Calming
Soothing
Understanding
Integrating
Shifting
Lightening
Relieving
 
If anything at all has your mind or body feeling revved up and on a hamster wheel, this workshop could be such a sweet release into fresh air.
 
Our workshop for help and lightening of anxiety and stuckness is this coming Saturday, September 9, 10 am – 1pm.  I hope you’ll come and settle into, sink into, a softer space with whatever is happening in your life. 
 
Here’s a little bit about our format next Saturday, so you have a sense of it.
 
I’ll talk a short bit about what may be a new understanding for you about what anxiety is – which in itself is so pressure relieving.  If we think there is a snake (anxiety), we spend so much time and effort looking for strategies to cope with, get around, avoid the snake. But when we suddenly see that it is a rope, we don’t need any strategies. After that brief orientation, I’ll take questions – both about the material and more importantly, any specific circumstances and challenges in your life that you’d like some insight around.  It’s an opportunity for some personal coaching, and it is also an enormous benefit and gift to share in a group.  It’s so easy to think we are the only ones going through something, the only ones that have anxiety or scary thoughts. It’s easy to feel alone and bonkers.  But when we sit down with others and share our humanness – and share that our experiences are normal and natural because that is how the brain protects us! – the sharing itself is a relief.  
 
You’ll learn from others’ experiences, including my own, and this is part of how we learn to not be afraid of the anxiety itself. Which, frankly, is the very worst part about feeling the energy we call anxiety.  It’s just an energy, until we label it as “anxiety,” and then we whip up stories about how terrible it is to have anxiety!  We add anxiety on top of anxiety!  We freak out, then freak out about freaking out!  That second layer is where so much of the suffering comes from! This is a cognitive, educational, “top down” approach for your mind so it understands how and why human brains create “anxiety” and why it might get stuck in protective modes of hyper vigilance or numbing out.  
 
We’ll also go through an in-depth exercise for calming your nervous system, which will help your brain and body move out of stuck spaces of fight, flight or freeze.  It involves a timeline, and teaching your neural networks to know that the things you may be chronically guarding against are over – in the past.  The exercise then is about helping the body experience that understanding in a “bottom up,” sensory level way.  
 
I’ll talk a bit about other resources for continuing to support your new understanding and integration.  New modalities, books, podcasts, practitioners and that can all help ground your new insights.
 
More information about the workshop, how to register via payment and receive La Mesa workshop address are below. Please email me if you have any questions! 
 
Looking forward to YOU, seeing yourself and the world with new eyes, with a more relaxed body and more trust.
 
All is well.
Hugs,
Christina
 
PS, These are a couple more views from the Montana trip.  So peaceful and expansive – just like your own essence! 

“I have felt so safe and not scared of my past since we last met. I have never felt so comfortable being with myself and my past selves at the same time……It’s hard to believe it is me feeling this way- but it is!  These sessions completely changed my way of being…..” Betsy P., super awesome person and client!

Betsy is a dear client that I have been working with for awhile. She came to me because she was having panic attacks and some really rough anxiety.  But a LOT has been shifting for her lately. 

One of the big topics in our last session was that she feels “off” because she doesn’t feel anxious anymore and she doesn’t know what to do with that!  I’m giggling as I type that!  She laughs about it too! 

Betsy says she feels weird because she’s not getting as worked up as she was before. She’s less stressed and she notices that she seems to be able to handle situations that used to really agitate and upset her.   She says she still feels a little uncomfortable, and hears all the old thoughts come up, but those thoughts just don’t upset her nearly as much as they used to.  The feeling just isn’t as intense.  Or, she’s just more okay with the feeling being there and it doesn’t “get to her” like it used to.  She says it’s weird to go through life without the familiar feeling of anxiety.  To be without that constant companion.

Betsy calls it her “Little Buddy.”  She said it’s like having a friend that was there your whole life that isn’t there anymore. She realized that the familiarity of it was like having a lifelong buddy.   To her mind it had become comforting to have that constant presence and noise going on.  In its absence, it feels strange to her to be without her “friend.”  She feels lighter and, in a way, sort of exposed.  But Betsy sees it now.  She can’t really fully get behind it when her mind wants her to be anxious about being NOT being anxious!

