Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing Podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Welcome to the Conversations on Healing Podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and I’m so glad you’re joining us today. We have a wonderful guest, Judith Blackstone. She is a teacher, psychotherapist, and author of eight books. Most recently, she released the Embodiment Workbook for Women. Her work sits at a remarkable intersection of spiritual awakening and embodied healing. Judith is the founder of The Realization Process, a method she developed after a serious injury ended her career as a dancer, and centered on a profound journey to heal herself. That journey led her to discover what she calls fundamental consciousness, or an undivided ground of awareness that lives within and all around us. This has been described by many spiritual traditions using different words and language. And this became the foundation of her life’s work. In today’s conversation, Judith shares what it truly means to live inside your body rather than simply being aware of it, but experiencing it with a kind of a fullness.

And also, she discusses the ways that our traumas, our injuries, or our unfelt emotions can become blocks to full embodiment. She guides us through specific embodiment exercises in the podcast that you can try for yourself. And Judith offers a definition of healing that I think will stay with you long after this episode ends. So this is really a rich and deeply nourishing conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. So let’s dive in.
Well, Judith, I’m very grateful to welcome you to the Conversations on Healing Podcast. Thank you so much for joining the show.

Judith Blackstone Well, thank you for inviting me.

Shay I’m delighted to talk with you today. Your story is really rich and I thought we might begin very early in your life so that you could share with our listeners a little bit how you came into doing the work that you now do today. You started dancing professionally at the age of nine years old, but then had an injury in your 20s that really changed everything. So I’m wondering if you might be able to take us back to that time and how it eventually led you to develop your own healing approach.

Judith Well, I did, as you said, I injured my back very badly in my early 20s and had to have surgery, which pretty much ended my ability to move the way I had moved since childhood. But I was still teaching dance to earn my living. I lived in a 2,000 square foot loft in Manhattan, which at that time you could get fairly inexpensively. This was many years ago. And people were coming to the loft to take classes with me. And I was pretty much lying on the floor of the loft, just kind of praying for some sort of help in order to begin to heal myself. And I did begin to get help, which was very interesting. I began to feel all sorts of very interesting things about life that I had never known before. For example, as I let my weight drop to the floor, I could actually feel currents of energy.

I had no name for it at that time, of course, but I now know that they were currents of energy. They came up up from the floor and actually began to pull my body into alignment. And that was fascinating to me. I also discovered because my spine had been fused in an off-center position, I was very uncomfortable. I discovered that I could find a space to the right and left of myself at the same time. And again, my spine had come to center. Another very interesting discovery. And one last thing I’ll mention is that I could feel very clearly in my body that where the spine had been fused, there was a brick there.

That density was repeated everywhere in my body. So another interesting discovery, I now know that has something to do with fractal geometry and the self-similarity principle, but everywhere in the body was mirroring that one point of density. So in the meantime, people were coming to the studio, to the loft, to take dance classes, and I began to teach them these very subtle attunements that I was making within my own body to heal myself. And it was very interesting for me to see that even though they didn’t have the kind of crisis that I was working with, they still had imbalances. They still really could benefit from finding these internal points within their body, from finding that internal balance. So that was the very beginning of what became the Realization Process. It began as a dance technique in a way, but a very revised dance technique.

Shay Yeah. And I think it might be helpful for listeners who are new to your work to have you actually describe the Realization Process in plain terms, what it is and what that can actually do for people so that our listeners have a deeper understanding.

Judith Yes. So it’s several things, the Realization Process, really. It’s a spiritual technique. It’s a technique for embodiment, for making deep contact within one’s own body and actually feeling one’s own aliveness and internal wholeness. And it’s also a psychotherapeutic technique. And it all is based on the ability that we all have to uncover in ourselves, through subtle invert attunement with ourselves, a very subtle-I’ll call it dimension-that sounds kind of hokey, but it’s a level of consciousness, an undivided level of consciousness that we can uncover without too much difficulty pervading our whole body. And as we get more and more subtle in that refinement of our focus, even pervading the world around us. And what that means, I call it fundamental consciousness. It’s actually mentioned in Buddhism and in Hinduism and has a lot of different names in the spiritual literature. But when we actually experience it, it gives us the ground of our own individual being.

And at the same time, it gives us deep contact with the world around us.

