If we’re connected here it’s probably because in some way we’ve impacted one another. That’s the thing about being human, we impact one another. It feels important to me to be intentional with my impact so I’m pausing inside the muchness of this moment to remind you, you are loved. You matter.
Yesterday I wrapped assisting a training for trauma therapists, the first 2 years of Somatic Experiencing training led by Dr Shideh Lennon in the Hudson Valley (our first local cohort). The work that emerged inside this cohort impacted me deeply. I hope the impact might ripple through you also. I trust you to discern if it feels okay enough to turn in deeper with me and invite you to meet yourself with care.
This module we somatically explored Natural Disasters, Horror, Torture, Ritual Abuse, War, and Survivor Guilt, Emotional, Relational, Developmental, Social and Intergenerational Trauma and Shame, timely topics set against this current geopolitical backdrop.
Inside the training container, I returned into awareness of tightness in my shoulders, back, and belly. Bracing in my jaw. I listened to collective discussions and unfolding learnings. I pendulated in and out, tuning in bit more and then a little more to what I usually turn away from. I started to come back into a bit of contact with stuff our culture has normalized, stuff I have learned to stuff away so I can keep on keeping on. Over time, I had stopped noticing my body. And I noticed this was also true inside student practice sessions. And also within families, communities, and I’d guess, the whole of human history.
I dipped in a bit more, with slow tenderness, and noticed a slight tremble. I know this tremble. I’ve felt it before. It holds ancient knowings. I’ve experienced its emergence inside hard relational spaces, inside feelings of terror, inside the helplessness of witnessing horrible events, and recognizing existential threat in my bones. The tremble scares me. I tend to turn away from it when it arises in me and also in resonance with others. I have a pattern of turning away from it when it points towards what I fear, what I’ve turned away from, avoided, refused to witness. When it points to grief and shame.
The tremble is the unfreezing. Like when your foot falls asleep and then as it wakes, it’s going to hurt. That hurt in and of itself is not a bad thing, Shideh says, it’s a coming to life. I slowly trace into a felt sense of the roots of hurt, harm, pain, loneliness, disconnection, loss, grief, sadness, worry, fear, protection… the paths of humans bumbling thru life, intentional or not, impacting one another. Reenacting harmful histories and traumas of generations past. And I meet these realities:
We’ve all been hurt.
We’ve all caused hurt.
We keep repeating these cycles.
What if the job of our pain, of our tremble, is to help us humans unravel these cycles of harm in big and small ways everyday? Can you feel into your impact on those with less power and privilege than you—and simultaneously remember, you are loved. You matter.
