Keynote Script - April 18, 2020
This was one of the programs I was always going to offer in 2020, before coronavirus made its way to the United States; even the title is the same! So, I am exactly where I want to be, with who I intended to be with. While in a new format, this event is a commitment older and wiser than a pandemic. Even just saying that brings me a little boost of strength. Knowing that the skills and the tools we’ll try on today, are steady and available, continuous.
I’m extremely grateful for the Central Eastern regional staff who helped make this possible to take place on Zoom. During this part of our time together, I’m going to do a lot of talking. You’re welcome to adjust your environment during this time as much as you need to. There’s no need to stare at the green dot. First, I’m going to describe embodied somatic health work in general. Then, I’m going to talk for a short time about trauma, and more specifically what’s happening to us collectively right now. Then, I’m going to talk about the specific practices we’ll be trying together. If you have questions about the content I’m sharing, you can chat them to the hosts. I won’t be answering them during this part of the session, but I will be looking at them a bit later, answering a few that I can and then I’ll answer the others at a later time and share them with you. Again, as Shannon and Beth described, if you need to follow along with what I’m saying you can go to www.copingincommunity.com and the links to this manuscript are there. It doesn’t have all the citations in it as fully as I would like, so please do check back there within a week for more full bibliographic information. And some more resources you might want to check out.
First, I want to say that there are communities and ancestors who for centuries, have known what embodied healing is and articulated it in similar and different ways to how I will. In her blog post about this event, Shannon mentioned relying on her grandmother’s wisdom. I am finding myself imagining the caretakers during the early days of the AIDS pandemic, without having all the words and the facts what the people taking care of my brother’s body and other HIV+ people and communities were relying on to keep them strong. And finding comfort there, strength, resilience. Knowing that before this pandemic and before somatic work would begin to take its current shape in the West and really, the West of the West, there was healing, there was medicine.
Our ancestors knew about the power of “feeling, sensing and collective action.”[1] The landscape of our spirits is deeper and broader than we might have words for. Somatic work is not so much about language. Though language is a powerful tool to help us feel connected and to allow our experiences to be named, as we become present and purposeful.
Embodied healing is about “making choices based on what we care about, rather than reacting from survival strategies, even under pressures of living, loving and doing social justice work.”[2] After the effects of trauma are felt, it can help us widen our window of tolerance for stress, so that when we face something challenging, we are able to access more choices of how to respond by involving the body in a bottom-up approach. It ranges from “emotional first aid” helping us get out of the emergency phase to joining with the eagle’s view of our situation, or helping us to speak aloud during a big time of change.
Now, I want to assure you that when I started learning about embodied healing, I was skeptical about ever seeing this so-called eagle’s view and the ability of fine-tuning my body’s reaction to being in the world felt almost laughable. I had things to work on that felt so immediate and urgent. And that was OK. I didn’t have to be bought-in to the big picture to find relief in collaborating with my own body and to heal the much more intimate ways in which I needed to heal.
So, how did I get into this work? This is when I’m going to talk about trauma for a bit.
So, in 2011, I was in a serious robbery in front of my home, in which all my wounds were emotional. I quickly experienced a number of post-traumatic stress symptoms that felt somewhat familiar to me. I had been in talk therapy for years working on issues related to having complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from persistent, adverse childhood experiences, like abuse and neglect. Those childhood experiences and my coping mechanisms had echoed into my young adulthood, came with me to seminary and were still there. Before the robbery, I was in a maintenance mode. I had a stubborn longing to cope better and to become integrated. I had delayed fully embodying my calling, felt the folding in my body in high-risk leadership situations. I was always being bowled over, as the ways of surviving childhood trauma were all that felt available to me. Polyvagal theory, one of somatics theoretical sibling, would say my social engagement system was broken down. I could rely on the emergency reactions and survive, but I was in pain, some of it was physical, which was a constant mystery to me. The survival mechanism of appeasing and performing kept me going, echoing the internal narrative of trauma. My fight response in the robbery rewarded me with survival, but the flashbacks were so pervasive that I felt as trauma was making a cold, permanent home inside my body. A friend showed me a few somatic first-aid tools. I immediately wanted more. I started working with a somatic coach named Dr. Vanissar Tarakali and after experiencing rather-immediate transformative relief, I stayed engaged with those practices to try to soften the other survival strategies I had in operation. Vanissar geared some of her work to be focused on people working for social justice, particularly other white people like me who were striving to educate and do antiracist organizing in progressive social movements or communities, such as Unitarian Universalism. That part of the picture is really, really important.
