A Path of Healing
By Robert Weston
© 2009 My work with Arthur Munyer
Arthur Munyer sits directly in front me. We are both in identical IKEA chairs, only Arthur’s has a white sheepskin draped over it. Our knees are nearly touching. We are in the studio/sun porch of Arthur’s home in Carmel, California. The room has windows all around, revealing a lush, tree lined back yard. Sunlight pours into the room, refracted into sparkling diamonds by a hanging crystal. There is a picture on the wall of a pair of hands holding a newborn infant. There are several ‘altars’ around the room with various icons: statues, crystals, pictures of spiritual teachers.
I have come to Arthur for trigger point massage to address a chronic neck stiffness and pain I have had now for nearly 10 years. I have sought almost every kind of remedy for this condition you can imagine: deep tissue massage, chiropractic, physical therapy, stretch exercise, electro contractions, magnets, essential oils, psychotherapy, antibiotics, cortisone, and supplements galore. All have helped, to a degree or temporarily, but my range of motion is still 30% restricted and the pain is acute. Arthur is my latest effort. A call to the local massage school asking for a referral to a trigger point masseur yielded only one name: Arthur Munyer.
Arthur, also known as Shambho, a Hindu word meaning “abode of bliss”, is a senior instructor of Esalen Massage and Trigger Point Release. He has practiced and taught bodywork, spiritual, and emotional release disciplines at Esalen Institute in Big Sur and other locations in the US, South America, Europe, and Bali for over 30 years. He is also a certified Sivananda Yoga instructor. He has developed his own unique somatic healing practice which he calls “The Munyer Method.”
Arthur and I talk. In fact, on this first visit, we talk the entire session. There is a massage table right beside us, and I expect to spend most of my time on it. But Arthur has other ideas. He wants me to tell him about the best thing that has happened to me in the past 24 hours. I want to tell him about my neck, but Arthur doesn’t seem all that interested. Instead, he asks about what has given me the most enjoyment during the past day. I think about it, describe a moment of walking through the Point Lobos National Reserve just up the road. I describe the natural beauty of the place, the freshness of the air, the dramatic joining of ocean and land, the unique geology, the seals, otters and sea lions. I begin to relax. Arthur notices that I am shaking my legs.
“Slow that down,” he says, and then leads me into a wide ranging meditative exploration of my body and the images, thoughts, and feelings that come up as I move my legs slower and slower, finally in micro movements that almost don’t look like movements at all. My mind wanders all over the place, from some image from childhood to memories of a painful divorce over 40 years ago, feelings about my mother, my relationship with my current wife, unemployment, fatigue, depression, and neck pain. Throughout the journey Arthur is watching me closely, listening, listening not so much to the story as for something in my voice or perhaps in my body movements. Sometimes we sit without either of us speaking for a long time. Arthur asks me to check in with my body at intervals. “Are you feeling anything in your hands? Notice any heat on your face?”
After a while he asks me to look around the room. He had invited me to do this the moment we sat down. “Just take a look around.” he says. “What do you notice?” I had commented on the spider webs outside the windows, the greenness of the shrubbery, and the warmth of the sunlight. Now Arthur asks “Do you notice anything different?” I scan the room again, and sure enough, I say, things look brighter, greener, more 3-D. I see a picture I hadn’t seen earlier. “How is your neck feeling?” Arthur asks.
I twist my around, back and forth. “About the same,” I say.
“We’ll have to work on that,” Arthur says. And eventually we do. Intensely. Arthur is indeed a trigger point masseur. He uses various body-work techniques to release and move my neck in ways it hasn’t moved in years. But we always start the same: I scan the room. I tell him about something good that happened to me today. He notices an unconscious gesture or movement. He tells me to slow it down. He tells me to follow my thoughts, feelings, images. To notice repetitive stories. To allow feelings to come up and be expressed. Then I come back to present time. I reorient to the room. And then, if asked for, table work. Deep, strong table work.
Over time, I learn what Arthur is doing. “The Munyer Method” is an integrated four-body (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) therapeutic process for the healing of trauma through the movement and release of trapped or compacted energy. I had thought that I was signing up for “Trigger Point Massage,” a method developed by Dr. Janet Travell [1] , John F. Kennedy’s physician, in the 1940’s which involved a combination of pressure and injection to unlock trigger points of contraction within the muscles and tissues of the physical body. Arthur doesn’t use injections. And though he knows the anatomy as well as any therapist I have worked with, his interest is that of true yoga, an integration of body, mind and spirit.
