Author: Holly Mae Haddock

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Internal family systems model of healing

Unburdening: Parts Work and the Internal Family Systems Model of Healing

Internal Family Systems Therapy, also called Parts Work and IFS for short, is gaining widespread popularity in addictions and mental health treatment.

IFS is on the rise, not only because it has earned a spot on the list of the so-called “evidence-based” approaches favored by regulators, which always gives a healing modality a boost in visibility, but because it’s intuitively appealing and even, sometimes, fun.

Especially in combination with the arts and somatic therapies, Parts Work is a revolutionary treatment for trauma and addiction. I like to think it’s making progress towards healing the world of all manner of soul sickness.

How Does Working With Your Inner Parts Heal You?

According to the IFS model, healing takes place through the process of unburdening.

Unburdening takes place when a misunderstood Part of your own Self reveals itself to you, and you are able to recognize it in a positive light. When you are willing to understand, rather than condemn, you will become aware of your misunderstood Part’s burden.

A Part’s burden is related to its primary life-enhancing purpose, and the needs that it has to be able to do its positive job well for you.

Prodigal Return

Once a Part has told you its story fully, you will be stunned with compassion. You will feel a greater respect for all you have endured, and what it took to survive what you have survived.

With forgiveness for yourself and your Part, you will be moved naturally to reclaim it as a long-lost member of your inner family. You then recognize your Part as an important, valued side of your own vital life force.

Through this reclamation, the Part is integrated. This means the Part is brought back into harmony with the rest of you, through a restoration of relationship with the rest of your psyche.

Making amends with this Part, understanding her true intentions, and seeing her side of the story, you decide consciously that you no longer need to keep her banished away like a criminal.


Banishment

As Romeo ardently expresses in Shakespeare’s poetic voice, banishment is the worst kind of punishment: “Ha, banishment! Be merciful, say ‘death;’ For exile hath more terror in his look”. And yet self-banishment of Parts of our own nature is the most common strategy we humans use at this stage of our evolution, for fitting into this anti-human world and its requirements of us.

Banishment itself is the source of a lot of our own pain. The pain of a Part’s banishment is part of its burden. The burden a Part carries, and the pain the Part feels in being rejected, marginalized, and forsaken by you, is largely responsible for the problematic, disruptive behaviors generated by this part.

Taking a Part out of inner solitary confinement is the beginning of healing and getting to the bottom of where all the trouble started.


Rehabilitating the Wild Ones Within

With time, patience, and a sincere willingness to heal, even the most difficult Parts will eventually respond to our attention. Once they trust us, they turn from wild beasts threatening to rip our lives to shreds, into devoted loyal guard dogs wagging their tails when we come into the room. It is love that accomplishes this.

IFS teaches us a radical practice of allowing any and all sides of us back into the protective circle of our own Self-love. An IFS therapist holds space for this process for another, sometimes serving as an example. But each woman’s Parts will only ever be cured by her own fierce love.

Interview With a Part

Here are some questions that help Parts tell you their story. Try them out as a journaling exercise next time you’re aware of a problematic side of you. Examples of Parts recognized by pop psychology include the Inner Child, the Inner Critic, and the Addict, but there are many others.

  1. Who are you? What name I can call you?
  2. What is your original, highest, most benevolent purpose in my life? What is your job within my Psyche?
  3. What would happen to me if one day you couldn’t do your job (if you called in sick)?
  4. What is your special burden? What’s hard about being you? What don’t I see or understand about you?
  5. What or who inside gets in the way of you performing this function and purpose easily?
  6. What or who inside assists you in performing this job/benevolent purpose? Who are your allies?
  7. How could I help you? What would help you perform your job better?
  8. What would it take for you to feel completely relaxed and ok that this job is getting taken care of?
Categories
Meeting your needs

Meeting Needs With the Power of Pretend

Getting to Know Our Human Needs

Non-Violent Communication, created by Marshall Rosenberg, helps us get our truest needs met. The methodology offers a kind, helpful library of tools that can help us have better conversations, even when we’re talking about hard topics.

NVC gives us a viable path into peaceful, loving exchanges and clean clear requests of each other. Check out this list of universal human needs to get a feel for how needs are understood in this model:

The beauty of NVC lies in this: when we are aware of what we feel, what we want, and why we want that, we can communicate self-responsibly without adding extra pain to this world.

Empowerment to take charge of meeting our own needs is the most essential ingredient for moving out of victimized, helpless states into feelings of agency and possibility. Getting to know our true needs is the beginning of everything good!

Hm….What Need Is at Play?

NVC maintains that everything we do, we do because of our underlying human necessities. Lest we fear or reject these needs, NVC asserts that all needs are life-affirming and positive at their core.

