Tag Archives: healing

This Lent, I will love the wildness in me.

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Little girl sitting in the forest with sun shining on her

Cleaning the irrigation ditches, “acequias,” is a tradition in Northern New Mexico. Farmers dig acequias to bring water to their fields. Every spring, at the beginning of the growing season, the community gathers to weed and dredge the ditches, so the water goes where farmers want it to go and waters what they want it to water. Acequias have deep roots and a holy place in Pueblo and Spanish New Mexican culture.

Cleaning the acequias has long been one of my favorite metaphors for Lent. This week, as I was listening for what wanted to be written to you, I realized that cleaning the acequias is a tame metaphor. It doesn’t work for me anymore.
 
What’s Lent?
Lent shares a root with the word “lengthen” and refers to the seven weeks before Easter, a time of lengthening daylight in the Northern Hemisphere. Lent is when many Christian religious folk prepare intentionally for Easter by taking on a Lenten discipline.
 
Lenten disciplines often involve giving something up—chocolate, alcohol, social media—or taking something on—Bible study, meditation, decluttering. The point of a Lenten discipline, traditionally, is to make room in one’s heart and life for the risen Jesus on Easter Sunday. A focus on sin—how we fall short—and penitence—how we can punish ourselves so we’ll do better—loom large in this traditional mindset. 
 
Many progressive clergy and church communities do their best to steer their Lenten focus toward spiritual growth and wholeness. Given the deep rootedness of sin and penitence in Lent, they’re fighting an uphill battle.
 
Back to acequias.
Irrigation, no matter how picturesque or historic, domesticates wild water. Copious, noisy, wild water, flowing downstream from snowy mountains, is diverted into smaller and smaller channels. Weeds are not allowed, only crops that meet the needs of farmers or landowners.
 
Four years ago, I wrote “A letter from God to her daughters who observe Lent.” It went a little viral in 2019 and has now been read over 60,000 times. I think that post resonates so deeply because those words refresh and renew like cold, clear water. They feel good in our bodies. They feel healing. They feel true. They feel like love.
 
Traditional religious ideas about sin and penitence can hurt. There is no healing in fear-based disciplines.
 
“The Cathedral and the Well” is the story of a pilgrim walking through the desert, searching for water. She’s checking old maps and sees that water is around somewhere, but she can’t find it. She’s desperately thirsty, and all she sees is a ruined building made of dry, dusty stones. Then, in the silence of the desert, she hears the faint sound of flowing water. She follows the sound and discovers that it’s coming from the building! She moves a loose stone aside and the sound gets louder. She continues to pull away stones until there’s a gap big enough to crawl through. Once within, she sees a spring of living water emerging from the dirt. She drinks deeply.
 
For centuries, pilgrims passing this way piled stones to mark the location of the spring. Over time, the stones had completely covered the life-giving water. (I’m renaming this story “The Cathedral and the Spring.”)
 
We can choose Love-based disciplines. We can choose wild disciplines. This Lent, I want to love the wildness in me. I want to love my internal wilderness—the inappropriate, unkempt, honey-sticky, dirty, weedy, weird parts—the parts I try to hide. The parts I haven’t quite gotten tamed so I keep them closeted and caged.
 
Peregrina Martha explores wildness through the lens of old-growth trees in this excerpt from Lost & Found, my Camino novel. (For more, you can download a free PDF here. The novel’s a bit of a mess in places, with occasional salty language.)
 
 

Going Wild
I watch my hand that holds the hammer that pounds me into a shape that fits the proper hole. I pound and pound myself, but I don’t quite fit. I squeeze a bulge in here, shave off a sharp edge there, and pound and pound and pound. I try to whittle myself down to nothing so I can disappear. Bang bang bang on my head hits the hammer. Square peg in round hole. Redwood into toothpick. I cut the inconvenient pieces off. I limb myself so I slide smoothly into the mill.

Limbs are where the wild things live – where birds make their nests.

