Deep Listening
First of all, I just want to support you to know that it's okay to be right where you are, as imperfect as you are, as hard as life can be. When something just continues to be hard, there's something to pay attention to. There's likely something that is deeper and more profound than your rational mind can understand.
I encourage you to keep listening. Keep showing up to whatever your process is, and just noticing what's here. So you feel so depressed that you don't want to get out of bed today? Okay, how can you meet yourself right where you are? In bed, needing rest.
What is trying to emerge?
Complacency vs. Empowered Indifference
Indifference is an empowered, conscious choice to not react to your chronic symptoms.
Complacency is a disempowered, mildly avoidant way of just managing symptoms without much hope of improvement.
When you understand why you are experiencing chronic pain and take the active steps to work with your nervous system, you can make an empowered choice to not obsess or react to your symptoms, and instead allow them to be there in a way that allows for more spaciousness.
When Self Care becomes Dysregulating
It's not about the practice.
It's about how you are relating to what you are practicing.
I have used many "self-care" practices as a crutch for when my nervous system is dysregulated...trying to urgently transform the way that I feel in those moments when I feel terrible.
Essentially, I weaponized the very tools that were supposed to help me because they were used impulsively to avoid feeling uncomfortable.
There is so much information in the world of mind/body healing from chronic pain about safety reappraisal, which is essentially exposing yourself to the uncomfortable sensations while simultaneously being resourced enough in safety to relate with your symptoms in a different way from your patterned, automatic reactions of fear, despair, anger or avoidance to your pain.
And in my experience, I have not been able to experience that safety without first really grasping that I am a human who deserves basic respect and dignity. That I too am a human who deserves to have her needs met just as much as anyone else.
Loving Presence
Loving presence has become an embodied anchor for my own healing and growth process. When I find myself feeling disconnected and wrapped up in rumination, judgement, or fear...I gently call on loving presence by bringing my attention to my heart, and I feel the underlying softness that's already there.
Deepening with the Mind/Body Connection
Deepening is part of the fluid method of Hakomi when you are in a session, and you are able to land on some kind of significant insight that wasn't available to you before with the assistance of a practitioner who can support you in this process of skillfully traversing the mind/body connection.
In Relation to the Many Realms
The word Hakomi is believed to be a transmission from the Hopi people, and it means this:
"Where do you stand in relation to these many realms?"
Nonviolence through Allowing
The body knows when we are safe enough, and when the conditions are just right for something to rise from the unconscious to the conscious, or for deeply repressed emotions that are ready to be felt, expressed, and witnessed, to do so in a container of safety.
Hakomi-informed Somatic Therapy or Coaching is a modality in which the organic unfolding of your present moment experience is supported within the context of the therapeutic relationship, with your body’s wisdom as the compass.
Core beliefs and Sensitivity
Core beliefs are deeply held, unconscious beliefs that exist as a felt sense in the body, rather than a conscious, rational belief held in the mind.
For example, you may have the conscious belief that you deserve to be respected just as much as any other human being.
You may know this in your mind, but your body may hold the implicit memory of being bullied, neglected, or abused as child. So the unconscious core belief that exists as a felt sense may be something like "I am unworthy".
And as much as you may say your affirmations or try to change your core wounding from changing your thoughts, your body keeps the score.
Intersections of Sensitivity and Complex Trauma
An infant has no degree of conscious awareness that the outside world is differentiated from their internal world.
To an infant, their inner sensations are one continuous experience to their external environment, with no consciousness dividing the two.
The experience that occurs in infanthood is “If something is wrong outside of me, then something is wrong inside of me.” Of course, the reverse is also true, and this experience is not a conscious thought, it is a very basic felt sense.
Often this process of awakening to the core wounds of the sensitive strategy is one of immense confusion and overwhelm. However, once realized, I truly believe that highly sensitive people are some of the most insightful, soulful, creative people on the planet.
Hakomi Somatic Therapy
Your body has a lot to say about what happened to you growing up, how those experiences shaped you, and what your present needs are.
You may already have some of this information from explicit memories that your rational mind understands as holding some foundational rooting of your present symptoms and struggles.
However, the body is where we carry implicit memory which is the deeply held patterning of your nervous system that the conscious mind often does not have direct access to.
This is why Hakomi sessions occur in a state of present moment awareness, or mindfulness, for both client and practitioner alike, so that this core material is more accessible through the felt sense of the body.
Sensitivity, Anxiety, and Chronic Pain - What is the link? Do you identify as a sensitive person?
If you are a sensitive person, you may have at least one or more of these core beliefs:
· There is something wrong with me
· The world is unwelcoming and dangerous
· I am not safe
· I am not normal
· I do not belong anywhere. I am not welcome.
Embodiment and the Middle Way
Working through neurophysiological pathways and patterns of trauma is anything but a linear, clean, simple process. The brain and nervous system require an immense amount of tending when we are working with our neuroplasticity. It’s not just changing old habits, instead it’s finding a new way of being through many realms of our experience.
Our habits, movement patterns, posture, thought patterns and the connected emotions, beliefs, perceptions; really all these things that make up our conscious experience are all interconnected and simultaneously functioning in this complex dance of being a human being.
Core Beliefs, Chronic Pain, and Choices
Our beliefs are often not a deliberate choice we have consciously made, but instead are often rooted in our physiology, manifesting as a felt sense in the body that correlates with our perception of ourselves and the world.