NVC teaches us to ask:

What do I feel?

I feel how I feel because of a need I have. What unmet need is at the root of this feeling?

Is there anything I can think of, that I and/or another person could do, that would help this need be met, thus changing my feeling state to something more comfortable for me?

How might I make a clean, clear, non-demanding request of someone, to see whether they’re interested in helping me meet this need?

How Non-violent Communication Helps Us in Mental Health and Recovery

One big benefit of Non-Violent Communication is what Dr. Murray Bowen called psychological differentiation.

As we learn to identify and assume responsibility for what need of ours is at play, we define our separate, individuated self-hood.

Separate self-hood helps us feel good, strong, worthy, and capable in our lives. Also, getting the help we need from others is much easier when we hold onto the primary responsibility for our state of wellness, versus projecting our needs onto others and trying to control or manipulate people into helping us.

There’s a huge difference between a conscious ask and an unconscious demand. NVC preserves freedom, our own and other people’s. It allows people to say yes or no to our requests.

Freedom is very important, a key ingredient of psychological differentiation. Psychological differentiation, becoming an individual while staying in connection, is the cure for codependency, the relationship illness that underlies addiction and many mental health struggles.

Creative Needs-Meeting Exercise Using the Power of Pretend

The following creative journaling exercise can help you get to know your needs in a fun way.

  1. Start with writing a list of all the things you know you need. Set a timer for 5 minutes, and free write using the stem

I need…

I need…

I need…

  1. Now look at the NVC list of universal human needs for inspiration. If there is anything you missed in your list, that you recognize you also need, add it on!

I also need mutuality…

I also need self-respect…

I also need to be understood…

  1. From your list, choose some key zingers that seem especially important and potent today.

Today I especially need rest…

Today I especially need time alone…

Today I especially need self-expression…

  1. Now the fun part. Pick one need and use your powers of pretend to imagine this need in an over-the-top, ridiculous, fantastical way. Write it out in a paragraph:

Need: encouragement for my creativity

Pretend fantasy of my need getting filled:

I wake up one morning to hear the doorbell ringing. I go to the door & to my great surprise, the person standing outside my door is my musical hero Bob Dylan, as he used to look in the 1970s. I let him in, and he says, “I’m just here to tell you: you got it, kid. I love your songs. You gotta keep going.”

  1. Having written out a fun fantasy of a need being met, now draw a little picture, sketch, or cartoon, of you receiving this glorious, fun fantasy meeting of your need.
  2. Somewhere on the drawing, write down 3 words that capture the feeling you get from this fantasy:

-astonishment

-excitement

-bubblies

  1. Take a moment to reflect on your ability to meet your own need through using your powers of pretend. What does this show you?

Thanks for reading, friend.

Categories
Turn that frown upside down

From No to Yes: Journal Exercise for Turning a Frown Upside Down

Some days we’re cranky and negative and we are not having it. We’re not in the mood for gratitude, appreciation of our lives, or for putting a happy face on our situation.

On such days we can lose energy all day trying to change our feelings into something more pleasant. Not wanting to feel grumpy or irritable, we try to get happy.

But when a negative mood is not easily shifted, that might be for a good reason. Sometimes it helps, in the larger goal of getting back to Yes-type feelings and energies, to spend a little time appreciating and honoring our No energies.

The Sacred No

What is negativity, actually? Is it just us being difficult? Is a no always coming from our pathology, our addiction, our ego, our shadow? Or could it be a valid no, a no to something that we’ve unconsciously pushed upon ourselves, that isn’t actually right for us?

I believe there is a Sacred No. The Sacred No is the No that comes from our true Self, the one who knows best what is or is not aligned with our true nature and its emergent, moment-by-moment needs.

Negativity is often, in its origin, actually a boundary. When I’m saying no to something, by feeling resistant, that means something about the thing itself or how I’m relating to myself about the thing is actually out of alignment with Source.

Consent Is Important

Rather than forcing yourself to override your resistance, inner conflict, or negative thoughts and feelings, what if you tried the path of listening first? Overriding our No when we don’t know what it’s even about yet, is a form of inner boundary-crossing, violating our own consent.

I believe strongly that consent matters in a lot of contexts, even within our own Selves and psychic processes. When we have internal permission from all Parts of ourselves, then we can really line up all of our resources and take effective action.

When powerful psychic Parts are not on board and are sending out a No energy, our first task is to find out why we do not have consent from these Parts, considering that they may have very good reasons for not wanting to comply.

In the long run, sometimes the fastest, smoothest, most energetically sustainable path to a full Sacred Yes is to hang out with our No until it feels fully heard, understood, accepted, and valued.

Journal Exercise: Follow Your No to Your Sacred Yes

To work with this idea, start with letting yourself complain, aka say no a little, in the following way.

