Nurturing Growth: New Moon

We are all healers. Our roles shift and change depending on a myriad of factors, but at one time or another, each of us takes our turn as healer and self-healer, as practitioner and patient. Looking deeper, we can witness how we are all self-healers all the time. Regardless of the role, there is another opportunity to tend to ourselves, to detoxify and rebuild in body, mind, and spirit so that we might be clearer conduits for (self-)healing, co-creating, and co-existing.

"The body is the greatest intuitive tool", I’d often share. I believed it, I just didn’t embody it. Now, in my second year of Somatic Experiencing (SE) Therapy training, developed and hosted by Dr. Peter Levin, my capacity to embody the brilliance of my intuitive body is available to me. Somatic Experiencing has helped heal my body. What’s most beautiful about the SE method is that it is self-healing. Today, I live in my intuitive body.

What is the true nature of healing?  I find that one of the most important distinctions is between ‘healing and curing’. To cure is to focus on the eradication of symptoms, whereas to heal is to emphasize and support a person’s inherent state of wholeness. I often share the following analogy with people I work with; ‘Imagine an apple tree. The apple is the area of symptom, if we were to only focus on the apple, we’d eradicate the symptoms, yet the disease and imbalances remain. However, when we get curious about the roots of the tree, we can heal wholeness. Eradicating disease, irregularities, and release the cause of the symptoms.’  Energy medicine is root work.

Somatic Experiencing is also root work. SE helps reorganize the nervous systems, and greatly reduces, if not completely, trauma responses from the body.  So much of our behavior is not intentional, so much of our behavior is driven by the body’s physiological state we are at the time and if we could be more aware of that, we could help our body be calmer or start to develop skill sets of calming.

I am learning and experiencing just how the methods of subtle energy healing and somatic experiencing help create a healing platform that allows us to work at the root of the cause, physically and energetically. This brings about compassion and wholeness, self-agency, and even a sense of benevolence generosity to the interconnectedness of all things. We are subtle energy, and we are physical. The subtle aspects of ourselves are part of the energy anatomy, a complex set of energy channels, organs, and fields that flow and “dance around you,” the energies that establish the rules and foundation for physical, mental, and emotional health and vitality. When we are grounded and available to be with a calm body we may experience ease in connecting to greater states of self-healing.

If we are in chronic states of trauma responses (fight/flight/freeze), our nervous system feels that it can’t afford to be concerned about anything other than protecting itself. As a collective, we are living in a constant state of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We are being triggered in every way. In one way or another, we are constantly being evaluated. From social media, religion, race, sex, education, etc. Collectively, we’ve generously supported this framework, and effectively now experience fear-framework and threat for simply being us. This could feel rather inescapable.  An ideological threat is very different than a physiological threat, yet the body interprets them in the same way. This is what makes mental and physical traumas the same to the body. This can make it rather challenging for a clear narrative. Being in a regulated (calm) body lends agency and self-authority. It also lends an awareness to resonance or a level of relating, so we can contextualize why we may be so reactive to an atmosphere, person, place, or event… for example.

Triggers tell us “This is a familiar pattern or situation that’s led to pain before”.  The recent Solar Eclipse in April invited me to cultivate a deeper wisdom to my trigger(s). Triggers become reactive behavior. Feeling powerless is one of the trigger themes I worked with.  I knew that if I didn’t change how I oriented to these triggers I was going to remain entangled by them. So I spent all of April tending to, healing, and liberating myself. I immediately experienced shifts.  It is a raw and vulnerable journey to have an open heart while in trust, and willingly release and receive where I never have before.

Our relationships suffer when we live from our wounds, rather than our hearts’ knowing and integrity. Being resistant to tending to them and avoiding cultivating the wisdom and beauty that dwells in those areas, we block our ability to be lifted and empowered by the pain. Permitting ourselves to release pain, and befriend the eye of the trigger, almost immediately heals the physical body. We mustn’t carry burdens of shame and fear to our self-detriment.

If at the end of the day, you only have little capacity for self-healing, try this. Give yourself permission to ask yourself and maybe even another for compassion, reassurance, and be reminded that everything is okay. Feel the floor beneath your feet and claim, I AM HERE.  Then, invite in love. Call it in and sit with it. Know that you are love and loved. If we can bring what’s in the way up, and out from our hearts, we continue to heal and strengthen together. Then love begins to take the lead in the healing journey. Trust and know that everything emerging before us and within our relationships is emerging in our lives and relationships for a reason. If we are experiencing it, trust that our loved one(s) is too.

Cultivating relationships and atmospheres that support a calm body that can trust reciprocity and be with love and compassion is a tender, slow process. This brings about a state of true balance in the body, mind, and spirit. You are your greatest healer.  Be curious, healing is a learning process that will lead you to love yourself again.

xo Tiffany Marie