Meet Marcia

I've had the privilege to be a therapist for more than 40 years. In that time, I've worked with clients who have severe trauma, anxiety, depression, and deep somatic experiences. I’ve learned to respect that there is always a reason that patterns of wounding become chronic and deeply embedded in our way of thinking, feeling and acting. With the right care and attention, we can heal our deep hurts.

I've also learned that no matter how deep the hurt, all of us have strengths of resilience that got us through. Finding and accurately naming these strengths helps us through the suffering as we heal.

  • "Marcia embodies a unique combination of true clinical excellence and practice-based spiritual understanding. It may seem an unusual word to use in this context, but she’s a badass, one with deep grounding and boundless heart, and the ability to meet you anywhere you might go, in your language. For many of us she has been, quite literally, a lifesaver. I’m as allergic to buzzwords as I am to hyperbole, but where Marcia is concerned - well, you’ve just read it."

    Kevin Selig

  • "Marcia's guidance has been invaluable to me in my healing and spiritual awakening journey. With her vast experience, honed skills, and refined perception, she has been able to skilfully and compassionately guide me through the maze that healing complex childhood traumas can be. Marcia truly is a world-class therapist and spiritual teacher."

    Sebastian Wendeus

  • "I’ve known Marcia for over 30 years. Her ability to listen from all her senses exemplifies excellence and the power to bring healing forward as a psychotherapist. She pulls together from what is said, unsaid, and perceived helping to integrate healing within her clients."

    Karen K.

  • "Marcia's generous spirit is inseparable from her keen, perceptive mind and her practical wisdom. Her energy is bright, clear, and expansive; her presence gracious and open-hearted. She listens deeply not only to her clients but also to a source of inner guidance. I am honored that she is my colleague and my dear friend."

    Roma Hammel, PhD, Senior Realization Process Teacher

The practices of the Realization Process give me compassionate and precise tools to guide my clients to recover and heal themselves.

As I teach clients to meditate and use the practices of the Realization Process, I am repeatedly reminded that it is Wholeness that heals us; the unbroken Wholeness that exists within each of us. Wholeness can be felt, and revealed. It spontaneously creates healing, and metabolizes our wounding. Our Wholeness is already there - as it is revealed, it connects us to our authentic Self that has always been there. This shift to authenticity touches us deeply and is lasting. The Realization Process practices give access to this Wholeness, and a method to live from the deepest part of our Being.

 

Our painful and familiar patterns resulting from neglected parts of ourselves can be discovered, metabolized and integrated into our Wholeness. Relationships can grow and get unstuck. Rather than transcending our emotional wounds, we make contact with them to validate, heal, and create a new narrative about ourselves.  We can be, and are, whole Beings. We have a capacity for love, purpose, and deep happiness.

This is my mission, and why it is an honor to do this work. 

There is a geography to Being that I can teach you to feel within your body.

  • How could I give people an experience of the difference between non dual psychotherapy and traditional psychotherapy in a 15 minute talk? I felt inspired to guide people into an experience of living within the vertical core of the body by breathing within the heart center, opening them to their wholeness, and a very subtle connection to everyone and everything else at the same time.

    In traditional psychotherapy, a therapist goes back and forth between being connected to their own experience, and the experience of the client. In non dual psychotherapy, the therapist does both at the same time, by living within the subtle core of the body, it allows being connected to the other person's core at the same time... For me, by breathing my own location in space in my subtle core, I am simultaneously connected to myself and to a very fine level of consciousness that brings all the information I need to be connected to my client to me. - rather than just being connected to energy- I may still experience energy, but the energy moves through the Stillness that is the ground of being of us, and everything. Its nature is Stillness. Energy moves through the Stillness without disturbing it. The foundation of my personal identity and my identity as a psychotherapist is attuning to this Stillness. This attunement to Stillness gives room for all my other skills as a therapist to rest in this ground of Being.

    This ground of Being is our Wholeness.

    The Realization Process, developed by Judith Blackstone, provides a radical and elegant method to embody Wholeness in the vertical core of the body. By embodying our Wholeness, it reveals ourselves and the unified field at the same time. We can know ourselves as this field of consciousness, while also authentically being ourselves, self possessed.

    The Realization Process is unique in naming the human qualities of embodiment, and revealing them as qualities of self that once embodied, unify us with the ground of being. To name them quickly, these intrinsic human qualities are gender and sexuality, power, love, voice, and intelligence. Judith's most recent book, Trauma and the Unbound Body, presents and discusses these qualities in depth.

    As Judith Blackstone says in Trauma and the Unbound Body:

    By inhabiting the whole body, and the depth of the subtle vertical core of the body, we uncover an experience of a fundamental unified ground of Being that pervades us and everything else.

    Exercise:

    The vertical core of the body is the spacious center of ourselves, from the very top of our head to the very bottom of the center of the torso.

    Let's try that, breathing our own location in space in the vertical core of the body..... find your heart center deep in the core of your chest, and feel some of the love you feel there.... and breathe (tiny mental breath) there, not a big breath but a very fine mental breath... as though there is air there to breathe, the mind breathing in the center of your chest. Continue breathing your own location in space in your heart center....let the mental breath in the heart center feel as though it can continue on its own. Without moving from your own heart center, find the other heart centers in the room. Great, you may feel the feeling in the room change as you do this......Now think of someone in your life that you love, and imagine them being in the room with us, and connect to their heart center, again without moving from your heart center, still breathing your own location in space within your own heart center. This is what a dis-entangled relationship feels like....there is space for you and the other, and space between you....with a connection to each other and the unified field of consciousness, fundamental consciousness.

    When a client in psychotherapy is taught to inhabit the vertical core of the body, they can imagine someone else in front of them, and get information to disentangle the relationship. For example, an invasive controlling relationship may be felt in the space of the chest. We disentangle, or “let go” more deeply when we actually feel with sensation our own part in the entanglement, and can access our own agency to be in disentangled clear relationship. A client with a brilliant father who "takes up all the air in the room" will actually notice how that feels in their own head, and in the area of voice in the throat. Any relationship that has a trauma history requires building internal resources before doing any of these disentangling exercises.

    I suggest that if they want, they can think of someone they have a bit of conflict with, and picture them just outside our circle, while continuing to breath their own location in space in their heart center. notice if you lift up or out of your chest or lift out of your feet, or feel constricted anywhere in your body. Take this as information coming to you.... information that with the help of a skilled therapist could help you to release and be disentangled in the relationship. Now dissolve the image of this person, and return to just breathing within your heart center. Thank you.

    Marcia Haarer LMSW Asilomar April 13 2019