I was interviewed recently by Simone Fürnschuß-Hofer from marie | Spezial, a Vorarlberg newspaper. We spoke about relationship, compassionate healing and our innate abilities to self-heal. I also share some early experiences that led to my personal development and how this grew into Body Resonance and my practice today.
What the World Needs
We met with Body Resonance founder David Crean, 62, and learned that his work is about nothing less than wholeness. The resonance that leads us to compassion and self-healing. And the deep realization: nothing in this world is separate.
"We are always in relationship - with other people, with nature, with the whole world." This first sentence of the workshop called "Body Resonance: the Power of Connection” at the Bildungshaus Batschuns made us curious, it fits so well in this marie-special issue. We wanted to know more and met with the founder of this approach, which is more an attitude than methodology. That David Crean, born in Canada and living in England, also works in Vorarlberg, has been more or less the same in recent years. However: a ski holiday in Lech when he was a five-year old gave him an experience that could almost be interpreted as a harbinger of his work today. The fun on the slopes came to a sudden end when little David broke his leg and, was taken to the nearest hospital by horse and sled, a picture that has burned itself into his memory. Even the doctor who treated him, Dr. Rhomberg - now deceased – he remembers well: "First he treated my injured Teddy bear before he dedicated himself to my leg. That's how I completely trusted him. It was a brilliant thing to do that showed what it means to be a doctor in relation to your patient." The Body Resonance approach developed by David Crean over the last three decades, however, goes far beyond relationship work. As a universal language that can individually assume the most varied forms of expression, it seeks to bring us into contact with ourselves and, at the same time, create a link to the big picture. Body Resonance, according to its founder, wants to expand the space in us, activate self-healing powers, open the door to our inner knowledge, to our intuition. And, by virtue of that, lead us into a compassion that we do not understand as achievement for the other but as something we want to develop for our own sake.
self-healing
If you want to better understand what brought David Crean to "become" as he is, you have to look further, because the broken leg was only a small part of David's many experiences with illness. Tuberculosis overshadowed his entire childhood. Nevertheless, he was drawn to the theater as a young man, where he was initially confronted with the fact that his voice was too quiet as an actor. At the same time, this was also the phase in which he threw all his illness-related investigations into the wind. Especially since he did not feel sick anymore. And indeed, after he had finally arrived for a long overdue check-up, the - extremely indignant – doctor could hardly believe what the x-rays revealed. "It was the classic. One of those stories in which the doctor tells you they must be the wrong x-rays. The scars had disappeared… I realized that self-healing is possible," David Crean realised retrospectively. Nevertheless, the quiet and too weak for the theater voice remained. At least for the time being. He became aware that although he had solved the problem on a physical level, his lungs were healthy, his mental-emotional work was yet to come. The full implications of his personal history, the mental and emotional relationships and the spiritual dimension within, all of this only became apparent to him years later. Today, he is firmly convinced that every person has the ability to turn things around for the better. So he accompanies many people with serious diseases, including cancer patients, and says: "The more the person develops a feeling that there is more than just his own body, that we are all connected to a bigger picture, the more resilience (immune system resistance) seems to develop."
Meeting yourself
Body Resonance considers the body as a resonant space. "As humans, we have this extraordinary ability to resonate and transform energy. Both together have an immense healing potential ", David leads us to the starting point of his work. "We receive and send all the time. A person is made up of a myriad individual frequencies interacting in a very specific symphony.” He continues, “When we interpret faces as babies, that is basically the first step to empathy. We need resonance to learn. Or to feel close to someone. But we should not stay only on the level of empathy. Because at the level of empathy we ‘suffer together’ and that ultimately pulls us down together. That is the nature of pity: to pity someone is narrowing, it contracts us. What the world needs is compassion. Compassion transforms narrowness into space that can include any discordance." That’s how a healing field can grow. What participants can expect in the workshops is hard to pin down to a set of concrete exercises, simply because David responds to what arises, adjusting to the dynamics and issues that each group brings with them. It is a bit like a meeting with oneself, with a view to those parts that we would otherwise rather ignore. "Yes," says the Body Resonance founder: "we do not analyse what's wrong with us. On the contrary: we open the space within us. Like spring, when the ice melts and things that were frozen float to the surface and become visible. There is light, it is redemptive.” Not necessarily in the spirit of a big ‘wow’, more in terms of little, ordinary wonders. In any case, every participant can relax and be safe in the sense of being seen. "Too often we hide because we are ashamed of what we did or did not do. Because we are expected to have these and those feelings. If we give ourselves permission to discover ourselves and express feelings, when conditioning is dissolved, then inner vastness can emerge - and with it the resonant space for compassion."
Not-knowing as an answer
"Yes," he says, the question "Who am I?” he has already answered. While he used to have to "know" because of deep fears, he became aware that really he did not know anything. Not who he is either. This freed him from filters and enabled him to be a clear mirror for others. Maybe it's experiences like his personal "Vision Quest" in the Canadian forests some twenty years ago that revealed "not knowing" as a field of limitless possibilities. After days without water and food, he found himself in a revelatory super-sensory state that offered him not only abundant messages, but also death as an option. He (or was it the big picture?) decided in favour of life. The doctor later diagnosed a heart attack. David Crean sees life as a wonderful gift. And it sounds so simple and plausible when he says things like, "Life is free. You can do it all. Go ahead, discover and develop your creativity. At an individual level, we have the choice. To do even what is destructive. At a higher level, though, you'll soon find that if you hurt others, you only hurt yourself. Because we are all connected."
Was die Welt braucht marie - Spezial: Ausgabe 3 2019
Ich wurde kürzlich von Simone Fürnschuß-Hofer von der Vorarlberger Zeitung Marie interviewt. Wir sprachen über Beziehung, mitfühlende Heilung und unsere angeborenen Fähigkeiten zur Selbstheilung. Ich teile auch einige frühe Erfahrungen, die zu meiner persönlichen Entwicklung führten und wie dies zu Body Resonance und meiner heutigen Praxis wurde.
Wir haben uns mit dem „Body Resonance“-Begründer David Crean, 62, getroffen und gelernt: Es geht in seiner Arbeit um nichts Geringeres als ums Ganzwerden. Um die Resonanz, die uns ins Mitgefühl und in die Selbstheilung führt. Und die tiefe Erkenntnis: Nichts auf dieser Welt ist voneinander getrennt.