She’s learned to listen to what her Little Buddy is saying and step back from it. So, as an example, she was able to see the clear truth when her mind wailed “How will I ever get anything done without anxiety?!”  She looked at me sheepishly and said, “But I notice I’m still getting things done anyway!”  Yep!  Even without those old feelings of pressure, discomfort and urgency!

A lot of Betsy’s insights have come from understanding that her mind created anxiety as a safety strategy for something that happened a long time ago.  It worked then – doesn’t work now. But the brain figures that keeping Betsy constantly scared and on the lookout is how she survived, so her Little Buddy keeps doing it!  It keeps doing its best to create that familiar, “comforting,” blanket of panic!

Her body is doing the same thing to try to keep her safe too.  Her nervous system also didn’t realize that it doesn’t need to protect Betsy anymore.  So her instinctual, animal body was stuck in a reaction of alternating between fight, flight and freeze.  I mean, the brain IS part of the nervous system. The mind IS part of the whole being. But there is a different way of accessing shift that is less “think-ey” and goes more directly to the body.  Betsy and I wanted to support her change from a more sensory, body-based, not-more-thinking direction that would help her from the “ground up.” So Betsy started doing a listening therapy (Safe and Sound Protocol) that calms and resets the nervous system, showing her whole body and being that it’s safe now. It’s kind of awesome because it doesn’t give her mind anything to grab onto because it’s coming in the “back door” of sensory input! Our coaching conversations helped her realize how her mind works and helped her make sense of what was going on from the “top down.”  The listening therapy has helped from the “bottom up” and has been another big part in helping her make so many amazing shifts and realizations.  Back door, top down, bottom up, ground up……!  Together, Betsy and I are being curious in all kinds of directions! That curiosity without bounds is truly what helps all of us step out of old, imagined boundaries of being!

Betsy gave me permission to share all this with you, because she agrees that when we are going through challenges our minds will often convince us we are THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD GOING THROUGH THIS!!  ;-

Learning about other people’s stories and about how others realized there was a whole BIG WORLD outside of their suffering is so helpful. Human minds have a way of creating a whole reality inside us that we think is real and is the ONLY reality!  We don’t look past it when we think it’s real. But those voices, those “Little Buddies,” aren’t us.

Betsy had some other amazing realizations as she looked deeper into this. Stuff about food, control, not speaking up, feeling small….  I’m so excited and honored that she wants to share a little bit more of her journey in future emails.  She’s made some absolutely fundamental changes in the way she relates to herself and her whole life.  That has me in awe! 

I am in awe of the whole, ever-unfolding process of LIFE!  New stuff keeps showing up, everyone. Betsy said, “I never would have believed I would have gotten this far!”  Never believe your mind when it says you’re stuck and this is how it will always be. Or that you have to keep doing it that same way or “the world will fall apart.”  It won’t.

Well, the world your fear constructed will likely fall apart, actually.  But the point of our work, really, is to lift our vision out of that tiny reality and see that there is so much more in this vast world than what we’ve created in our heads. 

Thanks, Betsy. For bravely feeling into your heart and lifting up your gaze to see so much more. And thank you for taking me on the gorgeous journey. Here we are, at a sort of dawn, looking at a sun rise above a horizon that is breathtakingly bigger than anything we ever knew before.  Love you, Betsy! 

I love you all reading this, too. Here is to our Connection to Something Bigger and the freedom, relief and joy of that!
Chris

The Party Is Now!

My friend celebrates life
with “BIG ASS DANCE PARTIES!!”
Death too.
She dances the continuum of human moments –
Plunging – laughing and fearless – into the sea!!
Or silently sipping tea, bent and worried.

In both,
tiny particles surge,
creating her body in wave after wave –
just like the creation of trees,
stars and
all the invisible rhythms
that just dawned a sudden smile on that boy’s face
or rises and falls each breath in that old woman…

It’s all now!
The party is now!
Time to Celebrate!
Time to celebrate our past –
not curse it, not fight it, not waste it.
Time to move in,
move on
and move with the joy of life –
All of it.
Even death, horrible and ecstatic,  
the marriage of human with Divine.
Even there.
Even dancing there too.

