Voice Dialogue with Astra Niedra

Looking for the Self Behind the Symptom
 

Using the Conscious Body Method

by Judith Hendin PhD

Emily, the branch manager of a local bank, slunk into my office with her head pounding. “It’s been a long day, lots of pressure and decisions,” she explained. “My head throbs at the end of a day like this.”
“Something inside you is trying to get your attention,” I told her, “as if it is tugging at your shirtsleeve, saying, ‘Please come find me.’ I guarantee that whatever this ‘someone’ is, it will enrich your life and may even heal your body.”
She screwed up her eyebrows. “Shouldn’t I just take my usual pill?” “That is up to you,” I answered. “But wouldn’t you rather handle the headache without putting a chemical into your body, just using natural means?”
“What’s involved?” Emily asked.
“We’re going to assume that energy needs to shift so you feel like a different ‘you.’ Your headache might lessen or even disappear.”
I instructed Emily to lie down and relax. Then I said, “Tune into the headache, into its energy. Do you get any image or message?”
“I’m sensing something yellow. What on earth is that?”
“Your unconscious is percolating,” I answered. “Stay with the yellow and notice whatever happens next.”
“I’m feeling loose. That’s weird. I’m feeling silly and frisky.”
“Why don’t you let that energy fill your body for a moment?” I encouraged her.
“You’re kidding.”
“It was not my idea, Emily. The notion of friskiness came from your headache. Why don’t you trust your body and try it?”
“All right,” Emily said as she rose. She put her arms in the air and took a few dance-like steps side to side.
“You look a little frisky,” I said.
“Yes, I feel it,” she smiled.

For a few moments we frolicked. We grinned and laughed together. Then I asked, “How is the headache?”
“Good grief, it’s gone,” she said.

And it stayed gone for the rest of the hour. That whole process lasted five minutes. It has taken me a decade to be able to work with a symptom so succinctly and to use the same approach with any illness.

The Adventure

When a self in us is ready to be known, it leaves a trail, much as Hansel and Gretel left a trail of breadcrumbs so they could be rescued from the witch’s gingerbread house. Excluding ailments caused by environmental, nutritional, or genetic factors, behind any symptom a self is trying to be known. It is trying to get our attention. It holds great medicine. Some selves are easy to discover. An inner couch potato yearns to exist in the life of a busy executive. A playful child cavorts within the strictest schoolteacher. Common sense, or a good therapist, can pinpoint the underlying cause of many symptoms. An adventure begins when we start with a symptom, like Emily’s headache. It’s even more interesting when we look at a symptom that has no apparent cause and discover the self behind it. A mystery beckons. I have studied clients for years, gathering data on 144 symptoms they have presented. When treated through disowned selves, my results showed 63 percent of these symptoms healed and 22 percent improved.

Not a Fanatic

I’m not a fanatic. Not everything that happens to us has a deeper underlying cause. Environment, diet, lifestyle and genetics factor in, as do the activities of daily life. When I danced professionally, I received reflexology, a method of Chinese foot massage that treats points in the feet which connect, through energy lines called meridians, to every organ of the body. One day the reflexologist found a very sore spot on the ball of my foot. “If this is sore, you may have liver problems,” he said.
“Or maybe it’s sore because I’ve been jumping on it for four hours today,” I retorted.

I love and respect reflexology, but my problem that day was simpler. If you’ve been painting a ceiling and your neck hurts, there is probably no deep underlying issue there, though you could find a self that would rest more or would hire someone else to do the job. Maybe my foot was expressing someone in me that said, “Four hours of jumping? Please!”

Deep Water

The body throws us into our most immediate concerns and our most pressing issues. For Emily the immediate concern is to find a way to balance serious responsibility with buoyant playfulness. (Isn’t that true for many of us?) Her body took her right there. While gentle counseling can take us step by step till we are ready to face delicate subjects, the body throws us into our most gripping issues. Though Voice Dialogue begins with the primary selves and gradually uncovers the disowned side, the body usually takes us directly into disowned territory. (Exceptions are protectors as primary selves that emerge occasionally.) When we swim with the body, there is no shallow water.

Facilitating the Self Behind the Symptom

Conscious Body and The Self Behind the Symptom offer a sophisticated map of the body-psyche terrain. Elements of this map can occur in any order, but they do occur like clockwork. Here are some of the components: We talk to the Rational Mind and allow it to report the history of the symptom and medical treatments. The Psychological Knower offers its conjectures about inner causation of the symptom – how convincing these guesses can sound! We then speak with the Gatekeeper of the body-psyche, the part that does not want to do this process, thank you very much, even if the client has flown on the Concorde from Europe for these sessions.

