tell me a story part 2 the body
How to start? Starting is so hard!! I can think about something for weeks, years, and then when I sit down to write about it, I feel frozen, overwhelmed. Sometimes I just imagine people talking shit for ten minutes, or thinking ugh, UNSUBSCRIBE, this ol’ broad just keeps on quackin! (What if that’s how I talked in my head? Like super old timey!) Here’s what I have literally never pictured, someone opening their inbox, and being so excited and curious to see what on earth is going to unfold this week. AND then finding something that is useful to them, or even better, lights up their heart, and gives them a little courage to follow the heart memo they’ve received. Literally never! And that’s so silly because I have heard so many wonderful things from you, and every time I do it fills me with so much feeling that I basically cry, and then I just forget it.
I am used to my stories, my maladapted version of the world suits me just fine, until I realize that it doesn’t suit me fine at all, until I realize I want more for myself, and my current programming is not aligned with actually getting more, but with keeping myself overly comfortable, and therefore stuck. The stories I tell myself are not facts. I have in fact gotten more positive feedback about the newsletter than negative. The faster I realize I am making a choice to tell myself these same sad stories, the faster I can get to work on shifting them.
Being happy takes work. Building the life you want takes work. I think that this is such great news!! Unless you want to play Candy Crush 24/7, then it’s probably bad news.
Writing a gratitude list, achievement tracking, or as a friend recently said to me, a done list vs a to do list, a blessings list, a what I love list, a what I love about myself list, a what’s going well in my life list. When I prompt people in Sunday Soul with 10 things that are going well in your life, the first thing I always see is sudden faces of bewilderment, it’s like time stops for a moment as the brain stands frozen in a What the F did you just say to me, Davis?
These are all incredible practices to begin to shift our thinking, but what about our bodies? What does our body have to do with anything? Well, 80% of information sent up to the brain to process information comes from our body, so I’d say quite a lot. I’d say 80%, A LOT.
We’ve all had that experience of trying to convince ourselves to not be anxious or scared. We have all stood in the mirror filled with fear or sadness or desire and said some weird ass shit to ourselves about how it’ll all be okay. And that’s okay! It’s us building a relationship with ourselves, it’s us trying to soothe ourselves. Sweet!
The language of the nervous system is sensation. Read it again. Our nervous system speaks the language of sensation. I will also repeat here that our nervous system runs like 6x more slowly than our thinking meaning making brain. So in order to get the nervous system in on the system we gotta learn the language of sensation and slow down. You can do that, right? Learn a new language and slow down.
You can do it, but it’s not so easy, because once we’ve put something off for a really long time, it’s always hard to face it. Often people think of clutter as physical matter that is clogging up their office drawers or their closets, but our bodies collect so much emotional, physiological, energetic clutter, and then we tell our stories from this place. We make up stories from the scared six year old place in the body about how Bob seemed liked he liked us and was gonna take care of us forever, but then he left because we are bad or ugly or had a moment where we were just too extra and cut off all our Barbie’s hair and tore off her left leg. Oops.
How old are your stories? Have you ever found yourself starting to tell a real old crowd pleaser at a dinner party, and on like the second sentence you are so bored and filled with regret. Then cuz people are staring at you, you keep going and you try to pretend that it still works, but inside you are just wishing that Phyllis would interrupt you and start talking about her trip to Cancun again. Are you so bored of your stories yet?
Somatic Experiencing created by Dr. Peter Levine explores and tracks our experiences through the lens of five channels, Sensation, Image, Behavior, Affect, and Meaning. We all lean on one or two as our processing crutches; I have a very strong sensation and image channel, my feelings channel is a little bit out of reach sometimes. When trauma happens, big T or little t, when our agency gets taken from us we often get stuck and these channels help us to navigate where the gooey is. I will get more into this at a later date, maybe I’ll even do a week exploring all of them, but for today SENSATION.
Have you ever been through a break up, or a death, and then every single story you tell yourself about your life is just pure crap? Like I see that maybe the story has a different outcome or possibility, but I just really really feel like the sky is falling down around me and it will be FOREVER; broken hearts only play sad songs on the juke box.
So a big part of changing the stories we tell ourselves about our life is getting to know how to talk to the nervous system. It is learning to listen to and engage with the stories that we are holding in our bodies. I believe we can only go as far as our nervous systems will allow us to go, so maybe it’s time to do some intrapersonal networking, and start to make friends with our bodies.
This is as far as we are going to go today, at the introduction of an idea, because remember, slow it down, listen, then you can forget everything until you remember again.
POTENTIAL PRACTICES
How strong is your sensation channel? How strong is your sensation vocabulary?
Find yourself on the sensation channel GPS. 0 -10. Zero being What body? 10 being it feels like a little glitter swimming pool on my elbow that flows into sharp tacks down my arm, and on and on. No number is good or bad, it is information.
Sit down for ONE minute AND THINK ABOUT SOMETHING WONDERFUL THAT HAPPENED TO YOU THIS WEEK. Can you name 1-5 sensations that you notice in your body? IF I HAD A LOUD SPEAKER I WOULD SAY AGAIN, SOMETHING WONDERFUL. Because we always want to get into the nitty gritty of what sucks and hurts, but what if we start at what feels pleasant, so that we always remember we have a nice space to come back to. And if something unpleasant comes up, maybe get up and go do the dishes.
Go on the internet and look up lists of sensations. Maybe pick one or two that stand out to you and see if you notice that sensation anytime throughout the week.
If you catch yourself telling yourself a story about how all the worst things you could imagine are about to happen, can you take one moment to notice if you feel tight or lose in your body. Can you take a short walk, and then see if the story still feels as real?
When somebody asks you how you are doing, tell them something that is going well before you launch into well, this person at work looked at me, and I was like...
big xo’s, J
photo by Guy Bourdain
