Author: Holly Mae Haddock

Categories
Therapy

Good Vibrations: Voo Sound

There’s a wonderful technique used by Somatic Experiencing therapists, called Voo Sound. Not only is the name fun, the technique itself is fun to do. 

The essence of the technique is to vocally emulate the deep, thick, low sound of a foghorn. You might also think of a tuba, bass clarinet or a cello playing the very lowest notes it can, long and slow. 

When I first tried Voo Sound out myself – I learned of it when I was working as a therapist at Villa Kali Ma and another practitioner showed it to me – I thought it sounded a little bit like Tibetan throat singing. I also loved it right away, as it seemed uncommonly fun for a trauma technique.

Down the Rabbit Hole of Voo

Little did I know, my first Voo Sound was the beginning of me going down the rabbit hole of  learning all I could about how the vagus nerve can be called upon to help us heal, and why singing, chanting, toning, and music in particular are so powerful for people with trauma, mental health struggles, and addiction. 

Turns out, how and why Voo Sound works to heal trauma explains exactly why listening to Tibetan throat singing and Gregorian chants has such powerful effects to calm a person down too. Voo Sound, Tibetan throat singing, Gregorian chants all access the vagus nerve. 

As detailed extensively in Steven Porges’ work on polyvagal theory, and emphasized in Somatic Experiencing founder Peter Levine’s work as well, the role of the vagus nerve is central to the body’s mechanisms for restoring us to safety, balance, and health after disruption. 

The Vagus Nerve

The vagus nerve is a thick, evolutionarily ancient bundle of neuronal pathways that runs all the way from the base of our brain to the top of our gastrointestinal system, playing a bridging role between the operations of these two command centers. 

Because the vagus nerve’s job is to induce a return to the emotionally regulated state, one way to assist the body to regulate is to find ways to encourage the vagus nerve to operate, through gentle stimulation.  

The Voo Sound stimulates the vagus nerve just so. The vagus nerve, responding to this stimulation, communicates with (or triggers – these are both simplifications for the sake of grasping the idea) the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, the part that is tasked with guiding the body to create states of peace, safety, calm, and ease. 

Finishing Unfinished Business

The purpose of Voo Sound is to swiftly regulate the body. Interestingly, Voo Sound isn’t about changing your experience though, so much as surrounding your experience with support. Rather than trying to “disappear” your discomfort, the intention is more to give that discomfort a space to be in. Like putting your distress in a soothing sound bath so it can unwind. 

This distinction is important, because Voo Sound isn’t intended to suppress your trauma responses, but actually allow them to complete what they’re trying to do. 

This is because of another insight from the world of trauma research: the reason your trauma symptoms won’t just “go away” is because your trauma response has a job it is trying to finish! 

Voo Sound helps a trauma response finish its job. When a symptom, such as anxiety, finally has a chance to finish the job it’s here to do, it will at last be freed to move on and leave you alone forever.

If that sounds amazing, it is. Wanna try it? 

Get Vooing

To try Voo Sound out, go somewhere where it’s ok to make some noise without feeling worried someone is listening in on you. 

Wherever you take yourself, whether sitting, standing or lying down, take a moment to adjust your body to be as comfortable as is available to you right now. Take a couple of conscious breaths in the most comfortable version of this body position. And begin. 

  1. Take one very big deep belly breath, and on the outbreath, tone the syllable “voo” in the lowest pitch you can generate, while still feeling comfortable and relaxed in your throat and vocal chords. 
  2. As the Voo Sound comes out of you, notice the v-sound buzzing in your lips. Change the shape of the -oo sound as desired, playing around to find the richest strongest and most sustainable tone, relaxing any unneeded extra effort or tension. Allow yourself to notice and enjoy any vibrations you witness in your chest and abdomen.
  3. At the end of your first Voo Sound, let your intake of breath be natural and easy. Let the body do what it wants to do.
  4. At the top of your next in-breath, wait for a beat, then let another long, deep, round Voo Sound out. Enjoy the the good vibrations of the deepest sound you are able to make.
  5. Repeat this cycle as long as you want to if it is feeling good and calming, centering and grounding. If you’re not liking the effect, stop it and don’t worry about it, there are other techniques for accessing your vagal nerve if this one isn’t for you. 

To learn more about Voo Sound, take it from the horse’s mouth by reading Peter Levine’s Healing Trauma: A pioneering program for restoring the wisdom of your body.

Thanks for reading!

Categories
Modern Love Letters to the 12 Steps

Dear Compassionate Witness: A Modern Love Letter to the Fifth Step

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 entirely 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. 

But the Steps don’t leave us there, nearly halfway up the stairway to heaven! Onward, dear friends, to Step Five. During the fifth step, we recover the right to be compassionately witnessed. 

Sounding the Resonances of Truth

Dear Step Five, 

You read, “We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

You can sound like confession, penance. Those of us who tend to beat ourselves up, to punish or correct ourselves, who draw nourishment from a framework of moralization, may take it that way. 

In truth, admitting the exact nature of our wrongs to another person out loud, acknowledging the truth in our own hearts as audible resonances, spoken, resounded through our bodies, will be the liberating cure of truth. 

