Grace and Discernment

What do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind?

What emotional, physical, mental, even spiritual clutter do we carry throughout our lives?

Not only things outside ourselves, Dear Loved Ones, but in the very essence of our being? In our soul, our mind, our body?

Before we dive in, Dear Loved Ones, I’d like to share something.

I’m struggling.

Struggling with what to bring here on Faithful Focus Media.

Wrestling once again with what is, as well as what is no longer as important to me as it once was.

Not because I no longer care, and not because I don't value my previous work, but because of how I have grown and changed.

While I long to bring you content,
— I also desire to bring you context.

Context that lives elsewhere.
On another platform.

History that I would like to honor while stepping towards who I have evolved into now. A foundation, blueprint, background that provides substance, continuity, and even credibility for topics I may mention in passing.

A framework that might help you understand not only something of the journey that brought me here, but also references that aren't here

—Yet. Or perhaps ever...

And while that matters, I so long to jump not just into the present but also the future I hope to create. A shift not only in focus or in mindset, but in how, where, and why I find my center.

Because, as much as I am still the same person I have always been,
— I have also been reborn. 

Different but still me.
A curiosity all my own.
My experiences still a part of me.
What I learned still growing inside me.

Wandering the desert for sure,
but not trapped in the same place anymore.

I have grown into a fuller version of myself. A still incomplete version; one that is still adapting, maturing, and transforming into who Adonai made me to become.

My life has changed dramatically over the course of the last decade.

More than once in fact.

And everything I am learning in Scripture teaches me that this rebirth is an invitation to step into deep, mindful, and meaningful relationship with the One who made me.

To discover a purpose only He can reveal.

With that said, I shall do my best to lean into the path ahead, while bringing forward what from the past still helps illuminate the way.

It's an intentional effort, Dear Loved Ones.
A lesson in how to practice Discernment and Grace while seeking wisdom, and learning what it means to walk in discipleship.

I don't want honoring my past, or providing context, to consume the time and energy I'm longing to devote to what Adonai is putting before me now.

Please know this isn't the end of our conversation here;
—it's merely a beginning.

For now I'll leave you with a provocative question for next time, Dear Loved Ones.

How do we honor who we have been without allowing the past to determine where we're going, how we are consciously evolving, and who we are mindfully becoming?

How do we honor our histories without becoming captive to them?

I've spent years, Dear Loved Ones, studying bodies, social and natural sciences, holistic practices, and a wide array of things. While my vast interests haven't necessarily changed, my center has.

God was always a part of everything in my life, including my business practices and name. The more I learn and experience, the deeper my faith grows.

I marvel at the body and the world,
Dear Loved Ones,
because I am in awe of the Creator.

If I'm writing about faithfully inhabiting the life Adonai has given us, how could exploring and understanding our body not occasionally enter the conversation?

So buckle up, Dear Loved Ones!

We're about to wade into some wonderfully murky water...

~ ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ ~

I marvel at the body because I marvel at its Creator.

I've been talking about the histories we carry in our work, our choices, our individual experiences, and our understanding of ourselves. But history doesn't only live on old platforms, relationships, photos, or in memories.

We carry history in our body too.

The body's interconnectedness, adaptability, resilience, communication, compensation, and capacity for healing can become part of the wonder—not merely the science or mechanics.

Some of what I experienced has straightforward anatomical and/or physiological explanations; some aligns with ideas found in ancient and modern science, medicine, and healing traditions; still some remains more difficult for me to explain.

With each session, my sensitivity grew.

My hands and energy developed a deeper awareness.

I learned how to recognize similarities and differences in how various tissues of the body feel.

To notice differences in texture, density, tone, movement, temperature, tenderness, etc., and responsiveness.

I developed a relationship not only with the client, but their body as well.

I don't believe something must be easily measurable, explicable, or even justifiable for our experience of it to be meaningful or powerful.

Nor do I believe experience should exempt our conclusions from curiosity, discernment, or continued learning.

Balance, after all, does require Grace...

These are things I learned from years of listening to many different bodies—with my hands, my education, experiences, observations, wonderment, etc., and the people who entrusted their body to my care.

As well as life's many teachers.

Thank you teachers, guides, role-models, helpers...
Good. Bad. and Otherwise.

Whole-body Interconnectedness, and the Series of Interstitial Ponds that Make Up Our Body.

The body is an ecosystem—crafted with an extraordinary capacity to communicate, compensate, adapt, protect, heal, and more.

Throughout my years practicing massage therapy, one of the things I enjoyed most was teaching my clients about their body.

Educating my clients was something I not only believed to be incredibly important for many reasons, but that also proved true over and over.

I have believed that the better we understand and connect to/with our body, the better equipped we can become to listen to it, care for it, participate in our own health and healing, and encourage others to do the same.