Limbs are an impediment to masts and poles. I will wield the ax for you. Let me cut off my limbs to make myself suitable for industry. I will make myself straight and rigid and useful to you powers. Let me read your mind and do what you want before you ask it, so you are blameless.

Behold the limbless handmaid of the Lord.

I will stop pounding myself into a hole that will never ever fit. I will regrow my limbs and branches so wild things have a place to live. I will nourish my roots and reach for the roots of others.

I am no longer espaliered.

I am a Redwood. I am an old Ponderosa…

I am regrowing myself. I am undebecoming.
Deep kindness. Compassionate heart.
Put down the hammer and the axe.
Let go. Free fall. Trust.
Allow yourself to be who you are.
Completely here…

We are not a fiber farm. We are not a monocultured industrial forest. We are old growth. We are many- layered, and we harbor secrets. Sasquatch lives within us. We hold stories upon stories. Our usefulness is not immediately apparent. Tiny communities of uncommon organisms live only in us. We are interwoven and interdependent. We contain entire ecosystems in our crowns. Marbled Murrelets nest in our upper limbs, bathed in Pacific fog. A thousand feet above the ground, seedlings sprout from leaf duff six feet deep.

We are the old ones. The living ones…

You are deeply loved.
Growing is your job.
Be who you are.
Exform your Self into the world.

Prepare.

Good questions for Lent:
Old-growth Redwoods contain entire ecosystems on their branches and in their crowns. What chopped-off limbs will you regrow? How wild will you let your crown get? What axe will you put down?

Living Water flows in the Wild places. Who’s thirsty in your heart? What desiccated places within you yearn for wild water? What parts of you long to be rewilded? What stones will you dislodge so Living Water flows freely? What internal wilderness will you explore? 

These are, for me, good questions for a healing, holy Lent. I offer them to you with love.

P.S. If you’d like my latest writing, news, and coaching offerings delivered to your inbox, please subscribe to my weekly-ish newsletter here, and thank you! 


[Photo: Melissa Askew on Unsplash]

Your original blessing lives in your body.

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Little girl sitting in the forest with sun shining on her

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

~Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

These famous words of Mary Oliver perfectly express my wish for this first step in remembering. We start with the body. Your body. Most of us, by the time we get to midlife, have lost touch with our embodiment.

Why is embodiment the first, most crucial remembering? Because your body does not lie. Your body is tuned to truth. Your body is your soul enfleshed. When you were born, your body was a pure, true expression of your wants, needs, and desires. Babies don’t tell falsehoods. Not at first. Over time we learn to hide our true selves as necessary to keep our caregivers attached and our little kid selves alive.

That’s why, of course, you lost touch with your body. It’s really hard to hold your body’s inner truth and the outer lies you learn to tell to survive. Especially when you’re a child.

Good news! Your original truth is still alive and well underneath all the faking you’ve had to do for decades. Your original blessing resides in your body.

Often when we start our work together, my clients tell me that they’re fluent in their body’s language. They do yoga. They meditate. They eat right and they exercise often. But as we dig deeper, they realize they really have no idea what their bodies are trying to tell them. What they’re actually fluent in is their thoughts about their bodies. Their ideas about their bodies. Their judgments about their bodies.

We’re often much more adept at mindfulness than bodyfulness.

So task one is to re-inhabit your body. Your beautiful, sweet, holy “God pod.” This marvelous “meat sack” that means you’re alive on Earth. Because this meat sack in which your mind has its being is the key to the garden of delights which is your life.

Remembering the beauty and original blessing of your body can take some time. And it will probably feel uncomfortable to return home to all the pain and memories you’ve stored in your flesh. Getting back in touch with your truth as communicated by your body will almost certainly create some havoc in your life as usual. Perhaps that’s why you’re here. Because maybe you know, deep down, that a little havoc is just what you need to reset your compass to your true north.

