Content note - in this episode I share with you details about my father's + mother's deaths. Please take good care of yourself while you're listening if listening to someone speak about death is difficult for you. I'm back with a personal story of how mindbody wellbeing skills have helped me through the difficult time of my father's recent passing. Milton was almost 98 1/2 years old when he died earlier this month. He will be missed greatly. May his memory be a blessing for all who knew him. It's been a full circle experience for me, navigating elder care, covid life changes and the ongoing care of a loved on with dementia. In this episode I share my experiences of how I used my understanding of mind, body, nervous system along with memory reconsolidation and trauma empowerment to help support me during this difficult time.
Content note - in this episode I share with you details about my father's + mother's deaths.
Please take good care of yourself while you're listening if listening to someone speak about death is difficult for you.
I'm back with a personal story of how mindbody wellbeing skills have helped me through the difficult time of my father's recent passing. Milton was almost 98 1/2 years old when he died earlier this month. He will be missed greatly. May his memory be a blessing for all who knew him.
It's been a full circle experience for me, navigating elder care, covid life changes and the ongoing care of a loved on with dementia. In this episode I share my experiences of how I used my understanding of mind, body, nervous system along with memory reconsolidation and trauma empowerment to help support me during this difficult time.
I hope there's something helpful here for you to apply to your life to help make healing past hurts and helping your mindbody today sense into more safety.
[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity.
[00:00:29] So you can feel more better. more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:57] Hello, my feelers and healers. This is Deb with the Curiosity Cure podcast wishing you very happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and any other holiday that you celebrate or wishing you a fantastic Wednesday, if that is what resonates with you. So I wanted to share some things that have been going on with my life and highlight the mind body skills that I've been using to help me get through them and help me feel strong and resilient and connected with myself and being really a good companion for me through this time of my life.
[00:01:47] My father passed away, in December. He was 98 and almost half years old, which is pretty incredible. And I have been taking care of him in one way or another for the last, I would say almost five years. Packing a suitcase and going from California to Florida to take care of him. And then the events of COVID keeping me in Florida in a way that was unexpected. dramatic, destabilizing, all of those things. My life has changed radically. Because of his fall and because of the world events of COVID. There's been a lot of change that I have reckoned with and rolled with. There's been a lot of difficulty in the experience of taking care of somebody who has dementia.
[00:02:41] There's been the great expense of this American experiment with not healthcare, everybody is going to get old, maybe, and die. Everybody's certainly going to die. Maybe not everybody gets old, but the lack of the structures for us to provide good care without tremendous expense. It's pretty insane, this system that we have to move through as if we're surprised that we're going to get old, need help, need care, and finding ways to pay for that. Those are just like so many of the things that I've had to Navigate and manage and I know that I am not alone and uniquely troubled with that, but still it kind of landed on my shoulders and there are ways that I was prepared and unprepared for it.
[00:03:36] There were ways that I really showed up and far surpassed my own expectations of my abilities and there are ways in which it brought up a lot of old memories of when my mother was sick and dying and that process and that time in my life, which was It's very difficult, very traumatic looking back on it. Kind of sometimes when you're in the midst of an experience, you don't have the language or the awareness or the experience to name that this is traumatizing, that this is more than I can handle on my own.
[00:04:20] So some of what I wanted to talk about is like. The kind of what's different for me from that time to this time, how I have changed as a person, what these skills and techniques have helped me bring into my life in a way that really helped me feel confident in my own ability to take exquisite care of myself, to survive, to be present with what was unfolding, and to also, like live what was my mission, to, help foster or shepherd a very peaceful, Oh, this
[00:05:03] is hard to say,
[00:05:06] you know, it. When I think about it in my head, it's like the emotion isn't there and then as soon as I start to speak it, it's just very real
[00:05:16] that he's gone.
[00:05:19] So, yeah, my mission was to help him depart this earthly plane with as much peace as possible. And I really believe that I fulfilled that mission. I'm really proud of myself. So one of the things I noticed was when I got the call that he was really declining and I had spent much of October and the beginning of November with him. Um, and. That was very special. There was some work that we did to help get him on a different medication that helped, bring him some ease and that meant his caregivers had some ease that also meant that I enjoyed spending time with him a lot more, which was also very healing and reparative for me.
