Making sense of it all - part 2

How to get still and start feeling what you’re feeling

If you came to our first meditation circle last week you will have hopefully been through a process of starting to pay more attention to what’s going on in your body. If you missed it, the replay link can be found here. 

We also had a great visualisation in the season mentoring gathering that started to bring in the notion of feeling how we want to feel as we move towards a place. You can watch the replay here. 

Today I posted an essay around the idea of something called Polyvagal Theory which talks about our own autonomic nervous system and what it’s telling us if we pay attention to it. 

This exercise is all about starting to put some language around our own internal landscape. I thought it might be helpful to tackle this before we get too stuck into the physiology and start thinking about the concepts rather than feeling what we feel.

Give yourself permission to feel

Last week I spoke about my balanced state - my ventral state to use the language of Polyvagal theory. This is a nice place to be for the most part. 

Given the brain’s negativity bias, it can be easy to think of times when we are not living from a place of calm and connection, feeling we can cope with the demands of the day. 

The dorsal state - of collapse and shutdown is the heavy darkness for most of us. I have talked about it here and here in the latest essay.

Mornings would typically be my demon. The other time is at the end of the day when I feel I've not been enough that day - or rather done enough. Stuck in the cycle of striving and grasping for achievement and outcome. Never feeling the sweet sense of satisfaction of a day well passed, just as it was and just as it needed to be. In spite of whatever happened. 

However we do sometimes need to move to a place of action and mobilising energy - when we need to get s**t done - it’s not always about running away from the proverbial  lion - that is only when we are in survival mode - I talked all about this in the essay. 

Simply to say - how and where do you feel that energy in your body when it feels effective versus when it feels chaotic and too much and where is the switch over? 

I think for me that idea of mask wearing and hiding is a sign I am feeling on the verge of being too chaotic. 

A busyness like buzzing bees around my head and a constant grasping for thoughts as no one stays long enough to make an impression on me. A tightness in my chest and throat and jaw, a clenching of even my eye sockets. Not stuck energy but fast moving repetitive flicking from one way to the other - over and over and over again. 

But moving and mobilising is also what moves the stuck energy so it can be good to have a sense of movement - feeling the oxygen flowing in and out of the lungs and the heart pumping the blood through our arteries. 

When I am here I can either breathe or meet friends to do something to go up to the connection state, or breathe and rest and slow down to drop into the dorsal state until I am replenished.  This rest is not the rest of lethargy but the nourishing rest of stillness and calm. Like a boat gently rocking on the calm waters or lapping at the edge of a lake. Memorising and hypnotic but pleasant. 

And there comes a time when we are naturally ready to move up and away from this place, back up through the mobilising energy of our sympathetic system to action, maybe only briefly before we find our way back to the place of connection and balance. 

And so it continues. Naturally, healthily and with ease when we pay attention and know where we are and how to get from one place to the next and back again. 

This is the functioning nervous system. 

Question for today