Healing trauma manifests in miraculous physical changes.
The woman stands up excitedly and exclaims, "Guys, I can see my feet!" Her face gleams in pleasure and her short curls bounce as she jumps up and down in awe.
This beautiful client, of an age I hadn't asked, but who could be anywhere from the late-30s to the late-50s, had completed a 45-minute healing session with me the night before during a Park City "Embody Wellness” retreat. I had presented my Kiss F8 Method for the first time, and had conducted ten private one-on-one sessions with women like Alice* in the privacy of my room in this large cabin nestled in the mountains.
Frost had laid itself in repose on the golf course out back, settling in for the long winter. It glistened that morning when we had woken up, but the shine on this woman's face made it pale in comparison.
"I haven't been able to see my feet in decades! It's like my stomach shrunk overnight!"
Most believe health is exercising more and eating less. But what if the key was focusing on healing the mind, and true, vibrant health would effortlessly follow?
Over the last 5 years I've religiously followed The Work by Byron Katie. Facilitated by Kathryn Dixon, Clarity Coach and Founder of the Clarity Coaching Institute, I've sat on a couch and wept for two-hour sessions weekly, bi-weekly, and later, monthly or more sporadically, while also practicing on myself via written, solo sessions.
Nothing else I've ever done has made such an impact on my mental health, and, as an instant by product, healed my body and soul in unprecedented ways. It has truly been the greatest gift. And I thank Kathryn and the incredible Byron Katie for their blissful, enlightening healing.
The Work by Byron Katie
Byron Katie was a woman, mother and wife who was so depressed, and living in a place of self-loathing, that she was physically incapable of functioning, taking care of her children, her home, or working. Her family didn't know how to help this woman they saw wasting away in her own painful thoughts, and so they checked her into the only place they thought could help her, and the only one they could afford: a halfway house not far from skid row.
One night, Byron, who slept on the reed mat in the attic upstairs for months, was awakened by a cockroach crawling on her. And then she started to laugh.
The medical establishment would say she had had a psychiatric break. A nervous breakdown. A manic episode.
But I simply say she had an awakening. Not a breakdown, but a breakthrough. And her followers would gratefully agree.
Byron Katie is probably one of the most enlightened women to ever grace this earth. And next to people like Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna, she has helped more people awaken to their divine light than probably anyone.
She is true divinity.
But she wouldn't say so. Humble and capricious, she lights up the room. But at the time of her awakening, her ego had collapsed so entirely, she couldn't tell you her name, or where she lived, or who she had been.
She was a pure tabula rasa, an infant reborn.
"Where are my people," she asked her family upon her miraculous awakening, and their hearts must have broken because they didn't (yet) understand. She then walked out the door, and onto skid row, where she spent the next weeks among those deemed "schizophrenic," but I propose that she felt were the ones who truly saw.
A shaman once went into a psychiatric ward of a modern hospital and wept for what he saw as the world's most awakened "healers" being locked up, mistreated, and, worse, unheard. But Katie heard them, and listened.
Over the next years, Byron Katie's daughter helped put her back together so she could function in this world. And Katie created a method so simple, it has now helped millions.
Based on four simple questions in a mindful, cognitive-therapy based meditation that also has components of emotional release and positive replacement, The Work is a true miracle. I can attest. It has pulled me out of some deeply intense "dark nights of the soul." And, along with the right supplementation, has healed me from falling into my deepest depressions.
A 2015 study of the benefits of her method found participants enrolled in a 9-day School for The Work experienced significant positive changes after the course, as well as in the six-month follow up, in comparison to the baseline group.
Depression all but disappeared, happiness increased, and people felt their quality of life had improved. Anger and anxiety fell.
And it is this simple “Inquiry-Based Stress Reduction” method I've used on countless others to have just as transformation and profound impacts.
