The Village: Healing Group

The Concept: Coaching people into their own awareness and healing patterns.

The Goal: to help people realize their potential, and heal any and all places of their lives.

The Struggle: This touches on all levels of healing, which taps into all levels of wounds.

How to convey? This is the ultimate struggle. There is a lot to express and teach when it comes to; learning about our anatomy, our health, investing into self care, how we think about ourselves and how it effects our body and movements and actions and inaction. The entire purpose is to reroute the system you’ve known and told yourself, to reinforce your integrity until you are living your truths. No longer lying to yourself about the dreams you’ll never achieve, but being totally honest to yourself.

“Being honest to oneself is the hardest thing anyone will ever do.” - Bruce Lee (Jun Fan)

Things we need to understand in order to develop the proper balance with movement and relaxation, pushing harder when you need to versus resting and how to get there.

The Nervous System: I consider the spine an organ, because it houses the center of our nervous system. Not just in its ability to store pain as information packaged in the body, we can also learn to unwind it.

What makes this modality of effort become fruitful, is to allow and invite new energy to come in. Call it light, love, whatever. Usually these things are correlated with memory, so you need to not just unroot the bad or painful memories and their narrative, but also to allow room to recreate new memories to take place and invite that energy by allowing the change to happen within you. It’s not about finding a memory you don’t have, its more about allowing change to occur by not agreeing to the story we’ve been told, and have been reinforcing in our internal dialogue possibly our whole life.

Parasympathetic vs Sympathetic. Anger. Love. Sex. Relaxation. Activity.

How hormones work, what it means to increase or activate endorphins or serotonin or melatonin, gaba, etc. How diet and thought patterns influence this, and how to reprogram how you feel and think, changes how you act and create boundaries to avoid further wounding to occur. In my mind, I see it as using martial arts as how I understand martial arts into every aspect of life. To me its never about fighting, it’s learning to become fused with or, redirect/redeploy energy. To heal, grow, or protect yourself.

Dance, move, learn to free yourself by being the weirdo!

Next would be Pain. Which is likely the biggest topic. What pain is for everyone is a different story, but one we can all participate… I’d be shocked otherwise. Something I’ve been learning about in my recent work outs, is the rehab work in healing old injuries to improve function, energy, movement, feeling, esteem, range of motion and quality of strength.

Identifying weakness, it is not about a lack of strength in the whole system, that is a defeated way to approach any circumstance which relates closer to doubt than reality. Chronic pain is a response that relates more to the habit loop of cue, routine, reward. In order to unwind the potential energy of chronic pain, it must be approached in a long term, big picture way of understanding. Because as you release one pain, you will find others, which is the GOAL!!!

We want to identify the next and go down the ladder to minimize the occupation of overload/stress/pain in our total system. As we unwind our physical pain, the other pains in our life will also fall into the present experience on their own time, when those traumas feel the space and comfort to be allowed in, present, and vulnerable. And most of the time, if we are gentle to the experience, it will pass like the wind. And sometimes, it takes a more guided meditation or facilitation from someone else to guide the energy to move.

There are many tools other people have, that we cannot find simply on our own. I believe wholly in the collective conscious and being able to find all the information we need available in that moment. But, I also believe that we cannot know ourselves without relating to others. “It takes a Village.” And again, taking from Bruce Lee’s philosophy – “Relationship is understanding. It is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself – to be is to be related.” – Bruce Lee. We need others to help push us outside our comfort zone, or on the contrary, we sometimes need someone else to create a zone of security that we have been unable to achieve in ourselves on our own.

Knowing Pain, Strain, Soreness, Growth, Damage, Rebuilding, Reshaping our Form, etc. the transformation is rarely if at all, a pain free process.

I’m not saying you’re going to get hurt more, it is possible if you don’t know your own boundaries and limitations, this is why this coaching process is vital. Learning how to respect the body in order to enhance it is the entire focus of this curriculum. What I’m saying, is to accept that you will feel pain upon the process of letting it go.

