What would it be like if you could feel joy in your body and it felt totally safe? 
Last night in my grief group, we worked with the energy of Lunar Imbolc and planted seeds for what we want to create in the upcoming year.
Inspired by Danielle Laporte’s Desire Maps/Goals with Soul Process, we looked at a big list of what we typically think of as, “Positive Feelings.” Everyone chose 3-4 feelings from the list that they want to bring into their beings more this year, and then we worked with a Somatic practice to explore what these feelings were like IN THE BODY. It was POWERFUL.
Weird thing to do in a grief group, you might think. Why would you focus on POSITIVE feelings in a group where you are supposed to be working with grief?
HERE’S WHY:
Because we don’t work with grief & trauma in order to hang out in it forever and only.
And in order to be able to grieve & navigate our trauma effectively, we need to actually make space for the FULL RANGE of emotions.
Grief can be like oxygen – it expands our ability to feel joy when we do it in a good way. And it can be the inverse when we set intentions for what we want in our lives. We feel into what we deeply want and it brings up all the grief of NOT having that experience. Yet.
So we play there.
Weaving, pendulating.
Dark and light. Light and dark.
Grief & gratitude. Joy & grief.
Until we are dancing the full dance – breathing – ecstatic – feeling it ALL. Rapture.
This has to happen S-L-O-W-L-Y mind you.
It probably won’t happen the first time you try. And that’s good.
It’s like building a muscle, but it’s actually neural pathways in your brain.
The stronger they get, which only happens through practice, the easier it is to feel a fuller spectrum of e-motions.
And if you’re deep in grief, it’s not necessarily the first place to focus. We need to begin by making space for the grief to move.
E-motion is just energy in motion. It wants to move, but we stop it because at some point that feeling, whether it was, “positive,” or “negative,” was TOO MUCH.
(That’s one definition of trauma – too much, too fast, too soon.)
But now, you have the ability to relearn that.
To expand, slowly, into ALL the feels.
What would it be like if you didn’t need to play down your JOY?
