Breathing Fresh Life into the Stories We Tell: The Practice of Updating Our Narratives

I've never thought of myself as a storyteller.   

Since I began delving into my whiteness, I became more deeply aware that narratives transmit contexts, and contexts tell us what we belong to and what we don't.  Belonging is fundamental and a powerful motivator (consciously and unconsciously) for behavior.  As with other mammals, belonging can make the difference for survival. Our sense of belonging is related to our experience of safety, connection, warmth, love, and meaning; and even our health. 

I've been paying attention to what stories are being told and how things are framed in our society these past years.  I imagine you have too, to a greater or lesser degree -- it's hard not to notice when there are many competing and polarizing stories about what's happening and what it means.  This is an important topic, and it's not the main focus I want to write about at the moment.    

Let's take a more personal look at storytelling, and how it functions internally.  

But first, I need to back up a bit.  Last year I began studying Somatic Archaeology© and Historical Trauma with Dr. Ruby Gibson, Founder of Freedom Lodge organization.  Updating our narratives to reflect what just unfolded in our process -- allowing our mental interpretations to arise directly out of our body sensing and emotions is part of the Somatic Archaeology© process.  Through my own experience as well as guiding others through it, I've learned some interesting things about my personal process of framing my experience into stories. In the SA© process, this mental function is referred to as interpreting.  

I've been aware of spiritual bypassing and mental overriding for years, a couple of decades at least.  However, through Somatic Archaeology©, which has a particular sequence of contacting the realms of body, emotions, thinking, and spirit, I gained more awareness of how often I jump into thinking as an attempted escape from inhabiting my body and connecting with my emotions: as a stress response.

I'm not the only one who experiences this pattern from time to time.   :)  

Overlaying a spiritual interpretation onto a stressed body or unfelt emotions is also a stress response.  

These stress (or trauma) responses of mental and spiritual bypassing are not wrong in themselves.  We all have stress responses which are a protective functional intelligence which has worked well enough to keep us alive and continuing even under duress up to this point.  And it can be extremely helpful to take a higher or wider view to bring compassion and space to our stress.  "This too shall pass" is a good example.  

However, if we are engaging our mental and spiritual bodies as a method to try to block our physical and emotional bodies, we will not experience inner coherence (the felt sense that all the parts of us are inter-connected and in relation internally) or harmony or peacefulness.  Mental overriding and spiritual bypassing also negatively impact interpersonal relating and connection with Nature.  The more we are abandoning aspects of our experience that are physically or emotionally unresolved and continuing to perpetuate stress, we will suffer to some degree.  

Becoming more aware of how we function in these realms of earth, water, air, and fire and reconnecting them within and around us allows us to update our narratives directly in response to our physical and emotional bodies and integrate and open to spiritual connection.  The continuing weave of all these aspects of life, like the infinity loop, contributes to profound inner and outer healing, integration, recovery of sacred identity, and reclamation of stories as sacred.    

The 5 Steps of Somatic Archaeology© are:

1) I notice (ground & set intention)

2) I sense

3) I feel

4) I interpret

5) I reconcile

SA© is a bottom-up process.  That means that once a mindful / heartful self-connection and intention is established, the process begins with body sensing.  Mental sense-making and interpreting doesn't come in until the next to the last step.  

What's common in our culture today is that we tend to want to start with an interpretation and then maybe we'll check in with how we actually are in our bodies, what's our stress level, and how we feel.  It can feel too scary to be present with the state of our nervous systems while not yet knowing how to make sense of our experience and what our emotions are conveying to us.  Our colonial belief system in the dominant culture is the false belief that our bodies don't know much anyway.  That our bodies, like our planet, are here to be extracted from, dominated, and used so we can achieve a sense of control or power over.  This paradigm and our attempts to belong to it are creating some serious symptoms and multiple crises.  

It's not working out well for us as a whole.  (I realize this is an understatement.)  

And not individually either.

The bottom-up Somatic Archaeology(c) process, which is grounded in Indigenous wisdom, honors our Earth and the earth of our bodies as sacred.  This planet has been around for a while, and our bodies are a part of Her wise Nature.  When we slow down and become present in our bodies and with each other, all kinds of wisdom, beauty and resilience unfold.  And there's stored pain too; pain from our own lives, and from our ancestors and the collective. Pain from the harms that we and our ancestors have experienced and that we and our ancestors have perpetrated (often related to harms we / they experienced before that.)  Unresolved trauma is a vicious cycle until it can be interrupted.    

It's an intelligent survival response for our bodies to store residues from traumas that happened before.  When we connect with our bodies -- when we excavate the archaeology of our bodies -- we can gradually unfold the experiences, stress, and memories that were held in our bodies, breathe to allow the emotions to come up and move through us, and then we can have the information available to interpret what is true for us now.  With that insight we can align with our truth, honor what is needed now in our lives, and reconcile what needs to be addressed (which has emerged through our process).  When all the parts of us - body, emotions, mind, and spirit - are congruent, we can embody an update, a new story, about who we were, who we are, and orient towards who we are becoming.  Now that's fresh!