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Episode 786: Living in Front of Ourselves with Judith Blackstone, PhD · The Trauma Therapist

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Right. Welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gamiferson.
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My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible cells, to be human,
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to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in
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who we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating
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authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more
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about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com.
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That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started, okay, So
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five or three, two and one, our folks, welcome back to the
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podcast. Very excited to have as my guest today, Doctor Judah the Blackstone
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JA welcome, Thank you so much. We're welcome. So. Doctor Blackstone
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is a founder of the Realization Process, a method embodied psychological and relational healing
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and non dual spiritual awakening. She teaches workshops and teacher certification trainings throughout the
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US and online. She's the author of several books, including the Fullness of
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the Ground, A Guide to Embodied Awakening, Trauma and the Unbound Body,
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The Healing Power of Fundamental Consciousness, as well as The Enlightenment Process belonging here
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A guide with the spiritually sensitive person and the empathic ground. Judith, Welcome
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to the podcast. Thank you. So before we could go in here,
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share with our listeners where you're from originally and where you are currently. I
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live in Woodstock, New York, upstate New York. I guess I grew
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up in Brooklyn and spent my early adulthood in Manhattan and then moved up here
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quite a few years ago. Awesome, So how did this start for you?
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How did this interest, this passion start for you? Well, many
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years ago, I was a professional dancer in Manhattan in New York City,
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actually been performing since I was nine years old. And when I was twenty
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five, I injured my back quite severely and wasn't able to dance, and
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of course I thought my life was over. I had put quite a lot
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of quite a lot of work into that, and so I lived in a
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dance studio and a loft in downtown Manhattan. And I was really quite injured,
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but I had people coming to the loft to take dance classes with me
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because that's how I made my living. So I lay on the floor and
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just really prayed for healing. I had, of course, gone to many
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body workers and doctors and so forth, and nothing helped affect some of the
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things, made it quite a bit worse. By little, I began to
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get these very subtle, these very subtle experiences, these inklings of a more
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subtle way that we can attune to ourselves, that we can actually get even
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deeper, more subtle level of attunement to ourselves than any sort of entries,
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either psychological or physical. And since I had people coming to the loft to
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study with me, I began to teach them these very subtle attunements that I
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was finding that I was experimenting with. And that was good because it meant
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that the work at the very beginning developed not just for my own according to
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my own problems, but on a number of different bodies and beings. And
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then it just just kept developing from there. What type of dance dancers modern
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modern dance, modern dance? Okay? And what happened to your back?
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How were you injured? Well? I have anyway this location that I was
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probably that I was born with her. That happened to birth sculiosis and something
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a little bit worse. Where the verbebrae are four on the sacrum and when
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I was twenty five, woman named Pina Bau, who's actually was quite a
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well known choreographer, came to our dance company, the post enisor the dance
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company, and she put me in a position that exactly mirrored the distortion in
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my back, which actually I've been working with quite well for years, but
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having to hold that distorted position for a while then brought the spine much further
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out of position. It had been what we call a well balanced, well
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compensated sculiosis where my head was over my sacrum, and now that wasn't And
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then I had spine surgery where they actually fused me in that off center position.
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So then I was really, really, really in trouble, and you
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know, I was just held in that I couldn't even it was hard to
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walk in a straight line. So I had quite a lot of work to
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do on myself. And and that was that was the beginning of the work.
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I realized that I had to go through many, many levels of of
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inward contact with myself in order to begin to bring everything back into back into
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alignment. And of course, as these things often are, it was a
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really saving grace that this happened, because I wound up in a much a
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much better place, both in my own body and in my life. So
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you talked about these kind of atonements and you used another word forget what it
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was, these kind of in relation. Yeah, what is that? Talk?
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Be specific? What are you talking about when you say that? Well,
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so two things. The inward contact with oneself is really the ability to
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live within one's body. Interestingly, we don't actually live within our bodies.
