Seasonal ingredients

This isn't a recipe blog. It's a place where I put words when I need to express or process something about my deepening understanding of the body-mind, otherwise known as somatics, otherwise known as the process of experiencing life.

So, why the reference to seasonal ingredients? Well, my favourite way to cook is to pull together whatever is fresh and at hand, thus inspiring me to create some kind of alchemical flavour bomb that feeds and nourishes.

This evening, while making one such bomb, I listened to a talk that alerted me to some fresh ingredients which I will soon bring to my public practice.

The talk was a conversation with Hakomi teacher Manuela Mischke-Reeds on "How Kindness and Body Wisdom Unravel Trauma Stories". Hakomi is a method that keeps making itself known to me. It originated with Ron Kurtz, who - among many other things - studied with Moshe Feldenkrais. It seems to me Ron Kurtz gathered some very potent ingredients.

I had my first Hakomi session with a friend the other day. He's training in the method; we've agreed to do swaps. As far as words go in describing it, Hakomi is an experiential form of psychotherapy - a form of psychotherapy that has every intention of inviting one's entire, embodied experience into the picture. And the magic ingredient is kindness.

This looks like one of the next places for my learning to go.

There were several things that really struck me about Manuela Mischke-Reeds' approach to trauma. Firstly, she described trauma as complete overwhelm which could result from a major event AND something that could accumulate over time.

In her words: "too much, too fast and no metabolising. The experience is too much for me to handle, it’s coming too fast and I have no way of metabolising - literally - physically, somatically, emotionally, spiritually. I cannot digest the experience." It broadens the way we think about trauma.

Metabolising. What an interesting word. Metabolising emotion. Metabolising spiritual experiences. Metabolising shock. Yes, how does one do that when the pace of life won't allow a moment's reflection?

Manuela brought into the discussion the experience through the media of being alerted to tragedy over and over, how this can be one such accumulation. Work is stressful. Someone is mean etc etc.

I began to see some of the unlikely (but, on reflection, obvious) ingredients that have informed me, and will inform my practice.

I worked in the media. I operated at the pace of the daily news cycle. My brain trawled for throwaway stories. My bosses pushed me to get the stories that would disturb people - both the readers and the players in the stories - which I found both impossible and futile.

It wasn't until I was in the real ratrace - living alone, catching a train to the city every day, working on a computer, communicating with people soaked in stress, firing off cortisol, pushing myself to meet deadlines, creating content that often was - again - futile, useless, unused. Serving egos that had no vision of where they were going, except up the career ladder - that ...

I burnt out.

Just before I stopped working, I asked my boss for emergency time off. It felt as though something was gaining on me and I could no longer outrun it.

Manuela described trauma as a "perceived threat to survival". That's what I was experiencing in many ways (I haven't fully described all of the ways, and all of the experiences that had accumulated, some more shocking and life-threatening than others). But just that daily grind was life-threatening. The attitudes I faced daily and the attitude I felt compelled to perpetuate to be in that environment were life-threatening.

It was lifeless.

Gradually I have come back to life. And, as a wise and unconventional psychologist once said to me, the way to do that was through my body.

I spent four years training in a professional Feldenkrais program, going through intensive periods in which I would go deep inside my experience of myself, my body, my feelings, thoughts, images, ideas, stories, attitudes. I've come out feeling as though I've been through a tumble dryer, wondering, WTF is the Feldenkrais Method? How am I going to practise it?

Well, that's the thing. I don't have to practise "IT". I will practise with all of the ingredients.

Through some guidance from a knowledgeable coach of healers and the like, I realised that the Feldenkrais Method is an ingredient. Just as my experience of jumping from the corporate ladder and running for my life is an ingredient. Just as my keen consumption of that talk tonight is an ingredient.

These are just several of countless ingredients that will come together in any given combination at any given time in service of healing and wholing whomever happens to be in the mix. And whatever is at hand, whatever is fresh, will inspire me to create some kind of alchemical flavour bomb that feeds and nourishes.

Please stay tuned - my practice will have a home very soon.

Into the unknown

Today, I invited a workmate around for some one-on-one Feldenkrais practice on the table. She is a personal trainer, working with strength and fitness. She is aware of her body, but somehow she knew I was offering a different kind of awareness.

