Blog from Newsletter - Somatic Developmental Trauma Healing with Rosalie Corame

December 21, 2021April 9, 2022

Inching toward safety deep inside our nervous systems

Hi, Beautiful One and Everyone, (originally an email newsletter)

I add “and Everyone” because this is my newsletter, and while I want your nervous system to feel that I am absolutely thinking about you and talking to you directly, I don’t want your nervous system to start out thinking that I have composed this message to you individually – and to then experience a shock when you realize it’s my newsletter that’s going to a whole bunch of people.

That has happened a few times, and I feel a shock in my body when I realize that someone experienced my email as something different than it was.

It’s interesting. A lot of what we do in nervous system healing could be interpreted as “tricking” our nervous system. But I guess I see it as tricking our nervous systems into believing what is already true, when our trauma has us stuck believing things about ourselves that are not true.

For example, today I’m sharing with you a healing process I just put together for myself. The intent of the process is to trick the nervous system into feel loved, blessed and safe. It’s not really a trick. The intent of the process is to invite the nervous system into feel loved, blessed and safe. As humans and mammals, we are pretty programmable, so is there a difference? I think the significant difference may be in our motivation and intent when we seek to re-program ourselves and others.

n practical life news, the very next morning after my last newsletter went out, my husband John went to the hospital with heart attack symptoms and came home nine days later with a quadruple bypass, four clean new arteries carrying blood to his heart. As an educational note, his chest pain was mild, that was really a minor side symptom that by itself would not have triggered alarm. The most significant symptom was tremendous pain in his left arm, as if there was a snake wrapped around the arm squeezing it tightly. The arm pain plus the milder chest pain, plus referred pain up his neck was enough for us to suspect a heart attack and call an ambulance, in which John was treated as soon as they got him settled into the vehicle. Along with an upgraded heart, John feels he has a new lease on life and he is actually feeling a lot better than he had for some time prior to the heart attack.

It was a lot. I did my best to pace myself, but through that whole sequence of events, I ended up crashing with what was presumably a resurgence of long Covid. My doctor couldn’t find any signs of any current infection. I was so tired I was in tears, even on days that I didn’t go in to the hospital. I’m still slowly crawling out of that place of aggressive fatigue.

*Me. Crawling out of resurgent post-Covid fatigue*

And now, inspirations from a warm soak in the tub:
It is normal and natural for you to find yourself feeling stuck and numb, either operating on automatic, or being sedentary and just not getting things done, or impulsively doing things that you know are not the things you really want to do.
That is normal. When you find yourself there, you have not failed.

You are standing on the battleground – you are the battleground – between forces of protest, anger, expression, and emotion that push upwards reaching for greater aliveness and forces of quieting, suppression, numbing and disconnection that push downwards seeking relative calm and safety.

The place of the stalemate, the standoff, is where you find yourself sitting. Neither side has won because you are neither fully vital and alive nor are you at peace.

All of this is normal. Again, you have not failed. You are not a failure.
And just as this place of stuckness is a familiar habitual place, the things you do to get yourself back on track are often also old familiar habits. Some of these “snap out of it” or “let’s shift gears here” activities may be really healthy and awesome, some may be rough and disrespectful to yourself, and some may be relatively neutral.

But I want to talk a bit more about this place of stuckness, rather than about ways of escaping it.

“I know that I am sitting inside the tug of war or wrestling match between the forces of intensity and pain and those of disconnection and suppression. If it is a tug of war, I am the rope. If it is a wrestling match, I am sandwiched in between the two fighters, being pulled and knocked and punched with every interaction between them.

I know that these forces are primarily inside myself even though they are affected by outside people, things and events.

Rather than continuing to distract from or endure this conflict, I would like to find a way to reduce the conflict and eventually bring it to an end.

I know that the way that the conflict can diminish is through my body and my nervous system feeling safe, which can only happen when my body and nervous system can even learn how to feel safe.”

I invite you to hold your hands out in front of you, cupped with palms up, like you are open to being gifted with something beautiful.
As much as you can in a safe way, feel in your hands the invitation for someone or something to love you by giving you something that will bring you joy.
Feel hopeful, open, and expectant in your hands if you can. Whatever you are feeling is ok.

