I’ve been pondering a lot lately …
The state of the world, the all encompassing doom that often is being felt, circulated, recirculated yet again, on all the platforms, in all the ways …
I have been contemplating a lot about this lately …
Perhaps it’s because I have an abundance of time (thank you Universe for that strange and unexpected “gift”), or perhaps it’s due to the circumstances that have come together to create that ample time and space, I don’t know, but here we are once again.
In my experience, in times like these, we need more than ever these things:
- Our resources
- Our community
- Connection
I’ll go deeper into what I mean about each of these words/concepts in a moment but first a bit more context because context is everything.
Over the past 20 plus years my own healing process has led me through some pretty interesting and extraordinary paths that let’s just say have completely shifted the lens in which I see the world around me. While I acknowledge that all of the old lenses and perspectives still live within me (they always do), the Universe seems to call me back to this particular perspective over and over again.
It’s the lens that helped me heal my own body during my late teens and pretty much the entirety of my 20’s when I pushed and pushed, always injured or recovering from injury, suffering for over 10 years in chronic pain, and constantly finding a way to push further yet through.
Spoiler alert – it wasn’t pushing that unlocked the path to healing, but I’ll get to that too.
More learning was yet to come as a few years later I would fall very ill to a mysterious illness that I now understand to be ME/CFS. It seems a deepening of these “teachings” was required to bring me to a place of an 8 year remission period where I would dare say I thrived at a quality of life, health, and energy I’d never known before.
It seems now that I’m in my third “big” season of learning as chronic illness returns, and I’m forced once again to return to spirit, and forced once again to listen – deeply listen.
During my own path I’ve also been fortunate to be a part of other’s journey as well. It is no surprise to me that most of my clients in my former craniosacral therapy and spiritual practice also suffered chronic pain, mysterious illness, and were often survivors of trauma.
With a bit of context laid out, I want to share with you now some of the key concepts I have understood and have helped me and those I’ve worked with move through immense challenging and difficult experiences.
Gathering Our Resources
When we are suffering or struggling or have a history of trauma, we have a tendency to see the world in a very particular and narrow lens. While it is important to acknowledge and honour all of our patterns of experience – that is to say, we should not ignore trauma – it’s actually more important to gather and strengthen our connection to our resources, especially when shit is hitting the proverbial fan.
What are resources?
Simply, resources are the simple things in our lives that make us feel genuinely good. These are not our vices. I’ll explain …
Often we start to associate “feeling good” with being distracted from feeling uncomfortable or numbing our discomfort. Both totally normal responses to discomfort, to pain, to suffering.
However that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Often identifying our resources and engaging in them is a very active process.
What are the things that make you feel not just good in your body, but like you are fully alive and present in your body?
If you’re unsure where to start, you’re not alone first off. This is like a highly atrophied muscle for most human adults, but we must wake it.
I often like to start where it’s most accessible – maybe it’s a memory, a snapshot moment of an activity that you love to engage in, or maybe it’s a simple body scan to find a place in your body, no matter how small, that feels good.
Yes, even if you are in chronic pain there will be one place, even if it’s tiny, that might feel pretty good.
Don’t believe me? Lick your lips. Apply a lip balm and press them together. Does that feel pleasant? Start there.
What about the top of your foot? Or the tip of your finger? Or your earlobe?
For me, I’ve been practicing gathering my own resources for over 15 years now so I’m pretty good at it. My go to is often a snapshot from one of my favourite waves I’ve surfed.
I close my eyes and let myself remember with all of my senses how it feels to relive that delicious moment in present in my body right here and now. I remember the smell, the water temperature, the feeling of the water gliding on my skin, the glistening of the lip of the wave in the sunlight and the sparkling of the spray as it hits my face. I can feel the huge inhale, then the giggle that bursts out of me uncontrollably as I get hit in the face with warm salt spray. I feel my toes, finding their way in balance and harmony, walking on water, both griping and releasing my board under my feet, as I sliiiiiiiiiide down the face of the perfect right.
There are other things too that especially now have become my daily practice.
Especially in relapse of chronic illness, this is the most important time to find as many resources, no matter how small they may be, and lean into them with my full attention. This is my spiritual practice. It keeps me stable. It keeps me sane.
And most of all, in my experience, it is the quickest path to healing and full recovery.
Our Community and … be careful of your environment.
It is my experience and belief that chronic illness is not a life sentence, nor is trauma.
I think that through our yearning for validation of our pain, our suffering, and our experience, we’ve confused our need for compassion in that pain and suffering for identity with that very pain and suffering which in turn is our death sentence.
