Attuned, 2
In late July and early August of this year (2024), I attended Bioaquatic Exploration in CranioSacral Therapy in Freeport, Bahamas, through Integrative Intentions International and The Upledger Institute International. I learned how to support clients’ bodywork in the water outdoors (pool and bay) and also in a tank with dolphins. This training was valuable for many reasons. Water allows for 3-D movement of the body, and the practitioners work together in groups to offer support to a client/fellow practitioner, allowing unique healing opportunities to unfold. Client movement is more fully realized in some ways than on the table. Nature interacts through its ambiance and atmosphere – bird calls, sun, waves, kelp, rain, salt. The greatest takeaway, however, was an inexplicable body-mind response when I received this work myself.
One day, I was fortunate to be a client during my second week, the week in which I participated as a therapy assistant with clients in the Dolphin-Accompanied CranioSacral Therapy program. In the morning, I received a multi-hands (meaning receiving from more than one practitioner) CranioSacral session on the table. Then, we went to the Unexso Dolphin Sanctuary, where a practitioner held my feet while I floated. Three dolphins had access/choice to come and go from the tank in which a group of us relaxed in the water. Dolphins swam around us, under us, or hovered nearby using their echolocation clicks. I felt these rapid clicks enter my central nervous system at about the brain stem area in the low scull.
I turned over at times to see them in the water. Two young dolphins, one 8 years old and one 10 months old, hovered in front of me vertically in the water and looked me in the eyes, several times. The baby placed her nostrum (“nose”) against my hand in greeting. The expression of these beings was loving, perhaps also fun, and definitely interactive. I have never felt such unconditional love in my body-mind. This encounter was followed by a final session with my CranioSacral practitioners in a pool, where my body moved and rolled actively and spontaneously, without conscious choices. The practitioners supported me fully, and my trust in them to keep me safe was easy, as arms, legs, head, and torso repositioned at will. At times, my spine undulated, rolled. Since I have had limited motion through a hip issue relative to multiple myeloma, these gestures felt freeing.
That evening my sleep was disrupted by heat radiating throughout my torso, what bodyworkers call a “release.” My body wanted to elongate, and my spine needed to pop and shift. I awoke at times with my arms stretched over my head. I was also emotionally moved by this love I cannot explain. Our human love pales in comparison, I believe. For me, it also isn’t the conscious notion of agape, or spiritual love, which I’ve felt in times of gratitude and miraculous recognition of being assisted spiritually, or coporeally, through God or the infinite inexplicable. I have treasured my special dogs as children and held strong bonds with them, but this expression of love from the dolphins was different. If you can believe it, more pure and unconditioned. (One really cannot compare the two species in any case.) I was touched by acceptance I haven’t felt spiritually, my emotions and self-worth altered, and from a mammal on our planet.
Now, I am seeing past response patterns I had not realized within myself. I have always felt it takes two to dance in experience, that we are constantly responding to our stuff and “their” stuff. Now, I see the “other side” of otherness more clearly, or at least what is possibly going on with others and what doesn’t include me as an influence. I am more able to set “me” aside in an effort to understand others’ behavior. For, mostly I am walking internally in a large world, and so my interactions are narrow. My consciousness is inward most of the time, experiencing my life through lenses – cultural, familial, socio-economical, personal, traumatic, philosophical, religious, gendered, and conditioned.
I do not have solutions to share toward this inward focus and how to beyond it. I myself am trying to view encounters with others with more possibility. I want truer, more enriched loving and living in this world. I find that to start, I’m identifying what I must unravel within myself to perceive what is happening in the lives around me. I believe dolphins carry none of this challenge. Their communities/pods are socially bonded, sure, but they are and act as the whole, I think. Their “me” is fluid and not all-encompassing.
I have had other breakthrough moments, but not from receiving something so positive. Usually, I am overcoming some type of hardship beforehand. The practitioners who have done this work for several years said that I could be responding, reacting, changing, for up to a year!
Thank you for reading and sharing this story with me. Perhaps one day, you also will be able to go to Freeport, receive a window into the type of love available on this planet from beings who gain nothing in offering it. Well, besides interspecies interaction and possibly their own joy returned. Maybe I offered them something too! How can we become more dolphin-like?
Copyright Laura E. Garrard 2024. For a definition of CranioSacral Therapy, click here.