Here’s an Embodiment meditation you might like to try. (Click here for video version.)
Grounding Cord, adapted from Shakti Gawain:

Sit. Take three breaths. Imagine a long cord extending from the base of your spine down into the Earth. You could imagine this cord like the root of a tree. (If you prefer to stand, imagine the cord extending from the soles of your feet down into the Earth.)

Now, as you inhale, imagine Earth’s energy coming up through the cord into your body, up and up with every inbreath. The energy flows into your body as it rises, and continues out through the top of your head. Do this three times.

Now, as you exhale, imagine that the energy of the sun and stars and planets is coming down through the top of your head, down your spine, infusing your body as it flows down into the Earth. Do this three times.

Now, be with both energies. As you inhale, be with the energy coming up from the Earth. As you exhale, be with the energy coming down from the cosmos.

Keep inhaling and flowing Energy up, exhaling and flowing Energy down. Feel both energies intermingle and flow throughout your body.

We are Earthlings, made of stardust. We are Earthlings, made from dirt.

Take three breaths to finish.

Upcoming events:


A Summer Solstice Gathering:
Tuesday, June 21, 4 pm Pacific, Zoom. Free. Subscribe to email for the link.

Three workshops going deeply into the first three modules of my Self-Recovery Coaching Intensive: Embodiment, Awareness, and Ownership: July. Dates, times, and investment TBD. More info coming soon! Reply to this email and let me know if you’re maybe interested. (Today’s post is from the Embodiment chapter of my Coaching Intensive workbook-in-progress, delayed by Covid.)

Coaching Intensive Group starting in September: Ten weeks of step-by-step, carefully constructed classes covering the three phases of self-recovery: Remembering, Reclaiming, and Recommitting. Tentative investment: $1000. Details coming your way in August. 

Private Coaching: Contact me to schedule a no-cost, no-strings-attached Clarity Call.

For current writing and events, please subscribe to my weekly-ish newsletter here, and thank you! 

Photo Credit: Melissa Askew on Unsplash. 

The quality of your peaceful presence matters.

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Sunset on Manzanita Beach

Dear friends,

I turned 64 a couple of weeks ago. Growing old has been on my mind a lot lately. It’s been damn stressful up in my brain. Here’s what’s helping me, offered to those of you who are also thinking about growing old and feeling stressed about it.

We were at the coast last week for our annual post-Easter rest. (My Episcopal priest husband naps. I walk.) As is often true of the Oregon coast in April, the weather was wet and windy. But every evening for a couple of hours, the rain would taper off and I’d drag Jed down to the beach to watch the sunset. On this particular evening, the sunset was subtle. A solid bank of clouds out over the ocean seemed set to block the sun’s rays as it sank into the sea. The cloudy sky turned a beautiful mauve and pink, mist gathered at the base of Mount Neahkahnie, and waves reflected the sky back to itself.

We passed a photographer with his tripod at the waves’ edge, long lens pointed to where the invisible sun might be. A family of five, their big black poodle bounding in the surf, walked up the beach toward Manzanita, occasionally glancing toward the western horizon. Jed and I were ready to go inside out of the wind ourselves, believing we’d seen all the show there was to see.

We were wrong. Suddenly the sun peeked out from a hole in the clouds and shone right at us. Immense. Orange. Stunningly beautiful—clouds above, below, and all around the one little hole. The sun had an entire limitless Pacific horizon to choose from, and she came down in the one place she could shine through. We were awestruck. Through binoculars we watched the curvature of the sun slowly sink behind the clouds like mountains. Words cannot describe.

I turned to see if the photographer was catching this, hopeful that he’d capture the shot of a lifetime. He was walking up the dunes, tripod over his shoulder, his back to the beauty blazing behind him. The family of five was likewise walking up the beach toward Manzanita, seemingly oblivious, black poodle still bounding in and out of the waves. We watched until the last burnished edge of sun sank below the cloud bank, and reminded each other to breath.

If we’d let the wind and the wet keep us inside, if we’d turned our backs too soon, if I hadn’t brought my binoculars … We would have missed it.

