Why knowing the language of PolyVagal Theory could change your life

A mental model that has served me well in this journey of growth and optimal mental health is to view the process as if we are learning how to be experts at river kayaking. The river being life, the kayak being your body-vehicle and the paddles being your breath. A wild and beautiful journey that requires presence and power to stay centered, present and "in control" as you make the most of whatever terrain you find yourself in.

Before you can embark on a river kayak journey, joyfully riding into the rapids and knowing when and how to re-fuel and restore, first you must get to know the tools and map.

When we live unconsciously, your kayak and paddle may feel like they are working against you. Perhaps you notice you have paddling patterns that are not appropriate nor efficient. It would prove helpful to know how and why to use various paddling strategies as well as how to self-track so you can know what kind of state your kayak is in and how you unconsciously paddle in certain states versus how to notice and then choose how to consciously paddle.

In order to do this, I have found Stephen Porge’s Polyvagal Theory to be extremely helpful. It is a template to see how the nervous system works and why tools of self-compassion are necessary to develop patience and loving space for learning and growing, because being a beginner is not easy.

Before we dive into polyvagal theory, let’s review the Autonomic Nervous System:

The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) controls involuntary responses to regulate physiological functions in our major organs in relation to danger and safety signals internally and externally. We evolved to switch attention instantly when we sense danger: the snapping twig that might signal an approaching predator, or the shadow that could indicate an enemy behind a tree. Our goal-directed, or top-down, mental activities stand little chance against these bottom-up forces of novelty and saliency — stimuli that are unexpected, sudden or dramatic, or that evoke memories of important experiences.

While we are immediately impacted by the signals relayed via our ANS - as they are automatic - we also have the capacity to consciously take control of our Nervous System when it's signals and reactions have proven to be maladaptive.

"One general way of considering the distinction between these perception modes is that with the bottom-up we are experiencing the mind as a conduit of sensory experience whereas in top-down we are additionally a constructor of information. A conduit enables something to flow freely, directing that flow but not changing it much; a constructor is fueled by input and generates its own input, a transformation that changes the fuel into another form: It constructs a new layer of representational information beyond the initial sensory input. The mind can be a Bottom-Up Conduit and Top-Down Constructor...Without Constructor, we don’t learn; without Conduit, we don’t feel...Differentiate and then link the two, and we become integrated."

- Daniel Siegal, MIND

We influence our ANS top-down and bottom-up with our emotions, feelings, sensations, thoughts and conscious or unconscious meaning-making. The healthy functioning of the Autonomic Nervous System is central to our physical and mental well-being. And to develop the habit and skill of optimizing your Nervous System will open up gateways you may not know are possible yet. When you feel good, life feels good. When you tune into a sense of flow within, life begins to flow with ease. When you understand how to get yourself into that ideal and optimal state, suddenly the roadblocks or struggles that once plagued you begin to unravel and release in the present moment.

The Polyvagal theory can be understood with the image of an upside down traffic light with three main states of Green, Yellow and Red. This theory also aligns nicely with the Window of Tolerance (coined by Daniel Siegal), and so I will speak to both.

The Window of Tolerance is a term used to describe the zone of arousal in which a person is able to function, learn and heal most effectively. When people are within this zone, they are typically able to readily receive, process and integrate information and otherwise respond to the demands of everyday life without much difficulty. In polyvagal theory, this same zone is referred to as The Social Engagement System, because it is the state where we can be present, open, and connected to ourselves, others, nature and spirit.

While there are many benefits to expanding your window of tolerance and spending more time in that optimal zone, one major reason for practicing this expansion is that those who spend more time outside of the window of tolerance (in Hyperarousal or Hypoarousal) have a higher rate and re-occurrence of disruptive mental health afflictions.

Hyperarousal is our first line of defense when we are triggered by stimuli of danger (which is objective and subjective). It is the fight or flight system, or sympathetic system, or limbic hijack, or Sympathetic Overdrive. All of these names are pointing to the same state - an overactive mind and body that is unsettled with a surge of cortisol and adrenaline. In polyvagal theory, the window of tolerance is the green light, and this sympathetic reaction of mobilizing with fear is considered the yellow light; i.e. proceed with caution.

Hypoarousal is the next line of defense when we have not been able to find or feel safety, the body engages the shutdown response. We move into Red - full stop. Once in this immobilized with fear zone, it takes a lot more effort to activate the system, find and feel safety, and make our way back into the window of tolerance.

For me, having language and understanding of this wise and protective system has supported me in letting go of any shame or judgement in thinking that something is wrong with me when I fall into bouts of depression or shutdown. I have a visual of how my nervous system works and I do not expect that I can function long-term when I allow myself to remain in a hyper-aroused state. I engage in self-tracking throughout the day to notice what I am feeling, how I am breathing, what I am thinking, and I regulate myself so that I do not spend more time than necessary in either of my survival states. The polyvagal theory makes this simple:

“Am I in green, yellow or red? What do I need now to hold space for what I am noticing and gently regulate myself in needed?”

While there are specific breath techniques that can support the process of increasing the window of tolerance and accessing more loving presence on a daily basis, the first step is to simply get into the practice of self-tracking to see yourself more clearly and what patterns your nervous system engages in.

To take this a step further, and to see the polyvagal theory weaved into the window of tolerance, I have created the image below. It shows Hyperarousal and Hypoarousal on the periphery, to represent what it looks like and feels like when the window of tolerance is a thin line between these two survival states, and how we can actually experience both hyperarousal and hypoarousal simultaneously.

The center circle is the window of tolerance, and as it expands it does not exclude us from experiencing agitation or shutdown. However, it gives us access to the ability to remain present, loving and compassionate with ourselves as we move through these natural states (and hopefully, without remaining there for very long). This expansive window also gives us access to two hybrid states:

1. Sympathetic system and social engagement together, as healthy competition, intense focus or exuberant playfulness.

2. “Shutdown response” (also known as the dorsal branch of the vagus nerve) is met with social engagement, which allows us to slow down mindfully, cuddle, meditate and engage in restorative activities.

I hope this brief tutorial through your autonomic nervous system has sparked some insight and given you access to a little more compassion as you witness and experience your patterns through the lens of the polyvagal theory and window of tolerance.

For more support, reach out for a consultation.

marinmccue@gmail.com

Breath - why this automatic function may need to be retrained

"With each conscious breath, we present ourselves with Life itself. We land in the present moment with burgeoning awareness. Each deep, nourishing inhale is literally an abundance of inspiration and energy. Each relaxed, surrendered exhale is a letting go of both the "same old, same old" and the need to replace it with something new. In its place we find ourselves naturally alive in the midst of perpetual change."

- Trevor Yelich

Breath & Rhythm

The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is located in your brainstem. It receives and organizes all sense data in priority and relevance to survival (based on belief, experience and current state) and sends the pertinent information to the Thalamus. The Thalamus is like the mailroom of the brain. All sensory input is swept into the Thalamus to then get dispersed throughout the brain. This is happening at 20-80 HZ - an internal metronome that speeds up or slows down in an attempt to match the internal environment with the external - creating waves of information to be processed 20 to 80 times per second.

The Respiratory Central Pattern Generator resides in the RAS and is the area that controls the unmanipulated natural breath; i.e. how you breathe when you are not paying attention to your breath or when you watch your breath without interfering. This unmanipulated breath is working to maintain a baseline level of Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide and pH in the blood at all times, and this baseline or equilibrium can be set at an unhealthy balance when coping with chronic stress and the impacts of "overbreathing" or "underbreathing." The good news: this habituated/natural breath pattern can be retrained and optimized over time. Like any habit, with conscious doing, you effect your new subconscious way of being.

The waves of stimuli and assigned importance is what formulates your sense of self and directs you to pay attention to whatever is deemed a priority; based on past experience, beliefs, current state, and environmental factors. Generally speaking, the quicker the metronome, the more consuming (or loud) the sense of self becomes. Your breath is swept up in this bloom of stimuli. While your present moment natural breath is a tangible source for knowing your current Nervous System state, it's also the entry point to consciously go inward and regulate what needs healing and reframing. Story follows state. If you feel disconnected from yourself or others, or caught in maladaptive or hysterical patterns, it's possible your internal environment is responding inappropriately to external stimuli. In other words, the Nervous System is "trying" to take perceptions of the outside world (exteroception) and merge those with the perceptions of the inside world (interoception) and link them so we can operate in our environment appropriately (proprioception). When things are out of sync, you can take action by holding the hand of your breath as you access what is real for you with compassion and curiosity.

The act of conscious breathing with a coherent and functional rhythm is what revives a sense of synchrony in the RAS and supports harmony in the brain. Harmony in the brain results in more space and energy for growth, awareness, practice, course-correction, patience, compassion, and upgrading beliefs and perspectives. Even quick breathing, when engaged in consciously and therapeutically (Conscious Connected Breathing, for example), when done for short periods of time, it can act like medicine to allow people to experience themselves, others and life differently. It may be reducing their identifications (by down regulating the default mode network in the brain that is involved in identity and autobiographical memories) and providing more ready access to old beliefs and other mental/emotional material.

It is through the slow, soothing and gentle rhythm of your breath that you can access your higher self state regardless of whatever else is present for you. It is this harmony and rhythm, or the regulation of breathing, that is intimately linked to the regulation of all processes in the brain.

Because rhythmic durational breathing seems to synchronize the brain, we can then see why different patterns of breathing elicit different experiences of self. And when breath-work is repeated consciously with an intention of seeing ourselves more clearly, we can potentially facilitate different knowledge of self. Regulation and human up-leveling starts with you, each of us, together, as one.

"Altering our breaths' depth, rhythm, and rate changes our attitude, perception, and stress level. In essence, to have breathing patterns at all is to be experiencing imbalances in some way. When in health, the human body is constantly adjusting itself around optimal homeostatic ranges and will therefore constantly adjust the depth and frequency of breathing to meet the demands incurred internally and externally (through changes in activity and environment)."

- Trevor Yelich

The main breathing muscle

The diaphragm is the thin dome-like muscle that attaches to the bottom of the heart and lungs, expanding out in connection to the chest wall, spine, ribs, sternum, abdominal cavity, and anchored at the first (or lowest) ribs. Referred to as the thoracic pump, it is the negative pressure in the chest during inspiration that pulls venous blood into the vena cava and right side of the heart so that it can circulate to the lungs. The respiratory diaphragm is one of six pumps (or diaphragms/transverse planes) in the human body.

"The diaphragm is a major component for inspiration. To inspire means to take a breath. If the diaphragm becomes loose and pliable - as the largest muscle in the body - then it starts to secrete the peptides of inspiration. When you are inspired, you are friendlier, you are more loving and more caring, your more willing to share. "

- Guru Singh

Most commonly spoken to is the relationship between the respiratory diaphragm and pelvic floor diaphragm, as the ideal healthy functioning being these two moving in sync - both lowering on the inhale, and lifting back to neutral on the exhale - managing the movement from intrinsic core through the entire body. The movement of breath is our primary source of energy, detoxification and connection to life. Each breath impacts us at the cellular level, supporting the process of metabolism which is essentially the process of continual change.

"It has been suggested that around 70% of the toxins brought into the body are removed through the breathing process, which happens through two main processes. First is the simple elimination of the by-product of a living body's metabolic process, carbon dioxide, with each exhalation. Second is through the movement of the diaphragm, our primary breathing muscle. This muscle's movement assists in activating the movement of lymphatic fluid throughout the body, carrying poisons/toxins, dead cells, and excess water from around our cells back into systemic circulation. This waste material is then separated and broken down into reusable components and refuse. The reusable components are recycled and reused by the body. The refuse is expelled from the body and/or stored in lymphatic nodes to keep it from negatively impacting the body. A medical study on diaphragmatic breathing showed that deep breathing leads to as much as 15 times the normal amount of toxin elimination in the body."

- Trevor Yelich

Diaphragmatic breathing also ensures the removal of excess water from the extracellular environment via a well circulating lymphatic system and keeps cells in what is known as a "dry state." It is vital for cells to be in a dry state in order to absorb the oxygen available in the body. The imbalances from poor oxygenation in the cell leads to cell death and/or disease (i.e. cancer).

"[Conscious] Deep abdominal breathing also stimulates and refreshes the internal organs directly, through massage, and indirectly, through increased cardiovascular circulation. The use of diaphragmatic breathing has also been shown in medical studies to improve the hearts' health in patients with heart disorders."

- Trevor Yelich

When you understand and experience your breathing as an integrative process, with many body parts and systems' optimal functioning being in intimate relationship with the health and act of breathing, you may start taking your breath more seriously.

What is it to breathe well/properly?

When you feel good, life feels good. When you tune into a sense of flow within, life begins to flow with ease. When you understand how to get yourself into that ideal and optimal state, suddenly the roadblocks or struggles that once plagued you begin to unravel and release in the present moment.

Your inhale is connected to your Sympathetic Nervous System, and exhale is part of the Parasympathetic Nervous System. There is a time and a place for breathing through your mouth and it is not meant to be habitual way of breathing. Challenge yourself to breathe through your nose as often as possible throughout your day to keep steady levels of nitric oxide flowing and gain the benefits of using the nose for filtration, hydration, and breath volume management.

Tune into the proper initiation of the respiratory and pelvic floor diaphragms and intrinsic core working harmoniously. On your inhale, feel the natural drop down of both diaphragms, creating space for breath, and on the exhale, the surrendering release as both diaphragms lift back up to neutral. This detoxifies your system and cultivates an increasing level of present moment awareness.

By remaining steadfast on the breath, we experience a wide range of our impulsive reactions, and can consciously and gently notice, feel and release by remaining with the rhythmic breath at an exceedingly slower rate (towards 6-8 breaths per second). Including breath holds at the top of your inhale and bottom of your exhale will support you in increasing your tolerance to CO2 fluctuations, which is a vital ingredient for our body to absorb and utilize the oxygen it needs.

"Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron activity." - James Nestor, Breath

By engaging in this breath technique daily you will improve your ability and capacity to stay aware, present and conscious to constant change and choice while witnessing your patterns unravel before your eyes. When you understand and experience your breathing as an integrative process, a gateway to higher levels of consciousness, and having a direct impact on your physical, mental and emotional states, you may start taking your breath more seriously. With intentional practice, conscious doing becomes your new subconscious way of being. Stress is not the enemy, it is your teacher.

"The way you choose to cope with stress can change not only how you feel, but also how it transforms the brain. If you react passively or if there is simply no way out, stress can become damaging.”

- John Ratey, SPARK

CO2 Tolerance

The common reminder to take a deep breath when feeling stressed can have an adverse effect in our system. While oxygen is obviously necessary for life, it's CO2 that we need to pay more attention to - specifically to ensure we have enough in our blood at all times in order to capitalize on the oxygen available.

Generally speaking, we need approximately 5-7.5% CO2 present in our lungs/blood to ensure that we can utilize the 95-98% oxygen saturation in our blood (which is the common level for those at sea level or acclimatized to current altitude). Without enough CO2, the O2 sticks to the blood cell wall and will not absorb into the body, which was discovered in 1904 by the Danish physiologist Christian Bohr (referred to as the Bohr Effect).

"Danish physiologist Christian Bohr discovered over a century ago: Blood with the most carbon dioxide in it (more acidic) loosened oxygen from hemoglobin. In some ways, carbon dioxide worked as a kind of divorce lawyer, a go-between to separate oxygen from its ties so it could be free to land another mate. This discovery explained why certain muscles used during exercise received more oxygen than lesser-used muscles. They were producing more carbon dioxide, which attracted more oxygen. It was supply on demand, at a molecular level. Carbon dioxide also had a profound dilating effect on blood vessels, opening these pathways so they could carry more oxygen-rich blood to hungry cells. Breathing less allowed animals to produce more energy, more efficiently. Meanwhile, heavy or panicked breaths would purge carbon dioxide. Just a few moments of heavy breathing above metabolic needs could cause reduced blood flow to muscles, tissues, and organs."

- James Nestor, Breath

For most people, getting enough oxygen is not the problem. At sea level, generally, 75% of the O2 inhaled is then exhaled. Even in exercise when we need more O2, the body generally exhales as much as 25% of the O2 inhaled. Breathing greater volumes of air actually equates to less O2 being delivered throughout the body, as CO2 levels drop, airways constrict and O2 begins to stick to the blood cells.

"Rather than focusing on breathing in more O2, we should be focusing on retaining the CO2 in our blood, which facilitates the delivery of O2 throughout the body."

- Patrick McKeown, The Oxygen Advantage

High CO2 Tolerance is directly correlated to an expansive Window of Tolerance, which means more awareness, more energy, more presence, more healing and more positive growth.

"Chronic overbreathing leads to loss of health, poor fitness, and compromised performance and also contributes to many ailments including anxiety, asthma, fatigue, insomnia, heart problems, and even obesity."