Spoken Truth Cures the Sickness

Truthtelling sets us free, even when what we have to say isn’t pretty. The body responds to truth’s vibrations, blooms to it. 

When we say truth out loud with the music of the voice, speaking to ourselves, a trusted other, and also to God inside us, we follow through on the freedom we claimed for ourselves in Step Four.

Why is it so important to share truth out loud with another? Because as they say in AA, we are only as sick as our secrets. And secrets do keep us sick. 

Just as it’s dysfunctional to ask children to keep the secrets of the family to themselves, so as not to bring shame on the family, the same holds true when we ask portions of ourselves to hide, to pretend we are healthier than we are. 

The Need to Be Seen

Underneath our shields, our weapons, our armor, there lies a hidden desire to be seen and known, not only for the best of who we are, but also for the worst of what we have become. Because what was done to us is visible in what we became.

It is a terrible burden to the soul to be forced to hide its darkness. It contorts, perverts, and destroys soul to be bound to always wear the costumes and masks of a false self. Nevertheless, that is the assignment given to ego. 

The poor ego. The ego is not much more than a parentified child, trying to, as they say in AA, whistle in the dark.

The Flower of our Soul Revives

What lies underneath the protective bluster of the ego is damage. Harm, hurt, and ways in which we have been mangled out of our original divine human form. Like crushed flowers, the more tender, vulnerable sides of us have become mashed underfoot. 

But these sides of us would spring back to life and full form given the right conditions, like sand being jostled into beautiful patterns by the right sound tones, as seen in cymatics. 

Step Five, you respond to something real. That within us which has been forced to live underground, in reversal, pressed out of shape through the forces of traumatization. That which longs to be seen in its damaged form. 

These parts of us all need our own recognition, our compassion, our understanding of the story of how they got to be this way.

The Longing to Be Good

Deep in the soul, we want to be good. Those sides of us who have wanted, on their worst days, to spread their damage to others, they do to. The parts that want to enact patterns that were enacted upon us – even those sides, if they felt it was an option, would choose to be good if they could. 

Lacking a pathway back to the light, parts frozen in darkness communicate in the language and tools of their world of darkness. If given a pathway back out of isolation, exile and marginalization, these parts will take on different forms, recognizable as aspects and colors of our divine nature. 

The journey back to our basic goodness starts with admitting fully what the current situation is. What we have become, where we have fallen short of our own integrity. 

Asking for What We Want

Step Five, it is healing to recognize this, and even more healing to recognize it in the light of compassionate witness from another. With one who knows all about how darkness corrodes the best of intentions when we are playing a game that it is impossible to win. 

The God nature inside us forgives all, when we ask for forgiveness. If we do not admit to ourselves that we know deep down, and feel deep down, the dissonance of our actions, we will never ask to be freed of those burdens. We want to be good. We must find the frequency of humility, to ask for what we want, receive our own permission to return to who and what we are. 

Step Five, you are the beginning of a genuine ask.

Categories
Art Therapy

Small Seeds and Mighty Trunks: Art Therapy for Growth

From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow. – Aeschylus

Our lives are composed of cycles within cycles within cycles. Rhythms of pause and motion run through our experiences. Nature cycles in particular are a mirror for us. 

We are also nature. Observing how all of nature’s other creations start in a still, fecund nothingness, then gestate, birth, grow, mature, recede, and finally dissolve back into the invisible helps us recall ourselves. 

This art therapyfor growth exercise is for taking time to recognize these cycles in our lives. It begins with journaling. 

Step I: Journal about Your Life as if it were an Oak

Reflect on the following areas of life: 

  • Material World Abundance, Basic Security and Financial Health
  • Romantic Life, Relationship Skills and Love
  • Family, Friends, and Community
  • Healing Your Wounds and Forgiving the Past
  • Personal Adventure, Learning, Experiencing and Discovery
  • Joy, Happiness, Fulfillment and Meaning
  • Creative Expression and Finding What You Have to Say
  • Spirituality and Embodying Your Essence into the Here and Now
  • Contribution to the Collective (Shared Human and Planetary Well-Being)

Now journal to the following prompts. 

Acorn

What aspects of your life story are in the acorn stage? What seeds are you aware of which are still germinating, full of secrecy and potency? What do you sense may one day bloom and grow within you?

Sprout

What has clearly already shown up as a sprout in your life? What fresh, tender shoots, that still need protection, are clearly visible as verifiable manifestations in your world? New people, new skills, new energies?

Sapling

What strong young saplings are present in your life? What manifestations can you already almost lean on? What has viability, resilience, and strength? What are you proud of, reasonably secure will make it further on the life journey? 

Oak Tree

Which features of your life are in the oak tree phase, splendid, large, and solid? What thick boughs and formidable branches of your life are in the prime of their manifestation? Where are you beautiful and manifested, already fully unfurled, sheltering others?

Aging Oak

Which aspects of your life feel they may be shifting, giving way under their weight, perhaps looking towards the end? Where do you feel the groan of something coming gradually to its conclusions, heading towards sunset years?

Decomposing Wood

Which aspects of your life are fully complete, in the process of losing your body, disappearing from this realm, and making their exit? What has completed itself, no longer needs to be here, is on its way to the great beyond?

