How to Heal Trauma Through Embodiment with Judith Blackstone

Lorne Brown 

So can you tell us a little bit more than about this realization process?

Judith Blackstone 

It’s a series of attunement practices for uncovering fundamental consciousness, but it starts with inhabiting the body. And a very interesting thing happens when you inhabit the body is that you get in touch with your love, you freeze it, right? Wherever we’re in the body, we’re fluid and responsive. So we live in our chest, our emotional capacity becomes more fluid and responsive to the outside world along with our love, any emotion, but along with what seems to be a deep source of our love.

Lorne Brown 

By listening to the Coherence Code Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition, either in yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast, where we explore how the mind and body work together so you can move from stress and inner conflict to clarity, calm, and alignment. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. And through my work, I’ve seen that healing happens when you remove what gets in the way and allow the body and the nervous system to do what they’re designed to do to heal. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Welcome back to the Coherence Code Podcast, and I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and today I’m being joined by Judith Blackstone, psychotherapist, teacher, and founder of the Realization Process, which is an approach that integrates embodiment, trauma healing, and non-dual awareness. Now, Judith has spent decades, and when we start to chat with Judith, I want to know how many decades. I think it’s somewhere between three or four maybe, or even more, but she’s been spending a long time helping people understand how contraction, resistance, disconnection from the body can obscure what she describes as our more fundamental ground of being. And we’re going to learn about what she describes as a form of conscious. What do you call it? Foundational consciousness?

Judith Blackstone 

Fundamental consciousness.

Lorne Brown 

Fundamental conscious. We’re going to learn about that as well. Now she’s the author of several influential books. She has eight of them. Some of them I’m going to read out to you is The Enlightenment Process, Belonging Here, Trauma and the Unbound Body, The Subtle Self. And I think your most recent book at the time of our recording is The Fullness of the Ground: A Guide to Embodied Awakening.

Judith Blackstone 

Is that your latest? It’s not actually my latest. It’s the one right before my latest. I just wrote a book specifically for women, although my male students tell me it’s just as helpful for them. It’s called The Embodiment Workbook for Women. So that’s my very latest.

Lorne Brown

All right, so I have to get my hands on that one. So there’s The Fullness of the Ground, A Guide to Embodied Awakening, and then she has a workbook out as well geared to women. And I get that in my practice, Judith, we’re open to men and women coming, but it seems like women gravitate to health professionals and for personal development more than the men. So it’s a good market you chose to the women. And I think we’re going to need the matriarch to help us heal this world. So let’s get the information to the people that I think are going to shift this paradigm anyhow. I also want to share that what I really appreciate about your work, Judith, and to let my listeners know, is that it seems like it’s not about escaping the body or transcending difficult emotions. What I get is it’s about learning how to fully inhabit ourselves.

So soften what I call resistance and reconnect to a deeper sense of presence and aliveness that I think may already exist beneath all this noise. So in many ways, her work parallels what I often describe through the metaphor of a radio signal. So the music’s there, there’s a DJ speaking, you can kind of make it out, but there’s so much static noise that it interferes with our ability to really receive it, to hear it clearly. And so much of healing may not be about fixing ourselves, but about reducing that noise, that interference. So Judith, welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.

Judith Blackstone 

Thank you so much. I’m very glad to be here.

Lorne Brown 

Our listeners, a lot of them have reached the top of the mountain. They have done what they were told, get the great job, get a good spouse, live in this city, all the accolades, but yet they’re still feeling anxious, burnt out, even disconnected despite all their success. So they built a great life, but they don’t feel the way they thought they would. And I wanted to know, for somebody who’s written the books and teaches what you do, did you have your own wake-up call? I would really like to know about you because how did you come to be the person that I would call teacher of consciousness, your realization process? But what was the Judith a couple of decades ago that got you into this work? Were you born realized? Right.

Judith Blackstone 

No, I was not born realized, but I’m afraid it was more than a couple of decades ago. My wake-up call came pretty early in my life, and in a sense I was lucky that way. It was in my mid-twenties. I had been a professional dancer actually from the age of nine. So I’ve been kind of out there all my life in some way, connecting with people through art and then through this teaching that I do. And it was extremely important to me, that path that I was on, that dancer’s path, artist path. And when I was in my mid – 20s, I injured my back so badly that I had to abandon it. It abandoned me. And I was left broken in my body. And as I looked at it more closely, broken in other ways as well, psychologically wounded, what had been my spiritual connection, which was the dancing, that’s I think why it was so important to me.

I could no longer feel it. So it was truly bereft. And as you have said, as you know, it’s that real bereft moment where what has been just very faintly discerned now can really be uncovered, really needs to be uncovered.

Lorne Brown 

So are you kind of grateful? And the reason I’m going to ask this is, again, if people are tuning in, they’re going to listen is there’s this unease, disease in the body and they want to be happy, what I would call, they want peace. They want to experience that peace and start to enjoy life. And they’re learning that the external world can’t do it because they got all the stuff in the external world, most of them. So they’re learning, oh, I got to go heal on the inside. I got to do internal work, which is why I want to have this conversation with you. So when you were a dancer and you were identified as a dancer, and then as you said, it abandoned you, was there a period of time then where you were lost and you said broken and the sense again, yeah, your back was kind of broken, but emotionally there was a break.

And then what happened because you’re not there now, you’re not at that state now. So was there suffering back then? And if you could go back to that younger self, would you have some kind words for her process?