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Most of us live a bit in front of ourselves for many reasons, partly
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because we grew up in that kind of pattern of relating that we feel like
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we have to come out of ourselves in order to really reassure the other person
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that we're making contact with them, or you know, this has passed down
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from generation to generation, that sort of relational style. But it's mostly because
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in reaction to abrasive events in our life from day one or before that,
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which of course are unavoidable, that some things are going to be a bit
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unpleasant, too unpleasant to really take in altogether. We we actually pardon ourselves
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against experience. We shut down our heart just a little bit. Most of
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us, you know, we constrict against any sort of sexual harassment or even
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being touched in an unpleasant way might might be certainly well intentioned, but for
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the for the young child, and for the baby, it's it's not tolerable.
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So we start to constrict our body, and in that constriction it blocks
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our ability to actually live fully within the body. So a lot of the
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psychological aspects of the realization process focuses on finding the focuses on finding those constrictions
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releasing them. We have we have a technique for doing that in the realization
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process and then inhabiting the body more fully. And the interesting thing is that
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the more fully we inhabit our body, the more open we are to the
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world around us. So that inward contact with ourselves is exactly the same as
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openness and responsiveness, fluid responsiveness emotionally in every way to the world around us.
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So it's a process of regaining ourselves in that way. And now the
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attainment is that as we do that, our actually our perception becomes more more
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refined, more subtle. Instead of seeing just the surface of things, we
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have the sense that we can see deeply within them, especially people or animals.
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I said, we're not just connecting surfaces surface, but we're actually attuning
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in a more subtle way to the world around us and to our own being.
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So we get to a more subtle I'm going to use the word dimension,
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but I don't mean in a hockey way. We get to a more
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subtle level of our being. Right, and that most subtle level of our
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being, which I call fundamental consciousness, is an undivided level of consciousness that
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we can actually experience pervading our whole body and pervading and even pervading the world
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around us, so that everything appears to be both solid, you know,
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made of the stuff that we're made of, and at the same time made
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of this very very subtle, pervasive space consciousness. And that's that's how that's
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how the realization process becomes a technique for nondual realization. So it's both a
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psychological healing, a relational healing, an embodiment technique, but primarily it's a
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way to experience that oneness when we uncover that undivided space of consciousness pervading our
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own being and everything around us. This is really fascinating to me because I
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don't think I've ever talked about this in this way on this podcast, So
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I'm very excited right now. This idea of living in front of ourselves to
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me is really interesting. I mean, it's it's a it's a very powerful
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visual and I can feel what what that means. But I want to ask
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you, you know, you said when you got hurt, when you got
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injured, that became almost like an opportunity for you. What were you doing
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specifically on for yourself? What walk walk us through that? How did that
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come about for you? You know that's a very very long story. But
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it began just lying on the floor, really surrender, you know, giving
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in a sense, giving up, you know, the despair that you know,
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I don't know, maybe you can only feel with twenty five when you
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feel like, you know, that's it for you. And I just lay
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on the floor and I realized, you know, after a while that if
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I actually dropped my weight to the ground, what felt like currents, the
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waves of energy began to come up from the ground and move through my body
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and actually pull my spine into alignment. That was amazing to me because of
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course, now you know, in our realm, we know about you know,
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in our community, we know about energy. But I was quite unfamiliar
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with it. So it was quite an interesting and alarming and amazing experience for
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me. But really what was amazing was to feel that something natural, something
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innate in the in nature, came came through me and started to pull me
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into alignment, actually to center me, to heal me. So and that
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was something that then years later I found again when I began to meditate,
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that that we can just sit and open to that current that that comes up
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and brings us deeper and deeper and deeper within. And you know, the
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more centered we are. Here's another interesting thing. The more centered we are,
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the deeper we are. So so that's how it started. That,
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I mean, that was how it started. Just lying on the floor and
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then you know, knock on the door. It's five o'clock. My class
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is here. They want to learn how they wanted to dance, you know,
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and I'm like lying there, and so I laid them all down,
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and you know, we all did these, you know, open to these
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subtle experiences. So are we talking about accepting acceptance? Are we talking about
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use the word surrendering being open to our own experiences and what's going on?
