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.

Being with our Emotions

The last 3 months have been really trying emotionally for so many people. We humans are wired for social connection, the social engagement part of our nervous system which is in our face, neck and the back of our neck is designed that way. We are designed to attune to each other through our facial expressions.

Now we find ourselves in a time where we can see few of our loved ones close up. I don’t know about you but I am really missing hugs. The Corona Virus also makes us face our own mortality. The whole situation has brought so much fear up for so many people. Fear is a very difficult emotion for many people to process, we tend to push it away and try ignore it. Yet it sill runs in the background when we do this.

How can we be with our Emotions?

We let ourselves feel the emotion, we let it run. This can be hard when we have repressed them for years.

One of the best exercises I have found to let ourselves be with them is to access them via the Felt Sense. The Felt Sense is somatic language that we can use to describe the sensations we are feeling inside our bodymind. I say bodymind because they are one thing, we aren’t walking heads.

So I have prepared a practice for you to use that you can find below that you can use to scan your body and practice tuning into your felt sense and the sensations and emotions. You can download it. Also there is a felt sense dictionary which comes from Peter Levine who is one of the founders of somatic experiencing.

How do you use it?

Firstly, review the felt sense dictionary so you can get a sense of the felt sense words you use to describe the sensations in your body. It will probably resonate with you because when you ask a child how they feel inside they often use these words. Itchy, wiry, purple, cloudy. They seem silly and culturally, the english language is not really geared to this terminology, to describe emotions and feelings. Many latin based languages that are typically more emotive, are better in these descriptions.

Then lay in a comfortable spot, put the audio on and follow the instructions. As you scan your body from top to bottom or vice versa, pay attention to what you notice, tension, stiffness, discomfort and really hone in on in and how it actually feels.

What you may notice as you pay attention to these sensations is your body may start to relax or it may bring up the emotion underneath the sensation. So if you feel like you need to cry, thats OK. Let it out. If you notice anger come up bash the pillow next to you. If you feel Fear and then need to move, go for a run or a walk. Whatever comes up is OK.