Hello dear ones,
I’m just gonna dive right into today’s newsletter with no preamble! But first, a gentle reminder that pre-orders for anchored: a deck for healing close in 4 days. You can get anchored here. Thank you, as always, for being a part of the CARESCAPES universe — it’s such a deep honor to have you here with me!
As you may have seen via Instagram, I just completed a BIG ASS THING: I moved from my home in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to Los Angeles, in a total of 10 days!!! I’d originally planned to write about the magic of community and how this wouldn’t have been possible without a web of other humans — including y’all — and I’d planned to have written and sent this out yesterday (stay tuned for that post). But then the universe had other plans for me: within 5 hours of landing in LA, I was hit with food poisoning or some sort of rapid pace stomach flu that knocked me out for 12 hours. And so I spent most of yesterday in bed, trying to sleep through the nausea.
Thankfully, I woke up this morning feeling so much better. As I laid in bed with my partner, I mused about what I’d talk about in my Tuesday morning therapy session. “I guess I should maybe process and integrate how I just did this BIG ASS THING,” I told them. When the time came, and I looked at my therapist through my computer screen, all I felt was resistance, annoyance, disgust. “I don’t want to process,” my fight part proclaimed. “I just want to be in the joy of getting through something so hard, of getting the life that I’ve been dreaming of.”
At first we thought that my fight part was trying to protect me from getting overwhelmed by the grief that would surely come up if I started to process this life-altering change I’d made (this is often what our different protector parts are trying to do). We soon realized that my fight part had a different motive, and that all it wanted was for me to not do anything at all.
“It sounds like what this part of you wants,” my therapist shared, “is to enjoy a little bit of non-doing. That’s the gift of arriving to the place you’ve been working towards.” “Right,” I said back, “It’s like integration isn’t always about doing. Integration can be a practice of non-doing.” I could feel my body relax as I said this, and I imagined myself sprawled on my bed like a starfish.
As humans committed to our healing practice, we might feel like we’re not healing if we’re not actively doing something. But if we’re always doing something, then we may actually just be living in the trauma response that is hyper-productivity. Paradoxically, if we’re always doing, then we may be moving away from the present moment — again, another familiar trauma response.
Sometimes healing is passive. It’s letting yourself settle into the moments of calm that you created for yourself, and simply choosing to not do anything. This can be incredibly hard if you’ve never experience immobility without fear (a term I learnt from Nurturing Resilience, which describes the experience of learning that it isn’t safe to be still). And yet, as my therapist reflected to me today, “You’ve done a lot to build your capacity for calm.”
I hope this writing can be a permission slip to starfish on your bed, take a nap, read a book, lay in the grass — to practice non-doing. Non-doing is just as vital to our healing process as doing. In fact, non-doing is often when the magic of integration can happen.
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The practice of integration / non-doing is something I talk a lot about with my TRE clients and love to have lots of different types of resources to share—I'm excited to send this to folks as an example of what integration / non-doing looks like & feels like. Thank you for this great resource!
Welcome to LA!!! Despite what some (New Yorkers ha) say, it’s a pretty great city of storytellers of all stripes 😁