One of the first things I often tried to help clients understand was connective tissue, restriction, and what I came to describe as congestion, or Dis-ease, within the body.

Sometimes, the easiest way to understand something we cannot see is to compare it to something we can.

Over the years, I came up with plenty of metaphors and analogies.

One I probably used most often came from the pond and stream I grew up near, known simply as The Beaver Pond.

~ 🦫 🦫 🦫 ~ 🦫 🦫 🦫 ~ 🐟 💦 🐟 💦 🐟 ~ 🦫 🦫 🦫 ~ 🦫 🦫 🦫 ~

Think of a pond and stream that has been dammed up by the local wildlife—aka, our wonderful beavers.

As spring arrives and the ice thaws, the water often starts as clean, clear, and beautifully refreshed after its winter hibernation.

Slowly as spring turns into summer, one can start to see pockets of muck on the surface of the pond—kind of like when soup sits for too long in the bowl.

If there is no intervention—natural or otherwise—to break up the emerging lining of stagnation, more and more pockets of gunk develop across the pond's surface.

Slowly they expand toward one another and eventually there is a covering over the entire surface of the pond. Some areas quite thick with ... I don't even want to know what. 😂

This image viscerally illustrates—perhaps disgustingly so—what can happen within the body, and how localized changes can interact within a larger system.

Just as with the pond, dis-ease and dysfunction in the body can start small, yet over time and without intervention can take over the entire organism…

The first pockets of 'muck' forming and building in the body often begin with one irritated area: a particular muscle, a joint that isn't moving quite as comfortably, a habitual posture, a recent or old injury, a movement pattern repeated thousands upon thousands of times.

And what about the things that are harder to see?

Emotional experiences carried within the body.

Energy that doesn't seem to be moving as freely as it once did.

Mental static that leaves one feeling weighed down.

Just as our lives accumulate clutter, so can the ecosystems of our body.

And what happens when our physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and perhaps even energetic experiences begin collecting interconnected muck?

Because of the various trainings, self-study, personal and professional experiences uniquely given to and lived by me, I have felt what I came to understand as the effects of a body's ecosystem developing its own variation of pond scum.

There's a history in our tissues, and this particular quality of buildup is something I often referred to as congestion.

This congestion can feel different in the various and diverse tissues of the body. Overall what I mean is a build up that is kind of like inflammation buuuut still different.

If our body’s filtration systems aren’t working well or are overloaded, stagnation can occur. This interstitial fluid might be remnants of damaged tissue and/or waste creating additional and unnecessary inflammation.

—We'll talk about lymphatics more in depth some day, but for now stick with me.

Over time something that started out as small and insignificant can build and develop momentum—much like anything rolling downhill, or hey ... downstream!

As the ‘surface of our pond’ succumbs to increased congestion, we can be at higher risk of developing adhesions, trigger points, and all sorts of various types of layered and diverse buildup, and 'pond scum' might just be the perfect way to describe how we feel about it 😜

The more dysfunction we have in our ecosystem, the harder our body has to work to function optimally. Everything can be impacted.

Sometimes something that hurts 'here' is coming from somewhere way over 'there'...

—Stay with me Dear Loved Ones. We're, once again... just opening room for deeper, later conversations...

Connective Tissue plays a role in everything we do.

It is woven throughout our entire body and goes by many names depending on where it is located in the body—one that has become more commonly known is Fascia.

Connective Tissue surrounds and supports muscles, nerves, blood vessels, organs, bones, and other structures.

While we won't dive too much into the science (yet), this incredibly diverse tissue is highly innervated and creates an interconnected network throughout the body that can travel—aka communicate—fast. Like, Really FAST!

One fascinating 2018 review of the fascial system published in Cureus and available through the NIH's PubMed Central, this is possible because of electromagnetic fields.

Fields that can not only "travel faster than the electrical signal", but also"cross the whole body almost instantly". (1)

This is merely one remarkable way God designed our body to function.

An important thing to know that we'll discuss in more detail later, is that in many areas of the body, these tissues also need to be able to move and glide in relationship with one another.

Additionally, because no part of our body exists entirely on its own, changes in one area can influence how other areas move and compensate.

One muscle begins doing a little more. Another does a little less.

We shift our weight. Alter our gait.
Protect something that hurts.
Favor one side. Avoid a movement.
Stop... any number of things.

And slowly, often without our even realizing it, the body adapts.

One little pocket becomes another. And another.

Until the original issue may no longer seem particularly isolated at all.

That doesn't mean every ache in one part of your body was secretly caused by something somewhere else. Nor does it mean the body is literally becoming clogged.

The pond is a metaphor. It gives us a way of imagining something extraordinarily difficult to visualize: the body as an ecosystem.

The body is an intelligent, intuitive, and interconnected ecosystem.