- Patrick McKeown, The Oxygen Advantage

With each 9-12 minute practice session of nose-breathing, conscious breath holds, and intentional and gentle practice of remaining in the state of slight air hunger, your respiratory center readjusts (resets) to a an increased tolerance to fluctuations of CO2 levels (i.e. lower volume of air and calmer breathing), and nasal breathing will become more comfortable and natural.

"Holding the breath after exhalation provides greater consistency for measuring progress, involves less stress on the lungs, and provides a higher concentration of both nasal nitric oxide and CO2 which relaxes, and dilates the airways."

- Patrick McKeown, The Oxygen Advantage

“The yogi’s life is not measured by the number of his days, but the number of his breaths” B.K.S Iyengar

In summary: Breathing Well/Proper Breathing

"Underbreathing," "Overbreathing," versus "Breathing Well: breathing less more often and breathing more occasionally."

"Scientists discovered that our capacity to breathe has changed through the long processes of human evolution, and that the way we breathe has gotten markedly worse since the dawn of the Industrial Age. They discovered that 90 percent of us -- very likely me, you, and almost everyone you know -- is breathing incorrectly and that this failure is either causing or aggravating a laundry list of chronic diseases. On a more inspiring note, some of these researchers were also showing that many modern maladies -- asthma, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, psoriasis, and more -- could either be reduced or reversed simply by changing the way we inhale and exhale."

- James Nestor, Breath

Chronic (unconscious) Under breathing:

- Apnea while awake

- Unconscious shallow breathing (generally associated with hypoarousal)

- Intellect Over ride/Overthinking

- Not present

- Often coupled with overbreathing (when pattern is hyper and hypo)

- weak diaphragm, strain on heart/thoracic pump, poor lymphatic drainage, poor digestion/metabolism

- CO2 elevates and blood pH drops to acidic level

Chronic (unconscious) Over breathing:

- Can manifest with chronic mouth breathing, excessive yawing or sighing

- chronic anxiety, ADHD, body image obsession/eating disorders (generally associated with hyperarousal)

- low tolerance for CO2 locks you in overbreathing pattern

- CO2 drops and blood pH rises to alkaline

Almost all cellular functions in the body take place at a blood pH of 7.4, our sweet spot between alkaline and acid.

Breathing Well - Breathing Less more often and more occasionally:

- Coherent Breathing

- Expand window of tolerance and build strength in diaphragm with Conscious Connected Breathing and Conscious Breath Retention to be with elevation and descension of Carbon Dioxide without panic or avoidance (Optimize tolerance of CO2 fluctuations)

- Buteyko techniques for mild air hunger to slowly reset your Respiratory Pattern Generator

- Discern when to upregulate or downregulate versus when to compassionately be with your current state to re-pattern and reparent emotional charges (increase Vagal Tone for quicker emotional resolution)

- Work towards 5.5 rhythm: approximately 5.5 breaths and 5.5. liters of air per minute (breathe less)

- Increase Aerobic Capacity and Red Blood Cells (exercise while nasal breathing and work towards slowing breath rhythm as heart rate and work load increases)

For some of these details explained, check out my podcast episode all about BREATH. For more information (yes there is a lot more where this came from!), please reach out for further support.

If you have questions, need support, or have some feedback to offer on what I have shared above. Let’s keep learning and growing together.

marinmccue@gmail.com

"Is there such a thing as too much empathy?"

I remember the day I first recognized that the amount of Empathy I was feeling had become debilitating. I was sitting in anger towards my mother as I watched her struggle with the divorce with my dad. This anger I felt confused me because I recognized my justifications of anger were surface level and petty. I then realized that anger is easier to feel than sadness, and I suddenly dropped beneath the anger and got access to immense sadness and pain as I felt myself attempt to “be in her shoes.” I cried and trembled. It was overwhelming, all consuming, and debilitating. I remember googling soon after that “is there such a thing as too much empathy?”

My confusion amplified as my current understanding of empathy was that it was wholly good and important, yet my experience in the moment was telling me otherwise. And so, I shut down my feelings and leveled back up to anger, so that I could get some energy back and function in the world.

Years later, my awareness was showing me that my avoidance of sadness, pain and empathy was maladaptive. I was choosing activities that were numbing or extreme in nature, and I saw more narcissism within me. I was too quick and eager to avoid and turn a blind eye to others’ pain. In fact, other people struggling around me became a huge inconvenience. So once again, I acknowledged that anger and frustration is easier to feel than pain or sadness, and I expanded my heart open to let myself feel what has been lurking beneath the surface all along. Debilitating sadness, grief, shame and an overwhelming empathy flowed in. This time I had some tools to support me. I was able to meet the feelings, go deeper to get to know the sensations in my body, how they moved and how they didn’t move, and I began to visualize little-me emoting these feelings. This was healing on so many levels. I was cracked open and I felt confident in my ability to hold this larger emotional space.

Although this process was able to take me deeper and move through emotions rather than be weighed down or fearful of them, I still found myself in consistent episodes of heartache as I continued to practice my current understanding of empathy, of feel to heal, and occasionally found myself in shame and guilt as I saw my part in others’ pain and took on the responsibility to try to feel what they were feeling. All the while I knew that I would never fully or truly understand what others’ experience is or feels like, yet I thought it was my duty to lean in with my heart and take on some of the emotional baggage my ancestors and my blind-privilege and cognitive bias had contributed to. Yet once again I found myself in overwhelm as empathy weighed heavy on my heart and mind.

On March 5, 2020, I walked into a guided shamanic journey, ingesting over 7 grams of Psilocybin mushrooms, and one of my intentions was to develop a new understanding and relationship with empathy by bringing in compassion and wisdom to balance it. While I could write a novel about my psilocybin experience, this blog post is specifically about Empathy ;). I walked away that day with a visceral understanding that Empathy is not what I had thought it was for so many years. I realized that I can try with all my might to feel what other’s feel, and it will always be a projection as I can only experience through my own lens.

Fast forward several months, and I found myself once again in despair caused by self inflicted shame and guilt around my white privilege, white fragility, and the veil lifted that allowed me to see my part in the racist system and racist ideas and beliefs that have been rained down on me my whole life, and for generations. While I was deeply entrenched I was also highly aware and fascinated as I witnessed my own debilitation and downward spiral. I was able to hold loving space for the part of me that was so habitually ingrained to respond with overwhelming empathy. This opened me up to research, to conversations, to self compassion, and a slow build into a new way.

In my podcast episode uploaded today with my good friend Yemie Sonuga, I share how my white fragility and imbalance with empathy led me to make poor decisions in how I showed up as a friend and ally. And Yemie schools me with love, grace and accountability of what the social justice movement truly needs - people who have done their research and found their stability so that they can join with right-action rather than needing to be held up and educated by those who are fighting the good fight.

A few days later I was speaking with Anshu Narayan on The Expert Connect Wellness Chat and before we went live, Anshu was telling me about a huge gesture her family made over the weekend to support a family in need. She said something along the lines of, “while we can never know their pain, we can let them know we see them, that they are not alone, and that we are here to support them.” My jaw dropped as I felt these words land as the medicine I needed to hear once again. I let her know how timely that statement was and what I have been going through as I find my footing beyond debilitating empathy.

A few days after that, I was at my dad’s house for dinner and began the evening catching up with my step mom and sharing what is alive, exciting and challenging right now. As I walked through my learnings, lessons and insights around empathy, leadership, anxiety and the beautiful sharings I have received in timely conversations, she responded with: “This reminds me of Rabbi Friedman’s work.” She then gave me a synopsis of how as a young mother she had struggled with how to strike that fine-line balance of empathy while not taking on her children’s struggles or pain as her own.

And so I leave you with this, a couple paragraphs paraphrasing Friedman’s work from a post titled “Empathy Doesn’t Cut It”:

“Rabbi Edwin Friedman was even more suspicious of empathy; he saw it as “a focus on weakness or immaturity rather than on strength, an orientation toward others rather than toward self, and a way of avoiding issues of personal accountability” (Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, 1999, 2007, page 134).  He argues that although empathy may be “an essential component” in a person’s, and especially a leader’s, “response repertoire,” there is no evidence that it makes one more responsible for their own or another’s situation or destiny.

As a matter of fact, Friedman suggests, empathy is most often a partner to a lack of self-regulation, and therefore the encouragement to invade the space of a neighbor.  Empathy without the limiting force of a well-defined and emotionally well-regulated individual acts like a virus: it is “reactive and very much like parasitic dependency.”  Thus Friedman scores the “fallacy of empathy.”

In summary my friends, as we all continue to expand our emotional and self-regulation abilities, we must remember that while we cannot truly know the pain of another, when we know our own pain and desire a world that is more fair and just for all, we can use our privilege, our voice, our power, to take a stand for those with less privilege, to lift people up to be heard and seen, and to ensure that we do not berate ourselves into inaction or elevate ourselves at the detriment of others.

xoxo

Thinking and Sensing - two different skills that overlap

As a teacher, I often find myself pausing when I am in a flowing, visceral experience to reflect on the steps and potent cues that are present to further my ability in guiding individuals or facilitating groups in to embodied states. While I love my desire to teach and guide others, it also comes with some challenges. I have had many experiences that were moving deeper and expanding wider than I had ever previously experienced and my inclination to pause the flow to asses where I am and recall the steps to get there have pulled me out of pure presence. Sometimes I am able to surrender right back in, and other times the pure energy moving through me stops its flow and I am not able to tap back in. This recurring experience has brought me closer to understanding the Quantum with the reminder…..

“You can’t know where something is and how it is moving simultaneously.”

I understand this as speaking to the realms of the Experiencer versus the Narrator. When I am fully in the flow of pure sensational experience, the flow often stops when the Narrator chimes in too much to make meaning and structure. Both modes are imperative and overlap in many ways, yet they are also distinctly different and grow stronger and wiser when you can cultivate a relationship with them separately and in unity.

I recall being quite confused the first several times I was guided in Embodiment practices. I was told to get out of my thinking mind and just feel, just notice what I am feeling, just experience what I am feeling, just observe what I am feeling and how it moves. And then I would be asked what I am noticing, and suddenly my “thinking/narrating” mode would begin analyzing, relating to memory or coming up with ideas, and I would lose touch with the pure experience of sensation and embodiment. How do I describe what I am feeling without “thinking?”

This is where the overlap comes into the picture. “Thinking” in the traditional sense of the word is the realm of the narrator and often is experienced as thinking about the past, the future, deciphering meaning and story telling. On the other hand, “thinking” in the ream of embodiment refers to observing and engaging with the sensations in the body in the present moment. Sensing and feeling without stacking on meaning-making, judgements, action plans, and problem solving is the skill of the Divine Feminine energy within. It is the Liminal Stage that can be expanded and illuminated to feel more and get access to deeper levels of wisdom that cannot be heard or felt in a busy or activated mind-body.

As we explore and feel and sense what is being experienced internally moment to moment, we develop the ability to hold loving space for ourselves and offer ourselves the unconditional love and self compassion that is required for us to access the space to regenerate and upgrade our DNA. This is how we get out of our own way and tap into our innate ability to heal. You will know you are in the realm of the experiencer when you are noticing what you are feeling and allowing it to be there. It is a state of turning towards what you notice with love and curiosity.

True confidence arrives from an internal appraisal of our ability and capability in whatever the task at hand is. Whereas, arrogance is a forced state of overplaying one’s ability that does not include an internal appraisal and relationship with the divine energy within. Any quality that feels forced is simply a mask we are wearing in an attempt to cover up the wounds of insecurity, scarcity or fear. To take the mask of and develop the pure and deep virtues of essence, you need to turn towards the discomfort beneath the facade to feel, love, hold space and integrate the unprocessed or unfinished sensation/emotion with your loving presence. When we learn how to feel unconditionally, to notice sensation and be with ourselves in the liminal stage between impulse and reaction, we see the intensity that has habitually been pushed away and we open up to the possibility that there is treasure on the other side of this discomfort. It is in this space that we start to reframe the story we live into and upgrade what we are capable of. More presence means more power.

Creating daily rituals for practice provide nourishment as our mind-body harmonizes and integrates when rhythm is present. Yet even too much ritual can cause problems. Blindly engaging in ritual tends to create cognitive biases, which are systematic tendencies that lead our thinking away from a rational judgement, even when we are presented with facts that prove our current beliefs are not true. Our mind is constantly constructing our understanding of reality and the foundation is composed of our beliefs and experiences. When one of these beliefs is challenged, it can feel as though our whole construction is threatened. When living in an unconscious auto-pilot state, it’s a lot more “efficient” and comfortable in the moment to disregard new information rather than allow our whole life construct to be broken down and rebuilt.

However, when you have a daily practice of releasing the grip of the analytical/thinking mind and continue cultivating a relationship with the divine feminine by surrendering control, letting go of the material world and opening to the immaterial, recognizing the illusory construct of your ego/personality and feeling into the Source energy of loving presence with the knowledge that We Are All One, it becomes a lot easier to consistently adjust the construct of the mind and strengthen a Growth Mindset. When you are not overly identified with your “mind,” your beliefs, your personality, or the material world, it won’t feel as threatening to break down the construct occasionally and rebuild with the new information you have.

When we are too ingrained or attached to our beliefs - habitually in our survival mode - than anything that does not fit our current model of perception is often belittled, fought against, or ignored altogether. Too much rigidity leaves no room for growth. If you are willing to be wrong, you’ll see your own biases with much more ease and compassion.

As the saying goes, knowledge is for the mind and experience is for the body. Knowing this work is different than experiencing this work. We need both.

Want to experience this work? Check out my offerings or reach out for personalized support. I would love to hold space for you.

xoxox

How to practice Awareness and Embodiment with B.R.I.T.A

Chronic Stress manifests differently for each one of us, and can lead to various forms of breakdown. Bottom line, too much stress high-jacks your brain and body and eventually leads to sickness. When you get your stress under control, you get access to the innate abilities that we are privileged to experience as human beings.

Rather than avoiding the discomfort, seeking pleasure or entertainment, or perceiving “upsets” as meaning something is wrong, we must instead turn towards ourselves and begin the process of dismantling the stories and beliefs and fears that are driving our cyclical patterns of suffering.

"The core emotional experiences of the past that have an impact on our current experience are by their nature uncomfortable. Our automatic impulse is to push them out of our awareness so that we can get on with our life. This is called suppression and is achieved through sedation and control. This is akin to a jar full of water, as your authentic self, the awareness of our authentic true present nature. And the oil in the jar is the uncomfortable emotional, physical and mental experiences. Shaking the jar endlessly in an attempt to change our experience just mixes the water and oil so we can’t see where they separate. All our endless doing and thinking results in a murky mixture. Reactivity is shaking the jar. Response is allowing the jar to come to stillness, so we can slowly scoop out the oil. Put the jar down, watch it, and allow the oil to come to the surface"

- Michael Brown, The Presence Process

To develop the skill of holding space for ourselves and witness the “oil” separate from the pure “water” of our Essence, we must practice Interoception. Interoception is the scientific term for the ability to feel what is going on internally, inside your own body. It is a vital skill as we cannot address or understand what we are not aware of. Through interoception we can discern what is fleeting, what is familiar, what we need more of or less of, what is an important feeling to pay attention to, what can be simply enjoyed, and what requires more time and attention to avoid a compounded future glaring issue. As a skill, interoception is critical in order for us to be in charge of integrating and consequently releasing emotional charges.

How do you know when you have to pee? Can you feel your heart beating? Notice gas bubbling up your esophagus before a burp? What about the sensations that arise right before you yawn? Have you ever noticed a heart-ache when experiencing grief? Do you notice sensations that tell you you are full? How about the tingles or weightlessness when in immense joy or bliss?

The more you practice noticing, the more fine-tuned and granular your abilities become. Some say we can get so good at this skill that we can be in direct contact and conversation with our organs, tissues, various systems and potentially viral intruders. If you are not aware of something, there is not possibility of control or intentional change.

Building interoceptive awareness is as simple as being with each bodily sense and feeling what arises without analyzing and story telling or getting into action right away. When the left side of the brain is dominant (analyzing, problem-solving, thinking, etc), it is quick to chime in whenever something is uncomfortable. Yet, for us to get to know our depth and what is going on beneath the surface of the exposed ice berg, we must be willing to feel unconditionally without immediately getting busy in our mind to figure it out. It takes patience to be with what is there and allow it time to unfold and guide you into its depth and nuances.

"Interoception is your brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system...This produces the spectrum of basic feeling from pleasant to unpleasant, from calm to jittery, and even completely neutral....

