A guided meditation for Waiting.

Begin by finding a comfortable seated position, either on a cushion or in a chair. Close your eyes and take a breath in, filling your lungs with air. Hold it for a moment, and then slowly exhale, releasing any tension or stress you may be holding onto. Begin to find the rhythm of your breath.

As you continue to breathe, bring your attention to the present moment. Notice any sounds around you, the feeling of your body supported in the chair, and the sensation of your breath moving in and out of your body.

Now, bring to mind a memory where you are waiting. It could be waiting for a loved one to arrive, waiting for a life change, or waiting for test results. Whatever it may be, fully immerse yourself into the felt experience of waiting.

As you sense, notice where "waiting" lives in your body. Perhaps you feel anxious, excited, or impatient. You may notice your breath change, heart rate increase or slow. Even a feeling deep within the body or a sensation in your face. Whatever it may be, acknowledge it without judgment and allow this felt sense to be a new awareness of your lived experience.

Pause here as you discover this sense of waiting within you, and be present to any emotions, thoughts or feelings that emerge.

Now, bring your attention back to your breath. As you inhale, imagine breathing in calm and peace. As you exhale, imagine releasing any tension or stress you may be holding onto.

Now, visualise yourself in a peaceful environment, surrounded by nature. Perhaps you are sitting by a calm lake or walking through a beautiful forest. Allow yourself to fully immerse in this peaceful environment, feeling a sense of calm and tranquility wash over you.

As you continue to breathe deeply, remind yourself that waiting is a natural part of life, and is an example in nature. Beginnings, middles, and endings. Allowing us to slow down, reflect, and appreciate the present moment. Trust that just like leaves emerging in Springtime, everything unfolds in its own time, and that you are exactly where you need to be in this moment. Could this too then be true for you? Return to the body again, does the body believe that your unfolding is also at work in the waiting?

If you can, and in your own time, begin to welcome this thought into being... "Just as in nature, all things are unfolding in my life, as I wait".

When you are ready, slowly open your eyes and take a moment to ground yourself in the present moment.

Remember that you can return to this meditation anytime you need to find peace and calm while waiting.

Making Maps, discovering my Parts.

After a delayed start to our book study For Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown, we finally got together to explore our reactions and reorientation to the language of emotion in our lives.

After reflecting on the book as a whole and looking at aspects of Chapter 1, the themes we focused on were:

The image of maps and us as Map Makers

Power of language and its impact on our perception,

How our position/location on the map influences perception [which led to realising this could also mean our actual literal posture],

Our biography, biology, behaviors and backstories.

We could have talked for hours!

Towards the end, I offered those attending a chance to explore a part of themselves and the emotions experienced at a certain time or event in life. The exercise/reflection is included below. You will need a pen and paper and a good 20 mins for reflection.

This “MAP” should help you to locate several parts of self – formed in childhood development and still active today. It speaks to how our biography shows up in our biology, informs our habitual responses and behaviors, because we are being influenced by our old often subconscious experiences. My own example is of my 7yr old self, sick at school, who got sent to the principal’s office and at that time perceived the experience as a punishment, and it turns out it has sat in my subconscious, running an operating program for the best of 45 years.

Although not the only reason, exploring my experience and parts at that time, helped me to identify why: 1) I carry a strong sense of shame about being physically unwell (the irony was that I _was_ an asthmatic child), 2) I freeze inside, and potentially dissociate when under stress, particularly when exposing my vulnerability to others, like those in authority, 3) I struggle to trust older women who are aloof with me, 4) I rarely ask for help (although, this is getting better).

Parts often work in groups… and are embodied as sensation… and although we are reading a book about the language of emotion, neuroscience and neurobiology teach us that emotion, long before it was thought, began as a physical impulse (energy in motion) in the body.

Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems therapy influences the way in which I use this tool. IFS is known to increase Self-Awareness, helps people understand each other’s emotions, helps with Self-Acceptance, reduces stress and anxiety, enhances relationship skills, helps address trauma and PTSD symptoms and helps to build resilience, and we all could benefit from more of these!

Richards book No Bad Parts is worth the deep dive and reflection, and also speaks to religious identity development in relation to parts work.

So have a go at the tool, take some time to ponder and reflect on what you encounter and how you are living from that time and space today. If you feel overwhelmed or confused by your reflection, please reach out to your therapist, pastoral caregiver, or trusted safe person.

Hope you learn things about yourself… whenever you can’t quite locate what’s going on inside, this exercise helps to map out your experience and the other supporting (often unconscious) parts at play. Let me know how you go!

