On Friday 25 September we meet about 47 people by zoom, it is the second seminar that is done online following the COVID-19, it is exciting to see us and strange format. The seminar is entitled “My Dreaming Body, Our Dreaming World: An Online Seminar to Work on Somatic Experiences.”
To situate ourselves a little, the first day consisted of a short introduction to the basic theory of process work and an exercise in learning to unfold a bodily sensation; on the second day we focused more on understanding theoretically and experientially what it means to give space to the experiences we have, how we experience them and in which channels they are expressed, and to practice deploying an experience of our day to day that blocks us. We also did an exercise on chronic symptoms. The third and final day focused on the relationship between what happens in the world and how it manifests in our body, why the historical memory is so important for to situate the impact of the collective traumas we have experienced throughout of time and how this manifests itself in bodily symptoms, dreams, mental health and cultural patterns, and that affects us individually and collectively.
For me the seminar has been like a training that starts in the micro, as are the experiences and bodily sensations, to the most macro, how social conflicts affect us and are manifested through bodily symptoms.
Some important learnings have been around how to track and amplify the bodily experience through staying in the sensory grounded information, focusing on the area of the body where we have that feeling, helping to amplify what is happening, and while the longer you are, the more we can understand and discover what it is and what its essence is and thus be able to know more to learn how to use it.
I also share an exercise that I really enjoyed, it’s called “The Stuck’s practice” from the Presencing Institue, a creative way to transform a situation we have stuck, from the perspective of body and movement, not thinking like we usually do. Here are some videos that explain the exercise in English https://www.presencing.org/resource/tools/stuck-exercise-desc.
Another important point was to know how to work around chronic symptoms or long-term bodily experiences. When it happens to us, we tend to ask ourselves why this happens to us, and we live it as individual experiences and in solitude, however, if we work on them, we realize that they usually lead us to a countercultural place, they invite us to be in the world in a different way and perhaps very liberating and nourishing not only for oneself but also for the rest of the world.
Finally, we trained ourselves in becoming aware of how the impacts of what is happening in the world are manifested through bodily symptoms. They named Sherri Mitchell, Resmaa Menakem, Tomas Hubl and Arnold Mindell to explain different perspectives on transgenerational trauma and the interconnection we have different people around the world with other living things and nature.
I leave you with a piece of interview that Vicki Robin did with Sherri Mitchell on her Covida Conversations show (https://vickirobin.com/podcasts/covida-conversations/sherri-mitchell-covida-conversation/): So when we’re feeling immense grief that we can’t explain, because there’s been no triggering experience for us in our daily lives, what we’re not realizing is through quantum entanglement, that what’s happening is we’re experiencing the grief of that mother whale who carried her baby around for 17 days trying to tell us what we’re doing to their ecosystem. When we’re swamped with loneliness, even though we’re connected to people that we love, and we feel engaged with, what we’re feeling is the loneliness of the last white rhino on the planet who has no one left in their species to talk to or communicate with or be with. When we’re waking up in the middle of the night with panic, we’re experiencing what the trees in the Amazon are experiencing as they’re being burned and cut down for logging. We’re having all of these collective experiences of all of this emotional – I guess, I’ll try to think of the perfect word for it – of this emotional wave, that is evidence of the reconnection of our synapses with the synapses of life on the planet.