It is similar to PTSD in that regard, but in various doses. Meaning that you will end up remembering or going through a familiar state which you’ve been avoiding, in order to return to a state of “homeostasis” or origin. (We will avoid the term normal at all costs.) As we make a new ‘normal’, by understanding that nothing is ‘normal’. The definition of normal accosts everyone as we grow up, and creates a system of judgment, and again, we are here to not demonize our tools.

Judgment is needed and vital to this experience, and needs redirection and patience and often times sweetness to bolster others and guide them to understand their weaknesses before they become exploited. Exploiting or exposing someone else's weakness, even if it is known to them. What they need is what to do about it, and if judged, they then know to feel insecure, which is damaging.

Instead, I’m inviting the aspect of movement to teach what weakness feels like, and when to push harder to feel good about it. When the system balances through the weaknesses after a long-term effort, and change is accomplished, it facilitates the person healing to do the exploiting on their own, and we can then later laugh together at the past. In a sense of gratitude, that there is relationship, connection, trust, and growth. Not laughing because that persons shape or form was despicable, and its not something to fixate on either. Focus on the now, and how even subtle guidance can make drastic changes in how someone feels when doing a particular movement that is difficult and new.

Next is understanding the Feminine and Masculine energies as a modality to teach introspection and relationship within self. Example, feminine heals through touch, masculine heals through presence and awareness. To heal, to coach and teach, there must be a balance of knowing when either or both are available to be present.

For a lot of people, the exposure of being seen may be too much. The fact they showed up may not be enough for them to know what they have to do, or what they set themselves up for. So presence will need to be a gentle touch, but perhaps they don’t want to be touched either. So awareness then, is more about learning how to communicate to someone’s learning style than their traumas. We are all unique puzzles, and it’s important to start as gently as possible. Let us help people ease into this controlled struggle and strife for increased effort, for patterns that influence momentum in our life, instead of falling into ruts of comfort that keep us dissatisfied.

Introspection – this is the ‘how’ we talk to ourselves. What, isn’t always in our control. Sometimes its just noise for people, awful scenarios that trigger us internally that aren't meant to hold the stage in our mind, or they are very deliberate and critical, or some people have a quiet but busy highway of information colliding and rerouting all the time: Thinking they are busy, even when they are doing nothing.

I think we all have moments of any of these traits and more, because the mind is insatiable and has the power to reach any and all corners if allowed… which can mean more harm than good. Which is why Introspection needs to be part of the coaching. We need to learn ‘how’ to talk to ourselves, by learning how we learn. Once we know what’s softest in our learning patterns, we can learn to put more conscious effort into it, like we do with weaknesses in the body.

If we know the dominant way of how we learn, Visual, Auditory, or Kinesthetic: We then know directly how to process any and all information, and what we may have a tendency to miss or leave out when ‘hearing’ or ‘listening’. Example, I have a hard time understanding step by step instructions, and need steps within a single step sometimes to truly grasp what I’m trying to do. And it’s not just cause I question everything, it’s because I have to make it my own before I can confidently approach the task in my own way at my own pace.

Further into the discussion is going to be breaking down the stages of the bulk of targeted classes and focus.

Rehab – being the biggest learning curve and start of the program, because the need to fill the holes of information our parents and teachers never gave us, can be paramount.

This will go into the vast topic of Self-Care and discipline, creating boundaries, and will more likely than not, require a therapist that fits for you. This part will be very physical, but it will also open up a lot of emotional and mental restraints and people could possibly react as if being attacked. This is not the intention.

We want to avoid this, by offering tools, that may feel harsh in the moment, but if allowed in and owned by the person experiencing their internal struggles all at once. People also need space to grown, and if they find themselves on the other side of the struggle by their own means, then they will find gratitude, hopefully for themselves in learning how to use the tool. And then come back for more, so that we can regroup and go further into the curriculum.