Fallow Ground

Which aspects and areas of your life are complete unknowns, totally sealed in mystery for now, fertile voids into which you have no insight? Where do you simply have no inkling what will happen?

Step II: Visualize Your Life in Cycles of an Oak Tree

The next step is to make the information you gleaned in your journal process visual. 

The following instructions give you the general idea, but feel free to adapt the process as you go along, according to your nudges of inner wisdom.

Materials

The largest paper you have

Markers, colored pencils, and paint if you have some

Process

  1. Draw a large circle, as large as you can fit onto your paper. 
  2. Make lines to divide the circle into 7 sections, like cutting a pie. 
  3. Draw a small acorn in one section, leaving a lot of empty space in that slice of the pie. Draw a small sprout in the next, then a sapling, an oak tree, an aging oak, decomposing wood, and in the final section, leave it empty. 
  4. Incorporate words from your journaling into your wheel now, together with little symbols, to indicate which aspects of your life are at which cycle stage. For example, if your love life is in a sprout phase, you can write the word “love” inside a heart symbol in the section of the wheel that has a sprout symbol drawn in it. 
  5. Take your time to add everything that feels needs to be there. It can fill up quickly – it’s ok to layer and cram words in if you need to – that itself is indicative of how much you may need to make visible for yourself. 
  6. Feel free to color it in and make it pretty or ugly, whatever feels fitting and creatively compelling. 

Step III: Look at your Artwork and Reflect

Set a timer for 3 minutes, and look at what you have created. 

Now journal. What strikes you? Any patterns? Are there sections of the wheel especially full or empty of topics? 

What might that mean about how you could support yourself better, in acknowledgment of the needs of each stage? If your sobriety is a new little sapling in need of support, and you’re also starting a new relationship, this may imply you have an extra need for protection and tenderness with yourself. See this about yourself.

If you have a lot of fallow ground in your life, see that it’s a time for having faith, not for looking at your life critically. If you have acorns longing to sprout, what will help them issue forth their riches into the world, when the time is right? Where you’re a full tree, can you enjoy, acknowledge, and appreciate that, all you did to get that tree to where it is now?  

Thanks for all that you are and all that you do, fellow traveler. 

Categories
Inspiration

Building a Palace from the Blueprint of the Soul

One of the beauties of human life is to consider how the core blueprint of the soul – our nature, purpose, and path – repeats and reappears in different strata of our being. We each are a uniquely-patterned tapestry, shot through with motifs, shapes, and colors, the combination of which is part of what makes us entirely our own. 

Whatever we experience in our thought stream has a mirrored reflection in the body. What we relate to as emotion is created through sensations arising in our physiology, which we imbue with kaleidoscope-like filters of interpretation. 

Emotion joins sensation with meaning, making stories out of the raw experience. These stories, in turn, dynamically impact our physiology. Everything arises together, co-creates, and sensitively responds.  

The Chemistry Set Inside Us

Whether positive or negative, we feel how we do at any given moment courtesy of our body using minerals and chemicals to create a state within us. 

States are generated through a complex process involving our brain, nervous system, and the circulation of microscopic units of electrically charged materials employed as messengers. 

These chemical messengers, tiny molecules of neurotransmitters and hormones, tell muscles, organs, and our bloodstream which state of neuroception best suits the needs of the moment we are in. 

Neuroception is a phrase used by the trauma researcher Steven Porges to describe how we experience distinct modes of being through the beautifully complex functioning of our neurobiology.  

As Porges’ polyvagal theory explains, a fearful thought is accompanied by a sudden influx of neurotransmitters and hormones circulating in the body that tell the physical body to create readiness for action. 

Physiological changes are then instigated that affect nearly every system of the body: our muscles constrict, our bloodstream is flooded with energizing chemicals, our breathing shallows, and our heart starts pounding. 

These are the tell-tale signs of nervous system arousal. Nervous system arousal is felt to us as discomfort. It isn’t meant to feel good – the bad feeling is part of the motivation to act quickly to save our lives. The trick is understanding that the body has already created the state of unease long before the moment we consciously notice that we are thinking a fearful thought. 

Going Positive

Positive experiences like happiness, inspiration, and love are also created in the body as physical sensations. 

Our muscles relax, our breathing slows and deepens, and we notice that the body creates sensations of pleasure, relaxation, safety, and unrestricted energy flow. The body creates these positive-feeling experiences through the exact mechanism of circulating chemical messengers.

The trigger for whether the body should create feelings of well-being or discomfort lies deep in the brainstem, out of sight of our conscious awareness. 

Lest we feel that we have no edge of influence, though, the good news is that over time, through yoga, artmaking, breathwork, mindfulness – any of the sundry practices that develop mind-body connection – we can learn to work with our bodies to gain a greater measure of self-authority.

A Core of Mystery

So much mystery lies at the heart of us. Researchers have argued that the body drives our experience, with our thoughts only coming up with invented explanations for a reality driven by biology after the fact. Nature decides how we will be, and our mind is told afterward.

Other lines of inquiry point to the supreme relevance of will, thought, and focus, highlighting how our thoughts create our feelings, driving behavior, and results in our lives. Here you might say that mind is the driver, directing experience through its lenses, filters, and shaping constrictions.