Vanissar’s approach defines trauma as those “experiences that diminish our ability to feel safe (in our bodies; in the world) and connected (to ourselves, others, the earth, and spirit). [It] can take the form of individual, personal threats to our well-being, vicarious or secondary traumas that our work exposes us to, or social traumas (oppression). Trauma shows up in the body as contraction.” The body narrows in on what will keep us alive. This focus makes complete sense. As the threats repeat, our body can “become stuck in contraction.”
Social justice work, central to our faith, is an opportunity to work with contraction, as it lives in our bodies.
A few months after the robbery, I was teaching a course called Resilience and Resistance at Starr King School for the Ministry. We had a panel of presenters. And on the panel was Lisa Gray-Garcia from POOR Magazine, who was just starting an organization called The Homefulness Project. And she said, “there’s a point when resilience starts sounding like capitalism.” I remember my jaw dropped open and I can still feel what was happening in my body - it was a collision of all the healing I wanted for myself, my promoting resilience in movement building with my students, and then this connection between purposeful action beyond my individual wellness that doesn’t just repackage myself into a self-help book wrapped up with a bow.
For Unitarian Universalism if these practices gain more traction, my hope is that if we are healing ourselves through the body, if we are cultivating resilience then my hope is we can more authentically trust, navigate conflict, as well as resource and generate systems and cultures that we believe in. With practice, somatic work restores our creativity and reconnects us with our agency, frees up stuck energy to act in relation to what we value.
So, what’s it like to be or have a body right now? In this online engagement studio, I’m inviting you to be curious about that question. The practices I’ll teach are opportunities to test out what works for you, to collaborate with your body, and to thank it. My hope is that you’ll find affirmation through a couple practices you’ll want to keep repeating at home. My guess is you signed up for this because you’re curious already to some degree. You might also be needing something to heal with. That there is something you have noticed about your body’s reaction to this past month of pandemic and something that you’re expecting to happen in your body over the next year or so, which you want to work with.
Here in Southern California, tomorrow April 19th, will mark a month of being fully incorporated within one place - bringing the sites of our lives into a contained location. Except for, of course and this is actually a large category, our essential workers, including health care workers, utility professionals, bankers, grocery workers, delivery workers, and other care providers. Our daily practices of relatedness, the things we do to communicate, connect and share space, have changed dramatically, and even for those whose interactions with other peoples’ bodies are some of the same, the mind-body experiences of touch and contact are tactically different.
Armoring is part of what our bodies do to protect ourselves. We have experienced profound changes and losses in a short amount of time - physical separations, cancellations of milestone events, job loss, deaths, loss of contact with friends or teachers. We can assume and we see evidence of it everywhere that people are doing their best to find safety and cope with uncertainty. It looks different across socioeconomic groups, geographic regions, cultures, communities and sectors.
So, if we ask our body first, what is our contraction taking care of? Our body’s responses to COVID-19 are protecting us and that fighting against our survival strategies won’t work. I don’t know anyone for whom saying “get over it” means we just drop it and get over it. Blending practices can help us connect with our shaping of what we care about on its own terms. Where are we reaching toward? What are the sensations that are coming up for us? When we think about all that we love and care about, where do we feel that in our bodies?
