Autumn is for Allowing: Body of Wisdom, October 2024
Theme of the Month: Autumn is for Allowing
Have you noticed just how quickly the days seem to be getting shorter? The shift from summer to autumn felt instant in some way to me. As the years of my healing go by, I am drawn deeper into this cellular relationship between my body and the cycles of nature. A remembering on repeat: I am nature. I feel this in how the seasonal shift reverberates through my being.
Traditional Chinese Medicine works with five elements and assigns an element to each season. Winter - Water, Spring - Wood, Summer - Fire, Late Summer - Earth, Autumn - Metal. So here we are in Autumn, the season of Metal.
When thinking Autumn and Metal, feel into these body systems and themes in your life:
Organs: lungs, large intestine
Potentially more challenging emotions: Grief, despair, can lead to nihilism
Potentially more rejuvenating emotions: awe, respect, reverence, sense of meaning
Themes: holding onto what we love/what we need and letting go when the time is right, letting go of life’s imperfections
Both the lungs and large intestines are organs that balance us between taking in and letting go. The inhale, the exhale. Absorbing water and vitamins, releasing wastes.
Bring to mind an image or feeling of fall - what does it feel like to you? To me, it’s a reflective time, insightful, meaningful. I feel crisp, cool air coming into my lungs. The crunching of fallen leaves below my feet. Blasts of stunning color to punctuate the loss of foliage and the bare branches to come. Warm drinks, cozy blankets, and hot baths soften me, allowing my layers to shed, allowing my nervous system too, to let go.
Alaine Duncan and Kathy Kain write in Tao of Trauma how the element of Metal helps us hold life’s tragedies in a broad context. How the inhale, and so importantly the exhale, provide us the capacity for love and connection, even with the loss that comes with life.
I will admit, the grieving hasn’t felt easy yet for me this autumn season. Maybe it’s the continuous days of gray mist and rain. There’s been a stickiness inside me. I sense it as a limitation in my energetic inhale, or receiving inspiration for life, and a limitation in my energetic exhale, my system bracing and numbing against feeling.
Deep down, I sense the biggest reason for the stickiness is that what’s there to be grieved is just really big. It’s the housing developments plopping down over old farms named after the trees that used to live there. The tension in my client’s neck bracing for stability in a world that has rocked her around between unstable systems. The hoops people try so hard to jump through to get their health insurance to cover something that will actually meet their needs. It’s the school shootings. The bombs killing children that my tax money pays for, money that would really be so helpful to instead spend on my own well-being or the well-being of our communities.
It’s all of that. And more. And that’s a lot. Plus it’s election season, and the systems go round and round.
If you find yourself stumbling across something similar this autumn, or really whatever you find yourself experiencing, my invitation and the word I’d love us to all play with is this: allow.
Allow.
For me right now, I allow the numbness. Allow my nervous system’s brakes which stop me from feeling too much. Allow the stickiness, which makes me want to squirm out of it, and allow the wanting to squirm too.
Out of allowing, so often comes healing, comes truth, comes beauty, comes feeling, comes release. Comes ways of being, relationships, and collaborative solutions we may not have imagined before.
Whatever the layers that impede your inhale, and your exhale - whether fear, confusion, grief, aversion, dissociation… what would it take to practice allowing them to be here even just 5% more? And trusting your body to know what to do, if you can ease back just a bit, and allow it to do its thing.
I wrote a few haiku’s about allowing…
allow the gripping
notice waves of softening
hear the relieved sigh
resisting what is
locks me out of my body
keeps me from healing
if I am afraid
I lose touch with my witness
forget my power
I have faith that this season will provide the container for my grief to unfold as it needs to. And that it will gift me those vast reflective moments of broad context and greater meaning that give me so much gratitude for being alive (in fact I’m having one of those now as I write this to you).
What I also feel in my heart is that our collective grief is not only valid, but that its expression, and our compassionate witnessing, is part of the transformation we need to imagine and co-create the more beautiful world for which we long.
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Somatic Tool of the Month
Enjoy this somatic tool, taken from my self-paced course: the Somatic Journey Toolkit. This course is available for anyone with lots of sliding scale and gift options.
This tool gives you a way to work with fear which can often create barriers to allowing other experiences to happen in the body which don’t necessarily need to be scary. Gradually becoming more comfortable with our body signals and experiences creates capacity to allow our autonomic nervous systems to move through and metabolize bigger things, leading to healing.
Uncoupling Fear from your Experience
In somatics, one thing we work with is coupling dynamics. Sometimes things are grouped too closely together; we call this overcoupling. An example of overcoupling is feeling overwhelmed when you think about a situation that is bothering you because you’re feeling it all at once - for example, the fear, sadness, worry, and anger are all coupled, or tangled together into one tight knot of chaos and confusion. Too much to process, so you try to avoid it all together.
Undercoupling happens when things that belong together aren’t together. The nervous system has created space between elements of experience to manage activation. For instance, you went through something really hard but whenever you talk about it, your face gets flat and your voice is emotionless. The grief, hurt, fear, or other emotions that accompany that experience are missing from the re-telling.
