Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Slowing into the pause & breaking harmful patterns

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Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. ~Rollo May, The Courage to Create

she learned to walk away
from everything
that didn’t inspire her
toward greater things
~Mark Anthony

a successful life is created
with two words: yes and no
have the courage to say yes
only when it feels right
and no to the old patterns
that do not serve you
~yung pueblo

One way that complex trauma impacts us in our adult lives is in our relationships, be they with friends, family, or intimate partners. Many of us with complex trauma are not good at tolerating painful emotions, like sadness, frustration, or disappointment. 

In fact, most of us don’t have a lot of tolerance for the more “positive” emotions like happiness, joy, and pleasure either.

Any feeling – sensation and emotion – can feel too much and can trigger our fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. The feelings can be overwhelming and so we need a way to release them, to get them out of us, because actually feeling them is intolerable.

So, we start fights. Or turn away and cut people out of our lives. In the moment we may freeze and feel stuck or placate and people please and then later move into the space of either wanting to fight or flee. Depending on the situation we do one or the other of these or we do some in rapid succession. 

Our reaction is generally immediate and coming directly from our back (or reptile) brain. There is no thought that is going into it. We don’t slow down to engage our front brain and are fully in our survival instinct. Because feeling our feelings feels like our actual lives are in danger. It feels like they might consume us. It feels like we won’t survive the sensations and emotions that are swirling within us.

I know for me a go to reaction was always to flee. And by flee I mean turn my back and cut people out of my life. One disappointment, one time of feeling rejected or abandoned, and it was “proof” that the person wasn’t trustworthy and therefore I needed to shut them out of my life. My armor would go up and if need be I would start fights if they wouldn’t “let” me leave. 

It has taken a lot of time, therapy, practice, patience, and self compassion to find my way to pause between the action of an emotion being activated and responding.

Because for most of my life I reacted, immediately, and without thought. What I want for my life, for my relationships, is for me to be able to thoughtfully respond, to slow down and evaluate the facts of the situation and previous situations so that I can respond intentionally and mindfully.

This has meant coming into my body. This has meant learning to tolerate all those intolerable sensations and emotions. This has meant practicing keeping my front brain (where logic, reasoning, creativity, problem solving, and compassion live) online while also experiencing the sensations and emotions that live in my back brain.

It hasn’t meant stuffing my feelings down. 

It has meant allowing myself to experience them and learning to know they won’t actually kill me. They will be uncomfortable, I may not like it, but I certainly won’t die.

When we are able to engage our front brain while also experiencing our feelings, we can begin to look at situations more objectively. We can look for patterns, for habits, for cycles. We slow down not to make excuses for the other person, but to see if our own pain is actually stemming fully from something they did or said or if it also stems from a long ago wound that never healed. 

And then we can decide how we want to respond to the person. We can intentionally decide if this is an opportunity for our own personal growth and processing. We can decide if it is an opportunity for us to communicate our needs, to repair in relationship and to stay. Or to communicate our needs, set a boundary, and possibly leave.

It is true that when another person triggers our feelings of disappointment, frustration, abandonment, and or betrayal that it was indeed their action or words that did this. It is true that our hurt is in part due to the what the other person did or said.

And.

They don’t deserve the full force of our fury or rage or pain, most of which comes from past hurts from others we trusted.

Sometimes when another person triggers our painful feelings it isn’t intentional, or may be a matter of circumstance or what they did or said is actually a perfectly reasonable or normal thing, but it sets off our alarms anyhow. Sometimes these triggers are not an indication of who they are as a person.

And honestly, sometimes it is.

Which is why we need the pause. So we can slow ourselves down and determine what we actually know about the other person. What we actually know about ourselves. What patterns we have seen. What other actions and words we have witnessed or not. 

We need the pause so we can engage our frontal lobe and respond in a way that lets us stand in our own integrity and authenticity. Without needing to cause another pain. Without lashing out. Without cutting people out because in that moment we are hurting and find it unbearable.

The pause requires us to be in our bodies, to be able to tolerate uncomfortable even painful emotions and sensations. It also allows us to enjoy the fun and pleasurable emotions and sensations that can also a part of living as a human.

Learning to live embodied, to tolerate, experience, and sometimes even enjoy the sensations and emotions of our fully human lives is a life long process. There are not five easy steps and then you are done. It is not a one time thing we can check off. It is a constant practice that will have its own ebbs and flows.

The pause will not come to us quickly. It will take time. At first you will notice while you are reacting that you are indeed having an immediate response. With time you will be able to “bring yourself down” more smoothly and quickly. Then, you will begin to notice that you are about to lash out and eventually stop it. In more time, with more practice, you will be able to catch yourself at the very beginning of being triggered. You will be able to feel the sensations and emotions and also be able to explore them, analyze them and the situation logically. And then intentionally decide how we want to respond.