Of the four bodies, the physical is the most obvious. It is where most massage begins and ends. There are the muscles, tendons, cartilage, fascia, bones, lymph and blood. According to Arthur and a great many other somatic therapists and teachers [2] , the physical body registers traumas of all sorts and, if the traumas are severe or sustained, retains physical symptoms. The trauma may be physical, including birth itself, but it may be psychological, emotional or spiritual as well. Life affords manifold opportunities for trauma. From the original one of birth, through early childhood confusions and possible abuses, into adolescent emotional distresses, relationship failures, vocational frustrations, and the occasional fall off a log or getting a little whiplash from a rear-ender.
Any of these, if severe enough or endured long enough, will likely result in pathological symptoms, ranging from migraine headaches to cancer. Stiff necks are a common trauma consequence. Whether the trauma was whiplash or computer freeze, necks appear to be highly vulnerable. Lower back is another hot site.
The emotional body is home of our feelings. According to Arthur, there are really only five feelings: love, joy, sadness, fear, and anger. All the others are sub-sets or aspects of these five. We are, he maintains, in one or another of these states, or a combination of them, all the time. An accurate response to the question “How are you feeling?” would be: “I’m feeling a lot of love, and some sadness.” Or, “I’m experiencing a lot of anger right now.” Or, “I’m really sad.” Or, “I’m feeling afraid of …..” Or, hopefully, “I’m really joyful right now.” Of course we usually prefer to respond with the conventional “I’m good. How’re you?”
Love is the feeling of enjoyment and attraction to someone or thing. There will be gratitude and perhaps some ‘longing after’ in love. Desire, lust, is an elemental manifestation of love. It is clearly a positive feeling, an affirmative state of being, though it is possible to become a ‘love junkie’ and codependent. It is related to joy, which is simply the expression of delight in or enjoyment of someone, something, or simply life itself. Sadness ranges from despair and depression on the one hand, to the heartfelt reaction to a situation or story or song that touches us with its tragedy or poignancy. Anger is a rousing energy that responds to situations we find unjust or irritating. It can be healthy and motivational, or can be pathological when it becomes locked into hatred, prejudice or a passion for vengeance. Fear is what eats us up as worry, gives us panic attacks, and free floating anxiety, and turns us into cowards and wimps. When positive it serves as caution.
The mental body or mind is the home of our stories and the source of our choices. It is the house of analysis and talk. Most of us are more comfortable in this body than any of the others. We are happy to talk endlessly about our opinions, experiences, hopes, desires, plans and catastrophes. Much psychotherapy deals exclusively with this body, under the impression that understanding something will lead to healing. Not necessarily so, according to Arthur. He points out how easy it is for us to get stuck in our soap operas and life dramas, and how telling the story over and over may bring some relief but it may also reinforce the trauma unless there is a fundamental energy release. We can, Arthur insists, make choices in the mental body that will definitely affect our sense of being. It is here that we can take control of our use of language, whether in self-talk or conversation. Contradicting the negative, critical, put-down of most self talk can shift our experience. [3] Taking responsibility for our condition through “I” statements instead of projections and blame can lead to empowerment: “I need or want you to” vs. “You ought to;” or, “I feel anger” vs. “You make me angry.” [4]
The spiritual body is where we experience the realities of bliss, cosmic or agape love, peace, and enlightenment. This is the realm of our specific religious and spiritual practices and commitments. It can be the locus of dogma and fundamentalism, or the airy fairy platitudes of pop spirituality. At its best, the spiritual body is an experience of presence, consciousness in the now, and unattached love.
The point of all this, according to the Munyer Method, is that in a “natural,” undamaged state, energy flows in and through all four of these bodies all the time. When trauma occurs, however, instead of a ‘natural’ discharge of energy, in most humans there is a blockage, a compaction of energy in one or more of the four bodies. We get stuck. Stuck physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually, and usually in all four domains. And so we do not heal. We do not recover from the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ that Hamlet complained of so bitterly and which we all know to some degree or other. Symptoms appear: stiff necks, depression, indecision, despair, migraine headaches, diabetes, cancer, and the addictions, prescribed and otherwise, which are supposed to kill the pain. What is needed is a way to access the compacted energy, whatever body it is in, release it, and allow discharge and expression. Hence, The Munyer Method.