Part One: The No

In list form, write down all the things that you/your energy seems to be saying no to today.

No to waking up too early feeling achy in my body
No to cell phones invading and taking over human life
No to feeling tired all the time like I never have enough energy
No to not having any food in the house
No to my desk being messy ….

Really let yourself be negative for a bit.

Look out for the Part that will want to talk you out of your No, that may have a judgment or an opinion about that, such as that your No is childish.

That may be so. It could be your Inner Child who is saying No. But we still need to care for her – that which is still a child within us needs a lot of tenderness, sensitivity, and protection.

Part Two: The Yes!

The secret of working with the sacred No is to understand that it’s the same exact information as a Yes, just expressed differently. We can use each No as a doorway into a resonant Yes, by simply turning the same information on its head.

Go through each of your Nos and find the implied Yes.

No to cell phones…YES to time in nature, reading interesting old vintage books, and making things with my own two hands!
No, to feeling tired all the time…YES to running on the beach and swimming in the ocean and going on long hikes and coming home pleasantly exhausted and happy!

Part Three: More and More Yes

Now extend into any other areas that maybe you didn’t yet think of, but you’re feeling a Yes to the idea of.

YES to feeling seen, loved, and celebrated for my unique Self!
YES to my backyard veggie beds being fruitful and abundant!
YES to joy and laughter all day every day!

May this be helpful on your journey, friend. Thanks for reading!

Categories
Safe space visualization

The Inner Sun: Visualization for Feeling Safer

Safety Is a Feeling

We create feelings of safety in the nervous system and in our own perception. Thoughts, feelings, and body states create the sensation of safety.

We have much more control over feeling safe than we realize.  We feel unsafe because we have been trained our entire lives to feel unsafe.

We can change this, right now, and at any given moment we can use our inherent powers of imagination, thoughts, and feelings, to create safety.

The most important part of this is remembering and rediscovering how safety is something subjective, it is an internal reality made up of thoughts, feelings, and body sensations taking place inside our own experience.

This is true no matter what is going on outside of us.

Most of Us Are More Safe Than We Feel

The film Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni tells the story of how a loving father created feelings of safety for his child, even when the reality was the child was not safe. But the child was able to have the feelings of protection and safety anyway.

I won’t speak for you, but my life is, by any reasonable person’s standards, quite safe, if not outright wonderful. The feelings of unsafety are mainly memories of the past and fearful imaginations of the future, what ifs.

The only thing that threatens my life verifiably at this moment is phantoms in my own head, scary thoughts, and scary feelings.

Exercise for Feeling Safer

1. Three Big Breaths

Sit or lie down comfortably. Start with three very big, very deep, very full breaths. On the inhale take as much air in as you can, and on the out breath, let everything go that you can in this moment. Release all burdens, tensions, stress, toxins, pressure, and discomforts.


2. See Your Inner Sun

Close your eyes and now picture that there is a small ball of energy tucked under your rib cage just above the navel. It can be whatever size is right for you, but maybe it’s somewhere between a baseball and a soccer ball in size. Imagine this energy as like a small sun, a ball of very potent, bright, powerful light full of your own vital life force essence. This energy is yours, comes from your Core Nature, and belongs fully to you. As you are placing your attention on it, see what colors it has, and see that it is alive, vibrant, potent, and humming. This is your Inner Sun.


3. Expand Your Inner Sun to Greet the Six Directions

You are now going to imagine that this ball of energy, your Inner Sun, is getting bigger and stronger as you allow it to grow in strength and size. You don’t have to force it, just see that it grows bigger as you allow it and intend it to.

Once you feel it is big enough for you for today, send energy from your Inner Sun out in front of you, as far out into the horizon in front of you as you can imagine. This happens very quickly, and once your Inner Sun energy has touched the horizon, greeting it warmly and lovingly, bring the energy sent by your Inner Sun back from the horizon back into your Inner Sun.

Now send some Inner Sun energy out to touch the horizon to the right of you, again allowing it to return back to your center Inner Sun after having touched the horizon to the right of you.

Flow some Inner Sun energy through the back of your body out behind you, to touch the horizon behind your back, again returning to your Inner Sun at your core.

Flow Inner Sun energy out the left side of your body to touch your left-most horizon, and return it to your core.

Send Inner Sun energy down below you, deep into the center of the earth, and return it to your core.

Finally, send your Inner Sun energy up to touch the sky, then return it back to your core.


4. Write Some Safety Affirmations

Now switch modes and get out your journal. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Write a free-flowing paragraph: I am SAFE. I am free. I am calm. I am independent. I am lovely. I am strong. I am surrounded by loving, peaceful energy. Make up whatever sentences, mantras, and statements you like, that seem to come out of this Inner Sun experience.


