Category: Uncategorized

Self Practice Supports Us!

I soften and open to the experience
of the trees greeting me,
welcoming me, smiling at me
and being happy that I am here.

I soften and open to the experience
of greeting the trees,
welcoming them, smiling at them
and being happy that they are here.
And the flowers and the lightposts and the automobiles and the humans.

Self Practice Supports Us!
I feel how
I don’t know who I am
I don’t know how
I am meant to fit in
I invite myself to be with this gently,
without stress or panic,
in a way that is neutral and curious.
There is freedom and possibility here.

Hi, Lovely Human and all of my amazing friends and contacts,

There is a lot that is challenging, disturbing and frightening right now in the world around us.

For some of us this shakes us up and makes everything worse.

For others, the overt violence and pain in the news matches the threat and distress we were feeling in our bodies all along, and sometimes matches – or at least parallels – the actual threat that we or people we care about live with all the time. That might exaggerate our distress or it might paradoxically make us a little more comfortable.

I hope that you are navigating well and that you and your family members are healthy and safe.

I know I find myself asking these questions in relation to the Russian invasion into Ukraine and to the poverty, racism and inequity that shows up in so many ways in our US culture.

“Am I doing enough?”
“Am I making a difference?”
“What do I need?”
“Is it ok to be focusing on what I need when there is so much need all around me?”

These questions interact with the nagging questions, thoughts and feelings that my developmental trauma history planted in me:

“I know there’s something I’m supposed to be doing that I’m not doing.”
“Who am I failing today?”
“It’s just all too much.”
“But I have to push on and keep performing the best I can.”
“Am I an utter failure or just a mediocre failure?”
“Am I allowed to feel good or have hope when I am clearly not living up to my intentions?”

My own trauma shadows dance with the shadows from current events and everything seems muddled and confused. Do I even know who am I and the basics of what I am meant to be doing in this life?

For me, this adds up to another reminder to do self-practices, like the “I am who also” practice:

I am an insightful healer who also struggles with fear, guilt and the feeling that I should be doing and giving more.

I invite you to visit my blog or my Instagram feed (links below) and pick out a self-practice or two and just try them. There has not been much activity for the past several months but there’s a lot there from earlier.

Shortly after my last newsletter went out in December, I contracted Covid for the second time. I am more or less recovered from that infection but I am still persistently and unreasonably tired. I’m doing my best to balance activity and rest and I’m pursuing various avenues of diagnosis and treatment for the fatigue.

Shifting gears to insights on developmental trauma healing.

I woke up a couple of mornings ago with an insight about anger that unfolded from my dreaming. The message I took from the dream was this:  “My anger needs to be balanced and in the right place.”

Like many people who experienced developmental trauma, I have a habit of suppressing my anger, of not even allowing myself to know that I am angry.

Angry, annoyed, irritated, impatient, frustrated. I block myself from having those feelings.

And this folds into my relationship with demands. My body-mind system believes that everybody is placing demands on me all the time. I feel the pressure of expectations from others that I know are either exaggerated or not even there at all. But I still feel the pressure and it tends to live just under the surface, so I don’t know why but I know I feel stressed and ill-at-ease. 

With all of those unreasonable demands on me, of course I feel angry!

Obviously I don’t want to be angry at the people I care about, support, and work with. Plus I’m aware that these demands that I’m feeling are not actually real.

If you click on this button it will take you to a recording of the little song I sing to myself to help my body remember this:

What to do with this? The people in my life in general are generous, patient, forgiving, flexible and supportive. They are not perfect but they are pretty great. But I feel like everyone is making demands on me. And I know that I feel angry about those demands and that I hide that anger from myself because I don’t want to be a terrible awful bad angry person.

I used to believe that I just didn’t have anger. “I’m a superior enlightened being with no anger, only love and generosity.”  That’s how committed I was to hiding these feelings.

I need to give myself permission to feel anger, even if its basis is bogus, so I don’t have to keep suppressing those feelings and thus suppressing my life force. 

Because there are deeper stories that are legit.

There are plenty of totally valid reasons for me to feel anger: violations, insults and abandonments that happened when I was young and helpless. Ultimately I want to connect with that deeper anger in a safe way. Making space for the anger that is closer to the surface and not reality-based (without actively buying into the content of the anger) is a healthy step toward making space for the deeper anger that is reality-based.

