Somato Respiratory Integration
– Stage One Stories
Shorter stories – Healing, Sports, & Public Presentation:
Healing:
Rebecca could hardly move. Not even lying there in bed on her back. Every time she felt the need to roll on to her side, she was gripped by a stabbing pain in her mid-back, hollering and gasping for breath like she was literally being stabbed.
“Oh my God! How can I be reacting this way? What is going on here? So many painful moments in my life, even giving birth at home to the midwife’s astonishment of how well I moved through it all. How can it be that this pain feels like an all-out attack each time I move?” Rebecca recalled her mother groaning in pain on her death bed for years. “Oh God, what would happen if this was how I’m going to go, totally depending on my kids?”
With plenty of time to reflect on the what if’s, after surrendering to whatever could be the worst situations she could come up with, that she would never want to face, a deep sense of peace came over her. After that, when she did roll on to her side, still so much pain, but her reaction a little softer each time. “Whew! At least this crisis is starting to move in the right direction.” And so it did come to pass.
A sense of helplessness, perhaps only spanning a brief second, characteristically commences the stage one connection, as in “Oh God!”
A sustainable healing resolution happens incrementally, one step at a time. For this reason, culturing that sense of knowingness about when you’re moving in the right direction is vitally important. The most reliable compass is a growing sense of peace with whatever is at hand. A decrease of pain is not the most reliable barometer, since more comfort can often be a temporary result of avoiding what must eventually be resolved.
Sports:
Robert, feeling the pressure of winning the most important long-distance competition for the scholarship he knew his parents were hoping for, discovered “the zone” once he accepted that he could live with himself, win or lose, realizing all he could do was give it his best shot.
Oftentimes, there may have to be more than a few stage one connections before we reach our goal. When Russian pair skater Marinin dropped Totmianina on the ice headfirst in the 2004 Skate America contest, it was Marinin who took much longer to recover – from the anxiety of lifting her again. No doubt, Marinin’s healing involved many of the 12 stages. Stage one whenever acknowledging and then accepting more of the details about what happened, his participation in the accident, and perhaps how things could have been done differently if given the chance again. They then took several impressive wins in 2005, as well as the Olympic gold in 2006.
Public Presentation:
At the beginning of her talk, Jane felt there was nothing she could do but admit to being a nervous wreck. The audience responded with compassionate understanding, and she breathed a sigh of relief. From that moment on, everything felt energizing and effortless at the same time.