Author: janapanter

My first client of the year had just arrived, and we were checking in. As she talked about the holiday visits with her family , and her goals for the new year she’s thinking more and talking slower. “I’m stuck,” she said concluded. Taking the time to contemplate awakened her to the ways her life felt stuck. She said something about 2020, but she paused in the middle, more like 20…20, and I thought about having 2020 vision.

As she lay on the table and I grounded myself before connecting with her I thought about being stuck. After all, stuck is something we all feel at times.

Once we connected I had an epiphany about being stuck.

We don’t always get stuck because we don’t have options, or even because we don’t know what those options are. Sometimes we get stuck because none of those options feel forward. Or, perhaps more accurately, they feel like they are going to take more energy, more work, than the problems they’ll solve. It’s a caloric equation, where energy input exceeds energy gained.

As these thoughts roamed through my head, I felt her Being soften and the blockage released. Her energy flowed fresh and vibrant.

My goal for 2020 is Clear Vision. I want solutions to be effective, easy and graceful. To lighten our loads. For my clients, and myself, I’m seeking solutions that have a positive caloric equation.

Thank you

My client is a young woman, who has lots of stress partially from high expectations of herself. In this session, through my hands, I have an image of her throwing herself around a small padded room, as if possessed. Slamming her body into walls, landing at odd angles. She doesn’t want to be flung around the room, or at least most of her doesn’t, yet she can’t help herself. I think about how much we all do it. We set unreachable goals then wear out our bodies and spirits trying to achieve them.

My first thought is to suggest let it go, but a recent interaction with let it go, prevents me from recommending that little gem. I’d hurt my shoulder and had been instructed not to raise my arm over shoulder height. And there was this perfect pear on the pear tree just slightly too high. If I raised my arm a bit higher I could reach it. I imaged the pear’s sweetness, juice dripping down my chin. But I could reinjure the muscles, setting back my recovery. Let it go, I told myself, let it go. Turns out let it go isn’t a comfort—it’s . . . it’s . . . aggravating.

I apologize, sincerely, if I ever said let it go to you.

Meanwhile, my client is still on the table. In my mind’s eye flinging herself every which way, exhausting and hurting herself. I ask her inner wisdom for advice and take a deep breath.

An image comes to mind; She’s waltzing gracefully around a large ballroom. The melody is rich and eloquent. I watch for a moment as she glides along, the graceful pace enabling all her muscles working in perfect affinity. Every cell is breathing and there is spaciousness and flow throughout her entire being. A new phrase comes to mind; slow it down.

The session ends, and she gets off the table, her face brighter, her body relaxed. I share the waltzing image with her and she loves it. In subsequent sessions, she mentions how the waltzing image, the idea of slow it down, helps her to set priorities and attainable goals, keeping herself happily prolific.

We all have moments where it’s too much—the responsibilities and expectations of our lives push us beyond our most effective and joyful productivity. We get crabby, cycling into increasingly bad decisions causing even more frustration and blunders. Can we steal a moment to go waltzing around the room, a moment to slow it down?

Thank you

I’m proud to say that my manuscript, What If You Could? Diving Deep Into The Healing Waters Of Craniosacral Therapy, is done!!!

Like most worthwhile things in life, I found writing a book was much harder/more wonderful than I anticipated.It drove me crazy sometimes; searching for the right words only to realize that it wasn’t the words that were wrong, it was the concept. Hunched over the computer, ensuring everything was eloquent, or at least clear. Sometimes it felt like a school kid’s nightmare—stuck in the windowless room on detention when all my friends are outside playing. One day I lost track of time, rushed out the door, sat down at an important meeting and realized I was wearing two different types of shoes.

Then there’s the rewrites. Ernest Hemingway said you should write drunk and edit sober, but I like writing far more than editing—can I write sober and edit drunk?
 On the other hand, I feel blessed to believe in something so deeply. While the writing process has had its high and low-tides, my confidence in Craniosacral Therapy and the importance of book never wavered. I’m grateful to have the time and resources to spend writing a book. I’ve grown in so many ways, including becoming a more consistent and clearer thinker. I’ve found oceans of support from all sorts of people: my husband and kids (including both JTs), friends, clients, colleagues, and people far-flung that I’m unlikely to ever meet.

