Encountering Ourselves In Recovery

I wanted to share this beautiful video that for me really encapsulates what it is to come home to the innate rhythms of our nervous system and of who we are.

There is no better teacher on our planet than nature. Her innate rhythms and cycles are also seen within our bodies with the seasons of our lives and with the innate nervous rhythms of activation, settling and integration we go through over and over.

Anyone that works with me knows that I see healing as an allowing of the return of these rhythms and a trust in them - rather than something we have to achieve, do, or get to.

In life trauma is inevitable for a large percentage of us. But how we recover from it in mind and body, and how we change our relationship to it changes everything. We can have a renegotiation of the experience and very slowly and gently build the capacity to hold it in ways we never could previously.

When things were too fast or too much or too soon for the nervous system we get overwhelmed and have to find strategies to survive; like freeze, fight, flee, collapse, fawn. If these important and sometimes life saving survival strategies get stuck on, they can cause us difficulty physically, emotionally or/and relationally.

When we can meet those strategies with compassion, time, and support (which is often what we did not have before) - we can get in relationship with both those strategies and what they protected us from, in titrated, safe and kind ways until we can metabolize/digest the experience.

In doing so we make ourselves more resourced to meet future challenges with new skills and presence. There will inevitably be more challenges because life is a continual cycle of activation, settling and integration, over and over. This is growth.