[00:06:17] So we spent a lot of time playing gin and we were just good company with each other, and that was really pleasurable and enjoyable. We also got to celebrate the holidays together. We got to do Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur together and together with his community. And those were, that was very meaningful to be able to be there and also to be able to help him be with his friends and people who cared about him.
[00:06:48] But one of the things that, that happened is when I was on the plane to go back there, I noticed that my whole body was definitely in a different experience than my brain was in. So my body was like shaking and I had lots of strong feelings and I was getting a headache and in that moment realized because in my brain I was pretty calm.
[00:07:17] My body was like, not calm and in mind body work and in hypnosis, we speak about the body as the subconscious, as the unconscious mind. And one of the things that I've come to learn is that the, the unconscious subconscious mind is out of time. What happened yesterday could feel like today, what happened a decade ago could be very present in this moment in a way that can feel destabilizing, can feel frightening, can feel confusing.
[00:07:52] So with that idea, I just gently repeated over and over again, this is now and not then. This is now and not then. This is now and not then. This is now and not then. And as I repeated that, my body started to settle and my brain was like, right yeah, it's now. It's not then. There was this almost clicked into place sense of that message really penetrating all the way through me.
[00:08:28] Because what was actually happening was my subconscious mind was remembering the difficulty that I had when my mother was dying and that time, which I had not these skills, where I wasn't really as good as taking care of myself as I am now. I didn't really know what was happening. At that time, I was just responding. I was in a trauma response and I was just in it. There was no gentle witnessing. There was no, ability to be inside and outside my experience. There, there was hardly any capability of doing anything other than just putting one foot in front of the other and dealing with what was immediately in front of me.
[00:09:19] There was a lot in my life at that time that was in a crisis. I was, I had closed my business. I had had a big breakup. I had moved across the country. Like there was a kind of a mistaken understanding in my, body mind that my external circumstances were causing my feelings, my feelings of extreme distress, and that if I changed those circumstances, I would feel better.
[00:09:54] And one of my biggest takeaways from that experience is like when you're having a crisis, that is not a great time to make big life decisions. And I made them all. I had all the things happening all at the same time and I do need to look back and give myself love, give that younger me some love and be like, Oh, wow, that Deb did the very best.
[00:10:17] that she could do at the time, with the skills that she had and the knowledge that she had and the support that she had or didn't have. There was a lot of loneliness, there was a lot of anger, there was a lot of fear, there was a lot of sadness, there was a lot of confusion, there was like all of it.
[00:10:34] All of it happening all at once, right? That, like that movie, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. I don't even know if that's the title, but that's what it felt like. And I was going back to the same place, to the same bed, to now be with my father in this time of his life. There were a lot of things that happened with my mother that felt tragic, like none of this should be happening. My cousin said around my father, this is sad, but it is not tragic, and I really agree with that sentiment.
[00:11:09] Whereas my mother was young, she was too young and vibrant to die when she did, except that she did. She died. And that's, you know, what happened. And it was painful, and it was intense. It was like not understandable in some way really basic ways having never been through that before in my life. So yeah, this time this experience, I had that past experience, sometimes your past experience is shows up and you're just like, well, that thing that I don't want to have happen again. Like, that's all, you know, you don't know what's possible, but you're just like that thing that had happened that I hated. I don't really want that again, and that's some information.
[00:11:58] So there's ways in which mind body medicine, these tools and skills, somatic tracking, just this understanding that our body and our mind are one, so that when we feel things in our bodies, they cannot just be reflections of things in the body, tissue damage or illnesses, or diseases, but they can be a reflection of our internal mental and emotional experience. That we do a better job learning how to take care of ourselves and understanding, even understanding treatment when we also add in that our mental and emotional states have a physical component.
[00:12:49] Right? So that when I was on that plane, having that experience, I wasn't necessarily thinking, Oh, hey, there's something wrong with my head, or there's something wrong with my stomach, or there's something wrong with my muscles. I was like, oh no, yeah, this experience, my body is out of time. It is reflecting the pain and the fear and the experiences that I had had in the past.
[00:13:18] And what it needs right now is to be reminded that I'm not there anymore, that that experience actually is over and has been over since 2012. And now is 2024 and it is a different experience. And between then and now, I am a different person. I have different skills. This is a different situation.
