MINDFULNESS IS AN INVITATION TO BRING A FRIENDLY ATTENTION AND CURIOSITY TO YOUR PRESENT MOMENT EXPERIENCE WITHOUT GRIPPING, PUSHING AWAY, OR ZONING OUT

Mindfulness teaches us to drop into the awareness that is witnessing your thoughts, feelings, and experiences, and asks whether they are the only story. Establishing what’s known as metacognitive or witnessing awareness, or mentalizing, is key to being with the challenging aspects of our experience in a new way: we become more equipped to relate to our life experiences differently, which can be a portal to transformation.

We can recognize, honor, and dignify what we feel without getting lost in our thoughts or how or what we’re feeling. We can learn to get curious about what it might be like to be with our feelings, and not just be our feelings: we can learn to keep them company. We can begin to recognize our emotions and name them mindfully from the witnessing place of loving awareness, be they the primary emotions of joy, pain, anger, fear, shame, guilt, love, or variations or new “somethings” that have yet to be named or emerge from within. With mindfulness, we cultivate skills to relate to whatever arises in us — and for us — in our lives, differently… perhaps inviting in a sense of curiosity and friendliness, instead of exclusively relying on what can often be the familiar, critical inner voice and rush to action. We learn to understand that critical voice, asking it, what does it want? Why or how has it learned that this is the “best” way to get our attention?

SOMATIC EXPERIENCING TRAUMA HEALING IS A WAY TO HELP ACCESS THE WISDOM OF THE BODY BY HELPING THE NERVOUS SYSTEM RETURN TO BALANCE AND CALM.

When we begin to trust ourselves through these practices, we can begin to know what it’s like to sit with our vulnerable feelings and feel them, allowing them to gently process through, with pendulation and titration, still staying within the window of tolerance and minding the demands and capacities of our nervous system. As we learn to go inside ourselves and cultivate our ability to recognize our felt sensations, we can begin to examine the “stuck” places and see how they may deactivate, after which we can return to more balance, clarity and calm. We can tend to these hurt places like we would tend to a baby, and then allow the natural movement that arises toward the joy, delight and sense of OK-ness that awaits. We can recognize our common humanity: our needs, desires and wants, our physical, sexual, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional range of our life’s experience. We can create enough space to embrace all of it with a mindful, curious inquiry and a friendly, kind awareness and attention.

WRITTEN EXPRESSION HELPS US CREATE A COHESIVE NARRATIVE OUT OF OUR LIVES. BY PUTTING OUR TRIUMPHS AND TRAGEDIES ON THE PAGE, WE OPEN DOORWAYS TO HEALING.

I use poetry in my own practice as a way of making sense out of things, like when I wrote this poem about the COVID pandemic in New York, in April 2020. This PBS story also describes a little about why I do what I do with poetry and somatic education and coaching work, and/or art, music, and creative pursuits.

I may invite clients to draw something they might not yet have words for and see what comes. Or, to show me what they’re feeling instead of me asking. Then we spend time talking about it, and whatever is coming up for you. It’s not about form or the way the poem or piece of writing or art looks - it’s the meaning behind it or in it for you and you alone; what is arising in you that wants to come forward and allowing yourself to do that with your own paper and ink or laptop. It’s for our eyes only.

Poetry allows for metaphor and nuance and wordplay in a way that strict language and left-brain sentence structure and the social niceties that go along with it, may not. Poetry is an invitation to connect with your deepest self, the part of you that may feel more than think - it is the quality within of ‘knowing,’ not the known, if you will... it’s establishing a relationship with your own inner wisdom and allowing it a portal to be touched into and allowed to express itself.