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That's definitely you know, actually, you know, crucial for the whole process.
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You know, if we don't accept where we are in the moment,
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we can't go we can't go anywhere from there. So yes, that's certainly
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part of it. Now, in the realization process, we don't just open,
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we don't just surrender. We also do these very careful inward attainments which
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take a little bit of concentration, not a whole lot, but a little
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bit to focus deeper within, so that when we do just let go of
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ourselves, we don't let go from the surface of ourselves into the space around
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us, but we let go from the internal depth of ourselves. That's when
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we let go into that more subtle dimension, fundamental consciousness. Otherwise we're just
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kind of expanding energetically. But we can actually focus and focus and focus until
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we can let go from that innermost core of ourselves. Now, when you
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started developing this, when you started, you know, intentionally constructing this process,
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At what point walk us through when you said, okay, I want
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to work with people in this way utilizing this process? How did that come
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about? And also took many stages and started out teaching dance. I've actually
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been teaching dance for years. By the time I was twenty five and so
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I was already in that kind of relation with people. People are very vulnerable
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when they're dancing, when they come to learn to dance, you know.
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So I already was in that sort of sharing role with people. And then
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I began to train as a body worker. I trained an Alexander technique,
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but a very particular kind of Alexander technique that was taught by a woman named
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Lydia Yohey, which was mostly table work and really really her own the innovation
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on it. And so I did. I did this table work body work
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for an well, I know, a number of years, maybe five years,
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eight years, and I began to at the same time as I was
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teaching dance and my loft. I began to notice that people would feel great
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for a couple of days and then they'd come back the following week and sort
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of be back where they were, and I wanted, I wanted to go
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deeper with them. You know. They would also they would also go into
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a emotional pain on the table, and I didn't know how to how to
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deal with that. You know. My family's way of dealing with emotional pain
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was to just keep busy, you know. That was always that was always
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the advice I got, you know, just keep busy, you know,
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works for a lot of us. Yeah, or eat something. I eat
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something. So so rather than that, I began to train in psychotherapy.
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I did a three year training program the Institute for Integrated Psychotherapy Rebecca Troutman and
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Richard Erskine. This was in the late seventies, we're talking about right,
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a long time ago. And that was actually quite a wonderful training because we
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were like a group of twenty people and we would work with each other,
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and Richard and Rebecca would give us feedback while we were working. You know.
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It was quite a good way, quite a good way to learn what
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worked and what didn't work so forth, and to experiment in a safe space
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where we all felt safe there. So I did that training program, and
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then I went into private practice, and for a long time I taught the
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realization process wasn't named yet, and I did psychotherapy, and sometimes I would
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combine the two. In nineteen eighty seven, I began to do workshops at
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Esslyn Institute in Big Surrey, California, and that's when I realized the work
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needed a name. It wasn't yet the realization process. I had a different
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name. For it, but it began to become a more coherent sort of
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process. I began to realize that I could teach a sequence of practices for
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this kind of for the workshops at Excellent, and so a lot of the
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work developed there. Me just pause here for a moment. We're speaking with
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doctor Judy to the Blackstone. I just want to think our sponsors here will
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be back in one second tier. So who would you say this process is
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for. Well, it does take some sensitivity, you know. I mean
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pretty much everyone who's come to do the work with me is able to.
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In fact, everyone is able to. They're even able to get that pervasive
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space, although it can take sometimes a little bit of practice. It can
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even take a couple of years. You know. Sometimes people, you know,
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I'll go on and on about how this work actually pervades the furniture,
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pervades your body, and two years later they'll they'll suddenly turn around and look
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at me and say, you know, it feels like the space is going
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right through the furniture. And I'm like, that's right, that's right.