[00:13:47] And reminding myself that I actually do know so much more about how to take care of myself, how to take care of my dad... my nervous system and my psychophysiological body was responding like in a fight flight freeze response with, this kind of trigger of those past experiences that were, were absolutely so hard and painful.
[00:14:17] And so one of the things that was helpful and that really shifted my state, so made all of those physiological experiences go away, and also really helped me settle, move from that kind of trauma response into feeling resourced, calm, feeling in my today body, my today body and my today mind as I was flying there, repeating to myself.
[00:14:44] This is now and not then, this is now and not then, this is now and not then, this is now and not then. And the more times I did that, I could feel my breath settle, my belly unclench. I could feel a big yawn come in, which I knew was my nervous system relaxing.
[00:15:05] I think I even added some tapping, so I would just tap on the top of my head. I did my faster EFT technique, just repeating that sentence over and over and over again. I did it maybe 20 times. So, you know, not hours of it. And something clicked into place and I was like, Oh right, yeah, it's now and not then.
[00:15:28] This is absolutely not then. That fear just resolved itself. That worry, that trigger had just untriggered itself. Then for me, my invitation to myself in this process is why are those memories showing up now? Why is that fear appearing? Oftentimes there's, there's two pathways for me.
[00:15:53] I think of it like a, It's not really a fork in the road, but that's the image that's coming up. Or maybe it's like a tree with different branches. So the different branches might be, I need the past pain to be acknowledged. That is one branch of the tree. I need to say, yes, what happened then was really painful.
[00:16:18] Yes, it was. That happened to you. That was really painful. Sometimes, you know, it's tricky when you say it shouldn't have happened, because then that creates a conflict because that's a place where I get stuck, where I see clients get stuck, when we get stuck in the, it shouldn't have happened, but it happened.
[00:16:37] So sometimes there's different ways to nuance that, which is to say, that thing did happen, and I wish it hadn't. Which is different than saying it shouldn't have happened, because seriously, nothing gets you stuck or trapped, like being in that loop of this thing happened, but it shouldn't have happened, it happened, but it shouldn't have happened, it happened, but it shouldn't have happened.
[00:17:01] Oh my God, that is this exquisitely painful experience. So we could re language that, re feel that, which is that thing happened. And I wish it hadn't. And just being with the truth of that. Sometimes when I'm in that kind of space where I'm remembering a difficult thing, I bring my today self, this sense of compassion, this sense of love, like literally I imagine me today feeling strong and resourced and loving, holding the me of yesterday. There's a hypnotic technique, which is watching yourself, watching yourself on a screen, bringing a movie back and forward, going through time, bringing yourself the things that you wish you had had then. So sometimes it's just like I go back in time and give myself whatever it was that I think now I could have used then.
[00:18:09] You know, if I have strong judgments of me in the past, I bring forgiveness. I bring the knowledge of like, you did the best you could. And so sometimes it's a really big hug. Sometimes I imagine folding my arms around myself, that younger me, and holding myself, rocking me, crying together, patting me on the head, giving me, I don't know, a kiss on the forehead, whatever it is, whatever conceptualization of care, but it's not an idea, right?
[00:18:46] This mind body work has really, really shown me that It's not just about the thoughts we think. It's about the embodiment, the feeling, bringing it all the way through you. And I can imagine that there's all these different me's inside of me. Every me that has ever existed lives inside of me in some way, whether it's through a memory, but that the sense of that self, I can feel that me.
[00:19:17] And so sometimes I feel it in my heart, or I feel it in my belly, or I feel it in my face. And so wherever it is when I get quiet and I sense into it, it'll just show right up. And it's not about making it go away. It's about making contact and resolving the the pain, resolving the pain, not in that I can actually go back and change the past, but that simple sentence, this is now and not then. Is an invitation for you to, to take that and apply that to yourself.
[00:19:57] Also the branch of the tree that is about meeting the pain of whatever past experience, so much of our mind body work is about kind of easing our way out of avoidance.
[00:20:11] And into this process of metabolizing past painful experiences, you know, somatic tracking teaches us how to, to be with, and to lower the threat response of physical and emotional pain of an unpleasant sensation, because when we don't just respond and react like, Oh my God, I cannot feel this and we are turning up the threat alarm, we're turning up the, the panic on something.
