Creating Resilience and the Capacity to Hold More
I felt a heaviness last week.
We have friends and family who live in Florida, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia…all of the areas hardest hit by both Hurricane Helene and Milton.
My heart, prayers, and support goes out to, not just my friends and family, but to everyone dealing with the devastation and even deaths.
Here’s some of what my friend and fellow coach (and also former coach to me), Melissa Fino, wrote about getting evacuated last week: https://www.instagram.com/p/DA55vY1J459/?hl=en&img_index=1
She went on to write:
“You need to develop the ability to hold more…It’s not just a matter of money. This is about capacity.”
It inspired me to keep going because if she and so many others can keep going in spite of being evacuated, I can also lift my heart and spirit to do so, as well.
I also had friends and clients who are going through health challenges, surgeries, and fires, and yet, I’ve also seen them get up and keep going with their businesses and their lives.
It’s about resilience.
It’s about having the capacity to hold more.
And this is why I was in Austin about two weeks ago…learning even deeper methods of developing the capacity to create resilience, to hold more space for my clients and member-students, and to embody the feeling in my body that I can take on hits, bumps, triggers, uncomfortable moments, and yes, even pain, at times, and be totally OK.
Here’s what I learned at the Elementum reunion: (Elementum is a trauma-informed training program that I got certified as a Master Coach from in 2021. I recommend that you do the below with a trained facilitator, rather than trying to it yourself.)
We started the first day with Osho meditation. This is what we mostly did:
This meditation is a fast, intense and thorough way to break old, ingrained patterns in the body-mind that keep one imprisoned in the past, and to experience the freedom, the witnessing, silence and peace that are hidden behind those prison walls.
The meditation is meant to be done in the early morning, when “the whole of nature becomes alive, the night has gone, the sun is coming up and everything becomes conscious and alert.”
You can do this meditation alone, but to start with it can be helpful to do it with other people. It is an individual experience, so remain oblivious of others around you. Wear loose, comfortable clothing.
The meditation is to be done with its specific OSHO Dynamic Meditation music, which indicates and energetically supports the different stages.
Instructions:
The meditation lasts one hour and has five stages. Keep your eyes closed throughout, using a blindfold if necessary.
This is a meditation in which you have to be continuously alert, conscious, aware, whatsoever you do. Remain a witness. And when – in the fourth stage – you have become completely inactive, frozen, then this alertness will come to its peak.
First Stage: 10 minutes
Breathing chaotically through the nose, let breathing be intense, deep, fast, without rhythm, with no pattern – and concentrating always on the exhalation. The body will take care of the inhalation. The breath should move deeply into the lungs. Do this as fast and as hard as you possibly can until you literally become the breathing. Use your natural body movements to help you to build up your energy. Feel it building up, but don’t let go during the first stage.
Second Stage: 10 minutes
EXPLODE! … Let go of everything that needs to be thrown out. Follow your body. Give your body freedom to express whatever is there. Go totally mad. Scream, shout, cry, jump, kick, shake, dance, sing, laugh; throw yourself around. Hold nothing back; keep your whole body moving. A little acting often helps to get you started. Never allow your mind to interfere with what is happening. Consciously go mad. Be total.
Third Stage: 10 minutes
With arms raised high above your head, jump up and down shouting the mantra, “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!” as deeply as possible. Each time you land, on the flats of your feet, let the sound hammer deep into the sex center. Give all you have; exhaust yourself completely.
Fourth Stage: 15 minutes
STOP! Freeze wherever you are, in whatever position you find yourself. Don’t arrange the body in any way. A cough, a movement, anything, will dissipate the energy flow and the effort will be lost. Be a witness to everything that is happening to you.
Fifth Stage: 15 minutes
Celebrate! With music and dance express whatsoever is there. Carry your aliveness with you throughout the day.
Osho explains about this meditation:
“Remain a witness. Don’t get lost. It is easy to get lost. While you are breathing you can forget: you can become one with the breathing so much that you can forget the witness. But then you miss the point. Breathe as fast, as deep as possible, bring your total energy to it, but still remain a witness. Observe what is happening as if you are just a spectator, as if the whole thing is happening to somebody else, as if the whole thing is happening in the body and the consciousness is just centered and looking. This witnessing has to be carried in all the three steps. And when everything stops, and in the fourth step you have become completely inactive, frozen, then this alertness will come to its peak.”
A Game of Being Attacked from All Sides
The next exercise we went into was something I have never experienced. The way they Master Coaches described it was this: It’s a game where you give permission to be attacked from all directions! It was physical; it was mental; it was even emotional at times! (I’m still physically bruised two weeks later!)
Here’s what we did (again, I would advise that you do this under a trained facilitator):
First round: Walk into the middle of the circle with purpose and power. When you’re ready, you nod your head to signal to everyone on the outside of the circle that you are giving permission to get attacked. Those who are attacking are coming at your shoulders, and they’re coming from in front of you, on the side of you, and behind you. You don’t know when because not everyone attacks at once. It’s more randomly staggered and up to the individuals on the outside of the circle.
