Coming Home to ourselves

This year has been testing for all of us. Being locked down is not an enjoyable process but there is always a silver lining for many. Spending more time with your family, appreciating how much you enjoy your work and working with others, valuing your friendships. For some people they have realised that they really enjoy working from home and spending more time with their family; participating in helping in the home with cooking or gardening. We’ve also been illuminated about many issues that our western lifestyle allows us to live in ignorance of. Corona Virus is bad but every year thousands of children in developing economies die from diarrhoea. The environment, womens rights, racism, child abuse, domestic violence. It is all there every day, how is it that we seem to lived oblivious to it. Some people are finding this really overwhelming to have all of this in plain sight, how do you ground yourself?

Come back home, to your body. I always think my body is the house that I live in. So often we look outside or ourselves to find joy and pleasure. That big holiday somewhere exotic, new clothes, you get the picture. How do we find pleasure and joy in the ordinary and within our home? Find what is alive within you. Find the joy within you, find the support within you.

It is hard to take the perspective that values the ordinary, the boring and the everyday in our life. How do we learn to appreciate it, value it and find the joy within it?

I’ve created a little body meditation for you to ground yourself when you are feeling overwhelmed and sick of the ordinary, the boring, the everyday.

Finding your inner light

I was going for a walk last week with my husband. In front of us was a man with his young son who would have been about four years old. As they held hands and walked along the little boy danced, kicked his legs out wiggled his arms. He was full of energy, he literally could not stop moving. It reminded me of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, albeit a more clumsy version, in those 1950s movies where they would sing and dance down the street. I said to my husband, remember when our boys were like that at the same age. He said yes and then it gets bashed out of them, they are told that they have to walk ‘normally’ and sit and be quiet. They literally have so much energy they are jumping out of their skin. Then they get to school and they have to sit still and be quiet.

Why do we do this to children? Why do we take them out of their bodies, insist they ignore their natural impulses to move and run. Disconnect from pleasure. Ignore their natural impulses to explore the natural environment and the wonder and awe you can find in nature if you really pay attention.

As adults we can get so caught up in own suffering, we can spend an eternity searching outside of ourselves when our suffering seems unbearable and obstacles seem insurmountable. We bypass and self soothe with shopping, alcohol and any myriad of other available avenues to bypass dealing with our own emotions and to be present and vulnerable.

I tell you something simple yet quite profound I learned from one of my coaching teachers Layla Martin. You have everything you need right inside of you.

So how to you find your own inner light within?

You pursue your pleasure. I am not necessarily talking about sexual pleasure even though that is definitely one avenue of pleasure to pursue. I am talking about what is pleasurable to you that nourishes and sustains you. Walking in nature, dancing, mindfulness practices that involve movement and breath; these are great practices to connect you with sources of nourishment. How do you connect and listen to your body? How do you learn to be with your emotions and pay attention to what your feelings are trying to tell you.

None of us have been taught to do this. It is almost as if we have been implicitly told that pleasure is a no go zone.

Where do you start?

A good place to start is working out what is it that you really want. A simple desires practice, spend 5 minutes writing down your desires, start every sentence with ‘I want….’. If you don’t know what you want, it is hard to connect with what brings you pleasure.

One of my favourite pleasure practices is just to sit out in nature. Maybe you could try to sit out in nature and lye down on the grass and just breath and imagine all the energy from the earth. moving up from the earth, up your legs into your core. Notice your breath moving in and out of your nose. See what that feels like. Dancing is another practice that we seem to stop doing in early adulthood. Why? Our bodies are made to move. Try dancing for 10 minutes a day. Swimming is one of my favourites particularly in the sea, just floating in the water.

We have so many resources available to us within and at our fingertips. Next time you zone out on your phone and start online shopping, stop yourself and go for a walk outside instead. Breathe in the fresh air.

Grounding through body meditation

A Body Meditation for Wise Women

These past two weeks have been really intense energetically. The protesting in the USA has been felt all around the world. This is a really important time for black people, who have been oppressed for hundreds of years, to be able to express their voice. It is also important for all of us to self-reflect and challenge our own thinking and biases. There are some great resources around that I will include at the end of the email. It’s not the job of BIPOC people to educate us, we have to do the work ourselves.

In this time, many people are feeling very ungrounded. There is so much change going on. In Australia we had bushfires, then CoVid and now social upheaval. So many structures and systems are crumbling or being dismantled. These are old systems and structures that stifle change and preserve patriarchal control. It’s important to stay grounded, in our bodies so we can navigate this turbulence. There are many ways you can do this.

Sometimes I find walking in bare feet on the earth really helpful, sometimes just laying on the grass can be really helpful. One of the most helpful practices I use is this pelvic bowl meditation for women. I made this up on the spur of the moment in a coaching session and I’ve continued to use it again and again because it has been so helpful to so many of my clients.

Our pelvic bowel connects the top and bottom parts of our body. It contains all of our reproductive organs. For women, our womb, cervix and ovaries are particularly strong energy centres and if we can tune into them they become a great source of wisdom. I also find the more we connect with them we build these strong neural networks in our brain and it increases our sense of agency in the world. Now is the time we can work on growing our personal agency. The world needs its wise women right now.

The best way to do this practice is lying down. So set yourself up on your bed or maybe build a nest of pillows. You might want to light a candle or burn some incense. Create a space that provides you whatever you need to feel safe and comfortable, where you can practice in silence without interruption.

Resources that you might find helpful

There is a really great book by Layla Saad called Me and White Supremacy. I personally have found this very helpful to explore my own biases. The second book I can recommend is Growing up Aboriginal in Australia by Anita Heiss. The third resource I encourage you to explore is the work of Rachel Cargle, she is an African American academic, writer and whose work explores the intersection of race and womanhood. She has many great resources on her website and youtube. Finally the Victorian Women’s Trust has some great anti-racism resources for you to explore. These are primarily Australian references on their website but they also recommend some USA based resources to explore.