[00:20:43] Then our body and our brain learns that this is dangerous and to be avoided, right? We're only making more fear. We're only making more of a threat response. We're only teaching our brain because, right, this is all about learned responses, conditioned habitual patterns. We're teaching ourselves, yes, that thing is actually unbearable, is actually something that we cannot come near and our brain will be like hot stove, hot stove, fire alarm, ring, ring, ring. Yes. Our mind and our body are looking for coherence, in our experiences and, you know. We're the only ones that can teach our brain and our body and our emotions that we're safe.
[00:21:28] So as I was on the plane, and I'm just sitting on a plane, I feel pretty safe on planes, and I'm just going back to Florida, which is pretty routine for me now. I live there and I live here and I go back and forth all the time. I joke that the plane from New York to Florida or from Florida to New York is like a bus in the sky. So I just got on the bus. In this moment I'm actually very safe and in this moment I am okay. And, you know, that's about creating. A strong sense of neuroception, a strong sense of safety in self. So one of the branches is about, acknowledging past pain, bringing care and love to that past you and resolving any avoidance.
[00:22:23] And now, inside of avoidance is often the thing we don't want to experience, right? So there can be judgment, there can be anger, there can be regret. It can be really useful to almost create a map. And so we want to do that with a sense of titration, with a sense of doing it at a level that feels comfortable, right? So really when we map our triggers in our body, we can tell when we're getting activated and we can tell when we're feeling resourced and more calm different ways of shifting and changing those triggers and titrating it, not pushing past what feels safe.
[00:23:11] The idea is we want to be like a rubber band. And , this is some coaching that, I don't know that I got it personally from my friend, Maggie Reyes, but I've heard her say this before, right? Being like a rubber band, we want to stretch and not snap. When we're expanding our window of tolerance, when we are learning to step away from only having the strategy of avoidance, We're going to feel that stretch and that stretch might feel uncomfortable and as we continue to kind of stretch this rubber band, we don't want it to snap.
[00:23:48] We just want to lean in and create that gentle stretch and then let the rubber band return and lean in, create that gentle stretch and let the rubber band return and really giving yourself agency and empowerment around it. Whether you're doing this on your own, or whether you're working with a coach or a therapist, just knowing that this is an active process.
[00:24:14] This is what we're doing on purpose. And it creates an empowering shift inside of your, emotional and physiological experiences. There are learnings. That are important to take from those past experiences and that is another branch of this tree. Another branch for me was to remember that time in which I felt a lot of pain, a lot of emotional distress, a lot of fear, and very, very alone.
[00:24:47] And I was like, what can I do that will help me feel better that won't be that experience, right? Because I didn't want to That experience to be recreated now, and I'm like, okay, as a person who has lived through that experience, and I don't want that experience to be happening now, there's a few things that I can do.
[00:25:09] I can recognize what is different. First of all, it's my father and not my mother. He's 98 and a half and not 70 years old. I've been really active in his care and done everything that meets my values and, been really present with him in the way that I have a lot of pride about.
[00:25:33] And then also being like, I need and want support from people I love, people I care about, and I can ask for it. And so I did, I reached out to a bunch of friends and people were reaching out to me, they were like, Hey, what do you need? And instead of just being like, I don't know, or I don't need anything, right?
[00:25:57] Not being like over responsible or, under dependent. These are some ideas from different, coaching that I've gotten. I think there is a sense of I, I am responsible, but not feeling over responsibility. I also need care. I also need help. And there were some things that I was worried about, like worried about calling hospice because I had had a bad experience with hospice.
[00:26:25] So I reached out to a friend of mine who had worked in a nursing home and I asked him to just Just listen to me so I could offload, which is a skill that I learned in somatica, which is just to like let it all out, right? Just to have somebody to be a witness to you letting out all the things unfiltered.
[00:26:47] And in that process, I was really able to see, what my worries were, what my past experience was, to acknowledge my past experience and to see, what is it that I need now? What would be useful in this situation? And in that conversation, I realized what I needed was a trusted person that I could get some advice from.
[00:27:09] And we had in the past hired an elder care specialist, who works in that area and I was like, oh, I was able to identify. She is a person I could reach out to and get some helpful information from. In that moment of offloading, of reaching out for help, of being with my fears of the past repeating itself, I was able to decide on some action items that I could do to help me in this experience.