You might wonder what this hotbed of continuous, intrinsic activity is accomplishing, besides keeping your heart beating, your lungs breathing, and your other internal functions working smoothly. In fact, intrinsic brain activity is the origin of dreams, daydreams, imagination, mind wandering, and memories...It also ultimately produces every sensation you experience, including your interoceptive sensations, which are the origins of your most basic pleasant, unpleasant, calm, and jittery feelings."

- Lisa Feldman Barrett

Try this:

Pause for two minutes

Get comfortable and close your eyes

Direct your awareness to your breath

Direct awareness to the palms of your hands and sustain for 1 minute to notice the various changing sensations

Mindfulness is the antidote to our human tendency to get lost in doing, which directs us towards an unsatisfying cycle of needing more of everything and anything to feel good, a constant striving and struggling and getting stuff done instead of living. Mindfulness is waking up out of autopilot and taking the steering wheel of our loving attention.

"The process of embodiment is connecting the channels between the body, brainstem and limbic areas up to cortical awareness and begins with the felt sense of noticing our inner experiences. Daniel Siegal refers to this as the 'subtle music of the mind, the ebb and flow of energy and information that we sense during the moment-to-moment shifts in our internal state throughout the day...that continually color your subjective sense of being alive.' However, the process of reconnecting to our inner experience can be coupled with fear and danger.

As we move our awareness inwards we can often re-experience past unresolved hurts, pains, and traumas. Sensations are often over-coupled with fear and danger messages. Clients may be fighting for survival to avoid this awareness and it can feel destabilizing. Yet, staying in our Window of Tolerance as we re-experience our past pains, hurts and traumas is the path to healing and clearing these samskaras."

-Prem Robin Campbell

Embodied Mindfulness is not aiming to control or suppress or stop thoughts, instead it is a state of being where we aim to pay attention to our experience and sensations as they rise without judging or labeling. Allowing the waves of our internal environment to move through to completion rather than continually stopping the wave and storing unfinished business, wounds, fears, and unhealthy patterns in our body.

"You will get to a point in your growth where you understand that if you protect yourself, you will never be free, you will not grow "- Micheal Singer

As you tune into the sensation(s) in your body, be warm and open with it, hold loving space for it, and describe it with words (to support the detachment from the story or the intensity of the feeling). Create space for it with your breath. Get curious and intrigued by it. Watch where it goes, how it might shift or stay put. There is wisdom in those spaces. The sensation may spark a thought, something that this feeling or this sense of openness reminds you of from your recent or not-so-recent past. Be in the flow of your thoughts and neural connections as long as it comes from an embodied space. As soon as you notice you are solely in your thinking mind, the meanderings and afflictions, get back into your body, back to your breath. The wisdom comes from the embodied mindfulness. The space that is created when you meet your sensations with your full-heartfelt attention. Integrate the unfinished business stored in your body and land in a clear path towards further alignment in your mind and body. Slow down, get quiet, get curious, and listen to the whispers and nudges that are there to guide you.

“Developing the lens that enables us to see the mind more clearly stimulates the brain to grow important new connections...How we focus our attention shapes the structure of the brain.”  Daniel Siegal

We can practice mindfulness by maintaining a moment by moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings bodily sensations and surrounding environment. An observing without judgement. Noticing patterns of thought and action without believing everything we think and without shaming ourselves in our hypocrisies.

"To extract ourselves from the maze of the mental plane requires that we choose to drop the story and instead pay attention to feeling its causal emotional charge unconditionally. As long as we cling to our stories, we choose the past over this moment....

The stories we tell ourselves, which we began telling once we start developing our mental capacity, established our current library of core beliefs. Because much of the charge that drives these beliefs was imprinted in our energy system before we had mental, and hence conceptual capacity, none of these stories are valid. They are all effects, which means our beliefs form an illusory mental passageway, we mistakenly walk along as a desperate means of making sense of the apparent chaos and unpredictability of our circumstances.

Because our stories are rooted in what we believe happened in the past, what we suspect this means for the future, it means that until recently, we have been designing the quality of our human experience based on fearful ‘guesstimations’. We have allowed the unintegrated aspects of our child self to be in charge of determining what is best for based on its undeveloped interpretation of the world. Since none of these stories are valid as a means of interpreting our current human experience, and definitely not of any use for integrating, it's self-defeating to continue to allow these unconscious core beliefs to function as the parameters by which the quality of our current experience is determined. For this reason, we now become conscious navigators of our life experience.

The first step in this new direction is to DROP THE STORY. Even if we believe our stories have the validity to stand up in a court of law, they are still mental interpretations of charged emotional predicaments. Clinging to any story is clinging to the past. No story has the capacity to free us from the past. Only feeling what is, without condition, empowers a return to an awareness of presence and the radiance of present moment awareness that emanates from us whenever we identify with this authentic expression of our being." - Micheal Brown

How do we engage in this practice in a tangible and clear process???

Utilize BRITA to scoop the oil off your pure authentic nature that is the water

B - BREATHE; functionally, fully and with PolyVagal theory in mind so you can BE WITH whatever is real and arising in the NOW.

R - RECOGNIZE you are feeling something. Perhaps you have been triggered. Acknowledge you may have just "flipped your lid". Soften as you remind yourself that you are a human having a human experience. Triggered by something external which has touched an internal wound, surfaced a memory from your unintegrated past. What a blessing it is that this unprocessed emotion is now at the surface for you to be with it and integrate it. Dismiss the "messenger" of the upset and send gratitude for the set-up. Following the re-action of blame or anger (or any other habitual re-action) is equivalent to accusing the mirror for the content of its reflection.

I - IDENTIFY the emotion and any sensations that are readily available to be felt. Identify where you are on the spectrum from Hyper to Hypo (or from Green to Yellow to Red)? Where in your body and/or mind do you notice the activation? Where are you on the mood meter? If an alien who has never experienced sensation was asking for descriptive detail, how would you label what you are feeling? Anxious? Angry? Frustrated? Disgusted? Fearful? Numb? Sad? Go deeper and meet the raw sensation beneath the emotion.

With Self-Compassion and patience, identify and describe sensation beneath the Emotion:

pulsing, temperature, density, weight, color, direction, open, expanding, contraction, tension, familiar, new, tingles, prickles, sharp, dull, ache, shape, flow, jagged, deep, surface, loud, subtle, numb, clear, intensity/mild, shooting, movement, squeezing, pointed, pushing/pulling, dense, stuck/shifting, localized, sound, light/dark, empty/full, etc

T - TRACK IT! Be with and feel the sensations unconditionally. Just as we cannot attach to any moment of our breath, we must witness and track sensation in a similar way. Observe without judgement as the sensations arise, move, shift, pulse, tingle, grow, transform, etc. Can you sustain curiosity, awe, wonder and love as you create space around whatever it is you are feeling? Just witness the natural flow without agenda, without manipulating it, without trying to fix, heal or understand it. Shifting from projection to integration. Allow these sensations to transform back into their true nature; energy in motion. "Integration is the conscious digestion of the unintegrated aspects of our childhood." Micheal Brown

A - ADDRESS IT by practicing self-compassion. Turn towards what you feel and meet it with loving awareness. (depending on the situation, there are various avenues for this integrative phase. Upon moving through the previous stages, you have guided your nervous system back to safety, and your higher thinking capacities are back online. This is where we need to step into new habits of self-soothing and engage in conscious communication, rather than cover the emotion back up with our old coping mechanisms.)

"The goal of the practice is not perfection, it's to be a compassionate mess" - Kristin Neff

Curious to learn more and become a master of your own Integration? Check out these offerings to find a program that aligns with what you need.

xoxoxo

"How to be an Anti-Racist" by Ibram X. Kendi

*Ibram X. Kendi takes us on a journey through his upbringing and the various stages of racism and anti-racism that he has seen and participated in as well. All quotes in this post come from Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to be an Anti-Racist.”

There is no amount of quotes or summaries that will do this book justice. This is a must read for everyone (or listen on Audible as I did), as the Anti-Racist movement is not as simple as simply ‘don’t be a racist’. If we are not willing to open ourselves up to consider that we can do better, be better, know more, love more, support more, and be more, then we will continue to blindly participate in a system that treats people differently based on the color of their skin. As author Ibram X. Kendi states: “Denial is the heartbeat of racism.”

As I used to say - and what I hear many people say when I engage in this conscious conversation - is, “I am not a racist, just ask ‘x’ or listen to these examples of my non-racist behavior.” Well, it’s a lot easier and a hell of a lot more comfortable to acknowledge where we are obviously not-racist than it is to see our blind participation in a racist system and the toxicity of our unconscious actions. I see people get defensive and angry; appalled that anyone would challenge their identification as a “good person” by pointing a finger and accusing of them of racism. And as Ibram X. Kendi so graciously explains, having a racist idea or behavior does not make you “a racist” and even people who have lots of racist ideas and behaviors, does not mean necessarily that they are a bad person. This is not about labeling some people as racist and others not, rather, understand that each one of us - regardless of skin color - can have racist ideas, beliefs, thoughts, actions, or judgments, even if/when we don’t identify as a “racist person.” This is a human problem, and as humans, we all need to acknowledge where we can do better.

This is complex and I admire Kendi’s ability to show compassion and his own humanness as he acknowledges his blind acceptance and participation in racism as well. I particularly enjoyed Kendi’s explanation of why race neutrality is not helpful. He describes the opposite of racist to be anti-racist, and that the safe middle ground of not-racist is actually a mask racism wears.

“The construct of race neutrality actually feeds white nationalist victim-hood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans towards equity is reversed discrimination. That is how racist power can call affirmative action policies that succeed in reducing racial inequities ‘race conscious.’ And standardized tests that produce racial inequities ‘race neutral.’ That is how they can blame the behavior of an entire racial group for the inequities between different racial groups and still say their ideas are ‘not racist’. But there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and anti-racist ideas.”

One of the important perspectives that was illuminated for me while ingesting this book was the notion that there is more genetic differences within racial groups than between racial groups. We are so much the same, and have used color and race to create a divide and separation that is illusory.

“There is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa, then between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups n western Europe than to ethnic groups in eastern Africa. Race is the genetic mirage.”

Kendi goes on to explain that while ALL LIVES MATTER and potentially removing all racial categories may be the final step in the process, the first step is to acknowledge the mirage of differences that are built into our system and that we blindly accept. We cannot declare ALL LIVES MATTER when we haven’t first acknowledged and rectified the fact that our system does not operate with the Modus Operandi that ALL LIVES MATTER.

“To be Anti-Racist is to recognize the reality of biological equality - that skin color is as meaningless to our underlining humanity as the clothes we wear over that skin. To be anti-racist is to recognize there is no such thing as white blood, or black diseases, or natural Latinex athleticism. To be anti-racist is to also recognize the living, breathing reality of this racial mirage, which makes our skin color more meaningful than our individuality. To be anti-racist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages. NOT to ignore the mirages that shape people’s lives”

Police brutality towards Black Lives is another sad truth that has been an issue for many generations. When I hear people defend the police and blame the black person who resisted, I am overcome with anger and disbelief. Why do you think he/she had the impulse to resist? How does resisting arrest equate to a life being taken away? Why is it the victim’s responsibility to calm the nerves of the over-reactive fearful “superior” with the weapon? When Kendi connected police brutality and victim-blaming to the similar discourse around women who are raped, I had to stop the audio and sit in silence for a couple of minutes to let that sink in.

“Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths.”

Ultimately, this book taught me to question my behavior, beliefs and thoughts and to stay humble and compassionate as I acknowledge my blind-spots, forgive myself for blindly participating, and then get educated and make a new choice. We need to stop generalizing individuals behavior as if it tells us something about an entire race, and we need to stop generalizing an entire race as if that tells us something about the individuals that are in that racial group.

“To be an Anti-racist is to recognize that there is no such thing as Black behavior. Black behavior is as fictitious as black genes. There is no “black gene”… All we have are stories of individual behavior. But individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals. Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally….Anti-racism means separating the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior. Culture defines a group tradition that a particular racial group might share but that is not shared among all individuals in that racial group or among all racial groups. Behavior defines the inherent human traits and potential that everyone shares. Humans are intelligent and lazy. Even as that intelligence and laziness might appear differently across racialized cultural groups.”

It makes me sick to my stomach when I suddenly become aware of my own racist beliefs or ideas that I no longer am willing to stay blind to. My white privilege has brought shame and confusion as I see it more and more and question how and what I can do to be a part of this shift from oppression to elevation. I know that if I get stuck feeling sorry for myself or paralyzed by the overwhelm of frustration or confusion, I am likely to become blind once again to my participation in this systemic problem. Yeah it’s uncomfortable and I am stumbling through this learning process sometimes with grace and other times with so much awkwardness it pains me. Yet this is the work, and I have learned time and time again that when I lean into the discomfort and choose the “hard” path, I grow and evolve in ways that serve my highest good.

As Brene Brown said in her recent podcast episode with author and activist Austin Channing Brown: “I am here to get it right, not be right.”

So with that, I encourage you dear reader to focus more on IMPROVING rather than being defensive or trying to prove you’re not a racist. Just accept that you probably have some racist ideas and beliefs deep within you, that it’s not your fault, AND it is now your responsibility to do the work.

xoxox

How to Handle Set Backs

HOW TO HANDLE SET-BACK

“Set-backs” are subjective. It is all about your mindset and relationship with these integral moments of learning and growth. If you change your relationship with fear and “failure” can you see how your experience with these qualities would be impacted?

Anyone can dream big and set goals, but it is in the ACTION and our ability to walk and thrive through the fire that determines our level of success and well-being.

Take a moment to do some self-study…

What is your current relationship (or habitual reaction) when faced with:

1) an opportunity to SHINE

2) constructive feedback on something you care deeply about

3) the possibility of “failure”

4) love from another and self-love

Our impulsive reactions are habits that are deeply ingrained with the intention of protection and/or seeking safety. I have found this to be one of the simplest reminders; if i am feeling defensive, resistance, overwhelmed, overthinking, distracted, or avoidant, these are all signals that my mind-body does not feel safe and is reacting with habits that serve to protect what feels vulnerable. While there are many ways to address this imbalance and reassure your system that you are safe, this first phase is focused on HOW WE THINK. If you have a deep-rooted belief that “failure” is disastrous, or that perfection is expected, or that it is too risky to be seen or loved, then you will manifest this as a self-fulfilling prophecy. We see what we already believe and we attract more of what we think about, for better or for worse.

The attitude or relationship you notice with certain people or concepts come from your beliefs. You can’t change other people by focusing on them. You can’t change the reality of fear or set-backs or struggle in life, but you can change your relationship and what you make these things mean. The way you talk to yourself, the stories and meaning you project and repeat, and the repetitive action you take, all create your unique perception of life.

To change our deeply ingrained beliefs we need to be patient, curious and self-aware so we can notice when the grips of our past takes hold on the possibility of the fresh moment. Old beliefs that maybe saved you one time as a young child, become limitations in our evolution as adults. Assessing and changing beliefs is a vital part of re-parenting and healing these old wounds. Limiting Beliefs have a resonance of tunnel vision, they are deflating, and generally are aligned with black and white thinking. They also generally have a facile quality, meaning, they appear neat and comprehensive only by ignoring the true complexities of an issue. Even if these limiting beliefs have an iota of truth in them, they are too rigid and sticky to encompass the more expansive truth that is more aligned with the human condition.

Alright, let’s wrap this up with some homework!

Here are three steps to build your mindful armor (versus reactive armor) to handle and flourish through your set-backs:

1) Envision what you truly desire

• My good friend Mandy Balak, founder of Ace Class, led a meditation this week with the theme of innovation and beliefs. She asked us this question several times and I have had so much fun playing with it in my journal…

  “What is the truest, most beautiful ________ of my life?”

  This is an opportunity to plug different aspects of your life into this one potent quality question and create a vision of your deepest desires.

• What do you desire for your intimate relationship(s)?

• What do you desire and envision for your own business?

• What would be the most beautiful expression of your ideal day?

• What is the truest possibility for your relationship with yourself? Give it a try!

2) Create a Mental Model that guides and reminds you how to “lean into struggle”

• A mental model is a blueprint from something you know well, placed on top of something you desire to shift in how you relate to it. For example, I know how to train for a half marathon in a way that is fun, patient and includes lots of struggle. I can then write out a metaphor of what it takes to successfully run a half-marathon and then use that blueprint to keep me steady and focused in other areas of my life where struggle seems to have a more deflating impact on me. What do you know well?? “Life is like a box of chocolates?” WHY? Play with writing it out in depth as a metaphor and see what arises as you place that blueprint on the area of your life that has been causing you suffering.

3) Commit to a Daily Routine

• What you do daily matters more than what you do once and a while. We all need to have space and energy in our mind and body in order to be self-aware and capable of choosing a mindful response after an impulsive reaction. We need to build the habit of reflection, self-study, and ensure that we are doing what we can to befriend our nervous system and get access to our rest & digest state. I have a FREE morning routine 21 day challenge that can support you with this. If you are not a morning person, then commit to an evening routine instead.

