Let me Pause, and Begin Again

Dear dreamer,

We can always begin again.

I recently attended a Somatic Trauma Healing Immersion organized by The Embody Lab and Ergos Institute. It was 5 days in a hotel ballroom in San Diego, listening to pioneers in the field of somatic psychology.

And it wasn’t until after I returned home that I could grasp the difference I felt in my body while I had been at this conference, participating in an environment inside the bubble of 600 people receiving beautiful invitations to listen to their own bodies.

The first difference I noticed was in my personal rhythm. Unsurprisingly, time slowed when I had been feeling my body breathe, and returning to the pace of normal life brought me back to a somewhat frantic, distracted kind of awareness of my body. I felt a sense of urgency—perhaps a cultural kind of pressure we sometimes put on ourselves.

I even felt a pressured kind of urgency within myself to share my thoughts and experiences from this conference—especially because many incredibly generous people contributed financially to help me attend it; I felt deep gratitude, and also a sense that I owed it to them to directly share back my learnings. This is something I’m only clearly recognizing now as I write it out.

In noticing that urgency or pressure, I allowed myself to pause.

Kai Cheng Thom (one of the speakers at the conference) would call it a Sacred Pause.

In the pause I became curious about this particular form my expression wanted to take:

writing to my email list…

specifically articulating my experience through words…

what does this medium offer to the time scale of my processing?

what is possible with written words?

what else is possible here?

And, most largely, can I drop the urgency?

Allow myself to wait until I feel the impulse to share again, and perhaps even savor the expansive, drawn-out time scale of my processing?

As I took a pause and let myself slow down, there was space for imagination and creativity to come online. Ah. I recognized this as an integral step in my dream work as well.

And as I waited, I found that my body also wanted to process through movement, so I started to dance.

And as I write this now I realize I’ve accumulated so many more ideas and experiences to integrate into the “processing” since the last time I wrote you (and urgency makes its presence known a bit again).

But I’m reminded that the “processing” is a process!

There may never be a true end point where I can check off the list that I finished expressing my “processing of that conference.”

So I allow the urgency to spark me into a little bit of action again now, without falling into the overwhelm of needing completion NOW.

I could say that this is also a release of the need for instant gratification, though I feel skeptical about taking a totally negative view of instant gratification. Surrendering to a paradigm of process rather than product could mean feeling gratification at any point that I am able to allow it in, rather than delaying gratification to some end point of completeness that may never actually come.

Or, put differently, I wish that when I was in college churning out dances, I could have taken as much satisfaction as I wanted at any point in my process without demanding of myself the “completion” of a dance in order to feel satisfied.

If I’ve lost you on that tangent, my point is that we just take another lap around the spiral and begin again. No matter how long the pause has been, I can always pick up those college dances again, or find my way back to the body connection I felt at the conference.

I sit back down to type.

I orient myself back towards daily creative rituals.

I remember to feel my body breathing again.

It is never finished and always beginning again.

This in itself is a lesson.

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