Shay And as you became familiar with attuning to yourself, noticing some of those things that you described, like that kind of brick energy, how it was throughout your system, the expansive awareness on either side and how your spine then could actually move more into alignment with awareness. As you started to experiment with that yourself in your own body, how did that lead you towards your own kind of healing? What did you discover through your own kind of attunement that helped you to support your healing?

Judith I discovered that I had to attune with a very subtle focus inwardly in order to begin to get some fluidity through what felt like a brick in my lower back. And I was able to do that and I began to experiment with all different kinds of ways of doing it. Now, I didn’t do it all on my own. I had several wonderful healers who all shed light on what became really one path, and that is finding these points of constriction within the body that are not just physical, but also ways that we have protected ourselves in psychological events, really in any event that was too abrasive or painful when we were children to fully experience ways that we have protected ourselves from the full impact of those experiences. So in that way, it became not just a physical technique or an embodiment technique, but also a psychological path of psychological healing.

So in that inward attunement to myself, I found both those sorts of densities, both those sorts of tensions, those that were based on the physical injury and the subsequent surgery, and those that were based on ways that I had to protect myself as we … We all do. It’s not a pathology. It’s just, in fact, a very, very healthy and helpful strategy that we all have for keeping ourselves intact when life is inevitably at times overwhelming.

Shay I was thinking for our listeners who might have questions about, well, wait, what do you mean? What’s this attunement? What do you mean to fully inhabit my body, the subtle energy? For listeners who might be less familiar with some of these concepts and they might sound like they’re uncertain, perhaps we could actually walk through a very simple practice and you share some of these in your workbook and in some of the books that you’ve written. You even have something on your website that people could also listen to. But I’m wondering if even just right now in the podcast to give people a bit of a taste of what this feels like, if you would be open to walking us through just a short exercise where we could embody this and feel what you’re describing.

Judith Sure. I’m glad to do that. The major shift in being able to experience this type of self-healing, this type of deepening connection with oneself is to make the shift between being aware of our body and living within it. And for some of us, that’s a really strange, unusual, big, major shift. Others will feel very familiar with it, but we can try this just very briefly. Take a moment, this is if you feel comfortable doing this, of course, to come sit up comfortably, rest your hands in your lap and take a moment to become aware of your hands.

Now, in becoming aware of your hands, you may notice how cold or warm they are or how tense or relaxed they are. And if you’re very attuned to yourself, very observant of yourself, you may also notice that you’re aware of your hands from somewhere outside of them. See, if you do notice that, you may be aware of your hands from above them or somewhere outside of them. Now, enter into them. Let yourself experience that you’re actually present and living within the internal space of your hands. It feels like it’s just a little bit of space, but in fact, it’s plenty of space to feel your aliveness, your presence, your being within your hands.

Now, if you want to continue with that, and we have a whole practice that goes on for 35 minutes, which I won’t do today, but then we go through the whole body like that. So just to give you a little taste of it, come on down to your feet and in the same way that you entered into your hands, see if you can enter into your feet. So we’re sinking down into them, softening them, actually feeling yourself living within your feet. Take a moment. What does that feel like to be inside your feet? You might feel that your breaths, every time you inhale, lifts you up away from there. So staying in your feet, see if you can adjust your breath so that when you inhale, it doesn’t lift you up away from them. You can stay in your feet as you continue to breathe.

Let’s just sit with that for a moment.

You’re in your feet, you’re inhaling and exhaling without leaving your feet. And now, just for a very quick taste of this, let yourself enter into your whole body, including your feet. And that means contact with yourself everywhere within your whole body. If this is something new for you to do, don’t expect yourself to be able to do it right away. It can take coming back to that instruction again and again for a little while until finally, “Oh yes, I can. I can live inside my body, not outside observing inward from the outside, but actually living inside, observing the world from within.”

Shay And I’m curious, as our listeners experiment with this, if they find blocks like the brick that you described, although their blocks might have a very different form or feeling or experience, over the years that you’ve been doing this work, how have you come to guide people in working with any of those either tensions or blocks or things that may come up in their system?

Judith Right. Well, the reason that we constrict ourselves in terms of experiences, so on the psychological level, we’re either holding things out, angry voices, smell of cigarettes, smoke, or whiskey, anything that would’ve been abrasive to us as children or adolescents, holding out an obtrusive gaze of people when we hit adolescence and became more conspicuous to other people. So anything that we had to hold out, there’s really no way we can do that except by tightening the instrument of our experience. So even to hold out angry voices, we tighten just that little bit within the anatomy of our hearing. In order to black out the smell of cigarette smoke, we’re going to tighten a little bit in our breathing capacity.