Then again, in certain states of the body, linked directly to neuroception, some thoughts cannot live and will fade away. Worry thoughts need a beta brain wave state to linger, and creative flow happens with alpha brain waves. 

We cannot think practical thoughts while sleeping, only swim in symbol-laden dreams. Feeling terrible when up to our chins in a warm, lavender-scented salt bath is hard. These are restrictions. 

The Cathedral We Build

All in all, the whole miracle of experience co-arises in mind, body, and emotion simultaneously. Far from being hapless and chaotic, our life is largely harmoniously organized, as self-coherent, beautiful, and graceful as a symphony. 

This artistic integrity of design might cause us to wonder, what genuinely underlies our existence that gives us our patterns? Looking at the shape of our lives, we can get a hint of what the blueprint of the soul might be. 

What instruction sets are we working with, have we been working with this the whole time? What palace for the soul are we building, breath by breath, thought by thought, move by the move? Getting a hint of it, might we more consciously align to what we’re really here to do?  

Categories
Mental Health

Turning the Love Beam Back on You: Shifting out of Codependency

Codependent Relationships Thwart Growing Up

Individuation is the psychological journey of becoming a whole, unique individual in our own right. A life-long process, individuation is how we gradually polish the diamond of our original Self, developing and becoming more and more who we really are at the core of our being. 

Codependent relationships typically stand in the way of the individuation process, by prioritizing psychological fusion at the expense of individual freedom and growth. 

Two Become One – But Not in the Way We Really Want

Psychological fusion means two people becoming one – but in a bad way. When we are codependent we entangle ourselves with another person in a way that’s called merging. 

Merging means that we sooner or later fall into dysfunctional patterns of control, enabling of unhealthy behaviors, and overly fearing the elements of aloneness and self-responsibility that are involved in growing into our own journey.

That’s because in our not-yet-healed state, we form a bond with another that is centered at some level around our wounding, in which we both attempt to care for the other, compensate for unmet psychological needs, and develop a condition of mutual over-reliance.

There is a higher, spiritual version of sacred union, wherein we each hold onto ourselves, and yet also can join to create a third energy. Codependence may be a kind of childlike attempt at that, but until we’ve had a chance to heal psychologically, it will be hard to sustain real freedom and wholeness in each person.

I’ll Heal You and You’ll Heal Me

The state of wounded merging (also called trauma-bonding) develops strongly where each person meets needs for the other that actually the other person should, developmentally speaking, learn to do for themselves. 

It can be quite sweet in the beginning. It’s like we agree to hold hurt pieces of each other until we’re each strong enough to do it for ourselves. We make up for missing pieces of childhood, providing safety, understanding, love, food, or whatever else is needed. 

We don’t have to make codependent relationships bad and wrong. We do need to see that they are relationships between two wounded children finding a way to get what they need by taking care of each other. No relationship can stay that way forever, because we do want, deep inside, to grow up, ripen, and mature spiritually.  

How Long Can We Avoid Ourselves?

Over-focusing on another can serve as a way of avoiding our own feelings, needs, and trauma. Codependency can be a distracting, addictive “fixer-upper” project, in which we direct our life purpose towards helping, fixing or caring for another person rather than looking at our own lives.

Each party takes on specific pieces for the other, making sacrifices and providing protections for the other. Both can become addicted to the same thing: using the other person as a way to delay facing one’s own life story. 

We can do this for a long, long, long time. But the call of our own life will never really go away, even if we try not to listen to it. 

Codependent relationships have negative impacts for both parties. Typically these negative impacts relate to the ways that we enable each other to stay stuck in patterns that aren’t actually positive or life-affirming. It starts to feel static and stifling. 

So many of us start to wonder: can we change the deal?

Changing The Deal

The hidden problem of the old deal is each person gives up a portion of their true Self, while requiring that the other do something for us. We each trade in our autonomy and self-responsibility, in exchange for emotional security, understanding, support, approval, or whatever goodies the other person gives us. The agreement boils down, if we look closely, to some kind of surrender of individuality in exchange for being taken care of.

What can we do about it? Well, once we realize that we are busy holding someone else’s wound for them, we can start to play with the idea of holding our own. We take our wounds back from the other’s arms, and gradually give them back what we have been holding for them. 

What wounds do we still need someone to hold, and how can we gradually be the one doing that holding? Here’s a journal prompt for you to explore this question. 

Journal Prompt: Turn the Love Beam Back on You

  1. All You Give. Write out all the things you do for your partner (or other loved one). Include physical world activities, like making sure they have something to eat, as well as time spent of more subtle emotional activities, like supporting them emotionally, thinking of solutions for their problems, or even just worrying about them. Any of your own time you spend focusing on them, their needs, and their shape of their lives.   
  2. Imagine Receiving from Someone Like You. Now imagine and write about what your life might be like if you were your own partner. If you met someone like you, who wanted to give you all that you have been giving away, what would that be like? How might you bloom and blossom under that beam of love? Does any resistance surface? What needs of yours still need the warm embrace of your own life-giving love? 

Thanks for reading!