What does this moment have to do with growing old? Here’s my takeaway. If I expect my old age to be a long slide into mellowness and mist, if I turn my back too soon, I’ll miss many extraordinary moments. We see what we expect to see.

Show up. Get out on the beach, no matter what the weather.

Be present with each step and each breath. The future radiates out from the present like a wave.

The quality of your peaceful presence in this moment determines how your future will feel.

Your thoughts about aging—your thoughts about anything, really—will strongly impact your experience. You can choose different thoughts, if you want to and you do the work. (Learning to notice your thoughts and how to choose better ones is a core component of my coaching work.)

Expect the extraordinary.

Carry binoculars just in case.

Love,
Barb

PS. Some resources I’m finding helpful:
This episode of Glennon Doyle’s We Can Do Hard Things with anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite
This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, by Ashton Applewhite

PPS. Interested in talking more about aging and how to think more helpful thoughts about this inevitable change? I offer free, no-strings-attached Clarity Calls. 

PPPS. I share coaching availability and current events in my weekly email newsletter. Want to subscribe? Click here. 

Photo: Manzanita Beach, Oregon. 2022. 

Four shifts to heal your life.

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Sun shining through fingers

(Three foundations – embodiment, awareness, and ownership – are fundamental. The four healing shifts – more soul, more acceptance, more intention, and more creation – are powerful. But making the shifts without the foundations is like building a house on the sand. I’m diving deeper into these seven facets of healing throughout November and December. You can subscribe here if this was forwarded to you.)

Shift #1: More soul, less façade. Explore the difference between your essential self and your social self. We all have both, and we all need both. Learn which one is in the driver’s seat, and how to change drivers if you choose to.

Many writers and thinkers have explored this core concept, often using different labels for these two parts of ourselves. Other names for “Soul” include Nature, Essential Self, Heart, True Self, and Must. Other names for “Façade” include culture, false self, space suit self, and should.

A couple of ways to begin to work with soul and façade:
1. Ask yourself these questions: What do you do because you should? What do you do just because you want to? What’s the payoff in doing things you don’t want to do but you believe you should? What’s the proportion of “should” vs “want to”? Are you happy with this?

2. If you played with last week’s “If God is … then I am … and my soul is ….” exercise, ask yourself what the opposite is. Is this a good metaphor for your façade?
Example: If God is an infinite underground river of living water, then I am a spring, and my soul is the place in the Earth where water emerges. The opposite of this could be something like “I am a Costco parking lot. I keep water from moving freely through the earth underneath me.” This feels like a good metaphor for façade to me, because wildness erupts when water is free to flow where it wants to go. So then I would ask myself where I’m hard and unyielding, stopping up living water.


Shift #2: More acceptance, less resistance. Explore your beliefs about the inevitable changes of being alive. To live is to change. Much of our suffering comes from misunderstanding and resisting change.

Change is a feature of this human life, not a bug. Because to live is to change, we have infinite chances to begin again, over and over. Every loss leads to new life. Where are you resisting change? Do you have losses to grieve? Thoughts about change to disbelieve?

Here are two blog posts from the archive for exploring this core concept further.
Seven things I wish I’d known about change fifty years ago.
Change and Covid.  (Written early in the pandemic, when we didn’t know what the hell was happening.)



Shift #3: More intention, less reaction. Explore how your thoughts cause your feelings, not the other way around. This is good news, because you can learn to choose your thoughts.

Learning to hear and question the thoughts that precede your feelings is the work of a lifetime. And it’s so worth it. When we’re in charge of our brain, we can choose thoughts that make us happier, healthier, and more whole. It’s that simple.

The most powerful tool I know to start hearing your thoughts is the Awareness Wheel. Remember, if a thought causes suffering, it isn’t true.  

Post from the archives: Thoughts create feelings. Feelings motivate actions. Actions determine results. Your results become your life.
If you want more of my writing about the Change Cycle, there’s lots. Just search “change” on the top right corner of the blog. 

