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The Core Emotional Process
Dr. Marianne Rolland & Toby Quinn

All of us have experienced some form of abuse, oppression or trauma in our lifetimes. The majority of us did not enjoy the presence of role models who demonstrated for us how to release painful emotions. As a result, these emotions became stored and stagnant in the body. Core Emotional Healing (CEH) is a therapeutic process that assists participants in tapping into, generating movement of and transforming emotional energies that have become crystallized and stuck. These frozen emotions significantly limit a person's ability to heal and to experience life fully and joyfully. With the aid of a trained Core Emotional Healing facilitator, the client accesses repressed emotions and is guided and encouraged to fully feel the energies breaking loose from their emotional core. The result is a transformation of dense crystallized energies into lighter/higher vibrational frequencies and the experience of greater well-being, personal authenticity, and inner peace. The CEH process can facilitate dramatic and quantum healing in a very short period of time, and therefore is also referred to as Rapid Transformation Therapy. (For individual accounts, please refer to our testimonial page.)

The process of healing our emotional bodies (which we acknowledge as being connected to all aspects of the human being) requires us to journey deeply to the core of our inner selves. In order to heal and experience inner peace we must first allow and experience the presence of our pain. By doing so, we are able to regain our personal sense of balance and to reconnect in a profound way to self-acceptance, unconditional love for self and others and to actualize our own dynamic self. The deepest and most successful core-level healing comes from being able to truly feel. The CEH process provides a profound technique for doing just this.


Core Emotional Healing

Dr. Marianne Rolland and Floyd Guthrie were introduced to Core Emotional Healing in the mid-1990s by Bonnie Serratore of Sonoma, California, who had learned the technique through her connection to and guidance from the spiritual realm. Captivated by the power of the technique and the transformations they experienced in their own lives, Dr. Rolland and Mr. Guthrie were trained by Ms. Serratore and began incorporating CEH into their work with people in the villages of rural Alaska. They now serve people throughout Alaska and the nation through the White Raven Center in Anchorage.

To begin the session we invite the participant to lie down on a padded mat, making sure the spine is straight and legs are propped comfortably over a pillow to relieve tension in the lower back. A blindfold is placed over the eyes to create a sense of privacy and facilitate an easier journey "within". A light blanket is placed over the body, also for comfort and a sense of privacy. If the client feels chilly, several blankets or a wool covering may be added. The goal is to make the participant as physically comfortable as possible at the beginning of the session. The process of tapping into intense emotions will wake up body memories that may be extremely uncomfortable.

While the Core Emotional Healing process may look quite different for each individual, it always starts with guided deep breathing. The breath is the pathway to access emotions stored at a deep subconscious level. Proper and full breathing restores the body's natural capacity to heal itself. It also shifts conscious awareness from the head to the heart. Once the participant is comfortable on the mat, a trained facilitator begins literally "breathing with" the client to ensure they feel safe and are maximizing the breathing effort. Once a breathing pattern is established, the facilitator offers a prayer for protection, guidance and healing, as well as to honor the ancestral helpers who assist with the healings. The staff of the White Raven Center is conscious of the diverse spiritual and religious beliefs held by individuals seeking our help and we take care to remain sensitive to personal preferences for prayer. We honor all belief systems that are of the light and lead to the center. It is the primary responsibility of the facilitator to "be with" and "hold space" to allow the participant to feel safe enough to let their inward journey unfold.

The guided focus on breathing is used to teach the participant to tune in and listen to the body. We teach that the body never lies and if we learn to listen to the body we will know exactly where we need to do our work. For example, many of us on the planet are so used to living in our heads, either projecting into the future or dwelling on the past, that we become disconnected from what is happening in the present and the messages that our body is sending us. As we come more fully into the physical body we learn to recognize where our conscious attention is focused and how we have learned to numb our pain by spending most of our lives in our heads trying to figure things out. We ask participants to not judge themselves for this; but in fact to honor "self" as this has been a coping skill helping them survive up to this point in time.

As the session progresses the participant will begin to tap into core emotional energy. Facilitators will encourage the participant to keep breathing into those powerful feelings, "to drop deeper" and to stay with the process. In other words, to take the ride of pain, in order to move through it and arrive in a state of inner peace. Once stored emotional energy is tapped, the process evolves in a manner that is unique to each participant. Many participants remember past experiences of abuse or trauma. Facilitators support the participant by maintaining a safe space in which they can work with these memories and the emotions that surface. Participants can allow themselves to fully experience the deep feelings of sorrow, pain, grief, or fear they have had to suppress and which have created energy blocks. The full experience of these emotions releases the blocked and crystallized energy, allowing it to move up through the chakras to be transformed at the heart level.


Paticipatory Soul Retreival

The process may also involve physiological energy clearing, the removal of energy forms that may have attached or been absorbed into body, and retrieval of lost soul essence or soul particles. This latter phenomenon is referred to by Dr. Rolland as participatory soul retrieval and is one of the most empowering aspects of White Raven Center's Core Emotional Healing process. This technique is frequently used to close a session as it leaves the participant with a renewed sense of personal power.

Attempting to 'figure out' our feelings tells the subconscious that our feelings define who we are: "I am sad" instead of "I feel sad". Being depressed, for example, becomes part of our identity and therefore very difficult to let go of. As we surrender to the healing wisdom of the body and the process of breathing into our feelings, the crystallized energy stored in the body begins to break down. The body begins to 'wake up' and release the energy of our emotional reality that has been stored within our cellular memory. As we cease to identify our feelings as who we are and begin to see them instead as teachers, messengers and allies on our path to wholeness, we are able to feel them, fully release them and reclaim power over suffering. We are no longer victims to suffering. As we further move this energy out of the physical body, our energetic body lightens, it ceases to feed a negative self image and we begin to see that all of our suffering has been the result of perceptions and interpretations of unresolved issues from the past.
As we heal, we begin to construct a new belief system that serves us in becoming whole and healthy people. Perceptions that were once in service to and shaped by painful experiences of our past fade away. We become alive and transform from puppets controlled by unresolved pains of our past, to thriving individuals who have reclaimed the power to choose and create our own reality. We no longer react unconsciously to events in our present realities that may resemble the dynamics of painful past experiences. We gather ourselves from the past and future into the present moment and can once again feel the bliss of being and the power of creation.

Unexpressed and unresolved feelings have the power to shape how we perceive everything in our world; therefore, through this work one can experience liberation in every area of their lives. Ultimately the applications of this process are endless; however, the following is a short list drawn from the experiences of clients over the years:

Becoming happier & more effective parents
Recovering from addiction
Releasing rage & discovering the peace that lies within
Recovering from social phobia & anxiety disorders
Recovering from effects of family violence
Developing positive life skills for teenagers
Healing from post traumatic stress disorder
Breaking cycles of grief & depression
Healing all family members from the effects of child sexual abuse
Creating healthy relationships
Healing the caretaker