Which brings us back to those demands.

Because of a history of demands placed on my when I was very young, I feel like I have to constantly perform to precise standards. It’s all unconscious but very powerful.

Feeling like I have to perform makes me angry.

But I’m not allowed to feel angry because I still believe that I have to perform.

Which makes me angry.

All in my unconscious, all in a perpetual loop.

That is the cycle that I have to break. You may have the same cycle or a different flavor of cycle.

And just to point out that this is not a one-time process, where I find the false belief and cycle of thoughts and behaviors, I break it down and now I am free of that pattern. It doesn’t work like that.

Again using myself as an example, I remember about 15 years ago that whenever I would sit down in a group meeting or yoga class, I felt like I was being watched and judged for where I sat, who I sat next to, how much I did or did not conform to the activities that were going on in the class or group. I felt constantly on the spot.

It’s not like that at all anymore. These days I’m fairly comfortable in groups. I have permission to be who I am and to be different from other people.

So I’ve come a long way in terms of the level of demand that I feel. The pattern is still there, and I’m cycling through it at a deeper level now.

I wrote the bulk of this newsletter a week ago, and I want to share with you a practice I’ve been doing during the intervening week to work with my own anger.

Anger Flash Cards!

I’ve been gently inviting myself to scan my bodymind for hints of anger, and then to ask the anger what it has to say. 
When I hear some words, I write them down on an index card.
The once or a few times throughout the day, I pick a card, read the message (silently or out loud), and invite myself to feel what that feels like in my body-mind-energy system and self.

Stop it! Stay away from me!

I’m not trying to dive deep, I’m not trying to find some sort of profound and transformational healing moment here. Note that I’m not diminishing the value of those life-changing healing moments. I have experienced that sort of amazing shift sometimes in past work I’ve done in groups and with facilitators. But that’s not what this is.

With this practice, I’m seeking to gently soften the protective barrier between me and feeling anger. I touch the anger a little bit, I let it run through my body, and I get on with my day.

My body discovers that it’s possible to feel anger without any punishment or backlash.

Gradually that should allow my fierce unconscious defense against feeling my anger to become smaller and to eventually crumble away.

If this feels interesting to you, I invite you to try it out for yourself. The most important ingredients are curiosity, kindness, patience, and forgiveness.

Much love to you through this chaotic and demanding time.

Love to your love, love to your fear, love to your anger, love to your hope.

Self Practice Supports Us!

Be Lovingly Curious about your Grandiosity and Spiritual Bypass – and then Translate

In what ways do I pretend to myself that I am super-human and not subject to the emotional constraints of mere mortals?

My old super-human self story:
“I am a superior enlightened being with no anger, only love and generosity”

I remind myself that I came to these beliefs as part of an important need to survive the intolerable.

My new translation:
“It is important to me to be loving and generous. I make space for my anger and pain and for the anger and pain of others.”

 This explanation is based on the Polyvagal theory which says that there are 3 branches of the nervous system:
Dorsal Vagal, which is responsible for sleep and freeze. The way this system responds to threat is to freeze – “play dead” more or less – slow everything way down.
Sympathetic, which is responsible for activity, getting things done. The way this system responds to thread is to fight or flee – ramp everything up.
“Social Engagement nervous system”, which includes the Ventral Vagal system plus several muscle groups in the head and neck, is responsible for pleasant, authentic and collaborative interactions between humans (all mammals actually). 

And this explanation is also based on the understanding of how traumatic memories or programs get implanted into our body systems:
When there’s a threat, and we can’t negotiate out of it using our social engagement system, then we go into fight or flight mode. But if for whatever reason or set of reasons, we can’t successfully fight or flee (we might not even try because we are so outgunned, as if I am a young child under threat by a caregiver) then at some point our system engages the Freeze response. However, since the threat is still real, our sympathetic fight/flight system is still running full tilt. This would allow us to quickly respond in an act of attack or escape if an opportunity presented itself. So the Sympathetic system is running full tilt and the Freeze is also running full tilt.