5. Record Yourself Reading Your Safety Affirmations

Now record yourself reading these statements out loud to yourself. Read your paragraph, what you wrote down, whether you fully believe these things or not doesn’t matter, just try them out with your voice and record yourself doing so.

6. Listen to Your Own Voice Saying Your Safety Affirmations

Listen back to your recording of your own voice, saying these things.

May you feel full to the brim with your own powers of safety. Thanks for reading!

Categories
Manifestation wishes

Somatic Manifestation: Exercise to Help Manifestation Wishes Come True

One of the challenges of learning to cocreate, or manifest, is helping ourselves get ahold of the right kind of energy and vibration about a wish we have. For things to really flow to us easily, we often need to upshift from unhappy feelings of non-fulfillment towards happier, brighter sensations of satisfaction, enoughness, and completion.

The following exercise for shifting vibes in service of manifestation draws inspiration from Peter Levine’s profoundly useful somatic exercise, Recalling Being Yourself.

May it be fruitful and nourishing for you on your healing journey!

Step One: Wish of the Day

Set a timer for 7 minutes and let yourself free-write about all the things you want. Your wants can come in any form, in terms of inner experiences or outer manifestations, doesn’t matter.

All My Wishes for Today

I want peace of mind.
I want to feel like my life has significance.
I want a bicycle with a basket in front.
I want…

After the 7 minutes have concluded, reread your wants, underlining and highlighting anything that seems important. Pay attention to any redundancies, or places in your writing where it seems like there’s an exceptional amount of energy, desire, or conflict.

Now select 3 things from all that you have written, that you most especially want, today, and write them out.

Top 3 Wishes of Today

I most especially want to heal my abandonment wound
I most especially want to find good creative collaborators, a trusted crew
I most especially want to love myself more fully and unconditionally

Of these 3 top wishes, you choose one to focus on, knowing that you can come back and repeat this process for any of your other wishes.

Wish of the Day

Today I most especially want…

Step Two: Recall or Imagine Wish Fulfillment

The second part of this process is all imagination, no writing. Set a timer for 7 minutes, during which you will do the following process in your inner vision, with your eyes closed, using your powers of memory and pretend. Read through the whole section before you start.

Begin by getting your body into a comfortable position, seated or lying down. Focus first and foremost on creating sensations of basic comfort and safety. Place your hands on your body in a way that amplifies soothing and ease. Seeking physical comfiness in moments of self-connection is an important part of self-love.

Allow your body to breathe naturally on its own, while you observe, just sitting or reclining in your comfortable state.

As you observe yourself softly, gradually let your outbreath lengthen, perhaps following a pattern like this: breath in for 4 counts, breathe out for 6 counts. Or whatever fits you today.

The lengthening of the outbreath allows you to ease into the liminal, or in-between zone, in which manifestation, healing, and energetic medicine are best facilitated.

Once you have stabilized a little in your physical experience, focus on your selected wish for a moment.

Today I most especially wish…

As your wish is in your focus, allow yourself to summon up a memory or a fantasy of a time when for whatever reason, the desire expressed in this wish was/is already the case.

Whatever you glimpse on, as you catch hold of this memory or image, allow it to become bigger and juicier, and see if you can let recalled or invented sense details draw you in. Stay with the image until your timer goes off.

Open your eyes, breathe and stretch, ground into this now moment, and prepare yourself to move onto the next step.

Step Three: Anchor Your Image of Wish Fulfillment

The final step of this process is to create a visual anchor that captures this experience for you to be easily reminded of it.

Draw a quick sketch that captures the essence of the image you saw. It’s ok to use stick figures, but do attempt to make a picture (rather than words only) because the image-making part of your brain helps with manifestation very much.

The purpose is not art per se, rather it is to help your psyche solidify this experience. Remember this is only for your own self-healing purposes, not to please anyone or be pretty

When you have completed your image, find a place on the front or the back of the image to set an intention or prayer, to your Highest Self or Higher Power, to indicate that you want to strengthen and move in this direction even more in your life. Such as:

More of this please, thank you Source

Place your image with its prayer or intention somewhere that you can see it, and leave it up for 21 days before you remove it out of sight.

May all your truest deepest wishes come true, friend! Thanks for reading.

Categories
Metta meditation

Metta Bingo – Try This Fun Twist on Loving-Kindness Practice

Resentment is taking rat poison thinking the rat will die, the saying goes. No matter who the rats in our lives are, the tendency to stew in resentment does nothing to harm them but instead harms us by polluting our hearts.

The Tibetan practice of amplifying loving-kindness, also known as Metta Meditation – is a powerful way to open our hearts to receive our blessings. Through Metta, we take a broom to our inner sanctum, clear the air, and remember the truth of unity.

