When words escape us, it’s time to fall down on the ground and rest.
Anyone that has any sense of empathy, morality, and ethics may be feeling broken right now. What can we do, as therapists and healers, when sanity feels crazy?
Words escape us for a reason, and it’s OK to not have answers. Think of it as a potentially creative time. It’s a call from your body to listen, to feel, and to rest. But it’s not enough to say that, because to really feel and rest your body, you need a safe holding container.
Embodiment practices can provide that space – a container to explore yourself in good times, to hold you in bad times.
If you’ve been trying to prevent yourself from falling apart, fully resting on the ground helps you let go, reshape, shape-shift, and transform instead. It’s the year of the wood snake, after all! Shedding what’s no longer needed is a secretive, quiet activity – not a big loud one.
This week’s video takes you through a physically luscious process of gently rocking and turning in your joints, to lowering your body weight gently toward the ground, to sitting and crawling and rolling and completely letting go.
Giving up… then rising up again, anew. And maybe different. Maybe less of a sanity super-hero and more of an ordinary person.
Falling apart is not dying. It’s not a permanent state of brokenness, but it can feel like that when you’re looking down the barrel. I’m beginning to realize that letting myself fall is way better than trying to hold it all together because with somatic practice, I can recompose myself in a new configuration. The pieces may have shifted, but that’s probably because shifting was needed.
If you are a therapist or somatic practitioner, you’ve got lots of skill around staying open and holding multiple realities for other folks while staying sane. But what about you?
What about when those realities are all systemic crises that can’t be healed by one or two people in a room together?
It’s mind blowing when so many of these crises are caused by denial and intentional human cruelty. People and places are being violated as folks watch and laugh. It is so easy to either perform sanity while feeling crazy, or to get lost in the fear and anger. It’s not enough to step away because that just puts you back in the loop of denial, passivity, and repetition. Which feels shitty.
It’s playing out like this in my life:
- Break/fall apart/fall down
- Let go and rest
- Reconstitute myself
- Look for 1 positive action to take
- Take it
- Repeat
I’m hoping that as the actions accumulate, my spirits will rise, and I won’t break as much.
I don’t have answers, but I do have practices. I think taking positive action has to be local and within your ordinary sphere of influence and capacity.
And…if you need some community support, I’m offering a free 30 minute guided community practice session on Thursday, February 27, from 12:00 – 12:30 EST. We will get down on the ground, travel through all 12 cranial nerves, moving our minds and our bodies to relinquish unnecessary control. We’ll learn a few lessons from our own nervous systems. All you need to do to attend is register HERE on Zoom.
This will give you a taste of what will be covered in the upcoming 6 week course, where I’ll cover 2 cranial nerves per class and go into the anatomy, science, and logic behind the practices.
Take the best of care of yourself, and each other. Until next time.