Last night at the session at the Marin Abused Women's Services, there was an exciting breakthrough.  One of the women who is articulate and informed about her process, but comes from a mental perspective, read what she had written in the workshop.  It was a word association exercise in which words were read by the facilitator and the participants in the workshop wrote for a few minutes whatever came to mind around that word. 

What Nora (not her real name)  had written was evocative of a past that was gentler and more nourishing than her present life.  The sweetness of that time and the absence of that quality from her life brought tears and a dropping down from a mental orientation into a more embodied, feelingful experience. Nora was able to bring that softer, more whole experience of herself to her child after the session was over.  Not only was the experience beneficial to mother and child in the moment but it modeled a future possibility for them both.