Getting Unstuck

Movements of the Dance

You may have noticed by now that “stuckness” is a favourite word of mine for whatever internal matter is interfering with our wholeness and our maturing. So “getting unstuck” is one way to refer to healing – something that helps us get past or through whatever is in the way of our living and loving well.

What I mean by healing is an experience that transforms our relationship with something that has been keeping us stuck. Examples of what could keep us stuck include: 1) an event(s) that traumatized us that we haven’t been able to process well, 2) some aspect of ourselves – our thinking, feeling or behaving – that has been causing problems, 3) a relational pattern we’ve not been able to change, 4) something that’s made us anxious or fearful, and 5) something we know we need to do that we haven’t been able to do. Of course, that list could be much longer, but I hope it provides a sense of how several categories of healing could be relevant to my description.

In my last post, I introduced the phrase “dancing with our stuckness” to help you imagine the healing process as alive, full of movement and rhythm. And now is when I ask you to keep that in mind as I get more substantive and descriptive about one way to create a flexible approach to what healing might look like. The movements that I’ll describe today are a form – like learning one type of dance. But, of course, the ways of dancing are endless.

I stress the flexibility because it’s important to see that healing is not something we control or “make happen,” it’s something that unfolds naturally when we help find or co-create the mixture of safety and courage that enables consent – the acceptance and opening up to a process that we’ve been resisting or avoiding.

So here is the set of four movements that I briefly mentioned in my last post:

• Stilling the Noise

• A Compassionate Consent to Reality

• Receptive Awareness

• Active Response

You’ll notice that the second movement is my title phrase; that’s because it’s the central turning point of the movements. The others prepare for and follow out of that turning point, though I do see them all as very significant aspects of how healing often unfolds. The movements are overlapping and entangled; the descriptions artificially separate them for the sake of clarity. I refer to this as a “description” of what I’ve seen in the healing process, trying to make sense of some key elements. Understanding the movements can help us approach healing for ourselves or others without suggesting rigid guidelines. I’ll describe the four movements relatively briefly today, and sometime down the road I hope to unpack each in more significant detail.

Stilling the Noise

The “noise” around us is partly of our own making and partly that of our environment. There is literal noise (traffic outside or a teenager’s video games). There is the noise in our head caused by things like time pressures, relational conflicts, job stress, financial worries or chronic pain. Then there are all the noisy distractions that we create to avoid the deeper noise we only hear when we get quiet and alone. All of this noise gets in the way of our facing tough realities in order to accept and integrate these parts of our lives – the parts that are keeping us stuck as long as we avoid them.

Contemplative practices are the tangible ways that cultures and faith traditions over millennia have passed on intentional ways of “stilling the noise.” In fact, “stilling the noise so that you can be aware of reality more clearly” could be a definition of contemplation. This means that a very broad selection of contemplative practices are among the best ways to prepare for a healing journey (and they remain important throughout that journey).

Therapists talk about a related dynamic as “emotional regulation.” Being emotionally regulated refers to our bodies and minds being in a state that is alert and engaged without being over-aroused (“fight or flight”), except when necessary or appropriate, and without having all of our energy drained by hopelessness or perceived powerlessness. In this emotionally regulated space (“window of tolerance” for Siegel fans or “ventral vagal state” for Polyvagal folks), we have all of our personal resources available to us. We think and feel in ways that fit our situation. We can see clearly without seeing threats or dangers that aren’t there.

Stilling the noise, possibly through our use of contemplative practices or possibly through compassionate accompaniment, contributes to our being emotionally regulated in body and mind, preparing us to approach reality and face the places that have been making us stuck. We then approach reality with all of our resources available: our fears are calmed and our courage aroused. We can trust those people who are supporting us in our healing journey. Our bodies soften, and we breathe easier and more deeply. We’re ready for the more challenging parts ahead.

A Compassionate Consent to Reality

Now we get to the heart of things, and we want to ensure that we do it with our heart. Consenting to reality cannot be done in an analytical way – with lots of words or thoughts “about” situations. Connecting with realities that we’ve been avoiding must be done in an engaged, experiential way. To repeat again Bessel van der Kolk’s phrase, we have to “know what we know and feel what we feel.”

So, heart language, the approach we associate with our brain’s right hemisphere (imagination, intuition, ritual, metaphor, symbolism and the integration of embodied feelings), are crucial for how we encounter the realities that we’ve been avoiding. These are riskier and more potent than thinking and analysis.

