A Riff on Resonance: A Foundational Principle of Healing

 This riff on resonance is part of the Healing Circle series I am currently leading.  I hope you enjoy it!

Why Resonance?

Resonance practice is about being present with what is in service of healing, relating, and discovering right relationship with our ecosystem and with Nature.  Resonating contributes to informing us about what is aligned for us, so we can make choices towards being in alignment with our deeper wisdom and our integrity.

Resonance is connected with right use of our energy / effort.  When we are operating from our survival strategies (wounds from our childhood environments which were impacted by previous generations and the wider ecosystemic environment), we are often applying our efforts in ways that are not regenerative.  For example, working harder or behaving in specific ways to get needed attention, or to keep the peace, or to prevent unwanted attention, or to make our experience as okay as possible for us as young children.  Resonance practice can help us discern these kinds of patterns, so we can feel (resonate) with the outdated functions operating underneath the pattern, which allows us to outgrow the adaptive behaviors which were once so necessary.

Resonance is connected with our resilience and our belonging.  As we recognize and somatically connect with the traumatized internal structures of our survival strategies, they can dissolve and our internal home-base rests more in the natural flow of life through us, which is innately resilient and creative.  As survival strategies melt, we become more ourselves and feel more connected with our belonging which was here all along, even though it was covered over for some very good reasons.  Resonating practice over time leads to powerful shifts.

Resonance, How?

Resonance is connected to embodying - being non-judgmentally present in our bodies; being with the sensations and inner movements we experience.  Paradoxically, resonance practice includes that we may sometimes experience parts of our bodies as numb or not easy to sense.  A regular meditation practice which focuses on body-sensing can be helpful, as over time we discover that connecting with our bodies is an ever-changing, ever-developing process. Not just because our bodies age, but because our awareness capacities develop and evolve with practice. The more we heal, the more intimately we contact the experience of being alive in our bodies.

Life happens through our bodies.  Our bodies are like an orchestral instrument, with life as the movement which vibrates the instrument.  At the same time, our bodies are the life movement itself.  When we connect somatically, we discover that sensations are moving, and we gradually experience our (inner) bodies more and more as movement.

Earth Sensing and Ancient Time

Intentionally resonating with the Earth and including grounding in our body sensing practice can put us in touch with the consciousness of ancient time.  The Earth is much older than we are, and we are interconnected with our planet. We are an expression of the planet.  As we deepen our sensing of Earth through our bodies, we tap into resilience and accumulated wisdom.  This practice contributes to decolonializing our belief / felt sense of ourselves as separate beings that have to heal and cope and achieve and become all by ourselves.  Expanding the experience of embodiment to be more inclusive of the natural world and our ecosystem is healing and restorative.  We can learn about movement from resonating with Nature, which has a different texture and quality of movement through our bodies than we may usually experience in daily life.

Edge Awareness

Sensing our bodies as a movement, we become more aware of places in our somatic experience that feel separate from our inner movements – that are frozen, numb, or held apart somehow.  We might name this an edge:  where some places in us are moving and flowing, and in another place something feels inaccessible, frozen, numb, or held apart.

Our edges are a fertile ground in many ways.

An interesting contemplation practice is to witness what happens for us when we meet an edge.  What happens in our bodies, our sensations.  What happens emotionally.  What happens mentally. What happens in our sense of spaciousness, and in the relational space between ourselves and another.

Each time we grow our development, or something heals, what was previously an edge becomes restored into a movement flow.

To practice resonance as a resilience practice, I invite you to explore connecting with what is moving -- what is flowing -- in your body as your baseline of somatic meditation.  This creates a habit to replenish and cultivate resourcing even when approaching a current edge.  Through choosing to consciously resonate with what is flowing, we strengthen our agency: our access to conscious choice about when we dive into unpacking what is enfolded in our experience of an edge, and when we don’t dive in in a given moment. Not with an intention to avoid or hide from edges which need our attention, but to dive in when we have the right conditions to do so whenever that’s possible.  Sometimes people on a healing path unconsciously pressure themselves to (try to) resolve every edge immediately, one after another after another, without allowing the space needed to rest, to integrate, and to enjoy.

And of course, sometimes life thrusts us into our edges, and in that case, we can claim our agency by discovering how we can relate with our experience.  We can resonate with what is happening through the 3 sync meditation so we can attune with sensing, feeling, and witnessing our thinking.  We can open to discovering what we need and want.  We can intend and open to learning about how to organize ourselves to meet life ife in a compassionate and empowered way, whatever comes.  

I invite you to explore and play with resonance, learning about your present capacity to resonate, noticing your edges, and widening your capacity to resonate in more of more of the experiences in your life and ecosystems.  

Blessings!

