Brisbane Craniosacral Therapy

08/05/2024

❤️‍🩹

22/04/2024

What is not moving / the bit we cannot feel is often the piece that causes us grief. To encourage balance, resolution of tension and reemergence of fluidity helps underpin restoration of health.

22/04/2024

Fantastic to be able to assist people experience their spark of health again.

Five new techniques for restoring thinking and memory.

16/04/2024

A brilliant weekend spent with this amazing group. So grateful for the wisdom generously shared by Zenith. Grief opening to pure joy.

Byron Deathwalker Training #2, what a great weekend.
Byron #3, Sydney and Melbourne to come.

15/04/2024

Crystal clear ❤️‍🔥

15/04/2024

A simple reminder of The power of ritual in life 🌱

The Grief Bowl

One of the questions I am asked often, is whether I experience my own grief while watching others anticipate and go through their own. The answer is yes. I think any human being watching someone else navigate the realities of losing someone they love, feels something. Perhaps it is not always grief, however at least for me, it brings up feelings that remind me of my own personal losses.

Anytime I witness someone at the bedside of their parent, I ache a little inside. I am envious of their relationship because I didn't have that. When both of my parents died, I was across the room from them with absolutely no idea what to do, what to say, or how to feel.

When I witness someone saying goodbye to their sibling, I often struggle with holding back my tears because I am reminded repeatedly how deeply I ache from losing my sister and my brother. But the truth is, anytime I am with someone who is having to say goodbye, I feel something, and I always take it with me when I leave.

How do I process that? It has taken me some time to design a ritual that I have been able to incorporate into my daily practice of self-care, so that I too can work through whatever I feel after I see someone die.

You might have heard me talk about my grief bowl before. It has become my immediate go-to when I walk through my door at the end of a day after witnessing people saying goodbye to someone they love. Sometimes this could happen two or three times in a day, which can weigh incredibly heavy. I have learned that if I do not take the time to process it that day, the following day the weight will be heavier. This is not something you can put off for another day, that isn't healthy or productive and I learned that the hard way.

My bowl contains hearts of all different kinds, metal, glass, crystal, clay, wood, and pewter. Each one is special in that it was gifted to me. When I come home from a difficult day, I take my bowl and I empty all my hearts on the table. I think about the people I was with, the last breaths that were taken, the way it made me feel, the ache and pain I felt in the room, and I also think about the love that was felt, because in most cases it is big. I take each heart, one at a time, and I think about my lessons as well as my own emotions, and I send each person extra healing, and comfort, and I honor myself with the same, because I deserve it too and it has taken me a long time to realize that.

And if I do this, the weight is less. Self-care is mandatory, in general, but especially in the work that I do. Anyone who sits at the bedside of someone who is dying, comforts people who are saying goodbye, or holds space for anyone that might be struggling with grief, needs to be cared for well. And if you can create a routine, or a special ritual or ceremony that honors your physical and emotional reaction to loss, you will be far more able to do it again, and in my case, again, and again, and again.

For me it is my grief bowl... it is the ritual that comforts me, supports me, and allows me to do this work, day after day.

Whether you work in end-of-life care or you are trying to navigate your own loss and are grieving, please be kind to yourself. Honor your heart and your body, you deserve that tenderness.

xo
Gabby

You can find this blog here:
https://www.thehospiceheart.net/post/the-grief-bowl

01/02/2024

31/10/2023

“To carry the self forward and illuminate the myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and illuminate the self is awakening.”

Quote from the ‘Genjo Koan’, translated as ‘Actualising the Fundamental Point’ and it was written by the monk Dogen (the founder of Soto Zen in Japan) for one of his lay students in 1233.

What resonates from this passage ?
What word or phrase or picture arises from reading Dogen’s words ?
For me, an invitation to sink beneath the busy mind, dropping the analysis and diagnosis, to just simply feel.
Noticing what I’m resisting ?
Where am I not allowing or accepting ?
Christian’s might say “let go and let God”
Daoists consider The Path of the Dao.

31/10/2023

Life is such a rush array of experiences. It’s nice to take a moment to consider the potential connections in it all.

The renowned Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist, Franklyn Sills, speaks about The Experience of Stillness in his seminal book, Foundations in Craniosacral Biodynamics Volumes 1 and 2. In a state of stillness, dramatic changes can occur. When the client reaches a stillpoint in their session, the quali...

15/10/2023

Craniosacral therapy works with deep “listening” and unconditional presence to our whole Beings, the body, nervous system, organs, tissues, whatever the story. And in that non judgemental open presence with our core intelligence, amazing things have been known to unfold.

When we meet with someone who is feeling melancholic, empty, shaky, or down, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong, and that our role is to (urgently) fix the situation. To provide techniques, spiritual theories, and advice to get them out of their experience and into a different one.

It’s natural to want relief for those we care about and do whatever we can to help. We can hold a larger intention that they feel better while simultaneously staying open to the intelligence that is moving through them.

Perhaps it is something more subtle, more soulful, more holy than relief they’re longing for. And that advice, techniques, and theories are experienced by them as misattuned and yet another failure in empathy.

And then on top of the difficult emotions, they feel unseen, unheard, and alone, which is shattering. They look and cannot find the Friend, and shatter more.

There is wisdom in the images and emotions which arrive as a complex is constellated and incarnates in the body, an important dispatch from the soul serving an initiatory function beyond ordinary perception.

If we slow down, we might discover how much of our need to fix, heal, and relieve arises not from true compassion, but from an unresolved, dissociative relationship with the darkness within, from our own untended vulnerabilities and sensitivities, and spinning ghosts of our own unlived lives.

It is possible that the most skillful and kind thing we can offer the other is to sit in the charged energy with them, in that claustrophobic or restless space, and stay near; to remove the burden that they come out of their experience, “feel better,” or heal in order for us to stay close.

Perhaps they don’t need to be healed, but to be held, to be heard, and to feel felt and understood, for someone to companion them as the hidden wisdom unfolds.

To extend a soothed nervous system and a field of love in which they can meet the reality of their own heart.

And be there with them to gather the shattered pieces, collecting them into a vessel of light.