Dreaming Beyond Trauma: Embodied Practice for Liberatory Creativity

So I'd like to walk you through the Resilience Toolkit guiding questions, starting with the first question, which is, what is my state? And here you're tuning in to your physical body, your emotions, your mental state, and also how you are relationally with other people. And you want to do this in a way that is fairly quick. You want to get a gestalt feeling for what's going on internally.

And often I would recommend sort of paying attention to some of the qualities. Do you feel spacious in your mind, in your physical body, emotionally, your heart is open? Do you feel relaxed, calm, at ease? Is there a sense of connection where you feel connected to yourself, and it's some clarity there, you feel connected to other people, to the more than human that you feel connected to spirit, to purpose. And there's a sense of vitality and a sense of aliveness, um, possibility, creativity, flexibility, softness.

So those kinds of qualities are one way to kind of feel into, or do you feel more pressured? Do you feel activated, reactive, hot, mobilised, either quick in the mind, quick in the body, a sense of contraction or pressure, not just of the body, but also mentally of what's possible. What's a sense of what is, time feels compressed. There's not enough time. There's a sense of impatience, hurry. And things become more binary. There's, there's a loss of nuance.

Is that more of what your state is? Or is there more of a numbness and a disconnection and a shutdown, apathy, not caring. Where things feel stuck, or you feel overwhelmed or hopeless. 

So just kind of the gestalt, open and spacious, pressured and activated and hurried, or kind of shut down and numb. 

And you just want to say, what is my state? Right? 

And the second question, the second guiding question is, how do I know? What are the signs, right? So you've got the sort of gestalt, but really what are the signs that you're noticing? Where is the pressure? Where is there spaciousness? And this gives you an opportunity to add some nuance to your understanding of where you are.

I will give one caveat. If you notice that you're really highly activated and very pressurised or numb, don't spend long in this question, because it can actually worsen or potentiate the intensity of what you're feeling. 

And then we move to the third question. Is my state useful for me right now? 

Because there can be circumstances in your environment, immediate, or just your ecology that says that this response that you're feeling is really useful. And in that case, there's nothing to do but recognise and have compassion for yourself, that you're responding to the situation at hand. 

However, if you're like, could I be carrying more stress than is useful in this moment? And if the answer is yes, good to note. And also there might be a sense of unsure. Maybe, maybe not. And so if you're sure that you're carrying more stress than you need, or you're unsure, I would invite you to go into the next question, which is question number four.

What practice can I do? And here it's, can you bring in a practice? 

In the resilience toolkit, we have very specific short practices that are usually 30 seconds or less, but it doesn't have to actually be one from the toolkit. The thing here is, is there a breathing? Is there a physical movement? Is it drinking water? Is it paying attention to a positive sensation in your body? Paying attention to something beautiful outside? It doesn't matter too much. The biggest thing is, as you do it, is to ask the fifth question.

How do I know the practice worked? And here, you don't just do the practice. 

And this is what makes the resilience toolkit quite different, is that we don't just do the practice, we observe ourselves in doing the practice. Okay? And so as you do that, are you noticing that you're moving towards greater spaciousness? That you're moving from pressured to a more settled and relaxed place, from disconnection to connection, from numb and sort of like a dead feeling to more alive.

And sometimes even in that transition to more alive, there can be a little more discomfort, but you're coming back to life. And so you're looking to make sure that the practice you're doing is actually starting to settle you into that place, closer to that place of greater spaciousness, right? A greater connection. And if it's not, if you say, I don't think this is working, or I'm feeling more stressed, can you stop and do something different? 

So in this practice of doing this resilience toolkit, where you're growing the capacity for meta-awareness, the ability to observe yourself, which grows without getting caught up in what you're observing, and you're also building the possibility and the capacities for regulatory flexibility. Something isn't working, how do I disengage and re-engage with something that could work? 

So taken together, moving through these guiding questions: what is my state? How do I know? Is my state useful for me right now? If it's not, or I'm unsure, what practice can I do? And how do I know the practice work? 

When we do this in repeated cycles, what happens is we begin to know ourselves better and have a better idea of our states and if our states are useful for the conditions for dreaming, for collective imagination, dreaming together, which is asking us not just to have the expansiveness, the spaciousness, the creativity of a settled nervous system, but to be able to do that together. And to be able to do that together, I have to be able to connect.

And I can only connect from a more settled place.