Judith Blackstone 

Oh yes, many encouraging words because of course it turned out that what I was going to come to on that path of healing was much richer and actually used much more of me, much more of whatever I could bring forward into the world than the dancing had. So it was a gift, but it took, oh, I don’t know, almost 10 years to really receive that gift. Yes, plenty, plenty of suffering. But also I began to enter a new dimension, if you will, a more subtle attunement to myself and the world, which also fascinated me because I had never known about it. So the experience that was kind of pivotal for me was lying on the floor. I lived in what we called a loft, a big dance studio basically. And so because I had moved there, I was going to make all these dances. So I lay on the floor of my loft and I had nothing to do but surrender it to the ground.

I could barely move. And I noticed that some kind of movement was coming up from the ground through my body and even pulling me slightly into alignment. And that was truly, truly fascinating to me. Turned out to be energy, what we now know those of us who live in that kind of more subtle dimension all the time, we just call it energy flow.

But there it was, and all the years of working on my body and honing my body, I’d never known about that, never known about it. At the same time, I had people coming to that dance studio to take dance classes because that’s how I made my living and I had to continue to make my living no matter what. So I began to teach them these subtle attunements. After I injured my back, I had really very destructive surgery done on it in which they fused my back in the off center position. And here’s someone who’d been used to being quite agile and suddenly I was off center, really swerving to the side, really off, really out of balance. But I began to notice various things that I also taught my dance students. For example, if you find the space to the right of you and the space to the left, it automatically pulls you towards center.

And that central position was what I was aiming for.

So at the same time as I was healing myself and exploring this and seeing how I could recover that balance, that internal balance, I was teaching it. And strangely enough, people who hadn’t been through the kind of injury that I had been through were also kind of off balance. This is like the human condition. I was also very interested to see that. And so they actually benefited and were happy about these very subtle attunement practices that I was teaching them. And that was the very beginning of the whole. The path went on and on from there, but that was the very beginning of it.

Lorne Brown 

There’s a few things you said there, but one that really I wanted to unpack a bit or emphasize is you said you surrendered and having interviewed, I don’t know, we’re in the 160s of interviews here, this seems to be the key here. And I find that people just have different processes or methods to get you to this state of surrender. This is my opinion. I’m just curious if you can unpack a bit about surrender. I’m going to bring this into my. We start off with that noise analogy, the radio, the noise, because my approach in my practice is always how do we uncover, undo all this noise or remove the noise to get to the signal that’s always there. And so I find that some people have 10 steps, two steps, three steps. I’m going to want to learn about your realization. But my understanding, and this is where I want to connect with you on this or learn from you, is that these wake-up calls or these uncomfortable feelings can act as portals, doorways to presence so they can grab our attention.

And currently we medicate them or we try to suppress them, depress them, project them out. It seems like that magnifies them, amplifies them. Or what I’m learning from your process, we can kind of lean into them and experience them and you’re going to hopefully unpack this. When we do this, we become present because we’re not. And the resistance, I call it resistance. I think you call it constriction or I think you’re calling it constriction, but with Chinese medicine, we call it qi stagnation by the way. It’s just qi stagnation.

Yeah, exactly. And when that resistance drops, then you can start to experience that flow and receptivity. But that resistance dropping requires a form of surrender because when you resist, you create the stagnation and when you allow, it can flow again. So I would love for you to talk more about that day on the dance floor and then to present day with your method that you teach, what is this component that people will call surrender or letting go? I don’t think it’s giving up a resignation, but there is a visceral aspect to this that I’d love to hear more about your work.

Judith Blackstone 

Just as your experience and mine has revealed that the source of the signal is always there, always there. In fact, that’s what the Asian spiritual literature, some of it also tells us. It’s already there. We already have that Buddha nature. It’s part of us. Just as that is already there and that for us to just simply uncover it, the path to it also seems in some way spontaneous that we can latch onto, we can fall into it, latch onto it, however you want to say it, and be pulled there. And part of that seems to be what I experienced on the floor that day, that there’s an actual something in the universe that pulls us towards center, that pulls us towards balance in the early. Let me tell you, that was in the mid 70s.

Now we go to the early 80s, 1981. I lived at a Zen monastery for 13 months, counting the months, and I was given there a meditation called shikantaza, which is just sitting, no object of focus, no technique, just sitting, surrendering. And there I felt again, that same thing, surrendering to what? To gravity, to the cushion, just letting go, began to unfurl towards that barely discernible signal. So obviously many years in between what I teach is also letting go, but not from the surface because that takes an awful long time and they never get there. There is a teaching out there in the non-dual field, if we want to call it that, non-dual teachers, where you just simply let go. And because it’s our true nature, because we know it’s already there, you just let go and you relax into it. But I find that when people are told to just let go, they let go from the surface of themselves.

So they sort of expand and it’s an energetic expansion, whereas this underlying fundamental consciousness, which I believe is that true signal, is actually stillness, pervades the energetic levels or also actually coexists with extremely subtle aspect of our energy system. So if we let go from the surface of ourselves energetically, we actually might not get to it. So realization process, we do an embodiment. We start with actually inhabiting the body, and that’s a volitional act, a gentle volitional act, being in our feet, being in our legs, being in the torso, being in the whole body, and we make our way inward into a very subtle innermost, what is experienced as a channel. Now, this innermost channel has been described in yoga where it’s called sushumna. The chakras are said to be along it. It’s been described in Tibetan Buddhism where it’s called the central channel. So in other words, it’s known, we know about it.

When we get to it, when we get to that very subtle inward focus, we can let go from that core of ourselves. Then we let go into that stillness, that undivided consciousness that we can actually experience it pervading our body and not only pervading our body, but pervading everything in our environment. So I do, I call it fundamental consciousness, foundational consciousness. Actually, I do call it that sometimes. That’s how it’s experienced as the foundation of our being and the foundation of our experience of the world around us. Because it pervades our body, because we can experience it pervading our body, it feels like the undivided ground of our individual being. And because we also experience it pervading our environment, at the same time as it’s the ground of our individual being, it’s also the ground of our oneness with everything around us, sometimes called non-duality.

