Ep. 24 Let the Light in: Remembering The Good - Solo Episode

Lisa Dawn guides listeners through a somatic practice aimed at enhancing multi-level awareness, particularly beneficial for those feeling anxious or uncentered. 

She emphasizes the importance of connecting with one's body to manage stress and navigate life's polarities. Lisa explores the concept of anchoring in goodness to balance the nervous system, advocating for recognizing and nurturing safety within oneself. She discusses the impact of trauma on the body's stress response, highlighting personal examples like sexual trauma healing. 

The script delves into the role of emotional awareness in relationships, addressing the challenge of staying open to connection amidst previous traumatic experiences. It underscores the significance of self-compassion, patience, and humour on the path to self-empowerment and authentic living.

 Lisa concludes with poignant reflections on finding joy, embracing vulnerability, and fostering genuine connections, advocating for a life lived with integrity and without shame.

Work with Lisa 

00:00 Welcome and Introduction to Somatic Snack

00:30 Exploring Multi-Level Awareness

04:09 Transitioning to Today's Topics: Anchoring in Goodness

08:08 Understanding Emotional Safety and Healing

11:34 Navigating Relationships and Emotional Mastery

23:00 Embracing Self-Compassion and Transformation

24:52 Concluding Thoughts and Farewell

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Lisa 0:11

Hey guys, welcome back. Lisa Dawn here. How is everyone doing out there? I thought we would. Shake things up a bit and begin this, this transmission with a little somatic snack, as my husband refers to them. I call this one multi level awareness. And this practice is great if you're feeling anxious, uncentered, or even for times when you're feeling just a bit unsteady. And also safety first, if you're driving, perhaps do this later, but please listen along. Um, so we're just going to start by listening to your breath, and this is not about changing it. We're just listening. And as you're listening, maybe even softening the face and the jaw. You can even place your hands on your face and massage it a bit. Next feel your feet on the ground. And as you connect with your feet on the ground, The ground moving up to support your feet. See if you can tune back into your breath while feeling your feet on the ground and next bring your attention to your hands again, just locate them. Now you can physically touch them and feel the contours. Just feeling your hands and as you're feeling your hands, see if you can connect back in or if you've lost attention to your breath and your feet on the ground. So now we're feeling our hands, we're listening to our breath and we're connected to our feet on the ground. And now just notice your pelvis and your legs. So focusing on your lower body. and feeling the body's strength and support. Now just checking back in. Have you lost connection with your breath, your feet, and your hands while noticing your pelvis and legs? Just seeing if you can hold this multi level awareness. And it's okay if it slips and it slides. We're just building this muscle of being able to toggle between a variety of different things. Thanks And now the invitation is just to notice how you're feeling from the beginning of this conversation to now, after we've done just a bit of settling and tuning in to the different areas of our bodies. So just notice if there's anything that's different, maybe your shoulders have dropped, maybe you have access to more breath. So let's get into today's variety of topics. I want to start by talking about having an anchor in goodness or lightness. So these are the things that, that calm us, that calm our system, or they just feel good, versus the things that activate us that we register as a threat. So I want to say that when we are overwhelmed, it's so easy to stay in our triggers, and then we get into using our minds to try and figure things out, meanwhile adding additional stress on our already taxed bodies. It's this idea that we can't solve a problem at the level that it was created. So we need the ability and the skill set to move beyond to get a new perspective. So a huge focus on the work that we do as somatic therapists is to help people go back and forth between what feels good and is working and what does not feel good and is not working. And you know, some of us live in our pain. You can probably recall times where everything we read feels like bad news. We fixate on the worst case scenarios in any situation. It's almost like we just cannot allow ourselves to feel good. And from a nervous system perspective, when we are in states of internal chaos or high levels of activation, we'll actually look for information to affirm that that state is accurate. So likewise, if our nervous system is always sending us signals that we are not safe, we will also be gathering proof that the world is not safe. People are not trustworthy and the world is going to shit. So we can very quickly get out of touch with what feels good and and it becomes so much easier to notice the pain and then we keep noticing the pain until that is all we feel. Been there, done that. So having a baseline for safety within requires us to notice what is good and then begin to introduce the stuff we avoid. So going into our personal pain vortex is not helpful if we don't have a solid foot in some goodness. And this is not toxic positivity. It's about learning how to hold polarities. And as you, most of you have probably experienced, life is full of polarities. And so this also reaches over into the work that we do on ourselves. It's so easy just to fixate on getting through. I think many of us have this obsession of getting to the root of all of our pain and misery in like a single session. We want quick. We want to, we want to ride that train out of Painville and pass over the journey. I know I did. I just wanted to be on the other side of pain. We want to go big. And we think that if we don't have a huge emotional release or a painful reaction, that something was wrong or the treatment didn't do much for us. But what I want to say is when we're constantly meeting intensity with intensity, it does not provide the opportunity for our bodies to feel safe. And this applies to so many things in our lives. until we have a safe anchor in our bodies to go into the places that hurt, we just run the risk of re traumatizing ourselves, which is what so many folks experience. So anchoring into what is good can look like so many things. I