“Current depression treatments have limited efficacy and come with many side effects. Our ongoing research suggests that The Work of Byron Katie is much more powerful. Depression affects over 300 million individuals worldwide.“ - Stanford Medicine
Alice, for instance, was able to heal a wound so dark and so deep, it went back to her being 17 years old and losing her virginity via rape. For the last 3+ decades, the trauma that hadn’t been processed and released manifested in all sorts of female health problems, including painful pregnancy, excruciating childbirth, a hysterectomy, and a numbness in her womb that she filled with food. Her womb became engorged with unprocessed emotion, but after a 45-minute session of my own approach based on Byron’s The Work, was so miraculously healed, her stomach visibly shrunk the next day.
“I would’ve saved thousands of dollars in therapy and decades of suffering if I had met you earlier,” she exclaimed, hugging me after her session.
I begin each healing session with my clients in a meditative descent into our root. I lead them from their crown and 3rd eye chakras down, down, down until their center of consciousness lands at the very base of who they are, on top of the perineum. It is a method I've modified but first learned over a two-day workshop with Philip Shepherd, author of a transformational tomb of a book called New Self, New World.
But Alice got stuck in what I always refer to in all my clients, whether male or female, as "the womb," the cavernous sacral chakra from where we create -- life, babies, art, whatever lights your soul on fire. Once we pinpointed her qualms with my verbiage, I asked her to identify a sentence from that space that gives her pain.
"I am less feminine, and less creative, without my womb." She had said, tearing up. But then, through the four questions, and the corresponding turnarounds, we processed, together, that deep, dark trauma of her childhood, and released.
"How long have I given him permission to be in me?" She had screamed at the mirage of a man who had stolen her childhood, and at the corresponding trauma that robbed her of her embodiment. And then she laughed ... and laughed, and laughed.
The next day she even seemed more feminine, and the happiness she felt inside was manifest in a glowing, beautiful and bright face and an even brighter energy.
"What if you are more creative because you don't have a womb? Because you have all this space that in the rest of us women is filled with organs we don't use all that much?" I had asked her in the turnaround section of The Work inquiry.
"Yes! I feel that!" She put her hands on her belly in joy. "It is a cavern of creativity!"
"What color is it?" I asked her.
"It's filled with crystals and gems. Blues and purples and reds. It's so beautiful," she said, eyes glistening.
Yes, we had wept together, and laughed together, and now we were sisters, forever bonded by the emotional experienced we had both shared. And all I had done was ask the questions. She had done the rest, answering them with such honesty, and opening herself to such deep processing of emotion, release was pure rapture.
Her awakening to the true essence of who she was was a glorious sight to behold.
So this is why in my Kiss F8 Formula, I believe “Face & Feel” is the most profound way to attain full mind, body, and spirit health. It is the quickest method to feeling better. And once your body is no longer holding on to trauma, it is free to heal itself.
In my three-month one-on-one coaching makeovers, I lead my clients in intimate weekly sessions on whatever is bothering them. We process childhood trauma and that stemming from the present day. We cry, then we laugh. We hug. We heal.
Lacrotherapy, or crying for release, is profoundly transformative. Crying is a self-soothing mechanism which activated the para-sympathetic nervous system and helps us relax. It releases oxytocin and endorphins that release pain. It lifts spirits and helps us feel better. It releases toxins and stress and helps us sleep. It even fights bacteria and improves vision!
I’ve trained myself to cry deeply while doing the work. It is my place to release the wounds the world so often inflicts on me. And in my sessions, I encourage my clients to feel -- to truly feel -- and it is transformational.
The best way out is through.
To truly recover from trauma we must sit with our pain. We must face whatever is clawing at us: that thing we run from, ignore, suppress and distract with Netflix or food binges, or the gin and tonics we have every night.
And just as a massage therapist receives as much benefit from touching as the person being touched, I come away from our sessions transformed and profoundly healed. I also change, because it’s an inevitable byproduct of seeing you wake up to your divinity. I see the light descend on you like an angel from heaven, a spotlight turns on, and you shine. And your light transforms me. Our light transforms us.
So, I thank you, dear client, for your profound impact in my life. And I invite you to say yes to the god within.
Let us work together to polish your shine, and sweep away the debris shrouding what is already there.
I can’t wait to cry with you. I can’t way to laugh with you. Let us embrace our Kiss F8. Let us face, feel, and be vibrant.
With love and gratitude,
Kisses
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