So internal wholeness and self-other oneness becomes unveiled, uncovered at the same time through that letting go from deep within.

Lorne Brown

So you understand this, first there’s the experiential and then the intellectual. So I’d like to talk on the concept a bit. You said it’s not like letting go on a superficial level. Can you give an example of that? I think I would like an example so we would know the difference.

Judith Blackstone 

Yes. I don’t mean on a superficial level, but actually from the surface of ourselves.

Lorne Brown 

Okay.

Judith Blackstone 

I can show it to you. It looks like this. So I’ve let go of myself. We call it spaced out sometimes. I’ve let go of myself, but I don’t land in undivided fundamental consciousness. And in fact, I’ve expanded myself in a way, and that’s not really what we’re going for. I don’t believe that we’re going for the eradication of the self, but we’re going for the innermost deepest ripening of our individual being. So it’s not an outward expansion. If anything, it’s an inward attunement that is a portal into that, what seems to already be there, all pervasive expanse.

Lorne Brown 

Okay. I mean, you used the word attunement, which I want to continue on then. I’ve interviewed lots. I’ve experienced what you’re discussing, and it’s funny because I don’t think you could. We could sit here for 10 hours and I don’t think until you experience it. Well, you know what? To me, this fundamental consciousness, I’d like us to hear your definition, but when I think of the medicine I practiced and it comes from Taoism, the Tao, there’s that idea that the Tao that can be named can’t be the Tao. So we’re trying to describe something that if it is it, you can’t actually describe it, right? If that’s what you’re talking about, fundamental consciousness here, or do you have a different concept for that experience? 

Judith Blackstone 

I think that those principles, if you’re experiencing it, you can’t describe it. My ancestry is Judaism. If you’re

Lorne Brown 

Not – Kabbalah says the same thing. oh God, and then you can’t even use it. You got to say Hashem versus –

Judith Blackstone

That’s right. Can’t name it. I think that those principles, very important, are so that you don’t minimize it or misteach it or think you’re experiencing it when you’re really not, or understand it rather than experience it. So it’s not a cognition, the realization of fundamental consciousness, but I do believe that we can, anything that we can experience, we can struggle to describe.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah, that’s the key word, struggle to describe. I’ll clarify is it’s not that you can’t describe it, but it’s still going to be incomplete. And I can only know from my experience, I’ve had glimpses. I believe I’ve had glimpses of what you’ve described as fundamental consciousness. And soon as I start to think about it, that experience goes away. As soon as I’m in my head, I’ve lost part of it anyhow. While I was in it, I definitely knew I was somewhere, like you call it dimension, it was something different going on.

Judith Blackstone 

So I think that’s where the cautionary tale comes in, that it’s not a cognition. As soon as we start to think about it, it goes away. By the way, that’s not the case once you’ve realized it in a stable way, then you can think about it all you liked. I’ve written eight books about it, so it doesn’t go away if you think about it, but it does at the beginning. You get that glimpse and then you’re like, “Well, what is that? What can I mean?” Want more. Yeah.

What can I do with it? And then it goes away. But once you’ve actually realized it and stabilized there, which it does stabilize with practice, thinking doesn’t interfere with it. We want to still be able to think because thinking is part of the richness of our lives, but just that leading with the thinking doesn’t work, that immediate try to grasp it intellectually, that eradicates, that obstructs it. But in terms of describing it, we can describe it. We can’t describe it to another person so that they really get it unless they’ve had a glimpse of it already. So in all of the books that I’ve written, I include practices. So this is best I can describe it, but here it is, go and try to experience it, do this practice, it leads to it, not that

Lorne Brown 

Difficult. Some of the people I’ve interviewed have described, say, they’re self-realized. LA Rex been on here, and I’ve asked this question, which you’ve answered, but I want to repeat it, that once there’s that self-realization, it’s just there. And so the question I’ll have is, do you find then where you are now in your life, do you have this kind of underlying peace? Even when there’s a shit show going on around you, you can experience all the emotions, but there is an underlying peace. Eckhart Tolle, I think it was in his book, The Power of Now, says, “You can be at peace in an unhappy situation.” I’ve had glimpses of that. I experienced that more often than not, but people that I’ve interviewed self-realize feels like that’s just their experience now.

Judith Blackstone 

Yes. I’ll say yes to that. Interestingly, once you stabilize there, you can actually keep opening to it. You can keep finding those constrictions that we mentioned and keep opening them, and then you have even more of that internal wholeness and self-other oneness and even more peace. And not only peace, but there’s a happiness, and that’s a very interesting thing. There seems to go along with it, some kind of internal happiness, not like bliss all the time, but happy.

Lorne Brown 

Yeah. And this is what your process is about, and this happiness, sometimes, again, I’ve had glimpses, low level bliss, or what I would call profound peace. I know what peace is, but I’m talking profound peace. And my big aha moment is, and it lasted for maybe 25 minutes, one of these profound peace where there was a terrible experience that I was remembering. It wasn’t happening in real time, but it was very traumatic of what happened to other people, and it brought incredible sadness. And it took me about a half an hour to decide to go into it, just to feel and experience it. And as I did, the sadness was so intense and I stayed with it. Tears come down my eyes, and then out of nowhere, I’m in profound peace. I am still aware of this story, but I’m in profound peace. This is why I like to interview people like you, because I was like, “That would be nice to have regularly.” And so this is where I want to go with you on this, because I want to unpack something.

I think I heard you say this, but my understanding then from your work and what you subscribe to is that this profound peace, this happiness is our innate nature. We’re not adding or fixing first part. I want to just check on that part.