We have now cleared the decks for the Self Behind the Symptom to appear, and the facilitator has begun to make deep energetic connection with the client. The client then goes through a full body relaxation and waits in the energy pool of the symptom – waits for images or messages to appear as if in a dream. We have literally stepped into the unconscious. From here on, the facilitator asks energy questions only; we are no long interested in information, we are following energy. The client uses whatever access channel is most productive: most people get visual or kinesthetic images, some draw or journal, many move. In this symbolic realm, eventually out of the mist of symbols a self begins to appear, with its particular point of view or need.

For example, Peggy, a young professional woman, faced the bleak prospect of a potentially terminal lung disease with no known cause. As our session began, having unhooked from the rational voices, Peggy began to sense a “scary sadness. It feels like a black hole, empty,” she said.
“Tell me more about this black hole,” I said.
“There’s a coffin. It’s only about an inch wide.”
“That is a very small coffin,” I said, wondering if an Inner Child might be surfacing. “Is anyone in the coffin?”
“Little Peggy is in there. She’s holding back her tears.”

Now things get DRAMATIC. We encourage full energetic presence as the disowned self that has appeared flushes the body with fresh, new energy, be it yearning, yelling, weeping, skipping merrily, or any other form of expression. We always stay aware of opposites that arise. The disowned self is struggling to come through. The primary self may hover near, and we delicately speak with it, honoring its perspective, asking its permission. Emotions — sadness, anger, fear — may surface, and often a Gatekeeper of Emotions steps up, too. This would sound, for example, like, “I want to cry, but I’m never allowed to cry.”

With Peggy, we spoke to the Gatekeeper of the Tears, the part that says it’s not alright to cry. By the end of the hour, Peggy was weeping. As the energy flows, the client lets it flow directly from the symptom, like air whooshing out of a balloon.

Sessions need not always be dark. Just before Christmas, Paul developed a debilitating case of sciatica. The sciatic pain led us to a playful sprite who wanted to make a mess and be mischievous instead of trying to keep order during the busy holiday season. As this playful one made a grand mess in my office, throwing books on the floor, scattering tissues and pillows and laughing all the while, the sciatic pain disappeared! Touch may be a part of the session if the facilitator is allowed to use touch. However, it is not required, and sessions are fully effective without it. When we do use touch, we use touch to enhance energetic connection, support movement of energy, and bring nurturing when appropriate.

In summary, when we step into the body-psyche without the Rational Mind, we step into the land of dreams and symbols, and when we stay with the symbols long enough, they lead us to the Self Behind the Symptom. It is all energy – the body symptom, the symbol, and the self behind it. With the sensitivity of Voice Dialogue facilitation, sans Mind and sans Knower, we can wade into the river of the living body-psyche and pan for gold.

Diagnostic Precision

Inner cause for disease is not an original idea, it has been around for millennia. However, deciphering the hieroglyphics of inner causation has never been more direct than now. We have a direct route from the body to the psyche. Approximations do not have the same effect.

Take the case of Glenda’s rash. Glenda came into the office with a red rash covering her chest. Neither she nor her doctor had a clue about what was causing the rash. Glenda had a strong Nice self. She was Miss Pleasant to everyone. You can imagine her surprise when the disowned self came barreling through the rash, hollering, “I can’t stand Glenda’s husband coming into her bedroom. Their relationship has deteriorated, and yet he expects to be able to have sex whenever he wants. I feel like yelling, ‘Get out of here!’ I feel like pushing him away.”

We took these cues from the body and moved from dialogue into physical release work. Glenda actually pushed against a pillow and yelled at it as if it were her intruding husband. This let the disowned self, an angry Straight Talker, express. The rash went away the next day. Glenda had had a vague sense she was angry, but didn’t know about what. That’s an approximation. If she realizes this anger is directed toward her husband, she’s getting closer. But neither of these is hitting the center of the target. When she lands directly on the self and its very particular issue, zap! She is right at the bull’s-eye, she is exactly at the focal point that gave rise to the symptom.