Now, if there is never a satisfactory and comprehensive enough resolution to this traumatic experience, wherein I am seen and heard and can feel and release all of the fear, helplessness, terror, anger, and overwhelm that showed up in me, if that safe resolution does not happen, then we get the ingredients for PTSD, or generally for unresolved trauma. In this case, the reality of the threat continues to live in the body even when the threat is far away geographically and/or far gone in the past. That means that inside my system, my flight/flight system continues to run full tilt and my freeze system also continues to run full tilt.

Continue reading “How Trauma/Freeze/Nervous System Dysregulation causes Syndromal symptoms”

One of the ways that my trauma pattern shows up is that I feel a constant nagging pressure to “Do something, get things done!” If I am sitting still, there is a voice, perhaps even a chorus of voices, shouting at me, “You are failing! You are letting yourself and everyone else down!”

And part of what makes things tricky is that there is definitely truth in that self-accusation. There are many things that need to be done, with real world consequences when they are not done.

But the pattern of pushing myself to work, work, work, do, do, do – that pattern is not actually effective. I can push, work, and do to some extent but frequently I just stop. Or I push myself to get moving but then I can’t even get started because I am overwhelmed by all of it.

Continue reading “Don’t Go Faster, Go Slower”

One of the goals of trauma healing is to allow what is hidden in our bodies to be felt, expressed, and released, as safely and gently as possible. We have hidden feelings, emotions and impulses leftover from past traumas and stresses. We also hide some or many of our current feelings, emotions and impulses from ourselves, out of a self-protective habit.

This Poetry Process is one way that I have found to incrementally surface hidden experiences. The process is simple. I give myself the assignment to create a Dark Poem, and then to create a Light Poem. [or vice versa, either can come first.] “Create” is not exactly the right word. My intention is to allow some of my uncomfortable – or pleasant – feelings or experiences to surface. So in a way I am allowing the poem, more than creating it. “Poem” in this context does not mean structured verse – it simply means free-flowing non-structured language that expresses an inner experience, often in metaphor.
At the time, I may be feeling neutral – neither joyful nor upset. I may not be aware that I am feeling anything at all. When the poetry comes out, it can sometimes be surprising, enlivening, or tender.

Here are examples of a Light and Dark Poem that have arisen in response to this process over the past months.

LIGHT:

There are little light energy beings
Inside of me or around me.
Perhaps they are me.
But no matter what
They scurry about playfully 

Little Skittle Scurry Furry Feet

DARK:

Gravity is too much
Entropy is too much
Gravity
Entropy
Falling down a long flight of stairs into a dark dank basement
It’s like that.

What is Emotional Amnesia?

I have noticed in myself and others a tendency to forget.
When I feel really good, I think – or at least feel – that my life has taken a turn for the better, and that it will continue to be good indefinitely. Whatever it is that happened has changed me, or changed the course of my life somehow. When I feel really bad, I know that I felt good sometime before, but I don’t see any path to that good feeling now, and I feel helpless to get back there.

Neither of these are accurate emotional conclusions, of course. Even when I have a truly life-altering experience – and I have personally had many – still, it is a guarantee that there will be a time in the future when I will feel lost, alone, discouraged, confused, helpless and overwhelmed. And whenever I am in that place of helplessness and overwhelm, there will be a time in the future when I feel good again, as good as my baseline for feeling good, which varies from person to person.

Continue reading “Polyvagal Theory and Emotional Amnesia”

Two days ago I used the bluebird energy to enliven and empower my day, but yesterday it didn’t work.

Is it possible, every day, to find a new organic inspiration?

I’m going to try today.

I am scanning my body, looking for and inviting anything that seems like a spark or current of hope, excitement, eagerness, or some other similar sort of energy.

But what is showing up is more like a sweet melancholy; a tender feeling of love. It is rising from my belly to my throat.

Continue reading “Turtle Day”

This is interesting.
I need some id and password information. I just lost my job, so now my husband needs to apply for Medicare and to do that he needs to open a social security account. I froze our credit reporting accounts after the Equifax breach in September. Creating a Social Security account online requires an unfrozen Experian account. Now, we could just drive to the Social Security office. But we prefer just doing things online. So I need the id and password information that will allow me to unfreeze our Experian accounts. But I don’t remember where I put it, since I did this three months ago.

That is the opening scene in today’s blog. Middle-aged post-traumatic woman who just lost her job sits in the recliner in her living room shouting “Where are those papers!?”

Continue reading “When Clutter Attacks!!”