[00:27:46] And then I had friends reaching out to me. was so grateful and I was just like, right, I need your care. So I was able to connect with a few people every single day. I tried to make sure that I like had a short conversation or ask somebody if I could text with them that I was making sure I had some local friends and I like showed up and we were able to see Wicked together.
[00:28:15] I was like, Oh, I really don't want to miss seeing the Wicked movie. Because I'm a big musical theater fan, and I was like, I really want to see this movie, and I was like, I have time, so I made sure that like, I was also getting things that I needed, I made sure that I was eating well, and sleeping as best as possible, I went and got a pedicure, like I was like, I have a body, I have needs, I have I am going to take good care of me because if I take good care of me, I will be more resourced and available for the kind of care taking that I am being called on to do.
[00:28:57] And so another branch of this tree is looking at the past and saying, what wisdom, what learnings do I have from that time that I can apply to this time? And so that was one of them, which was being like, Oh, I was so painfully alone at that time in my life and, you know, and I actually still had connection with people, but I felt so much more alone.
[00:29:31] So I was like, right now in each moment of connection, not just feeling connected or knowing that I'm connected, but actually really feeling those threads of connection with people who love me deeply and allowing that love to sink in, to be embodied, to really fill me up. So You know, I was doing the work of amplifying the love that I was receiving from people.
[00:30:05] So it's as if, yes, it had a certain vibration, but what can I do inside my body to make it bigger, brighter, bolder, feel it stronger, right? Feel those connections, imagine them. Sometimes I would just imagine them as these tendrils of light. These, little connection threads that are connecting me with other people all over the world who love me.
[00:30:32] So that past experience of feeling so hurt and so broken and so alone couldn't be replicated because what I was feeling now was so loved and so connected. I had to engineer the felt sense of that. It wasn't just going to happen because I really could have just been stuck in the past. And I had to take myself out of the past and put myself in the present. And that was really powerful.
[00:31:07] There was another piece wrote this as a quote on my Instagram. I said, I don't have to know everything. I can let it unfold. And so there were moments, right. When you're like in deep planning mode, you know, and we see this all the time in mind body care when we have a flare, when we have pain, when we're trying to plan ahead, and we're like, oh no, this activity is going to cause this pain, we're almost cementing that, we're codifying that in our mind body, in our brain, we're practicing in some ways ahead of time, what is going to happen. And when we have a predictive brain, the predictive brain is delivering us the experience that we are expecting to have.
[00:31:53] And of course, None of that is conscious, it is happening unconsciously by our brain. What we need to do is create a prediction error, and we create a prediction error by not forecasting what is going to happen. So this idea of letting something unfold, not knowing and planning, this is happening, this is happening, this is happening.
[00:32:17] There's a freedom, and also kind of a fear of letting go, of control, because really it's just the illusion of control, but when I think about it from a brain's perspective, from this predictive coding perspective, if I want a different experience, I need to break the prediction of the experience That I don't want to be having.
[00:32:44] And some of that is letting go of planning, letting go of fixing, and creating a lot of spaciousness for unfolding. We don't actually know what is going to happen. And sometimes we create even more pain when we're trying to make X happen and it doesn't and then that's even more confusing, more alarming, more distressing, rather than kind of being in the real time of an experience, letting it unfold.
[00:33:17] Right, then our nervous system is more relaxed when we are more capable of being in the present moment and maybe that is practicing nervous system skills, like orienting. So we are bringing ourselves into real time in our body. So that can be, doing bilateral touching that can be orienting ourselves to the room like Let me identify everything that is red in this room and looking around and really letting your mind and your eyeballs, which are a part of your brain, see what is here. Because when we are in controlling mode, we're in a certain kind of perception that is not actually here.
[00:34:03] We're in this fantasy perception of only being with what it is that we want to be happening and it can be very jarring when we come out of that state. And so sometimes also just recognizing like where am I? What state am I in? Where is my brain? Am I really here or am I in the future? Am I in the past?