One overcoupling that I see often with clients is the overcoupling of fear with other experiences, in particular the overcoupling of fear with dissociation, with immobility (or freeze), with big emotions such as grief or confusion, or with intense body sensations. Being able to recognize the fear as a DISTINCT experience from the dissociation, immobility, big emotion, or big sensation is essential to creating capacity to allow and perhaps even metabolize some of the experience.
Try this practice to see what you notice in your own body. Go slow and remember if something feels like too much, you don’t need to push through or dive into the middle of it. Experiment with allowing just 5% of it, or imagine touching into just the edge of the experience.
Select an experience to work with. Bring to mind an aspect of your experience that you’ve been having a hard time sitting with. Is there anything you’ve been avoiding feeling? That when it starts to happen, you immediately try to do something to get away from it or manage it? For example, maybe you’ve been feeling confused and overwhelmed when trying to take care of a financial matter. Or you may notice yourself dissociate when you’re around loud noises. You may want to start with something a little on the smaller side and not something with too much charge at first.
Notice the experience in your body. As you bring this experience to mind, allow yourself to experience it a little bit in your body. See if you can map a few places in your body that respond - perhaps your chest gets tight, your head feels floaty, your thighs get tingly, your shoulders turn inward, etc. After noticing some of these sensations, you may want to take a short break to focus on something resourcing, such as feeling your feet on the floor, looking at something pleasant in your room, or resting a steady hand on your heart.
Notice any fear as a distinct experience. If it feels ok, see if you can notice whether fear is one part of this experience. Allow the other elements of the experience to fall away, and see what happens if you focus on noticing just the fear in your system. Again, no need to dive into the middle of it, but perhaps just feel the edges of the fear. Notice of the sensations you felt earlier, which ones are connected to the emotion of fear? Is it tightness in the chest? Bracing in your belly? Again, feel free to pause and resource yourself as needed.
Notice the rest of the experience without the fear. Now that you have felt the fear separately, see what it’s like to get curious about the rest of the experience WITHOUT the fear. Some fear may still be here, but often noticing it separately starts to uncouple it, and create more space to actually notice some of the other aspects of your experience with less aversion. Perhaps now you can notice what feelings the other sensations belong to. Maybe the floaty head is some dissociation. Maybe the shoulders turning inward is sadness, etc. Is it possible to soften into these other aspects of experience at all, to allow them to be here? Again, take breaks and resource as needed.
Reflect. Take some time after the exercise to reflect on what you noticed. Were you able to notice fear as a separate aspect of your experience? What was it like to create space between overcoupled elements? Was there any more ease with feeling or witnessing the other parts of the experience once the fear had been uncoupled?
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Rooting in Ritual
Throughout human history, our ancestors used ritual to root into values as community. It’s easy to forget, to be pulled away by habitual ways of thinking. Ritual provides sacred structure, an opportunity to remember our intentions. To shed what is not serving. To invite in something new.
This month, consider a ritual for grief and gratitude. If you live somewhere in a temperate climate with deciduous trees, allow the trees to be your anchor.
Create a habit of noticing the changing colors. Maybe there is a tree you always drive by on your way to work. Or a tree you can see out your window when you first get up and look out in the morning. Each time you look, really notice the color. Subtle changes from the day before. Notice gratitude for the presence of the leaves, the greener leaves that were there yesterday, the continuing change that comes tomorrow. Sense into the coming loss of the leaves, any grief around that loss. You might also sense into the way the leaves create a mulch under the tree, protecting the soil from harsh winter winds, and feeding soil critters who enrich the soil for rebirth in the spring.
Gratitude and Grief, Grief and Gratitude, and the Cycles of Life and Death. Allow this ritual to teach you as the season unfolds.
You may also enjoy collecting some fallen acorns or nuts, some goldenrod, some bright autumn leaves, and ornamenting window sills, bookshelves, and mantles in your home. Create an altar with these nature items inside your home to ground you in your practice with Gratitude and Grief.
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Invitations into Offerings
I would love to weave with you on your healing journey. Here are some opportunities for our paths to cross:
Somatic Journey Toolkit - For folks feeling dysregulated and disconnected, who desire resilience, ease, and liberation from the stuck patterns in your nervous system, this course is designed to help you:
Feel more confident, at ease, and resilient in your ability to regulate your nervous system and emotions
Feel more free, having shed layers of stuck emotions and survival energy
Feel more authentic and connected to your needs, emotions, and desires with a stronger, more stable, embodied sense of self
10/1 Sacred Sisters Circle: Nurturing the Mother Wound - Join us as Beccah guides a journey into uncovering the patterns of our family lines and lightening the load as we mother ourselves and the next generation.
10/15 Sacred Sisters Circle: Seeds of Samhain, A Death & Rebirth Journey - Guest facilitator Safrianna Lughna will guide us in learning more about Samhain aka “the Witches’ New Year” and lead us in ritual to release outdated patterns and plant seeds of intention.
11/5 Sacred Sisters Circle: Heart Medicine - Amanda will guide us through voice, breath, and art to come into our tender hearts and connect together in shared warm resonance.
1:1 Somatic Coaching - Let’s center your body and nervous system as anchors in your healing and personal growth. I help people who want to spend less time living in survival mode and are ready to shed the accumulated lifetime of stress and conditioning and come back home to their hearts and bodies.
Photo by Amanda Lucia Photography