Writing this book, all that has and will come from the process, is an opportunity to practice one of my Eternal, Infernal goals: to face life’s challenges with humor and grace. A chance to practice accepting my shortcomings with self-compassion and to move forward through them. It’s shown me that perhaps I have more grit, more backbone, than I realized. I am trying to make the world a better place. It feels courageous.

Via client sessions, anecdotes, essays, and a few fables What If You Could explores Cranial, and reveals its amazing healing power. Yesterday, for the first time, I sent out the book proposal to a literary agent. Exciting things ahead!

Thank you

A client sent me a thank you card after a particularly helpful session. The card had this amazing feather on the cover so I asked her if I could post it on my blog. Her consent email included this story…

I was in the woods with who I thought was the mama owl. I spent a lot of time with her that spring and summer as I had just had to close my LMP practice due to hand surgery. My daughter was off to college and I was not sure what direction I wanted to go. I used to talk to this owl and ask her how on earth she could keep having two or three owlets and care for them so deeply and intensely and then they flew off into their own life after a few months?!!

One day she was on a branch not 10 feet away and above me. She was preening her chest feathers and this fell out! I held out my hand and it floated down into my palm! She had two babies that year and I would like to think that is why she had two hearts on that feather!!

Marilyn Aron

I am so  grateful to my clients for their trust, insight and wisdom.

Thank you

If you live in Seattle the ability to appreciate the rain sure is convenient…

The session started fine. My client came in, we talked, she lay down on the table and waited for me to place my hands on her. I took a few deep breaths and waited for the usual sense of quiet focus to come. Instead I felt twitchy and ungrounded. Searching for something to help me center, I noticed it was still pouring outside. The roof/ceiling in my office is flat and not-insulated. We could hear the rain perfectly. I closed my eyes and immersed myself in the sound of the rain. I felt the water gently falling and flowing on me, then running down through me like a river, running deep into the earth to ground me. Grateful to be able to center, grateful for the rain and my steady breath, I rested my hands on her shins and began.

Thank you

Monty usually comes in about once a month, though lately its been more frequently. He has been going through some really rough times, his parents are both sick, his dad terminal. About a month ago Monty was having back pain but we have worked on that and it is much better now. He came in today and talked about how his dad’s health is declining, not much time left. It is clear Monty wants to cry but is also fighting it. I encourage him to let it out (meaning cry) but I know from the past that he won’t.

As he lays on the table and I am holding his diaphragm (in the middle of his chest) I feel him releasing tension, grief and sorrow. Then it strikes me, he is letting it out. He is coming here to let it out, that’s exactly what he is doing on the table. Since he can’t let go with tears or words the release he gets on treatment table time is that much more important. It is his outlet. Sometimes sessions are about getting in touch with the grief, and once a person is able to do that they can go home and have a good cry, letting the grief out on their own. Some people aren’t able to do that.

I suppose the sessions act as a faucet: opening to let the grief, anxiety, anger and sorrow flow out. Monty won’t cry in front of his mom because he feels she is maxed out on her own health issues and her concern for her husband, Monty’s father. So he comes here to drain off some of the grief. As the load lightens he gains clarity and strength.

Thanks

He (or she) flew from tree to tree following the pups and I on our early morning walk today. I wonder how often I would see him if I looked up more?

Thanks

Sofia has been coming in for about three years, every two months or so. Occasionally she has physical aches and pains, but most sessions are preventative, to help maintain good mental health. Sofia is one of those people who deals with her difficult childhood by being relentlessly optimistic. Like the character Rob Lowe played on the tv show parks and rec, though I never seen Sofia do celebratory lunges.

When she came in the other day she seemed especially happy; feeling healthy, work and home were going well, and her daughter just got into her preferred college. When I came onto her system I felt nothing at first, as if her system were too fatigued to even acknowledge my presence. Then a flash of anger at me which quickly shifted to some deep sadness. Throughout this my hands rested lightly on her feet, then I went underneath her sacrum and the back of her head. I held her without judgement, simply observing the sequence of emotions. As the sadness faded her system began to feel more energetic, her flow feeling more vibrant.

She got up off from the treatment table and we moved back to the chairs. She asked me what I felt. I described the sadness and asked if she knew what it was about.

Oh yes.” She said quickly. “my cat just died.” I wondered why she hadn’t said anything at check-in but it did explain the sadness. I asked if she had been close to her cat and she described the love and devotion she felt to her cat and how he had been a comfort for her through some rough times. She said had tried talking to her friends about her grief, but they seemed uncomfortable with this relentlessly optimistic person being sad, so they quickly changed the subject.