[00:34:31] What's happening? Okay. And giving myself the gift of that quality of spaciousness. I don't have to know everything. I can let it unfold. And again, it's about creating this sense of safety, this embodied safety of the present moment. I'll read to you a little bit from my Instagram post. If anyone has their own personal experience with loved ones dying, you know, there's always a flurry of things to do, some urgent, some less so. And some of this is tied directly to being Jewish. This is not what I wrote, in Judaism, we bury people very quickly.
[00:35:13] So my sister and I had even figured out the year before. Like, where is the funeral going to be? Where is the shiva going to be? Because those are hard things to decide in the last moments. Neither one of us have a home that was appropriate to hold a shiva. So there were things that we needed to figure out.
[00:35:36] And sometimes what causes us distress is a bunch of unmade decisions. So it also can be really useful to sit down and write out a list of What actually needs to be decided and when so that you can get a sense of, whether we're reverse engineering, like, okay, at some point, he's going to pass.
[00:36:00] And these are the steps that are going to happen. And it was very helpful to have hospice there, because they have their own protocol and they are very clear on it. So they're like, you call this person and this, and then we take care of these things. So, you know, I had a sense of knowing what was going to happen.
[00:36:18] And we don't always get to have that, but sometimes we do. So sometimes it's even just knowing I'm going to wear this. Or whatever decisions that you can make and clear out of the way or hand over to other people. That was some of the things that I was also doing, collaborating with my sister and saying Well, I'm doing these things.
[00:36:42] And I need you to do these things. And we really split up the activities and things that we were doing. And I also, decided to delegate, like, not always the easiest thing for me. So going back to the post, there's always a flurry of things to do, some urgent, some less so, and there's also a lot of feelings.
[00:37:07] So, yeah the things that are useful for me to tend to my mind and body and heart, this sentence. I don't have to know everything. I can let it unfold was one that I say when I feel like I'm spinning in planning in future stuff. And so that is also applicable, not just around death, but around anything that has like a big sense of planning.
[00:37:34] It helps me ground back into this present moment and my own self trust. I am reminded of all the things that I do know and all the things that I've handled in the past and recently. It is so, so, so much. That soft landing of self trust is one place that really allows me to have a big, relaxing breath and a sense of spaciousness.
[00:38:02] Take a moment to say this saying or mantra out loud. And you can say it now. I don't have to know everything. I can let it unfold. What do you notice happens in your body? Do you feel a big breath come in? Do you feel pressure or confusion? Whatever you notice, this is the practice. We cannot attend to what we aren't letting into our perception.
[00:38:31] There are no shoulds here. Just an invitation to loosen our grip on the immediate or distant future. And this can help your day feel more open and free. Whatever it is that you notice, get curious. So that's the end of my post.
[00:38:52] Sometimes with the big feelings, what big feelings need is not fixing, it's witnessing. So that's another branch of the tree, big feelings. And so there are different ways to attend to big feelings. Feelings want to move, right? They are energy in motion, e motions. Big feelings.
[00:39:17] We don't want to stuff them down. Now, it's not always, I know it's gonna say appropriate, but that's not the right word. It's not always conducive to feel every emotion that you feel in every moment that you're feeling it. So being skilled with emotions can be really helpful. Noticing a big emotion arise and there's this 90 second rule of an emotion. So sometimes the idea is like, okay, move all the obstacles out of the way and let it roll through and just notice how quickly it moves through us. And that also really helps with letting go of suppression.
[00:39:59] Just allowing an emotion to flow through, to rise and to fall like the ocean waves, like a wave that crests and falls, oftentimes at the end of that emotional wave is a resolution, is a sense of your body relaxing and getting to allow those waves to flow through us really helps our body relieve stress.
[00:40:29] So it's an incredibly powerful stress reliever when we allow our emotions to flow through us. But then sometimes emotions need a certain kind of tending or if we're not good at it or if we have just like a tremendous amount of rage that I often like to meet on the page in my journal speak practice. Journal speak is a practice created by Nicole Sachs, a mindbody therapist who worked with Dr. Sarno.
[00:41:02] The way that I do it is, when I notice that I'm having a strong emotion, I will dedicate time and meet that feeling on the page with my journal speak practice and kind of write it all the way through. So I'm not making a pretty journal experience.
[00:41:19] I'm not saying like, well, this is what happened to me today. No, I just like let it out. It's like, you know, when you sneeze, you don't, keep the tissue, right? Or it's like vomiting it out on the page. Really like going into the feeling, just like letting it all out. What I also like to do is have my handwriting, my handwriting kind of tends to reflect the feeling.