The beauty of this approach is that we ascend from conjecture into exactitude simply because we can find the self and talk to it. Rather than speculate, we can dial its number as we would anyone we want to speak to. As a component of the psyche, it is available. This differs from guessing the self by the effect illness is creating. Many people feel they have gotten the lesson of their illness by the way it changes their lives – it slows them down, it connects them with loved ones, it teaches them to receive, it expands their perspective on life. Of course, these are precious gifts of any pain or illness. But we are talking about a different level, where we discover the self, the motivation, behind the symptom with precision. Sometimes the logical sense of an illness – like getting a cold after working too hard seems like some part of you wanted to stay home – may have subtler, more precise components. Like the flu I got. It seemed logical that I needed down time, but when the flu spoke, it actually expressed a particular sadness in my life that I wasn’t admitting, sadness about moving to a new city. I got well the same day. I can’t tell you how freeing this approach is for the practitioner. When we acknowledge that the body has the answers, we see that the answer is sitting right here in front of us, in the body consciousness. The mystery is no longer a mystery.

Time Frame

Time frames for healing, if healing comes at all, vary with each individual. Sometimes healing happens quickly because a person can unearth and fully express a self that was held inside. In these cases, pain can dissolve instantaneously, or a rash can disappear within twenty-four hours. Just unhooking from a primary self and bringing in a disowned self solves many health problems. Other situations take more time. A condition may have been building for a lifetime. One client likened the search for the self behind a body symptom to an archeological dig. As we go down in levels, we unearth civilizations as we take out the little brush or the little pick and delicately extricate the treasure, and sometimes we bring out the tractor and take mounds away. New pain and chronic pain follow the same laws. It takes courage to go within and discover the long-standing issues behind chronic pain or serious illness. Newly discovered selves may radically vary from long-held beliefs and behaviors, requiring time to integrate. It may be a monumental task to stop being nice all the time and say what we mean, or to stop working so hard and take time off, or to quell the Inner Critic and cherish ourselves. The harried businessman whose heart disease reveals a part that wants to spend time with his family faces major lifestyle and attitudinal changes for healing to take root. The woman with breast cancer who discovers she thirsts to love herself more and not take care of others so much, needs to return to this over and over again. The woman with ovarian cancer who has lived a lifetime with repressed anger must keep letting the steam out. Each of these people need to keep taking the medicine of the disowned self for its energy to permeate their systems.

Partnership with All Treatment Modalities

For a therapist, the body becomes a direct guide to important inner issues. Deep inner work in conjunction with traditional medicine creates a tremendous partnership. When body wisdom is taken seriously, it becomes a viable partner in the diagnostic process. Can you imagine the millions of dollars that could be saved in testing, medications, surgeries, etc, if this kind of inner work were used as a diagnostic tool? Healing factors can synchronistically coalesce. I have seen cases where a person did a dramatic session that uncovered a self behind a symptom, and not long after told me that their herbal remedy clicked in and started to work. Or all of a sudden they found a new doctor who gave them solutions to their problems. All the factors leading to healing had lined up.

Stories of Healing Through Conscious Body and the Self Behind the Symptom

Dramatic healing ensues when the Self Behind the Symptom is fully, energetically present. Sensitivity to opposite energies gives the facilitator tremendous leverage in the ever-shifting world of the body-psyche. Emotions are sometimes involved. Childhood traumas, or Inner Children in their various guises, often surface. Whenever an urge toward physical movement comes, we follow it — like curling into a ball or pushing someone away. Enjoy these stories.

Panic Attack and Heart Palpitations Normalize

I put my hand on the chest of a client who was in the middle of a panic attack. I felt her heart racing as she searched for the Self Behind the Symptom. When she found it and let it yell, the heart normalized instantly. I held my hand on another woman’s heart. Her heart was palpitating furiously. When she voiced unspoken words of love to her deceased grandmother and unspoken words of anger to her own mother for abandoning her, the heart normalized. We both felt it. What amazing experiences these were! To actually feel the heart slow down as the Self Behind the Symptom expressed was a gift beyond words.

Stepping Out of Pain

Jan limped into a workshop I was teaching in New York City. She was hoping to gain insight into the joint pain she had endured for a decade. As we spoke with the pain, Jan got an image of a diminutive girl dwarfed by an oversized wooden chair. Her strict mother had ordered her to sit in that chair when she was young. “What do you need?” I asked the little girl.
“I just want to curl up. I’m frightened,” she whispered.
I encouraged Jan’s inner child to lie on the floor and curl up in a ball. For a moment the entire energy shifted palpably from fright to safety. I asked Jan how her body felt now.
“The pain is gone!” she said.
“Wonderful,” I said, trying to contain my excitement.
It was hard for Jan to stay with that new feeling, so she started to talk about it and her Rational Mind took over. The pain returned as a signal from her child, in effect saying, “Help, I’m here, don’t lose me.” I gently led Jan back to the energy of the child, and the pain again dissipated.

