As we all know in this group, current experiences of stress and dysfunction
often have their roots in past traumatic experiences which have been
"walled-off" to minimise discomfort. They persist, buried in our psyche, as
energetic blocks to health and wellbeing [the "inner wall" or "outer
distraction/addiction" we created in order to minimise the pain] and also appear
as "over-reaction" or "under-reaction" triggers to current life events.

A good healer or therapist will help a client to trace the thread from the
current "symptom" to the "buried" [repressed] traumatic memory in an approach
which has been popularised in "The Journey" by Brandon Bays, whose book you can
now acquire for as little as 1P!...
http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0722538391/sunflowerheal-21
She has also produced a CD for doing your own "Journey Process" - currently on
special offer here:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780955579615/?a_aid=specialoffer

Occasionally, when taking clients, or oneself on these healing journeys to the
root of a current problem so that natural resolution can occur, there comes a
point where the natural resolution of the old trauma becomes stuck in a vague,
incomplete or non-moving memory-image of the trauma situation. Bill Redpath has
come up with some excellent tips on how to move forward through these
image-based energy blocks. He writes...

"At the age of eight, while chasing my sister, I crashed my left midfoot arch
down on a glass milk bottle shard imbedded in the ground. Forty-three years
later, with trauma resolution therapist Peter Levine, I examined this trauma.
Essentially, Levine's approach leads clients to complete momenta that get stuck
in the original moment of trauma where we are caught, in the classical animal
sense, between fight and flight.

"During that session with Peter, rehearsing the situation for the third time, I
recalled an image of tomatoes on the back porch of my family home in New Jersey,
a few feet from where the accident occurred. Levine invited me again to describe
the image, and I could see the red tomatoes on the porch wall shelf, and the
mosquito screening behind them.

"What is the colour of the screen?" he asked.
"The screen mesh is black," I noted.
"That's where the energy is traumatically held," he advised me.

"I focused upon that black, not as a net weave, but as held energy, nothing more
or less. I realized that the site I was scanning in the porch screen image
located where the trauma was fixed, contained and memorialized. In physics,
where there is black, there is no movement. And an unresolved trauma process
contains an impasse with no movement.

"Ordinarily, intention or will propels 'guided imagery' sessions. Now, through a
radical shift in perspective of the foot trauma memory, something beyond ego
control was resolving into an embodied awareness more vivid, more compassionate
and more real than before. And inwardly, I witnessed [paid attention to the
black area of the memory image] the held neurochemistry and experienced it
resolve within a matter of minutes.

"Soon, I applied these new insights about black and non-intention with clients.
I discovered that, unprompted, the black showed up often immediately, so that,
without intention, clients and I could focus quickly and directly upon the place
in their neurochemistry where the brain described itself as having no movement.
If we asked the system to describe its inner experience in the form of
sensations, pressures and colour, a whole set of landscape phenomena,
increasingly familiar, even predictable from client to client, began to appear.
We used the 'cursor of consciousness' and focused specifically on the black in
the client's inner portraits.

Bill called his emerging approach to resolving these places of "stuckness" on a
healing journey, "Trauma Energetics":
http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0964773007/sunflowerheal-21
I have drawn on Bill's insights many times in my work with clients and myself
and it certainly can help a stuck healing process to get moving again.

Colour Experiences and States of Consciousness
----------------------------------------------
Bill's also has something to say about the "Vibratory Colours" that are
sometimes encountered during meditation, healing or shamanic journeys. As with
black mentioned above, he suggests that they are direct reflections of brain
chemistry. So the range from GOLD to "Ethereal WHITE" and finally into "Radiant
CLEAR" reflects energetically high vibratory states such as
Christos/Buddha/'Personality in balance' states of consciousness. He relates the
range through brown, purple, pink and pastels to the moments when the
held-energy system is about to resolve out of shock. Other visionary colour
experiences Bill relates to prenatal "toxicity" experiences such as maternally
transmitted alcohol, nicotinic acid, caffeine or anaesthetic.

Healing Journeys for Children
-----------------------------
By the way, Brandon Bays has now published a modified "Journey" approach for
children:
http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0007155263/sunflowerheal-21
Has anyone in this group got experience of working with children in this way?

Your Experiences?
-----------------
Is anyone else in this group making, or has made, use of Bill's approaches,
either for personal or client healing?

Mike M.
http://www.sunflower-health.com