The method is an original integration of therapies and practices ranging from hatha yoga, Esalen Massage, Rolfing, Feldenkrais and the Alexander Method, to Gestalt psychology (Fritz Perls), trauma therapy (Peter Levine), and meditation and mindfulness practices. The context of the method is Shivananda Yoga and the spiritual teachings of various spiritual traditions, articulated profoundly in the work of Eckhart Tolle [5] . It is a method that has evolved over thirty years.
Arthur's somatics mostly comes from Peter Levine's work on trauma release. Levin basically observed how animals responded to traumatic experiences -- a gazelle that has been attacked by a lion or tiger but has escaped, goes into a secluded place and "shakes" to discharge the adrenalin that the attack has triggered. Humans do not do that -- or at least we tend to stifle any urge to shake, cry, scream or otherwise "discharge" trauma. And so, argues Levin, we carry the trauma in our bodies. It shows up as pain or stiffness, or in severe and chronic cases, disease, mental, emotional, or physical. Somatic trauma release work as Levin describes and teaches it is about allowing the body to reveal its trauma and then allowing it to release the compacted energies through discharge of some sort. The discharge may be subtle -- body heat, breath release, muscle tremor, belching, yawning, etc. -- or more dramatic, as in crying, rocking, screaming, etc.
Arthur has blended Levine's ideas with his own spiritual and body work orientation. More and more, his work is through non-physical techniques as he tries to guide his clients into areas of compacted emotional or spiritual energies. If a particular physical body site is indicated, then additional 'hands-on' work will follow the verbal session.
What follows is an account of my work with Arthur over the period of a year. I saw Arthur on average once every two weeks during that time. Each session was unique, but each followed the pattern I have described above. The sessions described below are representative of the work that we did and the results we obtained using “The Munyer Method.”
Click here to read more testimonials
<< Back to Top
By Robert Weston
© 2009 My work with Arthur Munyer
Arthur Munyer sits directly in front me. We are both in identical IKEA chairs, only Arthur’s has a white sheepskin draped over it. Our knees are nearly touching. We are in the studio/sun porch of Arthur’s home in Carmel, California. The room has windows all around, revealing a lush, tree lined back yard. Sunlight pours into the room, refracted into sparkling diamonds by a hanging crystal. There is a picture on the wall of a pair of hands holding a newborn infant. There are several ‘altars’ around the room with various icons: statues, crystals, pictures of spiritual teachers.
I have come to Arthur for trigger point massage to address a chronic neck stiffness and pain I have had now for nearly 10 years. I have sought almost every kind of remedy for this condition you can imagine: deep tissue massage, chiropractic, physical therapy, stretch exercise, electro contractions, magnets, essential oils, psychotherapy, antibiotics, cortisone, and supplements galore. All have helped, to a degree or temporarily, but my range of motion is still 30% restricted and the pain is acute. Arthur is my latest effort. A call to the local massage school asking for a referral to a trigger point masseur yielded only one name: Arthur Munyer.
Arthur, also known as Shambho, a Hindu word meaning “abode of bliss”, is a senior instructor of Esalen Massage and Trigger Point Release. He has practiced and taught bodywork, spiritual, and emotional release disciplines at Esalen Institute in Big Sur and other locations in the US, South America, Europe, and Bali for over 30 years. He is also a certified Sivananda Yoga instructor. He has developed his own unique somatic healing practice which he calls “The Munyer Method.”
Arthur and I talk. In fact, on this first visit, we talk the entire session. There is a massage table right beside us, and I expect to spend most of my time on it. But Arthur has other ideas. He wants me to tell him about the best thing that has happened to me in the past 24 hours. I want to tell him about my neck, but Arthur doesn’t seem all that interested. Instead, he asks about what has given me the most enjoyment during the past day. I think about it, describe a moment of walking through the Point Lobos National Reserve just up the road. I describe the natural beauty of the place, the freshness of the air, the dramatic joining of ocean and land, the unique geology, the seals, otters and sea lions. I begin to relax. Arthur notices that I am shaking my legs.
