Moment of Mind
As the Northern hemisphere of the earth this week shifted some of us from the summer season to fall via transiting through the autumnal equinox, I celebrated.
I love fall!!!
And also spring.
And also contrasts of temperatures.
Basically, when the season changes I feel some excitement; quite possibly because as someone with a sensitive body I get the chance to shift how those senses are supported. One reason I particularly love living in a northern latitude is seasonal change. In Arizona I felt like it was sunny with heat and sunny with cold and that was about it. I still appreciated the subtle variations in change, don’t get me wrong. And the Pacific Northwest has a bit more drama and pizzazz that’s hard to miss.
The applied mindfulness invitation this week is to notice where you have rituals in your life that you want to deepen…or where might you start a new one?
Since we’re talking about seasonality, do you have a ritual that celebrates seasonal transition? Maybe it’s as simple as the packing up of summer clothes and pulling out of the cooler weather clothes.
I invite you to explore the sensations of one or more of your existing rituals with your whole body. What does it feel like for your skin and sensory touch? How about your nose, does it notice any scents unique to this ritual? Are there sights or sounds that are particularly pleasing? If you want to go inside further, you might notice how your body connects to the ground as part of the ritual. You can feel your feet or body held up, supported at any time….why not in a ritual?
In my Forest as Nourishment e-course I bring up the difference between ritual and ceremony. Basically a ceremony takes a ritual – or any repetitive activity you do intentionally – and connects it to the sacred. If you want to go further, I invite you to notice where you may be transitioning a ritual into the realm of ceremony?
A ritual I’m transitioning into ceremony is turning toward anxiety or resistance to experiencing emotions. This fall I’m enrolled in the Integrated Somatic Trauma Therapy certificate program to learn as many ways to resource the nervous system to return to presence as possible. “Soma” means the complete human organism, as a self organizing system inclusive of the body, all of its internal systems, the self that the brain constructs, the spirit, the life force, the intelligence in all of its wholeness. At the same time, I’m in a second iteration of Clare Dimond’s RESET program, where we continue to peel away layers of false beliefs about what we are not…to see further into the truth of who we are.
It has been a long path of supporting the body to expand its capacity to be with emotional experiences, and the sensations that accompany them. The trauma history of early childhood led to a conditioned belief that I, or perhaps this physical body, doesn’t have capacity to feel. For most of my 20s and 30s memories of childhood hurts was so beyond available supports that the intelligence of the system used coping mechanisms to hold those feelings at bay through shutting down. Basically there was a belief of “I can’t handle feeling bad” running. This belief at its core also includes a belief in being separate from/a victim of life, rather than also being made of/a creator of it. Yes, terrible things happen, and also we create. It’s a both/and.
Mindfulness practice and somatic trauma healing practices continue to offer new learning to this system…that these beliefs of separateness and lack of capacity are entirely untrue. In fact the body is adept at initiating and completing a full emotional experience, it’s designed for it. While the mind has acquired beliefs that generate resistance to feeling, and this adds further suffering to the initial experience, the physiology of the system is still one of capacity. The system’s innate capacity is for a rise and fall of an emotional cycle. It knows completion, even if it’s more practiced at avoidance and unfulfillment. It makes sense now to support its return to staying fully with the full range of experiences.
This week as I noticed avoidance once again showing up as procrastination, as anxiety about what would happen in a projected possibility of x, y or z… I could see the mind’s creations for what they were. It was a proposed future that wasn’t happening now. One where I would fail, people would be upset, and I wouldn’t have capacity to handle either my failure or people’s reactions.
This pattern happens nearly daily. It is a companion to any social engagement of more than three people. Mindfulness practice has helped me find the sensations in the body and breathe into them slowly. This is the core self emerging to re-parent that small child inside. Through presence the system unlearns that hiding and resistance pattern and reclaims a physiological response of staying present so the emotion can run its course.
There are a lot of hiccups and perhaps half of the time I stay in avoidance. Given that repetition supports embodiment, I wondered if adding a ritual of feeling into the sensations of the body every morning, either with or without meditation, would contribute to the healing process. My intention now is to make this a ceremony of healing through feeling at least once a day. To honor the avoidance and anxiety and projections as teachers…as showing up to guide me back to the core self of presence, to guide me home as my coach Clare Dimond would say.