[00:41:43] So I end up doing big scribbles, and I do a process in which I only use one page, so I'll write, and then write over it, and then write over it, and then write over it, so that by the end, you, you don't actually even, I mean, one, you can't read it, you can't reread it, right? And this is very useful, because we don't want to go back and reread what we are letting go of.
[00:42:07] There's always You know, the events in the past, but there's a certain kind of processing and letting go of the strong emotion that's a rising in the moment. So my journal speak practice is a way that I'll do that. And then you want to do a self compassion or some kind of guided meditation or just some kind of like soothing breath after that practice.
[00:42:32] So bringing in the soothing piece. So maybe I will like hug and pet my, my squish mellow Lionel. and rock, and listen to a piece of music, and just soothe myself, or do a meditation, whatever it is, there's no wrong answer, but that process of shifting into this caring, loving, compassion state is very useful for after that experience.
[00:43:05] So there's different ways to Experience an emotion or experience multiple emotions and you are going to have more than one feeling at a time. That is very possible. So you know, sometimes if you don't know what you're feeling and that feels very confusing, you could sit with the emotion wheel and even just glance and look at the feelings and see if one really resonates with you and just start to connect that word and the emotion.
[00:43:39] So maybe it's not rage, maybe it's despair, maybe you feel despondent, like there's a lot of research that says when we have greater emotional granularity, which means more ways to describe an emotion, we actually have more emotional maturity. We have more ways of processing and allowing an emotion to move through us.
[00:44:02] And then our nervous system does not need to treat that emotion as a threat or a danger to us, right? It becomes very organic. We become enlivened as thinking, feeling, experiencing beings.
[00:44:19] And then the other thing that I did was to feel on purpose the big feelings in ways where I didn't feel alone so whether it's watching a sad movie and crying, listening to a piece of music and just weeping. One of the things that I did was go to see The Notebook musical in its final performance. That is a room full of people who are crying together. It's an incredibly Beautiful show and it has themes of love and loss and Alzheimer's, really poignant themes. We're in this together, but it's not me. I'm watching things on the stage. I am safely sitting in an audience and I am just sitting witnessing being in a room full of hundreds of people having a deeply moving experience. You can hear weeping in the row behind me and next to me, the woman next to me was shaking and quivering. Like I just felt so seen and connected with. It was the best choice for me after he had passed and after his funeral. It really felt very holy.
[00:45:38] And I guess maybe theater is my church, theater is my temple, is my sacred space. So I took myself to my sacred space and had a collective emotional experience and let it move through me. And so I recommend Being in good company, having those big feelings, and you don't have to be talking about what happened.
[00:46:04] You don't have to be in the exact content of you and your life. But bringing it to something that you are experiencing with other human beings can be incredibly healing. And doing it on purpose to let those emotions, that energy move through you to teach your body and your brain that it is safe to feel these feelings and to know that you are safe in this moment while you are feeling.
[00:46:40] That is what I have learned, that is what was powerfully, powerfully different for me between that past experience and this present experience. And I really do feel so, completely different in the most empowering way and one of the other things that happened was I noticed as I was in Florida taking care of my dad as he was dying that there were these nudges of memories that were showing up, these memories of that past time when my mother was dying.
[00:47:20] And instead of just suppressing it or saying like, Oh, well, that's not happening now. I noticed that those little nudges were kind of invitations to be with that past pain. And I would just take these little sips, these little moments. So maybe I would lay down and I would just let that past pain wash over me.
[00:47:44] As I said before, bring that present me to that past me, to that past pain, and bring this love and this sense of peace, this sense of forgiveness, this sense of resolution, or witnessing, just even witnessing that past pain. And I would do it in these little sips, these little moments, so maybe it would be 10 15 minutes of just taking a break.
[00:48:11] And letting that past come up, meeting it with love and kindness and letting it flow and then reminding myself if I needed to be reminded, like, Hey, this is now and not then. And bringing myself back to the present moment. And what I really noticed was it was if I was being given this opportunity to resolve those past traumas.
