Thursday, April 18, 2013

Movement

We are born to move, to sense our bodies interacting with everything around us. Think of a baby wanting to grasp, touch, hold things in its mouth, look, gaze at a face, lights, colors. Movement is natural. There is innate curiosity about what will happen if my person moves and comes in contact with you, with nature, with animals, with everything. We are born to move, be curious, experience life, engage in our deepest findings. If you find you are stuck somewhere in your life, my first guess will be to discover what it is you are not allowing to be validated in your life. Resistance is stuck-ness. Resistance is not moving. Risk movement and see what happens.

As I have journeyed and am still moving through graduate school in spirituality, depth psychology, somatic experiencing, learning about the nervous system and trauma, I am discovering my truth as a practitioner. I share it with you this morning.

I have a truth and a methodology of allowing one’s deepest experience to be honored, noticed, and validated in order for it to naturally move through. The experience only gets stuck in the body and the mind when it is rejected and invalidated. Then the response takes on a life of its own, calling the shots unconsciously of course, but nonetheless, controlling. We give the experience too much power when we are afraid of our reactions or needs. Where it takes over our thinking is in the resistance to it, wanting it to go away, and shaming self for having the experience or the response. Our humanness is not being allowed. 

By disallowing our experience ourselves, we then think others are rejecting our reactions too and rehearse over and over in our heads how and why they are now not supportive of us, turning the other into the enemy. This is our projection we have placed onto the other. If we can pull back our projection and realize it is actually indeed ourselves who are rejecting our experience, we can free the other person and ultimately ourselves; freedom to allow the natural flow of activation and rest within the nervous system and our emotional lives. Once the activation is tended, understood, and allowed, it will naturally flow out and move through us. 

Movement. Keep all responses moving so as not to create the freeze or shut down in the system. It is in the freeze that toxins form, adrenals get either stuck on or off and the natural flow from sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous systems gets thwarted. The sympathetic nervous system alerts us to something not being quite right. We need this activation. But we became afraid of it through a culture and upbringing that says to us that our activation is not wanted nor is it “right.” The parasympathetic nervous system, when allowed to naturally flow, will bring our activation into a rest mode when we tend to that which activated us in the first place. If we disallow our reactions and responses, the system gets stuck.

As a spiritual director, graduate student at Adler in psychotherapy, and working with somatic awareness, this is what I implement with all of my clients and have been amazed at the empowerment and healing that happens just by following one’s deepest experience and being curious about what it has to teach them.

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