09 Sep I can’t imagine this…..
Read all the lovely chapters of Deb Koffman’s book
Yeah, we all want to change. Preferably now. RIGHT NOW.
Magic wand kind of now.
When we’re overwhelmed with anxiety or depression, we don’t see the benefit of each tiny moment that is happening within the larger shift in time. Yet it’s there.
It’s in learning to slow down time, open up space, that instead of making us more overwhelmed we actually come into greater balance.
Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, describes this as the “Nourishing power of small, positive moments.”
This comes in the form of enjoying someone laughing out loud when you encounter something funny or noticing your shoulders ease when someone you care about smiles back.
Every week in my work with clients people tell me they can’t imagine good things, or make general statements about how things don’t work out. (Maybe you’ve thought something like this yourself? I know I can fall into this at times myself.)
When we’re in a sub-optimal state we fall into what Rick Hanson calls the “negativity bias.”
That slippery slope has an evolutionary magnetic pull. It’s not just years of habit that have us slide easily down that slope, but our evolutionary makeup that warns us to be prepared for the next bad thing that will happen.
Being positive, on the other hand, can be a much harder mountain to climb, or so it feels at first glance. We all are drawn to emotional states that make us feel positive.
That’s why we turn to the quick fixes of over consuming just about anything. Or getting the hit of feeling good by controlling. That can work too.
But they don’t actually give us what we really want. Those quick fixes don’t quite deal with the underlying needs, hopes, and wants that are foundational to building a secure internal self.
Instead we need to learn to make life more granular. This idea of granularity is something I learned from my early years with meditation and yoga. I then learned the academic research underpinning my experience from Lisa Feldman Barrett who studies emotions.
When we make something granular, we “look” into the “moment” to find many moments. Instead of denouncing how improbable it is that anyone would ever love us, we slow down time and explore what the concept of “love” is, breaking it down into smaller and smaller components until we can “touch” it, become aware of it sensorially, through our experience.
That does bring on a difficult conundrum for many people with trauma and attachment wounding. Sensing into the body can be hard. When we try we might feel numb. Or so anxious that we shut down. Attuning to the body can be too darn complicated – so we avoid it altogether.
Yet the body can provide the doorway into these kinds of micro-moments of goodness.
It’s where, if we learn how to do it, we access the molecules of ease, warmth, comfort. If we take one tiny, tiny, nano moment and connect it to another tiny, tiny micro moment we begin to build a lifeline that sustains good experiences over time.
It requires our internal sensing apparatus to orient toward goodness more than toward the negative.
Yeah, I know, it’s hard for many of us to do.
It was for me, too. I didn’t have the basic skills I needed when I was doing my healing work so many years ago.
Which is why I put the Becoming Safely Embodied Skills (BSE) together and taught them to groups.
Life does not have to be overwhelming.
It does not have to be a horrible repetition of the past.
We do not have to live triggered all the time.
There is a path through. And it works.
It’s helped hundreds, if not thousands of people who have used the Becoming Safely Embodied skills to organize their internal disorganized world.
They’ve done it one step at a time