August Newsletter
Personal Update
People are never truly alone or separate from community, and cannot be.
Ichiro Kishimi
Dear Ones,
How wonderful it was to come home to my community in California after eight years of living in Canada. I love and will miss my friends in Canada and the beauty that surrounded me there. But coming home to Nevada County and my wonderful friends of so many years has been deeply heartfelt and moving. The mutual outpouring of love and generosity has moved me to tears. Thank you all for your open arms and enthusiastic reception. You have more than validated my decision to return home. I hope you will enjoy this month’s article on The Alchemy of Relating. It came out of the deep work we did in the last Relational Intimacy Course.
With infinite love and gratitude,
Michael
People are never truly alone or separate from community, and cannot be.
Ichiro Kishimi
Dear Ones,
How wonderful it was to come home to my community in California after eight years of living in Canada. I love and will miss my friends in Canada and the beauty that surrounded me there. But coming home to Nevada County and my wonderful friends of so many years has been deeply heartfelt and moving. The mutual outpouring of love and generosity has moved me to tears. Thank you all for your open arms and enthusiastic reception. You have more than validated my decision to return home. I hope you will enjoy this month’s article on The Alchemy of Relating. It came out of the deep work we did in the last Relational Intimacy Course.
With infinite love and gratitude,
Michael
The Alchemy of Relating:
Healing Trauma Through Relational Intimacy
Healing Trauma Through Relational Intimacy
When we look at the overwhelming array of global issues facing humanity today; climate change, income inequality, habitat destruction, enslavement, racism, war, genocide, famine, and the collapse of our political and economic structures, it’s easy to want to numb out and shut down. We search outside ourselves for hope, leadership, and political or technological answers and are quick to blame politicians, corporations, and the “one percent.” This only leads to deepening despair, futility, separation, and suffering. But, what if we framed all of these challenges and issues as a new possibility or paradigm for relational healing and global awakening?
The emergent field of quantum social science explores how we are physically, emotionally, mentally, and linguistically entangled. Through thousands of years of individual, familial, collective, and ancestral trauma we have numbed and deadened our senses, creating a world view of separation, scarcity, and hyperactivity. We think of people as “out there”, objects in a world of objects. When we look at the moon in the sky, we say what a beautiful sight it is, but we rarely take the time to recognize and feel the enormous impact the moon has on us and all living things. So too we tend to look at others as objects that are separate and independent from us and rarely acknowledge how deeply we influence each other. When we shift our world view from a particle in space/time to an interdependent energy wave that’s occurring in our mutual nervous systems, a whole new possibility for relating emerges
Presencing is merging our perception with our awareness to zoom into our interiority and explore the inner movement of our physical, emotional, and mental processes. This act of mindfulness will often bring awareness to the numb and frozen trauma symptoms that we all carry. These frozen parts are the residue of overwhelming events from our early childhood, experiences of abuse, neglect, war, or “hand-me-downs” from ancestral transgressions like slavery, war, genocide, and ecological disasters. This freezing is not a mistake, it is a gift of a loving and resilient nervous system that has evolved over tens of thousands of years to protect us in times of threat, loss, and unbearable situations. To release the tension of these frozen embodied time capsules, we must bring awareness, compassion, and acceptance to them and the adaptive behaviours that accompany them.
Mammals evolve through co-regulation. For a child to develop fully they must feel felt, seen, safe, and heard. We need safety, protection, guidance, and loving touch to evolve and manifest our innate capacities. If in our early adaptation phase, we did not get the nurturing we needed, we must find a person or group where we can feel felt, seen, and heard, in that way we can integrate these frozen parts of ourselves and release the habitual behaviour that accompanies them. To be able to fully self-regulate we must first learn to co-regulate. When someone truly feels and sees us, we feel safe enough to release the holding of the symptoms of our unintegrated trauma. Anytime we digest a piece of undigested past we create more inner spaciousness, which leads to greater presence, connection, creativity, and innovation.
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The practice of Relational Intimacy is to check into our body, emotions, and thoughts when we encounter another person. Then we focus our attention on them and see if we can sense what they are feeling, sensing, and thinking. At the same time, we notice what’s alive in the space between us. The Buddhists have a wonderful phrase that describes this phenomenon called interdependent co-arising. To experience this we need to learn to slow down and observe the subtleties of our inner movement and stillness. The beauty of this practice is that every single encounter becomes an opportunity for deepening presence, connection, and awakening.
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When we find ourselves feeling tension, having a difficult time, or feeling challenged there’s a good chance that just under the surface is an unattended trauma symptom. When we say, “I have a dysfunction”, we are tapping into something which is serving a function of which we are not yet aware. By engaging in Relational Intimacy, we create healing that ripples through our inter-being and expands our capacity for authentic, creative, introspective, and connecting interactions. Those challenges that we think are barriers to our development become our path to personal, relational, and social healing that is needed to not only heal our challenges but deepen our connectivity with all of life. Coming together in Relational Intimacy contributes to healing a broken and fragmented world.
Much of our personal growth movement has been focused on fixing and getting to someplace where we feel whole and complete. But what if nothing was ever broken, that we were born into essential goodness, and that our system was designed to heal naturally, in communion with others. Relational Intimacy is a process of deepening and evolving our sense of relatedness to ourselves, each other, and our natural world. This is an experiential and mystical practice designed to heal the wounds of the trauma-induced adaptive child and tap into the natural genius and interdependency of the wise adult.
If you find yourself in repetitive and habitual arguments, challenges, and difficulties in your personal, familial, or work relationships, feel you are not being heard or seen by the most important people in your life, or experience frustration in having your voice be heard and your most important projects manifested, we invite you to learn more about the practice of Relational Intimacy. The alchemy of living relationally and interdependently creates a new field of possibility for healing ourselves and our wounded and fragmented world.
With infinite love and blessings, Michael