With the information about her cat dying I could look back at the table time and understand what happened: at first her system was reluctant to share (the sense of nothingness or fatigue), then she feared I would ignore or judge her grief or so became defensive and angry. Once she felt confident I understood the importance of her feelings of loss her system was able to move forward. The flood gates opened and the true feelings, the grief, arose.

This doesn’t mean she wasn’t still sad about losing the cat, nor should it. At the end of our session she was very grateful. She felt heard and respected, and that felt much better.

Thanks

Years ago I arrived at my therapist’s office a bit early. It was cold outside so I waited in the hallway to her home, far away from the therapy room. After our session she informed me that from then on I was to please not come inside until my appointment time, not pull my car into the parking lot till the person before me had left. She wanted her patients to have their privacy. On one hand, I understood—no one wants to be “outed” for seeking help without their permission. On the other hand—was it bad to seek help working through our issues? Were we supposed to feel embarrassed and to skulk around? To not smile or at least nod if we happened to cross paths? This predicament, privacy v. publicly, was irrelevant for my old office. It had a secluded entrance and, since I scheduled time between sessions to write my chart notes, clients rarely crossed paths. Then my lease expired and I had to move. Suddenly, as I looked at possible offices, the privacy v. publicly issue wasn’t irrelevant anymore.

 As I was looking for a new space, coincidentally, so was my Pilates teacher. For years we had discussed how sharing a space would mutually support our complementary practices and our clients. This was the opportunity to find a space together. Now we’ve been in the new space for a year.

My office is in a private treatment room in a corner of her Pilates studio. While the Craniosacral sessions remain private, my clients may walk past Pilates in progress, single and/or group sessions and may see and be seen by other people. I also practice Pilates at the studio. People may see me clumsy and struggling to follow the should-be-graceful movements of Pilates. I may even be in a Pilates class with a cranial client of mine. Part of me is embarrassed and wishes I could skulk away. But I strive to hold my head up proudly while practicing Pilates. It is only through practicing Pilates that I will improve. I believe being open and accepting our own flaws is an essential step to growing through them.

Whether you believe we are all imperfect beings, or all perfect as we are—we’re all in the same boat (love those water analogies). We all have our strengths, failings, flashes of ugly and moments of beauty and compassion. Letting go of judgement frees up vast caches of energy. Accepting imperfections; our own and other people’s gives us the space and the grace to experiment and explore our own unique way forward. The irony! Exposing our imperfections opens the path to better mental, physical and spiritual health.

Thank you

I woke during the middle of the night a few weeks ago, listening to the beeps and swishes of the ICU machines, our second night in the hospital. I wanted to weep with gratitude for those machines that were taking care of my son. The day before started at dawn, with my wonderful, obnoxious son cracking jokes as he drove us to the health clinic for his tonsillectomy. By that evening he was drifting between incoherent and unconscious, an adverse reaction to the post-tonsillectomy prescription painkillers. 

The ICU machines were the latest of the rapidly growing list of things I was grateful for: prompt paramedics, a speedy ambulance, and medicine to calm his frantic, frenetic behavior. But without a doubt, the most amazing aspect were the emergency room nurses. 

In my cranial practice, when a new client comes in, we follow the basic rules of social etiquette. They arrive at my office and politely, sometimes even pleasantly, discuss their health problems and the concerns that lie within their hearts. As we review their health history, I strive to find some pathway to connect with them; such as books, dogs or kids. This connection helps them relax and me gain perspective on their issues. Since cranial sessions are collaborative between the practitioner and the client, this connection facilitates our teamwork. Having a good connection as we begin is like having a delicious slice of cake after a good meal—not essential, but a lovely bonus. 

That first night in the emergency room, the patient those nurses cared for, my son, was either unconscious, thrashing around, or needing the sheets changed, again and again. The nurses were gentle and reassuring, especially impressive considering they were racing from room to room to care for too many patients. They didn’t have the luxury of connection while they worked, as compassionate by the end of the night as they had been at the beginning. 

I am grateful for many things from that hospital stay: things returned and things anew. I am grateful for the return of my son back to his wonderful, obnoxious self. I hold a renewed reverence for my clients; their courage at confronting their issues. And I have gained a new appreciation of the work of a nurse; the compassion they show for someone under duress, unknowable but still demanding. I admire their stamina and their skill. I am grateful for their hearts. 

Thank you