Spirit Into Form

Book excerpt: Forewords by Jaap van der Wal and Marcy Axness Spirit into Form invites you to explore with mindful, embodied awareness your earliest experiences in this life with curiosity, compassion and creativity. It guides you through developmental milestones, starting with pre-conception, through conception, coming into physical form as an embryo, negotiating the birth canal and hopefully being welcomed at birth. Each stage offers details of embryological development in simple, accessible terms with hand-drawn illustrations, elaborating potential challenges and lifelong effects of having met them. More than a traditional book on embryology, Spirit into Form includes psychological and spiritual aspects and the original embryological potential of this early time.This book is for anyone who wonders about the origins of human life and bodies, as well as personality, relationship and behavioral tendencies. Therapists and practitioners of many types, particularly those with somatic/body-centered or psychological approaches, bodyworkers, movement practitioners, birth practitioners, and also new parents and parents-to-be, can benefit from the gentle, mindful guidance in exploring your earliest beginnings, roots of many issues and strengths, and how to access potential that may have become occluded by challenges and conditions life presents. Cherionna Menzam-Sills's book, Spirit into Form, is based on her long experience as a craniosacral therapist and somatic prenatal and birth therapist. Cherionna takes you on a tour of important developmental stages during gestation. But in addition to that she has much to say about the larger fields of Love, Spirit, and Soul and how they are connected to the body. The scope of the material is wide, broad and encompassing. Cheronna's message is that when we come to understand our early experiences and how they establish in us lifelong patterns, habits, addictions and tendencies, we can begin to integrate, let go, and make new choices. Her book is a subtle distillation of wisdom, stylistic grace, and excellent advice for pregnant or soon-to-be pregnant persons. Highly recommended. -- Thomas R. Verny MD, DHL (Hon), DPsych, FRCPC, FAPAAssociate Editor, Journal of Pre and Peri-natal Psychology and Health (JOPPPAH), Past President APPPAH, Author of The Secret Life of the Unborn Child with John Kelly and Pre-Parenting with Pamela Weintraub. This is an absolutely necessary contemporary creation story that is integrative rather than reductionistic. Cherionna writes a narrative that helps us to enter the mystery of conception, birth and death. It is a narrative that points to a solution found in front of us and in us - our body. Marie-Louise Von Franz, a preeminent Jungian analyst says in her book Creation Myths, that any creation story that unfolds in stages is the "best" creation story. Cherionna unfolds our collective story, which is my story, chapter by chapter with her expert guidance. It is an unfoldment of our embryo as humanity and as embodiment. This is a book that inspires self-compassion, love and altruism as the necessary remedy for healing as a body and a body politic in the context of our planet now. She shows us the steps to recover and make meaning of our embryo - our lived perpetual embryo. Contained herein is the most genuine and authentic nature of her embodied experience. Simultaneously, it is a fountain of authoritative knowledge referencing relevant science superseding all such attempts that have come before yet holding perfectly all its predecessor's. This beautiful and spellbinding book must be required reading to become a full human being inherently complete from a single celled conceptus through the moment of death. -- Michael J. Shea, PhDFounder of SheaHeart.com, A Center for the Study of the Human Heart and Author of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, Volumes 1-5.