Having patience and compassion for ourselves during this process, while learning to come into our body and to tolerate all the different, varied, and nuanced sensations and feelings and learning how to find that breath, that pause, when some or all our old wounds are triggered is vital and part of the process.

It is true that what was done to us by others is not our fault, we are not to blame for their actions. And we are responsible to learn to respond to new hurts in ways that hold us in our own integrity, in a way that does not continue to pass on harmful patterns, in ways that allow us to break painful cycles for ourselves and the generations to come.

/…/

To read more of my essays, you can subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here.

These bones

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In my bones are stories that aren’t mine. Stories of my mother’s or grandmothers’ or great-grandmothers’. Perhaps they weren’t their stories either, perhaps they were handed down to them too. Passed off as Truth, as Rules to Live By, as The Way We Must Be. Stories of what it is to be a mother, a woman, a wife. Stories of how or when to talk, what it means to be successful, how our worth is measured by others, be they by our side or not.

Stories of being a bad mother not deserving of children. Stories of not having value. Stories of not talking too much, or shining too brightly. Stories of being noticed, but only for the right things.

So many stories live in our muscles and bones and DNA. Stories given to us on silver platters lined in blood and tears.

Competition, holding down, holding back. No trust in these stories, no sisterhood. No love. These stories were not shared in the red tent or in circle around the fire while howling at the moon. These stories were born of loneliness, isolation, pain, and fear.  Always fear.

Who spoke the first story telling us we have no value of our own? Who forced these stories upon our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and great-grandmothers and all the women before them? When did these stories become “Truth”? Was it when Hesoid transformed Pandora from a Earth Mother Goddess, a creatrix of life, into the bearer of all pain and destruction in this world? Was it that long ago? And why, oh why did our mothers succumb to the fear and allow those stories to be told so many millennia ago? Why, did they take them in as truth and allow them to be  spread as a disease that grows in our being, to be passed down through flesh and bone to each of their daughters?

What will it be to shed these stories one by one? Will they ever all be shed? How can we not pass these stories on to our daughters, who are made up of half our DNA? How we can show them the value of being a girl growing into a woman? How can we replace our tainted bones with ones of life and creation and beauty?

Slowly, so slowly the layers peel back, getting deeper into these bones, extracting the marrow that no longer serves and allowing a new nourishment to grow in its place. It is messy and painful and beautiful this extraction and new growth. One story excavated, shown for what it is: a myth, not Truth unless we want it to be. And as this story rewrites and reforms into our own reality and truth and being now, we find yet another story of theirs, and we take in a slow deep breath and prepare our Self for this next procedure of extraction and new growth.

Coming into the body, into the breath, taking back our muscles and skin and bones and very being as our own. First in our body and then in our soul. Sharing, giving, melding, and still holding what is ours as sacred and honest and earth and blood. The stories come and go and the tears flow and we hear their whispers and screams to stop this process, to let the stories lie and continue to live in fear of being too much or too little and always never enough. We wrap our Self  in love and comfort, letting our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and theirs too, all know that we will be okay, that there is no wrong in digging down to our truth and stories, in allowing this regrowth; there is only beauty in coming together in circle and allowing ourselves and each other to glow and that as we own our body and being and breath and life, we will do more than survive; we will flourish and thrive and glow and truly, deeply, fully, live.

know theyself

 

Inspired by Alisha Sommer and Robin Sandomirsky‘s Liberated Lines FLASH::Amplify.

Mindfulness, Schmindfulness – Part Deux

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There’s been a lot about mindfulness in the media over the last month or so. The most recent piece receiving attention being the TIME magazine article by Kate Pickert. Both PsychCentral‘s Mindful Parenting writer Carla Naumberg and the Huffington Post‘s Religion writer Joanna Piacenza have responded, not really to the article, but rather to the cover art chosen to represent the article and mindfulness in general.

I’ve also been sorting out my thoughts on this “Mindfulness Revolution” and how it is portrayed in the media. In my most recent Mindful Connections newsletter I shared some of those thoughts (which I consider to be Mindfulness, Schmindfulness – Part One). This one issue of my newsletter has received such a response from my readers that it has become crystal clear I should share these thoughts with a larger audience.

It feels like the whole world has declared 2014 the year of Mindful Living (The Huffington Post; Get Up and Do Something; NewCo; and various bloggers, including this one, just to name a few). At first this excited me. Ah, finally! I thought. The world is being turned on to mindfulness, a practice that has literally changed my life and how I view it. I envisioned the masses slowing down, putting down their devices, connecting in real time with the real people right in front of them, be those people children, romantic partners, work colleagues or friends. I saw a baby utopia starting to incubate and felt how the masses would step into this other way of living, of connecting and all would be beautiful.

Yeah, I’m a dreamer.