mean, for me, a huge one is humor. It can be play, it can be adventure, anything that we find pleasurable. It may be expressing things that we appreciate about others or ourselves. It could be the way that we connect with others. And it's like the more that we can see and experience the way life is working for us, it, the easier it is to go into painful things. When we don't have the ability to toggle between what's good and not so good, we experience overwhelm and self protection. So and we can experience that not only with negative or traumatic experiences, but also with seemingly positive events, like being offered a dream job. A new relationship, loving someone more than you ever have, or even giving birth. When something feels too big, our system registers it as threat even when it's not. Some folks call this the upper limit. We have to be able to grow into our desires. We have to grow into the spaces that love and kindness have created within us. And this can even happen in orgasm and is quite common because by nature orgasm is adding arousal or charge to our system and if we are already at our capacity for charge in our system, it can cause us to go into a stress response. So I want to give an example of this because I think it's relevant. When I was healing some of my sexual trauma wounds, a lot of the time after orgasm, my system would go into the stress response response of freeze. Literally, my face and my throat would feel frozen, which would then be followed by, uh, Maybe like a week or two or longer of depression or anxiety or just feeling helpless. And at the time my partner and I thought we were just having some kind of deep tantric initiation. Nope. Was, was y'all trauma. My body was just at capacity for activation and an orgasm would literally blow me out of the water. So there was dysregulation happening and this can look different for many people and I mean, I'm not saying that you know, orgasm will do this every time because oftentimes sexual energy and orgasm are powerful liberators. But when there's sexual trauma or high activation living within us, it can have the opposite effect. So, We just want to get to a point where instead of our full range of emotions, experiences, feeling overwhelming, it just feels like wholeness. And we know how to move with it instead of avoiding it. And like, emotions are intimate and shy things. So it makes total sense that they can take a long time to emerge in relationships. And when they do, so many of us were not taught how to be with our own emotions, let alone the people we are in relationship with. You know, so how does this play into relationships, emotions, self sabotage, or what I like to call self protection? Well, We all want to welcome in partnerships that allow us to feel safe, seen, and respected in conflicts and just in general. We want loving, honest, committed folks we can experience, play, laughter, pleasure, and trust in one another. But we also want to be able to be in conflict with one another, to work through our issues. But remember, lurking underneath, we may have this bias towards what is chaotic simply because it is what we know. We may feel like healthy relationships are boring or dull and don't offer us the excitement our nervous systems are seeking. And then suddenly we're faced with our old survival responses. And instead of bringing love closer, we are pushing it away. picking fights, becoming uber anxious, running away, you name it, it's all in the name of safety. You know how excitement and anxiety can feel very similar. I didn't realize this for more than half my life and it wasn't until I began to notice the nuance and track the sensations in my body as I was experiencing both excitement and anxiety, it was so easy to mistake them. So again, These practices, this healing work that we're doing, this journey towards self empowerment requires patience, humor, and humility, knowing that like no one has their shit together. We're all just walking each other home. And when we expect things to only be a certain way, we miss out on the opportunity to enjoy what is. And instead of appreciating our connections, we start to focus on what's wrong. And what I want to say is. Chronically unmet needs results in our body's inability to shift out of survival mode. So we just keep going back there time and time again. Our basic needs are pointing to love, support, compassion. And instead of expecting others to give those things to us, we can begin the journey by giving them to ourselves and then let the world catch up to our unshakable self regard. that we're building. How beautiful to have this opportunity to love ourselves more deeply, more completely, and from that place watch life conspire to bring more of that to us. But when we're stuck in our survival responses, we can't explore the deeper interests and the desire of our authentic selves. So there will come a point in time where others cannot do this for us and we have to learn how to do it for ourselves. you And this does not mean that we do it alone. It just means that we develop the ability to nurture and take care of ourselves in order to show others how we wish to be treated. And in turn, we automatically become more attuned to what others needs and ultimately learn how to nurture and nourish all of our relationships. And as we know, it's not anyone's job to rescue or complete us because we are capable and whole exactly as you are, as we are. Our job is to remember that and remove the obstacles that keep us from seeing it. Healthy relationships require a commitment of, or two, learning through these moments of difference or disagreement using emotional regulation, active communication, conflict resolution or repair, and compromise as well. So, this requires a relationship with our emotions and the capacity to be able to navigate the positive and negative without running away or shrinking. This goes back to multi level awareness and noticing what's good. It is then we take responsibility for ourselves, empower ourselves, and become active participants in creating the change we so deeply want and need. Because we are the only ones who can ensure that our needs are realistically known and met. And it's only when our needs are met that we feel safe enough to share our gifts and our talents authentically with the world around us. Because the most important relationship we have is the one with ourselves. And our liberation lives in the places we don't want to look. Where are we driven to please others to be liked? Oh, that one. When are we constantly fearful of disappointing or letting others