Practice 1 The Fist
Take your hand and make a first. Make it tight like it is taking care and protecting something that matters to you. And then take your other hand and try to pry your fist open, as if you’re trying to get it to change, act differently or do something else. What happens? Notice. Notice what you feel in your fist, notice what you feel in the rest of you. What’s the quality of relationship with your other hand? Perhaps, your hand gets tighter and resists. Perhaps you find yourself holding your breath. Maybe you feel some animosity between your hands.
Now, let that go.
Next try to make a fist in the same way. But this time, with the other hand we’re going to just wrap the other hand like it’s a present. We’re going to bring our sense of curiosity, of listening, no agenda for it to change. We’re going to be present with it, gently support it in the direction its going.
The fist may want more soft or more firm support. Do whatever feels best. What do you notice now? What do you feel in your fist, in the relationship with your other hand? Perhaps, your fist has a direction or a movement. Maybe your fist relaxes, or your breath deepens. Some people feel a good feeling between your hands.
When we’re curious about what our bodies’ activities have been taking care of, if we support that shaping in the direction its going, we leave open the possibility for change, for safety. We can blend with what tightness comes, we can pause here, knowing that what pressures, history, emotions and energy inside of us deserves to be felt, held, processed and even completed.
Whether holding or releasing your hands, as we take a second breath,
we affirm your body for each time it has been your armor or your cushion.
Thank you for giving us your presence, your survival, helping you to arrive today and claim your physical space.
Thank you for being an ever-changing and precious vessel of all that you have been and all that you are.
There isn’t an intensity or contraction that can take away the beauty and the resilience you already hold within you.
The words and the headlines used to describe this new state of being have a lot to do with our bodies.
Lockdown.
Emptied out.
Staying
Prepping
Distancing.
Isolating
War
Stuck
They all have this quality of collapsing down, contracting, and armoring. Like those folding travel cups - that fold into themselves and are the shape of the largest ring. Like a turtle tucking its head into its hard shell. Trauma is contraction. A folding. And yet, what the armoring looks like is not the same for everyone. I mentioned the ingrained patterns of trauma responses before -- these don’t fit into neat categories. Armoring and responding from our survival strategies may not return us to a place that we can tolerate for long. Before I found somatics, if something small threw me off in my day, it would take me a long time to get settled again, to be able to move on. I didn’t have a great way of returning my level of arousal to the place where I could make a choice.
Luckily, there’s other phrases you hear out there too right now that flow well with an embodied choice-filled approach to living with a pandemic.
Protect each other.
Stronger Together.
Reach out for help.
Connecting.
Gathering online in spite of.
We will survive.
I want to go back to something I said way at the beginning here. Our commitment to be here is older and wiser than the pandemic. Our commitments as a faith community pre-dates the intensity of covid-19 and orient us toward the future, toward interdependence.
It may overwhelm our minds to envision the future and not be sure about what it will look like, where it will be, and who will be there. Somatic awareness can help with this stage, too.
If while I have been speaking, maybe you were feeling some sort of sensation or you felt your mood shift or maybe you checked out to some of what I’ve said. I just want to greet you again, thank your body for taking care of you in this moment. You don’t need to fight against it. Welcome. Thank you for being here with all the natural contractions of bodies doing their best.
“Notice where your body is being physically supported. Pay attention to the sensations of your feet on the floor, your sitting bones on the chair, your back on the wall or chair. Keep bringing your attention to what your tissues and nerve endings are feeling with this contact. Notice what it feels like to have the floor/chair/wall, etc. consistently holding you.” (Vanissar)
The theory I’ve presented can calm our nervous systems down by tethering what I’ll ask you to do in the next couple hours to our intellect, to an organized scaffolding. It can help us prepare to get curious about our body’s experience, at the level of sensations - that is, the building blocks of our emotions -- temperature, movement, mood.
The focus of the rest of our time will be on the embodying safety so that we can be rooted in this world, the world of COVID-19. Our purpose is to become aware of our bodies and able to engage with what we care about.
