Recovery Protocols - Returning to Your Own Body

It is as if everyone is practicing a very advanced yoga, that of extending your body sense into what others are experiencing as bodies - "if you beat up on him, you are beating up on me."

This is the very definition of compassion - "feeling of sorrow excited by the suffering or misfortunes of another." From com, "with, together," + pati, "to suffer."

You may or may not be religious, but this is the essence of the Christian mystery. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."

It feels as if the world has changed because of the protests. There is an awakening which could be permanent, a message has gone forth, asserting the right to breathe, everyone has a right to breathe freely, and to live in dignity.

But we can't live in a state of emergency functioning forever. We have to create time to recover and recharge. Like breathing out and breathing in again, to recover from the exhaustion of the protests and marches, you may want to give some time to returning to your own body, inhabiting yourself, and letting your body and nerves heal and recharge.

Healing hurts. As our bodies repair the wear and tear, we relive the joy and the pain of how we got so tired. Expect this hurt and welcome it. Let the tears and laughter flow.

Some ways to approach giving yourself healing, if you have been traumatized by the events of the past few weeks or months.

- Team up with someone, either in person or on the phone. It is very helpful to have someone "spot" for you.

- Give yourself 4 hours of uninterrupted time, that you are giving over to encouraging the bodily process of recovery.

Here are some options:

- Sit in a darkened room, with phones off, and just tell stories and listen to the other person, for 4 hours. If you are the one talking, give yourself permission to pause and feel into your heart sensations and your fear sensations and your skin sensations, and speak from there. If you are listening, just attend. Let that other person be your movie, your Netflix. You have the privilege of seeing the world as they see it, for this time.

- Go to somewhere soothing, a park or grove of trees or river or ocean, and wander in an unhurried way, talking story.

- alternatively, do some vigorous activity such as running, swimming, playing a game, and then afterwards, in the joy of simple physical exhaustion, talk.

- arrange a playlist of the most heartbreakingly beautiful music you can find, and play it on the best sound system or headphones you can arrange, and lie on the floor and let the music carry you away. If possible, with a friend.

- if you are alone, bathe in pleasure for hours. Take a shower or bath, rub lotion all over your body, wrap yourself up in a bedsheet, and lie down and simply feel your whole body, everywhere, and track your emotions and sensations.

The rhythm of healing is that we first of all give ourselves a sense of safety, even a little, and an atmosphere of relaxation. It helps to have someone with you, but you may have to do this alone. Then in the atmosphere of safety, that which is painful, that which is burdening your heart, all your worries, come up to be felt and released.

What we call "meditation" is just a set of ways to allow this process. There are tens of thousands of ways. You have all that you need inside you now. In a conscious healing practice such as this, you are actively welcoming the same kind of healing that your brain and body will do tonight when you sleep, and have done in every moment of sleep since you were first conceived.

The fetus in the womb alternates between deep sleep and REM or dreaming sleep. This alternation is how brains, nervous systems, and bodies learn and heal. To meditate deeply and allow healing to proceed, you want to allow this cycling of different brain states.

Your mind is not "wandering," it is processing in the ways that dreams are processing. Meditation, when approached in a natural and effortless way, allows the body to enter a state of rest deeper than sleep, in about 5 minutes. This feels totally natural. It just feels like normal relaxation. But in the lab, and this was studied and replicated for decades, restful meditation is physiologically quite remarkable.

Meditation, in a sense, takes a load off of our sleep time, so that the brain does not have so much of our unfinished business to deal with. This will allow sleep to be deeper as well. Wandering in nature, listening to music, or talking story for hours and hours, give yourself a chance to return to your own body and let your energies recharge. Wherever you are, however you are, you have the tools to do this. And you can accomplish this one breath at a time, one heartbeat at a time.

Healing From Betrayal (Meditation and Intuition - Part 6)

If you have been betrayed, you know how much noise it makes in your head. This is because to be betrayed, we have to have been sold out or attacked by someone we trusted and considered a friend. Betrayal feels completely different than when we are attacked by enemies or competitors.