If you are curious to learn more, please reach out to connect. I would love to hear from you. xoxox

Why "This Feels like Truth" is a dangerous phrase in our vocabulary

In a conversation with an insightful and inspiring friend a few weeks ago, we were chatting about subconscious programming and how fascinating and difficult it is to reprogram the deeply ingrained beliefs and traumas from our past. I can’t remember exactly what she said, but she alluded to something I had shared about my personal experience with hypoarousal and that it sounds like my shut-down pattern is trying to teach me something. In that moment, I felt shivers move down my spine and I wiggled and smiled as I expressed what I was feeling. Her eyes brightened and she leaned in to say: “that means it’s true!”

In that moment, I agreed with her. “yeah that feels like truth” I said.

A few days later, speaking to my father on the phone, I shared this story with him and the un-deniable good feelings that prompted my friend and I to claim that insight as truth.

My father reminded me of the danger of this sentiment. Recalling his (and mine) upbringing in the Mormon religion, and how “feelings” were manipulated consistently to be evidence for truth or non-truth. Feelings were used as a way to enforce obedience. Feelings were a way to instill Fear.

He shared his memory of straying from the church in his adolescence and when he announced to his family and congregation, at 19 years old, that he has decided to “come back” and to serve his Mission for the church, he was applauded and celebrated. He said that felt so good that in that moment he took it as evidence that it must be true and it must be the right thing to do.

Our senses are not designed for the complexities of truth, of the Universe, and the nuances of bias and manipulation. We have a tendency for bias and to look for evidence that proves our limited purview as the “right way.”

“Our senses, after all, evolved on the African savannas hundreds of thousands of years ago: They were useful for keeping us alive, whether that meant avoiding a hungry lion or figuring out whether a certain leaf was safe to eat.” - Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Our senses are superb at picking up on danger signals, and innately inclined to find solace and vital space for “rest and digest” when we feel safe. What is “safe” objectively is not what is “safe” subjectively. What is it to be safe? Danger and safety signals to the individual - the subjective experience - is not necessarily aligned with objective truth. I can experience a danger signal from thinking about something in the past that was painful or imagining doom and gloom in my future. One person may experience a full on panic attack and be riddled with fear on an airplane while another person is flooded with safety, creativity and pleasure in the sky. Perhaps I hear an “authority” speak about how loving he/she is and the many stories that “prove this statement as true.” And maybe, this “authority” reminds me of someone I trust and feel good around. Simply through repetition and familiarity I may experience safety signals when I see this authority, yet that doesn’t mean it is objectively true, that’s just my experience.

The notion that “seeing is believing,” Neil DeGrasse Tyson writes in Astrophysics for People in a Hurry,

“...works well in many endeavors, including mechanical engineering, fishing, and perhaps dating.… But it doesn’t make for good science. Science is not just about seeing, it’s about measuring, preferably with something that’s not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias.”

We are all susceptible to bias, and we all have history that colors our desires, assumptions, expectations and beliefs. Even scientists get things wrong.

“Sometimes, scientists get the details wrong. Working on the frontiers of knowledge means that data and evidence—even that which is uncovered and analyzed by trained scientists—will lead to honest mistakes. But the scientific method (and process of publication and peer review) means that claims are challenged and argued over. As Neil points out, the structure of science means that researching and arguing move scientists closer to the truth, even if there are small errors or blind spots along the way. Hardworking scientists, he says, are always going back to the drawing board—or are already there—as a way of getting a firmer sense of the object of their inquiry. The process isn’t always pretty, but it moves us in the right direction.” - Neil DeGrasee Tyson

What I am realizing is that being “right” is not the be-all-end-all. What matters most is our ability to express and communicate our beliefs, where they came from, what potential biases we are working with, and then be willing to engage, ask questions, be open to new data, and ultimately, be willing to be wrong.

As I am navigating the overload of misinformation and non-experts making bold claims or regurgitating tunnel-vision perspectives on complex topics, I am learning how to think more like a scientist.

I see this as the pathway to integrating and balancing the masculine and feminine within each one of us. Too much reliance on “feeling” and “intuition” increases the possibility of blind bias, seeing what we already believe, and confident delusion. Too much reliance on analyzing and pragmatism could disconnect us from deep wisdom, collective consciousness, immense joy, freedom and embodiment. We need both. We need to honor and engage the material universe and we need to stay open, curious and compassionate as we surrender to the Unmanifest Universe.

Imagine the expansion and innovation that awaits when we expand our field of vision and ask questions rather than trust “authority” or stay shackled to the impulsive reactions programmed into our mind and body.

There is truth in all perspectives, and Objective Truth is only what can be verified and re-created through measurable experiments. Everything else is opinion, personal truth and theory. There’s purpose and power in naming it while remaining open to new data.

It’s time to question everything and gain clarity in our own biases, assumptions, beliefs and expectations. Objective Truth will become more obvious as you do the work to let go of what you want to believe and open up to what else could be true.

Testimonials from Befriend Your Nervous System with Yoga Nidra

I know my experience in this pandemic is not the same as everyone else. I do not want to glamorize self-isolation, however, I am practiced in focusing on the good and choosing gratitude on a daily basis. I acknowledge that for some, this pandemic has sped things up and created more work and responsibility (i.e. anyone in health care, oil and gas or financials, to name a few). Yet, for me, as a fitness instructor, yoga teacher at high schools, wellness retreat facilitator, and mind-body-life coach for groups in workshops or individuals, 90% of my income starting mid March to the foreseeable future has been cut. I am in creative mode every day playing with the various possibilities of how I can shift my business model to accommodate the world we are now in. AND, I am grateful and intrigued by the opportunity to get to know myself more intimately and spend more time befriending and retraining my nervous system so I can be an even stronger force of good in this world.

For me, being in self-isolation with the many tools I can wield and practice daily feels like ultimate Freedom. At the same time, I am very much aware and sensing the massive amount of grief, fear and uncertainty that is moving like strong and consistent waves through the collective.

What good can I do now? My main focus for the time being is to continue offering my two online group coaching programs on a consistent basis. I know there is immense value in these offerings and I am filled with joy and gratitude as I read the testimonials that continue to pour in. Right now I am in week 3 of the 4 week program The Four Pillars of Stress Resiliency, and the 6 week program Befriend Your Nervous System with Yoga Nidra begins again on April 28 (the four week program will start again on June 17).

Both programs are registration by donation for the time being. Meaning, whatever you are able to donate in exchange for participation, I will happily receive with no questions asked. You can send me an email with questions and the etransfer donation can be sent to the same email (marinmccue@gmail.com). Many people have donated and asked to be a part of both programs, which I am so thrilled to accommodate. I am also exploring facilitating these programs for individuals who want more one on one time, and for small groups that approach me with the desire to have the program offered just for them. I am happy to explore any ideas that come my way!

Here are some of the amazing testimonials I have received in the last few weeks.

“In the realm of the body and mind, Marin facilitates multiple pathways for anyone willing to dive a little deeper into themselves. Her depth of knowledge, wisdom and passion allow her to continually bring new and innovative ways of connecting to oneself. I am incredibly grateful for the workshops I have attended and the growth that has accompanied. I just finished the 6 week yoga nidra workshop and my heart is so full. It was an amazing resource to have access to while not being in the same city. Thank you for your dedication and all the knowledge you share.”

“I loved the program and didn’t realize I guess that it would be live with other people – which is fine, I just don’t tend to share a lot in that setting. But I did go through every week, did some reading and really spent some time on understanding and focusing on my body, my breath and what was happening. Even if there were some “sticky” spots, I even let that go and accessed what it feels like to just “be”. I found that probably the best part of the experience was to just take a breath and just “be”. Although, there are many times during a day that doesn’t happen, at least now I am learning to step away from what is bothering me/busy day, and take some time for myself.”   

“The REAL impact I've felt is completely different than what I expected. It wasn't the Weapon Against Bad Feelings I was expecting... first, it was an understanding of how deeply I've labelled feelings as bad or good, and the growing inkling that this labeling system didn't really come from me, and later that it was a tool of suppression and control that I was using on MYSELF like some kind of monster authoritarian government (gasp). Then it was learning about the complexity and paradox of all these feelings, which kind of threw my bad/good list into a state of confusion as good and bad feelings mixed together and became one. Then it was a slow acceptance of the purpose and ever-present nature of the feelings I had once labelled as bad. I started to let them in the room. And now over these last six weeks, I've felt a growing embrace of those feelings. (I should mention that if anyone had tried to sell me a program promising to teach me how to let my feelings be what they are, I would have run away really fast).

The elements of yoga nidra, the chakra system, and sankalpa have helped me bring this all into the present moment. I can learn from and release stories I've held in the past (they come up again from a different aspect, and I listen, learn, and let them go again). I can also let go of my deep desire to understand and control the future, which is of course entirely unknowable and necessarily chaotic. In the past, I was taught that variations of sankalpa were ways to pave a very specific road to success (I'm thinking vision boards with photos of a fit lady driving fancy convertible through the Tuscan countryside, words like "Joy", "Freedom", "Adventure", and a crowd of adoring fans clapping, accompanied by a the fit lady herself telling everyone how this all came to fruition through simple envisioning), but I've come to learn that sankalpa really has nothing to do with bringing to life a dream slideshow for the future. I think this is the true takeaway... through these practices, I can embrace unchangeable and necessary (and joyous) chaos, and jive with the ensuing emotions that colour my life. They aren't enemies at the gate, but important messengers flying through my open window. I'm now better at moving all the stuff out of the way that tells us me I must be more, or less, or that my life experience is lacking or troubled. And even more, I'm more present and empathetic with other people when they're behaving certain ways, and able to look past the shallowest level of their emotions. I can release that burden from myself rather than taking it on as my own.”

“The 6 week program was a great.  Even though I didn't attend the entire program but the ability to access the videos and the work you shared weekly was powerful. The one thing that I took away was being able to sit with my breath and energy.  That focus on energy and how it is moving and making me feel is very important for me as that helps me get in better alignment with my own self. I would highly recommend this program to everyone.”

“I think I got the most out of connecting during the actual session itself.  Given the timing of everything I was super grateful to have the meeting every week. I did not do the breathing consistently but I do feel that I got more comfortable with yoga nidra and am glad to have that in my toolbox to pull out if I’m feeling off.  I hope/think that I will continue that. I also found the mantra/sankalpa helpful and the thing that I will incorporate.”

“I really wasn't sure how much I'd get out of the zoom chats when I thought about it being a group type connection but I'm loving it. I like hearing about what everyone else is experiencing and sharing perspectives. It's really lovely!”

“We are 2 weeks in and I am loving it. The conversations are real, the questions are of quality, the guidance is above the bar. I encourage you to register for the next go around. It is worth the time. Invest in your knowledge so it can become wisdom.”

“The program was amazing, and honestly I did not feel as though I lost out by only being on a couple calls. I actually watched both weeks videos every week (even if I was in a call), and that almost made me feel more into the program. I think what stood out to me the most was just breathing… as funny as that sounds. I take it for granted all the time and it was just a reminder to slow down and breath. And like I said in the beginning my biggest thing was to slow down, and now I know how to do it.”

I am so grateful for everyone who has participated in these programs and I am excited to continue being in this work with future participants. Reach out, let’s get started.

xoxox

The line between Science and Woo-Woo

I am a very curious person. From an early age I have been asking questions like: who are we? where did we come from? why are we here? what can I know for sure and what can I actually never really know? what is valuable to think about, to feel? who do I want to be? what impact can I actually have? why does any of this matter? who would I be if I didn’t believe that? what can I change? what needs to change? what am I learning?

These questions used to be the prison walls of my own mind. It started as simple frustration and confusion from being fed “truth” by the religion I was born into while my own internal gauge of “truth” did not align. Eventually this spiraled into an existential crisis followed by several years of existential stupor. I continually had the feeling as though I was falling into a deep dark crevasse, and as soon as I managed to climb out of it (days or weeks later), it would only take a few questions to spiral me back into a dizzy spell and tumble back down into that all too familiar crevasse of doom and gloom. My mental dis-ease manifested as a mental health crisis; an eating disorder, depression, anxiety, self harm, drug and alcohol abuse.

Years of practice, learning, opening up, sharing my story, seeking support and guidance, and completely changing the Default Mode Network of my mind, and I am now steady, healthy, strong and live my life aligned with the pure nature of my being. I am healthy and deeply in tune with my mind and body, which allows me to dive deep into rabbit holes, hold space for others who find themselves stuck in darkness, and explore philosophy that is disconnected from science without losing my connection to reality. I can explore the furthest reaches of my current knowledge to highlight my blind spots, vulnerabilities, weaknesses, strengths, gaps, etc. without worrying that I won’t be able to find my way back.

I like to think of myself as a bridge. I enjoy plunging into the esoteric, mystical, spiritual and quantum, not only to appease my own curiosity, but also because I enjoy guiding others to the edge of their knowledge and beliefs while staying in partnership with science and the material world. It becomes a slow and patient process of pushing up against the edges of our current understanding to expand what we see, believe and know to be possible. When we honour our basic needs and have a stable routine for the daily practice, it is amazing what we can change and create within ourselves.

When we are intimately and intricately connected to a foundation of safety, balance, science and simplicity, we can learn to lengthen the bungee chord we use to plunge off into various directions, always with the intent that anything we discover or re-experience from a new lens must be able to come back to the foundation and align with what we know to be true. Which also speaks to the importance of not lengthening the bungee chord too quickly or too soon. Without that continual checking in and integration, it is far too easy to get lost in the mystery of the universe or to jump and slam ourselves against the earth.

In my own learning and development, I have been plunging into the quantum and the ancient texts of The Kybalion to feed my curiosity around my desire to seek out the Universal Truths that are the foundation for this life we are living.

The further away you travel from source, the more rigid or formless you will become. And to stay connected to Source, it makes sense to have some universal truths that serve as the key reminders for a healthy relationship.

What is balance truly? It’s dancing the line of form and formless, masculine and feminine, effort and surrender, full embodiment and mystical exploration, all contributing to the expansion and contraction of energy that is our life force in the present moment unfolding. It is the “engine” that adapts, communicates, grows, and is a part of something bigger yet also the unique individual experience. How do we dance while honoring the Universal Law of Change?

I do believe there are basic (yet not so basic) key tools and gems of wisdom that are pure in nature and 100% malleable through misguided perspectives, attachments or attempts at generating control of status. In general, I think if any of these key truths are dissected on their own, they will not hold up to human complexity. It’s only when taken altogether, the tensegrity of equal and opposing forces creates a frequency of energy that is stronger, more resilient, and has the capacity for high highs and low lows. I think when we get too caught up in analyzing we have stepped away from one of the Universal Truths; we must honor both the masculine (analyzing) and the feminine (medium of felt perception).

I am new to thinking in terms of Universal Laws and Truths, and of course there are plenty of people who have already said or discovered what I am stumbling upon. I do not claim any of these thoughts as mine, as they are serving me now, and I am open to new information and guidance so I can continue down the path with curiosity to know full mind and body integration.

What I appreciate about The Kybalion is the use of the concept THE ALL when referring to the force of energy of which all creation has manifested from. I like the neutrality of that, compared to the energetic resonance I feel when I use the term GOD.

I also like the play with words that happens with using THE ALL as our framework for attempting to grasp what it is and what it is not.

(1) THE ALL must be ALL that REALLY IS. There can be nothing existing outside of THE ALL, else THE ALL would not be THE ALL. 

(2) THE ALL must be INFINITE, for there is nothing else to define, confine, bound, limit; or restrict THE ALL. It must be Infinite in Time, or ETERNAL,--it must have always continuously existed, for there is nothing else to have ever created it, and something can never evolve from nothing, and if it had ever "not been," even for a moment, it would not "be" now,--it must continuously exist forever, for there is nothing to destroy it, and it can never "not-be," even for a moment, because something can never become nothing. It must be Infinite in Space--it must be Everywhere, for there is no place outside of THE ALL--it cannot be otherwise than continuous in Space, without break, cessation, separation, or interruption, for there is nothing to break, separate, or interrupt its continuity, and nothing with which to "fill in the gaps." It must be Infinite in Power, or Absolute, for there is nothing to limit, restrict, restrain, confine, disturb or condition it--it is subject to no other Power, for there is no other Power. 

