Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Secular Blessing for Becoming Unleashed 2018

By

The work of a lifetime, the process of individuation, is widening of that spotlight so much that everything is illuminated and you are conscious of and can see your All.

~Sera J. Beak, The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark

May we…

Unravel our stories of not enough, seeing in them the lies we have been told that have nothing to do with us.

Revolt against the idea that comfort at any and all costs is necessary for our survival

Dismantle the shame we carry in our bones and being

Embrace our beauty, our power, our voice

Realize we no longer need to compromise our integrity, our values, our love for our Self, in order to be loved by another

Release the tales of how we are too much and allow them to scatter on the wind like so much dust

Reclaim our birthrights of respect, honor, and real, honest, and mature love.

Learn to be accepting of the in-between spaces and unknowns as we move through this work, through our lives, through this world.

Find the ways of being that strong, resilient, soft, and loving that have always lived inside us.

Amen.

…

There is still time to join the Becoming Unleashed Circle 2018.  Registration will close at 10pm PDT Monday October 1.  To learn more and register you can go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/becomingunleashedcircle .

In case you missed the essays exploring the topics and ideas we’ll be examining in this circle, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring 

Why the Becoming Unleashed circle?

The essence of Becoming Unleashed

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

By

 

Without the ‘dark’ I would never understand how light the ‘light’ really is. And while I don’t care for the dark, I do appreciate what it does for the light. ~Craig D. Lounsbrough

Change is supremely inconvenient, uncomfortable and naturally scary. Yet we only move through life through the process of change, reinvention and renewal, and so bravery is our quintessential rebel for pushing us past our own limiting beliefs and behaviours. Bravery is feeling the fear, immersing yourself into it and through it so you can come out the other side. ~Christine Evangelou, Rocks Into Roses: Life Lessons and Inspiration for Personal Growth

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. ~Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Within each of us is strength, power, and daring.  Our own.  That of our ancestors.  Within each of us is resilience, love, hope.  Within each of us is a knowing, a trusting, a believing.  It is there.  We may not feel it.  We may not be able to admit it is there, we may not be able to see it, but it is there all the same.

The work of reclamation is to unearth and reclaim these parts of our Self that we have buried, pushed down, ignored, or truly did not believe existed.  It requires us to reclaim our bodies as ours, our strengths and skills and talents, our inner power and knowing, our courage, bravery, and daring to break patterns and cycles, to become the people we want to be.

Reclaiming those parts of our Self we thought lost, or worse that they never existed, is work that can only be done after the work of releasing and creating space, and allowing for the time of renewal to integrate the openness into our being.  Once that space exists and is truly a part of us, we can begin to see those parts of us we couldn’t before.  Those parts of us that we were told were vile, were ugly, or simply weren’t there in the first place.

Reclamation is the time of deeply and viscerally realizing that what we were told is “too much” about us is actually our strength, our power.  Of realizing all the ways we were told we are “not enough” is actually where our courage, our bravery, our daring lives.  Of realizing all the shame we carry isn’t ours, that we were never meant to have it living within our being.

Then, once we have all these realizations and can feel them in our bodies and at the core of our being, the work of reclamation becomes relatively easy.

I’ve described all these stages of this work in a linear fashion, first one then the next then the next.  And while it is true that in many ways one stage does need to proceed the next it is also true that we are constantly doing all these stages of this work simultaneously.

I envision the path of this work to be like a three dimensional spiral.  We travel along it, around and around, up and then down, revisiting the same narratives, the same wounds, but at different layers and from different perspectives each time.  The work is perhaps never actually “complete” and yet with each layer we find our ways closer to the person we truly want to be, the person we truly are, and finding more and more freedom from the leash of our own trauma and the trauma of living in our current western culture.

I talk more about these ideas in the 6-minute video here.

This essay is the fourth and final of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you have found it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

In case you missed the previous essays, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring (this essay)

 

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving

By

Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts. ~Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

And I feel like the Queen of Water. I feel like water that transforms from a flowing river to a tranquil lake to a powerful waterfall to a freshwater spring to a meandering creek to a salty sea to raindrops gentle on your face to hard, stinging hail to frost on a mountaintop, and back to a river again. ~María Virginia Farinango, The Queen of Water

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. ~Anaïs Nin

According to Merriam-Webster to renew has the following definitions:

  • to restore to existence : revive
  • to make extensive changes in : rebuild
  • to begin again : resume
  • replace, replenish
  • to become new or as new
  • to begin again : resume

If we look in the thesaurus, some synonyms for renewal are:

  • awaken
  • transform
  • metamorphosis
  • revolution
  • shift
  • radical change

When I think of renewal I think of the story of Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess of Heaven and Earth.  The very condensed version of the story is that Inanna travels to the Underworld to be with her grieving sister, Ereshkigal. Inanna had to travel through seven gates on her way down into the Underworld, leaving a piece of clothing behind at each gate to enter into the Underworld completely naked.  The descent into the Underworld and removal of layers of clothing represents Release.  Her time in the Underworld represents Renewal.