Shift #4: More creator, less victim. Explore the victim triangle and the empowerment dynamic. Create the life you want, instead of passively settling for the life you have.

To what are you acquiescing? To what do you aspire? That’s all you really need to notice. Then ask yourself Dr. Edith Eger’s Four Questions:
1. What do you want?
2. Who wants it? (You, someone else, the culture, etc.?)
3. What are you going to do about it?
4. When?

Blog post from the archives: This will change your life. I’m not kidding. 


PS. We’re approaching the Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere. I love this time of year, not because of holiday energy but because of the growing dark. Despite the frantic nature of holiday preparations all around, this growing dark feels to me like a time for letting go. A time to embrace emptiness, silence, and waiting.

I’ve been doing this work for ten years now. I feel a new thing wanting to emerge, and I want to honor that feeling. So I’m trusting the cycle and letting go of my coaching practice as currently constituted. My surgery and subsequent newsletter hiatus created a lull in my client roster, so this is a perfect time. 

I don’t know what my coaching work will look like going forward. I have a hunch I’ll be writing and offering classes, workshops, and retreats. I’ll be organizing ten years worth of blog posts into categories and putting them under a coaching tab on my website as PDFs. I’ll continue to writing books, both fiction and nonfiction. I’ll continue to send this email as I have news and writing to share. Probably. What I do know is that I love this work, and I want to honor my soul’s mysterious “musts.” I also know that new life grows in the dark, and emerges on its own time. 

So much change happens in the dark. I’m wishing you abundant blessings of this dark time and the return of the light, and I look forward to connecting in the new year.
What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?  ~Mary Oliver

Photo credit: Natalie Rhea Rigg on Unsplash

Foundation #3: Ownership

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Sun shining through fingers

Foundation #3: Ownership. Your theology is the matrix in which healing happens. Examine your theology. Deconstruct and reconstruct as you choose.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. ~Mary Oliver

(Three foundations – embodiment, awareness, and ownership – are fundamental. The four healing shifts – more soul, more acceptance, more intention, and more creation – are powerful. But making the shifts without the foundations is like building a house on the sand. I’m diving deeper into these seven facets of healing throughout November and December. You can subscribe here.)

First, a caveat:
I write these newsletters as the “me” who knows these things I write. I am still also the “me” who forgets them. I am still also the “me” who commits to this open-ended soul pilgrimage, gets scared, and returns to the safety of culture’s prescribed path. I commit to my journey, lose my way, and then find my way back to commitment, over and over and over. This seems to be how it works for most of us. Deep change takes time, usually. Time, and continuous recommitment.   

An audacious statement:
Theology should not hurt. Theological beliefs that cause pain aren’t true. It’s that simple. If a belief or a system of beliefs hurts, let it go and choose holier, healthier, more whole beliefs instead.

You get to do this.
You are a theologian. We are all theologians, whether we want to be or not. Many of us are passive theologians—taking what we’ve been told as the gospel truth, whether these beliefs about God*, creation, and our place in the cosmos cause harm or not.

When you’re more bodyful and mindful, you become aware of what hurts. You become aware of forces and ideas you may have endured for decades, believing you had no choice. After all, you’ve been taught, implicitly or explicitly, that theology is done by other people—more qualified, authoritative, male people.

Dr. Diana Butler Bass (author of Freeing Jesus, most recently) describes a moment in graduate school when another student referred to a woman author as a “theologian.” Diana’s male professor corrected them: “Women don’t write theology. Women write memoir.” (Or self-help.)

You get to choose your beliefs. If the theology implanted in your brain before you had the capacity to think about it critically works for you, rock on! If not, it’s your calling and your responsibility to create new theological pathways for yourself, and possibly for others.

These beliefs might be hurting you:

  • God* is male, therefore maleness is superior. Maleness is superior, therefore God* is male.
  • Bodies are bad, especially female bodies.
  • Earth and earthly things are profane.
  • My sexuality is dangerous, must be controlled, and is to be expressed only in the context of heterosexual marriage, if then.
  • One marriage only.
  • Religion is about following rules, being good, and getting to heaven.
  • Sin is breaking rules.
  • Jesus died for my sins.

