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.

Wash The Fear Out of Your Body (Meditation and Intuition - Part 5)

Sometimes just a little bit of meditation gives the nervous system enough juice, relaxation chemistry, that a significant amount of fear is released. This is possibly because some of our chronic fear is fear of relaxation itself. We are afraid to let go of the continual vigilance and shift over to really living. When we make the decision to meditate, then, that decision has a lot of personal power behind it. This means a lot to many of us, especially those who have not done such things before.

The basic mental focus of meditation is some aspect of life's rhythm: the continual flowing of the breath, or the flow of a yummy sound such as a mantra, or the flow of energy in the body. A sense of steadiness does emerge in this flowing rhythm, but you do not need to focus on it. The more you allow yourself to perceive rhythm, the more an underlying sense of stability will emerge.

As the senses become absorbed in perceiving rhythm and stability, the muscles of the body relax and let go of tension.

Now, let's go over that sentence again: "As the senses become absorbed in perceiving rhythm and stability, the muscles of the body relax and let go of tension." This is so obvious that it's easy to miss.

More on the Debriefing Process

What happens when the muscles let go of tension? Often, we become aware for a few seconds or minutes of what we were tense about. We see little mini-movies of what we were doing when we tensed up – an unfinished conversation, a disagreement, a negative emotion that came up between us and someone we love, a tense situation at work, a failure, a success, a deadline. This is your mind/body's natural debriefing mechanism at work.

In the military, whenever anyone comes back from a mission, they get debriefed on what happened, so that the intelligence agents obtain a more accurate assessment of the environment and the forces arrayed. Football teams also debrief about their games, and probably most professional sports use the technique.

If you have been meditating every day consistently, then most of your debriefing may be about current events, because you have caught up with yourself. If you have just started meditating, or have recently been through a lot of battles of some kind, then the debriefing that comes up during meditation may cover the whole time period. You will find your brain reviewing in excruciating detail crucial events of your life and how you responded to them.

How long does debriefing take? This is the weird part. Thoughts come in unpredictable bursts, just when you are most relaxed. This is because the body loves to do the debriefing while at ease, whatever level of repose is available at the moment. Unless you have some comfort in your nerves, you won't be able to filter away the excess tension.

Note here that the intelligence in your body does not care about you being relaxed. It only wants efficiency, and relaxation is usually the most efficient mode. The adaptive intelligence also wants you to have the most perfectly sensitive danger recognition and stress-response system. The keyword here is accuracy. The body wants totally accurate sensory information and totally appropriate response.

This is for most of us the hardest part of meditation, the toughest to take, this cycle of relaxation and tension release. While it may make sense logically to say, "Ok, when you relax, you let go of tension," in practice it is a bit of a bitch. You are sitting there all relaxed and at ease, and all of a sudden your brain is filled with images of when you were definitely NOT at ease, and your muscles are jumping with tension. What the f—- is going on here?

Again, what the f--- is going on is that your body/mind is taking advantage of the situation of meditation to wash the fear out of your system. You know this is happening during meditation because your awareness goes from being extremely relaxed, to replaying a movie of some time in the past when you were in a stressful situation, or some time in the future you think will be challenging. And what, really, is your body/mind doing? Practicing being relaxed while engaged in that situation, as relaxed as is optimal for your performance. Ask any martial artist, you are better off when you are relaxed. Ask a soldier who has been in combat. You are usually better off if you can keep your wits about you.

If you work from 8 to 5 each day, and meditate in the morning before going to work, most of your time during meditation will be spent thinking – your brain just going over the choreography of the day ahead, musing about your relationships, sorting, prioritizing, and mulling over anything that makes you tense. Only a few minutes will be spent in something like transcendence, where you are savoring the vastness of life, the delight of being alive, the incredible richness of the moment. These few minutes are precious, to be sure. But the unstressing aspect of meditation is just as important, because it allows you to live honestly in the sense of delight the experience of vastness gives you.