Aware of our bodies. Able to engage with what we care about. Rooted for this world.
[1] Richard Strozzi-Heckler, “Afterword,”in Staci Haines, The Politics of Trauma, 2020
[2] Haines, Introduction,” The Politics of Trauma
I’m extremely grateful for the Central Eastern regional staff who helped make this possible to take place on Zoom. During this part of our time together, I’m going to do a lot of talking. You’re welcome to adjust your environment during this time as much as you need to. There’s no need to stare at the green dot. First, I’m going to describe embodied somatic health work in general. Then, I’m going to talk for a short time about trauma, and more specifically what’s happening to us collectively right now. Then, I’m going to talk about the specific practices we’ll be trying together. If you have questions about the content I’m sharing, you can chat them to the hosts. I won’t be answering them during this part of the session, but I will be looking at them a bit later, answering a few that I can and then I’ll answer the others at a later time and share them with you. Again, as Shannon and Beth described, if you need to follow along with what I’m saying you can go to www.copingincommunity.com and the links to this manuscript are there. It doesn’t have all the citations in it as fully as I would like, so please do check back there within a week for more full bibliographic information. And some more resources you might want to check out.
First, I want to say that there are communities and ancestors who for centuries, have known what embodied healing is and articulated it in similar and different ways to how I will. In her blog post about this event, Shannon mentioned relying on her grandmother’s wisdom. I am finding myself imagining the caretakers during the early days of the AIDS pandemic, without having all the words and the facts what the people taking care of my brother’s body and other HIV+ people and communities were relying on to keep them strong. And finding comfort there, strength, resilience. Knowing that before this pandemic and before somatic work would begin to take its current shape in the West and really, the West of the West, there was healing, there was medicine.
Our ancestors knew about the power of “feeling, sensing and collective action.”[1] The landscape of our spirits is deeper and broader than we might have words for. Somatic work is not so much about language. Though language is a powerful tool to help us feel connected and to allow our experiences to be named, as we become present and purposeful.
Embodied healing is about “making choices based on what we care about, rather than reacting from survival strategies, even under pressures of living, loving and doing social justice work.”[2] After the effects of trauma are felt, it can help us widen our window of tolerance for stress, so that when we face something challenging, we are able to access more choices of how to respond by involving the body in a bottom-up approach. It ranges from “emotional first aid” helping us get out of the emergency phase to joining with the eagle’s view of our situation, or helping us to speak aloud during a big time of change.
Now, I want to assure you that when I started learning about embodied healing, I was skeptical about ever seeing this so-called eagle’s view and the ability of fine-tuning my body’s reaction to being in the world felt almost laughable. I had things to work on that felt so immediate and urgent. And that was OK. I didn’t have to be bought-in to the big picture to find relief in collaborating with my own body and to heal the much more intimate ways in which I needed to heal.
So, how did I get into this work? This is when I’m going to talk about trauma for a bit.
So, in 2011, I was in a serious robbery in front of my home, in which all my wounds were emotional. I quickly experienced a number of post-traumatic stress symptoms that felt somewhat familiar to me. I had been in talk therapy for years working on issues related to having complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from persistent, adverse childhood experiences, like abuse and neglect. Those childhood experiences and my coping mechanisms had echoed into my young adulthood, came with me to seminary and were still there. Before the robbery, I was in a maintenance mode. I had a stubborn longing to cope better and to become integrated. I had delayed fully embodying my calling, felt the folding in my body in high-risk leadership situations. I was always being bowled over, as the ways of surviving childhood trauma were all that felt available to me. Polyvagal theory, one of somatics theoretical sibling, would say my social engagement system was broken down. I could rely on the emergency reactions and survive, but I was in pain, some of it was physical, which was a constant mystery to me. The survival mechanism of appeasing and performing kept me going, echoing the internal narrative of trauma. My fight response in the robbery rewarded me with survival, but the flashbacks were so pervasive that I felt as trauma was making a cold, permanent home inside my body. A friend showed me a few somatic first-aid tools. I immediately wanted more. I started working with a somatic coach named Dr. Vanissar Tarakali and after experiencing rather-immediate transformative relief, I stayed engaged with those practices to try to soften the other survival strategies I had in operation. Vanissar geared some of her work to be focused on people working for social justice, particularly other white people like me who were striving to educate and do antiracist organizing in progressive social movements or communities, such as Unitarian Universalism. That part of the picture is really, really important.