In this first round, we’re noticing our unconscious pattern when we have no control and are being attacked physically. As you probably know, the normal stress or trauma responses are: fight, flight, freeze, fawn or a combination of these.
My unconscious pattern was to freeze. Afterwards I noticed that I just let people push me around, attack me, and I didn’t try to push back, get away or negotiate/please. I also noticed that when I was the one attacking, my unconscious reaction was to giggle and laugh, which is a fawning response. I didn’t want the person I was attacking to take it personally, and by smiling, laughing or giggling, I was, in a way, apologizing for it.
Woah! Crazy, right? I never knew that those were my stress and trauma responses. If I really thought about it, I could’ve probably guessed some of this because I grew up with physical and emotional abuse, and to keep myself safe, I would try and either be a “good” girl or freeze when I was a witness to it happening to others. However, I also thought that I was an escape artist – going either to my room or, at the very least, into my head and in some way, a different realm, so that I did not have to be totally present for the abuse.
The next round, we learned how to get more conscious of the triggers and to choose what we wanted to focus on.
Second round: Again, walk into the middle of the circle with purpose and power. When you’re ready, you nod your head to signal to everyone on the outside of the circle that you are giving permission to get attacked. In this round, there is still physical attacks, but each person who is coming to attack you, yells out something. It can be triggering words, like “Divorce,” “Death,” “Mother” (if someone had mother issues), “Money” (if someone was working through their money blocks), or anything else that someone may get triggered by. The facilitators said if you know the person in the middle of the circle and know their triggers, to yell out the words you know WILL trigger them.
The person attacking can also yell out “positive” words like “Fun,” “Play,” “Sex,” (yes, sometimes this can be a triggering word too), “Vacation,” etc. Then, it's your job, as the person in the middle of the circle, to get very present, listen for what you do want and redirect the person’s energy, so that instead of being attacked, you can move them to where you want or even dance with them!
This second round, I was super present, and I did a much better job of not freezing. Instead, I was able to be so present, to listen for what I wanted and move the people “attacking” me into a new energetic direction.
This “Game” showed me that I CAN get out of my unconscious patterns of freezing and/or fawning and into a present, conscious, and clear place, where I do have control in my responses to triggers. It’s a good way for our bodies to create “muscle memory” of having been able to navigate a stressful situation where you’re literally getting attacked and not only survive it, but to thrive under those circumstances and learn to be present and to redirect the energy.
Ecstatic Dance
The next day, we started the day with Ecstatic Dance, which I found so freeing.
(Can you tell that this was a very physical weekend? I felt like I was working out for the two days! But this is what embodiment means. Being IN OUR BODY. Trauma lives in our bodies, so even if you feel like you’ve done a lot of therapy, it may not get released, until it’s released out of the body.)
For many, many, many years, I’ve had a BIG fear around visibility. A few years ago, when I did Elementum, it was the biggest thing I worked on. We had to work through our own stuff, in order to graduate because they always said that you can’t take your clients through what you’re not willing or haven’t worked through.
Through this particular way Ecstatic Dance was presented, it created a huge release of those fears for me. I fell in love with everyone in the room, and no longer feared raising my hand or taking up space in that room! I also felt like I wasn’t scared anymore about an upcoming in-person talk I’m giving at a SPEAK: She Event. It felt like a miracle, and in so many ways, it is, since one of the Master Coaches, Christine Hassler, always says, “a miracle is really just a shift in perception.” So true, if you think about it.
Breathwork
I have to be honest. I don’t usually love breathwork. Most of the time, my limbs just get really numb. My back hurts, and I just feel uncomfortable and in pain most of the time. However, this experience was incredible. At one point, I saw images of meeting my husband and the beginning of our incredible love relationship, and I felt such a depth of love for him, that tears were streaming down my face. Then, the love and romantic images turned into a more orgasmic experience!
After a (long) while, the breathwork intensity turned into tremendous love for my family - for my mother and for family members who had passed. My grandmother and uncle came to me. My uncle hugged me, held me to his chest and shoulder and told me how much he loved me. Then, along with my grandmother, grandfather and other family members who had passed, they both told me how much they supported me. I cried so hard at one point that I could barely breathe, and yet, I felt so much release, so much love, and such an opening in my body.
Friendships and More
Besides the two days of embodiment and release, I also connected with my Elementum classmates, most, for the first time, in person. It was so incredible to be with your “soul family,” with people who actually know the most intimate parts of your psyche and childhood wounds, but may not even know where you live in the world.
…where every conversation is so deep that as soon as you meet them IRL, your soul says, “Hello old friend! I’ve been waiting to finally meet the physical manifestation of the human I already know so well.”
With Love & Gratitude,
If you would like to experience embodiment, release and freedom, I’m so excited to announce that I’m planning an in-person retreat in 2025! Please subscribe below, if you want to get more information, when it’s available, and to be one of the first to be invited (and get a huge discount)!