Judith Blackstone 

That’s certainly how it seems,

Lorne Brown 

Yes. And then what you call constriction. So this is the part, when people are having these struggles in life, I’ve heard the quote, change of perception rather than it’s happening to you, how’s it happening for you? Meaning what’s the opportunity here? There’s a message, there’s an opportunity to heal. Can you take that then and share a bit from your work for our listeners of what people are meaning by that?

Judith Blackstone 

Well, that’s certainly a wonderful attitude towards life. It’s not what I mean by constriction at all, but it is very important. I feel like, in fact, that’s what my life has been about, taking that injury and just learning everything I can from it. So I think that’s a really a wonderful attitude to cultivate and to have. By constrictions, I’m meaning when, especially as children or adolescents, when an event is too intense for us to fully experience anger coming towards us, anger in the house, smell of cigarette smoke, smell of whiskey on someone’s breath, where we have to close off parts of ourselves, don’t want to smell that. It’s not a mental activity. We just automatically close our nose against that smell. Someone dies, we’re told, “Oh, don’t cry. Grandma’s in heaven, better place. Don’t cry. Makes me sad when you cry, stop crying.” We just stop crying.

Well, how can we stop crying? We can only stop crying by bearing down, by constricting the instrument of our anatomy that’s involved in crying. How can we not be angry? Don’t be angry. I remember my mother told me, “I don’t look good. You’re not pretty when you’re angry.” Well, that’s terrible.

Lorne Brown 

So

Judith Blackstone 

How can I stop being angry? Well, there’s only one way I can stop being angry, except as an adult, of course, to reason with myself. But as a child, no, you’re told don’t be angry. You bear down on that anger. Those bearing downs when repeated over time seem to get lodged in the body. We do not really have a scientific explanation for this. As I’m sure you know the psychology field at this point is focusing much more on the nervous system and the brain because that’s something we can study. But anecdotally, we have plenty of evidence that these memories, we can call them trauma just because they were overwhelming, but they’re not trauma like a car accident or being raped, although those will also create holding patterns. And they’re not what you’re describing of, “I’m upset, this is terrible. I’m upset.” At that point, you should do some deep breathing and work on your nervous system.

But this is ways that we have shaped ourselves growing up in order just to keep going. Okay, they don’t want me to be angry. I don’t have to be angry. They want me to have a smiley face, smile on my face. Now I have held muscles where I held that. Don’t cry, won’t cry. So we grow up a certain shape. It’s usually a normal shape. We can usually live perfectly normal life like that. But as we release that, when we get to a point in our lives where we really want to be happy and we really want to be in touch with ourselves, we want that missing bit of life and we begin to make deeper contact with ourselves, we realize that those constrictions are in the way. They’re in the way of our self-contact, and because of that, they’re in the way of our contact with other people, with the world around us.

So that’s where we come in with this rather subtle work in the realization process of releasing those constrictions, allowing us to inhabit the body more fully, allowing us then to enter into fundamental consciousness more fully. And stagnant qi is I think also held pockets of. Isn’t it?

Lorne Brown 

I’m so excited to share some ideas with you now. When we do these podcasts, for me, you and I are at a cafe having tea or coffee and people are listening to our conversation. So this is where I’m going with this. Okay, great. You said we don’t have the science for this, how I would describe it, my background of clinical hypnosis, you’d say these emotions get imprinted on our tissues, right? I think Tara Brach is our issues are in our tissues. What’s his name? Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, these ideas. There is a science. Chinese medicine actually has a concept or understanding of what happens. So this was written a couple thousand years ago. The number one cause of disease, according to classical Chinese medicine, is your emotions. That’s what’s written. We’re just getting to that PNI now, psycho-neuroimmunology. And not that, oh, you’re frustrated in traffic.

If you have chronic, so somebody cuts you off in traffic and you get angry and scared, healthy. Three months later, you’re still pissed off about the person who cut you off, you’re trying to hunt them down, that’s an imbalance. Or like you said, rape. It was so strong the body couldn’t handle it. Here’s the cool part I want to share because there’s a understanding, there’s a map of this in Chinese medicine versus it just got stuck in there. Why? Why not? So the wisdom of the body is to survive this body. And if something gets into the organ system, it’s very bad for the body. So when an emotion comes in this strong energy, it doesn’t want in the organ. So the most superficial layer in Chinese medicine are the sinew channels. So that’s why we’ll get stiff neck and aches and all that. Then we have divergent channels and then it gets into the points, like the joints.

So we start to get joint pain. And as it goes deeper into the. And so what it’s doing is it is purposely what you’d call constrictions, putting them in the body to contain them, quarantine this stuck energy because the energy didn’t get a chance to make a resolution. If this experience came through you and it had a complete resolution, you experienced it for several minutes and you allowed the tears, you allowed the anger and it moved through you, it’s not stuck energy. So no harm, no foul. It doesn’t get stored because energy is its own entity. It moved through you. But we’ve been told in our society today, you need to take a pill if you’re sad and don’t get angry, it won’t look pretty. So we have a prefrontal cortex and we stop, as you shared, the experience. And now the body is stuck, this energy.

It’s like, well, we don’t want it to go to the organs because once it gets deep into the organs, now we start to experience autoimmune diseases. So this is again an understanding in Chinese medicine as these emotions go deeper and deeper. So Chinese medicine has this concept. I don’t know if you’ve ever had acupuncture, but people have had, myself included when I used to be an accountant, I was an accountant before an acupuncturist. And my patients, sometimes when they’re on the table and I put acupuncture needles in, out of nowhere they go, “I don’t know what’s going on.” They have no thought, but all of a sudden incredible tears and they just cry because emotions in the name, energy emotion, you experiencing qi in the body is you experience emotion. So if you have stuck emotions and the acupuncture needle moves the energy, then as that energy moves through you, you experience it again.

