Practices for the greatest dance on earth
How to stay connected to life
I’m what I would call a healer in recovery. After one too many retreats, therapy sessions, and meditation modalities, I am sick of healing. I’m quite certain this is a sign that the healing I’ve done up until now has been going well. I still go to therapy, but my internal process feels quite different these days. For years, I wondered what was on the other side of healing. Is it a finish line where everyone who has wronged you walks toward you with apologies? Is it stepping into your dream life—a material one often overlapped with capitalism? Is it feeling peaceful all the time? Is it death? Like, do I get a fucking prize?
With all the emphasis on healing, it’s often true that what the healing is meant for gets lost. But because healing is an experimental and experiential process that happens over time, the other side mostly feels elusive when you’re in it. When I was deep down in it, I never thought it would end.
I hope I’m not speaking too soon, but I actually think I’m quite close to being done with my own healing in the format that it has existed in over the past decade—one in which I was a project to take on and a riddle to solve. This new territory, where I am more of a fluid, changing experience inside a body rather than a body with a picked-over, analyzed singular experience, feels like the promised land.
It’s being connected to the whole forest rather than just believing I’m one tree.
In sentiment, that’s something I would’ve agreed with wholeheartedly ten years ago but very rarely felt. The felt sense is much deeper, much less fluctuating, and far more pleasurable.
These are my thoughts this evening as I land a bit more on some other side of the journey: I’m not sure we ever truly want to be healed as much as we want to feel connected, and we don’t want to feel like we’re stuck in a holding pattern that keeps us from our own life force—our own precious gifts and contributions—the ones that connect us to ourselves and others.
As an exercise for myself, I decided to sit down and collect the practices that have kept me most connected over the past 4+ months. Given the amount of recent upheaval in my life around the LA fires, I can actually share this list with the knowledge that these really work in times of immense, peak stress.
Slow down. Slow everything down, but especially the small day-to-day things. Make coffee, slowly. Fetch the mail, slowly. Taking time to slow down the smallest actions that we repeat often turns the slowing down into more of a habit that starts to seep into other parts of our day. The practice makes way for better noticing; see #2.
Pay very close attention to the gifts that are given. I like to call this one “filling in the coloring book.” Seeing gifts at a glance—a vase of flowers, a plate of food—can leave the brain with a fleeting black-and-white outline. But if you sit with the gift for just a minute longer, the object of generosity starts to become more vibrant—and usually exists within a larger context that’s equally pleasant, if you look in the right places.
Hold solid boundaries. Boundaries don’t just keep me well and others well in connection with me—they create a container for my self to rest, recover, enjoy, and create from. I’ve started to see my own boundaries as the warm and inviting cocoon in which I get to become myself and share myself with others. That imagery has totally changed the way I see boundaries, and it’s helped me immensely over the last few months.
Give others recognition. It’s so, so easy—especially in times of stress—to forget to reinforce with others that we care deeply about them and to tell them exactly what we appreciate about them. The day-to-day that needs to get done, in crisis or project mode, can just take over in a tidal wave. Choosing to make these kinds of reflections is a practice of love in action, and it has the most return for the collective wellness.
Allow the shifts to come as they do. In the past four months, I’ve had nearly 20 different plans of action, but at the moment, I’ve only ended up with one. They had to shift and change and get rewritten and move on. Much like the entire project of this Substack. What I’ve learned—sitting here writing to you from my dream home, for now—is that allowing the change makes way for something greater than ourselves to provide, well, something greater. Shift, shift, shift, shift, surrender. The practice of a lifetime.
If you’ve been here for a while, I so appreciate you being witness to how this Substack project has taken shape over the years—some of it in articles written, and some of it in silence. It will continue to be an experiment, and I’d love it if you’d opt to support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber, if you aren’t already.
As I delve deeper into my Somatic Experiencing training and my post-healing healing, I’m really looking forward to sharing more about what makes me feel free and alive—always holding the intention for your freedom and aliveness as well.
As I mentioned last week, I’m currently taking on new clients within the practice of my new offering, Fluid Foundation. I’d love for you to be one of them.
Until next week,
Much love,
Tanna