The other big reason that we constrict ourselves on a psychological level is to hold back what might not be met with approval or what might even be met with punishment. So holding back anger, holding back tears if we’re told big girls, big boys don’t cry, or no reason to feel sorry that grandma died, she’s in heaven in a better place, stop crying. Anything like that, to be quieter as children are often told, be quieter, don’t be so smart. Any of those kinds of demands on ourself or anything that we know is not going to be met with approval from the people who are important to us in our lives, our early lives, we can hold back. And once again, we cannot hold back without tightening the instrument of our experience. You can try that out for yourself. Let yourself feel just a little bit angry, a tiny bit angry, and now try not to feel angry.

How do you do it?

It’s not a mental exercise, partly mental, of course, but there’s a physical component to it. And over time, that holding back or holding out or mirroring of our parents holding patterns or getting stuck in various attitudes, defeat, despair within our body, over time, those patterns will actually become static, will actually become rigid within ourselves. We think that happens through the fascia. The tissues of the fascia. Now, fascia, sorry, is a technical term, a wonderful term. It refers to a level of tissue that’s everywhere in our body, everywhere, even probably around the cells, definitely around every bit of our physical anatomy, which means that we can tighten anywhere deeply within our body. And over time, that tightening causes the tissues, the fascia, to glue together and become a hardened part in ourselves. The good news is that since we ourselves heartened it, we can also let it go, but it does usually take some focus.

And in the Realization Process, I’m very careful that people are able to live within their body, at least to some extent, before doing any of the release work, because we don’t want to feel vulnerable. We don’t want to release into thin air. We want to release into that inward contact with ourselves so we get more of ourself rather than less, rather than feeling flimsy. We feel, in fact, more and more and more substantial. So I do recommend that you do that not on your own, unless you’re very familiar. If you’re very familiar with your psychological history, you’ve been working on it for years, then yes, you can pick up a book or go to a workshop and do these practices on your own. But otherwise, it’s very good to do with a therapist or any sort of empathic listener, supportive, non-judgmental listener who will support you because these holding patterns actually hold the memory.

They hold the emotion that we held back. So it can be intense to let them go and best to be done with a guide.

Shay And you offer trainings and you also have, as I mentioned, a workbook where many of the actual exercises are described in detail that people can work with if they feel that they’re psychologically able to handle that or they can work with a professional if they feel like maybe they need or want more support. So you have a variety of different books and entry points into this body of work. So for people who are listening, and this seems like new information, you actually have a tremendous number of resources through your writing and on your website that is a great entry point for people that are new. And I’ll just mention too, you mentioned Fascia. Some of our listeners may be familiar with the technique myofascial release or John Barnes’ body of work. And what’s interesting is even though he was trained, he’s now since passed away actually just fairly recently, but he was trained originally as a physical therapist, then developed myofascial release and came to really understand similarly to your basis of understanding that the fascia can completely shift based on shifts in consciousness, that in a sense, it is a physiological expression of how consciousness is impacting inherently

Our body and our inner system. And so he very much talked a great deal about the relationship between fascia and consciousness. So it’s interesting to see those similarities in your bodies of work.

Judith Yeah. It’s an amazing discovery really, and very difficult to really research scientifically, but experientially not so difficult to feel. And it does seem to be, fascia does seem to be the interface between our mind and our body. So it’s physical, but very sensitive to our consciousness, to our beliefs and to all the maneuvers that we need to make in order to keep ourselves intact as we grow up.

Shay And I also want to bring in the spiritual dimension because there is a spiritual dimension to your work that sets it apart from a lot of trauma approaches that don’t necessarily merge that spiritual element. So I’m curious how you see those dimensions of trauma healing and spiritual awakening connecting in this embodied process that you’re guiding people through.

Judith Right. So fundamental consciousness, which is really the basis of all the practices, everything that we do in the Realization Process, fundamental consciousness can be … I don’t talk about it in terms of metaphysics, because interestingly, Buddhist and Hindus, even within Buddhism and within Hinduism, people disagree on what it actually is. And yet, if we read the spiritual literature, we see the experience of fundamental consciousness, of the oneness of that undivided consciousness that we can uncover, we see that experience described over and over and over. So it’s spiritual in the Realization Process, I talk about it as a subtle experience. It’s spiritual in the sense that it’s very subtle, perhaps our most subtle way of attuning, of knowing ourselves in the world, and also spiritual because it’s undivided, because it gives us a sense of our internal wholeness and of our self-other oneness. So this is very interesting because it means that we mature as individuals.

