I Exist
Republishing an excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
REST
Behind the reeds there is a deer. She is bedding down here, soft hide still dappled with the memory of her belonging. The story that to be whole you need to be somewhere different than where you are is a trick. The landscape beckons you deeper. You get to be loved here, in this enoughness, this listening, the tender integrity of your approach. The deer rests, alert, in silence. Roots rustle underneath, full of the falling light.
I Exist
So quiet. The empty room, the generosity of silence. A moment of allowing nothing to be needed.
I am in a grounding meditation on a zoom call with a somatic practitioner, Kris Nourse. Bringing my attention to my lower body, I feel my pelvis, the rooting of my legs, the breath moving in my belly. Feeling myself going down, down, yielding to more sensation.
Suddenly my focus collapses as I am distracted by noise in the other room. I am so fed up with other people's energy. Since the lockdown started, it is so rare to be alone these days. I am living with my mother and grandmother in a two bedroom apartment, my partner has temporarily moved in with us also until we find our own place to live. With all four of us squeezed in so tightly here, it feels like a part of me is perpetually outside of my own body. So sensitive to the pulling of other people’s energy. Unable to let down my guard even when I’m alone.
Kris and I have been working together for just a couple months. So far we have only met online because of the pandemic. In our first sessions, we have been noticing how such a lot of intensity has been held up in my body, in my mind, in my chest. How much effort my body is spending in its bracing in hyperviligence. Our sessions have been primarily focused on grounding, on helping my nervous system “down-regulate” to the point where I can rest.
“Rest is how life remembers itself,” says Susan Raffo in an essay on gravity, the first reflex:
“Rest is how life remembers itself, reflects over what it has learned and slowly remakes itself in response to that learning. All of this is why systems of supremacy hijack the body's survival responses, keeping our nervous systems at the ready for disaster. Unable to rest.”
Kris’s energetic presence is like a magnet, helping me focus on the field of gravity, noticing that even as I’m pulling away from it, my body is still held by earth. For a while all I feel is tension, the gripping of my body contracted up and away, mistrusting the ground.
Then, subtly, I start to feel softening in my hips and leg muscles, savoring the simplicity of staying with the sensation without needing to do anything. We stay here for several more minutes, just feeling the contact with the ground.1
As I feel my lower body releasing, I notice waves of emotion in my chest, the grief at not being here always, the confusion of how easy it is when accompanied.
Feeling so much more of my lower body present and supported, I realize that I am regularly inhabiting only a sliver of my actual capacity for resource and presence. I notice how much of me has been compressed into a baseline of constricted energy, a persistent focus on holding myself together. So much of my life force is in need of being let down.
In the slowness of this simple presence with myself, eventually meaning and description slip away from me, as if the part that knows words has not quite made it to this depth yet. I feel my diaphragm shaking in wider breathing, my belly releasing. We sit in silence for a long time, just keeping that presence going down, feeling energy from my feet move down into the earth.
As we are finishing up the session, Kris and I start to talk about that part of me that slides sideways into other people energetically.
"Merging," Kris says, giving me a word for the process I've felt happen so many times in my life but have never been able to name. “Like a mother is merged with the nervous system of a baby for the beginning of its life, but then as the baby gets older, the nervous systems differentiate so the child can feel itself as separate from the mother.”
I realize that quality of differentiation never fully happened in my family, in my nervous system. That I’ve always been stuck in a kind of porous entanglement with the nervous systems around me. Merging. It's not helpful to be a totally open system. It's essential to have a sense of where my energetic edges are around other humans. It's essential to learn to perceive the clarity of my own response.
As we track this experience through sensation, I can literally feel a presence in my belly start to leave my body in a seeking to merge with Kris’s energy field. I realize that part of the reason it is so hard for me to settle into the felt sense of my body is because of this dynamic. My nervous system has learned to draw a sense of existing from the other nervous systems around me.2
Kris and I talk about how interesting it is to be doing an exploration around merging while having the energetic separation of a video call. It allows us the opportunity to play with that paradox of me being both by myself and also with someone else, in a situation where I can literally shift back to being alone with the click of a button.
Before we end the zoom session, Kris invites me to look around my room and try imagining that I am alone, while she stays in presence on the screen in front of me. This practice gives me permission to turn off the social engagement3 part of me that is tracking what is happening between us—the part of me that is perpetuating the merging energy—while still getting to remain connected to the energetic being-ness of Kris’s presence.
I feel a layer of hypervigilance in me relax as I release the need to track the social dynamics of being around another human. I feel the relief of allowing myself to feel fully alone.
My gaze wanders around my bedroom, drinking in this space that I have created. I see the altar with the mosaic of the ancestor tree goddess with her vibrant green leaf hair and bright blue bowl of spiraling water. My eyes linger on the glued-together magazine collage made with pictures of turtles and oceans, star fields and gestating beings, elders and bare footed women, reading again the intuitive poetry of cut out phrases: "dark riddles,” “through the portal” "I have turned my face to the roots,” “trust,” “earth chrysalis,” ”how to stay grounded when the ground is shifting.”
I look at the most recent painting that I have created in glowing browns and oranges, an image of a naked woman curled in a fetal position inside the center of a seed, her body breaking open in fissures of light as she begins to unfurl her roots into the soil.