However, with every new article and blog post I became more and more disenchanted, frustrated and frankly bored with how mindfulness is being portrayed to and understood by the general public.

I appreciate the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and his wife Myla in taking that initial step to separate mindfulness from Buddhist practice. No longer did one need to be a devout Buddhist to practice mindfulness: anyone could do it and receive the benefits of the meditations and exercises. The Kabat-Zinns opened the door for every person, regardless of religious affiliation, race, economic status or gender, to experience mindfulness and to bring more joy and peace and connection into his or her life.

And yet, when one does a Google search of mindfulness, we see image after image of serene scenes; yoga and meditation poses; young, physically fit and white women (rarely men are pictured); or images of Buddhist nuns and/or monks. Everything (and everyone) pictured is calm, at-peace and has this inner-I-am-totally-at-ease-and-peace-with-everything glow. There is no laughter, no chaos, no joy, no reality depicted.

And frankly that pisses me off.

A message is being sent as to what Mindfulness should look like; what your life, if you are doing your mindfulness practice right, will look like. I’m not good with shoulds. Or have-tos. Or thou-shalts. I react strongly to unrealistic expectations or homogeneous pictures of “if you did it right, everything would look like this.”

Mindfulness started to take on a sheen that is actually the opposite of what a mindfulness practice actually is about. Suddenly we could judge each other and ourselves on a scale of how mindful we are (or aren’t) and there are failure marks.

One of the tenets of mindfulness is non-judgement of the moment, of ourselves, of others.  Oops.  Guess the mass media missed that part.

Suddenly there’s a standard (serene, physically fit, never yelling, always calm, never reacting to anything) that is being put out there. A very unrealistic and not-based-in-reality standard.

Life is busy and messy and because of this, people who practice mindfulness can also appear busy and messy. We yell. We get excited. We laugh loudly. We dance and bring up high energies.  We rest and produce more subdued energies. We yell at drivers who cut us off on the freeway. We get mad at our loved ones, friends, bosses, the world. Sometimes we hit things or throw things out of frustration.

We feel. We feel our anger, we don’t stuff it down. We experience it. We feel our joy, we don’t cling to it, we savor it in the moment. More often than not we can catch ourselves from yelling at our kids or partner or friends and take in deep slow breaths, find center for a minute and then analyze what is really going on, what is really being triggered here. It’s a practice. There is no perfect. It is a continuum that we as practitioners slide up and down.

As I said in my newsletter:

My goal for my mindfulness practice is not to have that “inner-I’m-totally-at-peace-with-everything glow.” No. The goal of my mindfulness practice is to enjoy life. My life. To connect to the people I love. To experience laughter and spontaneity and connection. To be true to Me, whoever I am in whatever moment. To be fully me, now. And that may mean swearing like a sailor at the person who cut me off on the freeway. It may mean turning off my laptop and having a tickle fight with my girl. It may mean taking lots of breaths and checking in with my body or maybe it means going and punching the crap out of a pillow or punching bag. It may mean creating art, or having a spontaneous dance party in our living room, or going for a walk, or kissing my husband just because, or going on a date with one of my best friends because we need some grown up time away from the kids.

My mindfulness practice may sometimes look calm and peaceful. And sometimes it won’t at all. And that’s the way I want it.

Because I want to experience all of life. I want to be present for it. I want ME to be present for it. Not some “model of mindfulness” rather the true me right now.

This is what mindfulness has brought into my life. Yes, I do actually have a sense of inner-peace I didn’t have several years ago. Yes, sometimes people even tell me I glow. But my life does not look like an undisturbed lake nor does it look like a woman calmly and serenely meditating on the shore of said lake. And I believe the same is true for most of those who practice mindfulness, living in the real world. There are days of rushing out the door to appointments or classes or work. There are quiet moments of watching and smiling and feeling at peace. There chaotic moments of interacting and smiling and feeling totally connected to the people we are with and to the world. And there are moments when we have to search for our ground, our center, our breath. And frankly there are moments when even if we need to search for these things, we don’t.

Because we are all human.

Mindfulness, for me, is about connection. Connection to my self and understanding how my body, mind and emotions react to the world. Connection to the people in my life and being present and interacting with them in real-time, without electronic distractions. Connection to my greater community and the world, developing a deeper understanding of the experiences of others.

Mindfulness is a lot less about sitting on a meditation pillow and being all “ooooohhhhhmmmmmmm” and a lot more about having a dance party with my with girl or a long talk at the end of the day with my husband about nothing in particular.

And yes, actually I do meditate and practice yoga. And yes, those practices are a fundamental piece of guiding me to be more centered and grounded; to being able to be more present. And yet those practices take up less than an hour of my entire day (on the days I actually do them); they are not what my whole life looks (or even actually feels) like.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what mindfulness means to you. Email me or comment below.