I’d love to hear what rituals you’re exploring,
Much love,
Tia
Love for Your Inner Science Activist Nerd
There’s extensive research about the need the human brain has for ritual; indeed that our brains may have developed in part through our acquiring rituals, and how deeply ritual is a part of every human culture. In more than one book on trauma recovery, authors I admire discuss the mental health benefits of some type of intentional ritual. I believe it is because many repetitive efforts can involve presence. Lewis Mehl Madrona in his book Healing the Mind Through the Power of Story has a chapter on ceremony that helped me understand what it means to connect with something sacred – where ritual transitions into ceremony. His book includes themes to support you making your own ceremony (rather than taking from a culture you don’t know much about). Ritual and ceremony, he notes, is not something that one tribe, one culture, or one religion owns. It’s a collective human creative practice.
It’s from that mindset that I read the book The Power of Ritual by Casper Ter Kuile. I picked it up to see if I should add it to my 200 level undergraduate class called Understanding Communities. While it’s a bit short for that purpose, I loved its gentle meander through situations we all do already: eat, rest, move the body, read, etc. as entry points for ritual. Really though he’s talking about spirit, community, belonging, and therefore ceremony in many examples. He also repeatedly points back to the connection and wholeness that are part of who we are. The author walks through observations (and the occasional study) of a sub-set of modern humans who are moving away from formal, organized religion, yet still cultivating ritual within a secular context. What results is an exploration of how many people are creating communities and culture when it would otherwise be lacking.
As someone who has nearly no ties to the cultures of my ancestral heritage (Eastern European Jewish on one side and on the other: Scottish, British and a handful of Northwest European, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ties that I’m not sure how to learn more about from just Ancestry.com results) I recognized some of my pursuits among the groups described in the book.
I found the author’s pointing out “this is not this religion…and yet notice how people are doing something that echoes this practice” helpful. In reading online reviews, one of the critiques of the book is that the author does some referencing of people creating ritual in a secular context and then compares it to organized religion traditions such as Jewish, Muslim, Christian or one of many Indigenous cultures. For one reader, this came across as appropriative. For example, when the author uses a word from a specific religion (for example using the term “sabbath” to refer to intentional forms of rest) for a group of practices that aren’t connected to that religion – that’s unnecessary. You can take a break from electronics without referring to it as a sabbath, for example.
To be clear, I don’t recommend that. Instead, consider creating your own ritual for honoring what’s important to you that’s unique to you, instead of using the tools, words, songs, and practices of other cultures. Particularly if you have historically been separated from your origin land, cultures, and peoples. This is what the groups the author featured were doing.
Ritual is a way to use your creative instincts in structuring your days. I create ritual around waking, sleeping, walking, eating and even swimming. I include ritual in teaching and in connecting to my spouse. I’m in the process of developing a course on peri-menopause that will include building ritual for this transition time. It’s a way of marking and honoring change.
I’d love to hear how you work with ritual.
Get Your Park Groove On
Columbia Park in North Portland is just over 35 acres of a community space. It doubles as a type of arboretum with multiple different tree types. It’s an accessible park with many paths through and around the various attributes.
The day I visited children were on the playground, there was a lively game on a field (too far away to tell whether it was soccer or softball), and folks were out exploring. There are benches for resting, a native habitat section for pollinators, and so many trees! After spending time in forested areas, sometimes going to a park with a lot of trees feels strange because the different levels of undergrowth are replaced with grass. As a park lover though, I was happy to plop down and rest on the lawn, looking up at the sky through the tree canopy.
Upcoming Events & New Offers
The Forest as Nourishment workshop registration closes on Oct 5th. If you’re wanting to start your own ritual in deepening your relationship to the more than human world, this is the workshop for you.
If you’re over the age of 60, you can check out one of the upcoming forest bathing walks I’m offering through the City of Portland’s Lifelong Learning program. I think there are one or two seats left.
The next workshop I’m offering starts in January “Peri- so very menopausal”. The title is a work in progress, much like the peri-menopause process! Six weeks of connection, ritual, and exploring. Core themes (in no particular order) include: sex, elderhood, change, loss, gain and honoring.
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