Time to get out of the wailing room of lack,
of morose funeral,
and step outside to the Big Ass Dance Party!
To the open air that equally holds
the cracking thunder
and the quiet, bursting miracle of the butterfly
on the swaying blade of grass.

Time for us to stop making ourselves
do what is “good for us,”
even if it hurts
and instead, walk around on foundations that feel good!
Time to stop being angry that someone told us we’re not allowed to ……..
and just live.
Time to stop believing that if we suffer enough
we can take away someone else’s suffering.
Time to stop living in limbo,
playing dead,
one eye cracked half open –
hiding from ourselves as much as anyone else’s judgement.

Time to stop punishing ourselves for “doing it wrong.”
The mountain can’t be anything but Itself.
The tree can’t be a cloud.
Each of us is the unique animal that we’ve been built to be –
with our own ways of looking,
Of being,
Of loving.

Time to wake up!
Time to join in!
Time to throw our arms around ourselves
and each other!

Time to welcome every glorious morning
and embrace every wretched moment of despair.
This dance cannot leave anyone or anything out.
And it has never, ever held itself at arm’s length.

Time to move close,
hips and cheeks and breath as one
in the ecstatic pleasure and pain of it all.

Writhing, laughing, twisting, aching, pounding, flying, spitting, gasping, touching, whispering, feeling, moving, embracing……


Here.

Now.

Is the celebration of our lives.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dancing with you all in love,
Chris

God said to me: Stop asking me to do stuff for you. Just be alive and open yourself to life. Stop acting like there’s some barrier between you and me. Between you and life. Between you and anything.
–Christina Brittain

Have you ever noticed that the body hurts more if you talk about the pain? It’s strange. It’s as if the body is actually in the process of healing, but rolls its eyes when it hears me complaining.
–Dave Fry

Use whatever word you like. God. The Universe. The Body. Life. Nature.  Source. Love. Whatever It is, It can’t be contained in a name anyway.  But we all call out to It to help us. 

It’s natural to want to ask for help. It’s natural to want to feel good. It’s natural to have suffering too. It’s even natural for us to quietly, cleverly, “spiritually” try to manipulate Life into doing it our way.  Our minds can try to be sneaky all they want, but Life keeps happening for us.

There is ALWAYS more going on in the Universe than what our minds have conjured in between our ears. 

What if Suffering Itself is actually a built-in pointer for us to call out to a Bigger Something beyond our “separate” selves? 

Maybe we just forgot to stop and notice and ask:
what IS it we are calling out to here, anyway…?

In this moment of clarity, when you lift your gaze, get out of your head and open your senses, can you feel a lightening? A loosening of the claustrophobia of “the problem?” Can you maybe even feel a wink?  A little grin maybe? Can you feel that your body, that Life, is already carrying you?

Life is has been Rolling you along with it in its exquisite movement this whole time
And maybe smiling and rolling its eyes at you a little, too…

~~~~~

Winking and smiling with you!
Chris

There is nothing wrong with you.
You didn’t fail as a kid.
The scary situation wasn’t because of you.
Controlling your life, your body, your spouse or your children now
Will not make you safer.
It won’t make them safer either.
Things wouldn’t have gone better if you were somehow different then.
Changing or controlling yourself today still won’t work.
It really was impossible be anyone or anything but who you were.
Same now.

The pressure of trying to be something else –
The constant vigilance, self-criticism, blame, self-loathing –
Can’t make you be anything other than you.

But oh honey,
You don’t need to be.
You never did.

You’ve been trying your whole life to get love, get seen, get heard, get included and
Get inside the loving shelter
That may never have been there at all.
You’ve been
Trying to find safety
In that way-back-when place.

But
That
Is
Not
Happening
Anymore.

There’s nothing wrong with you
And that terrifying time is over.

Come home now.
Come out of the dark forest, the bushes
Trying to punish yourself, hide or track all possible new danger.
The scary thing is over. No matter how long it lasted.
It’s over.
Come home
Finally into the deep rest, the relief of being exactly you,
Perfect as you are,
As you have always, always been. 

~~~~~~~~~

We’re here, together, now,
Chris