Vanissar’s approach defines trauma as those “experiences that diminish our ability to feel safe (in our bodies; in the world) and connected (to ourselves, others, the earth, and spirit). [It] can take the form of individual, personal threats to our well-being, vicarious or secondary traumas that our work exposes us to, or social traumas (oppression). Trauma shows up in the body as contraction.” The body narrows in on what will keep us alive. This focus makes complete sense. As the threats repeat, our body can “become stuck in contraction.”
Social justice work, central to our faith, is an opportunity to work with contraction, as it lives in our bodies.
A few months after the robbery, I was teaching a course called Resilience and Resistance at Starr King School for the Ministry. We had a panel of presenters. And on the panel was Lisa Gray-Garcia from POOR Magazine, who was just starting an organization called The Homefulness Project. And she said, “there’s a point when resilience starts sounding like capitalism.” I remember my jaw dropped open and I can still feel what was happening in my body - it was a collision of all the healing I wanted for myself, my promoting resilience in movement building with my students, and then this connection between purposeful action beyond my individual wellness that doesn’t just repackage myself into a self-help book wrapped up with a bow.
For Unitarian Universalism if these practices gain more traction, my hope is that if we are healing ourselves through the body, if we are cultivating resilience then my hope is we can more authentically trust, navigate conflict, as well as resource and generate systems and cultures that we believe in. With practice, somatic work restores our creativity and reconnects us with our agency, frees up stuck energy to act in relation to what we value.
So, what’s it like to be or have a body right now? In this online engagement studio, I’m inviting you to be curious about that question. The practices I’ll teach are opportunities to test out what works for you, to collaborate with your body, and to thank it. My hope is that you’ll find affirmation through a couple practices you’ll want to keep repeating at home. My guess is you signed up for this because you’re curious already to some degree. You might also be needing something to heal with. That there is something you have noticed about your body’s reaction to this past month of pandemic and something that you’re expecting to happen in your body over the next year or so, which you want to work with.
Here in Southern California, tomorrow April 19th, will mark a month of being fully incorporated within one place - bringing the sites of our lives into a contained location. Except for, of course and this is actually a large category, our essential workers, including health care workers, utility professionals, bankers, grocery workers, delivery workers, and other care providers. Our daily practices of relatedness, the things we do to communicate, connect and share space, have changed dramatically, and even for those whose interactions with other peoples’ bodies are some of the same, the mind-body experiences of touch and contact are tactically different.
Armoring is part of what our bodies do to protect ourselves. We have experienced profound changes and losses in a short amount of time - physical separations, cancellations of milestone events, job loss, deaths, loss of contact with friends or teachers. We can assume and we see evidence of it everywhere that people are doing their best to find safety and cope with uncertainty. It looks different across socioeconomic groups, geographic regions, cultures, communities and sectors.
So, if we ask our body first, what is our contraction taking care of? Our body’s responses to COVID-19 are protecting us and that fighting against our survival strategies won’t work. I don’t know anyone for whom saying “get over it” means we just drop it and get over it. Blending practices can help us connect with our shaping of what we care about on its own terms. Where are we reaching toward? What are the sensations that are coming up for us? When we think about all that we love and care about, where do we feel that in our bodies?
Practice 1 The Fist
Take your hand and make a first. Make it tight like it is taking care and protecting something that matters to you. And then take your other hand and try to pry your fist open, as if you’re trying to get it to change, act differently or do something else. What happens? Notice. Notice what you feel in your fist, notice what you feel in the rest of you. What’s the quality of relationship with your other hand? Perhaps, your hand gets tighter and resists. Perhaps you find yourself holding your breath. Maybe you feel some animosity between your hands.