*“Even though there have been so many difficulties and disappointments, I open for love and nourishment to come to me”*

I invite you to now take one of your hands and move your fingertips to the palm of your other still open hand, gently touching your palm as if you are placing some small and precious object in that open hand. You can imagine some object or just see light and love being placed into your palm. And if there is light landing in your palm, then it travels up your arm and through your shoulder joint and then the light spreads throughout your whole body. And then have the fingers of the giving hand touch the fingers of the receiving hand, gently holding or stroking, offering blessing and comfort.

“Bless you. I know that you have been hungry. With this touch I wish to tell you that you deserve all the love, safety, nourishment, protection, and joy that you have ever wanted.”

Let your receiving hand receive. Know that in doing this, you are gently, ever gently nudging the deepest unconscious layers of your nervous system to move away from alert and toward softening and safety.

“I am willing to open to receive. I am willing to move toward safety and softness at a pace that is tolerable for my body system.”

As I am doing this with myself, I am noticing my head and neck gently and spontaneously moving.

Take your time. Be curious.

“As I receive this blessing and comfort, I am here, I am alive.”

If it feels right, I invite you to try the process again, switching hands. First both hands open to receive, then the hand that was the receiving hand becomes the giving hand and offers a gift and a blessing. You can re-read and follow the prompts above or follow your intuition and your body in any way that feels right.

Take your time. Be curious.

“As I receive this blessing and comfort, I am here, I am alive.”

Allow yourself to be aware of your body and just notice whether there is any information or whether there are any messages that your body wants to give to you. There might be and there might not be. Just allow the space and listen and feel as you breathe.

As I am doing this part, my hands are exploring each other, touching, holding, stroking.

And for me, the message is, “More gentleness.” The fingers of one hand are stroking my breastbone and coming to rest on my belly.

I yawn, my arms and legs feel tingly, and my head and neck are moving again.

And my body is reminding me of something I had planned to include in this practice when I thought of it in the bathtub. So here it is:

When you are in a familiar and stuck place, you feel familiar and stuck feelings. And then you have thoughts about why those feelings are here right now, stories about your struggles and failures.

But the feelings are only a little bit from the present and are mostly from the past. And the stories about your struggles and failures may have grains of truth in them somewhere but they are not the truth in present time.

So again and again we need to learn that nearly every sentence that starts with “I feel like this because…” is simply not true.

I feel calm now, I feel good after doing this process. I know that I will find myself stuck again, and the feelings and stories will be back.

When that happens,
– I will not be a failure &
– the feelings will again be mostly from the past &
– the stories of my failure will again be largely not true

even though they will feel – and seem – very true in those moments.

I wish you an easeful holiday season and a safe and heart-warming winter.

May 2, 2021April 9, 2022

May is Self Practice Month! What practices are you doing today?

Here in Maryland, the dogwoods are in full bloom, approaching the end of their spring display, and there are Star of Bethlehem flowers in many of the lawns in the neighborhood. Since I took over cutting my own lawn again, I was able to mow around these lovely white flowers and give them another week or two to adorn my yard.

In the US, COVID cases are dropping. The virus may never go away and may continue to kill thousands of people every month, due to the combination of vaccine fears and new variants. But by sometime this year, life should be able to find a new normal that allows us to gather in person again.

In India, though, COVID is spiking dramatically. Because of widespread poverty and close quarters, the virus is very difficult to manage and contain there.

Here are links to some of the organizations providing support and relief in response to the COVID crisis in India.

Thank you for whatever you are doing that supports health and healing in your family and in the world.

And in the interest of psychological and nervous system healing, I have declared May to be the month of small personal practices!

May is the month of small personal practices!

I invite you to join with me in setting the intention to do personal practices every day (or most every day), or to add additional practices to your standing regimen.

How is it helpful to do more small personal practices? If I am doing pretty ok, why should I trouble myself with trying to fit one more thing onto my plate?

Let’s start there. The intention in doing personal practices is not to add an item to your to do list that will increase your stress. We want to reduce stress and increase flow. So if setting an intention will cause you stress, then perhaps you can just have an idea of maybe trying something out if you feel like it.

But let me explain why personal practices are useful, and then I invite you to find a way to fit them in with a spoonful of joy rather than stress.