(3) THE ALL must be IMMUTABLE, or not subject to change in its real nature, for there is nothing to work changes upon it nothing into which it could change, nor from which it could have changed. It cannot be added to nor subtracted from; increased nor diminished; nor become greater or lesser in any respect whatsoever. It must have always been, and must always remain, just what it is now--THE ALL--there has never been, is not now, and never will be, anything else into which it can change. THE ALL being Infinite, Absolute, Eternal and Unchangeable it must follow that anything finite, changeable, fleeting, and conditioned cannot be THE ALL. And as there is Nothing outside of THE ALL, in Reality, then any and all such finite things must be as Nothing in Reality. Now do not become befogged, nor frightened--we are not trying to lead you into the Christian Science field under cover of Hermetic Philosophy. There is a Reconciliation of this apparently contradictory state of affairs. Be patient, we will reach it in time.

I do align with the belief that there must be a great “engine”, energy or cause of life. On this material and human plane of existence, we can not know all that THE ALL is. We are part of it, come from it, all of it is in us, yet as THE ALL it is beyond EVERYTHING and is therefore rudimentally unknowable.

“THE ALL is in the all, all is in THE ALL.” We can understand that anything that IS, is a part of THE ALL. And conversely, anything that IS, houses THE ALL within it. The way this makes sense to me is to think of a single cell within your body. That single cell has the DNA makeup for absolutely everything that you are. All that you are is housed in that single cell, yet it is also an individual cell and manifests as an important part of the whole, and not the WHOLE in and of itself.

"Under, and back of, the Universe of Time, Space and Change, is ever to be found The Substantial Reality--the Fundamental Truth…. 

"Substance" means: "that which underlies all outward manifestations; the essence; the essential reality; the thing in itself," etc. "Substantial" means: "actually existing; being the essential element; being real," etc. "Reality" means: "the state of being real; true, enduring; valid; fixed; permanent; actual," etc. Under and behind all outward appearances or manifestations, there must always be a Substantial Reality. This is the Law.” - The Kybalion

The Kybalion speaks to Seven Principles of Truth…

"The Principles of Truth are Seven; he who knows these, understandingly, possesses the Magic Key before whose touch all the Doors of the Temple fly open."--The Kybalion. 

1. The Principle of Mentalism: “The ALL is MIND; the Universe in Mental”

“We can transmute one mental state into another, along the lines of Polarization. Things of the same class may have their polarity changed.”

2. The Principle of Correspondence:

“As above, so below. As below, so above.” Truth corresponds on all planes of manifestation. 

3. The Principle of Vibration: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates”

4. The Principle of Polarity: “Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites>”

5. The Principle of Rhythm: “Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides; pendulum; rhythm compensates.”

6. The Principle of Cause and Effect: “The ALL is above cause and effect, except when it wills to become a Cause. Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause.”

7. The Principle of Gender: “Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes”

“He sees that nothing really IS, but that everything is BECOMING and CHANGING. Nothing stands still-everything is being born, growing, dying-the very instant a thing reaches its height, it begins to decline--the law of rhythm is in constant operation--there is no reality, enduring quality, fixity, or substantiality in anything-- nothing is permanent but Change. He sees all things evolving from other things, and resolving into other things--constant action and reaction; inflow and outflow; building up and tearing down; creation and destruction; birth, growth and death. Nothing endures but Change. And if he be a thinking man, he realizes that all of these changing things must be but outward appearances or manifestations of some Underlying Power--some Substantial Reality.” - The Kybalion

I am not suggesting you believe in Hermeticism and I am certainly not suggesting or judging you if you prefer to speak and believe your version of GOD. What I do suggest is that we can all pause and reflect on where religion came from, and begin to question the manifestation and evolution of religions to gain clarity on whether there may be another perspective to try on. Perhaps a “rule” you have been blindly abiding by can be updated, expanded or transformed as you settle into the foundational Truths that all other “rules” came from. I think all religious beliefs become convoluted and misguided when distilled into cultural rules or an organized way of living. Man is imperfect. These Universal Truths that are the foundation of so many religions have lost their potency and power because leaders in Church pull their congregation further away from Source. AND, I do believe there is wisdom in exploring consciousness and the different realms of existence as long as we don't get caught in thinking we will know what is actually unknowable. 

More questions, fewer answers. What will it take for us to find solace and power in the expansive questions versus craving certainty? What will it take to stop fishing for quick fixes and answers when the questions themselves are so much more nourishing? What are you curious about? Let’s follow that curiosity.

Microglial Cells - fascia of the brain

I stumbled across a couple of articles a few days ago that completely grabbed my attention with a deep knowing of significance. These articles have enthralled my attention and have given me some new insights into my own mental health journey and what my passion and purpose is to this day. The articles are about microglial cells in the brain and their connection to various mental and physical health and ailments.

What are glial cells? They are part of the neuronal family yet they function differently than the neurons that communicate through electrical currents jumping from one neuron to the next and so on. Glial cells can either function primarily as the physical support for neurons, including the ability for neurons to grow myelin, or they provide nutrients to neurons and regulate the extracellular fluid of the brain, especially surrounding neurons and their synapses. Microglial cells are a specific glial cell found in the brain, and have a similar role as the fascial system of the body.

Let’s detour for a moment for a brief reminder of what Fascia is and why this connection to microglial cells is blowing my mind right now.

In a nutshell, fascia refers to the connective tissue that surrounds every layer of every organ, cell, and structure in your body. The Fascial System surrounds, interweaves, and interpenetrates everything in the body and allows all body systems to be integrated. It is composed of elastin (which allows the body to move in every dynamic plane possible), collagen (which provides the strength and structure of the human form), and a gel-like substance referred to as ground-substance (which is the fluid that fills all the space in the extracellular matrix; i.e. the space outside the cell). The human body is innately intelligent, because the fascia is a wise fibre-optic system that works like an organ in and of itself. It has become more clear in recent years that traumatic memories, implicit memories, habits, and our general history is stored within the body, within the fascia. The fascia is the biological page that our life’s narrative is written on. This is why it is nearly impossible to think your way into a new state of being when your body is holding on to the stories of the past. You can think one way, but if your body feels a different way, feeling will trump thinking, otherwise we shut down feeling and lose access to the power and innate wisdom of the body.

When we address the body, rather than simply the thinking or language ability of the mind, we can heal and transform at a much more successful and efficient rate. 

The Nervous System is embedded in the Fascia, and highjacks the entire body anytime it receives a signal of “danger” (which is far more often than necessary nowadays). The Nervous System reacts to posture, movement, thoughts, and chemicals of our inner-pharmacy. It’s job is survival, so it is extremely sensitive and animalistic in nature. When we live in chronic activation (hyperarousal) or deactivation (hypoarousal) we lose touch with our innately intuitive, sensitive and wise fascia. And, as the saying goes, “use it or lose it.” When we do not properly care and tend to the fascia, the physical body, our body begins to harden, break down, and become separated and disconnected versus integrated and whole.   

Now, back to microglial cells. Just as the fascia of the body can be the conduit of whole body communication, wisdom, freedom of movement, and immense joy and pleasure of living, the microglial cells of the brain operate in a similar fashion.

In the first article I mentioned above, it is stated that previously scientists thought glial cells only had the function of support for neurons, yet it has become clear that glial cells are active participants in a number of neurologic processes, including pain and various symptoms associated with various mental health afflictions.

This is a big deal for many reasons, one being the massive amount of microglial cells in our system.

“Outnumbering neurons in all areas of the brain, glial cells account for over half the volume and more than 70% of the total CNS cell population.”

The new understanding of microglial cells has expanded the view of what these amazing cells are actually doing for us on a daily bases.

“Mirroring their wide distribution centrally and peripherally, glial cells have multiple functions in a wide variety of physiological processes, including CNS development, pathogen recognition, phagocytosis, antigen presentation, cytotoxicity, extracellular matrix remodeling, repair, stem cell regulation, regulation of tumor cell proliferation, lipid transport, neuronal communication, and modulation of inflammation.”

Another fascinating aspect of the microglial cell is that it expresses cannabinoid receptors, which plays a role in the body’s natural ability to relieve pain, produce anti-inflammatory chemicals, provide antioxidants, and engage in neuronal protection and self preservation in the face of stressors. Microglial cells basically support our body’s ability to heal itself!

However, just as a friendly puppy can become a rabid terror if treated poorly with neglect and abuse, our very own Glial Cells are capable of turning against us, producing chemicals that block homeostasis and actually increase the chronification of pain. When we neglect our own basic needs, our body, our glial cells, literally become agents of destruction.

The second article I mentioned speaks to this potently and refers to microglia as game-changers for mental health.

“Under the right circumstances, microglia keep the brain healthy; they twirl around neurons like tiny dancers stretching out their long, elegant limbs, soothing and bathing neurons in anti-inflammatory factors that help protect the brain’s all-important neural circuitry.

But microglia, it turns out, also have a dark side. When they sense incoming threats — the same triggers that can overwhelm our body’s immune system: chronic stressors (including adverse childhood experiences), environmental toxins, trauma, infections— microglia can morph from angels into frenzied assassins. They can begin to spit forth inflammatory toxins and engulf and destroy the very neural synapses they once protected — those fundamental to our mind state, mental processing, mood, behavior, and memories. Indeed, the root causes of depression and anxiety, stem not so much from chemical imbalances but from microglia gone rogue — when microglia spit out inflammation that alters levels of dopamine and serotonin.

Because these microglia-led inflammatory changes appear differently in the brain from one person to another, we give it a hundred different names: OCD, ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, memory loss.

This science also solves a decades-old mystery: the link between trauma and loss of brain synapses has long confounded the medical community. We’ve known for some time that adverse childhood experiences can alter important synaptic wiring in the brain — we can see this in brain scans of children and teens who’ve experience chronic unpredictable stress, whether that stress is due to parents fighting, emotional neglect, chronic humiliation, poverty, or community violence. Connections between important areas of the brain can become compromised, wanted and necessary brain circuits and synapses can be lost. Gray matter volume decreases. We also know that children facing ACEs have a higher rate of mental health disorders, mood disorders, and Alzheimer’s as the years tick by.”

While scientists are in the process of discovering and designing drugs that could potentially target glial cells, which is a complex undertaking, the best course of action for all of us is to take our mental and physical health more seriously. I know I want this army of glial cells to be fighting for my highest good and that means my practice of meditation, movement, intermittent fasting and diverse diet, sleep, constructive rest, vitamins and nutrients, connection with myself, others and nature, and anything else I can do to know and love myself more intimately is absolutely a top priority.

For many years now there has been research and a general understanding that our gut health is highly correlated to the amount of serotonin in the body, and therefore, a predictor of potential mental health issues. A fascinating statement in this article mentions: 

“…that one way to influence both the gut and microglia is through intermittent fasting and fasting-mimicking diets, which help increase the resistance of neurons to overpruning. With fasting, we may have some ability to influence microglia to turn from the dark side to the light again.”

And then my favorite nerve in the body is mentioned; the Vagus Nerve.

“Scientists are also working to try to reboot microglia by hacking the largest nerve in the body, the vagus nerve, which travels down from the brain stem and throughout our torso, sending its roots into our heart, lungs, and digestive system. The vagus nerve acts as a superconductor, sending bidirectional signals between body and brain. When the body is under emotional or physical stress it zips “fight flight freeze” warning messages up the vagus nerve to the brain, which puts microglia under duress too, leading, over time, to changes in everyday mood and behavior. Work to calm the vagus nerve — like Stephen Porges’s Safe and Sound Protocol — are now more crucial than ever. Meanwhile, human clinical trials are examining whether stimulating the vagus nerve can ameliorate symptoms in chronic pain, memory loss, depression, and autoimmune disease.”

So there you have it. These tiny inconspicuous cells are actually at the foundation of some major life altering experiences and very well may be the key to optimal mental and physical health. I find this knowledge so inspiring as it gives me a clear visual and purpose behind the often tedious tasks of sustaining my basic needs. I know sleep is important, I know eating well and listening to my body is important, I know, I know, I know…..and now when I take action for my overall health and longevity, despite any inconveniences, I will visualize these tiny and amazing microglial cells in my brain getting what they need so they can be the powerful conductors of strong health and well-being.

Quantum mindset

We are creatures of habit. We can quickly and easily get stuck in cyclical patterns of actions, cyclical loops of thought, and find ourselves in stagnancy, weighed down by our own perspective, locked in on a reality that is not THE ONE AND ONLY REALITY. There is nothing to shame or hate in this system, as it is serving to keep us alive! If you are reading this now, you are alive, and everything that is a habit for you right now is perceived as vital and efficient for your continued survival. Yet we are capable of more than simply surviving. When we get off the cyclical loop, we get access to thriving.

At times of low vibration, low consciousness, meandering the dark hallways of doom and gloom and Victim-mentality, I pause to remind myself that there is much more that is unseen than seen, and it is in the unseen that we get access to expansion. By moving inward, meeting sensation, noticing and observing ourselves, we start to gather insight. Rather than simply going along for the ride and avoiding discomfort while seeking pleasure, we can build our emotional maturity and begin living as adults in the NOW without our childhood leaking unconsciously all over the place.

At the quantum level, there is a fascinating reality beneath the level of reality we experience on a daily basis. Everything material (including our own body) is composed of atoms. And what are atoms? They are particles composed of protons and neutrons, which make up the Nucleus, and electrons which orbit the nucleus. And what is in between the nucleus and electrons? Space and energy.

If we blew up an atom to a size we can comprehend, the nucleus is equivalent to a speck of dirt on a baseball pitcher's mound, and the electrons would be orbiting the parking lot outside the field. In between, is a whole lot of space and energy.

Now, condense that atom back down to its microscopic size, and combine trillions of atoms to compose the human body (or anything else in the material world). What we see as tangible flesh, is actually less than 1% of what makes us who we are. We are more space and energy than we are a physical body. We are primarily subtle energy, potential, possibility, and mystical.

To take this a step further. In the "double slit experiment," quantum physicists have discovered that when we measure elementary particles they become "real" and known in the one location they have been measured. Yet, when we do not measure or know where it is in space and time, it remains in a wave-like form, everywhere simultaneously and no-where in reality. In fact, we cannot simultaneously know where a particle is and the direction or wave pattern it emulates. Subtle energy is everywhere and no-where at the same time. The “observer effect” is what creates a fixed knowing of where the energy manifests in the material world, yet without observing, the subtle energy behind the material remains in a flowing wave of possibilities. As Joe Dispenza says,

“Look for an electron, and it collapses from a wave of probabilities into an event called a particle, the physical manifestation of matter. You, as the Quantum Observer are commanding matter to conform to your intentions.”

The best analogy I have heard to understand this more clearly is to imagine the wave-pattern as a coin spinning; neither heads nor tails, yet simultaneously both. And when we observe or measure where the coin is, it comes to a full stop and makes a choice as to whether it will land on heads or tails.

The version of reality you are in now is a creation of your mind. The more stuck or stagnant you feel, the more indication that you are focused on the material and you are believing your thoughts as more real than they actually are.

While it is vital that you check your thoughts and ensure you are thinking in a way that creates space, energy and possibility, we also need to do the work to get the body on board with the change you seek. We have over-identified with the thinking mind. Of course the thinking mind serves a purpose, and it is vital and amazing. And, it equates to 5% of your power. Your subconscious is like a wild 6 ton elephant, and it cannot be controlled with words alone. You need to meet it, see it, embrace it, coax it, and retrain it. If your desires and goals in life are not in alignment with what you demonstrate and how you feel, you are in a battle of the 5% against the 95%.

Now, back to science, the next quantum experiment to consider is what would happen in a vacuum, if all air and energy was removed, what would remain? What is “nothing”? Through a series of experiments, creating vacuum environments, they discovered that elementary particles and their corresponding energy continues to appear and disappear, despite there being “nothing” in the container. This is where we start to expand what we know to be possible, as "nothing" takes on a new meaning.

At the qunatum level, "nothing" encompasses everything. Every possible manifestation lives within the nothing. And so we can say, we are everything and nothing.

And so I am reminded to slow down and create more space for quietude and contemplation. There is more going on beneath the surface of the material, beyond the world of distraction, within the subtle sensations of felt perception.

Feel your breath. Put your hands on your body and hold space for sensation to rise and fall. Yes we are tangible fleshy material objects in the world, AND we are waves of energy expanding and contracting on more planes of existence than what the eye can see. Step onto the road less traveled. Open your mind to meet your body. It’s time to befriend that wild elephant and work with it, not against it.

The more we can open our minds to the unknown, hold space for uncertainty, move like water, and tune in to the energy of expansion and contraction without needing a fixed point or rigid view of reality, the more we get access to this mystical side of who we are, where we came from and where we are going.

The mystery and beauty of the quantum brings me into a state of awe. My rigid thinking shifts from fixed on heads or tails, and begins to spin, expand and open up to the vast possibilities that I may not have considered before. I begin to question all of my beliefs and I notice the vibration of my thoughts, knowing that I don’t have to continue thinking, believing or behaving in any way that weighs me down.

