Some thoughts on practice, staying curious & living self compassion.
Photos of my by Nadia Meli
When I share thoughts around living as a human in a deeply complicated and painful world I want to be very clear that this is not about goals or ‘self improvement’. My personal journey began there, my self hatred finding a new mask as wellness and positive change. As I move through this spiral of reclaiming my Self, goals have become like sandpaper and the idea of progress makes my soul scream in defiance…
‘we are not something to fix’
So the offerings I talk about here are about aliveness & becoming, not fixing.
Practice is about presence, not productivity.
I have wanted to write about practice for a while. It’s something that has changed my life and opened me up to the world. Practice for me is a living container, it’s not fixed and it’s always evolving. It’s fluid and magical and it has many forms, for me it’s about embodying the mystery of aliveness, not fixing or oppressing myself into some linear idea of progress.
I have shared some of my somatic practices to support therapy on here before so this isn’t a how to guide but a reflection on what practice really means and why it’s important.
When we want to learn something new we need to practice. When I decided that I wanted to become a photographer, I didn’t know how to use a professional camera or how to edit and I was pretty shit for a long time. I had to practice. I had to make time, I needed to study and I had to give myself the grace to be terrible. I also had many mentors and teachers, people who had walked this path before me.
The same is true when we want to cultivate a relationship with ourselves, our inner worlds and our aliveness. If you want to develop self compassion, creativity or courage, you have to practice. If you want to understand yourself, alchemise trauma, allow expression of grief, anger, joy, then we need to practice. Especially in a world that has worked very hard to oppress all of the above.
Practice is also an anchor. It’s a container, a vessel. It’s where we can give our grief a bottom and get to know the song of our heart. This is where practice really began for me. The creation of a vessel where the emotions and feelings I was terrified of could be expressed. For me this was yoga and then somatic movement & dance. Guided at first and now I have the skills for self practice. This has been slow and cultivated over years, a slow weaving of a vessel that my body can soften into. A place for regular expression of my grief, for play and tending to the fire of my aliveness.
Practice is also where I connect deeply with the interconnectedness of everything. My first experience of this was in Portugal on my 200hr training during an ecstatic dance. As I sat heart wide open to the world, witnessing the trees of the valley, fully recognising their aliveness, I suddenly had an experience of witnessing myself as the tree. It’s an experience I struggle deeply to give words to but it changed my life because I could really feel how the life force, the animism that moves through me also moves through the trees, the soil, the birds, the waters and everything else on this earth.
I regularly get to experience this interconnectedness through my practice and now the everyday moments of my life BECAUSE of my practice.
Practice has also cultivated my creativity. Every single one of my ideas, blogs, poems have come from my practice. Visions and insights are given the space to come forward in my practice. The softening of my body, my fascia, allows the waters of aliveness to flow and with that comes inspiration. When I practice connecting with nature I am inspired by the living world. Wisdom of the rivers, the trees, the soil shared so freely when I take the time to practice listening and observing.
Practice is also where I can fully meet my Self. Over the years it has become the most important of tools for meeting the parts of me I have previously tried to push away or control. Practice has been where I have learned to become self compassionate. My movement practice has been the foundation for this. For many years my body was a hostile place, a place where terrible things had happened. My body was a thing to control and harm. Movement, soft, somatic and free movement has become the container for me to meet the depths and the beasts that live there. Learning to collaborate rather than control. A space to embody curiosity and understanding. I have met the sticky, tar like dread in my belly, the closed fist around my heart, the angry tigers that live in my lower lungs and I no longer reject any of them. Through practice, I have discovered what they need and what they were protecting and we have become allies. Each of us remembering that we are a part of one another.
There are some important things to note about practice…
There are many different ways to be in practice. This not a dogmatic or stagnant thing. It’s not an escape from life but a tool that helps us meet life. Practice is an embodiment of aliveness and some examples for me are…
Movement, what began as yoga for me is now more free & somatic. Sometimes it includes asana, other times dance or sometimes just lying on my belly and feeling the ripples of my fascia as it releases across my back when I let myself breath into the sticky places.
Sadhana/meditation, I can’t access seated practice without movement first, perhaps one day this will evolve. That might be dance, stretching, walking or swimming. Quite often I have eyes open. For me this is about being with what is, allowing, not pushing away. Sometimes it’s peaceful, other time fraught with frustration. Quite often my grief spills out from this practice.
Gratitude. I begin my daily journalling with gratitude, quite often I am repeating the same things but what a gift that is. It also weaves throughout my days. I quite often when walking name plants, trees, animals and rivers out loud and express my gratitude for them. Gratitude is noticing and remembering our reciprocity with each other and the world.
Daily writing/journalling by hand. This is crucial for me and many others. Everyday I write down thoughts that I will never share. I write down my grief, my joy, the things I am ashamed of. I write about life and the wider collective. Sometimes it has depth, others days it might just be a mindless ramble. The act of writing by hand slows me down and feels deeply pleasurable.
Listening, for many years I couldn’t listen. Anxiety, trauma loops and years stuck in freeze. My inability to listen was rooted in my disconnection from myself other people and the more than human. Constantly needing to be liked, be right and give solutions to be of value, meant that rather than listening I would instead be planning what I wanted to say from a place of anxiety. Listening requires presence & intimacy, it is a skill many of us lack and requires practice.
Self compassion, so hard. Our culture and experiences often condition us to hate ourselves. I am still undoing this and it arises in many ways. One manifestation is when I look in the mirror I stand sideways and think how disgusting I am. For many years this was unconscious, I had been conditioned to bully myself. This act of violence would happen every time I walked past a mirror, went to the toilet or walked past windows. This still happens but now I catch myself. It began as a lie, a moment to place my hands on my body and say thank you. Now it’s a practice and a truth. The violent act bought out of the darkness and gently challenged is slowly alchemising. I weave self compassion into all of my practices, I look in the mirror less now and when I do it is with more compassion. A compassion that also extends to the part that wants me to believe I am disgusting.
I have many other practices, from astrology to tarot, regularly connecting with nature and ritual are some other examples but I don’t wish to overwhelm you. Choose something, commit to it daily for a month, let it be alive not fixed and let it evolve.
Cultivating practice is a daily, weekly, monthly opportunity for us to remember and connect with our humanness, our aliveness and our interconnectedness. It’s about vitality and it’s not meant to be contained to half an hour in the morning but it can begin there. Ultimately for me, practice is about love. Love for life and it’s an opportunity to keep coming back to that, especially in the darkest of times.
There are many ways you can work with me. I offer one to one somatic therapy, regular in person and online movement practices and I also have my group offering STARDUST which opens every quarter for new members who want to explore somatics alongside the astrological year.