Now, let that go.
Next try to make a fist in the same way. But this time, with the other hand we’re going to just wrap the other hand like it’s a present. We’re going to bring our sense of curiosity, of listening, no agenda for it to change. We’re going to be present with it, gently support it in the direction its going.
The fist may want more soft or more firm support. Do whatever feels best. What do you notice now? What do you feel in your fist, in the relationship with your other hand? Perhaps, your fist has a direction or a movement. Maybe your fist relaxes, or your breath deepens. Some people feel a good feeling between your hands.
When we’re curious about what our bodies’ activities have been taking care of, if we support that shaping in the direction its going, we leave open the possibility for change, for safety. We can blend with what tightness comes, we can pause here, knowing that what pressures, history, emotions and energy inside of us deserves to be felt, held, processed and even completed.
Whether holding or releasing your hands, as we take a second breath,
we affirm your body for each time it has been your armor or your cushion.
Thank you for giving us your presence, your survival, helping you to arrive today and claim your physical space.
Thank you for being an ever-changing and precious vessel of all that you have been and all that you are.
There isn’t an intensity or contraction that can take away the beauty and the resilience you already hold within you.
The words and the headlines used to describe this new state of being have a lot to do with our bodies.
Lockdown.
Emptied out.
Staying
Prepping
Distancing.
Isolating
War
Stuck
They all have this quality of collapsing down, contracting, and armoring. Like those folding travel cups - that fold into themselves and are the shape of the largest ring. Like a turtle tucking its head into its hard shell. Trauma is contraction. A folding. And yet, what the armoring looks like is not the same for everyone. I mentioned the ingrained patterns of trauma responses before -- these don’t fit into neat categories. Armoring and responding from our survival strategies may not return us to a place that we can tolerate for long. Before I found somatics, if something small threw me off in my day, it would take me a long time to get settled again, to be able to move on. I didn’t have a great way of returning my level of arousal to the place where I could make a choice.
Luckily, there’s other phrases you hear out there too right now that flow well with an embodied choice-filled approach to living with a pandemic.
Protect each other.
Stronger Together.
Reach out for help.
Connecting.
Gathering online in spite of.
We will survive.
I want to go back to something I said way at the beginning here. Our commitment to be here is older and wiser than the pandemic. Our commitments as a faith community pre-dates the intensity of covid-19 and orient us toward the future, toward interdependence.
It may overwhelm our minds to envision the future and not be sure about what it will look like, where it will be, and who will be there. Somatic awareness can help with this stage, too.
If while I have been speaking, maybe you were feeling some sort of sensation or you felt your mood shift or maybe you checked out to some of what I’ve said. I just want to greet you again, thank your body for taking care of you in this moment. You don’t need to fight against it. Welcome. Thank you for being here with all the natural contractions of bodies doing their best.
“Notice where your body is being physically supported. Pay attention to the sensations of your feet on the floor, your sitting bones on the chair, your back on the wall or chair. Keep bringing your attention to what your tissues and nerve endings are feeling with this contact. Notice what it feels like to have the floor/chair/wall, etc. consistently holding you.” (Vanissar)
The theory I’ve presented can calm our nervous systems down by tethering what I’ll ask you to do in the next couple hours to our intellect, to an organized scaffolding. It can help us prepare to get curious about our body’s experience, at the level of sensations - that is, the building blocks of our emotions -- temperature, movement, mood.
The focus of the rest of our time will be on the embodying safety so that we can be rooted in this world, the world of COVID-19. Our purpose is to become aware of our bodies and able to engage with what we care about.
Aware of our bodies. Able to engage with what we care about. Rooted for this world.