Some alternatives to try on:

  • God* is love. God* is in everything and every thing is in God*.
  • All bodies are holy.
  • Earth, the body of God*, is sacred. There is no such thing as “profane.”
  • Sexuality is a gift to be cherished, explored, and shared if I wish.
  • People change. People grow. Sometimes that change and growth requires leaving a marriage.
  • Religion (the Latin root means to reconnect, retie, realign) is how I outwardly express my inward beliefs. Religion is how I tie myself to the holy.
  • Sin is refusing to heal and be whole. 
  • Jesus’ radical beliefs about human belovedness and the loving heart of God* led him to the cross. His fidelity to his beliefs and his willingness to die for them are what saves.

Some ways to begin:
1. Awareness = bodyfulness + mindfulness. Pay attention to how different thoughts feel in your body. Say a thought out loud or to yourself. What do you notice? What’s going on with your breathing? Your heart rate? Your muscles, especially in your upper body? Your abdomen? Truth feels like freedom. For most of us, freedom feels expansive, light, open, and warm.

2. Remember your experiences of holiness, if you have them.
Ask yourself questions, and listen for your answers.

  • Do I really believe in God*? (Maybe you don’t.)
  • If yes, why?
  • Have I ever experienced the Sacred/More/Holy/Love/God*? (Maybe you haven’t.)
  • If yes, how? Where? When?  

Attend to what you know is true. Truth feels good in your body. Perhaps unsettling, but good. False thoughts and beliefs do not feel good in your body.

3. You could play with this sentence: “If God* is …, then I am …, and my soul is ….” Using my Camino deep womb-like heart experience, I might say “If God is a deep womb-like heart connecting everything, then I am a child of God, and my soul is an umbilical cord.” Here are more examples.

This above all: Trust your knowing. Trust your experience. Your knowing is more valid than beliefs formulated by others, passed along as truth. Stop trying to make yourself believe things you know not to be true. Stop pushing those uncomfortable thoughts of disbelief aside. Believe yourself. Be truthful with yourself. Know what you know, at least internally. Claim your integrity.

If all you know to be true is the sweetness of an apple, or the feel of water on your feet, or the sound of birdsong? That’s okay. That’s real. That’s authentic. Trust yourself. Believe yourself.

Stop cutting off parts of yourself to fit into others’ theological boxes.

This work is too important to delegate. Be your own theologian. Take ownership of your fundamental beliefs.

*** ”God” is a commonly-used name for unknowable, unnamable, animating energy. How does “God” feel to you? If that name feels good, use it if you want to. If not, trust your knowing and use another name, or no name at all.  

 PS. Happy Thanksgiving to my readers in the United States. I’m thankful for each of you. Here are a couple of resources if, in addition to giving thanks, you want to think critically about this day.

To know more about, and perhaps acknowledge, Indigenous people who occupied your home before you, check out this resource. Bend, Oregon, is located in the homelands of the Tenino and Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, comprised of Wasco, Warm Springs, and Paiute people. Members of these Tribes, and others, live here still. 

And here’s a video by Robin Wall Kimmerer about “The Honorable Harvest,” which describes an ethical relationship with plants upon whom we depend. 

Photo credit: Daoudi Aissa on Unsplash

Foundation #2: Awareness

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Open hands holding a flower

Foundation #2: Awareness. Bodyfulness + mindfulness = awareness. Awareness is attention. Attend to your life. Tend your soul.
 

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. ~Henry David Thoreau

(Three foundations – embodiment, awareness, and ownership – are fundamental. The four healing shifts – more soul, more acceptance, more intention, and more creation – are powerful. But the shifts without the foundations are like building a house on the sand. I’m diving deeper into these seven facets of healing throughout November and December. You can subscribe here if this was forwarded to you.)

