How am I feeling in my body? Where is there sensation, connection to breath? Am I breathing? How am I taking up space? Where is my centre?
I’m repeating these invitations to myself like a mantra in the in-between moments of every day.
As I scroll through images of destruction and genocide I notice I’m holding my breath. My body is hunched, protective. I’m holding my breath for everyone in Gaza. I’ve been holding my breath for 4 months now.
In the face of the horrors we’re seeing every day through our screens it might feel like a wise thing to stop feeling. Preferable to detach and remove ourselves from the pain, especially when we feel so helpless and like it’s too much.
But what if there’s a way you can let yourself hold it? To be a witness, allow the rage and the tears and the frustration and the bone-deep sadness a place too, and come back to feeling again and again, like a mantra, like the waves of the ocean.
This world wants us detached and numb. It wants us distant and hopeless so that genocide can happen as we turn our faces away.
In these moments courage is calling us through our ability to stay with what feels hard to hold.
This is the work of somatics - teaching ourselves to feel more, not less. Riding the nuance of when to detach and when to stay present. Finding more capacity to widen our breadth and our arms to the things that might once have shut us down and removed us from ourselves and our humanity.
In times like these, I wish I could offer you (and me) a magic somatic spell or practice that can help you immediately feel reconnected to hope and joy. I want that magic button - but after years of studying and teaching, I still haven't found it.
This isn’t about uncovering a hack so that the weight of the world won’t press you into despair. Instead, it’s about learning to become a vessel for our feelings so they all have a place. So that pain and sadness can live alongside ease and hope not making one wrong so the other can be right. This is ‘both, and’ not ‘either, or’.
In my own body, I’ve found that the sense of ‘welcoming it all’ arrives when I pause. When I open my awareness to the moment in front of me and feel myself powerfully in the present.
From this place, I can be aware of numbness, anger, sadness, a glimmer of hope and an understanding of ease. Not only seeing what’s wrong or hard but opening my peripheral vision to what’s ok or neutral.
As I bring my awareness to the support of my bones, the earth and my breath I can feel my strength and steadiness return with the understanding of the structures that hold me, that will always hold me. I can open myself to notice, not to try and fix or shift or change but just to be a witness.
I know this sounds too simple, and perhaps it is. But noticing and allowing isn’t the endpoint, it’s actually the beginning. It’s creating a pause in the eye of the storm so we can realign ourselves with what feels important, to what we care about so we can move from that place.
So we can feel the clarity of our minds and the strength of our hearts again and consider what’s next. Revealing the path of action that keeps us connected to ourselves and the greater collective, to what feels true and right in our bodies.
I invite you to explore connecting with this wise place inside yourself now. So you can feel the steadiness of what supports you and so you can feel aligned with what feels important - press play on the recording below and notice what you notice.
Finding centre:
Something I’ve been returning to again and again (and again) over the last months is the practice of centering, an embodied practice designed to bring you into a place that offers more presence, openness and connection.
I first learned about centering through the work of Prentis Hemphill and Staci Haines and the organisation Generative Somatics. This practice is designed to have us reinhabit our felt sense and open up the possibility to find a space, or create a space for it all.
Everything we experience, our traumas, the traumas of oppression and war and genocide, can live in and take hold of our bodies, our tissues, fascia and muscles, even of the way we move and think.
The practice of centering is about bringing more breath, aliveness and rootedness into our bodies so that we can be present to what is, more open to what’s to come and we can be in connection to ourselves, each other and the world around us.
This way we grow the capacity to not turn away from ourselves and from each other. This is how we expand our ability to invite in our personal and our collective liberation, for the good of ourselves, and for the good of all.
You write so beautifully and in a way that is both poetic and accessible. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and expertise with such honesty and humanity x