We find our individual depth of individuals, our depth of love, our depth of understanding, our depth of pleasure at the same time as we transcend our individuality, same time and same way by uncovering that dimension, that undivided consciousness. So that’s the spiritual aspect of the work. And even if we don’t regard it, we don’t use the word spiritual, we can still feel that self-other oneness as deep connection with other people and the world around us.

Shay And you walk through different, what I would call maybe stages of the work, you might describe it differently, but where initially someone might close their eyes to be able to tune in and feel the inner experience of their feet or the hands like you walked us through, but then you might progressively work with them to then open your eyes and are you still able to feel that? Or you might then progressively work with them to now walk around and are you still feeling that? Or now to look at an object and can you experience the space between you and the object? And so you continue to expand that awareness of fundamental consciousness, both within and without, and with also all of the dimensions in between, right? What we would call empty space is actually not empty space at all. And so part of what you’re also helping people to explore and understand is that they can actually experience space itself too.

And these are actually visceral opportunities that as you work on these very subtle levels can become more and more clarified through practice.

Judith That’s absolutely right. For some people, I go through those stages, other people come to me and they can right away go into fundamental consciousness, pervading themselves, pervading the physical space, because it does, it’s more subtle than physical space, pervading the furniture and the walls. So some people are ready to do that immediately. And some people, and of course for some of us, if there’s been enough abrasive events in our early lives, even just being in the body is going to have to be done very slowly and carefully. It might feel dangerous to be suddenly present, even though in fact it’s safer because we have contact with ourselves, we take up space, we feel our aliveness, the potency of our own being. Initially, it might feel like, oh, if I’m present, I’m going to be subject to that same danger, that same abuse perhaps that I felt that I endured as a child.

So people come to the work from all different places, all different paths that they’ve already traveled. So depending on where people are in their process, that’s where we start.

Shay And I’ll just mention, you’ve written a book, Trauma and the Unbound Body, that explores how trauma lives in us physically. And so for people that might have a stronger trauma history, that could also be a resource to help them to understand a little bit about how to navigate this. I don’t know if you want to speak to that at all any further.

Judith Yes. Yes. I think the books now, I think I’ve written eight of them, they all describe from different angles the work. So depending on what your connection, if you feel a connection to this work, depending on what your connection is, there’s also a book called Belonging Here, which is specifically for people who grew up more sensitive than the other people around them, and that caused certain difficulties for them that they felt vulnerable even to sounds and to sights, they felt diffuse in a way. People who really have spiritual gifts, but as children, those gifts might have made particular challenges for them and also may have caused them to feel estranged from other family members perhaps or their peers who were not attuned to the same world, the same spiritual experiences. So Belonging here, if that’s your connection for particularly sensitive people, that’s a good book.

I recently wrote a book for women, for the specific challenges that we may have sustained growing up because of the way people treated us based on our femaleness. A lot of my clients are saying, “why not a book for men?” And I’m hoping that one of my male clients will write one. I felt I could speak a little more credibly about female experience, but of course the embodiment is the same for men and women. But if you feel that your connection is really through what you’ve worked with as a woman, then that book, the Embodiment Workbook for Women would be a good place to start.

Shay And if there’s someone listening today who knows that they feel kind of numb or disconnected or it produces anxiety to even think about dropping into their body, how would you recommend that they start on this journey? What would your initial recommendations be to someone in that situation right now?

Judith When I work with someone who has a lot of anxiety about being in their body, of course, we have our usual nervous system approach to helping people be calmer. We have a foundational grounding practice in the Realization Process for helping people alleviate anxiety, at least for enough time to be able to begin to do the embodiment work, but mostly I would talk about and uncover the reasons for that anxiety. That needs to be done first. Why? Why does it make you anxious? To think of being in your body.That’s very important, the understanding and the resolving of that, since it’s an understanding that was probably created when you were a child and does not need to be your understanding today, but that needs to be looked at. I also would advise you if it interests you to go to the website, realizationprocess.org and to the senior teacher’s page.

I’m actually retired from private practice, but wonderful teachers have come to the work and to look at their photographs, to look at their bios and to choose one that calls to you and work with a teacher.

