Let That Good Feeling Linger

Sunflowers are my absolute favourite flower – they are strong yet fragile, bend to the sun, and keep facing upwards. I also love their cheery colour and reminder of hot summer days. I went with my family recently to a sunflower farm, where we were about to walk among hundreds and hundreds of rows of them. I took in the felt sense of this experience and it lingers in my body in a happy way (kind of like that smiling flower in the photo here). I’ve been practicing this a lot lately.

Since summer break is coming to a close this week (for many of us it feels like the end of summer as a whole), I want to share this experience with you as it may come in handy when you need to hold on to the good feelings in your body.

It was my anniversary this summer and my partner and I were able to have an extra long date. While it happened over the course of a seven-day long therapy training for me, we were still able to stay present in the date. It might be because I am immersing myself in somatic-based therapy work but we were able to put our good feelings from the date in an imaginary jar.

We love bike riding in the city, both with our kids but definitely without them as well. After a delicious meal at one of our favourite places, we took a long bike ride along the harborfront. It’s such a gift that the city I live in has a great lake connected to it. As an ocean lover, i know that it may not be an ocean persay, but a Great Lake is a close second. As a water loving person, I know I never spend enough time in its presence. So, we decided to bike along a new path that is right beside the lake. It just opened recently – that itself was such a nice gift as we may not have done it with our children.

I was able to use the bike ride as a way to share with my partner more about Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) and how it works. There are 5 core organizers that are the main base of how SP therapy helps connect the body to the mind both in healing trauma but also in everyday mindfulness. It’s a great way to help good feelings linger in an intentional way, like an imaginary jar of a good date you want to hold on to.

The 5 core organizers are body sensation, five senses, movement, emotion, and cognition, and in that order. So on our date, we decided to blend all of them and this is what we came up with:

1) Body Sensation: My body felt like a warm glow in my heart and my core, and a freedom in my shoulders that experienced the wind
2) The Five Senses: The feel of air touching my arms, the smell of the lake, the beautiful skyline of the city, the sounds of life around us, the taste lingering from my delicious dinner
3) Movement: We brought awareness to our legs pedalling both up hills and around us. It was an incredibly hot day so we also noticed how the pedalling felt with our warm bodies
4) Emotion: I carry with me now such a deep sense of love and happiness both for that experience, to share with my partner, and to be with my partner in that moment
5) Cognition: I acknowledged how grateful I was that we had that time together, and shared this talk with him so that we could hold onto it together

Now when life gets in the way, and we are getting stuck in the grind of everyday life, all i need to do is to recall this date and my body will respond. I will embody the memory and not just think about it. When I’m forgetting a detail, all i need to do is to recall the smell of the lake, or the body sensation in my core. As i bike daily, i get a quick hint of the memory whenever i feel the breeze on me or grip my handlebars. I don’t need to recall a big part of the story, but rather a single moment and my body and mind are united in recalling the happy moment. It’s a lovely way to practice more intentional felt sense of positive moments – we are so prone to minimize them and rush through them. It’s like I’m peering into that jar of happy memories or giving myself a warm hug by recalling this night.

As summer is coming to a close, you can try this tool. What memory from these last 2 months do you want to cherish and hold on to?

Listening to Yourself

I recently had to put the brakes on a planned weekend away with my family. And i mean literally. I’ve been working on trusting my intuition (or my gut instinct if you will) more, and the opportunity presented itself. Each year in September, we have been going away on a weekend as a quick goodbye to Summer. This year, our month was quite full and our weekends especially felt too busy. So, when we were able to narrow down a weekend to go away, we jumped at the chance. We told the kids, we packed our bags, we even packed the car. And yet the whole time leading up to it – and i mean a few days worth – I keep thinking to myself, “do i really want to go? Is this what i want or is it more that i think we should go? Is it worth the added work for me”?

Going to the cottage ideally means relaxing, reading, snacking, enjoying the outdoors. Going with small kids when the weather is cold and we can’t swim is another weekend all together. It’s just more work in a place that is not mine to unwind in. To further this conundrum, when I found out that we were not going to have the cottage to ourselves as we have in the past, my gut was silently screaming to me to not go. And yet, i kept moving ahead because: I DON’T want to have to tell the children. Ugh the drama!

So, after my sweet family picked me up, and we were halfway out of the city, i was updated more about the state of affairs at the cottage. It was just enough in me to say a firm “No, we are not going.” My partner also was hesitant (aka scared) to tell the kids that we weren’t going – we were in the car already for crying out loud, and they had already turned on their Long Drive Tablet Videos. But, i chose to listen to my intuition and not my fear. I chose to be the Alpha parent and teach my kids to face futility. I was there to catch their feelings.

And you know what? Sure they were disappointed, but they weren’t devastated. We worked out a great Plan B of fun things to do in the city and it was just what I needed.

All because i chose to listen to my intuition.

What is this thing i call Intuition, you ask? For one, it’s choosing to listen past your fear and ask yourself what is it that you truly want? Pause and notice what your body is asking for. Our intuition acts as an inner guidance. In the brilliant Many Moons Journal for October 2018, Sarah talks about how the word “intuitive” itself comes from the Latin term to gaze or contemplate. She posts some guides to help you connect more actively with your intuition. A good question to ask yourself is what decision are you looking at? Can you think of a time where your trusted your intuition, or what happened when you ignored it. You can start a practice to notice signs that are repeating themselves (like if 3 people in a week tell you to read a certain book, or a song plays on the radio 3 times in a day) – what could they be telling you? You could start your day by asking yourself to be open to a certain message or receiving help. Before you go to bed, tell your intuition what you need help with to clarify. See where it sits in your body – for me it really is in my stomach/gut or womb. That is where i feel the strongest energy pull to listen to what i know is best for me to honour. My fear sits elsewhere in my body (my upper back, behind my heart). That helps me locate where both live and then respond accordingly.

It can be very hard for us to trust our intuition as it can get so buried down. We may have learned to not trust it, especially if you are a trauma survivor and your internal radar has been untrustworthy in the past. Or it was taught to be hidden as a way to protect it. Ou world today still has misogynist anti-magic beliefs that are so pervasive, that it is scary at times to connect with this part of ourselves, let alone voice it. As busy women and mothers, we can get swept up in the day to day tug and pull of life. Sometimes we may not even notice that it is our intuition that is telling us to turn earlier onto a different street (therefore avoiding a traffic jam), or to make a point to pick up that public transit transfer ticket (avoiding a tense chat with subway police – yes i have felt that urge and am so glad i honoured it). Gabby Bernstein has coined the term Empowered Intuition, where you are allowing yourself to trust how you feel, be patient with yourself and choose love. What i love is that it is about choosing to trust ourselves and not carry judgement – itself a hard and empowering process.

What are some ways you can work on honouring your intuition?