As we were entering a process of movement exploration, my friend made some very interesting observations. She noticed that the movements made her aware of loads of things she hadn't been aware of before - things going on in her. Because the touch was so unobtrusive and the movements so gentle, she was able to feel much more than she does in say, a massage. It seemed there was so much to notice, her mind could barely keep up.

That is what it's like to enter this kind of learning for the first time. It's discovering the tiniest tip of the biggest iceberg.

And I commented that she had hit upon one of the principles of this method, which draws on the Weber-Fechner law (aka the field of psychophysics, aka sense physiology). So basically, the quieter the room, the more you can hear in that room. If drums are being played loudly in the room, you won't hear a pin drop. However, if the room is completely silent, you will hear the same pin drop. (It gets more complicated if I try to explain it fully, but that is the gist.)

When you reduce the stimulus, when you calm the nervous system and quieten the mind, the doors of perception have the opportunity to open, expanding the options for how you experience the world.

Another very interesting thing my friend / colleague / guinea pig said was a question: she asked me about how I work. If I were to see a client like her, she asked, with all of this stuff going on, and the first visit was just about getting to know her - how she moves, what movement patterns are happening - would I then have something to work with on the second visit? Would I know what to work with?

The answer was an honest: "I don't know."

And then it hit me. I'm right at the beginning of my education in this field. I have been to multiple training segments (and, granted, haven't quite finished the training course), where I'm immersed in the method, travelling through states approximating confusion, euphoria, frustration and Eureka moments. Learning. But when I meet an individual, who has this pain, that constraint, this difficulty, I sometimes don't know where to begin.

Actually, that should be, I almost always know where to begin but sometimes don't know where to go.

So I'm going into the unknown. And that is the practice. Learning to go into the unknown. The only way I'm going to learn it is by bringing more and more curious souls to the table, to discover themselves in a new way for the first time, and - if they like it - maybe the second time and maybe the third time.

So today, although we took a few twists and turns in our exploration, and I wouldn't call the practice a "Functional Integration" (which is what a one-on-one Feldenkrais lesson is called), my guinea pig totally got what the practice was about, she found movement options she hadn't had at the start of the lesson (which completely surprised her) and she was keen for more. I guess you can call that success.

Note to self: it's like ATM. Start with the classics, learn your scales, ie. have a couple of solid FI lesson structures to refer to as a starting point.

Boundaries

Being calm, peaceful, relaxed, isn't a show. It's not just something there for a purpose, of making the way easier for others, of making yourself more acceptable to others.

Being calm is a gift to the self. It is a state of being aware of the self at any given time. It is being aware that I have boundaries, that I have the means to stop others from overstepping those boundaries, and that doesn't necessarily mean they'll like me, or that their way will immediately seem easier.

Remember your self. Remember your nervous system, your breathing. Remember that your environment affects you, and you are allowed to determine what effect it has. You can do this by changing where you are in that environment, or by finding out whether that environment can change, or both. If that environment cannot change, you are allowed to remove yourself from it.

Releasing my voice

Everything is connected, Arlyn Zones would say. As would any ecologist, as would anyone who has anything to do with the practice of observing life.

Where I am now, and how I arrived here.

This evening, I took part in a functional integration session carried out on my self by Zoran Kovic. He asked a question - I don't remember the words exactly. But my answer was something like, I want to feel like I can be OK with wherever I am.

It was in response to environment, to feeling constantly like there are demands on me, time constraints on me, emotional needs to be met just to keep the peace, a feeling of being pulled in many directions. How to cater for all of those demands. How to be in so many places at once. It is a feeling of panic, chaos, not feeling the ground, not getting a sense of where I am, not being OK with where I am.

Part of that environment is negative thinking. Habitual negative thinking. Thinking so negative, it doesn't even know it's negative. I encountered it when I arrived home to my parents' place tonight: compulsive judgement, compulsive criticism, compulsive inability to accept, compulsive subjectivity. I noticed it. I noticed I didn't want it. And this, I realise, is a really major boundary for me.

This FI came after two and a half weeks with Arlyn Zones, a person who has embodied much knowledge and experience, who observes the world with great capacity, who I must remember is human. However, in her presence I felt held, and her leaving left me feeling like the carpet had been pulled out from beneath me.