Shay Yeah. And you’ve mentioned that obviously because many imprints form in childhood or in our young lives, that often those are things we’ll discover. But of course, as we grow and mature and become adults, we also can sustain injuries and insults, whether those are psychological or physical or emotional that also impact in our adult lives. And as you have worked with so many individuals over so many years with this approach, do you find that injuries sustained in adulthood connect to those early childhood injuries? Or do you find relationships between the two? Do you find very often people are needing to focus more time on early woundedness? Or I’m curious about the balance across a lifetime.

Judith Right. That’s a big question. Of course, it varies. In terms of sustaining a wound or creating a constriction in the body that’s going to glue together as adults, it would need to be either an extreme trauma, such as a car accident or a rape, an extreme trauma for us to really hold so tight that it becomes a bound tissue in the body or it would have to be an abusive relationship over time. And of course, any of those things can hark back to childhood wounding. I would say the most likely would be the abusive relationship that often if we find ourselves in an abusive relationship, it does have something to do with early wounding, with early relationships. I won’t say that as a blanket rule, but it’s often the case. But any unhappiness, any anxiety, depression, lack of self-worth, anything that is plaguing us today as adults probably does have its roots in childhood or adolescence.

And I do feel that most of the binding, the held constrictions in the body are based on childhood events or adolescent events, but even more so childhood events. And for us really to free ourselves of that, we do need to look at the childhood history.

Shay Yeah, absolutely. And I’m also curious about the flip side. You mentioned how obviously some people might feel like it’s very difficult to be in their body at all for a variety of reasons, like we’re discussing childhood wounds, et cetera. But then you also mentioned that sometimes someone will come to you who already has a lot of capacity or skill to be able to do that. And I’m curious for our listeners who might relate to that, that they already have a good amount of facility to move inside their body to feel it, to occupy it. How do you work differently with somebody that’s in that stage?

Judith Well, we can simply go further, go deeper. It’s been my experience that healing or freeing ourselves from childhood is really a lifelong process. There’s always just a little bit more to open. And the more we … Here’s something important. The more we let go of those holding patterns, that means the more we can have that internal contact with ourselves. And the more we have that internal contact with ourselves, the more we can open to that very subtle level of fundamental consciousness pervading ourself and our environment. So that means that at that, we can say advanced level, we’re really doing spiritual work. It becomes very clear that psychological healing and spiritual realization are really the same process.

The more we contact ourselves … It’s been so interesting for me to feel that inward contact with ourselves, living within the body is at the same time letting go of ourselves. So inward contact is synonymous with openness. If we live within our chest, for example, you can try this out yourself if you’re listening, if you’re comfortable to do this, to come for a moment and just come on inside your chest to the extent that you can. You may feel a little tenderness there. You might actually feel love there or any of the emotions that you might be holding, sadness. Let yourself feel that, what it’s like to be in your chest. And now let yourself feel that being in the chest actually, for one thing, frees the fluidity of our emotional capacity, of our emotional responsiveness. So by contacting the internal space of our chest, we’ve let go of our clamping down.

We’ve let go of our grip on our emotional capacity. And that goes for all of our functions, all of our body and being. But you may also feel that you can at the same time be in your chest and find the space in front of you at the same time that you’re in contact with yourself, you’re living in your body, but you’re permeable, you’re open to the world around you, and not just in front, but in back and to the sides. So all of that happens at the same time. All of that happens concurrently.

Shay And I know something that you’ve described in your work is how sometimes we’ll have a difference in right-sidedness or left-sidedness in the body so that one side might feel very different from the other. And I wonder, you may also … I’m sure some people experience a difference too in front-sidedness or backsidedness, so that when they attune, things feel very different in those different quadrants or areas. And I’m interested to hear what you’ve learned about how embodiment adjusts across the different planes or hemispheres of the body and what that has to teach us.

Judith Yes. Well, that’s a wonderful question. So the imbalance, right left, front, back, has to do with our particular design of protection and openness. I mean, it’s pretty simple. If the abuser is on the left, if we got hit upside our head on the left, the holding pattern will be on the left and so on. So everybody has their own very specific design. We can say openness and density. Fundamental consciousness, as we get to that more subtle ability, it’s hard to describe. As we live within our whole body or almost our whole body, because whole bodies, that’s an ideal. But as we approach it and we’re pretty much in our whole body, we uncover that very subtle ground of fundamental consciousness. That just happens. And that subtle ground is undivided, so it becomes a level of balance within the body. Now, one of the ways that we enter into that subtle level is to experience balance.