Categories
General

Paths into Presence: Variations on the 5-4-3-2-1 Tool

We know that the present moment is where the good stuff is. As gilded as our fantasies may be, and as rose-tinted our past, true deep body satisfaction is a now-moment experience. There is a deliciousness, a ripeness to having our sense experiences bloom in our awareness right here, right now. 

That’s part of why we practice mindfulness, why we try not to miss our lives while they happen. You could say it’s the goal of all healing work, to free ourselves from ruminating about a moment we already lived through. Released from unresolved feelings belonging to things that happened long ago, we don’t have to squander our creative fortunes envisioning terrible futures, either. 

We gradually become free to live life deeply and fully in the now. 

Shifting Neuroception

Like many people with trauma patterning, I personally have found that “just” being present is easier said than done, for a thousand reasons. I always appreciate, therefore, tricks that work at the biological level to help us shift our state of neuroception gently, from fight-flight-freeze-appease states back into presence.

These gentle paths into presence create subtle but palpable sensations of safety and pleasure in the body. This is even more important than it sounds! When the body feels good, we naturally open the aperture of our senses, and become patient, calm, creatively receptive, lively, loving, and at ease.   

The 5-4-3-2-1 Tool

The 5-4-3-2-1 tool is a technique for rapid orientation into the now moment. The simple and quick process goes as follows: look around the room and identify five sights, naming them out loud as you see them. 

I see my desk lamp, a blanket crumpled up on the couch, my ukulele, a pencil, and a tree outside my window.

Now do the same with four sounds, then three physical sensations, two scents, and finally one taste. 

Tastes and if smells can be imagined if nothing is around, though often people will be able, if they focus to pay closer attention, to identify something like “the lingering taste of orange juice on my tongue”, and find aromas like the smell of their own shampoo in their hair or the scent of soap on their hands.

Just sensing and naming sense perceptions works very quickly and well to break the spell of being “somewhere else”. However, more fun can be had with three small variations, if you want to sink deeper into your senses!

Three Variations of the 5-4-3-2-1 Tool

I. Slow it Down & Add Details. Make the 5-4-3-2-1 experience even richer by slowing down and lingering on each thing for a moment to take in and describe the qualities of what we’re looking at.

I see the desk lamp over there, and that the lampshade is made out of dusty rose-colored fabric printed with small birds. The body of the lamp itself is white with little blue designs on it, it looks like it might be made out of china. It looks smooth but also a little uneven, and it’s gleaming softly in the cold silvery light coming from the window.

II. Turn it into a Journaling Exercise. Turn the 5-4-3-2-1 tool into a writing exercise, in which you imagine things in each category rather than observing. Technically, this takes you out of your current now moment, but by summoning up sense memories you are connecting with your organs of now-moment awareness, which feels wonderful. I have found that using imagination in this way shifts your state of neuroception, and you will get the same result of finding yourself sensing your environment more richly in the now. 

List 12 things you love in each sense category: sights, sounds, touch sensations, scents, and tastes you love. For example, in the smell category I love: 

  1. The smell on my hands after picking lemons from the tree at my mother’s house
  2. the smell of long golden grass that’s just been dampened with a light rain 
  3. the smell of wild bay leaves when I pick one and crush it between my fingers when I’m on a hike 

III. Create Sense Effects.  In this variation, deliberately create sense effects in each category, getting up and moving around your entire house, if necessary, to find things. 

In the sights category, see if you can create visual contrasts or juxtapositions that interest you. Be curious. 

When I move my head closer to my teacup and peer in, the window of light that was reflected in my tea disappears. 

Look for aromas (kitchen and bathroom are good places to look): Ceylon cinnamon, this jasmine tea my Dad brought me from his trip to China, my husband’s toothpaste that smells sharp and clean and sparkly.

The sounds channel is especially fun:

My ceramic salad bowl makes a perfect G note like a gong when you strike it with a wooden spoon. 

And the physical sensations are an especial delight, when you look for sensations that feel interesting or pleasant: 

I like the feeling of my placing my palms flat on my cold, smooth wooden desk.  

Have fun, and may you enjoy your rich, sumptuous Now. 

Categories
Trauma

Feeling Yourself: Somatic Experiencing

There is a type of Somatic Therapy called Somatic Experiencing, developed by trauma-work pioneer Peter Levine.  

Somatic Experiencing, as the name implies, helps people release trauma patterning through learning to experience life somatically (through the body). 

Why do we need help experiencing life through the body? Don’t we always experience life in the body? Yes, we do. But we’re not always conscious or paying attention to how our life feels to the body. 

The Body Dimension

The body does many things on its own, without us even noticing. Things like how we are breathing, our muscle tension, our posture, pleasant and unpleasant sensations, can all be ignored if we keep our focus elsewhere, which, let’s face it, we often do. One of the goals of mindfulness practices, breathwork, and yoga, is to help us tune into and stay in the body awareness. 

Human life can be experienced through many different channels of our awareness, of which our body awareness is only one. In any given moment, there is a thought dimension to our experience, an emotional dimension, a creative dimension, a relationship dimension, a spiritual dimension, and so on. When we’re balanced and whole, we can be aware of many of them all at once, which is a very satisfying, colorful experience. So why do we skip over the body awareness so frequently? 