Ereshkigal was not happy to see her sister and had her hung on a hook to die.  Inanna’s handmaiden, Ninshubar came after three days and helped Inanna back up through the gates, reclaiming what is rightfully hers at each gate, and back to the land of living.

This time in the Underworld, hanging on a hook dead, was the time of Inanna’s renewal, her own transformation, her incubation that lead to her rebirth.

It was her time in The Goo.

If you are new to me and my work, The Goo is the time in the cocoon when the caterpillar has fully disintegrated and decomposed yet not yet formed into a butterfly or moth.  My feeling is that this is a very uncomfortable time.  The Goo is no longer what it was (a caterpillar) and also isn’t yet what it is to become (a butterfly or moth) and honestly I believe The Goo has no idea what the future holds for it, and so it is a time of unknown, a time of needing to trust in the future without being able to see it. It is the time of great change, great shifting, profound transformation.

While The Goo is uncomfortable, likely terrifying, it is a time of quiet restructuring.  To the outside world when we are in our own versions of The Goo, it may look like we are doing a whole lot of nothing or that we are resting.  This is because The Goo is not a time doing, it is a time of being.  It is a time of outer stillness in many ways.  Not stagnant, for there is much movement internally, but stillness to allow for the internal restructuring and integration to take place.

The Goo is when we learn what it is to tolerate discomfort, to accept the unknown, to be able to be in the in-between spaces of life without trying to force things in one direction or another.  It is a time of acceptance.  Of surrender.  Of allowing what needs to happen to happen.

It is not an easy time.  Like the stage of release, but to a greater degree, it is a time of unlearning, unraveling.  A time of allowing old neuropathways to atrophy and new ones to sprout and take root.  It may be a physically painful time, it is always an emotionally painful time, and there may even be moments of psychological pain as we let go of old coping mechanisms that no longer serve us, but in fact are now causing us harm.

The Goo may feel unbearable at times, but it does not last forever.  Even the most profound of transformations do come to an end (to allow us to move into a new time of transformation).  The discomfort doesn’t last forever, pain does pass.  The person we become on the other side, I believe, is worth all the work, and discomfort.

I talk more about these ideas in the 8-minute video below.

This essay is the third of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

In case you missed the other essays and videos in this series, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving (this essay)

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

On Safeness, Stabilization, & Self Care :: Definitions

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Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.

~Fred Rogers

Welcome to my new educational essay series On Safeness, Stabilization, & Self Care.  Over the next three weeks I’ll be talking about these ideas, what they are, why they are important, and how they relate to our trauma processing work.

I believe it is important to start with defining what exactly I am talking about, so this is where we start.  These are my own definitions (formed and influenced by my education, my clinical work, and my life), and while there are other therapists who would agree with these definitions and who use this same language, others may not.  I don’t believe there is only one way to define these ideas, however so that you can understand what I mean when I use these terms, I’m sharing these definitions.

Safeness

Safeness is not the same as safety.  Safety is an outer state, more of an absolute state (we are either physically safe or we are not), whereas safeness is an inner state of being and feeling.  Safeness is a way of feeling (sensations & emotions) and sensing internally.

There are three aspects to our sense of safeness: safeness in our environment, in our self/body, in relationship with the person(s) who is (are) in the room with us.

Having a sense of safeness in our environment means that we can feel calm and at ease in the space we are in.  It is knowing we aren’t likely to fall through some hidden hole in the floor, that the roof over us will protect us from the elements, etc.  It is an inner knowing that we are okay in the physical space we are in and that no harm will come to us..

Our sense of safeness within our Self (including in our body) is about trusting our Self (including our body).  It means that if something dangerous should crop up, our bodies know what to do and how to respond.  It is trusting that “gut feeling” and trusting that we will not only hear it but also honor it.  It means trusting that we will make the right (conscious intentional or automatic depending on the circumstances) decision for that moment.  It is also about feeling good within our own skin.

The idea of our sense of safeness in relationship can be a bit trickier, in part because for many of us the idea of a “safe relationship” is confusing.  We may think that to be in a safe relationship means that the other person will never ever cause us emotional harm.  Here’s a thing though, we are all human.  Which means the people we are in relationship are human, with their own traumas, their own conditioning, and their own unconscious motivations.  Which means, other people, given enough time, will cause us some emotional pain.

Where the idea of safeness in relationship comes in, is when this time the other does cause us emotional pain occurs, that we, together, can come through it.  That we can work it out.  That we repair.  And through the repair process the relationship is then made stronger, and our sense of safeness in the relationship grows.  Our sense of safeness in relationship also means that boundaries are respected, that we are able to say no and have that no honored, that we can share ourselves and not be punished for who we are in some way.

(Please note that I specifically named emotional pain and not physical or psychological.  If someone is causing you physical or psychological harm, that will never be a relationship where you can grow a sense of safeness, and when you have the resources I would encourage you leave that relationship and find your ways to processing the pain caused.)