For example, sitting here, again, if you feel comfortable to do this, find your right shoulder socket, just find it. Yeah. Find your left shoulder socket. Now find both at the same time. Now, just doing that, you may find that you can enter into more subtle level of your being. Now, very important not to hold onto that balance, and that’s not going to give you a permanent balance, but it will set up a process that gradually brings you towards balance.

Shay And as you walk people through this and they are able to access fundamental undivided consciousness and then are experiencing that, like you said, in a more complete way throughout their body, even it may not be total, but near closer to total

Judith Experiencing

Shay Of that. Do you invite them to sit in that state of undivided consciousness? Or once they are able to get to that more subtle level, then what have you found to be the guidance at that point in time?

Judith So we have a couple of stages there. And one is attuning to it, which is a volitional act. We attuned to it, but that’s not the realization itself. It helps evoke the realization. The realization of fundamental consciousness is not a volitional act. It’s uncreated. We even have that on the word of Shankra, who’s an ancient Hindu sage. It’s uncreated, that level of ourselves. It just emerges. It spontaneously comes about. Now, some people have interpreted that meaning that we don’t need to do any practice. It’s just our own nature. We can just relax into it. But that turns out not usually be the case because we really need to let go into fundamental consciousness from deep within our own body. Otherwise, we only experience some kind of clarity outside of ourselves, but we don’t experience that self-other oneness, which is the realization. So that letting go into that fundamental consciousness becomes an ongoing experience, becomes what even in the traditional spiritual literature is called stabilizing there.

After a while, with practice, with attuning to it, letting go of it, attuning to it, letting go of it, we stabilize there. We find we’re just there without any effort. Now, even at that point, we can still continue to open to it.
And that’s another thing where I’m in disagreement with some of the non-duality teachers. It’s not just one and done. We open to it. We’re in that oneness all the time, and yet there’s still places in the body that are still held. We can still continue to open to it more fully. But there are those stages of just attuning to it. And yes, we can sit with it for a while, that’s fine, but I do advise people not to try to hold onto it because holding onto it will not get you to that eventual, a totally non-volitional state, that real true realization.

Shay Yeah, it’s fascinating. I think one of the balances I’ve always played with in my own life is how to feel the fullness of that emergence when you get to that place. And then because at least from just my very individual experience, that can be so full and almost totalizing in moments when that emergence occurs, that then there’s at least been for me, a question of, okay, and to some degree, how do I navigate this in my day-to-day life a little bit? Like a question of how are you doing that, feeling that and paying the bills and going to the grocery store? And maybe that’s some skill development that occurs around the dynamic relationship there. And also, I guess these are some of my inherent questions just personally. It’s like also sometimes there is that experience where you just allow it to be so totalizing that you don’t want to walk, you don’t want to move, you don’t want to drive a car.You’re just allowing a fullness of that emergence to come through and sometimes stillness or just receiving is, at least to me, it feels like a very good choice in some cases.

Judith Again, a really good question. So there’s a stage I left out, right? So we can volitionally attune to it as a practice and then let go of the practice. We can also experience it spontaneously, probably after some amount of practice, as a peak experience, as something that’s so blissful, that’s just so wonderful, all oneness that yes, we don’t want to drive a car and we shouldn’t drive a car at that point. But then it does go further that stabilizing there is actually quite a … It’s not an overwhelming experience. There is a good internal feeling, a kind of wellbeing, even kind of happiness within the body, but it’s not a blissful state, it’s not an unlivable state at all. It’s rather a sober experience and it becomes quite ordinary. It becomes just simply the way you are. Oh yes, I am made up of space and light and compassion.

And writing the bills becomes easier actually. Everything in that way then becomes easier.

Shay Wonderful. I’m glad you helped to clarify all those different elements of it. I’m curious because you’ve been doing this work now for decades and I’m interested to hear what kinds of transformations, or you could use a different word other than transformation that feels more appropriate, but what kinds of changes or evolutions do you see occurring in people that have committed themselves to the Realization Process and are dedicated practitioners?