Germination and the sprouting of roots begins with an act of burial. The seed becomes a sacrifice, made sacred by surrender into mystery, buried deep in the womb of the earth. The seed begins as a contraction, a concentrated core of aliveness. Its hard shell a protection against premature revelation, carried within it the exquisitely sensitive discernment of knowing when it is safe to unfold. The seed needs the pressing warmth of soil to begin the process of germination. It is so painfully close to the bone, so fearful of exposure, so utterly tender and raw. The process begins at the core, in that deep listening and stillness, an intense concentration of energy, a humming pulse of life. The sacred dark, warm and moist, the compost a sovereign trust in the necessity of loss as material for transformation. From here an internal ignition begins within the seed, a moment of choice, knowing it is safe to crack open and spill its tender roots into the soil, a libation, a re–membering.
I begin to feel a sensation of clarity at the edges of my skin, and more dimensionality inside my body. Kris rests with me in silence as I notice that the spaciousness I’m feeling is the same sensation that I have in the solitude of wild places, when my sense of body opens outward to include all the beings around me at the same time as I feel rooted in my core.
Kris asks me what I am going to do the minute we end the call. I say that I will sit at my altar and breathe for a few minutes. We spend another minute together and then she proposes that she will end the zoom call on her end while I remain focused on the feeling of energetic spaciousness of being alone-together that we have been cultivating.
I sit at my altar as I said I would. I feel my breath. The feeling of my seat on the ground. After a few minutes, I look back at the computer to see that Kris has closed the call. And yet I still feel the spaciousness of our connection, the energetic field that we have been in together. Although Kris has left, that field of support is still here, as tangible as the energetic presence I feel when I am walking through a forest. The feeling that helps me feel myself.
I feel in a slightly altered state, as if I am in that same kind of ritual dreaming that I experience with the land. Waves of emotion shake my diaphragm. Tears rise to my eyes. My hand spontaneously moves to my chest and I begin to tap out a rhythm: beat beat beat, beat beat beat, beat beat beat. I see my drum hanging on the wall next to me and I pick it up. Placing the drum against my chest, I begin to beat out the same rhythm. Amplified by the resonance of the drum, the sound reverberates into my sternum. Beat beat beat. Beat beat beat.
And then the words come with the rhythm: I exist. I exist. I exist.
I sense the presence of very young part of myself who didn't feel safe to be here, who never felt welcome to exist around other humans. A part that is so young that maybe she didn’t even begin with me. Maybe this little one who exiled her existing goes back generations, to my mother, my grandmother, further even…I exist. I exist. I exist. The drumbeat holds me here, in this clarity of being.
Two years later, listening to a recording from Carolyn Hillyer, the keeper of the neolithic roundhouse on Dartmoor where long ago I made the sorrow pouch, I learn that the rhythm which came through me in that moment is a specific drum beat that was practiced by my Celtic ancestors. This is “the bright drum,” which she describes in her Braided River online journey:
…the drum of unfolding ceremony and the steady rhythm. About healing and nourishing and mending, binding magic, and we might also call that the mother drum.
A few months after learning this, I participate in a volva stav retreat to connect with the wisdom of my Nordic ancestors.4 Deep into our ritual practice, in the middle of the night in a Wisconsin forest, rain deluges around us as we crowd under a tarp together to practice the art of seider, trance visioning to the beat of a wooden staff which represents connection to the Tree of Life. I hear the same rhythm. I exist. I exist. I exist. The rituals of my ancestors come from the same place as my own original impulses for sound.
Thank you for reading Earth Poet Edge Weaver. If you are able to support my practice through a financial contribution, I welcome donations to the health fundraiser that is supporting my medical and rehabilitative expenses as well as a large portion of my living costs right now as I'm living with chronic illness. This fundraiser allows me to offer projects like this at a free or donation-based rate to make them accessible to a wider community of people:
One thing that I’ve been playing with throughout my research into eco-somatics are six textures of eco-somatic relationship that allow for that re-tissuing between nervous system and ecosystem. The first and most foundational (literally) of these six textures is Contact: the relationship between an organism and the wider ecosystem that it is held by.
I had this realization within the relational context with Kris first, but I later learned that is is a foundational teaching of another mentor of mine, Bree Greenberg Benjamin, who talks about how seeking existence from the people around us because it is not able to be sensed internally is a specific characteristic of dependency systems and patterns of addictive doublebinds.
This is a situation in which the Polyvagal theory’s emphasis on the "Social Engagement System” really isn’t helpful, or at the very least is an incomplete understanding of a wider experience of relationality, especially when you’re a person (like me) who was conditioned into almost constant fawning/appeasing dynamics for most of my childhood and adolescence. The times that I have been most somatically at ease have often been times when my “Social Engagement System” did not have to reciprocate other’s facial expressions or sometimes even be in verbal conversation with people at all. It’s more about those moments of being mammals together that blur the edges between human and ecosystem, a way of being that softens nervous systems into a porous receptivity with a wider dreaming.
The retreat was facilitated by Portia Richardson, informed by the volva stav practice of Kari Tauring.