As someone with chronic illness who has personally walked through the other side more than once, I know in my heart and my experience to avoid those groups. You know the ones. Support groups. Not all support groups, but many.
When people who are suffering find others who are suffering that will validate our experience we will often feel such an immense relief in being seen for the first time that it can be difficult to see the very thing that keeps us trapped in our pain.
It’ totally normal to feel depression, despair, anxiety, and utter hopelessness when we are suffering.
This is totally normal and totally human.
And it’s not the way out and through to the other side.
Community is more important than ever in our world. It is the key to healing much of the suffering and chronic disease amongst us which is one of the reasons it’s so important for us to be discerning about what and who we take into our world.
Much like gathering our resources, this is not about overcomplicating nor is it about striving for perfection in our relationships. This isn’t about cancelling people out of our lives because they don’t get us or we don’t get them. It’s not about carefully curating our lives, rather asking ourselves “what are the qualities, environments, practices, places, and spaces that are supportive for me right now?”
Maybe it means reaching out to friends we’ve grown distant from through life circumstance. Maybe it means taking the time to walk barefoot in nature. Maybe it means joining a knitting circle, or taking weekly dance classes. Community is built on layers of layers of both closeness and intimacy as well as ambivalence. It is multilayered, multidimensional, and looks and feels different in different seasons of our lives.
Living in chronic pain and trauma is a very isolating experience. It can sometimes feel like the safest thing to stay in the echo chamber of other survivors when in reality, we need to actively expand our perspective and our capacity for perception which many groups don’t do, rather they can reinforce our narrow lens, which feels soothing to our souls, but long term traps us.
In rebuilding, or building for the first time perhaps, our resources, we must ask ourselves “is this supporting me, the self who is there, recovered, and in her wholeness?”
“What are the experiences in my everyday life that support my resourced self and growing a broader perspective in how I relate to the world around me?”
Connection is not optional … it is a human need
Connection and community go hand in hand – resource too. Well they all do really.
I think in the end, my point of this whole post is to give you permission.
It’s ok to disconnect from the places, spaces, and let’s be honest social media that constantly bombards us with toxicity. Even someone without a history of trauma would be overwhelmed.
We and our poor nervous systems were not built for the speed and toxic waste dumping that technology has brought us.
Now more than ever it is time to reconnect to the tangible, real world – the plants, the trees, our neighbours.
Even in a busy world, especially in our busy lives, we need to slow down and create space for genuine connection with life.
Healthy connections are what sustain and support trauma and any challenges we do and will face in our lives.
We are inherently relational beings. We are designed and build this way. To deny it is certain death – quite literally.
Children with developmental disorders experience complete chaos not because of their neurology, but because of the disorganization of the connection and coherence in their nervous systems and thus bodies.
Almost all disease and illness stems from some kind of lack of coherence in relationally – either inter-relationality or outer-relationality, or both. Lack of harmony in relationality – whether it be at the cellular level, or in our human to human relationships – is often at the core of our distress and dis-ease.
The good news is that we are not fixed structures, but living, evolving, beings.
We are expressions of nature, and therefore inherently intelligent, and inherently moving towards harmony as a natural impulse.
This is the beauty and gift of impermanence.
Nothing is permanent – not even chronic illness or trauma.
The seasonality of our suffering is simply that – a season.
It may be a long season and we may or may not come out alive, however this is the process of nature.
So in this season of global suffering, what can we do?
I think sometime when we are faced with overwhelm it is most important than ever to come back to these core foundations.
Resource, Community, Connection.
These are the foundations not just of our own personal survival, but the foundations that are needed to counterbalance the collective trauma that is being reverberated in the world.
Again, I reiterate that acknowledgement is vital, acknowledgement alone is not the path forward.
Naming and identification in itself does not automatically lead to reparation and healing both on the individual and collective levels.
Sometimes the best thing we can do for the world lies in the health of our own smaller worlds – our friendships, our neighbourhoods, our communities. Now more than ever we need to come together and support each other in our collective resources, not rally with our collective traumas.
This is permission to release the guilt or shame about not being able to do more or not be able to do something.
You can do something.
Create.
Write.
Make art with friends.
Start a book club.
Walk the neighbours dog when he’s away.
Bring tea.
Share cookies.
These are not small acts – they are the foundations of the world we want to live in.
It’s our responsibility to nurture them.
One last thought and ponder and perhaps an upcoming post topic …
Art as a revolutionary act.
Let’s remember our humanity, our creativity, and the light of the human spirit.
We need it – especially in times like these.
xo
jenn