V-day got me thinking...

Plant: Hoya Hearts or Hoya Kerrii

Hope you had a lovely holiday weekend.

Valentine’s day got me thinking….

What are the conditions needed for love to exist?
What are the qualities of a healthy living relationship?

This weekend’s Settle Your Sh*t workshop participants came up with this list

Compassion
Warmth
Kindness
Availability
Trust
Empathy

I’ll add listening and honesty.

Now, let’s flip it by turning these qualities inward. Partnered or single, practice the qualities that help you to FEEL love in your body, your thoughts, your emotions. Practice that love inside yourself.

How can you let yourself know that you appreciate and love YOU?
What actions can you take to show empathy, trust, listening, honesty and courage?

Somatic therapy is a practice of self-love. It goes deeper than understanding your history, changing your diet, and deep breathing. It addresses the things we didn’t get from our caregivers as kids. It gives you a chance to be seen and heard beyond words. A chance to feel as though you belong here just as you are. That’s when your sh*t starts to settle and patterns start to change.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t taught to us by our caregivers, it wasn’t modeled for us at home or in our culture. Let’s change the patterning now for ourselves and for the little people in your life to grow up with these skills.

Reply to this email for me for private therapy
Scroll down for somatic movement classes and upcoming workshops

I love you, do you?

Carve out space to develop a connection to yourself this week.

Ready for 1 on 1 work? Connect with me for a complimentary 30-minute chat

Register for an online Somatic Movement Class

Come to the next Settle Your Sh*t workshop

How to Feel Empowered When You're Triggered - For Highly Sensitive People (HSP)

Do you identify as an HSP (highly sensitive person) or do you feel like you are super sensitive to other people's energy, get easily annoyed, triggered, or exhausted from your environment? Have you ever felt these things? Yeah, Me too.

This is for you.

Your body home is taking in and digesting all of the experiences it has. Just like your digestive system digests the food you eat, your nervous system digests experiences, sights, sounds, sensations, memories, thoughts, experiences that are soothing, and those that are jarring or intense. Ideally, these experiences are fully digested, assimilated, and completed. If they aren't, they get stored as energies inside your body home that are trying to complete, but can't. Similar to when you eat way too much at a meal and there isn't enough room in your belly to move the food around. You've probably experienced this. It’s much harder for your belly to fully digest what you put in because there isn't enough space for the digestive juices to churn and it all breaks down. All of your body's life energy goes to digest that packed in pooch, making you tired and needing to rest until the food is a bit digested and your energy comes back into the rest of your body.

When your nervous system doesn't digest or complete its experiences, they settle inside your bodyhome. Over time, we collect them and as your body container fills up with more and more old uncompleted experiences, two things happen.

1. Your container is full of these old experiences

2. Your body is using a lot of your life force to manage all of that old energy

Circling back around to the HSP. If you find yourself super sensitivo, it's likely that your nervous system belly is full at that moment. This can make you feel irritable, annoyed, frustrated, and even angry when seemingly small insignificant things happen. The lights become too bright, the sound is too loud, people are annoying. It’s also common that those sensitivities come with aches, pains, and other health problems like migraines and stomach issues.

So, how do you change this pattern and feel empowered when you’re sensitive and triggered?

1. Mindset

   When I hear people say "I'm an HSP", I cringe a little bit. Labeling yourself as a certain "type" of person is a limiting perspective in terms of human growth and healing. And we know from neuroscience that your brain (which is your brain in your head and your body brain aka. your nervous system) can grow and change through neuroplasticity. So, if you find yourself saying you're an HSP and want to become more resilient to your surroundings and others, your first step is to see yourself as a human having inner experiences that can change over time.

2. Shift your attention away from the story

   Learn HOW to complete your experiences and emotions. This is actually supernatural but we have been cultured out of it and most of the humans I know weren't taught or modeled this way of being by their caregivers growing up. This completion happens in your body physiology, not in your head. This is why talking about what someone did that was so annoying isn't always enough to change the way you react to it.

3. Shift your attention to your body and your surroundings

   Becoming aware of your body and bringing your senses into your experience can help to shift your body into more of a regulated state which will help your nervous system settle a bit, creating a feeling of calm awake and a little more openness.

4. Process the energy of emotion

   This is not what you might think. Processing the irritation, frustration, or reaction to the trigger happens in your physiology, not in your head. All triggers and emotions have a body experience to them. Leaning in and getting to know that experience in a regulated way will help your nervous system digest, metabolize and complete these responses. Which will in turn create more space in your body container. The good news is, you don't always have to know why you are having the experiences you are having. You can complete them without it. Although I find with myself and with my clients that meaning comes from actually moving the energy through the body, not the other way around.

5. Ride the waves

   As you continue to regulate and process the energy of emotion in your body, you will find that you experience waves of emotion that come and go. Learning to ride these waves makes you more resilient and more able to handle what you couldn't before.

Are you ready to become more resilient?

• Join a Somatic Yoga class

• Come to the next Settle Your Sh*t workshop

• Contact me for a 1 on 1 Somatic Experiencing therapy session

with LOVE and Regulation
Dorie

Asking and Receiving

Having a birthday during the pandemic is so bazaar. It is almost a year since we started lockdown, I’m sure you have experienced it. You may have felt,
“What’s the point of celebrating?”
“If I can’t do it the way I want it., what’s the point?”
”Whatever, other people are suffering so, I’ll celebrate next year”

The truth is, we don’t know what the future holds and what kind of ways we’ll be able to be together to celebrate milestones such as birthdays, anniversaries, marriage, death. So, as my birthday approached, my sistah asked me, “what do you want for your birthday?”

“All I want is a zoom party. “ I requested.

Mostly, my wish was to see all of my people and their faces together. Oh, and I didn’t want to plan it. That was the plain and simple ask.

You guys, I received the most incredible zoom party I could have imagined. With all of the faces of my people on the screen at once, I felt my heart burst open. I got that gift of connection, face to face recognition and my body settled a bit. Then, we played a few group games that expressed everyone’s love for me. After that love bomb, there was a video filled with all of my people singing, dancing, and some even wearing wigs and costumes expressing their birthday wishes. I laughed and cried. It was incredible!!!! Then, we danced, of course.

Asking for what you really want isn’t easy. It’s even harder and more complicated when there’s been loss, childhood or adulthood trauma, or neglect.

Perhaps your desire is a certain kind of listening, emotional support, or touch, It takes a lot of inner clarity, to know “what do I want”? It takes feeling deserving and a willingness to receive whatever is being given.

All of that inner clarity, worthiness, and willingness to receive happens from a state of regulation. In a world of total uncertainty and threat in so many forms, regulation is hard to come by. If you’re struggling to feel clarity, feel deserving, and be receptive, reach out for support. Let’s get you feeling what you want to feel.

With LOVE and Regulation
Dorie