[1] Richard Strozzi-Heckler, “Afterword,”in Staci Haines, The Politics of Trauma, 2020
[2] Haines, Introduction,” The Politics of Trauma
Post-Keynote
And now, we’re going to start the practice session portion of our time together. The fun part. The part you came for, I think.
Here is the schedule of how this will work. We will have two rounds of practice, small group, debrief. With a break in between.
I am going to give the instructions for two sets of practices and you are welcome to watch and listen to me. But I do invite you to try them with me as I go. To get a sense of which practices feel like a yes. They are extremely simple, but repetition is really the key.
Then, you will be assigned into the breakout groups. Some of you have opted to be in breakout rooms based on an affinity. Some have not. In either case, thank you. Amy, Beth, Evin and Shannon have organized these groups using Zoom’s features. You will take a 10-minute break here to go to the rest room, grab any of the props you wanted to use. And you will meet back with your group at 11:00 ______
There you will have 15 minutes to practice and reflect with your group members on a few specific questions. The point of these groups is to feel seen and get the experience of being believed, listened to. If we are going to regulate our feelings of safety, then it’s good to have the opportunity to witness and mirror someone else’s response to a practice.
Preparing to Practice
There’s a couple of other things that somatics is not - it is not necessarily about what has happened to us, and it is not necessarily about figuring out why we are the way we are. Though, its important to download and process with others, and certainly, those things might come forward. I encourage to consider those things gently. And in your sharing and naming, try to stay with the sensations that emerge. If you have trouble getting in touch with the sensations, slow down and repeat the practices that felt like a yes or maybe, and send yourself a little affirmation for trying this. When the first sensation arrives, you can draw a circle around it of “yes!” Draw a “yes!” as much as you want.
I want to say something else about regulating our psychobiology - or returning safety to the body.
For embodied practices to take root, they have to be chosen, consented to, before they are repeated. During our time together, I invite you to get a bit disorganized with your engagement.
My hope is you will try the practices on, but if you really prefer one over the other or want to tweak how I’m doing it, I promise you that you can’t mess this up.
And even if you really hate every practice, there’s space in this studio to relish in that feeling - whether its annoyance or disgust or a bland “no thanks.” I’m not going to take it personally. I’m not going to try to convince you out of your opposition to a practice - instead, I’m really thankful for it showing up.
Our bodies are wise, and if we try something on and it’s clearly a “no” then that’s pretty intelligent; it’s information for us about 0ur bodies, its insight into our history and what we need to feel safe. Feeling safe, which is itself really complex, partly depends upon being able to recognize our choices.
So, on the other hand, how do we know if our bodies like a practice?
When our body likes a practice, signs of unwinding appear: yawning, sighing, deep breaths, tears, giggling, burping, unprompted stretching, etc.
To further check out if we like a practice, we can play with the practice. I’ll be showing you a couple of those ways, I promise if you can look half as silly as I do, you’re probably getting some playfulness out of this.
Containment and Mirroring: Eyes and Jaw
First, scan your body for congestion, tension or discomfort. We’re going to work with four different armoring bands in the body, but it is good to start with an awareness that first, you have a body. And where you might feel any clenching, tightness, tension or numbing.
In each area of the body we’ll focus on, you have two options and within each option, there are a lot of ways to tweak the practice for your body. There’s no wrong body to practice with. This is a studio in which everyone is making their own art form. Unlike a body scan or guided meditation, this is a full-on choose your own adventure. I invite you to be playful about which you choose and how you choose to practice there. I also invite you to know your body best in terms of what might cause it pain, any injuries you have or conditions that might cause pain.
Containment practices - are those in which you allow yourself the feeling of being held, grounded, supported, a beginning and an end, a periphery. This is a great time to grab some of your softer and heavier props to help you.
Mirroring practices - these are expressive forms; they are more playful, active. If you’re not feeling interested in settling down or it feels risky, you want to move a bit more. These are great options.
I invite you to try both of the options for each part of the body. You could also vacillate between the two. Try them out. Ignore the one you don’t like. Really embellish the one you do.