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So it can take a little practice, and some people get it right away
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because they've always experienced something like that, and so it's pretty much for anyone
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who who wants it, who who feels drawn to it or wants to feel
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deeper contact with themselves. The interesting thing is that when we live within the
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body, we have much more confidence. You know, there's actual that a
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sense of self possession at the same time as there's that transcendence into the self
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other oneness. There's at the same time, because we're experiencing fundamental consciousness is
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in the ground of our individual being at the same time as it pervades everything
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around us, there's a sense of self possession like oh, I take up
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space, I take up internal volume, and that goes a long way to
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helping with social anxiety. Many of the things that that sense of the people,
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that sense of the people deal with feeling overwhelmed by the world around them.
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And then that that kind of thing, because there's we actually feel that
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we that we exist. We we have a sense of our own existence.
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Hard to hard to explain in words, but it's a it's a palpable feeling,
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you know, there, there we are. Doesn't you know, the
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word presence doesn't quite get it. It's something a little more mysterious than that.
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But we can feel our sense of existence. Uh, and and we
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feel as vital as other human beings as the world around us. We no
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longer feel overwhelmed. Mmm, what you're talking about almost seems to me to
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be like the antithesis of anxiety. That's right, And yet it seems what
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you're talking about doesn't seem easy. It seems like it requires definitely some intentionality.
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I would even use the word courage too, I mean a full embodiment
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of who we are. Yes, Well, that doesn't happen overnight. You
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know, it's a very gradual process. Really, it's like a ripening inward
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in a way. You know, we do the practice, you know,
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feel that you're in your feet, feel that you're in your legs, and
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you know, so forth, and then you know, we can feel that
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for you know, a few moments, and then we lose it, and
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then we do the practice again. We get a little bit further, and
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then one day we're just there. So that's a gradual, gradual process.
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We don't open, and this is really important in the realization process. We
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don't open further than we can tolerate, right, and we release not into
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open space, but into that internal ground of our being. So we we
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right away feel that we're more of ourselves, more of our emotional being,
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more of our actual feel of power in our belly, more of our voice,
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more of our understanding. So so we're releasing into our internal being.
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So it doesn't I mean, of course, initially takes courage. Takes courage
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just to set out on any sort of path like this, but it's but
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there are no alarming moments in it, right, a garage in the process.
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Yeah, you know, kind of going back to this idea of living
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in front of ourselves. Why do we do that? Why do we tend
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to do that? Well, several reasons. One where we learn how to
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relate to other human beings that way. You know, if our parents,
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and this is most of us, don't live in our bodies, so very
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likely our parents are coming out of themselves either the other they're closed off,
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shut off, or they're coming way out in order, so we also come
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out to meet them, right. We also come out to concentrate. You
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know, children need to memorize, you know, they're tested every few weeks
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on whatever they're learning. So we need to really focus and concentrate outside of
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ourselves. But the real reason, the big reason are these constrictions within the
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body that they actually don't allow us to make internal contact with ourselves. So
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then we' we have to live outside of ourselves. It's actually a rare thing.
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And this is this is another just amazing fact about human nature. It's
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a rare thing that people are actually living within the internal space of their body.
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That's a mind body consciousness, the integration, right, it's really oneness,
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right, and then we actually experience ourselves as conscious everywhere in our body.
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That's it's an unusual state. It's not our usual, not our usual
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state. So people have been working towards experiencing that for thousands of years.
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It always has taken some amount of intentionality to do to get there. It
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almost feels like we're pushing our own selves outside of ourselves. Yeah, and
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there's almost something sad about that that we're right, well, I mean,
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it just seems to go in a sense, go against who we are.
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Why are we do we need why can't we embody who we are? Why
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are we stepping outside of ourselves in order to relate to one another? Yes?
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There, you know, you could say it's sad. We'ren't just the
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typical human condition, and yet when when we meet someone, are we talking
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about an aspect of authenticity here? Or authenticity in and of itself here?
