Afraid, and Doing It Anyway

From 1990 to 1998 I traveled and assisted on craniosacral trainings across the US, Canada, Jamaica, and Switzerland. So when my teacher suggested I do a biodynamic cranial training in England, I said yes. I didn't even have to think about it. I just trusted.

The training was one week a month for a year, held at the Karuna Institute in Devon. I arrived in London at 5:30 on a Sunday morning — starving, exhausted, half-blind, ready to turn around and go straight home. The urge was so strong.

I couldn't find my hotel. I wandered block after block in the rain, checking the address, sure I'd written it down wrong. I ducked into one of those famous red phone boxes and called home. A friend talked me down from the ledge and gave me the courage to keep looking, to stay, to keep my commitment.

What I hear in my own writing is how scared I was — and how I did it anyway. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is being afraid and doing it anyway.

A global room

Living in a big manor house with eighteen other students, sleeping four to a room, eating vegetarian — it was so far outside my comfort zone I'm surprised I went back a second time. There were people from England, Switzerland, France, and three of us from the States. A truly global group. It was my first time thinking alongside people from other countries, and it took blinders off that I didn't know I was wearing.

The whole and the particular

The biggest thing I carried home was a principle: you have to perceive the whole and the particular at the same time. I was convinced my ability to feel the entire body and the tissue right under my hands would never come. I was sure I wasn't good enough.

It took several years to embody it. Now I don't think I could ever separate the two. That is what I try to give my students — not another technique, but the capacity to hold both at once.