I start to see myself, and everyone, as a complex matrix of tethers. When tethers become damaged, some people avoid the discomfort and simply compensate by relying on other tethers. Others’ may move right into what is damaged, get to know it, and repair it. Some tethers are trauma, and they ball up into a knot as our amazing nervous system creates layers of protection so the pain is not truly felt until your mental and emotional capacity are ready and capable of processing. Layers of tethers are folded on top to conceal the wound, yet if the core is wounded, of course that will manifest in various ways in the other layers. Some people feel so much, they have a heightened sensitivity, and spend their days anxious, worried and overstimulated. Others have learned to push their discomfort away, to avoid what feels unstable and to operate from their tough outer layer of protection. Some people land on rigid thinking and beliefs, and let those tethers cement into place. Naturally a deep fear of shaking that foundation would be enough to protect it at all costs. Some people feel supported with safe and strong tethers uniting and bonding them to their loved ones, and to themselves. Yet others feel if they fall there is absolutely nothing there to support them. A sense that a fall means a free fall into the abyss with a fatal impact of some kind at the bottom. Again, naturally, the fear of not being supported is enough to shut down emotion or push people away in order to avoid the trauma of being disappointed or rejected. We all have patterns to uncover in our survival system. And when we meet them with love and curiosity, the unfolding and unraveling takes us on a journey towards thriving.

Momentum is difficult to start, and difficult to stop once it has started. Imagine these tethers, coalescing, unfolding, knotting up or untying. Whatever momentum you are in now, know that you can change the direction of your life, your mind and your body. It starts with one tether, one choice. An intimate look at one piece of your complex matrix that is accessible and realistic for you to work with. That one tether leads you to another, and then another, and then a whole layer reveals itself. Opportunity after opportunity to meet your un-integrated emotions and acknowledge the power this wound had on your personality and beliefs. You will recognize how your pattern of avoidance, numbing, craving, etc. are the effects of the deeper root cause; the emotional wound that needs love and attention to meld back into your wholeness.

One tether at a time. Before you know it, your perception of reality will completely change. The way is found in your conscious BREATH, and to move THROUGH we must go IN. And to go IN, you must meet yourself with AWE. You are unique and special, as we all are. And I want to live in a world where everyone knows their innate power, their immense contribution, and their irreplaceable creativity. Join me in that world. Do the work.

What it means to "hold space"...

Holding space for someone is an important part of my regular vernacular. It guides me into generous listening, to acknowledging the person I am listening to as wise, capable and in no way in need of saving. It is a process of honoring the other, allowing them to ask for what they need, and to simply receive a loving ear and heart to listen as they work through or arise to their own insights.

I say this phrase often, and my husband occasionally teases me by using the phrase himself, with a goofy smile on his face. Yet, I know he gets it. And I know not everyone understands this concept whatsoever. I stumbled across a beautiful explanation of this skill-set, and feel compelled to share with all of you.

on instagram, @risingwoman

“Holding space requires us to step fully into Being when everything inside of us tell us we should be Doing.

Space holding doesn’t mean taking responsibility for the internal world of another.

It’s never our job to fix another person’s feelings, or to expect someone else can fix ours.

Holding space isn’t saying all the right things…it isn’t doing much of anything really.

Holding space is the art of “being with” someone’s pain and allowing them to have their experience without making it about ourselves.

Holding space is the quiet, powerful force of present loving connection.

Holding space is an “I Love you and I’m not going anywhere” while you process this emotion.

Holding space is patience and eye-contact when someone is scared or overwhelmed by their own feelings.

Presence without judgement, a hug, non-reactivity, learning not to take things personally or trying to save someone from their feelings are all profound acts of space holding.

Our pain and our grief deserve equal seats at the table as our sparkle and our joy.

Blocks only occur when we try turning off the tap. And as we learn to let our feelings in, we learn to let them go just as freely.

Living by a “good vibes or goodbye” philosophy is dangerously shallow.

In a culture where we shame negative feelings and pedestal the light, we risk isolating ourselves from others when we really need love and support.

Relationships are deepened through vulnerability and the courage to let another in when you’re hurting.

Closeness comes from seeing someone in their darkest moments and reminding them they’re loved exactly as they are” - Sheleana Aiyana @risingwoman

While this is massively transformative for all relationships, this includes the relationship with self! I invite you to get curious and be in the practice of holding space for yourself. Notice what comes up for you. Anything you desire in your relationships with others, must begin with the authentic relationship with yourself.

xo

If it's hysterical, it's historical

I am hosting a 6 week Yoga Nidra series starting at the end of February (Monday or Thursday evening group call, 7-8pm, starting February 24).

An opportunity to connect online for one hour per week, move through a simple workbook, and practice this art of relaxation, retraining, and integration. Mental health struggles and afflictions are continually increasing, and it has become clear that healing and thriving is achieved in the realm of the emotional inner work, and is not achieved through surgery or simply talking it through.

"Positive and negative experiences register a memory in cell tissue as well as in the energy field. As neurobiologist Dr. Candace Pert has proven, neuropeptides--the chemicals triggered by emotions--are thoughts converted into matter. Our emotions reside physically in our bodies and interact with our cells and tissues. If a person is able to sense intuitively that he or she is losing  energy because of a stressful situation--and then acts to correct that loss of energy--then the likelihood of that stress developing into a physical crisis is reduced, if not eliminated completely.... my indicator of an accurate intuition is a lack of emotion" - Carolyn Myss

This Yoga Nidra series is an opportunity to get to know each layer of the practice intimately, so that you can understand the process, do simple and practical practices of inquiry, and get a deeper and more transformative result each time you lay back to receive your unique medicine. We live in a hustle culture, overstimulated, and a constant run, hide and avoid the darker or heavier aspects of being alive. Yet it is through opening up, embracing our complexity, and learning how to meet our discomfort with love so that we can re-integrate the past traumas into our wholeness.

Just as sound arises, moves and releases, so too can the sensation of charged emotions. Your endocrine  system reacts before your intellect or conscious thought (bottom-up processing). It regulates your  learning and growth (mind and body), metabolism, digestion, elimination, menstruation, and sleep. We have a constant internal orchestra of affect, majority being subconscious while some can be  in the conscious field - in the form of: arousal or calm, and pleasure or aversion.

Based on history and your current environment, affect leads to sensation, which is felt, first subconsciously, and second, consciously. This is followed by emotional reactions that often lead  to supposing meaning into our subjective reality. The sequence of events follows prediction and  prediction-error more so than simple reaction to objective stimuli. I.e. We see what we believe and expect. We don't see with our eyes, we perceive with our mind.

Emotion leads to charged memories and a map of survival and experience is created to support the  continued navigation through life. We literally are the architects of our own reality. Our fight or  flight system is triggered on average 50-300x per day (70% of waking day), and the resulting  neurochemical soup your mind steeps in all day naturally has a huge effect on energy, mood,  perspective, and ability to adapt, learn and grow.

The quality of hormones, glandular secretions, or inner pharmacy, shifts profoundly through  relaxation. A retraining process for your mind and body to find the healthy balance between fight  or flight, and rest & digest. We need both, just as we need the inhale and the exhale.

Join me to learn and grow as you open up to the art of slowing down to speed up.

More details here for the 6 week series

If you would like to register, please email me at marinmccue@gmail.com

Ring in the New Year

I like to pretend I am Superwoman. The amount I can get done in a day and the amount of projects and collaborations I can take on, makes me feel unstoppable, unshakable, immovable. And then, I slow down for some R&R and I am hit with exhaustion. Rather than pulling to the side of the road for a breather, my whole engine shuts down and rewires and suddenly I am left to figure out how to operate a new vehicle, with new insights, rules and connections. I have gotten so much better at listening to the whispers to slow down before they become screams, yet this time of year - with minimal sunlight and long nights - I just feel the need to spend more time in solitude, quiet contemplation and self-inquiry. I feel a death happening, of everything I am letting go of, releasing, and stepping out of - and that requires some grieving, healing and awkward practicing as I step into what I desire more of.

While I am definitely coming out of the fog of my latest deeply nourishing slow down, I am noticing a desire to create something epic for New Years Eve/Day for others to participate in and get their momentum going for the year ahead. While I do have an event at Yoga Nova on New Years Day (Yin, Yoga Nidra & Sound Healing), I find myself comparing my offerings to other health and wellness brands and I am lacking the New Years program to support others in getting their groove going for the year ahead.

Yet, I am also stepping into this year with some insights and desires that feel like uncharted territory for me, which is encompassed by the word GENTLE. And when I sit with the energy of Gentle, scrambling to create and launch something for NYE doesn’t feel like alignment. I have made a business by being creative and often that creativity is impulsive and comes from a flow of energy that feels simultaneously pleasurable and somewhat forced. Learning how to embody GENTLE is so much harder for me than I thought it would be. I have found myself falling into hypoarousal more often in the past couple of weeks, partly because I have consciously created space for NOTHING (which feels oh so good) and because I have built a habit of avoiding lots of space in my schedule because I do “busy” a lot easier than I can do “stillness and gentle.” Finding the balance is going to be my key to success this year, and to say that it has been a bumpy start to this new practice is an understatement.

So what would be the gentle approach to meeting this desire to create and facilitate a New Years Eve program or initiative? My soul lights up when I am in creativity and my heart sings when I perceive my work as impacting others in a positive way. While I gift myself the space to continue integrating my own personal lessons and desires from 2019 leading into 2020, I am opening up the possibility that I will create something to share within the first few days of the New Year, and in the meantime, I have gone through my video history on my youtube channel and pulled from the archives to share something that may be exactly what you need.

How to Create/Land on Your Word of the Year

This is a recording of a zoom call I hosted for my friend Lucy Dunne’s personal training group last January. I share my journey with Word of the Year starting back in 2013 and then guide you through a series of questions and exercises to support landing on your own word.

Enjoy and Happy New Year xoxo

Low Cost and Karma Yoga in YYC *updated

Hey everyone,

A few years ago I posted on my blog a schedule of low cost yoga in our beautiful city. Who knew that would be the most popular page on my website?? So, following the energy of what is being asked for, here is an updated version for you to utilize and share.

*Always check websites to ensure class is being offered before you show up

MONDAY

12:10pm - 12:55 PM $10 drop in. Yin - Warm - YOGA NOVA

6:15 - 7:15pm Hatha Flow. $10 drop in, pre-registration required - LifeSongYoga Studio in Edgemont NW.

7:00pm Critical Alignment Yoga, $10 drop in - Back to Mobility

TUESDAY

6:30 AM – 07:20 AM $10 Rise & Shine Flow - LIV yoga + wellness

12:10pm-12:55 Sound Healing Meditation, $10 - Yoga Nova

6:30-7:45pm By donation. Gentle flow style. - Penbrooke Meadows Community Association

WEDNESDAY

12:10 PM – 12:55 PM, $10 - The Restoration - Yoga Nova

THURSDAY

6:30 AM – 07:20 AM $10 Rise & Shine Flow - Liv yoga + wellness

12:10pm-12:55 Yoga Nidra, $10 - Yoga Nova

6:30-7:45pm By donation. Gentle flow style. - Penbrooke Meadows Community Association

FRIDAY

12:10pm-12:55 Slow Flow - Warm Hatha Vinyasa, $10 - Yoga Nova

6:15pm- $5 Funky Flow - Yogadotcalm

640pm MARDA & KENSINGTON, 7pm AVDA - $10 drop ins for charity at all studios - YYC CYCLE

5:00pm - $5 Flow - Yogadown Studios & Boutique

5:45-7pm - $5 Yoga Groove at Yoga Santosha in Mission

8:00 - 9:00 pm, Hot Yoga, $5-10 for charity - Metta Yoga

SATURDAY

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM, $10 Hips + Shoulders — Liv yoga + wellness

10:45 AM – 11:45 AM, $10 Flow - Liv yoga + wellness

12:00 PM – 01:15 PM, $10 Hatha - Liv yoga + wellness

1:30pm - 2:45pm, $5 - Metta Yoga Calgary

2-3:15pm Karma Yoga at Yoga Santosha (Mission & Kensington locations). 

4:15pm- Karma/donation class - Yogadotcalm

SUNDAY

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM, $10 Core + Back - Liv yoga + wellness

*In the spring/summer/fall (May-October), 10am - 11am, pay what you can - Mahogany Outdoor Yoga

*In the spring/summer/fall (May-October), 1:00 - 2:00pm, pay what you can in Stanley Park - Calgary Outdoor Yoga

*Winter (November-April), 1-2pm, pay what you can - Munro Yoga

Check out this website for more details… www.outdooryoga.ca

11:15 AM – 12:15 PM, $10 Yang/Yin - Liv yoga + wellness

12:30 PM – 01:30 PM, $10 Flow - Liv yoga + wellness

4:00 - 5:30pm, $7 dropin, Yin - Passage Studios.

5:00 - 6:15pm: $5 dropin, - www.theyogastudiocalgary.com

6:30pm - 7:45pm: $5 dropin, - www.theyogastudiocalgary.com

*All classes at Holistic Institute of Health & Fertility are $10

*Special Note: Anyone with Cancer or a caregiver for someone with cancer, classes at Wellspring are free for them. They just need to become a member (also free). The Yoga Thrive program offers a very reduced investment for classes, also for those with cancer/caregivers 12 weeks for $100.

*HotShop and both Yoga Santosha locations offer several free and $5 drop-ins through the week. Check them out!

You have another class to add to this list??? Send me a message with details and I will update. xoxo

The unfolding continues.....reflections and learnings

This post has been burning inside of me and I am so ready to sit and allow this to flow through and out of me. December is the month that I love to be in deep reflection as I tie up the loose ends of the year, land on the deep lessons I needed to learn, and create space for the possibility and growth of the year ahead. While this is obviously a public forum and I am going to eventually hit SAVE & PUBLISH, this post is truly for me. And the beauty in that is that when I am pure in my intentions and share openly and honestly, we all benefit. So while this is for me, it is definitely for YOU too.

I have been reflecting on my word of the year - Eunoia - and how that has supported and guided me in big and small ways this year. Choosing a WORD OF THE YEAR has been one of my personal favorite traditions for the past 8 years. To spend a full year with a rooted intention is a powerful way to move from practice to mastery; from conscious DOING to subconscious BEING.

It was a few years ago now that my word of the year shifted from the energy of Fire, Action and Power, towards the softer side of balance. I recognized, after working with BOLD, FEARLESS, and MOMENTUM, that I am a master at DOING. When I set my sights on something, I make it happen. I do not struggle with finding the FIRE I need to pursue what I desire. FIRE is my superpower.

Well, what serves you at one point in life, and maybe even saved your life, becomes your self-made prison later on if you have not released and evolved into a new way of being and doing.

Two years ago, my word of the year was UNFOLD and TRUST. I had become very clear on my need to learn the art of slowing down. I knew, cognitively, that slowing down, meditating and relaxing was important, but I had not experienced pleasure in it and found that slowing down often sent me into a spiral of disembodiment and depression. So naturally, I avoided slowing down because I simply didn’t understand how to do it in a constructive and conscious way.

2017 and 2018 sent me on a search for teachers and experiences that could help me learn to love and understand the art of slowing down. I made my way into Yin trainings, meditation trainings and experiences, yoga life coaching training, myofascial yoga teacher training, yoga nidra training, research into pleasure, the nervous system, and breathwork experiences. Look at me trying so hard to slow down!

The insights, metaphors and perspectives I was gifted in these trainings and experiences were substantial. Meanwhile, I wrote and published a book and kept adding classes to my drop-in teaching schedule. I was very mindful to bookend my day with earth, air and flow, yet my days were all FIRE/effort/busy!

The first sign of change in this arena began to creep in when my morning and evening routine began to lengthen. I was going to bed earlier and waking up earlier simply so I could have the ample space in the morning to meditate, breathe, move, read and write. I craved this time for myself, and could feel tethers of attachment form as my ongoing healing and development took on the energy of efficiency and FIRE, as that way of being was so familiar and comfortable for me.

2019 was the first time that my WORD OF THE YEAR was gifted to me. My friend Elly gave me a gift for Christmas, a necklace with the word EUNOIA inscribed into the gold pendent dangling from a gold chain. Along with it was a definition which read: “beautiful thinking that flows from a balanced, healthy and positive mind.” Upon further inquiry, I also discovered that it is a rarely used medical term referring to a state of normal mental health. BINGO! To develop and strengthen my eunoia, I knew I needed to take care of my basic needs, continue the practice of retraining my nervous system and expand my ability to be present. From this, my business expanded into the realm of Mental Health Strength Training.

Once again, my deliberation and execution of Eunoia was a methodical and intentional practice. More research. More training. More time in my morning and evening routines to engage in the repetition needed to create the state I desire.

