"Intimacy
with Number One"
by Kerstin Zettmar
reprinted by permission of Spirit of Change
magazine, 1996
Ah, relationship!
They are such wonderful catalysts to bring to the surface anything
uncooked that may lurk in one's soul. For many years I worked very
hard at becoming enlightened. Eventually, I got quite skilled at
the thinking positive, being all-accepting, ever-loving, and seeing a
spiritual purpose in everything. This was true as long as I stayed
out of intimate relationships. For some bizarre reason the men I
crossed paths with always seemed to be taken, live on another continent,
or have deep-seated fear of intimacy.
The men I did end up
dancing a few rounds with would suddenly have the power to press all
kinds of funny buttons in me. Pow! Out would come anger,
fear, distrust, and a battery of other "unholy" emotions.
How uncomfortable. I'd decided that they clearly didn't love me or
they wouldn't do that to me, and out the door I'd go. I developed
an appreciation for people who chose a monastic lifestyle.
Since I wasn't quite
ready to take that leap, though, I chose various therapies instead.
That helped to reassure me that I was a wonderful, open woman with all
the tools for intimate relationship. Maybe I just hadn't met the
right guy yet.
As life would have it, a
number of years later I found myself at a workshop for something called
the Rosen Method. It was advertised as a form of body work
addressing emotional root causes of chronic muscular tension.
Since I was now working as a loving, caring massage therapist, I thought
I might learn something that would prove beneficial for my clients.
Little did I know how entering this workshop would change my own life.
Rosen work is about
finding out and accepting who you really are at the core of your being.
It aims at creating a safe space for you to become intimate with your
innermost self, the person you are when you stop pretending, performing,
or pleasing. Marion Rosen, its founder says, "This work is
about transformation from the person we think we are to the person we
really are. In the end we can't be anybody else." The
key factor in this method is touch - a gentle, intimate kind of touch
that clients at times claim they've been missing since infancy. In
contacting the body in this way, the unconscious / forgotten feelings,
memories, and dreams that have been held in by tight muscles and
restricted breathing are evoked. Often what we have tried to
conceal the most, even from ourselves, shows up the clearest in the
body. The body doesn't lie.
I can still hear my
teacher's voice as she with warm hands gently probed the tight muscles
of my upper back in a class demonstration: "The first few
layers of Kerstin are quite relaxed. When I stay on the surface
with my hand like this, I get the impression of someone very open,
trusting, and receptive. I don't see a lot of breath in her back,
though, so that makes me want to explore deeper... and when I do, I find
some muscles working very hard, holding very tight. Right here,
over her heart, there is a big boulder that doesn't want to budge.
Something is being very well protected here."
And she was right.
As she contacted the big rock over my heart and just stayed there with
her hands, very patient, with unconditional presence, it slowly started
to melt. The melting was coming from inside of me, just like the
tears that began to stream down my cheeks. Eventually memories
emerged, shedding some light on why I at one time, had felt the need to
install this protective boulder - why it was so much safer to fall in
love with people that I couldn't get very close to.
I feared that if anyone
looked closer than the first few layers of me they'd find this very
human being. Since childhood I had tried to be "Christ in
drag," and with that goal in mind, a lot of my humanity seemed
unacceptable. I had swept a lot of it under a rug of muscular
tension; no wonder my back and shoulders felt so lumpy now.
That Rosen Method
workshop was the beginning of a journey for me and on the winding road I
have run into many bumps. It can be messy at times being a real
human being, yet it's much less lonely than being a phony saint.
For a long time I was
under the impression that so-called negative emotions were causing
tension in the body. It came as real news to me that it actually
is the trying to suppress unwanted emotions that causes the
muscle to work over-time. I do believe there is something true
about the notion that holding onto anger, grief, fear, and hatred can
contribute to making a person sick. Yet when we give ourselves
permission to fully feel our emotions through the whole cycle of
beginning, middle, and end, they usually don't last very long.
It's our trying to stop mid- stream that keeps us stuck and unhappy in
our unfinished business. For some people learning to trust the
cycles of emotions is a large part of this work.
These days I've given up
on the idea of becoming a perfectly enlightened being. In my
dance of intimacy I still lose my balance from time to time. The
difference now is that I take those moments as a wake-up call to examine
what it is inside of me that might be calling out to be healed.
I'm really much more interested in becoming whole than holy.
Being fully alive doesn't
mean you are in neutral or that you always are up. In my
experience it means that you have all your emotions available to you but
that you are not enslaved by any particular one of them.
As a painter I sometimes
think of it as having a full palette to choose from with all the colors
of the rainbow. As a weaver I know the importance of the dark or
the cool strands of yarn to set off the light or fiery ones. We
are all artists in co-creating our lives. Creativity is our
natural inheritance. I've been fortunate to watch many people wake
up to their creative potential as they have had courage to be honest
with themselves and go through the barriers down to their core.
And if we go deep enough we come to the place where we are all one.
What could be more intimate than that?
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