Stabilization

Stabilization is when we feel steady and secure in our emotions.  It means we are not flooded or overwhelmed by feelings of sadness or anger.  This does not mean we never feel sadness or anger; it means that they don’t overwhelm us.  For many of us living with trauma in our bodies and minds this differentiation may feel impossible.

I’m here to tell you it is possible. More on that in the coming weeks.

Stabilization is also not living in that state of overwhelm, it is feeling a sense of calm, much of the time, and sometimes even when things outside of our control happen. It is in the not having big reactive responses, and instead being able to respond to outer chaos intentionally and thoughtfully.

Again, this doesn’t mean we never feel angry or sad or frustrated or misunderstood… it means that we recognize those feelings (physical sensations and emotions) and do not act out mindlessly or thoughtlessly from those feelings.

Ultimately stabilization is about having a really great relationship with our frontal lobe (where logic and empathy live) and having all the parts of our brain working together instead of our amygdala always being in charge and running rampant.

Self Care

In a nutshell, this is caring for our Self, for our Self.  What I mean by this, is that many of us have received the message that we need to fill our own cup so we can be of service to others.  I don’t consider that self-care.  That is caring for our self for others.  To me, that is not true self care.

True self care is when we nourish our self in some way (from drinking enough water during the day to seeing our therapist each week to getting enough sleep to finding ways to calm and soothe our nervous systems) because we want to care for our Self, because we believe that we are deserving.

This can be a pretty big leap.  I think many of us have (and I include myself in this in the past) grudgingly done “self-care” so that we can be better parents/partners/workers; so that we have the energy and resources to be of service to others.

There is nothing wrong with being of service to others.  And. There is nothing wrong with taking care of our Self for the sole reason of caring for our self.

What does any of this have to do with trauma, grief, or embodiment?

Fostering a sense of safeness and stabilization are the “first phase” of any trauma processing work. This is work that needs to be done before you dive into the deeper processing work.  Once we have developed a sense of safeness and feel emotionally stable, we then have the inner resources to truly do the deep, challenging, and messy work of trauma processing and in depth embodiment work.

Coming to the idea that we are an interconnected (to others) yet autonomous Self, and that we are deserving of care because we exist not because of how we care for others, is revolutionary and also a part of our trauma processing work.  Even the idea of claiming our autonomous Self, which includes our body, mind, and spirit, as ours, is pretty revolutionary, and is also part of our trauma processing work.

I talk more about all of this in the 8 minute video below.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the spring program Trauma Informed Embodiment™ : Basics. We begin May 1.  You can learn more here.

This essay is the first in a three part series I have written exploring the ideas of safeness, stabilization, and self-care..  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

Definitions (this essay)

Self Regulation as Self Care

Shifting from Overwhelm to Safeness & Stabilization

 

On Self Care :: Stress, Grief, & Embodiment

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When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.

~Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

I have a confession.

I actually love the winter holiday season.

I love all the lights and glitter. I love the promise of snow.  I love the food we eat this time of year.  I love the hustle and bustle and the quiet snuggling in.  I do.  I love it.

And.

This time of year is also challenging for me.  My mother’s birthday is in mid-December and so there is a triple reminder of how she is not here to celebrate this time of year with us.  I notice how certain family members don’t call.  I think of friends who have moved away.  I consider the things and opportunities in life that I have lost.  I think about the life I wanted compared to the life I have.

In short, while I love this time of year, it is also a time of grieving.

And while I do love the bright energy of the hustle and bustle of this time of year, I also am acutely aware of how that bright energy can become heavy and oppressive.  How what is supposed to be fun can become overwhelmingly stressful.  How one moment I may look at my full calendar with excitement and anticipation and the next I may look at it with dread.

Basically, I am human.  Which means I am complex.  Which means I can have a mix of seemingly opposing emotions and feelings all at once.

Just like you.

To me, it’s never a question of my complexity.  Rather, it’s a question of how I hold all of me at once.

In other words, how to do I allow all my complexity to flow and be?  How do I sit with the bittersweetness of this time of year?  How do I not only allow myself, but also encourage myself, to feel all the various and opposing emotions, thoughts, and well, feelings?

For me, that answer is being in my body.  Not leaving it, not sitting or hovering outside of it.  Rather, being in it, in the now, and finding ways to tolerate all the complex sensations and emotions that I may be having.

Embodiment is both simple and not easy.  Coming home into our bodies, and deeply feeling and sensing our lived experience can feel overwhelming at times.  It can feel too much.  And also, with practice, we learn to tolerate those challenging emotions and sensations more and more.

We stop stuffing them down, only to wait for them to explode.

We stop ignoring them, only to have them crop up as various illnesses.

We start connecting to them, dipping out toes into them at first, and in time and with practice, going further and further in, finding new ways to embrace our own complexities, our own disparities, our own both ands.

I talk more about this in the 14 minute video below ::

This essay is the third and final essay in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for Challenging Times :: Holiday Edition.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.

Other essays in this series::

Holidays, Trauma, & Our Nervous Systems

Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries

 

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