Presence Matters

Hello - I’m Suzanne Scurlock-Durana and my main focus is to help you and all of us as bodyworkers have a stronger, more effective presence in the healthcare community today.

We play a pivotal role in the health care arena right now. We help people slow down in a world that runs far too fast. And no matter what our modalities are, hopefully we are all offering our clients the nourishment of therapeutic touch.

This is deeply healing in a touch deprived (or sexualized) culture. We take time with our clients when other healthcare providers are squeezed to spend less and less time with each patient. The connections we make have a lasting impact on health. It may show up immediately or it may be an influence that blossoms over time.

I was reminded of this recently when a client of mine with multiple sclerosis (MS) came in for her regular visit. She’d been receiving bodywork from me for over three  years (every two to three weeks for an eclectic mix of CranioSacral and other modalities).

In her latest CT scan the largest plaque on her brain meninges had disappeared. Her neurologist was stunned. He couldn’t explain it. MS “does not go away.” Yet he had witnessed the plaque disappear on her CT scan.  And now the client is getting better. Her fingers and hands are no longer as numb.

I tell you this story not to toot my own horn. But to share with you that week by week I wasn’t feeling a great deal of change in her system. I felt like I was simply maintaining the status quo.

Occasionally I’d  wonder why she kept coming back. She didn’t have any big “aha” moments, and her system definitely needed the same work every time.  Yet here she was telling me these treatments were making a huge difference in her life, one tiny bit at a time.

In my early years of practice, I would have been tempted to feel like I hadn’t been doing enough, or worse, that she must be resisting the healing process in some hidden way.

As I have grown and learned to stay grounded and be a strong presence for each client, I know now that I can relax and know that if I do my best that day, the healing process will take place. I simply need to get out of the way and let my therapeutic presence and connection speak for itself in the healing process - whatever it may look like that day.

What I have learned after many, many years of practice and hearing from thousands of students is this: the clearer and stronger our therapeutic presence, the better we feel after each session. And the more impact we have on our clients, aside from any technical skills we may use.

So my mission in this blog is to keep you up on what is feeding and nurturing me and the therapists in my classes, and what I am exploring that may feed and nurture you in some way, so that you can be a better therapist and lead a happier life while you are at it!
We have to walk our talk or it just doesn’t make sense in the long run.

I hope I can be of some help, and I look forward to hearing from you. If you’d like to receive an e-mail whenever I post something new, please subscribe below. I hope to eventually post audios with some of my latest guided explorations and perhaps a video or two.

Stay tuned. And,enjoy!