Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Practices to help us slow down

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She wore her ferocity like armor, and it was purely asexual armor. Liraz was untouchable and untouched.  ~Laini Taylor, Days of Blood & Starlight

I’m learning to let go of my shields, to take the armors off (they are too heavy anyways) and march unguarded, if ever the need arises, towards the battlefield in defense of love. ~ Ayokunle Falomo, thread, this wordweaver must!

Pretty armour doesn’t make a warrior. ~Mark Lawrence, Emperor of Thorns

We live in a world that applauds busyness.  If we aren’t doing-doing-doing, then we are wasting time, wasting space, wasting our life.  Rest is unacceptable.  Self-care is considered selfish.  Slowing down, or worse, actually stopping, is a clear sign of our laziness. 

A truth is if we are overwhelmed with our busyness, there is little to no time, space, or energy for true connection — not with our own Self, not with those we hold most dear, not even truly with our community.  The more we are doing the less we are being.  The more we are distracted with our long to-do list of task after task after endless task, the less we are questioning why we are allowing ourselves to be so busy, the less we question the status quo, the less we question if there is another way to live, another way to be, a way to actually feel fulfilled, loved, connected.

A way to move beyond our busyness, to find our way to being able to tolerate being present in, and even learn to enjoy, the now, is by coming home to our bodies.  When we are able to slow down and calm our sympathetic nervous systems and then move into the work of connecting even more to our bodies, our boundaries, our connection to ground and our own center, we learn to be in the present, we begin to feel the grip of those endless to-do lists loosen and our whole being be able to relax.

This is a process.  And there are some little tips and tricks, beyond the nervous system exercises I share in my weekly newsletter and on social media, that I have found helpful, perhaps you will too.

Sticky Notes: Write a single word or phrase on a stickie (or several) and stick it on your bathroom mirror, your refrigerator, your closet door, your window sill, your walls, where ever you like.  The more stickies you are willing and able to put up around your home, the better.  These are gentle reminders of our intentions, of the ways we want to live.  When we walk by them and notice them, we can take a moment to breathe in and exhale and allow that word or phrase to enter into our conscious mind.  Also, when we pass by them and don’t consciously notice them, our peripheral vision will see them and send that message into our subconscious (which is where the real work of shifting and change needs to happen).

“Tattoo” your inner forearm: Write a word or phrase on your inner forearm with a marker (trust me, even “permanent” ink washes off relatively easily).  This serves the same purpose as the stickies, the difference being it is more of a constant reminder of what we wish to embody.

Window Chalk the Windows: Same as the previous two, but putting these words or phrases on our windows, glass sliding doors, and or mirrors.  We can embellish the words or phrases as we like, adding flowers or butterflies or hearts or whatever you like. 

Some words and phrases you could use:

  • Ease
  • Love
  • Gentle
  • Breathe
  • Slow or Slow down
  • Rest
  • Compassion
  • Play
  • Laugh
  • Soft/Softness/Soften
  • I am love(d)
  • I am enough
  • I am safe in this moment
  • I am worthy
  • I am deserving
  • I am my own Self
  • I am NOT her
  • Break Patterns
  • Break Cycles
  • Rebel
  • Revolt
  • Shift

You get the idea.  

Folding Laundry “Meditation”: While folding laundry practice paying attention to what you actually doing.  No TV on, no music, simply standing or sitting folding the laundry, noticing each piece of clothing — its colors, textures, size (You may also begin to notice stains and small holes or tears that need attention!).  In time you can add breathing to this exercise if you like, taking a slow, big inhale as you begin folding the piece of the clothing and letting out a fully, big, forced exhale as you finish and set it on the folded clothes pile.

Washing Dishes “Meditation”: Similar to Folding Laundry, but adapted to work with washing dishes: noticing the temperature of the water, the way the soap bubbles melted, the colors and textures of the dishes and utensils.  You can do this even as loading the dishwasher, it is all about noticing what is happening, what you are doing, paying attention.  When you notice your thoughts have begun to wander, bring them back to the task at hand and back to noticing.