“Slow that down,” he says, and then leads me into a wide ranging meditative exploration of my body and the images, thoughts, and feelings that come up as I move my legs slower and slower, finally in micro movements that almost don’t look like movements at all. My mind wanders all over the place, from some image from childhood to memories of a painful divorce over 40 years ago, feelings about my mother, my relationship with my current wife, unemployment, fatigue, depression, and neck pain. Throughout the journey Arthur is watching me closely, listening, listening not so much to the story as for something in my voice or perhaps in my body movements. Sometimes we sit without either of us speaking for a long time. Arthur asks me to check in with my body at intervals. “Are you feeling anything in your hands? Notice any heat on your face?”
After a while he asks me to look around the room. He had invited me to do this the moment we sat down. “Just take a look around.” he says. “What do you notice?” I had commented on the spider webs outside the windows, the greenness of the shrubbery, and the warmth of the sunlight. Now Arthur asks “Do you notice anything different?” I scan the room again, and sure enough, I say, things look brighter, greener, more 3-D. I see a picture I hadn’t seen earlier. “How is your neck feeling?” Arthur asks.
I twist my around, back and forth. “About the same,” I say.
“We’ll have to work on that,” Arthur says. And eventually we do. Intensely. Arthur is indeed a trigger point masseur. He uses various body-work techniques to release and move my neck in ways it hasn’t moved in years. But we always start the same: I scan the room. I tell him about something good that happened to me today. He notices an unconscious gesture or movement. He tells me to slow it down. He tells me to follow my thoughts, feelings, images. To notice repetitive stories. To allow feelings to come up and be expressed. Then I come back to present time. I reorient to the room. And then, if asked for, table work. Deep, strong table work.
Over time, I learn what Arthur is doing. “The Munyer Method” is an integrated four-body (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) therapeutic process for the healing of trauma through the movement and release of trapped or compacted energy. I had thought that I was signing up for “Trigger Point Massage,” a method developed by Dr. Janet Travell [1] , John F. Kennedy’s physician, in the 1940’s which involved a combination of pressure and injection to unlock trigger points of contraction within the muscles and tissues of the physical body. Arthur doesn’t use injections. And though he knows the anatomy as well as any therapist I have worked with, his interest is that of true yoga, an integration of body, mind and spirit.
Of the four bodies, the physical is the most obvious. It is where most massage begins and ends. There are the muscles, tendons, cartilage, fascia, bones, lymph and blood. According to Arthur and a great many other somatic therapists and teachers [2] , the physical body registers traumas of all sorts and, if the traumas are severe or sustained, retains physical symptoms. The trauma may be physical, including birth itself, but it may be psychological, emotional or spiritual as well. Life affords manifold opportunities for trauma. From the original one of birth, through early childhood confusions and possible abuses, into adolescent emotional distresses, relationship failures, vocational frustrations, and the occasional fall off a log or getting a little whiplash from a rear-ender.
Any of these, if severe enough or endured long enough, will likely result in pathological symptoms, ranging from migraine headaches to cancer. Stiff necks are a common trauma consequence. Whether the trauma was whiplash or computer freeze, necks appear to be highly vulnerable. Lower back is another hot site.
The emotional body is home of our feelings. According to Arthur, there are really only five feelings: love, joy, sadness, fear, and anger. All the others are sub-sets or aspects of these five. We are, he maintains, in one or another of these states, or a combination of them, all the time. An accurate response to the question “How are you feeling?” would be: “I’m feeling a lot of love, and some sadness.” Or, “I’m experiencing a lot of anger right now.” Or, “I’m really sad.” Or, “I’m feeling afraid of …..” Or, hopefully, “I’m really joyful right now.” Of course we usually prefer to respond with the conventional “I’m good. How’re you?”