One of my practices this past month or so has been to walk around the block once or twice most days. This is me walking around the block with the sun behind me. If you look closely you can see my foot in the shadow at the bottom of the pic.

Hmm, I could segue into a discussion of shadow, but I don’t think that is where this particular email is going..

Based on my conversations with people seeking healing and growth, folks really want potent experiences and significant breakthroughs. We want to feel clearly in our bodies that something has shifted, that there is more room for us to be free, to feel, and to be ourselves.

I actually had the pleasure of such a shift just this past weekend. It was not a single event or insight, but four days in an intensive trauma training called ISP, integralsomaticpsychology.com, in which I got to do several practice sessions both as a facilitator and as a client.

As a result of that work, I feel like I have more space to be alive. I think that my life-long habit has been that whenever I feel actual eagerness, a dark shadow (there’s the reference to shadow LOL) immediately shows up and pours water all over my eagerness, so I end up muted and wet. But today I noticed an eagerness show up and I noticed that the eagerness just stayed there in me, that nothing came to drown it out.

That is what we want so much, palpable shifts, a clear knowing that who I am today is different than yesterday in some real way.

Do small personal practices bring about these substantive shifts?

No and yes.

*The daffodils have come and gone but I wanted to put another flower pic in here.*

Most typically, small practices do not directly evoke the profound shifts we are looking for and longing for. If they do not bring about major shifts, what do they do? Small practices can lay the groundwork for big breakthroughs. Here are two ways that our daily (or intermittent) practices support us in coming to major shifts:

First, to state the obvious, any shift is an adjustment, a change in how we feel or in how we perceive things or in what happens inside of us. A shift is a change. That is obvious, but it leads into this point. A small practice generally produces a small change, often temporary, lasting only during the time that we do the practice or for a little while afterward. So, not a permanent shift, but a change nonetheless.

If you do a variety of practices over time, your body experiences a variety of small, often temporary, shifts. Through this, your body learns repeatedly that shift is possible. The habit of shifting your experience through practice makes you more flexible and this allows your body to more easily accept a larger shift when circumstances allow one to arise.

The other element is that major healing shifts tend to be accompanied or even driven by insight and meaning, by shifts in cognitive understanding. The small practices we do every day often gift us with small insights, or with glimpses into a larger understanding that we can touch in our minds but can’t yet feel in our bodies. The accumulation of these smaller experiences of insight can support the meaning making elements of a larger shift, when circumstances allow for that larger shift to be possible.

So when we are in a particularly potent healing container or we have a life-changing event or a profound spiritual experience, the groundwork we have done through our practices creates fertile ground that makes a movement toward healing both more able to occur and more likely to stick.

And sometimes the accumulation of many small insights and shifts blossoms directly into a transformation inside of us. I don’t want to rule that out!

Perhaps June or July will be the month of larger shifts. I will offer ideas and suggestions about how to invite those shifts to happen. In the meantime, all of the small practices that we do in this month of May will indeed support those inevitable and powerful healing experiences that each of us seek.

What practices do you want to try, and how might you try them in a way that is easeful and joyful?

Note that when I say “small practices”, they can be really small.

For example, I just looked up from my laptop, looked out the window at the neighbor’s tree moving in the wind, and took a deep breath. That ten second act brings me a little more calm and a little more present.

I just took some moments to feel my feet, my calves, my thighs, my buttocks, my hips, my belly, my chest, my neck, my shoulders, my arms, my hands, my face, my brain, and the top of my head. It took more time to type about that than the time it took to do it. Yet that simple series of paying attention brought me more connection with my body and breath.

I just raised my arms up in a gesture of gratitude and smiled. That took about 15 seconds, and it softened my heart, my face and my body.

Throughout the month, I will be sharing my small practices daily through Facebook and Instagram and on my blog. I will also share some of them with you through my newsletters.

I invite you now to do one small thing. Stroke your own face lovingly. Or send a prayerful blessing to someone you care about. Or stretch. Or dance. Or breathe – deep breathing or belly breathing or alternate nostril breathing or breath of fire, whatever breathing practice your body loves.

Do one small thing, and then thank yourself for doing it!
I wish you a fruitful and joyful month of May!

In gratitude,

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