Cleaning “Meditation”: Adapting the above exercises to any type of cleaning exercise: sweeping or mopping, cleaning mirrors, windows, counters, toilets, tubs.  Noticing the feel of the rag or sponge or brush in our hands, noticing the difference between the dirty parts and the parts you just cleaned, noticing colors and textures, etc.

Laughter: Google “dumb dad jokes” and go to the images and let yourself chuckle.  Or watch your favorite comedian or comedy show or movie.  Read a kids’ joke book.  Whatever it takes to laugh, do it.  (Laughter has been shown to help calm our sympathetic nervous system and to boost our production of endorphins and serotonin.)

Connecting to nature: Go sit at the base of a tree, go barefoot in the grass, sand, mud.  If you like hiking, go for a hike.  If you like gardening, go pull some weeds or transplant a plant, or harvest the fruits and vegetables you have been growing.  Water a house plant and stand with it and talk to it, breathing in the oxygen it is is producing and giving it some extra carbon dioxide to process.

These practices are things you can try if you are feeling resistant to the more “formal” nervous system regulation exercises or in addition to them. They are ways to help us slow down, to be in the now, to remind your body that in this moment, you are physically safe.

None of this is a quick or easy fix.  None of it will completely change you overnight, or within a week or even within six months.  And you will start to notice little shifts, you will start to take those moments to pause, and in time those pauses will become longer and longer.

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This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter in August 2018. It has been edited and revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

From connection to relationship

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We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness. ~Albert Schweitzer

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous. ~Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

When I began my business/private practice almost eight years ago, my main value, intention, and driving force was connection.  I wanted to connect with others.  I wanted to connect with myself.  I wanted to guide others to connect with their own whole self – body, mind, spirit, and soul.  I wanted us to connect to our breath.  To connect to the present moment. I wanted to connect more with my own family, my community, the greater world.  I wanted the same for others.  Connection.  

Connection was my word for the last part of 2012, all of 2013, and then stayed with me from there on after as a base, a foundation of my work and being in the world.

Connection pushed me out of my comfort zone.  It had me reaching out to people I never would have before.  Connection expanded me in so many good and glorious ways.  The friendships that grew from my own drive for connection are some of the most important in my, and my family’s, life.  

Connection also brought me closer to me.  Connecting with my body, connecting with my mind, connecting with my spirit.  Unearthing and understanding some of the connections within me.  The connections of my traumatic past and the my ways of being in the present.  

And of course the intellectual connections: personal and political, social and self, individual and collective.  The connections between trauma, grief, and embodiment.  The deeper still understanding of systems and our inter-connected-ness as humans on this planet.

So much connection.

And even with all this connection happening, within and outside of me, to my body, to my intellect, to my Self, to my world, I still felt lonely.

Sometimes deeply lonely.

And not only lonely, but also alone.

A thing about trauma, is that it has us self-isolate.  It also impacts our attachment styles and relationships.  If we experienced trauma young enough, and the trauma was inflicted by primary or even secondary care-givers, our ability to trust others is deeply impacted.

In other words, it affects our willingness and ability to form deep, vulnerable, emotionally intimate relationships.

Which then, leaves us feeling lonely and alone, even if we are connected in some or many ways to other people.  Because, if we haven’t processed our trauma, we are still in an activated state; we are weary of allowing others in; we “know better” than to allow ourselves to be vulnerable by stating our wants and needs. And deep, intimate, relationships cannot form. Because we are still in survival mode.

Until we can feel a sense of safeness in our body, a sense of physical safeness, we can’t move on into the work of emotional safeness and vulnerability.  Our brain stems and nervous and lymbic systems need to be soothed and calmed and feel like we are physically okay before we can move into the next level work of emotions, compassion, and empathy, which includes vulnerability and the ability to state our wants and needs and then (more than not) have them met.

Our brains literally will not allow us to do the emotional work until it is convinced we are physically safe.  If we have trauma living within us that we have not processed, our brain does not believe we are physically safe (because trauma, and our fight/flight/freeze response in our amygdala is concerned about actual physical safety and literal physical survival) – even if our frontal lobe, the logic part of our brain, knows that actually we are physically safe. 

When we are in an activated state, we are not connected to our frontal lobe, we are living back in the survival response state of our amygdala.  