The beauty of Metta is that it erases the thin line between love and hate, as we see for ourselves how sending love to those we feel most stingy towards is exactly what brings love to our door.

Try this exercise and see if it doesn’t bring at least a little smile to your face if not some inner spirit replenishment. Oh, and maybe some wonderful manifestations in your outer world life, too!

Metta Bingo

Materials

Markers if you have some, otherwise any writing implement will do

24 small slips of scrap paper (can be cut up from paper envelopes, anything) OR 24 post-its

Step One: The Good Things of Life

On 12 separate slips or post-its, write down 12 things you want an abundance of, yourself. Don’t be judgy or moralistic, rather be generous with your definition of the good side of life. Whatever you want, you can use this exercise to admit that you want it.

So on 12 separate scraps or post-its, one idea per paper, write things like this:

Gobs of free time

Enough money to feel fully safe and free forever

Lots of time lying around in the sun

Laughing super hard until my stomach hurts

Step Two: People You Love, People You Don’t Care About, and People You Can’t Abide

On another 12 slips of paper or post-its, you will now write the names of some people.

On the very first slip of paper, write your name.

  1. Me

On the next 3 slips of paper, write the names of 3 people you love.

  1. Amelia
  2. Theodore
  3. Finnegan

On the next 4 slips of paper, write the names of 4 people you feel relatively neutral towards, for whatever reasons. Challenge yourself to find people you genuinely feel nothing one way or the other.

  1. The guy who works the cash register at Taqueria El Buen Gusto
  2. My mailman
  3. The woman who works at Hertz car rental at the airport
  4. Brian’s cousin Mandy

On the final 4 slips of paper, write the names (or if you prefer, initials – important is that you know who you mean) of 4 people you have distinctly negative feelings towards. The more you cannot abide this person, the more their name belongs on one of these four remaining paper scraps.

  1. B.S.
  2. P.T.
  3. K.S.
  4. A.C.

Step Three: Pair People With Wishes

You should now have 12 slips of paper, each with a separate wish written on it, plus 12 slips of paper, each with a name written on it.

Put the 12 names of people into one hat/pile/jar, and put the 12 things you want an abundance of yourself, in a separate jar.

Pull one from each jar, & pair them together. You will then have 12 sets of Person-Wish pairs.

  1. Laughing until my stomach hurts – My Mailman
  2. Lots of Time lying around in the Sun – P.T.
  3. Gobs of Free time – Finnegan

Step Four: Wish It Be So!

Now for each of the pairs, write out a full sentence in your journal that creates a heartfelt wish, perhaps lengthening and adding on to richen up your wish.

Dear Source, please may my mailman be blessed with plenty of time laughing until his stomach hurts. May he find many reasons to smile throughout his day, may he find the comedy in everything, and may he laugh with his full belly and be flooded with good feelings from head to toe, filled up from the inside with joy and happiness!

Dear Source, please may P.T. be blessed with so so much time lying around in the sun, feeling good and safe in his body, replenished and safe. May he swim in the ocean, and feel forgiven, surrounded, held, and loved, just as he is.

Dear Source, please may Finnegan be blessed with gobs of free time.

I hope this little exercise helps clear your heart space today, dear reader!

Categories
Being humble

Dear Humility: A Modern Love Letter to the Seventh Step

Series of Modern Love Letters to the 12 Steps

This post is part of a series of modern love letters to the 12 Steps. To start at the very beginning, read To Whom We Owe Our Recovery: Modern Love Letters to the Twelve Steps.

In Step One, we acknowledge our powerlessness over addiction.

In Step Two, we find hope of a cure in a loving, personal relationship with a Higher Power.

In Step Three, we surrender, casting off our burdens fully into the arms of life’s healing powers.

In Step Four, we reclaim our right to be set free by the truth of our tender humanity.

In Step Five, we access compassionate witness.

In Step Six, we find our authentic willingness to be changed.

But the Steps don’t leave us there, midway up the stairway to heaven! Onward, dear friends, to Step Seven, in which we recover our soothing, healing humility and being humble.

Dear Step Seven,

You read: “Humbly asked [God] to remove our shortcomings.”

Ask and You Will Receive

What comes before an answered prayer, a fulfilled wish, or a miraculous solution?

The ask. Without the ask, there is no answer.

Source, God, healing powers of life, this is my ask. Please change me. Take away the wounds, the sensitive, prickled areas of weakness. Where I do not have the strength, courage, the self-love that is required to resonate with Source stably.

There’s a lot of magic in this short sentence, dear Step Seven. The elixir of humility, being humble, and the miracle of extraction. Removal of what has been a verifiable structure in my body until now.

Asking, I receive.

