VIDEO - Attunement to Soma, the Subtle, and the Feeling Body

Attunement to Soma, the Subtle, and the Feeling Body 

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through questioning and reorganizing patterns of thinking. We can’t think our way out of trauma. A more tactile, sensual tincture is required.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, shards of unmetabolized experience (pieces of soul) are relocated into underground storage and held in subcortical and somatic circuitry.

From here, these figures long to come out of their crystallized state and return home.

Encouragement to “just get over it, you can’t really believe that, you know that’s not true, come back to the present moment, that’s just your story,” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as profoundly misattuned, even as the activity of violence and aggression.

The orphans retreat, and go deeper into the subtle body.

This “advice” is experienced as an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory.

In addition to the terrifying and shattering emotional pain, on top of that is a profound sense of aloneness. No one can understand; no companionship into the dark night. No relational temple in which to rest, breathe, and tend to the orphaned ones of psyche and soma.

The ally is nearby, but hidden behind the veil. A cleaning of perception and polishing of the heart is needed to see and to feel it. In ways that are counter-instinctual to that part of us needing to know ahead of time, the ally has located itself inside the wound.

Only an open wound can be healed. Otherwise, the tincture is unable to enter, reveal, and transmute. It’s within a sensitive vessel that the physical and subtle tears can weep freely, and wash us from the inside out.

It is the flowing of these tears that allows for the grieving to unfold, the mourning of the unlived life… the beginning of a new world.

Breathtaking, achy, tenderizing, pure joy

In the Autumn, there’s a way that things illuminate, break open, and reveal some previously undisclosed doorways into reality. Things are tenderized, in inner and outer nature.

Unprotected, unguarded, unable to hide from the shimmering alive nature of reality, as it is, which is rarely going to conform to my own hopes and fears, or the fantasies I have about who I am, what this world is, what love is, what the Divine is.

It’s just too wild and naked for all that. We can’t pin Reality down, wrap it up and resolve it into some nice tidy package, including through our great spiritual realizations; the Beloved is just too undomesticated for that, and just isn’t interested.

There’s a certain sort of shakiness that can go with this, an atmospheric coloring of melancholy or sadness, but not a sadness where something is missing or in need of healing or transformation. It emerges somatically in response to some experience of overflow: this life and heart and the sensual world, the outpouring, it’s all just overflowing.

It can burn at times, in the belly, heart, throat, the eyes, in the subtle body. A blazing aliveness and raging sort of awe at the whole thing.

All expressions of the “blue ones,” a particular group of inner travelers, pieces of soma and soul who reside in the blue regions of the spectrum of consciousness; internal figures who carry tenderness, melancholy, shakiness, and grief.

Where the heart is on the outside of the skin and not safely tucked away inside the rib cage. Fully exposed, naked, unguarded, its flesh just right there.

A “sadness” that’s also quite full at the same time; somehow the emptiness and fullness come together, as One; not in response to something missing or lost that needs to be recovered, cured, or healed. But if you really gave yourself to that that it will take you to the ground, turn you to dust, with the moon looking down upon you.

It seems this burning, this achy openness, this overflow, this being “turned to dust” is the direct response of the Beloved, the way she pours herself out of herself and into this world; they are her portals. Breathtaking, achy, tenderizing, pure joy.

Into the Autumn glory - communion, union, Unity

In times of liminality and transition, there is a unique invitation delivered to each of us, from the inner Friend, to slow down and open to what it might truly feel like to play and imagine once again.

To explore from that place of beginner’s mind, re-opening to those natural states of awe, wonder, and the simple joy inherent in a few moments of just Being, Being who and what we already are, without having to turn our lives into some unending self-improvement project.

While we can hold an intention to improve our lives, relationships, and sense of self, which is intelligent, and kind, simultaneously to spend some time each day in these less-structured experiences, ones that aren’t oriented in improvement, in getting to a different experience.

Maybe for us that’s being out in nature (perhaps without our electronic devices) or writing down our dreams or doing some type of yoga or meditation or prayer or whatever that might be: Writing, dancing, putting our hands in some clay or sand.

Tending to the wild undomesticated aliveness of the sensual world. An invitation into kenosis, of being emptied-out, of the known, the frozen, and the crystallized, that we hear about from the Christian mystics.

Taking time each day to interrupt the trance of the collective, the pull into a survival-level restlessness, return into our bodies, and provide an inner temple in which we can feel, where that which has remained unlived can come into embodied reality and disclose its wisdom.

To attune to that emerging, right-brain flow of image, feeling, sensation, and those states of communion, Union, and Unity.

This emptying out, into Fullness isn’t something we do only for ourselves (of course, were included in its embrace) but is for all of life - for others, human and animal, for Gaia, for the ancestors, and for the ones yet to arrive here, waiting for conditions to be ripe.

These “ones yet to arrive here” include others as well as those aspects of ourselves and pieces of soul - the entirety of the lost orphans of psyche and soma - who are longing to come into Being now, future parts that carry a profound creativity, wholeness, wisdom, and compassion - all qualities that our world so badly needs right now.

Photo: fall glory at the Dallas Divide near Telluride, photographer unknown