Therapy and the evolution of InnerDialogue

The fractured self and the search for being

For nearly thirty-nine years, I have witnessed the vastness, intricacy, depth and sheer enormity of the human Self. I have delved deeply into understanding how different elements and their accompanying force may change our fate, and the understanding how and what forces augment and accompany us towards our destiny. I have seen and experienced the unflinching hand of fate, and the unmistakable presence of Grace. I have witnessed the undeniable sanctity and spiritual nature of life, and observed the myriad quests for finding Self.

I initially found myself as a therapist; an osteopath who primarily used cranial osteopathy to facilitate change; and used my ability to manipulate the deranged fulcra in the physical and fluid body to facilitate a stillness within, that augmented an inherent healing capacity to manifest.

I added other skills such as kinesiology as a somatic feedback tool and  homeopathy, acupuncture, nutrition as additions. I was looking for ways to augment the healing capacity of, often, severely deranged human bodies, whether in the soma or in the psyche.

Kinesiology more and more took my attention as I realized the feedback had inherent idiosyncrasies and inaccuracies (the inability for a finding to be consistently reproduced from therapist to therapist) and the personal yet unconscious bias that each practitioner brings with them. However, the often unparalleled accuracy and ability for us to root out the underlying and ontological element that created the original disturbance, gave kinesiology an aura of wonder.

I trained with a number of the top practitioners (Bandy, Melldener, Goodheart, Beardall) who used kinesiology in a number of different forms, absorbing the richness of their understanding, the models that they constructed and used their maps in practice, very successfully.

Over time, however, I started to realize that often whilst with a client that the line of enquiry–the essence of ontological work–would lead me to an uncharted territory; an area which I had neither expertise nor had these nuances which were begging to be examined, ever been looked at, by other practitioners.

This is when Grace intervened; for one day–without elaborating the story and the how–I was with a colleague, Haakon Lovell DAc., and we were both forced, by the absence of understanding, to surrender to the Great Life, the Divine Intelligence and ask for help. At that moment both of us spontaneously received into our hands a similar mudra or gesture. As our kinesiology toolbox at that time also worked with mudras which Alan Breadall DC had developed in what is known as Clinical Kinesiology, this was not a surprise. But what was, was that as we stayed in this open, receptive aligned place, we were informed (at a visual, kinesthetic and somatic level) of the mudra’s nature, meaning and nuance. This initial receiving whilst in ‘clinical’ practice was the start of an intense process over the next many years of some several hundred, and now in its present form, several thousand mudras and other aspects of this unexpected proto-language to descend.

Over the years these many mudras took a shape, as if I was being given a manual of understanding. They included mudras which allowed us, whilst using kinesiology, to maintain accuracy, to be very specific, and to begin to understand why the body and its musculature created such an uneven and often seemingly unreliable display. Why a muscle would be weak, and then go strong, yet for another practitioner be strong (changed its state) and not respond to the mudra that had changed the muscle display a moment before. I formulated a neurological understanding of the levels of competence; the vagaries of reactivity–the local, spinal, limbic and higher reflex mechanisms–that the neurology employs to allow the organism to survive. When we use muscle testing (kinesiology) we encounter this unconscious drive to survive, so that muscle testing is affected by this inherent neurological flexibility and, the force of the practitioners own internal dialogue, state, beliefs and agenda also acts as a force and can affect the outcome of the integrity of the muscle testing and the result and conclusion. This acts as a further accident, in its ontological sense, within the therapeutic session.

Gradually we evolved the process of therapy; from physician-mediated, to client mediated and ultimately to dialogue. The foremost practioner of dialogue was the physcist David Bohm, and although we initially didn’t know of his work and understanding, our work grew in parallel with his model. We now see correspondences and parallels in our idea of dialogue as both models are mediated by silence, quietness and surrender to, as he would put it, the Mind of 'God', the Implicate Reality that runs through the center of everything. (We might conjecture that our central tenet of integrity infers this.) Out of this deep reverence arises the Explicate (Reality), which is the unfolding of life (our flexibility) as personal, collective, national and global narratives (the information field that is carried by this unbroken field (reflectiveness). The work had grown up.

It was a slow transitional not without difficulties, as I and fellow practitioners, trained in this work, had to let go of the view of what it is to be a therapist and be informed how be a companion.

Companionship is the core element of our practice, and the basis through which we dialogue. This has superseded our original understanding of the conventional idea of consultation. The dialogue process uses kinesiology as the neuro-musculo-kinetic feedback tool and mudras, body challenges etc., make up the language. The intermediary is the descent of baraka in the silence, pause or interval as the internal dialogue arises prompted by the invisible yet often palpable hand of Grace. This is the core of InnerDialogue.

To follow from the above narrative, the therapeutic  Ontological Kinesiology, which was the name given to the  work that developed between 1986 and ’97, was based upon looking (our primary concern as a therapist) for the accidents–the forces that affect us: whether actual as in a trauma, or an internal resonance that interferes with the natural harmonics of the body from our structural body as an inherent antenna; emotions, as in feelings that arise within us or that we allow into our somatic structure, stereotypes that we embody and foster, archetypes that fill our being but no longer serve us, or delusional higher elements that restrict our development.  The evolution of the work arrived at its present understanding and practice as a tool to allow for a narrative to unfold, mediated by Grace rather than the forces that often rule us.

The work has paralleled my own journey and growth as I have sought to understand my own failings, the complexity of my character, the familial patterns that I  struggle with, and the gradual unfolding of resources that I contained, yet laid dormant within me.

To paraphrase the above, InnerDialogue, practiced in what ever form the practitioner has mastered,  is useful when:

• You want to know the true source of what is bothering you
• You have an allergy or other chronic problem that is never resolved
• Prescription medications and/or nutritional supplements only initially resolve the problem
• Your condition appears to be resolved but then returns
• You feel stuck or are unable to manage aspects of your life such as relationships, sexuality, emotions, and habitual patterns
• You are seeking a new direction or resource
• You want to explore the “deeper” root cause of your state/illness
• You want to augment and support conventional therapy with a parallel process