So it comes out, letting go, and you have that catharsis. And that’s why after treatment, people will feel buzzed because you’re frustrated, so it was stuck to energy and now it’s flowing more freely for a period of time. So I just want to share that Chinese medicine has a really deep, cool understanding of what you’re calling constrictions in the body.

Judith Blackstone 

Yes, I’m really well aware of that. I’m well aware of that. And where does the fascia fit into that because the fascia seems to be. And of course, Ida Rolf had exactly the same experience that you’re describing when she dug her elbow into somebody. Suddenly they have memories, they have tears, they have emotion.

Lorne Brown 

But you’re talking about the Rolfer, for Rolfing. Yeah. That’s right. 

Judith Blackstone 

That’s right.

Lorne Brown 

There’s many ways to do it.

Judith Blackstone 

Yes. So she was working on the level of fascia and I feel like, although I don’t have the scientific basis to say this, and there may be some other level I’m not aware of that maybe Chinese medicine can shed some light on, but I feel like I’m working on the fascia. In fact, that’s what was taught to me too, that when we constrict in a way and hold that over time, the fascial tissues actually glue together, become hard rigidities. And in there is the energy, is the emotion, is the memory quite often, and even the feel of being four or being 13 or the mentality of our age. So this is a fascinating. I know that Chinese medicine’s coming from thousands of years ago, but it seems still to be a frontier for us to explain

Lorne Brown 

I just searched it because Helene Langevin out of Harvard, her research is how the acupuncture needle, when you turn it, pulls on the fascia, then pulls on nerve endings, and that’s how it affects the organs in the body. So her theory for the research out of Harvard is the needles are doing something with the fascia. I just thought that was interesting.

Judith Blackstone 

There’s got to be a connection, right? I mean, it’s got to be all connected, but exactly the relationship between the memory, the emotion, the different physical layers, we can look at the nervous system, we know about flight and freeze, but we can look at the brain and we know something about the amygdala and what happens. But sis, we haven’t really been able to put an MRI machine or whatever and be able to tell people, well, this is exactly what happens. Because even that wonderful explanation that you gave about Chinese medicine, that’s not a scientific explanation.

Lorne Brown 

Not yet.

Judith Blackstone

Not yet.

Lorne Brown 

We don’t have the machines to measure everything yet, but as we get better at measuring the biofield, and I had Dean Radin on here once, and every time he would tell me something and I’d say, why, why, why? We kept that. And then eventually said, if you ask why long enough, I’m going to have to say I don’t know. There’s often things that we know work before we know why it works.

Judith Blackstone 

That’s right. That’s what I tell my students too. We have so much anecdotal evidence of this, so much that this has got to be true. We just can’t explain it yet scientifically.

Lorne Brown 

There’s a quote that says, “Don’t confuse the absence of evidence of evidence of absence.”

Judith Blackstone 

Yes. Yeah.

Lorne Brown 

Right.

So it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It just means we don’t have a full understanding, but we’re still evolving. With your realization process, you said what I like about your work, and I would like to unpack this a bit, is oftentimes when I talk to people in conscious circles or quantum physics, their head are in the clouds, which means it’s fun to talk around coffee, but how does it help the person that is raising kids, going to their job, all the stuff that people are doing in this life? How do you bring it grounded? So I like talking to people like you where I believe your head is in the clouds and your feet are on the ground. You don’t have to go live in a mountain in a cave for 40 years to experience this. You can still live with your partner and your children and your job.

So can you tell us a little bit more then about this realization process and what is this process that you’ve made it, I believe, grounded so people can actually do this? I don’t know how you describe it, but so they can implement it.

Judith Blackstone 

It’s definitely meant to be implemented. It’s a basically series of attunement practices for uncovering fundamental consciousness, but it starts with inhabiting the body. And a very interesting thing happens when you inhabit the body is that you get in touch with your love, you freeze it. Wherever we’re in the body, we’re fluid and responsive. So we live in our chest, our emotional capacity becomes more fluid and responsive to the outside world along with our love, any emotion, but along with what seems to be a deep source of our love, but not just our chest. We come into a sense of a feel of power in our midsection that’s palpable. So we actually feel our power. This is good power. It’s a motor that can be under anything that we want to accomplish. We can feel our intelligence. And again, everything works better as we inhabit the body.

So it becomes extremely practical and pragmatic to inhabit the body, to be in touch with oneself in that way. And at the same time, it opens us into this undivided ground of being, which is subtle enough I think to be called spiritual. It gives us a sense of internal wholeness, which means that we can think and feel and sense all at the same time. We can function as a whole, we can receive life as a whole. And at the same time, that sense of deep connection, even oneness with other people and with everything around us has tremendous application to relationship because it means that we can be deeply connected to another person without losing inward connection with ourselves. So we know right away, this is good, this feels good, this doesn’t feel good. We know right away. We don’t need to lose our own needs in the relationship, so forth.

Our true boundaries go along with simultaneously with our real deep connection with other people. So extremely pragmatic. So a series of practices. The main one is inhabiting the body and attuning to fundamental consciousness. Then there’s attuning to that innermost core of the body that I talked about, which is a portal into fundamental consciousness. And then there’s a series of practices, oh God, maybe 30 of them that are based on those two. So can be applied simply to being in the body, can be applied to this deep spiritual realization, non-duality, and can also be applied to psychological healing because just as that wonderful thing that you described, how you could be in a sense of peace and experiencing deep sadness, but being really present for it, not really overwhelmed by it, not shattered by it, that’s what happens when we inhabit the body. We have a container whereby we can now release those aspects of ourselves that have been constricted.