Balance – Which means learning how to target weakness, and respect our strength. It means knowing when to heal and rest, and how to heal with movement, when to push further and in what way. And not causing a new injury just because you’re in a rush, or because you’ve created a timeline to meet a certain goal. The body has its limitations, and the mind needs to respect it. The mind wants the quick fix, but the body wants long term practice in order to digest and integrate the transformations being presented to it. It could lead to injury or sickness if pressed too hard, which is counter productive to state the obvious.

Stabilizing and reinforcing – this comes before balance, but is mentioned after, because balancing is the art to stabilizing. Stabilizing in this class, is more about finding your zones of strength, and how long you can hold a position, and create ease. The less difficult any task, motion or stillness becomes, the stronger we become. Regardless of how much weight you can move, or how fast you can run, or how hard you can hit. If you have timing, precision, and awareness, that’s more than half the battle. The rest, is conditioning yourself to reinforce that, which is why I’m calling it, Stabilizing.

Strength Training - Taking the flow from the previous class, this is about how to really push yourself, now that you have all the tools, know your limits, and have created a foundation of security in your total being, to then expand and grow the amount of energy you can use in a single movement.

Which also means, that relaxation, or allowing energy in, is an extremely vital focus in this course. Because even as you're running, if you’re going long term, and or in a race, you’re saving your reserves of explosive power for the end, and you want your body to make it through without injury. Which means you’re focus, in training would be finding strength with endurance and stamina. But in competition, your state of mind will need to be slow and steady, be swift, be fluid, control your breathing, and be steady in your pace. It will allow your whole system to warm up, and stay warm, until you need to burst in a final blitz of power.

How long that blitz can last, will be up to the conditioning you are willing to endure to get there. Which is why this aspect is focused on strength training, because you know how to keep things balanced even as you hone in on a special skillset. Be it running, fighting, swimming, dancing, singing, etc. any action can become an art, it is an exercise of total will.

Even painters and artists will face this struggle, endurance is also about their posture, not just their will to keep doing what they’re doing. What if they are in pain while painting? Their breathing will change, and perhaps even their focus won’t be as wholesome as it was when they started. If they are relaxed and comfortable, and allowing the effort to flow through their movements, ease is found in the release of the action like its meant to be. Not a strain. If what we love becomes a strain to perform, then this becomes a need to reroute the system and rehabilitate the disfunction as its root in order to grow.

Diet - The training involved here will be targeting attention span, patience, willingness, and the open mindedness it takes to learn. So be ready to take notes for yourself. Diet is the literal fuel to allow momentum to occur.

There will be ups and downs, and the downs are the hardest to manage. The ups are unfamiliar, so it takes time to change that pattern. To make the ups familiar, and the downs easier to understand, but likely still hardest to manage. It's important to recognize old habits never die, they just don’t have to sit at the table with you while you enjoy yourself.

They have their own room, whether it’s trauma, grief, daily stresses, etc. Diet will help us have the energy and wellbeing to reinforce good patterns in, when we are facing our internal struggles and changing their faces from demons, to fluffy beasties we can rely on when we need them. Not to mention, what we eat changes how we feel, and what we do.

As organic machines, nutrients will be needed no matter what. We will need to eat more, as we use more, until we get used to it. The getting ‘used to it’ is the body’s way of acclimating to a new homeostasis. We need to each more as were transforming, because we are literally changing our shape and how we move, think, and feel in every way we can manage together, and on our own.

To conclude this Thesis: This is a Life Goal I aim to share with the world and not just a passage of ideas. It's been a study throughout my whole life, and will be part of my path in order to feel vigil upon the end of my life. In order to establish this in the ways I see it all unfolding, I'm investing my time, energy, and money into all of my passions. Funding this dream so that it sustains itself. I don't want money to limit our decisions to heal and be good to ourselves, which means I'll be doing everything I can to make this story you've read, a reality we can pull from for generations to come.

I don't want to be remembered for what I've done, I want to impact others by seeing how they manifest their own results. Knowledge doesn't belong to any one source, I just hope we pass down the art of "teaching someone to fish" instead of continuing to imprint trauma as a legacy. Cause even if a theory or tool is useful, it's important to be humble and compassionate. Not everyone wants to eat fish.