The body dimension of our experience is rich with resources. Body lives in the now. Body gives us warm, pleasant sensations. Body is like a friendly pet. 

Noticing the Good Times

Body is also that aspect of our experience that we are robbed of through trauma. Those of us who experienced deep injury to our being are frequently trapped in patterns of fearing our own bodies. We’re afraid to feel sensations in the body in part because after trauma, the body becomes a dangerous place, full of intensity and discomfort. 

One of the brilliant insights that Peter Levine had and expanded upon, is to help shift our awareness towards the times when we’re not feeling trauma energies. For those of us who experience trauma, distress can feel like a permanent state, that we are “always” triggered, afraid of being triggered, or recovering from having just been triggered. 

However the over-focus on the experience of being triggered is itself a sign of trauma, and represents that permanent, unchanging, looping quality that trauma has, which is not exactly right, objectively speaking anyway. Every day we have little moments during which we are not actually suffering, when our bodies do feel relaxed and safe, though we often miss these moments. 

The following exercises is a variation of the Recalling Being Yourself Technique, a staple of the Somatic Experiencing toolkit. You can find the original exercise in Healing Trauma: A pioneering program for restoring the wisdom of your body, by Peter Levine.

I have found it to be helpful in shifting into body awareness in a way that feels safe, easy, and approachable. May it be helpful for you too!

Short Exercise for Feeling Yourself: You at Your Best

The goal of this exercise is to recall a time when you were not in your traumatized self state, but actually doing pretty well. Not only were you feeling like there wasn’t any fear, pain, stress, or anger bothering you for the moment, you were actually letting your light shine. It’s important to acknowledge these moments, and love and celebrate ourselves for having them.

  1. Prepare for Meditation. Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. Prioritize positive body sensations, don’t be strict with yourself about how you sit. Take a few moments to ground and center into the breath, allowing your outbreath to gradually lengthen to be longer than the inbreath. You may like to count to three on the inbreath and to five on the outbreath, if that feels natural enough.  
  2. Recall A Moment of You at Your Best. Once settled, think of a time, as recent as possible, when you felt like you were, for whatever reason, being your normal, natural self, without being all messed up in a trauma reaction. Maybe you weren’t just your normal ordinary self, but actually a pretty wonderful side of you. Perhaps you were being big and shiny, commanding the attention in the room, or just walking along outside relaxed and happy. 

Maybe it’s a situation in which you were expressing love and affection, telling jokes, doing something really well, or just singing and dancing around when no one was looking while you made dinner. You can do this exercise as many times as possible, so don’t get too hung up on choosing a perfect memory. Just choose one memory, more recent than ancient if possible, of a time when you were at your very best.

  1. Explore the Positive Sense Memories. Once you’ve identified a memory, start allowing yourself to remember all of the sensory details. What can you recall about what the scene looked like? How was the lighting, the atmosphere? Any sounds, touch sensations you can recall? What season was it? What were the colors in the space you were in? Allow your memory to drift around to open up all the pleasant sense impressions. 
  2. Notice How You Feel Right Now As You Recall. As you continue to recall the scene, gently place your attention to your physical and emotional sensations that you’re having right now while you remember. Notice especially anything that feels good. Are there any parts of you expanding, relaxing, warming up, feeling good? Stay with that, let it be as big as it can be, linger with this. Don’t push, just allow. Stay here for as long as you like, allowing pleasantness to stay.
  3. Capture your Insights. Journal a little bit about what you experienced. Expand, anchor, make as delicious as possible. This will help you signal to yourself that these are the types of experiences you want to amplify and focus on, going forward. 

I hope you were able to feel your Self in this exercise. Thanks for reading!

Categories
Inspiration

6 Reasons to Keep On Keeping On

Sometimes, on the winding, yellow-brick road back home to ourselves, we get tired. Our spirits flag, and we lose motivation for a spell. 

On such days we might ask ourselves, why do all this hard inner work? When so many people in the world choose to stay hard-hearted, numbed out, or absent-bodied? Why should we bother to try to retrieve our aliveness, nourish our tenderheartedness, revive our colorful human soul? Why shouldn’t we just give in to the difficulties, to our self-destructive urges and patterns, to our desires to fall back asleep? 

Here are some thoughts of my own. I hope you will also add to this list and think of your own reasons for keeping on keeping on. Take heart, fellow traveler, on lonely stretches of the road, knowing good things are around the bend for all of humanity. Thank you for walking the road, it does mean something, to me and countless others. 

1. We Have to Keep Going to Get There

The journey to wholeness can feel endless sometimes, but the idea that our wounds won’t ever be resolved comes from the trauma experience itself, of feeling stuck and frozen in a hellish moment. The actual truth is that little by little, we are getting better, bigger, fuller, deeper, more ourselves. It just takes a long time, like a very long hike to the top of a mountain. 

The main thing that gets in the way of getting to the top is when we get discouraged and stop walking the trail. We have to give ourselves many, many chances to release, repair, and repattern. Sooner or later though, one fine day, we’ll get there. 

So it’s ok to stop and rest, it is. Maybe even kick and scream for a little bit, have a toddler tantrum and cry into our elbows. Then we get back on the road. Because we have to keep going to get there. 