A Voyage Into the Unknown

But wait Step Seven, is it possible to remove the bones of the negative ego, that attractor of shadows, right out of my body? Dare I hope for this?

Do I even want my fatal flaws to leave me once and for all? Am I willing to be so thoroughly transformed, that the ego itself, daily jailer and companion, narrator, shaper of personal realities, is at last subdued?

Or do I fear the loss of my one reliable protector in this life, the one who at least has been here through it all, thick and thin, my neurosis? The one who, in a pinch, will let me use, will let me act out, will let me self-destroy again, if I, really, really need to?

In whom do I place my trust? My arsenal of imperfect but loyal coping strategies, or the loving unknown wilds of my own deepest source?

Courage to Ask

It takes a lot of courage to ask for help. It takes trust, and it takes willingness. All of these have been prepared along the way, Step Seven, in the previous Steps, as I have inched closer to this important turning point in the story.

What makes the asking vulnerable, is the memory of asking and not receiving. At least not enough, not in time. Not when we needed it most.

The childhood and lifelong pain of needing, and not getting. The gap between admitting to ourselves, and another, that we need help, and the moment of help arriving.

A Totally New Ask

But it is different this time. This is a different ask than ever before because we are not asking our parents, our teachers, our friends, our partners, or even the image of a distant, judgy God given to us by religion.

We are asking our own highest powers of love, the personal and infinite, the part of our Being who truly has no limitation whatsoever.

A part that compassionately adores us and gives to us abundantly, every day our breath, our extraordinary body, our creative consciousness. The one who has no interest in withholding from us, unless it is truly better for us in the long run, not to receive what we’ve asked for.

The one just waiting, waiting, waiting to be asked. Waiting for us to be ready to receive all the goodness she has in store for us.

This ask feels different when we know for certain that the one we’re asking is her.

Transformation Time

The intense vulnerability, of needing and not being certain of when and how our dire needs will be met, is one of the most purifying fires we can undergo.

The ego tried to shield us, to sit like a suit of armor over the soft flesh of our true bodies. Our splitting off, our defenses, and our distancing purported to help us. And the ego did help us for a while, like a rigid cast that held our broken psyches together. Thank you, ego, for getting me this far.

But armored like this, I was cut off from spirit. From my source of regeneration, my vitality, my heaven.

Double or Nothing

Ok, Step Seven. I’m all in. I’m holding nothing back. Nothing of myself, of my addictions, of my pain, nor of my strategies for keeping darkness apart from me.

I agree to unify, to join my shadows, to alchemize. To be changed. To leap into a purifying fire of love, knowing I will be reborn. In a lighter, brighter form, that can hold the vibrations and frequencies and movements of spirit.

As a log burning in the fire, I suffer. As the fire itself, I am bright and alive. As the fine, white ash that remains, I am freed to move on the wind. As the wind itself, I am myself once again, at long last.

Categories
how to laugh more

Funny Ha Ha: Learning How to Laugh More

Laughter Is Powerful Medicine

The best thing about laughter is that it feels so, so good. How many medicines can boast the same?

And it’s super contagious! Have you ever just gotten helplessly drawn into the laughter of others? Of course, you have. That’s how laughter works.

If you want to laugh right now, this one always gets me: Flight of the Conchords Outtakes/Bloopers

As does this: The Californians Breaking Character Compilation

As does this: How to Ruin a Joke – Key & Peele

Work Your Funny Bone

You’ve probably heard of laughter yoga, a trend that has happily caught on around the globe. The essence of laughter yoga is laughing as boisterously as you can for at least a minute.

There are other ways to develop your funny bone, and I think any of us on planet Earth but especially those of us working with recovery and mental health can benefit greatly from placing attention on and developing our sense of humor.

With practice, our humor grows robust and palpable and helps us see the circumstances and experiences we find ourselves in, with a greater appreciation of the divine absurdity of which we all partake.

Personal Humor: Journal Exercise to Laugh More

The following journaling exercise can help you deepen into what’s funny to you personally. It’s very important as you do this exercise to understand that this is not about “being funny” in someone else’s eyes. This is about noticing when the spirit within you, your true core self, is chuckling a little at the natural comedy of your life. The pressure to “be” funny or clever is a comedy killer.

If you pay attention, you may find many situations in your life are or could be laced with laughter. If you’re standing in line at the DMV and you’re noticing that the woman behind the counter would be a great character in an SNL sketch, you’re on your way!

So hold it lightly, as a friendly investigation into what makes you laugh and why.

Seeing Yourself in Funny People

A. List 12 comedians or actors who make you laugh abundantly. For each of your 12 comedians or comic actors, take a moment to identify what specifically about them is so funny to you.