Our body isn't a collection of isolated pieces.

The body is a living, communicating, continually adapting organism with many ponds our anatomy books call systems.

Something happening in one area can influence another.
Something that was once helpful may eventually become restrictive.
Something small, ignored long enough, can sometimes become something much larger.

But the opposite is also beautifully true.

Imagine those first little pockets of muck appearing on the water, and think of how that applies to your body.

Caring for our body is a little like caring for a series of interconnected ponds. We're not trying to control every ripple, or demand that the water remain perfectly still, start moving, or become perfectly clear.

Our body is incredibly resilient, adaptable, forgiving, and capable of great healing. In fact, sometimes all we need to do is support it.

Paying attention to new pockets appearing in or on the ponds that make up our body, is a great place to start.

Another is supporting our lymphatic system.

You know, that thing from earlier we'll discuss in another conversation ... hopefully, it can help us to clean up and clear out the body's muck building in and throughout our ecosystem.

Just as opening the stream allows water—and some of the film and scum on the pond's surface—to move downstream, our lymphatic system collects and carries excess fluid and other materials from throughout our tissues.

Our tissues aren't static.

And neither should we be—in more ways than one.

Fluid is continually moving into, through, and out of the spaces around our cells. The lymphatic system plays an essential role in maintaining that balance.

No single system does everything, though. An ecosystem is made up of many moving parts working together as a whole. Our body works the same way.

The body's many interconnected systems continue the work of sorting, recycling, processing, and eliminating what is no longer needed from the stream that is our lymphatic system.

Interestingly like a stream, our lymphatic system is a single -lane, one-way journey.

If we develop greater awareness by learning to notice what our body is telling us before having to shout to get our attention, we can notice and respond to the pond scum.

Perhaps even clear some away with self-care practices, lifestyle changes, and various remedies one might even enjoy.

Doesn't it just make you start to wonder... what happens, what is possible, how could things change if we can open the stream and create flow?

By pausing to notice where, how, and possibly why things have stopped flowing as freely as they might, and gently helping restore movement, adaptability, and balance through small acts of care, we can create a ripple outward.

If restriction can ripple outward, so can care.

The body is incredibly engineered, and like any other structure, it has its stress points. The key is finding those stress points and applying the 'right' countermeasures.

Much of my work focused on understanding and addressing patterns of pain, restriction, compensation, and imbalance throughout the body.

Being highly analytical and a problem-solver, my hands-on experience taught me to pay attention to patterns throughout the body. To notice even the slightest changes in tissues.

It helped me create highly integrative work that was individualized, assessment-informed, and oriented toward addressing pain, mobility, injury, dysfunction, etc., and rehabilitation.

I believe in the science we've explored, as well as what we have yet to understand through tools and measurements.

I believe in the One who Formed all of Creation.

I believe in the incredible healing ability of not only our body, nature, and the soul, but in the power (and science of) belief. Of hope.

Something I've said throughout my life, Dear Loved Ones, is that the more I learn, the more I know I don't know—and the more curious I become.

The more I want to keep learning.
Keep exploring.

Keep asking questions.

Questions like:

• How do I discern when, what, how, and why to clear the clutter from my many ponds?
• Where, what, why, and how am I holding this in my body?
• What does practicing Grace feel like?
• How can I grow from this?
• How do I embody wisdom?

Perhaps, Dear Loved Ones, the lessons are in the wonder...

One Final Note.

As much as I love beavers and their many wonderful contributions, they offer us at least one additional lesson today.

Something that alters an ecosystem doesn't have to be inherently bad. As Melissa McPhail beautifully wrote throughout her epic and forever unfinished fantasy series (2) "there is balance in all things."

A dam changes the flow of water.
The pond responds.
The plants and animals respond.
The surrounding landscape responds.

Our body responds too.

A change in one part of the ecosystem of our mind, body, heart, soul can influence another—sometimes nearby or directly relating things, and sometimes surprisingly distant.

Equally important, restoring movement, or offering care with patience and love in one place may create changes elsewhere too.

Remember, Dear Loved Ones, ripples occur in more than just water, and can be carried far beyond what the eye can see...

Don't blame the beaver.
Don't blame the pond.
Don't blame the body.
Pay attention to what the ecosystem is telling you.
Learn, Adjust. Grow.

All, while practicing Grace... and Discernment.

~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ 🦫 ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ 🦫 ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~ ❤ 🦫 ❤ ~ ❤ ❤ ❤ ~

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more!

REFERENCES:

1. Bordoni B, Simonelli M. The Awareness of the Fascial System. Cureus. 2018;10(10):e3397. Published 2018 Oct 1. doi:10.7759/cureus.3397 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6281443/
2. McPhail, Melissa. (2010–2019). A Pattern of Shadow & Light [Book series]. Five Strands Publishing.