Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Welcome to my January Newsletter!
This week marks Doctor Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday. Dr. King has been an inspiration for me since I was a child and listened raptly to I Have a Dream, and watched him shoulder to shoulder with others confronting hate with peace and non-violence in Selma.
His vision still lights my heart and permits me to hope that we can bring the peace we seek into the world by first finding it in our own hearts and then in the hearts of others.
Dr. King left us Six Principles of Nonviolence (you can read them all here: UNODC- King’s Six Principles of Nonviolence). These are the steps we can take to create the world we want to live in.
Principle five: Nonviolence chooses to love instead of hate. Nonviolence resists violence of the spirit as well as the body. Nonviolent love is spontaneous, unmotivated, unselfish, and creative is my favorite.
And it’s relevant to my work as a biodynamic craniosacral therapist, as a professor, as a parent-infant coach, and a mentor, mother, sister, and friend.
In my role as a craniosacral therapist, nurturing touch, for babies, children, and adults is key to enhancing emotional well-being, reducing stress, and maintaining cognitive health across the lifespan. However, many of us have experienced violence of spirit, or body, or both.
Before we can receive nurturing touch, we need to feel safe – we need to know that we are surrounded by nonviolent love.
It is my job to bring this nonviolent love into our sessions so that the nurturing touch and calming effects of craniosacral therapy create a sense of security and trust, fostering a deeper connection and sense of peace.
This sense of peace allows you to optimize your circulatory system, to balance your endocrine system and regulate your hormones; In rest, your immune system functions at its best, and your nervous system’s equilibrium is restored.
We can only share what we have. By creating this nonviolent love in ourselves, in our families, in our clients, we can more easily spread Dr. King’s doctrine of nonviolence in our wounded and weary world.
I invite you to share that gentleness and compassion with those around you and remember that this is what we need now to replace the hate and contempt that flows too freely around us.
Together we can.