We can feel deep pain and we can feel our appropriate in the moment pain. We lose someone where someone oppresses us, righteously angry. We can have the full spectrum of all our emotions ready to go without being overwhelmed by them, having that container. So we can bring that to healing old wounds and we can bring that into our present day emotional life. So very applicable to psychological healing and there’s a whole aspect of the realization process which focuses on psychological healing.

Lorne Brown 

The inhabiting the body, can you, if there is, differentiate that between what people would call awareness or witness consciousness? And the reason I ask, and again, this is my observation in my practice for myself and what I do for my patients is I have a process called notice, accept, and then choose again. And so first part is noticing you’re triggered. And then accepting, I bring in many tools to bring in that awareness, to become aware of where it is in your body. And then slowly, first step is awareness, but I feel that you’re embodying it because the whole idea is to experience it without judging it, without trying to push it away. And that does take a discipline or practice because it’s uncomfortable and we’re not used to feeling the uncomfortable feeling. So there is this reaction to not embody it. That’s your word. I’ve heard that through you in this conscious work.

For me though, I wanted to know, I got the sense from your work that it’s not awareness, it’s embodiment. And I can see there’s an intellectual difference, but for my experiential is the awareness helps me get into the embodiment. And I’m just wondering, are they fully separate or is it an evolution to noticing it, observing it, and then eventually you’re experiencing it, but non-judgmental, no resistance? And to me, that’s when the attunement happens because the key is from your teaching, I believe, it’s the attunement. Going back to the radio analogy, you get all the static and I think your realization practice is changing the dial so you can fully tune into what was always there.

Judith Blackstone 

Yeah. I mean, definitely you have to have awareness in order to start out on this. There’s no question about that. Well, I often with people who first come to the work, do a very simple exercise of having them be aware of their hands and then enter into them. And that’s the difference.

Lorne Brown 

One of my hypnotic inductions in my practice is we do breath to get them into more of a parasympathetic from sympathetic alpha brains. And then without looking, touching, where are your hands? Become aware of them. So where are they in space and time? Can you tell you have hands attached to your body and then go inside your hands?

Judith Blackstone 

So that’s exactly – But

Lorne Brown 

That you’d call embodiment. Okay. So tell us a little bit more about that because this is something that just kind of downloaded, I would say. I don’t know where the hell I came up with it, but it just became a natural progression in my inductions for my patients.

Judith Blackstone 

I’m not sure what else I can say about it. Most people are aware of their bodies rather than living inside within it, within the body. Interestingly, a real shift, and it was for me as well, a real shift to being inside the body, being aware of the body from the inside. So of course people are aware if they have a stomach ache or headache, they’re aware, but they’re observing from usually from above, like my body’s down there, I’m up here, my body’s down here. So to actually be that you are that internal space of the body, and that brings you to that very subtle ground, you are that ground that’s everywhere in the body, that’s a very different experience than being aware of it from the outside.

Lorne Brown 

Let’s have listeners, you’re open to a short experiential then, because I think it’s one of those things experience. I got to ask you this question beforehand. So ladies and gentlemen, we haven’t done this yet, Judith and I, but I’m predicting this process is so incredibly simple, so incredibly simple that people will dismiss it. That I think is the only downside to what you’re probably going to share is that it’s so simple people like this can’t do anything. Is that a fair statement? I don’t know what you’re going to do. I’m just predicting here.

Judith Blackstone 

It is simple. For some people, not so simple because for some people being in the body has been dangerous as children, has felt dangerous.

Lorne Brown 

Simple doesn’t mean easy. I just said

Judith Blackstone 

Simple, anybody can do it. Yeah, not easy. Yeah, simple. And every once in a while someone will, but it doesn’t happen anymore. Someone used to say, “Well, what’s this good for?” Everything.

Lorne Brown 

Everything. Peace.

Judith Blackstone 

Pretty much everything. I will do a very, very brief version of what usually takes half an hour.

Lorne Brown 

Okay.

Judith Blackstone 

And I’ll start with that being aware and entering in. Okay? So very, very short version. So it starts with just being there, just breathing. And usually we would spend some time doing that just to get there. Now, yeah, rest your hands in your lap and take a moment to become aware of your hands. So in becoming aware of your hands, you may notice how tense or relaxed they are. You might notice the temperature, but you might also notice that you’re being aware of your hands from outside of them. Interestingly, Lorne, who’s doing this exercise is already in them.

But that aside, most people will not be. So be aware of your hands, right? You may notice that you’re being aware of them from outside of your hands, probably from above. Now, enter into them. Let yourself experience that you’re living within your hands, that you’re present and alive within your hands. Now come down into your feet and let yourself feel the same thing, that you can enter into them really alive within your feet. Take a moment to let your breath adjust you being that far down in your body so that when you inhale, it doesn’t lift you up away from them.

You can be down in your feet, inside your feet, and continue to breathe. Now come into your legs. So deeply into your thighs, deeply into your knees, into your lower legs, all the way to the outer edges of the legs. Take a moment to feel that you are that internal space of your legs, your ankles, and your feet. Now come into your pelvis, let yourself experience living within your whole pelvis and settle there. Here’s a place we can really settle. And again, all the way to the outer edges. Living fully within your pelvis. And now come on into your midsection, which is that area between your ribs and your pelvis. Let yourself enter in there fully.

And take a moment to really experience yourself living inside your midsection. Same thing now in your chest. Come on into your chest. Here’s another place to settle, soften and settle. And contact everywhere within your chest, all the way through to the back of yourself so that you’re even inhabiting your upper back all the way out to the sides. Let yourself feel that you’re living within your whole chest. Now come on into your shoulders, your arms and your hands. And we’re filling in gaps in contact. Every time you do this, practice, if you repeat it, you may find a little bit more internal territory, a little bit more of yourself within your body. So that place right above the wrist.