What gets you can be a tiny thing, the look on their face, a voice they use, when they break character, whatever. Do your best just to circle in on one or a few things that seem to especially make you laugh.

What you especially resonate with another is usually part of you too, some kind of affinity. See if you can see anything in this person, that reflects you to yourself. Are you a little like that, too? If so, start to look for it in your life.

B. Now list 12 TV shows or films that have made you laugh in the past, or are still making you laugh. There may be some overlap with the list of actors of course.

Again, think about what these shows may be mirroring to you, about yourself and life. Even if you don’t see any aspect of yourself in those shows, you may meet or know people like the ones you see portrayed. This recognition still points towards your inner personal comedic lens.

Seeing a Funny Person in Yourself

A. Write a list of 12 things about your own personality and/or situation in life that is potentially funny, or could be depending on how you think about it.

It’s ok if not everything you list is immediately hilarious, or even clear why it’s funny, yet, it might only be a little inkling. What’s a little absurd, ridiculous, comical, or amusing about you personally, even if you can’t yet put your finger on why?

Some things from me:

I am very warm and enthusiastic with people’s dogs but kind of standoffish with their owners

Sometimes my inner world is like the Sound of Music and sometimes it’s like a Werner Herzog movie

I’m absurdly codependent sometimes in ways that make my daily life harder. Such as wanting everyone in the grocery store to feel good, safe, and loved, to the point where it causes me to lose focus on my shopping list.

B. Many sitcoms and comedy specials are written by people who realize that something about their ordinary personality is silly. For example, Larry David plays an exaggerated version of himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm. What might the comedy sitcom of your life be?

Mine could be a sitcom about a team of good-hearted therapists who have no business helping other people because they’re all completely cuckoo themselves.

Thanks for reading!

Categories
How to get good karma

Instant Karma’s Gonna Get You – In a Good Way!

John Lennon’s come-on-everybody-wake-up anthem, Instant Karma, is one of my favorite songs of all time.

I love the lyrics, the melody, the chord progression, everything about it. And it’s a real belter – a song that makes me want to sing along at the top of my lungs.

The reminder to snap out of it and realize where we are, what we’re doing, and what we’re creating with our every breath, is so precious.

Wake Up, Wake Up, Wherever You Are!

He sings:

Instant Karma’s gonna get you

Gonna knock you right on the head

You better get yourself together

Pretty soon you’re gonna be dead

Startling. But… yeah, right? Good point. Are we using our time well? Every precious moment of our precious birth? 

What in the world you thinking of

Laughing in the face of love?

What on earth you trying to do?

It’s up to you. Yeah you! 

It’s up to us. To me, to you. As the poet June Jordon says, we’re the one’s we’ve been waiting for.  

What Will It Take?

What will it take for us to take charge of our own lives more fully? To understand that no one else but us creates our lives for us?

Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors generate the world we live in. If we do not choose to remember our authorship in all of these, we yield our time.

If we do not claim our role in creating reality, the ruthless help themselves to our world-creating powers. The world we live in today reflects what humanity at large has either consciously created or unconsciously allowed to be created using our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Can we tolerate that? Can we live with what we have authored into being?

One Human Race

Instant Karma’s gonna get you

Gonna look you right in the face

Better get yourself together darling

Join the human race.

An injunction to join together. Look past our differences, the petty and the paltry, and instead unite.

What unites us is our membership in the tribe of humanity. As just-like-me contemplation reminds us, we are structurally the same on the inside, though our contents be different.

Just like me, all humans have bodies.

Just like me, all humans have feelings and thoughts.

Just like me, all humans experience physical and emotional pain.

Just like me, all humans die. 

The Star You Are

Lennon sings on:

How in the world are you gonna see?

Laughing at fools like me

Who do you think you are?

A superstar?

Well, right you are!

We’ve been shamed if we thought ourselves too shiny, too powerful. Here Lennon shames us in reverse. We are superstars, truly. Each one of us is a sun, if not a universe in our own right, a child of the divine. Why do we behave as less?

Well we all shine on

Like the moon and the stars and the sun

Well we all shine on

Everyone come on!

Yes, we do. Whether we realize it or not, whether we consciously choose what lights, sounds, and vibrations we radiate out to others, or whether we are lost in reflections of another’s light, spending our lives reacting to the moves of others.

The Law of Karma: What We Give, We Receive

Lennon’s song is often interpreted as being about karma in the negative sense, as in, if we don’t watch out and take care, our miscreations fire back upon us.

The reverse is also true: we can choose to send out good, and each wavelet of goodness we ripple out also returns to us manifold.

How might we use our last remaining time in a precious, world-creating human embodiment for sending good out to all, knowing the good we do others is good to ourselves as well?