Living in that survival state has varying degrees.  Sometimes it shows up as full on panic attacks, other times it appears as a relatively low-grade anxiety or depression.  And even if we are in a relatively low grade state of anxiety or depression, even if we can partially connect to logic in our frontal lobe, our brain stem and amygdala are running the show and will over-ride our frontal lobe and logic brain.

What all that can look like in our personal lives is that we have many important connections.  We have friendships and relationships that mean the world to us.  There are people in our life who have literally saved us and who we love dearly and deeply.

Even so, moving to a deeper level of intimacy with other humans is really hard.  It is something that terrifies us in a way that is non- and pre-verbal.  In a way that we know stems from trauma and has no logic in relation to the present moment and or person.

Part of our own personal trauma work is in calming our brain stem and limbic and nervous systems enough for them to understand that we are actually physically safe in this present moment, so that we can move into the next level territory of exploring what exactly emotional safeness is and how even in times we put our trust in a person we perhaps shouldn’t, we will survive it.  Now is the work of moving beyond connection into relationship.  Intentional, deep, vulnerable, intimate relationship that takes work and bravery on our end.

Relationship, attachment, belonging – these are also basic human needs.  But they come after our physiological needs of food, water, shelter and the ability to use the bathroom; they also come after our need for physical safeness and safety.  Until we have been able to (correctly) convince our activated systems that we are indeed physically safe, moving into relationship and emotional safe-enough-ness is nearly impossible.

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This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter in January 2018. It has been updated and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

We will be exploring our relationships, how complex trauma impacts them, and how we can begin to shift that, in the six month Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Relationship that begins September 1. You can learn more here.

Dysregulation, compassion, & finding equilibrium

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When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.
~Bessel A. van der Kolk

The only consistent thing about living as a human being is that change is inevitable.

Sometimes the changes that come our way are out of our control.  

Sometimes the changes that come our way we do not consent to.

Sometimes the changes that come our way stem from our own choices.

Sometimes the changes that come our way are our own choice, and still we may wish they didn’t happen.

Life is complex and rarely stagnant.

When big changes come our way, they can throw us off kilter.  Our systems may become dysregulated. Our old traumas may be triggered.  The change itself could be traumatic in its own way. This can happen even when a change is of our own conscious choosing.  

I have witnessed that basic human response to change, sometimes even to changes of our own choosing, is to fight like hell to return to the status quo – the way things were before the change.  This fight is almost always a losing battle.

The dysregulation our systems experience when change happens is inevitable.  Systems theory confirms that when a change happens within a system, the parts of the system will do all they can to find equilibrium again.  Sometimes we call this “finding our new normal” when it comes to the changes that come into our lives.  Until we find this equilibrium however, our systems, including our nervous systems, will be agitated. 

Change happens.  Dysregulation happens.  It is how we move through the changes, how we find our ways back to equilibrium, or our new normals, that matters.  How we do this is up to us and frankly is unique to each person and each situation.

And.

What I would love all of us to remember, including myself, is to have some compassion for the dysregulation that is an inevitable part of being human.  To have compassion for ourselves as we find our ways to the new normal of each new change in our lives.  To have some compassion for trying things and feeling like failing and trying different things until we are able to figure out what works for us. 

This is true even when the changes we experience are of our own choosing, are welcome, perhaps even wanted. It will still take time for us to find our feet again, to find that “new normal,” to get back to our equilibrium. 

Reminding ourselves that we are trying to find our way back to a “steady state” as we shift through a major or even minor life change is important, and is part of where our self-compassion comes in.  Giving ourselves the grace of knowing we are doing the best we can with the resources we have.  Slowing down to allow ourselves to feel the myriad of emotions that may be coming forward, some possibly expected and some probably not.  

We are all complex beings, and our life experiences are complex.  Sometimes change is welcome, and even in this welcoming for a short period the change will cause some amount of chaos and dysregulation.  Remember to be gentle with you.  Remember to give yourself time and space to breathe and feel all the feelings you are having.  Remember to be patient with yourself.  And most importantly remember to have compassion for yourself as you stumble along finding your ways to your own new normal. 

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This was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on July 15, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.