The Drunken Buddha: aka "Ben the Heart"
Twenty years ago, my first teacher told me something along the lines of:
"Rick, you're going to find a few pearls...and if you keep collecting pearls...*" ~ EJP
Like everything else he said back then, it all eventually came to fruition. In truth, it still is; like a Zen koan, his words proved capable of endless refinement.
Throw in sunlight, water, good soil and a hefty dose of beginners mind, the words of a true teacher will always do this. Trust "The Joker", in particular. It might take G** 20 years to deliver the punchline, but when they do, it'll be worth the wait.
I have since met many other teachers. Technically, every moment is a teacher. But humans are fundamentally social creatures and so it is the human teachers we most easily allow to become an enduring element of our human story.
If you get really lucky, you might even get to call one of these teachers 'friend', too. Teacher, friend, pearl. White or black, both equally as precious. When it comes to pearls, HODL is the best strategy and time in the market has the best ROI.
No consent was acquired in the posting of these images. I think that might be technically illegal.
To me, Ben is a white pearl. He has dedicated a decent chunk of his life immersed (I would say baptised) in the schools of non-duality, somatic inquiry and other technologies of transmutation, both ancient and modern. Were he an alchemist in those halcyon days of yore, he would have circled pretty close to the Philosopher's Stone by now, if not finding the thing itself.
There are a lot of people out there proclaiming themselves as somatic therapists. There are comparatively few that are genuinely any good and unfortunately considerably more that would earn a more honest living by selling shit next to the stables. But don't take my word for it; truth does a good job of standing up for itself.
Especially when it does so with a sense of humour.
From drunkenbuddha.net
"You should try trauma-informed somatic work, it’s the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to healing and spiritual development. Seriously. That’s what I was doing in the desert that whole time.”
—Jesus of Nazareth
(OK, Jesus didn’t really say that, but it’s true!).
I wanted to repost some of his latest content; after all, it's the network that wins the set of games.
We are taught to deal with our anger one of two ways. When something or someone pokes the rage-bear within, either we have learned to repress it, deny it and basically pretend that nothing has happened; OR we explode with disproportionate rage. The former harms us, because we have to disconnect from our true feelings and expression, eventually becoming a weak, ineffectual person who is afraid of expressing themselves. The latter harms others, because we deal with our anger by lashing out at them. There is a middle way that allows you to connect to your truth and integrate your anger healthily to become a strong, effectual person in the world. But without lashing out and harming others. #somatichealing #trauma #somatictherapy
It never ceases to amaze me the clever and sophisticated ways our nervous system has learned to protect itself by repressing and resisting certain emotions that feel threatening or overwhelming. And there's nothing wrong with that—it was necessary for us at some point in our lives. But if we want to heal, we need to slowly find our way through these defensive mechanisms to process the pain underneath. In this video, I take you through 5 practical ways you can start to unwind the layers of resistance so you can open up to the emotions below.
In this video, I take you through a guided inquiry to investigate unconscious identities and images we hold onto around two areas: smallness and specialness. #somatichealing #trauma #somatictherapy
Nervous system regulation is a very popular approach, and it’s very useful. But it’s often touted as the goal or final end of trauma or healing work. If we can just regulate our nervous system! But this is a misunderstanding. In this video, I explore the limits of NS regulation and why it's not enough to heal at a deep level. Dysregulation is essentially when our nervous system gets stuck in a survival state. Nervous system regulation helps us come out of that survival state to a more grounded mode. This is great. So if you get triggered at work and you fly off the handle, you can regulate yourself and calm back down. Hurrah. The problem is that this doesn’t address the root cause, which is the backlog of historical emotional pain that we carry with us, that is what is being triggered in the first place. So if you just regulate your nervous system, you’ll be regulating yourself forever. That’s why some people are stuck with crazy complicated two-hour long morning routines of regulation exercises of meditation and gratitude lists and so on. It helps, but we don’t want to be doing this for the rest of our lives! The key is to process the emotional pain we are carrying. That’s the root. When we process the emotional pain, it integrates and dissolves. And then we simply don’t get triggered. There’s no need for regulation, because there’s nothing to regulate. Regulation helps us take our pain that is spilling over and push it back into its box. Emotional processing helps us lift it up and through. And NS regulation can be a critical prerequisite to give us the space to process emotions. So we all need to start there and if that’s what you need, perfect. But the goal, in my book, is simply to NOT have to regulate ourselves, because we have processed our pain, instead. You can learn how to process you emotions here: How To Feel Your Feelings - https://www.drunkenbuddha.net/blog/ho... #somatichealing #trauma #somatictherapy
If you like the cut of his jib, you can book a 30 minute free discovery call to find out more.
Next event: "How to Feel Your Feelings - Somatic Workshop" - Friday 4th April - Flow State, Hove, UK.
Email: ben@drunkenbuddha.net
He's on some of the socials, too.
@thedrunkenbuddha
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