It was this year that I started to notice a disconnect. I am working so hard to find peace! I know how to heal and I am so inspired to teach and share, yet the fire and intensity that I used to forge my own healing path is not the same energy I need to be the support for others. I found myself angry with people I love because they weren’t doing as I do. I was frustrated with family members who were struggling because I wanted them to be more vulnerable and heal the way I did! At the time, this confused me. How is it that I am practicing peace and love, yet this anger and frustration can take over and feel so strong. What am I doing wrong? Back to the research!

All of that is simply to give context for what has arrived in these last three months of 2019….

Myofascial Yoga - Christine Wushke held a weekend training focused on Pelvic Health. I know several people who struggle with prolapse of various kinds, chronic pain in the pelvic region, degeneration of the hip bones, sexual abuse that has left lack of sensation or fear of pleasure, and on top of that, I have experienced occasional low back pain that seemed to flare up every 6 - 12 months. So, I was curious to learn and implement what I learn. We explored the anatomy of the pelvis, where stress and tension often lands, how we make it worse without even realizing that’s what we are doing, how to properly engage the core muscles, and how to move and engage the muscles of the pelvis region to create balance in strength and relaxation. Being open and connected to the pelvis area is a pleasurable experience and one that is relatively new for me. Having an eating disorder for so many years, I did not have love for my belly or lower body in general. To be connected, fascinated and curious to explore and find true alignment has become one of my deep desires, and what I often refer to as one of the many rabbit holes I get enthralled by.

My own pelvis misalignment became very obvious in this weekend workshop, as we all had a turn assessing each other’s alignment in various positions. Such a valuable practice as a teacher. I was empowered to know more about my body and what I can do to release the stuck tension and practice neuro-muscular retraining so I can move in a more aligned and healthy way.

In true Marin-fashion, I began the “healing and realigning” process in the way I know how: checklist, discipline, force, and effort. And, rather than release something else to create space for this deliberate re-patterning, I simply added it in, in between classes, coffee dates, writing sessions, and trainings. I think it is worth mentioning that while I was doing all of this, I truly did not see the fire and effort as an imbalance. I was way more balanced, present and mindful than ever before, and overall, extremely healthy and successful. It’s not until looking back that I can see what I was so obvious to many others who know me.

Three weeks ago, I was feeling more aligned and embodied than ever. I was moving differently, my pelvis felt great, and after teaching a yoga class, I spent a few minutes to do some of my deliberate healing practice. I moved into a deep backbend, deeper than I ever have before. And, it felt AMAZING! I was in awe of the progress I had made in only a few weeks. One deep back bend turned into 5. With a smile on my face, I rolled up my mat and off I went. Two and a half days later, my body recognized that I was not slowing down and had no intention to, and so, my low back seized and I was forced into slowing down. In fact, I had to clear my schedule for the day and get several classes subbed for the following few days so that I could lay on my back with very minimal movement.

What I realized while laying on my back for a full day was how magical and amazing the human body truly is. I wasn’t mad, frustrated or in fear. I was so curious and open to what this experience was teaching me. I saw that those deep backbends were not the problem. The problem arose when I did not honor the equal importance of slowing down, integrating and relaxing after a clear push outside my familiar range of motion (or comfort zone). What a gift that was to receive. A true gift in that I already cognitively knew this balance was important, but until I experienced it in my body, I didn’t fully get it. Now, I do.

I got the support I needed to release the stuck tension in my low back, and allowed myself to steep in slowing down. Within a few days, my back was fine, great in fact. But this time, I stayed with the lesson learned and began to look at my schedule, at my self-imposed expectations, and how I had allowed physical movement, research, learning and creating to become a distraction from what I had been pursuing…the art of slowing down.

This is when the story starts to pick up….two Friday’s ago (November 22), I was laying on my back at home and I was meeting the sensations in my low back. I was in the practice of being with the sensations, not trying to fix, feed or fight, not labeling as good or bad, just being with. Suddenly, a memory surfaced. I recalled being 14 years old at an all boy’s basketball camp. My older brother, his best friend, and my cousin were leading the camp. At one point, I fell hard onto my tailbone. HARD! I jumped up and ran out of the gym in tears. It was so painful. My cousin, being the late adolescent that he was, began to make fun of me. He drew attention to me and my injury in a way that brought me into shame, embarrassment, and anger, all mixed in with the intense pain in my tailbone.

It dawned on me suddenly, laying on my back at home, that may have been the moment that this misalignment occurred. And, because I was already struggling with mental health and an eating disorder at that time, the tension and adhesion’s simply mixed in with the matrix of wounds in that area. I finally could see (and feel) that healing truly is an unwinding and an untethering to the stories and emotions that get lodged into the body.

My heart burst open and I was overcome with joy, love and awe. The next day, Saturday, I went to a Sound Healing session that was hosted by my friend Saleste. Trying to describe this experience will barely do it justice. Laying on my back being engulfed by the sounds of crystal bowls and gongs, I moved into complete effortless-ness. No fear of the darkness and no expectation on the light. I found myself moving and breathing intuitively, not a contrived following of others or past habits. I felt flow. I felt the vibrations of the sound move through me unhindered and unobstructed by my own effort or desire. I was curious and expansive, and peaceful.

Two days later, I stepped into an immersive Yoga Nidra training with Tanis Fishman and the School of Sankalpa. This was one year after my first Yoga Nidra training and I was so excited to dive deeper into the practice and fine-tune my own writing and delivery of this life changing practice.

What became clear in this training is that how you show up as a teacher is how you show up in your life. And, really, how you show up anywhere is how you show up everywhere. It’s all connected.

Yet, to be in a loving space with mindful and wise council, I was able to be seen and challenged to let go of the effort and control that I did not see as my self-made prison. It was an opportunity to step into effortlessness and trust. I do not need to hide behind the research, hide behind all that I KNOW, hide behind exertion and force, and I certainly do not need to hold this expectation of healing for others. As the saying goes, the fish cannot see that it is in a fishbowl. The lessons we need to learn are right in front of us, yet it often takes the loving reflection of another for us to truly see what is there. I see it now. I see the way I have hidden my fear and my seeking for approval behind creating and effort. I see my good intentions to support others and teach them how to heal is lost in the noise of trying to do and give too much all at once. And I see the vital step of ensuring I am honoring the balance within me of Teacher and Student. I see it. And the best part, this is a practice of being, of letting go, of effortlessless, and I was so ready to receive that insight.

Now what? To honor this learning and truly integrate it into my being, I have created space in my schedule. And while I do still love to learn, read and create, what has shifted is my delivery and my comfort in stillness and silence. I am letting go of the reigns that I have been holding onto so tightly. Healing and overcoming, for me, needed tight restraints and a template to follow. And now, as I step fully into I AM HEALED, that comes with the knowing that a new skill set is appropriate. I feel as though I have shed a layer of skin that was ready to peel off but was stuck in a few places. A death and rebirth. I am so excited to see how this evolution continues, and, I am going to enjoy who and where I am.

My word of the year for 2020…….I await for the word to choose me, as I am done forcing and curating, I am ready to be the conduit.

xoxo

The Vagus Nerve and Polyvagal Theory

I can see a clear timeline in my life: before I knew and practiced with the Vagus Nerve in mind, and after!

While I have been on a decade long journey to absorb, digest and practice new ways of thinking, being, moving and relating, it is the Vagus Nerve that tied that journey together with a bow. I finally had a physiological explanation for what I had experienced for many years.

I know I am not alone in my struggle with depression, anxiety and overwhelm. I spent most of my teenage and early adolescent years on an emotional roller coaster that would inevitably leave me in a state of shutdown that I felt completely victim to. I felt like a victim a lot actually. I didn’t understand why I would go from a goal-driven and hard working social person into suddenly a shell of who I am, saying things like “I don’t care” and “I am lazy” and then spend days or weeks in a state of complete darkness and lethargy. I felt like I had no control over my own mind and body.

In a previous post I detailed The Window of Tolerance, and how getting language for that shutdown as Hypoarousal was a gamechanger for me! Suddenly I didn’t feel broken, and I had clear actionable steps I could practice daily to down-regulate when in Hyperarousal, and up-regulate when in Hypoarousal.

The Vagus Nerve takes us to the next level of understanding the beauty of this human body.

We have 12 cranial nerves. The first nerve is anchored at the backs of the eyes, numbered in order of sequence, we find the 10th cranial nerve (Vagus Nerve) at the base of the skull, and it connects the brainstem to the body.

The Autonomic Nervous System has one primary function: to ensure the survival of our physical body. The Nervous System is composed of the brain, the brainstem, the cranial nerves, the spinal cord, the spinal nerves, and the enteric nerves. The Nervous System is functionally an upside triangle, the brainstem (and all basic autonomic functioning) being the point at the bottom, and our higher cortical functions are the long base of possibility at the top. The Vagus Nerve is a portal of communication sending stimuli from throughout the body, up to the brainstem, and then it gets spread and diversified to higher levels of brain functioning.

So, what do you need to know about this amazing nerve also known as “the wanderer”…

It has two main branches (down the left and right side), starting at the brain-stem, it wanders down the outside of the throat, through the lungs, heart, diaphragm, stomach, through the small intestines and it lands in the colon. It also has many periphery branches that spread out throughout the body, picking up on the frequency of danger versus safety.

It is heavily involved in the body's ability to calm down after the nervous system has been activated (aka the parasympathetic nervous system), which is our 'rest and digest,' 'stay and play,' 'feed and breed,' and 'restore and repair' abilities.

The Vagus Nerve impacts many facets of the mind and body...

1) Receives sensory input from throat, tongue, heart, lungs and abdomen to communicate “safety” signals to the rest of the body. Fun fact: the tongue actually becomes the pericardium, which wraps around the heart, and connects with the diaphragm.

2) Provides motor function/movement to muscles in neck for swallowing and speech

3) Heavily involved in function and health of the eyes

4) Responsible for (healthy) function of digestive tract, respiration and heart rate. And sends anti-inflammatory signals (healing frequency)

5) Gateway or locked door to higher states of consciousness (Gamma, Alpha and Theta)

6) Overactive Vagus Nerve activity leads to dorsal dive/loss of consciousness, depression/exhaustion, organ damage, inability for heart to pump blood around body (inability to heal)

The PolyVagal Thoery

Stephen Porges is known for his work in bringing the polyvagal theory to life. A brilliant way to understand the stress response and how our constant seeking for danger/safety influences our daily lives.

There are three main states we function within…

1. The Ventral Vagus (myelinated and frontal branch), interfaces with the Parasympathetic Nervous System, or in other words, serves as the "brakes" when in a stress response. This state is known as SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT (or the Window of Tolerance), as we are able to connect, laugh, grow, heal, learn, integrate, problem solve and be in the present moment or flow. This is the optimal state we want to be spending more and more time in.

The ventral vagus nerve controls down-regulation for the heart, lungs and digestive tract (guiding back down into the Window of Tolerance). Basically, it's main job is to send signals of safety when there has been a stress response. When we have a strong and healthy ventral vagus nerve we seek and initiate social contact.

2. The first line of defense when we interpret danger signals, is our fight or flight response which urges us to MOBILIZE! Get safety now. Fight or run your way to safety! This reaction sends an influx of energy to our limbs, major joints of the hips and shoulders, and jaw as we prepare for battle or a sprint from the scene. This is our Hyperarousal state. The priority of getting safety diverts all energy away from healing, growing, digesting, absorbing nutrients, or connecting with others. This is a necessary and vital part of survival, but you can see why this is not a state we want to be in for long.

3. The second line of defense takes over when our body stays in the stress response. In a real life scenario, this would be someone who is trapped, unable to flee or fight their way to safety. This is the SHUTDOWN response.

The Dorsal Vagus (non-myelinated and wanders down backside of body), when healthy and functional, toggles back and forth between arousal and relaxation (approximately 5x per second). 

When the sympathetic system is too aroused (aka stuck in hyperarousal), the dorsal vagus nerve shuts down the entire system and we go into freeze/shutdown (or hypoarousal). This is most common in trauma, in shame, learned helplessness, victim-hood, and depression.

Remaining chronically in a dorsal vagal state when there is no longer any threat or danger robs us of our clarity, productivity, and joy of living until we can get back into a state that opens us back up to social engagement. 

In our culture, we have become preoccupied with problems stemming from stress. Unfortunately, we have remained largely unaware that another danger to our health arises from the widespread condition of chronic activation of the Dorsal Vagus circuit.

An epidemic of people who walk around like "zombies," disconnected from their body (feelings and affect), and feeding into a negative feedback loop that takes them further and further away from health and optimization.

The Vagus Nerve must function properly in order for us to make healthy decisions, feel good emotionally, and interact positively with family, friends and others.

WHAT CAN I DO NOW to impact and strengthen my Vagus Nerve??

• Slow down your Exhale, lengthen it to be a few seconds longer than the inhale

• Create deep tones with humming or chanting (Humming Bee)

• Gentle throat massage (think soothing and nourishing touch)

• Gentle massage of the ears

• Stick out your tongue and make an audible exhale sounds (Lion’s Breath)

• Breath of Fire or double exhale

• Belly Breathing (feel your whole torso expand with your inhale)

• Cat/Cow movements

• Hypopressive Breathing (pelvic floor lifts with inhale)

• Mindful Eating (Connect with your breath and smell your food before ingesting. Ensure your body knows it is safe and ready to eat)

For more information, support and practice, the 4 Pillars of Stress Resiliency 8 week program is for YOU! A comprehensive self-lead journey to learn and implement simple tools of knowledge and practice to retrain your Nervous System! Reach out with questions or for more details.

xox

Marin

You made it this far?? Here is a video I made to describe the Vagus Nerve. The more you learn about it, the more you will understand its power!

HAPPINESS: What’s it mean to live a happy life?

Special thanks to conscioused.org for this awesome blog post! I am sharing it here because this post kept me captivated and had me giggling. For the full experience - with fun pictures - head to their website to check it out!

https://conscioused.org/wiki/happiness/

by Ari Yeganeh

We live in a happy-obsessed society, constantly bombarded with happy smiling faces on TV or billboard ads telling us their version of happiness.

Even worse than this, we see our own friends on social media posting photos of their ridiculously happy lives; but never sharing any raw feelings of what’s really going on in their lives.

It is an unspoken law that we all want to be happy but the reality is that most of us have not thought about what happiness means for *ourselves*.

I used to think if only I had the right kind of job, the right group of friends and the right partner, then I would be happy. I worked so hard chasing these goals. I saw happiness like reaching the peak of a mountain…

All I had to do was work really hard, achieve all my goals and then I’ll be happy.

And that’s exactly what I did. I worked really hard and got to the top of the mountain. But at the top, I didn’t find what I was looking for…

What I actually found at the top of the mountain was disappointment. I had worked so hard to conquer my goals and the realisation that I still wasn’t happy made me even more unhappy. But little did I know it, I had no idea what happiness was.

WHAT ON EARTH IS HAPPINESS?

There are probably as many definitions of happiness as there humans on the planet but broadly speaking, modern psychology categorizes happiness in two parts:

1) HAPPINESS AS AN EMOTION

Experiencing positive emotions like joy, pleasure and excitement
We are all familiar with this type of happiness – good food, great sex, new clothes, walks on the beach, hot oil massages and puppies, lots of puppies. This is what’s constantly advertised to us and what we think of when we see our happy smiling friends on Facebook.

2) HAPPINESS AS LIFE SATISFACTION

Living with a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment with life
We are less familiar with this type of happiness as it is not as straightforward as getting a massage or hugging a warm puppy. Rather it involves a deliberate process of self-discovery and cultivating the right mental attitudes to live a happy life despite the ups and downs of everyday emotions.

Let’s explore these…

1) HAPPINESS AS AN EMOTION

CHASING POSITIVE EMOTIONS

Imagine if there was a machine you could plug yourself into that made you feel pleasure and joy 100% of the time. Better yet, you wouldn’t know you were plugged in so you would have no feelings of guilt. Would you plug in or stay in your current life?

(image credit: waitbutwhy.com/table/the-experience-machine)

The answer you give this question can reveal a lot about how you feel about happiness as an emotion.

If you asked me this question shortly after I had finished climbing my mountain of happiness, I would have almost certainly said yes. This is because I saw happiness only as an emotion that I had to feel on a regular basis. If I was not experiencing emotional happiness in the form of pleasure or joy regularly, my conclusion was that I’m not happy and that something is wrong.

This is why I chased goal after goal, mountain after mountain pursuing the good feelings a new job or new travel destination gave me. But the good feelings didn’t last. Before long, the emotions of joy and excitement would dissipate and I was back to where I started looking at an even bigger mountain to experience more joy in my life.

This is a common path to happiness for many people. “If only I have *fill in the blank*, then I’ll be happy”.

The obvious problem with this approach is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation – the idea that no matter how good something makes us feel, “most of the time we drift back to where we started, emotionally-speaking. One often-cited study famously showed that despite their initial euphoria, lottery winners were no happier than non-winners eighteen months later. The same tendency to return to “baseline” has been shown to occur after marriage, voluntary job changes, and promotions—the kinds of things we usually expect to change our happiness and well-being for the better in a permanent way.” Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D.