[00:48:37] And I took them because I was like, Oh, they're not pain that needs suppressing. It's like my body mind is available. There's a part of me that knows that I have the skills and the capacity to be with this and to let it resolve. Sometimes I would imagine it like, almost like it would arise, and then it would dissolve.
[00:49:05] It would kind of fade, and almost like those memories of it fading into the past. Oh my God! And you know what just popped into my head? Back to the future, right? So it's like Michael J. Fox, like when his body is changing, right? So it's like the past is just kind of fading. The things that I was holding on to that were so painful when I could be with them and process them and there was a wisdom in knowing, right?
[00:49:37] That's what I found. It was like, it was almost like my subconscious was like, hey, we actually know and trust that you have the skill and capability to hold and bear witness to this now. You can do it. We know that you can. And then I was able to be like, yeah, I really can. That landing place, that soft landing place of self trust.
[00:50:04] So I made sure that I had time to do that. And sometimes I could like take that time in the minute when it arose, and sometimes I would have to be like, I'm going to get to you later, and then really make a little bit of time to get to that later. It was incredibly beautiful and very, very healing.
[00:50:26] And now I can think of that past time and it feels really different in my body. I can remember being with my mother. I can remember laying in that bed, feeling so much pain. I can remember being so dissociated. I can remember being angry and upset. I can remember hiding in the car and yelling at the people from hospice because we were having a lot of conflict. I can remember how I felt about myself. And I can hold all that loosely and I can really see and feel that it is in the past. I have so much love now for that me who did the very best that I knew how to do. And same thing kind of with everybody. We were doing our best.
[00:51:18] And holding and feeling carried by the wisdom that I took, the experiences that I had, and the ways that I cared for myself in this experience, I was able to act in ways that felt aligned with my values, and in ways that I was not sacrificing myself. So that ability to care and to love and to be present and to help really also applied to me. I was not in conflict with what was happening. And that was really powerful. That's a really powerful shift for me, moving out of my selfless helper, self sacrificing self persona into a way in which everyone gets care. And I have boundaries, and I have needs, and I have these skills to be with myself when things are painful, and also go and seek out what is pleasurable and enjoyable and fun, right? So having the full range of human experiences. So that's a little bit of my, my story and it continues to unfold. There's always a lot of things to do when somebody dies and I still have my own needs. And while I'm attending to things in my life and things in my family's life, I'm trying to hold it all with a sense of love and compassion.
[00:52:55] Being able to recognize okay, what's important to do now and what can wait. Recognizing when there is a sense of urgency, really being able to tend to my body, my nervous system, bringing in that sense of spaciousness, bringing in that sense of relaxation and ease even in difficult experiences.
[00:53:17] I owe all of this to these mind body healing tools. I owe it all to pain reprocessing work. I owe it to all of my teachers and all of my clients who I. I have the privilege to bear witness and to be in this experience with them, helping them navigate their own mind body experiences, being in what we in Somatica call a trauma empowerment model, because this human life is difficult.
[00:53:53] And it is full of pain and it is full of experiences that shouldn't have happened and yet did. And being able to name this happened and I wish it had happened differently. Being able to hold the myriad number of truths that are true at the same time. The same time, being able to hold more than one feeling at a time, being able to have that ability to witness ourselves in an experience, and also being able to shift our physiological state to help our body move out of fight, flight, or freeze, and being able to shift into a sense of coherence and understanding.
[00:54:40] What is it that I need in this moment? What would help me feel grounded, present, connected, loved, or just even capable? Right? What is it that I need to get through today to be able to put my head down and go to sleep? How can I wake up tomorrow knowing that I can meet the day and be with myself and that I don't need to dread or fear or worry or panic or control.
[00:55:15] And I actually have a life in which I trust that I can navigate difficult things because in this life difficult things will happen and are happening all the time.
[00:55:29] Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for everybody who has reached out with a kind word, sending me love during this process. I so appreciate you. And if I haven't connected with you individually, everything that you're saying and sharing, I'm feeling. I'm feeling held by your love and care. As I am figuring out what the next steps are in my own life I'm taking a break but I will be sharing with you what comes next, how you can work with me, what we're doing together in our minds and bodies in 2025, and whatever it is that you're going through, I want you to know that healing is possible for you.
[00:56:18] Healing is possible for you, just as it has been for me.
[00:56:22] Wishing you very happy holidays and an incredible new year. Thank you.