Anyway, during her time here, she took us through a series of lessons all about releasing the voice, through the base of support, the spine, the way the head rests on the spine, the ribs, the tongue, the jaw. There was a battle going on around my sternum. Let that voice out! No, keep it in! Plus, during her time here, she started to create a major shift in that line along my front left side, from the ground to my pelvis, a line that has become more significant to me in recent months. I told her my left hip is where my doubt resides. It's the place that sparked up, began to spasm, last time I lay on an operating table, just prior to being anaesthetised.

In the FI, I started to feel how that place is also connected to the muscles in the neck, the left side of the neck. Following the demo in which Arlyn created that shift, I felt a new sensation of empowerment running from the inner arch of my left foot up my leg to just left of my vagina. A personal, private and powerful episode of phenomenology.

The factors I listed before my FI with Zoran were many - being in other people's spaces, sleeping in a different bed every month (or every week lately), breaking apart from my lover, riding his inevitable ups and downs, an emotionally demanding mother, work - switching between the intellectual of the work and the sensorial of the training - beating myself up, trying to give work 150%, feeling inadequate. It was all environmental. I told him I'd left the training when my system felt overcooked, and took my self out to a creek and swam. He said, you felt buoyant.

He proceeded to lay me on a blanket and move me ever so slowly, ever so minutely, in waves, to create the slowest moving environment for me that he could. Through the FI I was disturbed to hear a fellow student talking with another member of staff about her pain, very close to us. It disturbed me because I had been looking after that student (happily - looking after others is easy!) just prior to the FI, and I felt like I'd somehow given and then been slapped with a less than ideal FI, distracted by talking and whispers about other people's problems.

But my chest gradually melted. My sternum gradually dropped. The autonomic nervous system, Zoran explained, was settling down.

He gave me some tips. We found that place in my left hip as he was trying to plant my feet on the ground. He suggested ATMs about flexors, bringing the upper torso to the thigh / knee either diagonally, or laterally (I think we did an ATM like this with Arlyn) and doing such an ATM on a mattress so that there is give, and my mid back can work out how to move backward to allow the flexion.

He brought attention to a downward accent in my walk, and encouraged an upward accent, to allow freedom in my head and neck.

There has been so much I've taken in and experienced recently. There was a comment the other night - a trigger - to my sister. You haven't cooked us dinner? But you've only had all day. Yes, all day to raise five children and catch up on all the stuff she can't do when working 5 days a week, which she otherwise would be. The expectations placed upon us are not human. They are not superhuman. They are just idiotic, as Moshe would say. And that's not to say the people who have these expectations are idiots. It's to say that the society in which they (we) live is idiotic.

Holding my own space

Someone suggested to me the other day that starting a blog would help my learning. My ears pricked up and here I am, effortlessly making time to get my learning happening.

The reason it began tonight is because: 1. I went for a massage at Kiva Spa today, and that really made my body recognise its need to slow down; 2. my hosts went out for the evening; 3. I cancelled all plans.

This evening, I started doing the ATM from the morning of the second day of the training.

Several observations:

• I need my own space or a space where I can set a strong intention, in order to carry out an ATM. Being in other people’s spaces, I have been easily distracted. I have this phobia of being interrupted or “busted” by others.
• Meanwhile, it’s easier for me to commit to an ATM when other students and a teacher are around.
• I am not so intent on making “good” movements to “please” the teacher (a habit wired in from growing up) when I’m alone. However, the presence of a teacher makes it more difficult for me to give up. (I took a dive bomb out of this ATM about 10 mins before the end because I was falling asleep and my hosts arrived home.)
• It is easy to simplify your life; you sometimes just have to say no to others.
• My big habit is my big fear of the outcome not being good enough, being a failure. This makes it challenging for me to focus on the details.
• I was comforted by Julie’s comment at the start of the ATM that the exploration of distinctions is a “never ending development”.
• I felt quite out of practice. It felt like the training was a long time ago.
• A distinction was how I felt as a student. I felt less wide-eyed and more knowing. But it was a deep knowing, a knowing in my body.
• I liked Julie’s idea that you can think without words. I’d noticed during the ATM that there are times when the mind drifts toward a dreamlike state, dreamlike because you’re thinking in terms that are not words, such as images, and bodily sensations such as heaviness, lightness, groundedness, etc.