Separating bodyfulness* from mindfulness is helpful, but it’s not truly accurate. We’re intertwined, of course – combined bodies and minds. It’s helpful to separate them, though, when we’re learning to notice our patterns and processes, and to tend ourselves.

Your body, your Earthling body, is your ground of being. We’re feeling creatures who think, says Dr. Jill Taylor Bolte in her new book, Whole Brain Living. Our minds work better when they’re in service to our bodies.  

Now that you’re feeling your body a little more, let’s invite your powerful mind to the dance.

A Silly Story
Years ago, when I was a newby middle school English teacher, I was assigned to coach the school’s Brain Bowl team. I knew absolutely nothing about coaching Brain Bowl. Luckily for me, the Brain Bowl season didn’t start until March, so I could put off dealing with it for months while I learned to teach English. But I could feel my body tense every time my brain remembered Brain Bowl.

I began to picture Brain Bowl as a rattlesnake sleeping under my bed. You really don’t want rattlesnakes under your bed, right? If you’re not going to move out, you simply have to deal with them. Finally I did, by taking the obvious step of asking for help from the relieved senior teacher who’d shunted his unwanted duty onto me. The rattlesnakes under the bed began to slither on out.

That image has endured. I can still feel the frisson of fear running through my body when I imagine rattlesnakes sleeping under my bed. It’s my body’s way of telling me that something important I’d rather not think about needs my attention, and it’s time to deal with it.

Bodyfulness brings my attention to what needs healing. My mind works to understand and heal the sources of suffering.

Trauma
 “The body keeps the score,” says trauma expert Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk. When you bring your attention to your body, when you choose to be mindful of your body, uncomfortable feelings will almost certainly arise. Our bodies are repositories of trauma. Humans sequester scary stuff in our bodies until we can deal with it, so you probably have unprocessed fear stored in your body. As you bring mindful, compassionate attention to your body, these emotions and stuck places will show up.

The good news is that bit by bit you can surface and resolve the trauma. First things first: If what shows up is overwhelming, back off for now and find a trauma-informed therapist to walk beside you. If stored trauma is making itself felt, it’s wanting to be healed. You can do this, and it’s easier and safer with company.  


Adventures in Physical Therapy
 As most of you know, I had surgery on my right hand a couple of months ago. I was sitting doing my seemingly interminable physical therapy Saturday morning while my husband read aloud Richard Rohr’s weekly email. In this email, Fr. Richard references Buddhist psychologist Tara Brach’s “applied meditation” RAIN, about which I have written before. R stands for “recognize,” A for “allow,” I for “investigate,” and N for “nurture.” It’s a powerful practice, and I’ve used it often.

As he was reading about RAIN and I was doing my PT, I recognized that I’ve been treating my hand, which is still quite stiff and swollen, as an enemy. I recognized that I’d been feeling ashamed of my hand’s wounded state. I detested the scars, stiffness, and swelling. That’s a strong word, and it’s also accurate.

(Feeling ashamed of illness, brokenness, and helplessness goes back to my childhood, but it doesn’t matter where it comes from. It’s not necessary to understand the genesis of a thought that causes suffering to begin to unravel its hold.)

My poor hand, to be treated so meanly. I was going through the motions of caring for it – massage, exercise, desensitization – while inwardly resenting the hell out of it.

RAIN helped me see that pattern. That old, deep, fossilized pattern became visible because I recognized the feeling of loathing in my body. Now I can heal the pattern, one PT session at a time.

This week I’ve been practicing breathe prayers while I do my physical therapy. I’ve been breathing in healing and breathing out stiffness. I’ve been breathing in healing and breathing out swelling. I’ve been doing my exercises to the beat of my heart. I’ve been loving on my hand and treating it with compassion. This feels better. 


