Trauma Training Tip
When our biological urge to protect and defend is thwarted and left incomplete, that urge remains in our tissues. Healing requires us to access those places where a collapse or freeze state has been hidden away and helping it thaw, mobilize, and find clear voice. Our qi or “energy” and our blood are then better able to nourish, vitalize, restore, renew, find power, and enhance life. We will likely feel more spacious on the inside when we are not braced against an historically held freeze response.
We are witnessing this phenomenon in our nation’s body. The release of generations of thwarted attempts on the part of Black and Indigenous people to protect and defend from the life threats inherent in White Supremacy is opening up space in our national culture. The Confederate flag has been removed from Mississippi’s state flag, statues of Confederate soldiers are being taken down – sometimes by government order, schools are being renamed, initiatives to reform policing are underway, books on racial healing and workshops by thought leaders are highly sought after.
Healers have a very special role to play in these times – to help ensure that the transformation our nation longs for goes beyond conceptual or academic appearances to embodied ones. We can support:
- Capacity building in the kidney/adrenal system – helping people recognize the difference between “a snake and a rope” – helping them take a moment in time before sending an impulsive – and too often unfortunate message of threat.
- Regulation in the Sympathetic nervous system, to support breadth of vision and the development of strategic and comprehensive solutions to the suffering our nation faces in our social contract on race, as well as the necessary transformation of our health care delivery system and our economic foundation.
- Coherence in the heart or the ventral vagus nerve to help Americans see the humanity in people who are different from themselves, and to access our more compassionate, creative and thoughtful neo-cortex. We can help people “walk towards each other” in the face of disagreements.
- Transformation in our guts that helps ensure that the lessons we digest from this period are life-expanding rather than contracting ones.
- Cultivation of our body’s felt sense – the foundation of moving from cognitive, conceptual understanding to embodied transformation of our inner reality.
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again, “America needs its healers!”
Alaine’s Two Cents
I’m giving a shout-out to Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mt. Rainier, Maryland. For 25 years they have helped keep the heart of my community “in rhythm and on the beat” using the movement arts, theatre and arts education. In times like the ones we are living in, it is critical that we experience vibrations that touch our hearts. Joe’s turned their annual fundraising Gala into an evening of “movement, hope and healing” featuring local artists and healers in an amazing on-line offering.
I’ve been supporting Joe’s for years, and was honored to be asked to present this video on trauma healing and the creation of a new America that we are witnessing on our streets and in our institutions.
“Forward ever, backward never!”
You can join me in supporting Joe’s here.
Check This Out!
I’m looking forward to this webinar featuring two amazing authors and prophets speaking on the healing of America’s most primal wound.
More information and register here.
Clinical Curiosity
Q. I find myself feeling heart-broken about the impact that CoVid 19 is having on our world. Some days it’s hard to find hope – certainly to find joy. My heart feels tight and heavy and sometimes just plain inaccessible. It can be hard to think or focus – to find any joy in my relationships, and sometimes it affects my sleep, and then I have a hard time coping with my day. It certainly affects my clinical work as well as my personal life.
A. Yes, I understand. Truly. I do.
I’m going to offer you an exercise I learned from Kathy Kain. She calls it “Objecting without contracting.” We can – and I would say we should be – objecting to many things in our world. People are suffering mightily. There are so many wrong-headed cultural, medical and economic obstacles to realizing our full potential as individuals and as a nation. It can be overwhelming. It can be heart-breaking.
Taking time with – and offering your compassionate attention to that “tight and heavy heart” – or wherever that body-sense of “objection” is showing up will support it to transform. You may cry, you may shake, you may scream. I promise you – you will have more space in your body and in your mind when that objection has an opportunity to be lovingly witnessed and held. You may need to return to your sense of objection and return to offering compassionate attention to your heart several times – in tick-tock fashion.
Bit by bit, the contraction will soften and you will find your heart. It will open up, transform, and move out. You will be better able to find joy, use your mind thoughtfully, rest deeply and connect with your loved ones when your heart is not so heavy, tight and inaccessible. You will be better able to serve.
We can object to the personal and social wrongs we see and not hurt ourselves. It does not serve the creation of the new world that we long for when we are in a state of contraction. We will be more effective contributors to a more regulated world when we ourselves are also more regulated.
You can do this exercise with yourself – and you can certainly offer it to your clients in both virtual and in-person sessions. Let me know how it goes!