A Way to Self-Regulate and Achieve a State of Relaxation and Safe Surrender…
I start my day in quiet time with God and a cup of coffee. I listen to the song of the birds welcoming the new dawn and calling me into participation in the world. I read. I pray. I meditate. I have found this deeply helpful in centering my heart and mind as I walk into a new day/ a new opportunity to get it right. This also helps to keep me from crawling back in bed, pulling my weighted blanket over me and shutting the world out. Oh, that would be so much easier than putting myself in community and bearing the scars of not measuring up. Scars from childhood maltreatment I still carry with me all these years later.
According to Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk in “The Body Keeps The Score”, “It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability.” He goes on to say, “The birth of three new branches of science has led to an explosion of knowledge about the effects of psychological trauma, abuse and neglect. Those new disciplines are neuroscience, the study of how the brain supports mental process; developmental psychopathology, the study of the impact of adverse experiences on the development of the mind and brain: and interpersonal neurobiology, the study of how our behavior influences the emotions, biology, and mind sets of those around us.
Research from these new disciplines has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day to day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character-they are caused by actual changes in the brain.”
I use my prayer and meditation time as a way to self-regulate and achieve a state of relaxation and safe surrender. A way to quiet the voices that generate stories of inadequacies and more. Stories that are not true but due to the changes in my brain that occurred due to ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), I believe they are true. This enables me to greet the day more balanced and with a sense of connection. It may not last long, but it is a start.
How do you start your day? How do you enter the new dawn? Is it helpful? Could you share something that might help someone reading this today? Let me know in the comments below.
This morning, I read the following passage by Mark Nepo, in his The Book of Awakening. I hope it touches you the way it touched me.
“The Polynesians have carried for us the wisdom that we each grow in this life by breaking successive shells, that the piece of God within each of us stretches until there is no room to be, and then the world as we know it must be broken so that we can be born again.
In this way, life becomes a living of who we are until that form of self can no longer hold us, and we must break the forms that contain us in order to birth our way into the next self. This is how we shed our many ways of seeing the world, not that any are false, but that each serves its purpose for a time until we grow, and they no longer serve us. “
Until next time, friends.