“You’re squeezing your muscles, stop squeezing them”

I am returning to a knowing that is so easy to forget. It’s so habitual, operating in the background under awareness.

“Tensing our muscles shuts down flow. Shuts down life force.”

In the frenzy of the holidays it is so easy to go on auto-pilot and miss the experiences that we are running around preparing for. Here are a few tips for lowering the stress and enhancing the joy during this holiday time!

Each moment through a doorway can be used as a brief moment of mindfulness. As we move from one space into another we are offered an invitation to wake up. We can tune in to the state of our mind and body and make small adjustments in alignment and purpose, consciously stepping forward into whatever meets us next.

In Mindfulness Practice and Somatic Therapy Models, a primary goal is building capacity. I see building capacity as the ability to BE with our experience, whatever our experience is.

“I’m afraid if I am compassionate with myself I will be lazy, I won’t get anything done.”

I can’t tell you how many times I have bumped up against this belief in working with folks and in myself in the process of practicing Mindful Self Compassion. Perhaps we fear our true nature. Believing that we can only get things done out of a sense of duty, urgency, fear of punishment…and no wonder, this is how many of use were raised, this is part of our societal narrative. We don’t live in a culture that promotes a trusting of our own wisdom and rhythms. If we weren’t so hard on ourselves…what might happen?

In meditative reflection, I became aware of this subtle underlying belief that “Life is a chore.” Even the things that I LOVE to do can be experienced as chores at times. I recognized that this was related to a story that whatever I was doing was somehow taking me away from something more important...but what was that crucial thing?

I fell in love with Mindfulness through studying the brain. Why do we become tongue tied in interviews? Why do we fall back into old patterns we swore we’d never do again? Why does it feel impossible at times, in the middle of a conflict, to remember those great communication skills we have learned?

What neuroscience tells us now is that under certain conditions of stress, blood flow is diverted from our higher cortical areas (complex language, intuition, empathy, conscious choice, logic) putting our limbic brain (impulses, emotions, drives) and survival brain (fight/flight) in the driver’s seat. We can actually lose access to the brain functions of the neocortex and specifically the Prefrontal Cortex and are often left in a soup of emotions and impulses with the problem solving skills of a two year old.

BOTH/ AND is a game changer. Having grown up in an EITHER/OR world view, where you have to be “this or that” you are “good or bad”, “pretty or ugly” “smart or dumb” “with us or against us” the idea of BOTH/AND had never been presented as an option. In a state of chronic stress or trauma individually or collectively we are thrown into this brain state. My mentor calls it “black and white brain” where we feel polarized, in threat, as if there are only two options.

How easy it is to forget about the incredible power of the breath in our day to day lives! We face so many factors that push our bodies into a state of constriction...and our breath is one of the first places this can show up.

How do we know when we have ENOUGH?

As someone wired to feel scarcity, this is an ongoing meditation for me. I enjoy watching my lizard brain scanning, hoarding, and fearing loss...rarely signaling that blessed feeling of satisfaction spontaneously. It is a conscious practice of watching this tendency and retraining my brain to take in, enjoy, and savor that allows some relief from this biological programming.

One of my virtual mentors is Tara Brach, Phd. A Psychologist and Mindfulness Meditation Teacher, Tara’s wisdom has been a regular support for me personally and professionally and I continue to listen to her weekly podcasts which incorporate mindfulness practices with somatic therapy, an understanding of the brain and the impact of trauma, and are infused with a great deal of story and humor.