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Complete authenticity. Yes, that's another thing I wanted to mention. Besides taking
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up space and feeling our sense of existence, we also feel real. And
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you know it takes this again, probably takes some sensitivity to feel, but
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that awful feeling of not being real, you know, if you know,
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you know, I have this mask. You know, if I go to
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a party, I have to be a certain way. And we become aware
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of that. We become aware of that something is not quite real. And
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when we become aware of that, that's a that's a good that's a good
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step. When we inhabit the body and we uncover this undivided ground of ourselves,
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we feel real. It feels, oh, this is finally who I
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really am. And we look around and even our our vision not that you
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know, not that we can see better. It's not you know, it's
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not like wearing glasses. But there is something about the world being as as
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it really is, you know, to some extent, more you know,
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less less projected upon. Yeah, let's less subjectively distorted. So in terms
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of your books, I mean the first fullness of the ground, the guide
26:33
to embodied awakening, trauma and unbound body. Where does trauma come in in
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terms of the realization process? Right, So, I'm using the word trauma
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quite loosely. I'm using it in the realization process to mean anything that we
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were not able to fully experience. Right, So, if we were not
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able to fully mourn the loss of someone as a child, if we were
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not able to fully open to the sound of our parents' angry voices for example,
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Right, if we are not able to fully take in the smell of
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cigarette smoke or whiskey whatever in our child childhood environments. Usually when we're children,
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that we that we form ourselves in this way, although as teenagers,
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you know, if we're not able to take the looks that we're getting,
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you know, at our budding bodies, and we have to shield ourselves in
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some way, or we actually are attacked or you know, molested in some
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way, we definitely have to protect ourselves against that. So these are all
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you know, this is a very good part of nature that we're able to
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protect ourselves in this way from being shattered. This keeps us from being shattered.
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But at the same time, it does fragment us. Right, So
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we cut off those those parts of ourselves that we constrict we no longer in
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contact with. So we actually to some extent lose our emotional ability, our
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emotion, our ability to feel love. We to some extent lose our mental
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clarity, sense of mental clarity. We to some extent lose the actual feel
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of power, our good power within our body. We may lose our ability
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to feel sexual pleasure, or to feel any sort of tactile pleasure. So
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as we let go of these holding patterns and enter into ourselves more fully,
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all of this richness of our own being and the corresponding richness of our perception
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of the world around us comes comes into the floor, and all the richness
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of emotions and pain, I would assume also comes up with that. That's
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right, It's not like we never feel pain again. What we may get
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over is some of the extra pain that's you know, projected from our childhood.
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Right, So the many other losses. But if we lose someone that
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we love, yes, of course we're going to feel pain. If something
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is really threatening us, we're going to feel fear and we and we should
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feel fear, right, if something is oppressing us, we're going to feel
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anger, and we should feel anger, so yes, we get the appropriate
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emotional ability right, the ability to respond appropriately without that extra childhood. You
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know, I'm angry, and I'm so angry because of you know, something
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that happened to me when I'm four, So now that you're making me angry,
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it's going to be horrific. You know. You know that starts to
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dissipate. But we still have our full and very nuanced emotional capacity, which
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is of course the richness of our lives. So as we kind of wind
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down here, Judiths, I know on your website you have events and programs.
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What's coming up for you? How are you working with people? Who
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are you teaching? Who are you helping? I'm at this point I retired
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from private practice. I'm teaching workshops and teacher certification trainings. In the work.
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There's actually a training starting October sixth, meditation training. There's three main
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trainings, the nontal meditation aspect of the work, the embodiment aspect of the
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work, and the psychological healing which I call healing ground aspect of the work.
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All of that is on the website Realization Process dot org. Then I
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have wonderful people who are teaching the work, who've been through all the trainings,
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that have been teaching for many years, and all of their events are
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also listed on the website. We love that listed up here at the show
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notes page at the Trauma Theavers podcast dot com. Once again Judith Blackstone.
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Her website is Realization Process dot org. Judith, thank you so much for
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being here. I mean, you are so inspiring. It's yeah honor having
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you on here. Thank you so much, all right, take care you too.