And now, we’re going to start the practice session portion of our time together. The fun part. The part you came for, I think.
Here is the schedule of how this will work. We will have two rounds of practice, small group, debrief. With a break in between.
I am going to give the instructions for two sets of practices and you are welcome to watch and listen to me. But I do invite you to try them with me as I go. To get a sense of which practices feel like a yes. They are extremely simple, but repetition is really the key.
Then, you will be assigned into the breakout groups. Some of you have opted to be in breakout rooms based on an affinity. Some have not. In either case, thank you. Amy, Beth, Evin and Shannon have organized these groups using Zoom’s features. You will take a 10-minute break here to go to the rest room, grab any of the props you wanted to use. And you will meet back with your group at 11:00 ______
There you will have 15 minutes to practice and reflect with your group members on a few specific questions. The point of these groups is to feel seen and get the experience of being believed, listened to. If we are going to regulate our feelings of safety, then it’s good to have the opportunity to witness and mirror someone else’s response to a practice.
Preparing to Practice
There’s a couple of other things that somatics is not - it is not necessarily about what has happened to us, and it is not necessarily about figuring out why we are the way we are. Though, its important to download and process with others, and certainly, those things might come forward. I encourage to consider those things gently. And in your sharing and naming, try to stay with the sensations that emerge. If you have trouble getting in touch with the sensations, slow down and repeat the practices that felt like a yes or maybe, and send yourself a little affirmation for trying this. When the first sensation arrives, you can draw a circle around it of “yes!” Draw a “yes!” as much as you want.
I want to say something else about regulating our psychobiology - or returning safety to the body.
For embodied practices to take root, they have to be chosen, consented to, before they are repeated. During our time together, I invite you to get a bit disorganized with your engagement.
My hope is you will try the practices on, but if you really prefer one over the other or want to tweak how I’m doing it, I promise you that you can’t mess this up.
And even if you really hate every practice, there’s space in this studio to relish in that feeling - whether its annoyance or disgust or a bland “no thanks.” I’m not going to take it personally. I’m not going to try to convince you out of your opposition to a practice - instead, I’m really thankful for it showing up.
Our bodies are wise, and if we try something on and it’s clearly a “no” then that’s pretty intelligent; it’s information for us about 0ur bodies, its insight into our history and what we need to feel safe. Feeling safe, which is itself really complex, partly depends upon being able to recognize our choices.
So, on the other hand, how do we know if our bodies like a practice?
When our body likes a practice, signs of unwinding appear: yawning, sighing, deep breaths, tears, giggling, burping, unprompted stretching, etc.
To further check out if we like a practice, we can play with the practice. I’ll be showing you a couple of those ways, I promise if you can look half as silly as I do, you’re probably getting some playfulness out of this.
Containment and Mirroring: Eyes and Jaw
First, scan your body for congestion, tension or discomfort. We’re going to work with four different armoring bands in the body, but it is good to start with an awareness that first, you have a body. And where you might feel any clenching, tightness, tension or numbing.
In each area of the body we’ll focus on, you have two options and within each option, there are a lot of ways to tweak the practice for your body. There’s no wrong body to practice with. This is a studio in which everyone is making their own art form. Unlike a body scan or guided meditation, this is a full-on choose your own adventure. I invite you to be playful about which you choose and how you choose to practice there. I also invite you to know your body best in terms of what might cause it pain, any injuries you have or conditions that might cause pain.
Containment practices - are those in which you allow yourself the feeling of being held, grounded, supported, a beginning and an end, a periphery. This is a great time to grab some of your softer and heavier props to help you.
Mirroring practices - these are expressive forms; they are more playful, active. If you’re not feeling interested in settling down or it feels risky, you want to move a bit more. These are great options.
I invite you to try both of the options for each part of the body. You could also vacillate between the two. Try them out. Ignore the one you don’t like. Really embellish the one you do.