Love is the feeling of enjoyment and attraction to someone or thing. There will be gratitude and perhaps some ‘longing after’ in love. Desire, lust, is an elemental manifestation of love. It is clearly a positive feeling, an affirmative state of being, though it is possible to become a ‘love junkie’ and codependent. It is related to joy, which is simply the expression of delight in or enjoyment of someone, something, or simply life itself. Sadness ranges from despair and depression on the one hand, to the heartfelt reaction to a situation or story or song that touches us with its tragedy or poignancy. Anger is a rousing energy that responds to situations we find unjust or irritating. It can be healthy and motivational, or can be pathological when it becomes locked into hatred, prejudice or a passion for vengeance. Fear is what eats us up as worry, gives us panic attacks, and free floating anxiety, and turns us into cowards and wimps. When positive it serves as caution.
The mental body or mind is the home of our stories and the source of our choices. It is the house of analysis and talk. Most of us are more comfortable in this body than any of the others. We are happy to talk endlessly about our opinions, experiences, hopes, desires, plans and catastrophes. Much psychotherapy deals exclusively with this body, under the impression that understanding something will lead to healing. Not necessarily so, according to Arthur. He points out how easy it is for us to get stuck in our soap operas and life dramas, and how telling the story over and over may bring some relief but it may also reinforce the trauma unless there is a fundamental energy release. We can, Arthur insists, make choices in the mental body that will definitely affect our sense of being. It is here that we can take control of our use of language, whether in self-talk or conversation. Contradicting the negative, critical, put-down of most self talk can shift our experience. [3] Taking responsibility for our condition through “I” statements instead of projections and blame can lead to empowerment: “I need or want you to” vs. “You ought to;” or, “I feel anger” vs. “You make me angry.” [4]
The spiritual body is where we experience the realities of bliss, cosmic or agape love, peace, and enlightenment. This is the realm of our specific religious and spiritual practices and commitments. It can be the locus of dogma and fundamentalism, or the airy fairy platitudes of pop spirituality. At its best, the spiritual body is an experience of presence, consciousness in the now, and unattached love.
The point of all this, according to the Munyer Method, is that in a “natural,” undamaged state, energy flows in and through all four of these bodies all the time. When trauma occurs, however, instead of a ‘natural’ discharge of energy, in most humans there is a blockage, a compaction of energy in one or more of the four bodies. We get stuck. Stuck physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually, and usually in all four domains. And so we do not heal. We do not recover from the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ that Hamlet complained of so bitterly and which we all know to some degree or other. Symptoms appear: stiff necks, depression, indecision, despair, migraine headaches, diabetes, cancer, and the addictions, prescribed and otherwise, which are supposed to kill the pain. What is needed is a way to access the compacted energy, whatever body it is in, release it, and allow discharge and expression. Hence, The Munyer Method.
The method is an original integration of therapies and practices ranging from hatha yoga, Esalen Massage, Rolfing, Feldenkrais and the Alexander Method, to Gestalt psychology (Fritz Perls), trauma therapy (Peter Levine), and meditation and mindfulness practices. The context of the method is Shivananda Yoga and the spiritual teachings of various spiritual traditions, articulated profoundly in the work of Eckhart Tolle [5] . It is a method that has evolved over thirty years.
Arthur's somatics mostly comes from Peter Levine's work on trauma release. Levin basically observed how animals responded to traumatic experiences -- a gazelle that has been attacked by a lion or tiger but has escaped, goes into a secluded place and "shakes" to discharge the adrenalin that the attack has triggered. Humans do not do that -- or at least we tend to stifle any urge to shake, cry, scream or otherwise "discharge" trauma. And so, argues Levin, we carry the trauma in our bodies. It shows up as pain or stiffness, or in severe and chronic cases, disease, mental, emotional, or physical. Somatic trauma release work as Levin describes and teaches it is about allowing the body to reveal its trauma and then allowing it to release the compacted energies through discharge of some sort. The discharge may be subtle -- body heat, breath release, muscle tremor, belching, yawning, etc. -- or more dramatic, as in crying, rocking, screaming, etc.
Arthur has blended Levine's ideas with his own spiritual and body work orientation. More and more, his work is through non-physical techniques as he tries to guide his clients into areas of compacted emotional or spiritual energies. If a particular physical body site is indicated, then additional 'hands-on' work will follow the verbal session.
What follows is an account of my work with Arthur over the period of a year. I saw Arthur on average once every two weeks during that time. Each session was unique, but each followed the pattern I have described above. The sessions described below are representative of the work that we did and the results we obtained using “The Munyer Method.”
Click here to read more testimonials
<< Back to Top