Judith Every once in a while, someone will ask me, “Well, what is this good for? ” And it’s good for everything. I can’t think of anything that it’s not good for. It enriches our ability to enjoy life. It definitely helps us be calmer. It helps us experience a spontaneous upwelling of compassion and love that for some might be a new experience. That’s of course a wonderful experience, sense of kinship with other human beings. What else? I mean, everything, less projection of the past onto the present, less intrusive thoughts, head can be quite empty or open to new thoughts, more room for creativity. So I see these changes in myself over the years and in all of the people who do begin to realize this.

Shay Yeah. We started our conversation today with your injury and how you used this initially to try to understand your own body and what was happening and how to heal. And then you started sharing that with others who were also that you were teaching and doing dance with, and then they started to learn and it evolved and became a psychological and spiritual and energetic practice and took on became very multidimensional. How has this transformed or altered your understanding of what healing is and how would you define or describe what healing is based on your body of work?

Judith Yeah, of course healing can be defined in many ways, but in the Realization Process, I specifically think of healing as that ability to live fully within the body and to uncover that very subtle undivided ground. To me, that’s the direction of healing, the direction of spiritualization as well because in that self-body oneness, that consciousness, that being made of consciousness, feeling that one is actually made of consciousness, living within one’s body, that the body is consciousness itself as our own being, not something separate from ourselves, but as our own being as who we are, that frees and deepens all of our human aspects and all of those aspects that have been limited through traumatic experience, through abrasive experience. So our ability to love, our ability to feel actual power in our body, good power, a motor under all of our endeavors, sexual responsiveness, sexuality, for some, a sense of gender, which might not be their biological gender, but a basis in a real feeling at the base of themselves.

And all of these qualities are everywhere in the body that we attune to them certain specific parts of the body, but in fact, they’re everywhere. They’re part of our aliveness, the freedom of our voice from the constrictions. All of this is healing, the freedom of our ability to think for ourselves and the courage, the enjoyment of our intelligence, but also the courage to express ourselves. All of that comes in with living more fully within one’s body.

Shay And how have you come to understand, you mentioned in the start of our conversation that brick or that block, and that even back then, several years ago, you had some kind of insight or awareness that that was actually replicated throughout your system, that it actually wasn’t just in a single location, but like a fractal, there was this kind of replicability throughout. How have you come to understand why that is or how that works? What have you learned about that over these years?

Judith Well, I’ve learned that it’s everywhere in nature. I mean, that’s something I read about that confirmed. I mean, I learned about it later than my initial healing, that fractal geometry is everywhere, that the wholeness is replicated in each of the parts. That seems to be a fact of nature, an amazing fact of nature. And it does also seem to be the nature of our embodiment, and that’s why foot reflexology can work, eye eridology can work because all of the holding patterns, our pattern, our unique pattern of openness and protection is replicated everywhere, in every part of ourselves.

Shay Yeah, it’s beautiful. For anyone who’s listening, who’s feeling maybe discouraged in their own healing journey right now and they’re needing a little bit of insight or support, what would you want them to know?

Judith Healing is really possible, and I do believe that we need to bring the body in some way into the healing process in order to carry that along, but it is important to know that … I know from my own experience that I really traveled quite a long way from being injured in almost every possible way to feeling really whole and happy and productive in my life. So knowing that’s possible is definitely what I would want to leave you with.

Shay Yeah. And do you feel like if you could go back and talk to that 20 something year old version of yourself, what would you want to offer with the insights that you’ve now gained about the healing process and journey?

Judith Yes. Yeah. Just keep going. I mean, rest at times, but just really keep going. Follow your own lights, whatever feels right. In Zen Buddhism, they have a wonderful phrase called following an arrow or an arrow around a tree. This moment, what’s right in this moment? And now, what do I feel in this moment? What do I need right now? And then the next moment. So following that arrow to whatever feels right for you.

Shay Very good. Well, in closing, Judith, I just want to give you an opportunity if there’s anything else that you haven’t had a chance to share that you feel would be of value to anyone listening to just open the floor for you.

Judith This has seemed very complete to me. I’ve loved your questions and I think it’s really enabled me to present a pretty full picture of what the work is. Of course, if you want to know more about it, there is the website. I encourage you to go to it. We have workshops, some of them taught by senior teachers very inexpensively to get your first taste of it before you know if it’s something you really want to pursue, and then much longer retreats and teacher certification trainings.

Shay Wonderful. Well, thank you again for taking the time to share your wisdom about the Realization Process and what you’ve learned over many, many years, and I’m grateful for you and the work that you offer to the world.

Judith Thank you so much, Shay.

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