Pain, and Joy
So far I’ve been talking about the hard stuff that awareness helps us surface and deal with. But consciously practicing bodyfulness and mindfulness leads us not only to our pain, but also to our joy. The sources of our joy will likely be just as irrational as the sources of our pain, when we pay attention to our body’s joy. A warm shower. A walk in the woods. Playing around with words or paint. Purple twinkle lights around the bathroom mirror. Puppy videos on YouTube. Whatever.


A simple practice
Stop what you’re doing. Do a quick body scan from feet to head. What do you notice What sensations do you notice in your body? What emotions do you feel? Are you aware of any thoughts? Take a moment to note what you sensations, emotions, and thoughts on paper or in a notes app. Do this several times each day. Set an alarm on your phone if that would help.

Listen to what your body is telling you, then bring mindfulness to those messages. That’s all awareness is. Start small. Just notice. That’s all. You don’t need to be fancy and formal. Just keep track, somehow, of what you notice. Are there consistent body sensations? Consistent thoughts? Consistent patterns? Just notice.

Bring compassionate awareness to your daily embodied life. Little by little.

If you’d like to talk about any of this, simply “reply” to this email. I’d love to know what you think. 

*I owe the wonderful word “bodyfulness” to Christine Valters Paintner, the abbess of Abbey of the Arts, a virtual contemplative and creative community. See especially The Wisdom of the Body.

Resources
Dr. Tara Brach on Fear and Trauma
Dr. Tara Brach and RAIN
Whole Brain Living, by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
The Body Keeps the Score, by Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk
The Wisdom of the Body, by Dr. Christine Valters Paintner

Photo credit: Lina Trochez on Unsplash

Is your chrysalis calling?

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Chrysalis

Catalytic events come when they will, and we find ourselves once more riding the Change Cycle. We’re not in charge of the timing, try as we might to control the uncontrollable. Whee, anyone?

When we were younger, catalytic events were more often positive – graduations, marriages, parenthood. Catalytic events were largely results of choices we made.

As we age, the events that push us onto the wheel are more often unchosen by us – kids off to college, death of a loved one, a serious illness. These catalytic events feel more like grief and loss.

This is okay. This is how it’s supposed to be. Resistance is futile. Resistance to what is only causes suffering. Painful events are holy and full of grace, when we allow them to be. 

A common metaphor for the cycle of change, part and parcel of the Earthling deal, is metamorphosis. In metamorphosis, a caterpillar dissolves in her chrysalis, becomes goo, and eventually emerges as a butterfly.

The caterpillar has no say in the timing. And she must dissolve completely for her cells to reform as a butterfly. These two things are important.

As humans, we have the capacity to resist the chrysalis. This is never a good idea. When your chrysalis calls, it’s best to give in and dissolve. Resistance is futile. All resistance will get you is a gnarly beat-up caterpillar slogging through winter snows, shaking its withering head and muttering under its breath in disgust, eventually freezing to death. Not pretty.

I’m having surprise surgery next week to rehabilitate my right thumb. (Ligament Reconstruction and Tendon Interposition, for you medical nerds.) My right hand will be out of commission for a month or so. Surgery day, September 21, is also the day I outlive my mom – a day I’ve been aware of for a while now. Evidently, to mark the occasion, I’ll be getting my hand retooled for the next forty years, forty more than she had. Not what I would have chosen, and yet it works somehow.

I’m attempting to accept this enforced rest as a gift, a retreat, chrysalis time. I’ll do my best to be graceful about it and be a happy patient, but I’m finding out just how much I resist rest. Who will I be if I’m not working?  Will I deserve to take up space if I’m not productive? Is healing really necessary? Sheesh. 

This newsletter and our Community Conversations will be on hiatus until I can work a keyboard and a mouse again. This means our September 30 Community Convo is cancelled. 

I’ll be back, as soon as I’m back up and running, with updates from the Chrysalis.

PS. Many of you are fans of Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. Did you know Glennon and her sister Amanda host a fabulous podcast, We Can Do Hard Things? I recommend it so highly, and will be catching up on episodes while I’m resting in my chrysalis. (Thanks to my daughter for urging me to listen.)