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!

Portals to Possibility

In a difficult moment, sometimes something opens unexpectedly.  What a blessing this can be.  Not that the difficult experience is necessarily a blessing.  It may or may not be.  However, the opening – the discovery of a portal to possibility – can be a blessing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In hurt moments we often feel compressed.  Maybe we have hurt feelings or experience a disconnection in one way or another. Whatever the situation, we might feel sadness, fear, anger, shame, or some combination.   If we have an embodiment practice, we might notice stress arising somatically – a tightening somewhere such as the chest, belly, or back. Perhaps we become numb to our emotions or sensations.  We might notice stress in our thinking: either the pace of thinking might pick up, seem internally louder, or the content of our thoughts might feel distressing.  

A powerful contemplation to try on, is:  How do I treat myself when I feel stressed or hurt? 

These internal experiences are a part of the human experience.  Recognizing when we’re stressed is an important step towards discovering how to become responsive to our experience.  Being responsive to our stress does not imply figuring it out alone:  sometimes responsiveness means realizing we need support.   

It feels important to me to acknowledge that the situations I am writing about are within a context of privilege.  For those who are in dangerous situations right now, whether that’s interpersonal, systemically oppressive, in a collective situation like a war or other ongoing emergency, the space to reflect may be much more limited or not possible at all.  

This awareness of our state of stress itself can create an opening.  We often have habitual ways of coping with stress or feelings we find difficult.  These strategies may have been around a long time; perhaps since childhood, or they might even be ancestral patterns.  Stress responses tend to operate under our conscious awareness.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Whatever our coping strategies are, they are part of how we made it to this moment.  And what worked for us in the past may not necessarily be how we’d like to consciously choose to respond to stress going forward.  

Pausing to consciously acknowledge our stressful state may help us shift gears and make more contact with our felt experience.  When we have the capacity to compassionately and curiously turn towards how we are in our bodies, breathing, and emotions, we deepen self-contact.  We can potentially learn something about how the sacred life force is moving / not moving through us in that moment.  Shifting our orientation towards our experience can create the possibility of discovery and inner restoration.   What was stuck can move.  What was hidden can come into the light of presence.  What was hurt can be tended to.  What was too much can gradually be included and integrated.  What we've held alone can begin to be shared.  When more of us is included in our wholeness, more becomes possible for us.  

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!

Changing Perspective - A Story of an Ant & the Sky

When I was about 12, in the summertime I liked to bring my Barbie dolls into the large backyard where my family lived in Oklahoma, and play pretend.  One day, after some time, I got tired of the dolls and became fascinated with an ant crawling in the grass.  I put the dolls down and laid down on my belly to get a closer look at the ant.  The ant and the blade of grass the ant was crawling up and down looked very small.  But when I got closer, it was as if a whole other world opened up around me. 

What must the world look like from the ant's perspective, I wondered.

The very same small blade of grass and mound of dirt seemed much bigger.  I imagined what it might feel like to be an ant, to walk like an ant walks vertically up and down a blade of grass, among many other blades of grass, each many times bigger than I was. I could feel the cool blade of grass beneath my feet, and the warm sun on my back. The air around me moving gently.  It all seemed quite natural and secure to the ant, who continued to move steadily in the direction it was going.  The mound of ground which included all those blades of grass seemed huge.  The distance from where we were to the fenceline, to the house, seemed very far away.  If I were an ant, it would be a lot of work to travel that far.  And the sky...

I rolled over to look at the sky.  The sky, and the vista of space all around us -- me, and the ant, and the blade of grass -- seemed incredibly vast.  I lost track of time, and began to wonder what it would be like to be a cloud.  

What a blissful day it was.  What a feeling of belonging and connection in my environment.  

This experience I had imagining I was an ant opened something in me - a felt sense of interconnection with access to feel the ant and the blade of grass and the cloud and the sky as a part of me, and that I am also a part of.  That was a gift - that was grace.  

Opening our perspective to new vistas that we can experience in our bodies can feel that way - like opening to a whole new world.  

These days, one of the ways I work with people is helping them shift their consciousness.  While there can be complexity to creating conscious shifts mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, and relationally, there can also be a kind of simplicity to it with attuned presence.  

I'm grateful for the privilege I had to be free from danger, safe, and with a yard just beyond my back door surrounded by a quiet neighborhood where I could imagine and wonder and just be.  I'm aware not everyone grows up with that kind of access.  

