Aspis Somatics
Switch from a bottom feeder. Someone who resonates others’ pain. Doesn’t really help those. What people need is this who occupy, and took step to another plane.
What makes a difference is a friend… Someone who engages deeply, but stays at a different plane. Go there… Way of being… Not reacting.
There is a point at which I am ready to say “I’m done.”
At this point, I face all my distractions, and I say “I’m done.” I face my confusion, and I say, “I see you, and you can’t stop me”. And I face my exhaustion and my strong inner sensations and I say you are not all. And I find that glimpse of the sky and me under it and say “You are real”. I will work with my sensations and choose to go for a walk and step into what is hard, but necessary for me to open; at that same point that I could collapse.
The moment is the same, and I have a choice. This moment can either mean trauma, or it can mean a step forward. Collapsing and moving are choices from the same thing. Not choices in a cognitive kind of way. If I go cognitive and override what is here to act, then I am back where I was before. Treating life, my most important parts with override.
Instead, its this near impossible form of moving forward, with all. Breathing into, allowing, feeling the powerful sensations and emotions – those that would otherwise make me collapse – and taking steps, very very small and compassionate steps forward.
I honor myself by honoring my sensations & experiences as my own, but also finding that somewhere that I am also something else. So much bigger and more secure.
And I walk, where I could have collapsed.
Everything is perception.
4 Principles that Help Me Deeply
1. 100% Responsibility – especially in the most impossible things
2. Boundaries – I am not responsible for other people’s emotions.
3. Easter – I am something that is more than what I thought, transfiguring
4. Grief instead of Dissociation – Feel it, allow it, build a body that can allow; but don’t totally believe it
We have lost our connection with our somatic time scale. This is the time scale of learning, the time scale of growing, the biological-emotional time scale that growth and life happens. We notice that when we spend the time in the presence of children, even caring for children. What is the time scale that things can unfold while creating a supporting and learning environment around them? What is this this supported level space of effective eating, nourishing, sleeping, integrating, and release of past baggage that allows us to learn and to step into our lives.
I notice this in the contrast, and in the gift of doing corporate work while also working somatically with myself, with colleagues and clients, and with also having the front hand view of raising a child and keeping the diligence and pace / almost a protective pace / of keeping that life environment effective and nurturing for her and for those who I hope to keep learning and being supportive for, including myself and clients.
This is not a sentiment of berating, or saying ‘this is better’, ‘others are bad’. Rather, it is a sentiment of knowing this time scale. Can we find it in our bodies and in our processes, as we look back on our lives? What timescale, what way of being, what support in the environment, what way of caring for ourselves and having others be available made it most possible to learn and grow as a human being, in those (deeply changing) times in our lives? To find and live into this awareness is to be more fully alive.
This is because we are human beings. We grow deeply at a certain pace, and to know that somatic pace is to open to living in an alive (and therefore sacred, i.e. when we are really here giving ourselves/others the best chance to be here we are sacred, because being here and whole is illumination of living).
So I am not an either-or person. I advocate for touching into our learning and integrating sensibilities. This is valuable in: all lives, organizations, people and settings.. and it takes so many unique forms I cannot limit it with dogma of saying one way is bad. But see, seek, know a somatic sensibility. What is that pace of growing in your life? This is worth protecting, nurturing, knowing and growing awareness and practice.
Love,
– Rebecca
The morning is the most precious, young part of myself and my day. My inspiration is there. My tender, timid, softest opening is there. Life force flows there.
I find when I am holding onto information and content, its because I can’t yet find myself. When I touch that inside, I can easily begin to let go.
A guardian angel is a part of us. Its the part of us that returns us to being whole. It comes from us.
Life hives off the part of us that makes us whole. The part that makes us complete as we are, perfect without doing. Self-contained and content as we are. That happens in life.
We fragment. We need to become something, something that emphasizes a facet. Over-develop aspects that work and protect us. Put forward the parts that can handle (at least partially) the stresses of fitting into a social world, surviving outside.