And now come on into your neck, let yourself settle down into your neck. Here’s a place we often lift up. See if you can then settle down within your whole neck and feel yourself living there. Now come into your whole face and your ears and your whole brain very gently feeling as much internal contact as you can within your whole brain, your whole face, ears. And now take a moment to feel that you’re in your whole body. So contact everywhere within your whole body. If you can, and this can take some practice, take a moment to feel your whole being, one being.

And of course that’s you, it’s you. Feel that you are that one being inside your body. Now here’s the advanced part of the practice for those of you who want it. And again, this is a very short version. Find the space outside your body, the space in the room. Not visually, but just finding it and feel, experience that the space inside and outside your body is the same continuous space. You’re in your body, but you’re pervaded by fundamental consciousness. It’s experienced as undivided stillness. Undivided, pervading you inside and out. Your whole body, the midsection, pelvis, your legs inside and out, made your head very important part of the body. If your eyes are closed, open them. See if you can still feel that you’re in your body, but the space inside and outside your body is continuous, still in your body. Space pervades you and your whole environment.

With practice, you may be able to feel that you’re made of this space of fundamental consciousness and everything around you appears to be pervaded by and made of the same one space. That’s the experience.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you. At the beginning, you were aware, you shared that I was in my hand. So are you at the state of your life that you can, when you’re with people, sense this?

Judith Blackstone 

Oh, yes. Yeah, easily. And I also teach it and many people find they can do it.

Lorne Brown

Very nice. And I will share with the listeners because people say, “So what’s this good for?” Because again, this is simple. It’s kind of like a body scan, but with a different set of intentions. So it’s not quite a body scan. That’s what you would call on the superficial level or there’s a different set of intentions. So just by this set of intentions and how you put us into the body, it changes the tuning in. And I’m adding here that, so when you tune into that frequency or tune into your true nature, fundamental consciousness, fundamental consciousness is peace and happiness or peace and bliss, peace and joy. It’s its nature. So when you tune in, that’s your experience. So why would people want to do this is people say, “I’d rather experience peace.” There are people that want to have, they believe that they want to achieve more in life, reach their potential.

And when you are tuned into fundamental consciousness, the idea is right action follows right thinking. So if your action comes from fear and lack, you’re going to get more fear and lack. If your action comes from being whole and complete, you’re going to get more whole and completeness. So by tuning into this, just as you’ve experienced, Judith, you know self before when you were a dancer and the 10 years of healing and where you are now, I’m assuming it’s a question, that you are happy about the accident, grateful you had the accident or the surgery because you love who you are today. You wouldn’t sign up for it because it wasn’t a great experience. So if you knew it was coming, you’d say no. But now that you’re through it, you’re grateful you went through because without that, you wouldn’t be who you are today.

Does that make sense?

Judith Blackstone 

I’m extremely grateful for it. Yes, extremely. I think that I would suggest other people have a easier wake-up call than that one.

Lorne Brown

Yes. Yeah. And why ask people, I always tell people when they come in and I say, “Do you want to work?” And they’re like, “Well, I have this little thing.” And I go, “Why not get practice at the little things? Why do you need a tidal wave? Why do you need a death in the family or a terminal diagnosis? Why not that your boss didn’t give you feedback today or your partner didn’t do the dishes? Why don’t we do something that’s manageable?”

Judith Blackstone 

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Start now. Don’t wait to be knocked flat on the ground.

Lorne Brown 

And if you do the small ones every day throughout the day, then when the big ones come, they don’t actually feel so big because you’re practiced,

Judith Blackstone 

Right?

Lorne Brown 

Yes. Is realization an endpoint or is it still an ongoing unfolding for you?

Judith Blackstone 

I’m still unfolding. That back challenge is so much better than it was 50 years ago, but there’s more to go. And yes, still unfolding. I think it’s a lifelong, at least for me, lifelong process.

Lorne Brown 

And if someone listening feels, say, anxious, disconnected, overwhelmed, or even numb, where would you suggest they begin?

Judith Blackstone 

Even breathing. Breathing. But being in your feet or being in wherever feels comfortable right now to inhabit, is there a part of your body that feels safe and comfortable to inhabit and start with that part of your body and then dwell there for a while, see if you can live there, walk across the room, be in your life in that part of your body, and then little by little, see if you can add in the rest of the body.

Lorne Brown 

And I’ll invite people to, we’ll share it in the show notes in a moment, but read your books because there’s tools there. Go to your website because you offer classes and resources there as well. Before we wrap up, I want to circle back to relationships. You talked about how this is in relationships. And the reason I want to ask it is in my practice, I told you predominantly I see both male and female, but predominantly it’s females that come. They’re either trying to grow their family, so a lot of reproductive health, or they’re in their 40s and beyond 50s, perimenopause, menopause. Majority of them have a hit on their partner. 

Judith Blackstone 

They have what? 

Lorne Brown 

A Hit on their partner. They want to kill their partner. Their partner’s the reason they’re suffering. If only my partner was this way, I’d be happy. And I call it conscious relationships in the work, how when you do this work and you change, all of a sudden how you perceive your partner changes, and sometimes they actually change because the field changes. But you were talking about the relationship. So I wanted just to revisit doing this work because people go, “Does my partner need to do this work?” I’m like, “No, you do the work. He doesn’t need to do the work,” for example. What I have found, guys are a little, we could be dense. I can say this being one of the guys, you don’t have to tell them about it or do the work. Usually within six months to a year, they notice you’re different and they ask you, “What are you doing?” And then they’ll be interested in coming to see me or doing your work.