The Self Speaking Through the Body Keeps You Focused

Joe and I were dealing with the pain in his wrist. His Inner Child emerged, and as his child spoke, the wrist felt better. Then the wrist hurt fiercely when we switched to another subject. That was the child saying, “Stay with me, I’m the one who needs to be here!”

One Part Wants a Baby, Another Part Does Not

Marla, a therapist, wanted to get pregnant. After a long time of trying, she and her husband entered an embryo-implantation program. I suggested we approach the energy of infertility. I asked her to see the uterus with the embryo taking root, and to just pay attention to whatever came next. We were both dazed at what happened. She “saw” two arms pushing the embryo out of the womb. They brushed their hands as if wiping their hands clean of it. Clearly, there was a part of Marla that wanted a baby and a part of her that did not.

A Case of Cancer

In cases of cancer, several selves behind the symptom overlap. (This applies to cancers that are not caused by nutritional or environmental factors.) Though I draw on only a small sample, in the cancer clients I have seen there is always an instinctual self screaming to come out, and there is often a wounded self that needs to heal trauma. Geordie had spontaneously developed a form of leukemia and was expected to die within two weeks. Geordie began to speak about the rest she was looking forward to in heaven.
“Rest from what?” I asked as we began the session.
“From answering the phone all the time, being there for people day after day. It’s just too much.” (Do you hear the Caretaker, with overtones of Responsible and Pleaser?)
“You think you get relieved of this when you go to heaven?” I retorted.
“You mean I don’t?” She toppled over, aghast that her Caretaker might go with her.
“I don’t know. But in life, here, you can learn to not answer the phone. You don’t have to take care of people all the time.”
“Really?”
We spoke for a long time about her other worries, and she understood she was under no obligation to continue in those ways. In other words, she could unhook from her primary selves. Geordie lived for several months after this, well beyond the two weeks the doctors had predicted.

Emotions

It is commonly known that unexpressed emotions lie behind many illnesses. Anger is often behind mysterious symptoms. Here are several examples:

One client, a jilted wife, was suffering from schleroderma, a connective tissue disease. It improved when she discovered her fury, not only toward her unfaithful husband, but also toward the priest who supported him.

Another client’s numbness and exhaustion vanished when she shed tears over her deceased daughter.

A woman who played tennis had pain in her upper arm. She found a self within her that was terribly afraid of the machine that pitched tennis balls to her at high speed during practice. When she expressed the fear, her pain vanished.

An author suffered with back pain. When we listened to the author’s disowned self, it divulged a fear of humiliation if his book were not well received. The back pain went away.

A client had brown spots on her skin, which led to a voice that recommended “daily burn off of anger.”

A man’s tooth decay held “seething” anger.

A woman’s stiff back felt like a “rolling black cloud” of rage.

A persistent cough unearthed the fury of a daughter scorned.

Pain can vanish when rage pours out. Here is an example:

Admitting the Need to Care for Self — and the rage behind it

Alice was one of millions of baby boomers whose parents require specialized care. One day she received an alert from her mother’s lawyer. A large chunk of money was needed to pay the bills. Alice – actually, Alice’s Caretaker – felt she should care for her mother. Alice’s inner Caretaker seriously considered the financial request. Then Alice developed a sharp pain in the middle of her back. She had lifted a heavy box that morning, which might have caused it, but she elected to check in with her selves. A self emerged from the back pain, the opposite of her Caretaker.

CARES FOR SELF: I hate Alice’s mother. I don’t want to support her financially.

FACILITATOR: Tell me more.

CARES FOR SELF: I am surprised you do not judge me. I was ready to be judged.

FACILITATOR: Your feelings are acceptable. What do you need?

CARES FOR SELF: I need Alice to accept that another part of her may want to help her mother, but I don’t. We have a long, bitter history. Her mother has drained Alice emotionally, and now I don’t want her to drain Alice financially as well. That would be the last straw.

FACILITATOR: That is valid.