Developing the do part.
The guardian angel is the part that remembers who we are. It is the part that embodies, holds, holds onto that essence. It is that part, the formation of something, uniquely personal that will continue to exist, exist and protect us, exist and remind us, exist and support us, even as we form into a do-er self.
The guardian angel is an aspect of our being. An aspect that connects and links us to our perfection, our creation, our divinity. It comes from the part of us, where this experience is not even abstract. Because where we come from, and when we arrive in this world whole, this is not abstract, it is the water we swim in.
My daughter Ada is in Kindergarten. This is a neat but hard transition. She is entering institutional life. The pressure of so many rules, regulations, must-do’s. Much about managing bodies, managing and creating institutions. The loss of so much self-explored and organic-group explored activity and learning.
She feels that pressure.
Also the self-consciousness, a deep change in perception. Learning that I need to survive in this. Its largely social. Its bigger than me. I need to learn how to do this and fit in. Not love and joy for joys sake. The environment is not necessarily supportive and there just for me. I need to shrink my living to see what is welcome, possible. What fits. It no longer starts inside, out. The outside is a function of my inside expression. The outside is something that exists, and I need to see who I can be in it. The abrupt shift, turning outside in, hiving off our authentic, simple self-expression. To create something formed outwardly.
And she feels that weight. She feels that pressure. She is fine in so many ways. She, and others, need to build protections and functional ways of being. Becoming a do-er, is crucial to survival, it is part of what we do on this earth as human beings, it is part of the developmental process, the experience of moving through the journey of life. But from a spiritual perspective, and by this I mean that part of ourselves connected to wholeness, the part where this is not even abstract, but our actual way of being, a felt sense, a perception and experience in the world, it is the part that some essence, gets, relatively quickly, forgotten. Harder to know.
Today Ada is getting a guardian angel. A friend gave us the idea. It is a way of offering something that addresses her anxiety. It is offering something that is real, at least I am discovering this, as I see how this concept is emerging so organically and naturally from within this developmental moment in her life.
And it fits with her knowing and connecting back to her wholeness. We are going to a small special bookshop, one with lots of sacred small objects. I am allowing her to pick her guardian angel. We’ve talked about the idea for about a week. Ada has been having anxiety at night anticipating the things that are unknown about the next days school day. It has been helpful to talk about it. It has been helpful to normalize it, talk with her about how others,myself included feel that way. It has been helpful for her to use her ‘breathing tool’, something they offer in school. And it has been helpful for her to do some drawings, and she has drawn some amazing images of her face, in ‘nervousness’, ’scared and not knowing what comes next’, and ‘afraid’. But these are all still managing the ‘feelings’. There is a whole person there. There is a spiritual being there. There is someone who does not have to ‘control the world’ to be safe. There is someone who can learn to let go, and trust, so she can just be in her life, and not be obsessing about the parts she can’t control.
And for us, for her, we are introducing the guardian angel. It is the part of her she is forgetting. It is the part of her, she loses touch with when she is anxious, or her world feels bigger than her. And it is a something, a real something, a pointer back to what is always there. And she will find it and pick it.
Ada is a very open girl. She sees and allows the connection between the practical doing realm, and the subjective, fluid being realm. And she, in her life, is testing her relationship and perception between these realms. She will do great in school. She can do, and she is bright. But can she ‘do’ without fragmenting so much, without losing contact so much. Can we as parents, often as women, as spiritual beings (not in some woo-woo sense, but in the sense of having worked hard to be rediscovering wholeness) add and allow this connection between worlds and parts of ourselves and theirs.
For me, this little guardian angel, and the practice and remembrance it represents seems beautiful.
We will see how it goes.