down? Where are we afraid to turn down an invite without an acceptable reason? Or when do we feel like we have to over explain or over apologize when we do? Where do we shrink in order to make someone else feel better? Dang, where are we living the good person persona? So it's about developing the courage to sit in the fire of transformation and allow it to burn down what it may. We have to be able to learn to dance with connection and play with our hearts wide open. And we don't wait until we have it all figured out to let love in. That day will never come. Play now. open now. Healing is forever unfolding. It's not a destination. We don't have to have it all figured out. We will be reborn thousands of times in this lifetime. That is the point, experiencing it all. So the intention of deepening our relationship with ourselves is not to eradicate our need for connection or the desire to find a partner, but finding like a rightful resting place. at home in our bodies, in our hearts, and in our souls, and then welcoming someone else in to experience that. True transformation happens when our bodies feel safe enough to release held emotional memory. We require the warm presence of others with healthy and securely attached nervous systems. So in other words, healing ourselves requires connecting with others, learning how to embrace the good that relationships can bring, excuse me, and also the challenge that relationship can bring. We also do this so we can tend to the wound that chooses familiar pain over unknown happiness. Yeesh, snap, snap, snap. And if being in your body is unfamiliar and unsafe, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It just means safety was never modeled to you. So we're developing that. And our body communicates its ongoing assessment of safety to our brain. So how do we allow for more intimate bonds and connections with other human beings? Well, I think we've been touching on this all along. We have to be able to open ourselves back up to our physical experience, meaning. including our bodies. We do this so we can feel emotionally connected to others because we have a felt sense of okayness and what it feels like to be emotionally connected to ourselves first. And our ability to sense what's happening within our body increases when we enhance our ability to witness our internal sensations. So learning how to identify when our nervous system is stressed creates the opportunity for us to shift ourselves out of a reactive, avoidant, or dissociated state into an open and responsive one. When we become more attuned to what is going on within, we become able to discern, discern symptoms of obvious nervous system stress. We are more comfortable being where we are right now than we are stepping over the threshold into something unfamiliar. So the work that we're doing is so that we can get past that threshold, getting the thing that we say we want, feeling something that's really uncomfortable and growing through it instead of trying to avoid it or stop it from happening. And let me tell you, a trigger is almost always, I would even say always, an invitation to emotional mastery. We go into them as adults so that we can create a different response, so that we can create a different life. And it takes a certain amount of safety to do that. So maybe next time, instead of saying fuck you and walking away from someone we love, maybe we find the courage to say I'm hurt. And this is why that's vulnerable to share those pieces of ourselves. Because the us. in relationships needs to include a you and that you has needs and values and desires that are aching to be witnessed. We also do this so we can stop placing our value in other people deciding that we're valuable so that we can live a life that is centered around our values, our desires, and our integrity. And when I don't know what I stand for, I will always find myself at the mercy of the external world. So we have to keep on choosing ourselves, no matter what, so that we can go from longing to knowing, longing to possibility, from helplessness to powerful. Because when we feel powerless, our nervous system gets dysregulated. We get anxious, nervous, depressed, aimless. Liberation requires accountability. And taking accountability means knowing that we're not only choosing relationships from all of our good parts, we're also choosing relationships from the things we've rejected about ourselves. So, looking within and examining the role our fear, our self esteem, our pain, our immaturity, our wounds have played out in our relationships. It's then we can begin to take accountability to ourselves, to the relationships we say we want, to how we show up. We can give ourselves permission to feel. And this is where compassion and kindness come in. I heard this the other day and I absolutely loved it. Can I love myself like there's nothing to fix? Oh, just feel that one. So beautiful. Can I love myself like there's nothing to fix? Can I celebrate the parts of me that no one celebrates? I love that one too. Oh, nice train in the background. I'm not sure if you can hear that. Can I celebrate the parts of me that no one celebrates? Can I love myself enough to struggle? Yee! These are all so good. Can I look at the parts that need to change? Where am I scared to express? At some point we need to turn towards the parts of us that we had to leave behind. And healing does not happen from a self critical space. We have to have compassion. It's easy to love ourselves when things are going well. Well, what about when things are fucking terrible? What about when things don't go according to plan? I can tell you for many years, my go to was shame. And so back into the shadow I went to wait for another opportunity to try something different. And that is the shift from self criticism to self compassion. It doesn't mean that there's nothing to resolve. It just means that we can be kind to ourselves while doing our internal work. It also means learning how to replace shame with curiosity. And so my friends, it is with that that I'll leave you with something I wrote. Seems a fitting place to slide it in here. The world is often cruel. Be delighted anyway. Stop justifying your happiness as if you needed a reason to rediscover joy, to love deeply, reach out. You never know how much a warm embrace can soften the hard days. Ache with desire. Hold the discomfort, square your shoulders and forge ahead. Make more demands about how others hold your heart. Choose honesty over convenience. Welcome the people who feel like spring after a long winter. Until next week, bye for now.