Somatic Remembering - When was a time you felt that way?
Our joy is timeless, and our bodies don't know the difference.
When my clients tell me how they want to feel and who they want to be in their ideal future, it elicits one of my favorite questions, "When was a time you felt that way?" I use it to open an excercise called "Somatic Remembering"
I'm thinking about this question a lot as I put the finishing touches on the Fracal Inquiry course that starts in a couple days (nudge, nudge)
There are three things that I've learned over the years which makes this a particularly potent question.
First, Our internal state isn't dependent on external circumstances. Ramana Maharshi taught that. It is possible for us to be happy, courageous, focused, or relaxed as a result of our own embodied practice. It doesn't require us to wait for a particular event.
Second, When we focus on powerful memories, we often experience the emotional and vibrational states from those memories in the present moment. The emotions express themselves in our bodies in the form of energetic movement and physical sensation. We remember a happy time ten years ago, and we relax here and now. Our joy is timeless, and our bodies don't know the difference.
Third, The best way to be a certain way is to be a certain way. If you're looking to have more joy in your life, practice having more joy in your life. If you want to be more confident, let the confidence expand through your body as much as you possibly can. This is sometimes called "Somatic Embodiment". It can almost be done as a daily meditation
It's a good excercise. In my practice, I have noticed a few ways that points that often need to be emphasized for people new to this kind of work.
We ask our clients for a specific moment. It might be a ten minute memory, or an hour at the lake. Sometimes the clients will just talk about a vague past, or a long stretch of time. Help them get specific.
We want the moment to be free of resistence or conflict. If the moment is too fraught, find a new moment.
We ask our clients to move into their feelings about the memory. Sometimes they're more comfortable in their heads, and will just rattle off the details. The details are great, but the purpose in recounting them is to engender more feeling.
The idea is to move from memory to emotion to sensation, and then to recognize that the emotion and sensations can be generated independent of the memory. Where does the joy or connection (or whatever) land in the body? Which parts?
Then just practice it! We're moving the past into the present to create a positive future. Time travel at its finest!
Right Relationship in the Psychedelic Space Replay
Jhené Aiko
This song is so soothing to my system these days.
Shiny Things
This has been treating me pretty good too. Here is the Soundcloud Link.
Multiverses! What I've been watching
The Smoke of the Mirror — Toltec Teachings on Cultivating Consciousness
Golden Road Event with Dr. Oscar Perez
Our new psychonaut network, the Golden Road is having a special guest speaker, Dr. Oscar Perez on Monday, August 19th at 8pm Eastern.
Consciousness is a many-sided prism. In intact cultures, it is understood that consciousness is not something that arises in us, so much as we arise within it.For the Toltecs, the understanding of consciousness was approached through the concept of Tezkatlipoka, the Smoke of the Mirror. This concept includes but transcends the Jungian and Transpersonal approaches to consciousness, including aspects of what we commonly known as the Shadow — its recognition, transformation, and integration.In this talk, we will dive into some of the basic concepts of the Smoke of the Mirror. We’ll talk about perception, projection, and the Toltec concept of the Predators of Consciousness. These concepts help us to understand some of the challenging thoughts that we wrestle with in our lives and on the path of healing and integration of our experiences in meditation and ceremony.
Dr. Oscar Perez is a Trauma Recovery Specialist, self-proclaimed Underworld Guide, and teacher of Toltec and Shamanic wisdom for healing ancestral trauma and addiction. He is the bestselling author of The Flowering War: Toltec Teachings for Healing Ancestral Trauma, Overcoming Your Internal Enemies, and Fulfilling Your Life Purpose. He is the founder of Tending The Fires, a community and school for Earth-based healing of personal and ancestral trauma. He has a PhD from Brown University and won several awards for excellence in teaching from Harvard prior to leaving academia to create more engaged, community-based work with Tending The Fires.
And next month on September 16th we'll have William Padilla-Brown teaching Understanding the Human Body as a Biological Computer.