Embracing Change
How do you deal with change? Do you embrace it, always ready for a new beginning? Do you find yourself avoiding it, unable to move forward? Do you grind against it and kick and scream before it? I love change but I have often tried to change external things in an effort to avoid what's happening in my body and nervous system. Meditation and movement have helped me to be with myself in a different way. I know for sure that I can change absolutely everything about my current circumstances, but I'll still be stuck with myself no matter what.
I made a change recently when I decided to make a big shift and create a Patreon membership. It may seem straightforward to take a leap like that: but it took a lot for me. It's something I've been thinking about and dreaming up since early 2020. Something kept holding me back from actually moving forward with it: I kept thinking I needed more training, more knowledge. The truth though? I was waiting for someone to give me the permission to do it. Unfortunately for me, the permission is never coming. I've got to green-light myself. Sure, all the additional training I've done has made me a better teacher with a wider breadth of knowledge - but I was ready to serve community in 2020, and I did, just in other contexts. And maybe my nervous system simply wasn't ready.
I read something yesterday from the writer Clementine Morrigan on how developmental trauma creates late bloomers. For various reasons, I had quite a bit of developmental trauma and I've been a late bloomer in so many ways. Though it never helps me to stay in self-pity about this, it does help me so much to continue deepening my understanding of trauma so I can be more gentle with myself about how I move through the world. Clementine's writing reminded me of the great book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel A. van der Kolk, and this passage in particular:
'We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganisation of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.'
My hope with my Patreon membership (which I'll be sending more details about in next week's newsletter) is to support you in however you move through the world. I will invite you to notice your body, to notice what's present for you. I will invite you to sit with what's in your body but also to move with it, to move it out. I will provide you with tools to engage with your experience and down-regulate your nervous system. I will invite you to lean into love, into consciousness and to recognise yourself as a divine being. So, in a word, it will be really chill. Jk. Being a human right now is far from chill and I'm a quintuple Scorpio (lol). But I can tell you that we'll have fun.
I'm launching the membership on New Years Eve. Over the next month I'll be doing lots of free events to give you an idea of what will be included in the membership and I hope to see you at some of them!
Today I'm teaching a short class on IG live on Embracing Change at 1130 am EST / 830 am PST / 430 pm GMT about. I hope to see some of you there. If you can't make it live it will live on my IGTV after the fact.