What I had understood and what Bruce Lipton writes in The Biology of Belief, The Psychology of Change, moving through membranes is where transformation happens. As he was carefully becoming more familiar and comfortable, another cell came in touch with his membrane. Their membranes stayed connected and the other membrane (another participant) held his hand and supported him from outside as he moved back into his own cell; he had found a resourceful, supportive link while staying connected and moving into his own space. After that he was even more comfortable in his cell which helped him feel more at home with himself.

A link person can provide a missing safe prop that we need on the outside to support us to establish and reconnect with our own safety and self-regulation. In the embryology work it is known that in order to grow we need support – all the way through our life. These programs are often not respected; we sometimes think we have to do it alone with effort but actually we need to be supported in order to grow.

All Sickness is Homesickness

In another healing journey of body, mind and soul I actually began as that missing link that supported the person re-establish his own way to self-regulate for himself and return to being healthy and whole.There is a saying, ‘All Sickness is Homesickness’. So in this case, the symptom named itself as Parkinson’s and signaled the direction to return home…wholeness, health and holy – all words come from the same root or source.

We met when he participated in a group called ‘Step by Step Dancing Now’. At the end of the weekend he came up to me and said, “Thank you for teaching a robot how to dance.” He appeared locked in, peering through playful eyes; a knight in shiny armour searching for his heart. On his healing journey home we explored cellular exploration through somatic integrated movement and touch, relaxation, meditation, psychosomatics and reestablishing innate embodied resources.

We gently worked with moving in and out of the cells’ membranes with new programs. We continued during the next months exploring the psychosomatic explorations and educating the body how it could move in new ways, sensing itself moving consciously and safely again. We oiled his joints (addressing the mechanical language) through remembering how movements felt that had been locked in his frozen body; that is, we re-educated sensation perception. Peter Levine says in The Unspoken Voice that sensations are channeled via nerve impulses from different receptors in the body to the brain through kinaesthesia, proprioception, vestibular and visceral awareness. This means re-informing the body-mind system of new choices and possibilities of healthy movement and behaviour

Sometimes I would move his body and other times he moved very, very slowly while watching the sensations in his body. We always had our cellular consciousness practice as the basis of support, the navigator. Important is that it’s not the technique, it’s the response and observing passively the healing clues and accessing whatever the cells reveal in the orientation on taking care of health, rather than taking care of sickness. Programs revealed gave us clues in which direction to move by simply just giving them space.

His mother had tied him to the bed as a child because she thought it would protect him; she didn’t want him to die of a cot death. Hence, he had a program in his nervous system labeled “I have to make a lot of effort to survive.” With his nervous system continuously in stress he became a race car driver to be able to feel his life source. It was during races that he could feel he was alive. In one session we worked with hands-on touching his cells, and we could actually perceive how he was stuck in the cells, there was no movement through the membranes, they were frozen. Parkinson’s is freezing, rigid. Holding in the cell the belief “I have to make an effort to keep it together or hold it rigid to survive,” actually results in a tremendous effort of will to survive.

We gently worked with moving in and out of the cells with a new program. We got very far in the work and eventually needed a doctor to regulate the dopamine levels in his body. After finding a holistic doctor who could support this as well as a change in his diet, his healing accelerated in a relatively short time. In the meantime during our sessions he could consciously enter his nervous system, travel through organs, bones, carrying CSF (carrying new life source).

Humour was a very important ingredient in his healing journey. It was fun and a joy to discover which programs were affecting what – and as ’spiritual body detectives’ we got hunches about what needed to be looked at, often to find the medical system would then back this up – and that was exactly what we would be then clearing and re-patterning. It was magic, just magic.

The Taxi Service

The fascination is now that the unknown is now becoming knowable! Another client, a woman and osteopath, had too much bleeding as her symptom of sickness calling her home. When we connected with her cells through touch, she could verbally express what she was perceiving; a dialogue through hands-on. We were exploring the cells and I said I felt that information was not being carried through the membrane of the cell; the taxi service is not working. In our imagination, she had to wait for a taxi to get into the cells and pick up the info from the DNA about what she needed for nourishment, and travel through the membrane and carry it to the rest of the body as health information.

We had to go back and forth through the membrane a few times till the taxi could pass through easily. We had fun finding different ways for the feel-good taxi service to deliver goodies to the rest of the body. She found out later through medical tests that the delivery service from the DNA was indeed not working well. She asked, “How the hell did you pick that up?” I answered, “Your body informed us…we just had to listen, understand and take care of its language.”

The story was that she hadn’t been allowed to be juicy as a child and teenager. This ability had been suppressed, so she prevented living and letting the juice come through until today. Imagination is a powerful tool to play with and we must trust the pictures that come up that inform us of what supports the health potency.

It is most important to know that when we discover programs, behaviour patterns, and destructive beliefs, we now have the choice and possibility to create new and healthy ways to regain and support health orientation. Resourcing on what supports healing, rather than on what is wrong or not healthy, empowers the cellular strength. The cells respond to what we take care of. By taking care of health (ease) rather than taking care of dis-ease, the cellular conscious orients on dancing with health. The body-mind system works together, so beliefs affect the body and the sense of feeling comfortable in the body affects the mind.

I have had amazing physical journeys with people, where we needed to stretch our capacity to understand the body’s unique imaginative language. The ‘spiritual body detectives’ are able to detect a language that constantly gives information – if they trust in their listening abilities

Observation is important; rather than rushing in to analyze or fix a symptom, we take time to allow it to reveal what it has to say what needs taking care of. It is important to remain present, to be able to enter without expectations and allow the dialogue to happen in the ‘here and now’.

From my healing journey after my own accident and near death experience, (see: Power of Love and the Inner Mystery School) I have the capacity to handle situations which stretch very far and I can hold the space for people to go wherever they need to go for healing.

Selected quotes on this issue: The sages speak on the Forgotten Language

A sannyasin since Pune 1 days, Australian-born Navanita has always been a very active person, from being a sprinting champion to teaching somatic movement, dance, stretching classes, and ‘Divine Dancing Drunkards’ meditation among several others. After being severely injured in a bus accident in India in 1994, she took her ‘Talking to the Body’ practices and embarked on her own healing journey which ultimately led her to the present work she teaches – healing on a cellular level.

Navanita is starting a new five-part experiental seminar and training ‘Natural Dance and Somatic Movement Experiential Seminar and Training’ at Uta in Cologne this week; each one of the parts is independent yet at the same time sequentially interconnected. The entire training will be given during the course of one year. www.navanita.net

Photos by Ma Prabhu Damini
Bhagawati for Osho News