When a friend betrays us, the damage goes deeper than attacks by enemies. There are two reasons: one is that they are closer to us, inside our guard; the second is that when a friend betrays us, we have to doubt the part of us that trusted them in the first place. We come to doubt our whole relationship to the world. We may recover from the external damage that the betrayal does to our life. But the lasting damage, more difficult to heal, is that we turn against the part of us that trusted them. In other words, being betrayed can damage our ability to form friendships and to trust anyone in the future. Then, because we have to form alliances with someone, we become more open to being betrayed again in the future because our whole signaling system is out of calibration.

For meditators, this is important because healing the damage from betrayals is as painful as having porcupine quills or cactus needles pulled out of your leg. It's a series of ouch, ouch, ouch moments. And there is no Novocain for it because the type of healing that is needed is conscious healing. The last thing you ever want to think about again is your friend who betrayed you. The very thought of them is like a virus that crashes your computer. But when you feel safe and relaxed during meditation, their image will come up, the mini-movie will start playing, and you will be inside a debriefing session as your inner intel staff and your inner Sun Tzu sit around and work on the problem of how did you get there, what damage did you take, how were you deceived, how does your intelligence gathering and assessment system need to be revised, and what exact steps to take today to move toward a solution. And how to prevent a scenario such as this from happening in the future.

As part of recovering from betrayal, you have to learn to distinguish between different kinds of pain - the pain of the needles in your body, the pain of the infection around the needles, the pain of pulling the needles out, the pain of cleaning the wound, the pain of the scar tissue as it forms, the pain of working the scar tissue so it becomes more supple.

If you are in the process of healing from a betrayal, don't give up on yourself. You can heal, and you can be better than before. But ouch, the healing process hurts!

How Meditation Can Make You Stronger

When you challenge your body to work, you get fatigued, and then the body rebuilds itself and you come back stronger. Athletes and bodybuilders work this action/rest cycle constantly: it’s called training, and it’s how muscles grow. When you challenge your muscles, the body rebuilds them stronger than before. That is what “working out” is. Lifting weights, exercising, working the body, breaks the tissue down. There are micro-tears. At night, and on your rest days, the body rebuilds the muscles. It can take two days to recover from an intense workout. You may feel sore the next day, and really sore two days later.

I remember being surprised when I learned it is rest that makes you stronger. I’d always assumed it was the workouts that built you up. The trainers say it’s actually rest plus having sufficient nutrition circulating in the body to provide the raw materials for the repairs. The play of opposites is that you want to challenge the body and break it down, just the right amount, and then rest those body parts through sleep and normal use for a couple of days. That’s what makes you stronger.

Working out week after week without sufficient rest time can result in overtraining injuries, which means the body does not have enough time to repair the injuries before you stress it again. This is a known phenomenon in all form of athletic training, and coaches and exercise physiologists have done brilliant work in revealing these rhythms. Athletes who follow their training rhythms get better results with fewer disabling injuries.

In daily life, we do many kinds of workouts, on emotional, social, and informational levels. We challenge ourselves to cope with environments at home and at work, and we can get worn out on many levels. Our rest time is when we heal up and become stronger. I think we can suffer from a kind of “overtraining” fatigue on these other levels, such as emotions and information. Sometimes, we ache with fatigue, tension, or just plain pain that is not just physical. Mostly the pain goes away by itself. There are some forms of pain that stay, and we wonder what that is. This is more than just the usual pain, we find ourselves thinking.

This is where meditation comes in. Among other things, meditation can be a rest much deeper than deep sleep, which we can access in the midst of our day whenever we want. When you rest more deeply than sleep, you can heal more deeply also.

Meditation feels like time out, time off, a brief vacation in which you don’t have to do anything.

You pay attention almost idly, in the gentlest way possible, to some aspect of the body’s self-renewal process, such as breathing , the heart beating, or the relationship of your body to infinity, or any of a million other things. In meditation we enjoy whatever the focus is and rest in it. We do so little that the entire doing structure of the body can reset its circuits.

You place your attention in some aspect of how life renews life, and you rest there. Feed on it, bathe in it, explore it, delight in it, play with it. Nest there. Bond with it. That’s about it. The technique is extremely simple, but what can be elusive is finding the approach you love so much you want to do it, or that is so natural to you that you can do it under almost any circumstance.