2. We Do It to Stop the Cycle of Broken-heartedness

Many of us experienced intense suffering in our lives at the hands of people whose wounds were too big for them to hold. They themselves most likely didn’t mean to hurt us, but the damage in them damaged us. Because these people we loved and needed to love us back were so addled with heartache themselves, they passed their hurt right onto us. We end up holding the same damage they held. 

So those of us with the privilege of being aware of this do the hard work of healing so that we stop the madness of passing woundedness on from person to person, generation to generation. Not only that, we give from the best of us. We choose something else. We create new patterns that can be passed from person to person in the other direction. We do it to stop the cycle of broken-heartedness.

3. We Do it for True Love

True love requires full self-acceptance and self-love. If we want to experience the deep satisfaction of a true love union and partnership (or even a deep, real friendship), we have to do some work to be ready for it. 

We must learn not to push away the intimacy, needs, and yearning of others, and yet still hold onto ourselves. We must find a way to be our own selves fully, vulnerable and real, while also holding the power that belongs to us intact in our hearts. We have to combine all these paradoxes of strength and yielding into one human heart. It’s a lot, but then, true love is the best. So we do it for true love. 

4. We Do It Because Healthy Bodies Need Healthy Hearts

Physical health, immunity, and well-being at the biological level are influenced by whether or not we find ways to attend to the wounds of our souls. If we want to be in fit physical condition, we have to do our best to be in fit emotional, mental, creative, and spiritual condition, too! So we do it because healthy bodies need healthy hearts. 

5. We Do it for Our Dreams

Whether we have a bucket list of experiences we want to have before we pass on from this plane, or a set of accomplishments it would be very satisfying to one day achieve, we will benefit from doing the hard work of healing. When too much of our pain is neglected, cast aside, rejected and unaddressed, we will either not even try, give up at the first challenge, self-sabotage our dreams just when they’re blooming, or be unable to enjoy them when they do happen. So we do it for our dreams. 

6. We Do It for the Planet

If we don’t do the difficult work of healing our minds, bodies and emotions, we will always be manipulated by our wounds to continue to live in the ways that the Powers that Shouldn’t Be want us to. 

If we truly, really want to stop waging wars, victimizing the vulnerable, and destroying the world’s beautiful flora and magnificent fauna, the body of mother earth, we must learn to find ways not to respond to nudges and urgings that come from the appetite for destruction within us. The  most powerful action we can take to stop being part of the problem is to heal our hearts, bodies, minds, and souls. So we do it for the planet, too. 

What are your reasons for keeping on keeping on?

Categories
Modern Love Letters to the 12 Steps

Dear Truth: A Modern Love Letter to the Fourth Step

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. 

But the Steps don’t leave us there, only a quarter way up the stairway to heaven! Onward, dear friends, to Step Four, in which we recover the right to be set free by the truth. 

Dear Step Four, 

You read, “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

The Scary Step

Step Four, I was so afraid of you at first. I was scared of what you would uncover, what truths you might point out, what inadequacies in my nature you would expose for all to see. 

I was afraid of the heaviness of guilt. Implacable shame, the black blanket of soul-crushing self-condemnation, awareness of my disappointing nature. 

I was afraid, dear Step Four, that you would be my worst enemy, that you would align with those who told me I am nothing, who said I was bad, who said I had no worth.

I thought you would bear evidence to validate those who interpreted me in the worst light, who pinned me in the corner with judgments and interpretations of who I am, why I do what I do, what I meant. 

The Dark Wave of Shame

Imagining making a fearless, searching inventory of the ways I had fallen short of my own values of kindness, compassion, and goodness, what came roaring back to my ears was the sound of a massive black wave of shame. 

A sea of memories of all the ways I have ever been misunderstood, unseen, interpreted as though expressing the worst sides of human nature. 

Worst of all how, finding no way to refute these interpretations, I sided with Them against my Self. This is what I was afraid you would bring: my own, damning self-judgment, that original Self-betrayal. 

The Surprise Blessing

But I was surprised. What you brought me instead was a gift. 

You restored my right to be set free by the truth. The truth of what lives on in me, and why it does. What corroding, enchained, corrupted forces, what shadow-bound, what small-spirited and narrow-minded desperations live in the shadows of my soul, where I did not want to see or know them. 

Step Four, thank you for all you brought me. You are the courage to face my humanness, you are the truth that none of us is better or worse than another. You are true humility, true recognition of our shared wounds, our interdependence. 

Ego, the Resistance Fighter

Step Four, my ego wants me to be different than the others, so, so bad. It wants me to be better, it wants me to be more moral, smarter, more gifted or in some other way not fully part of the messy, heartbreaking psychological fray. 

Why does my ego wants this? Because the ego was once my consolation, my way of not having to wonder if I deserve to belong. Ego grew over the pains of wondering if I maybe am only my failures, my lack of courage, my smallness, my not-yet-ness, my incompleteness. 

Ego was the part that said, no, I will not be those bad things. I will be something different. I will resist, I will fight. I will make myself something good, something worthy, something beautiful, something strong.

Prying Off the Ego Shell

Ever since then, I never wanted to look back at shadows cast. Who I hurt, how I hurt them. I couldn’t bear to see the darkness, cast by the need to hold onto some kind of self-concept that feels acceptable, good, admirable. Step Four, I was afraid you would take my ego from me, its protections and its comforting illusions. 