This is not to say we shouldn’t enjoy the pleasures of life, we absolutely should celebrate getting that new job and we should cherish every moment of the honey-moon period of a new relationship. However, we should be conscious that experiencing these short term emotional highs does not equate to long term happiness.

RUNNING AWAY FROM NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

Another unfortunate consequence of seeing happiness only as a positive emotional state is that we ignore or suppress any other emotions that don’t make us feel good. We all want to feel joy and avoid pain, this is normal. What’s not normal and is rather unhealthy is persistently avoiding or suppressing difficult or negative emotions.

The reality of life is that we all experience difficult emotions and circumstances. People get sick, we lose our jobs, relationships fall apart, things break, shit happens.
Put more elegantly by Murphy’s law “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”
In his book, The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris writes:

“The more we try to avoid the basic reality that all human life involves pain, the more we are likely to struggle with that pain when it arises, thereby creating even more suffering.” – Russ Harriss

Similarly, in Buddhism it is believed that “life is full of suffering” and that our suffering is caused by our “attachments” – ideals we hold in our minds about how life ought to be. And one of the biggest attachments we have is the desire to feel happy all the time. This unhealthy desire to feel happy all the time ironically leads to suffering and unhappiness in the face of inevitable adversity and Murphy’s law. We feel unhappy because we feel we shouldn’t feel unhappy.

In my own pursuit of happiness, I found the more I chased happy feelings, the more i neglected dealing with the difficult or negative emotions in my life. But these difficult feelings were not going away and only started to accumulate…

Even worse than suppressing these emotions was judging myself for having these unwanted emotions. “Why am I feeling down? I should be happy right now”.

But rather than judging or suppressing difficult or negative emotions, what helped me immensely was just accepting my emotions and letting go of my expectations that I need to feel happy all the time. Rather than turning a blind eye to my box of unwanted emotions, I sat down, opened the box and listened to what each emotion had to say.

And the more I started to accept these neglected emotions, the more at peace I felt with myself and the less pressure I felt to feel happy; which paradoxically made feeling happy much easier.

Whilst none of us want to experience sadness, it is a fact of life that we will. Accepting sadness or difficult emotions is not the same as wallowing and indulging in them. Rather it’s learning to recognise that it’s healthy to experience the full range of emotions as a human being. And that these emotions don’t have power over us. We can observe emotions but we are not our emotions. And in due time, every emotion will come and go. No state of mind is permanent. Clinging on to positive or negative emotions is a fool’s game.

Note: Experiencing negative emotions is part of life, however if you are experiencing emotions like sadness, hopelessness or anxiety persistently on a regular basis, we recommend you reach out and seek appropriate help to better understand the root cause of your emotions.

2) HAPPINESS AS LIFE SATISFACTION

Happiness as an emotion is easy enough to grasp. We are taught from kindergarten:
“if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands”

What’s more difficult to understand and express is:
“if you’re satisfied, content and grateful for your life and you know it, clap your hands”

It’s difficult because life satisfaction is determined almost entirely by the contents of our minds with no visible indicators on the outside world. It’s possible to be a raging success on the surface and feel completely dissatisfied with life, but it’s also possible to have nothing in the material world and be completely satisfied with life.

Philosophers, psychologists, spiritual gurus and that uncle at every dinner party have all their views on what gives us satisfaction in life but the reality is that life satisfaction is a cake you need to bake yourself. There is no cake out there with the perfect list of ingredients that is going to satisfy everyone’s taste buds. You need to go on your own self-discovery journey to find what brings you to satisfaction and contentment.

I found my list of ingredients through a combination of reading books (see resource section at the end of this article), reflecting for long periods of time in silence, traveling and speaking to wide range of people from teenage backpackers to ninety year old monks about what gives them satisfaction in life. Whilst no list can ever capture every aspect of life satisfaction, below are some of the most powerful ingredients that have transformed my satisfaction with life and may help you on your journey:

INGREDIENT #1 – MEANING

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” – Carl Jung

A lack of meaning in life can bring great dissatisfaction, as I’ve personally experienced. For a lot of my 20’s I struggled with a deep hollowing feeling of meaninglessness. On the surface I would keep myself busy with chasing after goals and achievements but deep down I had a sense that something was always missing. There was no meaning, no clear sense of purpose in my life. I spent years working in large companies climbing the corporate ladder. But I never got any sense of purpose from what I was doing. I kept thinking to myself, there has to be more in life than building colorful spreadsheets and powerpoint slides.

This is not an uncommon scenario in our society, especially in the younger generations: doing a job that pays the bills but provides little to no sense of meaning or purpose (for a deep dive into this: read our comprehensive post on purpose here).

For me personally, I chose to quit my job in corporate and take time off to reflect on what I found meaningful. After a year of traveling and reflecting, this journey lead me to what I’m working on now: co-founding conscioused.org, an open source, self-organised alternative to university. (more on this here: conscioused.org/about)

But deriving a sense of meaning doesn’t just come from work. We find meaning in relationships with loved ones, through parenthood, spirituality, contributing to others or simply through the fact that we are alive. Ultimately each one of us is responsible for creating our own meaning.

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.” ―Anais Nin

The beauty of going on this journey is that we are all in it together. Not a single human came into being because of their own choosing. No one asked you if you’d like to be born. Your parents brought you into the world, and your parents were the result of their parents, and so on. In a strange cosmic sense, every human alive today is in the same boat. We all ask ourselves: Why am I here? What’s the meaning of my life?

INGREDIENT #2 – GRATITUDE

I always thought gratitude was reserved for blindly optimistic or wishful thinkers who couldn’t get what they want in life so they were forced to be thankful for what they do have. I thought intelligent, driven people don’t need gratitude, they just need to work harder and reach their dreams.

This was until my mum dropped this bomb shell on me:
“If you can’t be grateful for what you have now, you’ll never be happy”

This came as a shock to me because at the time I was busy chasing yet another mountain of goals, only focused on the life I wanted to create for myself in the future; only focused on what I didn’t have…

When I made the decision to practice gratitude daily, I felt as though a new world had opened up to me. I could suddenly see things that were invisible to me before. The more I practiced gratitude, the more I started to observe the beauty and blessings I had in my life and the more I felt content with my life.

I started with writing 3 things I was grateful for every morning when I woke up. This simple task made a significant difference to how I felt about my life. I found my mind was constantly looking for things to be grateful for so I could write them down the following day. Gratitude slowly became part of my mindset, something I did without conscious thought.

Without gratitude, it’s difficult to imagine a life of satisfaction. No matter where we are in life, we will always desire something more. Gratitude involves taking a step back in our life and acknowledging and being thankful for all the people and situations that we are blessed with.

Being ungrateful is easy. Take being alive. How much money is your current level of health worth to you? If the richest person on the planet offered to buy your arms from you, how much would you sell them for? What about your eyesight or your sense of smell?

I’ve asked countless friends these questions the answers generally range from a few million dollars to “No amount of money could buy that”. Yet it is so easy to take for granted what’s right under our nose.

INGREDIENT # 3 – PRESENCE

“It’s the moments that I stopped just to be, rather than do, that have given me true happiness.” Richard Branson

Think about the voice inside your head who’s reacting to the words you’re reading right now. I’m speaking to the narrator in your head, yes you!

“What narrator are you talking about?” is exactly what the narrator in your head would say.

It’s estimated we have between 20,000-50,000 thoughts every single day; but don’t worry you’re not crazy (or maybe we are all crazy). 2500 years ago Buddha called this phenomenon: monkey mind. He observed that the human mind is filled with drunken monkeys, jumping around, screeching, chattering, all clamoring for your attention. You just have to sit silently for a few seconds so you can hear them.

This is not to say that having thoughts is bad and we should have less of them. Our huge brains are the primary reason we are alive today. Thinking about the past gives us immeasuarble opportunities for learning and growth and thinking about the future allows us to imagine and create our desired visions. The problem arises when we are over-thinking or worst unaware that we are thinking and have let the monkeys go wild in our minds.

When our mind wanders, we lose touch with the present moment and go into endless thought loops about the past or future.

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.” Eckart Tolle

Empirically, we spend at least 50% of our waking time mind wandering not focused on the present moment; and the impact of this on our self reported level of satisfaction is clear..

(Watch this TED talk for more research on this)

We have come a long way since Buddha, yet his teachings on meditation remain one of the most effective ways to calm the monkeys in our minds and gain more presence and satisfaction in life. There are now hundreds of studies proving the physical and mental benefits of meditation and other mindfulness practices. We have written a guide complete with stick figures on how to form habitual mindfulness practice here.

“If you are quiet enough, you will hear the flow of the universe. You will feel its rhythm. Go with this flow. Happiness lies ahead.” – Buddha

BAKING YOUR OWN HAPPINESS CAKE

Ultimately each one of us is responsible for making our own happiness cake; one filled with ingredients that gives us true satisfaction and contentment.

But even with this perfect life satisfaction cake, we are bound to experience sadness and pain in our life. This is part of the human experience. Equally, we are bound to experience immense joy and pleasure in our life. True happiness is not about being caught up in these emotional highs and lows of life. Rather it’s learning to enjoy the highs with gratitude and accept the lows with self-compassion.

***

Last but not least,  no matter what cake we choose to bake, let us not forget to share happiness with another  

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” – Buddha

We would love to hear from you about your own happiness journey in the comments below. What’s inside of your happiness cake?

RESOURCES THAT CONTRIBUTED TO THIS POST:

* The Happiness Trap – Russ Harris
* The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
* Radical Acceptance – Tara Brach
* The Happiness Hypothesis – Jonathan Haidt
* Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl

“This is what a Bitch feels like”— how I practice Mindful Embodiment when Triggered.

*As featured on ElephantJournal.com

There is no shortage of self-help work out there that supports us in setting goals and building awareness around habits that are not serving our greatest good.

While we know what we desire, the hard part is actually putting new thoughts and responses into action until they become the new normal.

I find it fascinating to witness the strength of my habits when I am in emotional distress or triggered, and have discovered the practice of mindful embodiment to be the key for creating change while in the grip of emotion.

Here’s how (and why) I use this practice—and three ways you can start as well.

I was in a mood.

I was on the edge of an emotional outburst. I could feel it.

I was tired, eager to get home, and frustrated with myself because I know how to care for myself and I was neglecting some basic self-care needs. I was in a classic High-Beta brain wave state: tunnel vision on “my problems,” shallow breathing, replaying self-talk loops of negativity and darkness, and a general sense of discomfort in my body.

Sitting in the passenger seat, on our way back to Calgary from a weekend visit to Edmonton, I noticed my partner Andrew’s house keys dangling from the car key that we share. We have our own sets of house/work keys that attach to the car key depending on who is driving or who has the car at the time. In that moment, I realized I didn’t know where my keys were. My keys had been attached to the car key on our drive up, but they were not in the car, and they were not in my bag, and I began to feel panic arise.

I recalled that my keys had been in my bag, and Andrew had taken them out the night we arrived so he could go off to visit his friend. I asked him where he put my keys after he switched his keys onto the chain, and he said he put them where all the keys go at that house—in the key bowl by the phone. I could feel my temperature rising and I asked him why he would put my keys there instead of back in my bag where he found them. He brushed off the question and repeated again that the keys go in the key bowl by the phone, adding, “You should have seen them there and grabbed them.”

I was livid! The conversation escalated as I was probing for an apology and for Andrew to take responsibility for leaving the keys somewhere else than where he found them. Andrew, being just as stubborn as me, stood his ground and refused to take any responsibility for my keys still being in Edmonton.

I was yelling now, and Andrew turned to look at me and said, “Why are you acting like such a bitch?”

Now, first of all, he was intentional with his wording. He did not ask me why I was being a bitch, or why I was a bitch—it was an opportunity for me to pause and check in. Why am I acting like such a bitch?

I knew I had lost control of my emotions.

I closed my eyes and turned away from him. I put my mindful embodiment work into practice. I could feel a lot of heat in my body. I could feel a lot of intense energy lifting up from my belly toward my heart and throat. There was depth and an explosive nature to this energy pooling around my heart.

There were tingles or sparks of the occasional burst in my chest, like uncontrollable twitches that would ripple through my whole body. I could feel my breath was shallow and inconsistent. I could feel numbness or lack of sensation in my lower body, and poor posture as I hunched forward and my shoulders curled slightly in.

As I tracked this sensation and focused more deeply on lengthening and calming my breath, my posture opened up and I felt myself begin to settle into my chair. “Hhmm, this is what a bitch feels like,” I thought to myself.

A smile immediately spread across my face as I was overcome with gratitude for this practice, and my sense of humor began to kick in, allowing me to see the joy and comedy in what just happened.

I turned to Andrew and apologized. I told him that it wasn’t actually a big deal; I would call his parents and they would send the keys in the mail ASAP. And I admitted that my emotional outburst was actually not even about the keys. The keys were an excuse to rage. I was tired and had been overthinking and overanalyzing all weekend, and I didn’t have the awareness those few minutes ago to pause and recognize that I had been avoiding my feelings and steeping in negative thoughts.

That was it, the grand key crisis was over.

Why did this work for me and how can you practice this in your daily experience with emotion?

1. Emotion = Energy in Motion

I had an eating disorder compulsion for 20-plus years and have healed that by practicing mindful embodiment, compassion, meditation, and ultimately retraining my relationship with food. I share my story of healing in my book, Be The Change.

While it can seem scary and uncertain to sit with emotion as it arises, the thought to remember is that emotions are energy-in-motion, and they need to move through to completion. What we resist, persists. By avoiding, shaming, or stewing in emotions, we make them stronger. Yet, when we hold loving space for what we are feeling and allow emotions to move through us like a wave, they will subside and an insight for action toward healing and mending will arise. We need to get ourselves back into the Window of Tolerance (i.e. optimal state of presence) as that is where we have access to our higher levels of thinking and problem solving.

Embodied mindfulness and compassionate connection are the gateway to mental health strength training. When we can find calm, create space, and allow whatever is happening to be okay, we increase our resiliency and can safely process new sensation, as well as reinterpret and reintegrate our old, deep thorns that arise in compulsions or the simple and constant waves of emotions.

2. Fatten the Moment

While we cannot control the impulsive reactions that arise, we can control the deliberate response after a mindful pause. To get into the habit of “fattening the moment” between reaction and response, become completely enthralled by your own breath.

Try setting a timer for 90 seconds and aim to breathe in and out 6-10 times in that duration. Find a short pause at the top of your inhales and a short pause at the bottom of your exhales. Keep it steady, as you focus completely on the process of breathing. Try placing one hand on the ground, palm down, and the other hand on your lap, palm up. Notice what it feels like to be grounded and open simultaneously.

How do we do this?

Breath

>> Add two seconds to your exhale. Feel your lungs emptying out, your diaphragm lifting, and your body relaxing around the emptiness.

Movement

>> Bow your head, fold your body, and move in ways that you would not move if you were actually in physical danger.

>> Get grounded. Try some slow cat/cows, moving with your breath.

Shift

>> Hold quiet space to feel your heart rate slow down. Rather than “do something” just for the sake of it, sit and “do nothing” until you feel full-body presence.

>> Practice embodiment as you track and describe sensation within you.

>> Be a witness to the wave as it rises and subsides.

>> Ask yourself thoughtful and high-quality questions that cause pauses and discernment.

What do I need to cultivate safety right now?
What does my body need for nourishment today?
What perspective can I try on here to create more space for what I am noticing?
Who can I connect with to meet my social engagement need?

3. Track sensation

Your body and mind will follow your breath. A focused and deliberate breath will calm the arrival of emotionally charged, implicit memories as you actively imagine creating space for the wave to surface and move through to completion.

Just as in my example above, the problem was not actually about the keys, it was something much deeper than that, and they keys were my excuse at the time.

“The problem is not the problem, it is your relationship to the problem that is the problem.” ~ Micheal Singer

Nothing gets solved while you’re lost in your compulsion. Get out of your head and into the sensations of embodiment. What does it feel like? Stay with it. How does it shift? Observe it without expectation or judgement, and trust that it wants to move, be processed, and be integrated into a more wholesome and healthy relationship as well.

You have to name it to tame it, so observe your sensations and their qualities:

>> Pulsing
>> Temperature
>> Intensity
>> Weight
>> Dull/sharp/tingling
>> Shooting
>> Movement/direction
>> Squeezing/pointed/pushing/pulling
>> Open/contracted
>> Dense/expansive
>> Stuck/shifting
>> Localized sound
>> Light/dark/color
>> Deep/surface
>> Empty/full
>> Familiar/new

~

“It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable, so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.” ~ Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Fear