Some years ago I read Louis Cozolino’s book, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, and came across his references to “a safe emergency.” This has come to sum up so much for me about what healing or therapy is about. There is the creation of a safe space so that courage to face an emergency – something risky or painful – becomes possible. As we mature, we are able to create more of our own safety, but for more difficult realities, we often seek the support of compassionate others in order to have a “safe emergency.”

There are also ways in which safety and our imagination can be creatively combined. We can imagine someone wise and trusted to be present in the midst of the reality that we are giving our attention to. (This was the genius of “inner healing prayer” of which I’ve said a little in a previous post and will describe more again later.) Other approaches use imagination to build in safety through techniques like viewing reality through an imagined TV screen. This enables engagement but with a little distance for when that is necessary and possibly controls like “volume” or “zooming out.”

What these imaginative techniques can make possible is our ability to tolerate the emotions that are generated by engaging painful realities. Trauma is created when we are overwhelmed by our embodied emotions, when the feelings naturally generated are beyond our capacity at the time. For this consent to reality to be healing rather than retraumatizing, we need to ensure that we are prepared to tolerate the emotions that arise, with help if necessary.

The essence of this movement is restoring the natural ways in which we process and integrate all of what we experience into the wholeness of our lives. The rejection, denial or avoidance of reality that may have been an important coping mechanism for a time is over, and a fuller engagement with reality is possible.

Receptive Awareness

If the previous movement is the turning point, then this movement describes “the Gift” that the turning point makes possible. Passing through the “safe emergency” of our compassionate consent to reality is like wiping the fog off of our glasses or having our “ears pop” finally after a swift airplane descent muffled them. We can see and hear what we hadn’t noticed before. Our awareness is clearer and fuller – even wiser. In fact, I’d suggest that the spontaneous and compassionate wisdom that people become capable of once they’ve opened themselves up to the whole of reality – with its compassion and its pain – can be miraculous. I’ve seen people who were crippled by false shame at the start of a session come to know that what happened was not their fault and no shame was necessary, without my saying a word about it. The truth was suddenly real and experienced.

It seems a bit of a mystery, but the potency of having a truth intuitively revealed far surpasses getting there rationally or having someone else tell you. We believe liberating truth more deeply when it arrives spontaneously, without our effortful grasping.

It’s paradoxical to explore how to be intentional about receptivity, but it’s actually easy to picture. Receptive awareness is like a child opening up her hands waiting to receive a gift. We open our hands by listening intuitively to our inner wisdom (“inner light”), to our bodies, or just trusting that our perceptions have shifted. We can play with metaphor or art or music with an openness to new insights.

Sometimes there’s a simple, sudden awareness that we’ve just faced what we’ve been running from for years, and yet here we are: still standing. And that’s all it takes.

The transformative potential of receptive awareness is one of the ways that we see that healing is a natural process. We don’t need to be “fixed”; we need to clear away the obstacles and distractions so the healing can proceed. Somehow, in some form, the new awareness or insight will come.

free from the mud

Active Response

I’ll repeat that the movements are all overlapping and entangled. In many ways the active response may have already taken place. Effective calming through a contemplative practice is already an active response. The tearful expression of sadness or the angry declaration that accompanied an emotional re-connection with an experience is already an active response. The choice to be quietly receptive or turn towards an inner conversation with your wiser self or inner light is already an active response. So, there may or may not be a particular need for more of an active response, but changed behaviour is not an optional part of a healing journey. Taking an intentional first step could be an important beginning.

The possibilities are endless. Some examples that come to mind are:

• a ritual to mark and honour the healing

• forgiveness offered and/or received

• taking a step that hadn’t been possible earlier

• choosing an act of solidarity with others who have experienced similar pain or

• making amends

• embarking on a course of study or a pilgrimage or a symbolic journey

• reflecting on the healing journey with journal writing or other creative expression

That’s a lot, and so I’ll wrap up quickly. Each of these movements will get expanded descriptions in the weeks ahead. If they stir up questions or comments, please feel free to share.

---

Thanks to those who participated in the quick poll at the end of the post. The results are not particularly clear other than not appealing for longer posts! I think my plan will be to do more important/substantive posts early in the week and occasionally add a shorter one later in the week. Hope that doesn’t fill your inbox too much!

---

[This is part of a series of posts exploring a contemplative pathway to healing/maturing that I call “a compassionate consent to reality.” For an introduction to the project, you may want to see this post here. I’m so grateful for your interest and for any feedback/comments that you may have!]