And wherever we are, whatever state of consciousness we currently inhabit, and whatever our background, shifts are possible.  Like the ant, we start where we are. 

Steadiness and Ease, Yoga Sutras style

The yoga sutras encourage us to cultivate two qualities in order to master yoga. The sanskrit is sthiram and sukham, which is often translated to steadiness and ease.  Cultivating these qualities applies to the physical and internal practice of yoga poses, and can be explored in meditation, and in our lives.  It's interesting to me that some discoveries in neuroscience and psychology about attachment, human development, trauma healing and the nervous system guide us in a similar direction.  

On the physical level, steadiness refers to grounding, to finding a good foundation in the pose from the ground up. Steadiness allows us to sustain, with a quality of strength free of rigidity or force: not going against ourselves in any way.  On a more subtle level steadiness implies self connection - attentive to our minds, and connecting with our hearts, and even deeper with our values, purpose, or soul.  When we are connected with what is essential we may draw upon an innate quality of steadiness, an inner ground of being.  

Ease implies a quality of spaciousness with a kind or compassionate orientation towards our experience.  In this context, ease is about cultivating right effort in our practice - neither forceful nor lackadaisical, either of which will disengage us. Ease isn’t about avoiding;  it’s about a way of being with.  Ease also implies openness to trust our process, or trust life.  Our individual paths of trusting can be quite diverse.  Balancing and savoring the breath supports us with both steadiness and ease.  Cultivating steadiness and ease creates a physical and internal environment where joy and discovery can emerge.  

Info about my weekly online Yoga & Meditation classes

What if

What if...

we were here to regulate our nervous systems and expand our nervous system capacity?
   self regulation
   relational regulation
   we-regulation

we were here to heal?
   self healing
   relational healing
   ancestral healing
   collective healing

we were here to restore wholeness and connection
with ourselves,
in our families and communities,
in the natural world with humans and non-humans alike?

what if...

we were allies in learning, relating, restoring and co-creating
   even with those of us who don't believe we are, and
   even with those who are actively promoting division?

what if...

we can breathe together,
be together in curiosity and compassion?

we can move together,
shake together,
cry together,
laugh together,
feel together,
take action together?

what if...

we knew the state of our nervous systems structure our experience and perspective from moment to moment?

we learned that we can take care of our own nervous systems?

we contribute to the well-being of others' nervous systems?

we actively built nervous system coherence in the groups we already are a part of?

I wonder how that would be, and what would become possible.

The Heart's Gift: A Never Alone Story Inspired by Ancient Wisdom

 

The Heart’s Gift

A Never Alone Story Inspired by Ancient Wisdom

Once upon a time in a mystical, magical place there was a lake.  It was a huge lake, still and beautiful and deep.  In it were many treasures and mysteries.  At first look, some seemed scary and mysterious and menacing.

Upon a closer look, it became apparent that there was a great root – a great stem – that emerged from the mud under the very center of that still, deep lake.  That great, long stem bloomed into the most beautiful lotus flower that anyone had ever seen.

When people saw that flower in a dream, or in their mind’s eye, or in their hearts, they began to sing or dance or hum or play.  Sometimes they would run to give someone a hug or begin to spontaneously tickle someone nearby or play hide and seek or laugh out loud.

The flower was so beautiful some people even cried when they saw it.

One day a swan heard about that beautiful lotus flower and appeared on the lake to take a look. The swan and the lotus flower were happy to see each other!  The swan’s eyes reflected the beautiful lotus flower, and the lotus flower began to smell more wonderful than it already did.  The swan wanted to share his* happiness with someone else. She looked into the lotus flower and out came another swan, serene and diving.  “I am here with you,” said the swan.  “I have always been here with you even when you couldn’t see me.”  The first swan was so happy and grateful, she cried tears of joy.  Each swan looked into the other swan’s eyes.  They were seeing through eyes of love.

They swam in the deep, still lake.  They drank nectar from the beautiful lotus flower.  And they looked at each other with eyes of love.

They were never apart again.  To this day, those two swans are in that lake together.

They enjoy the lovely treasures within the lake.  Together, the treasures aren’t scary or menacing at all.  Some things are still mysterious though. 

When you are really quiet and still and hear your heart beating and feel yourself breathing in, breathing out, you might discover the swans’ presence and love right here, in your very own heart. 

*Pronouns include masculine and feminine deliberately, to indicate inclusivity.

Story by Rhonda Mills, Inspired by the Saundaryalahari – Verse 38

(c) All rights reserved. 2010