EMOTION AND EXPERIENCE MAP INSTRUCTIONS pdf.pdf

Download PDF • 188KB

The Art of Attunement + Journaling Prompts

The ultimate holistic goal of providing emotional support and therapeutic presence is the intentional facilitation of supporting a person to stay self-compassionate within their own experience of emotional pain. This requires those we care for to become comfortable with recognising and experiencing their whole selves. When people seek care, they rarely start by saying that they want a more intimate relationship with themselves. More often it is a result of a loss or a life change, where their life experience becomes something other than they'd planned, and they want ways of stopping the pain or cycle.

What is ironic is that as we journey with our clients to tolerate more of their experience, they often discover that they can withstand, integrate, and calibrate more than they ever imagined. This process of 'staying with' one's own experience cultivates awareness, coherence of feelings, strength, and the resilience to stay present to self as they mourn and grieve the loss, change and trauma.

As clients begin to inquire more intentionally about their experience, considering their current circumstances, it becomes clear that often the emotional pain they carry has come from relationships with significant others who have not seen, nor responded to their needs, and therefore it is hard to trust any support in their time of greatest need.

Relational betrayal and sabotage occur along a continuum from intrusive to neglectful behaviours. Extensive betrayals and unmet needs leave the individual with a deep sense that they were not important to those around them. Relationships can become unsafe, including their relationship with authority figures or their God, and the physical and psychological discomfort of this core belief can be overwhelming to experience. As a result, individuals often adapt by developing behaviors, symptoms, and reactions to deal with the impact. These can include depressed states, anxiety, inability to rest, somatisation, perfectionism, lack of boundaries, self-reliance, anger, and despair to name a few. These adaptations restrict self-awareness and can leave people afraid of their own experience, disconnecting them from their relationship to self, others, nature and the divine. The foundation of the therapeutic relationship is that the focus of attention is on the client’s present moment experience and as we stay mindfully present to their experience without leaving [as in the previous betrayals], we can begin to restore the safety of the relationship and renew the sense of trust, boundaries, and ability to stay within a safe relationship.

As caregivers, our developed self-awareness is the most important attribute in attunement as a therapeutic skill. Helping us to remain in a postural state of 'ease', fully present and able to apply mindful reactions to comprehend the client’s re-enactment of their world. An intentional commitment to personal reflexive work and the development of our ability to attune is therefore crucial in witnessing and supporting the client's needs, subconscious presentations, and present moment experience as the move towards integration of lived experience and inner healing.

When caregivers work from a posture of 'ease', the matrix of intra and inter-relationship supports and guides the direction and flow within any person-centered encounter. Without attunement to self and others, we develop a power-centered encounter that limits curiosity, makes assumptions about the client's needs, turns empathy into sympathy, disregards the value of their lived experience and dysregulates our nervous system producing high problem-solving, efforting and fatigue.

Definition of Attunement

A definition of attunement ‘is a kinesthetic and emotional sensing of others knowing their rhythm, affect and experience by metaphorically being in their skin, and going beyond empathy to create a two-person experience of unbroken feeling connectedness by providing a reciprocal affect and/or resonating response’. (Erksine 1998). One could say it is our ability to be present to, and with, another’s expression of their experience. Attunement could be thought of as the meta-skill which might have subheadings, such as empathy, mindfulness, immediacy, active listening, presence, experience and knowledge, and cognitive understanding. Any of these skills on their own is not attunement, but at times comes into ‘tuning into’ our clients as we explore with curiosity and connect to them.

The ability to be attuned really comes down to how connected to our clients we are in the moment-to-moment process of providing care, _and_ how reflexive we've become in our own personhood, qualifying us with the ability to connect authentically and fully present to them. Our presence, response and interventions are then a result of this attunement

“To be present means to be consciously attuned to the person before you. Naomi Remen describes this kind of attuned presence as being ‘seen by the heart’. It happens when you see the other, listen to and hear the other, and give your undivided attention to the one in your care…. Attunement is a feeling of harmony or oneness with another being, it is both a way of being and a way of doing. It’s the experience of focusing on another person with openness and acceptance.” See Me as a Person Guidebook pg. 50.

Journaling Prompts for Attunement

• When you were on the receiving end of a relational mis-attunement, how did it feel? Can you remember your body's experience at that time?

• When you have missed or messed up attuning to another, how did it feel? Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

• How do you consciously attune to the client/patient? Think of the ways - posture, actions, and attitudes you actively employ to engage in the therapeutic relationship.

• What is your primary goal when attuning to the patient present moment experience?

• As a patient hold “hopes” for healing, recovery or even a pain-free journey, what qualities both intra & inter-relational are significant in your experience as a caregiver?

• What brings you away from being fully present in your work?

• In what ways would you like to develop a greater sense of “being at ease in your chair”, when providing face to face care?