I Am You, You Are Me

The golden rule states: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The golden rule is nothing more than understanding that self is one with others, and when we do unto others, we are also doing unto ourselves.

For those of us with low self-esteem, sometimes we need the reminder that we have to be kind and loving also to ourselves or else risk harming another.

It works either way – what we do to the self, we do to others. What we do to others, we do to the self. Any equation which balances one over the other will create imbalances that ripple back to us.

Create Some Instant Karma – In a Good Way

Here’s an exercise for creating some Instant good Karma, recalling that creating good for others IS the same thing as creating good for you. May it be a fun exercise, connecting you with your inherent human oneness.

Part One of the Golden Rule: How You Like to Be Treated

How do we like to be treated? How would we have people do unto us?

Write down at least 12 statements, identifying smaller or bigger things.

  1. I love it when people listen to me with love, patience, and compassion
  2. I love it when people tell me about things from their day that made them laugh, so I can laugh too
  3. I love it when people bring me a cup of coffee
  4. I love it when…

Step Two of the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others

Choose one thing from your list, and do it unto someone. For example, if you like it when people bring you coffee, do that for someone today as a surprise.

As you do it, do it knowing that you are giving love to the other and giving love to yourself at the same time.

This is powerful karma, friend. And it’s gonna get you!

Categories
Inspiration

Remembering Your Play Powers

Free Play

Human life has largely been stripped of true, free play. 

For adults, the word play has almost negative associations, as if frivolous. Relegated to a domain of less importance, while work has been elevated, has a kind of sanctity to it. 

The truth is that the human spirit is made to play.

Playful by Nature

When we were children, self-directed play happened naturally. We explored, we found out, and we felt what it was like to be in our human bodies. 

Play happens almost the moment we’re out of the womb. Babies flow for hours on end just looking at their fists, putting their toes in their mouths, etc. Exploring and discovering. 

Later on, it becomes more obvious how imagination laces and saturates what young ones are experiencing as they play. They hold an ordinary twig up to us, enchanted, then cradle it like a baby, then put it in a bed made of sand. 

Play lives in a world where a thing is never only a thing, but has many other harmonics, octaves of potency, and meaning. Play is rich and rewarding, full of the resonances of a unified, loving realm, that has more connection, creativity, and impact.

We are part of Nature’s Play

Nature is playful, full of frivolity. Animals play, and nature herself plays, with flowers, with weather patterns, with the creation of the shapes of the world we inhabit. Everything changes, all the time, in ceaseless flow. Dancing, playing, experimenting, expressing.

And we, as part of nature, also play. Nature gave us a gift for open-ended, agenda-less play. Play is one of the core features of a human spirit, and all that is natural, undefined and open-ended in our world. 

Free play means we are free. Free to make our own choices without direction or control, without pre-definition from someone else. Free to find out on our own terms, as the results of our own moves. Play empowers us.

Play is Rehearsal for Life

Animals play at fighting, hunting, and building before they grow into adults. We do this too, by instinct. We pretend to be adults doing adult activities – cooking, feeding babies, building houses – until such time as we are. 

In our creative lives, you could say we pretend, try out, and try on being artists before we become them. Education has shown that children have an easier time learning when a game is made of a learning objective and when a sense of fun and joy is introduced to the skill acquisition process. Play is the rehearsal of real-life skills. 

Play Heals

All of the art therapies and play therapy itself demonstrate the ways in which play is also healing. 

Play answers what’s missing in the psyche. The right to joy, laughter, and self-created pleasure. The right to connect, to integrate, to flow. 

When you play, you don’t need anything else. Play is its own reward, its own answer, its own satisfaction, an alpha and omega completion in its own self. 

Sadly, as adults, we are often scared to play. Scared to look foolish, scared to open up a pandora’s box of shame, inadequacy, or anxiety. 

But we can slowly, gently restore our right to play, with recognition for the pain and damage we all carry around the right to be ourselves in this way, to use our nature-given instinct to play. 

Journal to Recover Your Play Powers

  • Identify a memory of a time when you free-played as a child. You may have been alone, guiding yourself, or you may have made up games with other children. What can you recall, that you especially enjoyed as a child?

An example from my own life: my four siblings and I used to climb a big old oak tree. We pretended that each of its branches were different rooms in our “house”. We designated a living room, our bedrooms, and a kitchen, where we made pretend meals out of smashed acorns and little stones. 

Last weekend on a trip home to the place I grew up, I recently saw this same old oak tree again, still alive though decades older. I noticed I still feel a very strong emotional connection to it, as one of the many living beings in my life who have offered me a sense of home. 

What about you, what can you recall from the times in your life when play was allowed? What riches came to you through the portal of play? 

Is there any area of your life now, where you might invite a spirit of play to meet you, once again? Your play powers are yours to recover. 

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