New Year, New Nervous System!
Day 10: The Enso:
Do We Ever Fully Heal?
Hey Regulators!!
The Enso pictured above in the photo means “circle,” in Zen Buddhism. It's interesting though–the circumference of the circle is never complete. This is intentional and symbolic. It's just one brushstroke from beginning to end, and usually trails off into infinity at the completion of the stroke, never fully crossing the circular axis again. There are no do-overs, no modifications, no fixing the circle once the stroke is made and the paper is penetrated. It is what it is.
The practice of Enso is a practice of meditation. It's a practice in letting go, in the chirality of nature, in the circle of life, and in how imperfect and incomplete that circle and cycle can sometimes be. Some things never end. Some things never have completion. Some things end too soon. And some things never come back together again. This is it. This is the truth. We all have scars. Life becomes us. The resolutions have to be within, even when they feel incomplete. Just like the Enso.
In Sanskrit, there's a mantra “Om Tat Sat.” It means: “this is it.” The idea of “Om Tat Sat,” in Yogic tradition is that in every moment, we have to remind ourselves, this is it. This is it right now, and later, and tomorrow. Whatever is– is. We have to work on allowing the reality of things to be.
There's another term in Sanskrit called “Samskara.” It means: same scar. It's the cycle people get stuck in when they keep tripping over the scars within, and end up in deep impressioned habits that can cause perpetual suffering. The things that happen to us, they leave a profound residue behind. They leave scars inside of us. Some you can see. Some will always remain invisible. This has been my experience for sure.
I'm not positive we ever fully heal. I'm not clear on if the things that happen to us ever really go away. I think we just get better at working with them, at not getting caught up in them. The grip they have on us seems to loosen with time, with deep heart work, and with love too.
But like I've said during this challenge, it's our reflexivity that keeps us sick. It's easy to fall back into the grooves of the same scars. Those scars leave big holes we can walk right into when we aren't paying attention. Reversion seems to be the easiest path to take. The one with the least resistance.
One of my teachers in the Somatic Experiencing training told a powerful story about her own deep scar. When she was a baby, preverbal, she crawled into a pond and drowned. Someone found her soon enough. They were able to pull her out of the water and resuscitate her. She never remembered this experience. She’d only been told. But her body held the story for her.
For years, she could never take a full deep breath, struggled with asthma, apnea, and other breathing issues. These breathing problems perpetuated a bunch of other systemic complications, which makes sense considering everything is connected. At some point, through her own contemplative work, she connected the dots that the experience she had as a child was still living inside of her and was affecting her breathing. She went to Dr. Peter Levine, the founder of the Somatic Experiencing method, for help.
The session was filmed and was incredibly powerful. During this experience, through very little content of her history, but just enough to activate her, her physiology began to tell the story of what she’d been unconsciously holding onto all those years.
She was maybe forty or so when this was filmed, and Peter was able to titrate the right amount of activation, then pendulate her nervous system in and out of charge, in such a way that he finessed this old physiological story to the surface. Her body was ready to let it go, but the right conditions had not been presented to allow her survival responses to finally settle. Sometimes we need a guiding force to get there.
The somatic experiencing session created that safe, supportive space for her physiology to complete the cycle that had been interrupted many years before when she was pulled out of the water, and barely resuscitated. As you can imagine, in that moment being dragged out of the pond, she was fighting for her life, and in survival mode. That survival energy was still lodged inside of her.
She was laying down on the massage bed, shaking, crying and quivering. All of a sudden she started coughing uncontrollably. She coughed up water and a thick, mucousy substance in the shape of a thick golf ball. A piece of her history locked deep inside of her, finally rose to the surface, and slung-shot itself out.
After that session, for a few years, she never had any issues or constricted breathing. Then, there was a traumatic event in her family, and her breathing reverted back to its old pattern of tightness and suffocation. By this time, she was a teacher of Somatic Experiencing, and was able to work with it to loosen so she could comfortably breathe. But the point is; under stress, she reverted to old patterns, old scars. We all do.
This is what we need to know: it's so easy to default to the places we've come from, to the people we've been, and to the shit we’ve been through. That's why it's important to stay steadfast on this path of healing. Those old hungry ghosts creep in through the cracks when we least expect it, and drag us into old holes we thought we'd already crawled out of.
They say that being on the healing path is like swimming upstream. Everyone seems to be going in the opposite direction and getting swept there fast. That’s why it's important to have a healthy environment, supportive community around you, and daily practices that contribute to creating conditions that support your nervous system, and ultimately YOU. Your job is to guard and protect this sacred body, and to do your best to support yourself in your own evolution. We are here to grow, to live, and to repair ourselves. Be steadfast on this path. It's your job. You are a warrior. Keep going to battle for yourself, the way your body has gone to battle for you.
Thank you for joining me in this journey, and for sharing with your friends and family! This is my life's work and who knows where it will go, but it will be somewhere wild, mysterious, and sacred, just like our bodies, just like us. You can continue to check out the content which will live on my website that I'll link below. This is all a work in progress for my next book and for the launch of my Method, which I'll share more about later this year.
For now, I'm going head deep into graduate school for psychological sciences and will share more soon! Because of this, I'm not working one-on-one with people currently. But I'm going to link some great people below who are doing this work, and are continuing to lead the path on this journey! If you want to share with me about your experience over the last ten days, please do so! Shoot me an email!
Practice Day 10: Check out these links below so you can continue your education and healing! Also, if you want to come up to Ojai and practice with me in person, I teach at Light & Space Yoga on Sundays at 9am, and Move Sanctuary Wednesdays at 515 pm. My next public retreat offering will be Late April for the Wild Body Somatics retreat 4/27-4/30 at Gather Ojai. I still have ten spots left. Email me to register or more info here: https://www.laurendollieduke.com/retreats.
Community of Healers and Healing Education:
https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org/ Ed
https://www.theembodylab.com/ Ed
https://www.juliepiatt.com/ one on one/group work
https://www.somahealingcollective.com/?r_done=1 one on one/group work
www.danielladevarney.com one on one/group work
https://www.libbyc.com/ one and one/group work
https://ourbreathcollective.com/ Breathing community + Ed
https://www.innerecho.com/ one on one/group work
https://trueself.health/ one on one/group work
http://www.mariakallasmonroe.com/ somatic therapist and SEP
https://www.healthiertherapy.com/ somatic therapy and SEP
https://www.lightandspaceyoga.com/ Ojai studio
https://www.movesanctuary.com/ Ojai studio
Love you all!
LDD