Soul Oriented Meditation Series: Day Twelve

Nessy Notes:

I really love doing group healing work because it’s a chance for us to all realize that our pain does not exist in a vacuum. If you felt it, I promise you EVERYONE else has felt it too at some point and often just as frequently and intense as you are now. The illusion that we are alone and unique in our pain is the main reason we suffer.

When we come together in open, authentic community we see that nearly everyone feels like they are unworthy, not enough, too much, or some combination that all that stacks up to make them feel undeserved of love, connection, dignity or even survival.

We could draw a conclusion from this that none of us deserve love and all of us are just broken beyond repair. But I sense that it’s our collective perception that is skewed, not the essence of who we are.

For most of us, it’s easy to see how babies and young children are innocent, doing their best to get their needs of safety, belonging and love met, often in less than gracious or direct ways. When they are young, even when their behavior is frustrating, most of us can get to the place of realizing they just don’t know any better and are doing the best that they can in the moment.

But regardless of our current biological age, we all have parts of us still operating at much younger ages. When trauma, big or small, happens and doesn’t get fully processed, our bodies store patterns that end up ruling us for decades to come, only shifting once we have connected somatically and liberated those stuck parts of us.

So - next time you feel frustrated because you are acting out in ways incongruent with your present time desires and values, give yourself a moment to feel that frustration and then come to your body, like an unconditionally loving parent, with the knowing that a younger part of you was in charge at that moment, one who needs space to emote and whose deeper needs need to be seen and attended to. In our embodied exercise in a moment, I’ll give one process of how you might do this.

Centering Prayer:
I Am Self-Compassionate

Embodied Practice:

For today's practice you may again want to find a place you be undisrupted and make some sounds and movements freely. If you don’t have that space now, you can come back to this exercise later, or just do it quietly if need be for now.

Take a couple of slow deep breaths to get into your body. Now take a moment to consider something you are feeling stuck in -- it could be a habit you want to break, a self-destructive mental pattern, a relationship dynamic that keeps you feeling disempowered, a feeling of helplessness to broader societal patterns or anything else.