You don’t have to tell them about it, they’ll notice it. But can you just go back to that? Just because I think a lot of my listeners, they’re doing so much in their relationships, they’re doing work on themselves, and it seems like their partner is their trigger, so their opportunity to heal. And I just wanted you to talk a little bit more about what your experience has been and why this work will support relationships.

Judith Blackstone 

Of course, it will support everything, so it will certainly support relationships. We have in the realization process, one aspect of it is called empathic ground, and that’s a series of practices for couples to do together where they feel the oneness and the separateness at the same time. Very often when couples get into trouble, it’s because one is withdrawing, the other is reaching forward, and that of course becomes an endless circle. The further you reach, the more the other one withdraws. So the equality, the mutuality of that attunement of experiencing one another as that pervasive stillness and then the deep contact that can happen there can be very healing and also a kind of diagnosis for relationships. Where are we not connecting and why? So one person is blocking in the chest and the other person might be blocking in the intelligence. And so the resonance that two people can experience together isn’t occurring.

And so it’s a wonderful supplement for relational counseling, relational healing. I, in my own life, have found relationship to be the most healing thing. I’ve been married for 43 years now, and my husband is on a very similar path and has been healing himself really since we met many years ago. So it certainly helps if both partners are willing to do that. And I think what you say is true, if one person starts out, often it is the woman, we’re like, “We’re going to fix this relationship.” But then little by little, if there’s that basis, that mysterious love thing there between them, then the partner may look over and go, “Gee, I want some of that. Let’s do it together.”

Lorne Brown 

Literally. When the guy. Comes in, I ask them, “Do you know what I do and why are you here?” And they said, “My wife’s different and I want some of that.” They just, “What’d you do? What have you done?” What did you do there? “You can’t even push your buttons like you used to.” They just notice there’s something different. And when you’re lacking, when you’re not tuned into, I’ll use your term, fundamental consciousness, then you’re looking for it outside. So food, drugs, work, your partner to fill that hole. And that is a form of neediness and neediness is very unattractive. And when you no longer need somebody to be a certain way because you’re tuned into it, then they don’t feel that pull anymore, like you were using a word. And so they just feel better in your presence because you’re not needing them to be a certain way.

And we’re not saying to be doormat. Don’t pretend, don’t be doormat. This is not about doormat work. It’s really you’re tuned in. And so you’re speaking your truth and doing things from that state of consciousness, which means some people do leave the relationship in consciousness.

It doesn’t mean you be a doormat. When you’re realized, you start to make decisions or choices that are aligned with being realized. That’s my thinking.

Judith Blackstone 

Yes, that’s right. I mean, there’s spaciousness. You can allow each other to grow. And sometimes that growing will take the relationship apart, but usually you’re growing together. Neither one is stopping the other person, so the love can mature as well.

Lorne Brown 

One of my teachers conscious said to have a holy relationship, it just takes one. One person to be doing the work and becoming realized can heal a relationship. Does that resonate for you?

Judith Blackstone 

I don’t know. I mean, I was very lucky to find a partner. I mean, we met at the Zen Monastery, so all along he’s definitely as realized as I am. And that’s been lovely. And what we do for fun is sit on benches together and meditate. That’s our favorite vacation. So I think that’s very, very lucky. But if one person is getting realized, it will certainly change the dynamic. And I think we’ll pull the other person either into it or the person will grow apart, will outgrow. 

Lorne Brown 

I Think it was Eckhart’s quote, “You’ll either grow into the relationship more in love or you’ll leave the relationship in love.” It’s not against. It’s okay. All right. Judith, thank you for being so generous with your time. Thank you for writing eight plus books. I don’t know how many websites you have. I found your realizationprocess.org website that has a lot of – That’s it. Is that the place we should send people?

Judith Blackstone 

Yes.

Lorne Brown 

Okay. So we’re going to put in the show notes, but just for our listeners, her website is realization with a Z, process.org. And on there you can see her books, her CDs. CDs, you have been doing this for a while. I see on your website a list of CDs there. You have been doing this for a long time. I have. No eight tracks.

Judith Blackstone

I have a landline.

Lorne Brown 

You have a landline. But her website, you can find out, she’s got events that she’s doing. She’s got training programs, teachings. There’s just a wealth of information and resources there. So I encourage you to go to her website, realizationprocess.org. She’s been on tons of podcasts as well, so if you search her, you’ll hear her as well. She’s a wealth of information. And again, if you’re kind of ready to evolve, be realized so you have peace in your life and you want to tune into that part that already exists, then I really encourage you to check out her website and the resources she offers because that’s what she seems to be dedicating your life to, how to tune into your fundamental consciousness, your true nature. You’re not fixing anything, you’re not adding anything. I use the noise analogy. Another analogy Judith, I often use is the sun is always there and it’s bright and warm, but if there’s clouds, you may not experience it and you think, oh, the sun is gone, it’s abandoned me, but it’s always there.

So your work is how you either part the clouds or pierce the clouds so you can re-experience the sun again. It’s always been there. It’s just you’re not aware of it because of what you would call constrictions are in the way. Clouds are in the way. And this work is how to remove the constrictions or part the clouds. That’s my other metaphor.

Judith Blackstone 

Yeah, that’s wonderful, Lorne. Thank you.

Lorne Brown 

Thank you, Judith, for your time. Thank you for spending this time with us on the Coherence Code Podcast. I’m Dr. Lorne Brown, and I will see you next week for another conversation on coherence and healing. If this conversation resonated with you, please like, subscribe, or follow the show and also share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. Remember to take a moment to breathe, reflect, and stay connected. Welcome to the Coherence Code Podcast.