Belonging and Relational Structure

In my studies with Thomas Huebl, I am learning about space, energy and structure.  I've studied these qualities through other lenses such as Yoga in the Himalayan tradition and the work of the Hendricks, and always find it interesting to bring in new perspectives.  

Space correlates with being-ness, the root chakra, and the right and space to be here in life. It also connects us with stillness, consciousness and the capacity to witness.  Energy correlates with becoming, learning and evolving, movement up the spine, and movement generally.  There are many aspects of structure such as things that make up the material world and most intimately, our physical body, which is a complex, evolutionary structure.  Structure correlates with the manifestation of life into form, with the horizontal field of connecting with others, and our belonging in life.    

In this post, I want to focus on the structure of belonging, which is the aspect of our relational networks and the ways we are connected with other people, animals, our environment, our planet, and the systems that are part of our lives today.  Examples of systems include governments, voting processes, medical care, money and banking systems, etc. So often when we think of these larger structures which began long before we were born, we feel disconnected from them and see them as something other than ourselves which we cannot impact.  From an energetic point of view, these structures are actually part of us, and we are part of them.  We are always contributing something to the structures of our lives, and they are contributing something to our lives.  (Part of the study of systemic oppression is how the systems we live in impact different groups of people differently, as well as the history and purpose of such differences.)  When we believe we are disconnected, nonessential or helpless related to our relational structures and systems, what we contribute is our absence.  

Absence is a symptom of trauma, and we all carry some trauma.  In other words, we all carry many or fewer symptoms of separation or absence within and around us.  This is not bad, per se, as absence serves a function.  When we or our ancestors were unable to face and deal with something in an integrated way, separation occurred.  When it was too much to process, the human nervous system wisely numbed what was overwhelming and could put our survival or functioning at risk.  Today we can call this absence (or trauma).  

Turning toward our own absence related to the structures around us is the first step toward healing and restoration. What we can (begin to) witness can begin to move, heal, and gradually be reconnected into wholeness.  

Even when we cannot see the results of our participation with the systems around us, our contribution always matters regardless of how small or insignificant it may seem.  Since we are in effect an individual manifestation of life, nature, and of the divine, it is up to us to discover what is our appropriate relation, participation and contribution to the structures in and around us.   

When we discover and enact our unique participation with our relational structures and systems, we contribute to healing our belonging.  Since each being alive in this moment belongs to life, restoring our belonging through right relationship ripples out and contributes to restoring belonging for all of us.  I believe our individual movements to participate and restore right relation with our structures and systems is fundamentally our purpose, each in our own unique way.  

May this year be a year when we all fine-tune our presence so that our unique participation contributes a healing, restorative flow into the structures in our beautiful world. 

Embodied Listening - Going Deeper (Part II)

In Part I of Embodied Listening, I wrote about how what has been fragmented or undigested within us can be welcomed back into wholeness.  Sometimes we call this unprocessed, stored experience “trauma.”  People sometimes think that trauma should be gotten rid of, but fragmenting energy which wasn’t successfully processed was and is not bad.  It’s an intelligent, protective movement in order to maintain functioning.  Trauma is in itself a function, not a dysfunction. 

Similar nervous system responses occur during the developmental process, when children aren’t responded to in ways which wire the nervous system for healthy attachment and individuation. In these cases, parts of the nervous system remain undeveloped, until an intervention occurs.

Regardless of the cause, most of have in our bodies (or as Thomas says, our biocomputer) either frozen / shadow areas, or areas where development was initially skipped over.   

Understanding the function of the trauma shut-down response in the nervous system helps us understand at a micro level what we all have experienced in our lives to a greater or lesser degree: repeating the past.   When energy has been fragmented and a part of our nervous system is shut down, the past equals the future because we haven’t been able to access, presence, and metabolize the energy which is closed off from our experiential, embodied awareness.  The trauma is untouchable or invisible to us, except through the symptoms it creates.   One of the symptoms is repeating unpleasant experiences in our lives which we wouldn’t consciously choose to re-create.

The flow of conscious, embodied presence -- which I’m calling embodied listening – supports inner and outer flow, which allows more of our nervous systems to be accessible.  As more of our nervous systems are accessible, we experience a felt sense of grounded wholeness, and a greater capacity for feeling, connection, and ability to process material that formerly was so difficult as to be inaccessible, either through overwhelm or numbness.  Embodied listening as a path of reclaiming wholeness supports the healing of our nervous systems which facilitates us to move into frontiers, ‘standing on’ what we’ve learned and integrated from our past experiences.    A new future becomes possible. 

In Part III, I’ll write about our collective nervous system, and how embodied listening in groups can help heal and free of us from the collective traumas of our joint past.

with love,
Rhonda

P.S.  Lifting, lifting is an example of a much-utilized coping response to discomfort and stored trauma within the body and nervous system.