CARES FOR SELF: (with gusto, which is the kind of energetic shift that brings healing) I feel accepted. I can speak freely. I’ve never said this before, but if I had a million dollars, I still might not help that bitch. There may be some altruistic part of Alice, but it isn’t me. I hate her mother. I do hate to see her suffer, but I am not going to let Alice suffer on her account. And if her lily-livered brother thinks that pouring resources into his mother might get him into the Pearly Gates, he doesn’t know one iota about real spirituality.

FACILITATOR: Anything else?

CARES FOR SELF: Just don’t give her mother anything unless she appreciates it. Don’t pour water on desert sands.

Needless to say, the back pain healed instantly.

Shaking Like a Leaf

At the annual Penn State Women’s Conference, Shakti Gawain was the keynote speaker. I was asked to introduce her. I am normally relaxed speaking in front of people, but as I picked up the microphone that day, my body trembled.

Immediately after her keynote address, Shakti and I co-facilitated a workshop on Voice Dialogue and the Psychology of Selves. With fifteen minutes left at the end of the workshop, I decided to demonstrate my own selves. As always, I wasn’t sure who would come out. First came a power side that loved the booming voice created by the big microphone I was holding. She loved the pink silk suit and matching heels I was wearing, and she loved teaching with the great visionary Shakti Gawain. Then an opposite self appeared. A total surprise to me! Out came my Inner Child, shaking like a leaf.

So that’s who was shaking during the introduction. She bent over, frail and shy. “I’m exhausted from all we’ve been doing this week with Shakti. And I hate these high heels,” she cried as she slipped them off in front of five hundred onlookers. “I want to go home.”

Afterward, several people said to me that, after two hours of talking about subpersonalities, that demonstration brought home to them the reality of selves. It certainly brought home to me who had been shaking and that I needed to take care of her.

Inner Critic, Insomnia, and a Spontaneous Adjustment

Jane had suffered from insomnia and chronic neck pain for years. She had tried many remedies for both. She decided to dialogue with her insomnia. First, Jane relaxed her body and her Rational Mind. Then she scanned her body and noticed her jaw became tight.
“Stay with the tightness in the jaw, and see what happens next,” I suggested. I knew the body was leading Jane right where she needed to go.

Jane focused on her jaw. A part of Jane began to speak. “I am stern,” it said. “You can call me the Headmaster. I’m a steel rod up the back of the neck, and I give pain there. I’m not so sure you want to meet me.”
I assured the Headmaster I did.
“We’ll see,” it said. The Headmaster explained its role. “I have to keep moving, keep going. I work hard all the time. But it’s not the kind of ‘doing’ you might think. What is important to me is growing. It is paramount that Jane grow. I am winning the race of consciousness. She can eat a little and sleep a little, but she doesn’t need much. She is not supposed to have any needs.”

At that moment, Jane’s neck made a loud “crack!”, spontaneously adjusting as if manipulated by a chiropractor. We sat in amazement. This confirmed that the energy of the Headmaster was, indeed, related to the neck pain, as well as Jane’s insomnia. In Voice Dialogue parlance, the Headmaster was a Consciousness Pusher with a dash of Inner Critic. In exploring the Self Behind the Symptom, an experienced Voice Dialogue facilitator can spot a self and dialogue with sensitivity.

Then Jane spoke to two parts that had lain buried under the Headmaster’s demands. First, a child-like voice cooed, “I need to play, dance, eat, sleep, love and be loved. It’s nice that somebody wants to talk with me.” Second, Jane met a part that did not feel it had to strive for consciousness at all. In fact, it felt adequate. As we encouraged it, it sparkled. It felt smart, capable, brilliant, and wise. Jane beamed as she radiated confidence, the polar opposite of the never-satisfied Headmaster. That night, and for several weeks, Jane slept soundly, a marked improvement from her years of insomnia.

© Copyright Judith Hendin

Judith Hendin, PhD, directs the Conscious Body & Voice Dialogue Institute. Drawing on her discoveries of healing the body through inner selves, she wrote the book, The Self Behind the Symptom: How Shadow Voices Heal Us. Judith Hendin has lectured at conferences of the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy. A beloved Voice Dialogue trainer and facilitator for 20 years, she has taught in Canada, Finland, Estonia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Her work is enriched by her background in psychological energetics, deep bodywork, and sacred choreography. She served on the Voice Dialogue staff of author and visionary Shakti Gawain, who says, “Judith Hendin has developed a profound and effective method for hearing the messages our bodies are trying to give us. She is a wonderful healer whose work I highly recommend.”

www.ConsciousBody.com
Judith@ConsciousBody.com