And you did! Oh, lordy. 

What I did not know is that when ego is cracked off, crow-barred away, and the vulnerability within me is exposed to the light, that I would find not that I judged myself, not that I was especially hateful or bad, not that I was worse than all the rest … only the same as everyone else. 

The Unifying Wound

The same. Not better, not worse. Marred by the same darkness, injured with the same instruments, carrying the same burdens as all of humanity. Gifted with the same bright lights. 

Like all who came before me. Struggling with the same wounds, the same self-rejection, the same longing to return to divinity. The same potential for reunion with all that is. 

Step Four, what you gave me was my inclusion and belonging. That in my goodness-mixed-with flaws, I am one with all. That I do not have to get away from that which connects me with everyone else. That I am always and forever together.

So I slowly love myself, for all of us, and love all of us, for me. Thank you Step Four, for your mysterious blessings. I reclaim my right to be set free by your truth. 

Love, 

Me

For more about the power of Step Four, check out The Heart Chakra and the Fourth Step.

Categories
Parts Work

Getting to Know Your Spiritual Parts

“Hello Darkness, My Old Friend”

I always loved the lyric, “Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again” from the song Sounds of Silence by Paul Simon. I love his affirmation that darkness is his friend. I feel that darkness is my friend, too.

In Parts Work, like all soul work, we gradually discover that all that arises within and around us is an expression of the One Psyche in whom we all are encompassed.  Aspects of life that feel unfamiliar, dangerous, oppositional, frightening, or otherwise unwanted eventually reveal themselves to be a friend. 

All dark shadows are another face of what we all are. Hidden, distorted through the schisms of self-alienation, but not, in the end, actually distinct from us. Can we learn to name all our Parts as friends?

Hello darkness, my old friend. Hello despair. Hello agitation. Hello anger. Hello fear. Hello suffering. Hello loss. Hello death. Hello hope. Hello vitality. Hello resilience.

The Baffling Parts

In my own decades of self-healing practices, through Expressive Arts and other kinds of soul recovery, it has been inexpressibly helpful to get to know and understand the more baffling Parts of my own nature, the ones that seem like outer enemies or exasperating inner saboteurs. 

The Part of me that prefers to be less than my full potential, for example. For God’s sake, why? asks another Part, a frustrated Part who reaches her wits end because of my noncooperation with social norms. 

And yet the submerged, unwanted, shadow-burdened Part whispers of the protections of being hidden away, out of sight, out of mind, out of target range. 

She reminds me how, when you act like you don’t matter, no one will take an unhealthy interest you, you cannot be skewered by envy, or projected upon, or anything. How in silence and invisibility we are sometimes safer. How in failure we can perhaps succeed better, in the dark unnoticed, serving our true work while no one sees. 

I remember why this was necessary before. It helps me see it might not be needed anymore. 

Understanding myself better, why I sabotage, why I rebel, why I fight my own nature, what I resist and why I resist it, is a return of soul to Soul. Bringing myself back to my Self, and my Self back to myself. 

Spirit Parts

Through Parts Work we not only liberate shadow Parts, but uncover Spiritual Parts. We walk a path of rediscovery, recognition, and reunion with Parts who have been there all along within one’s energy. 

These Parts are the parts of our own Psyche – again, shared with All, even while we all have our own experiences of them – that are stunning, beautiful, remarkable, moving. 

When we understand the messages these Parts have for us, we cry, we are grateful, we change our feelings from resentment, victimization, and bitterness, into joy. We soften into self-forgiveness, seeing how our pain, our suffering has all, after all, been worth it. We walk through doorways of the heart into spirit. 

These Parts speak to us with such kindness and mercy that we are moved by our own natures, by what we carry within us, what has always been there in the background music of our bodies, our hearts, our spirits, our dreams.

Getting to know our Spiritual Parts is another way of saying we build a relationship with our own God natures.

Exercise for Reconnecting with Spiritual Parts:

  1. Close your eyes and settle into a safe-feeling position in your body, perhaps through placing your hands on a section of your body that would like some comforting contact. I like one hand on the heart, one hand on the belly. 
  2. From your safe position, take a few breaths and then allow yourself to imagine or remember feeling relaxed, safe, held, and connected. Trust whichever image pops into your mind first, and don’t worry about choosing a perfect one. Feel loved, in touch with your own value, the beauties of this world, with goodness. 
  3. After having summoned up this memory or image, spend a little time writing about or drawing it. Get down as much information as you can about the context, the situation, what you experienced. 
  4. Now take the lens that this memory or image represents a time you had contact with a Spiritual Part, that there is a Divine Someone connected to this experience, a Loving Presence who was there giving you those feelings of love and safety. 
  5. What name could be given to this Part? What are they like? What qualities do they emanate and radiate towards you? What strikes you about them? 
  6. See what happens if you begin a dialogue between your ordinary-you personality and this Part.  

Hi Big Sunny Spirit Part.
Hi, my love.
Thank you for being here.
Thank YOU for being here.
Want to dialogue?
Yes! What are your troubles? What can I take from your little shoulders? I love you so much. 

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