**
I give thanks and acknowledgement to Wendy Hammond-Matthews who surfaced the idea of a guardian angel as a spiritual option for working with anxiety. I thank Ada for showing us this potential opening in this developmental turn in her life. I welcome the curiosity and input of others, as this is just an experiment and a creative offering and option in how we work with spirituality in our lives, in a real, and responsive, and deeply feminine practice. I thank my friends who let me send this very different kind of message and mini-essay, journal-type entry to them for experiencing. Much love, Rebecca
**
Questions
It is not meant to be denominational or a specifically Christian entity. I do not intend or experience any binary with any other form of God, Goddess, Diety, or Protector. But it makes me curious, what is the aspect, the other names of something that is personal, holds and protects us, and returns us to the felt (already existing) remembrance of wholeness, as if they hold the wholeness, which we in that moment cannot fully see in ourselves?
1. What would be other names and entities that would expand the intention of this touchstone or protector that specifically has this dimension of wholeness? Not a specific power, an aspect or way of being that is needed in the moment, but our wholeness?
2. What is that in other faith traditions? What is that in other forms?
3. What does it make you see?
This is how I decide what I am doing now. Its how I devote my attention.
I start with what is most important to me. For people, it’s who do I want to devote attention to right now. Not who needs it. Or who is banging on my window. But who do I need, and want, to devote attention to right now. What relationships, what conversations, what areas of really being honest are most important to me now. How do I catalyze those conversations, those exchanges and interactions now.
I never did it this way, I always responded to where the attention and noise was. Not what was needed by me.
This shift is this awareness that I have often put my attention, and my deepest sacred parts and self, into places and people that are not ready for that trust. I was young and some crucial relationships were looking to be held and cared for by people who had their own traumas, their own limits and needs. And I, didn’t yet know or discover, or arrive at the health and resources in myself, to see that I have the choice to live my life in a way that I am caring more and more for myself, and more and more surrounding myself with people who have that floor, who have done that work, or found themselves in places where they can trust. And so, I devote myself to my self-care. I build a spiritual practice and community where I take and care for my deepest questions and opening to healing. And I decide, I put my priorities first. First with those who nourish my life. I put my deepest trust and intimacy in those who we build a shared dance of learning, caring, and intimacy. And I let them go, build the ability to let go, so that they can go off and continue to be themselves and grow. And I don’t start the other way.
So each morning I decide and look, where do I put my attention relationally, and I start there. Everyone will figure out their own way. They will figure it out especially when I am honest about resonating where I am, and how I relate, through my own authentic experience. And what you put attention to grows. I and others will seek that out, by following that area of light, and we will find the relationships we need and the discussions we need to have.
It is not avoiding. Because important, difficult discussions also need to happen. But I do it with a knowing (a greater knowing) of who I am and how I care for me.
I can feel the shift. Its never been this way before.
I invite you to bring a big, beautiful cloth for this work.
Let it drape around you.
It will make you feel lovely.
Offer gentleness.
How would I operate as a professional and supportive, powerful, delicate coach?
I wold stay with them. Let them let go.
Let their natural curiosity take over.
I would support whatever unfoldment emerges. I would let them stay in it and work themselves out. Discussing each part with them.
I would not intervene in it.
I would invite them into experiences to be recognized and use their gifts, which may surprise them. (I would reflect back to them their gifts; I would give them invitations as equals).
I would treat them like an equal and share what I have with discernment, and a noble air.
These are the somatic equivalents of the 4 tasks of grief
1. Stop. (Stop again, stop & be stopped)
2. Sit with yourself. Sit with others. (A foremost task of grief)
Sit more than you want to sit.
Sit longer than you think you can sit.
Sit beyond what you ever though possible. Then sit some more.
Cry at every surrendering.
The pain of sitting and will eventually let you release.
Discover this as joy.
3. Sit while living. (Back and forth)
4. Live as your sitting. (Integration)
* By sit, I mean reflective, contact with your subtle self. The part of you that is the deepest part of you. The place you go to where everything is gone. The part that is uniquely you and not you at all. A felt sense of where you need to go.