Wibble-wobble/thinking aloud (13)

This little wibbly-wobbly guy lives on my kitchen worktop, his job is to remind me that balance is constantly lost and regained.  He's a little battered and bruised but still bounces back every time.  
Edit: forget to say I lost a Blip day or two to painkillers post-dentistry.  All done now so I can function again.
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Remember all the thinking aloud about ‘things ending badly’ that started here?  Remember that pesky phrase on this blip?  High stakes conversations require a step change in our way of being.   When I unexpectedly found myself on Amanda’s course I got to find out exactly what she meant by that phrase.  Before I dive into what I learned I want to make clear that on this course Amanda’s work is entirely process-oriented, by which I mean we did not talk about our personal stories, situations or issues.  The work was almost pure physical learning and practice, totally demanding, totally absorbing and a whole lot of fun.  So any reflections I might make on where my patterns came from or how they play out in my life, are MY reflections, not Amanda’s input.

At the start of the weekend I said that although I’ve been working and studying personal, spiritual, organizational development and body work all my adult life I felt that somehow I didn’t carry the fruits of that experience in my everyday presence.  As if I had all those riches stored in a series of lead lined boxes, especially since I retired and had no clear context to draw those riches out of me.

During the weekend we worked in pairs using mild physical pressure as a way to stimulate the postural patterns that define our individual reactions to stress.  We did this probably over a hundred times with different partners and my reaction pattern was the same every time, with only minor variations depending on the exact nature of the pressure [e.g. change in direction (pull vs push) or whether I was moving or still when the pressure came on].  This was true for every single person in the room.   Our patterns were unique but consistent across the board, no matter what the situation, who we were working with or what we planned do to differently the body won, conjuring our habitual patterns instantly, before the mind had any say in the matter.  Salutary.  Humbling and, over time, very, very funny.  Poor, dear humans as Kendall says.  

In the face of perceived pressure, opposition, attack the survival part of the brain opts for safety first.  We are built for connection, yes, but even more deeply in the most primitive part of our brain we are built for survival.  Under perceived threat the body’s choices are fight, flight or freeze. 

Some people crumbled, gave way under pressure; others bridled, ready for a fight at the least provocation.  Every single time.  I freeze, my body on high alert, every muscle taut, playing dead whilst deciding whether to fight or flee.  Buying time.  With increasing pressure I become rigid, solid as a rock, immoveable, focused entirely on the source of threat.  Under duress I become the embodiment of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”  Leaning forward, head down, heart withdrawn, feet planted.  You can beat me down and I am not going to move.  Ever.  I am going to endure.  That was my best option in childhood growing up in a war zone.  If I’m on a mission, set on a goal, facing opposition I steamroller forward relentless and unstoppable.  These conditioned responses have got me to where I am today.

We soon learned to recognize our own signature posture shift that lets us know we are under stress and we saw how disempowering those stress patterns are to ourselves and to everyone in our vicinity.  They are literally contagious, creating stress all around us despite our best intentions.  Then we learned to *center - uplift, settle/ground, expand focus into the space to our right, to our left, behind us and way out beyond the person applying the pressure whilst extending our arms out beyond the pressure source.  Once you get the hang of it this postural shift dramatically changes how you feel and the dynamic with the person applying pressure.  This centering practice was the antidote we learned to use every time our reactive patterns came up.  I’ll maybe do some posts later on fun places I’ve used this stuff, it's so useful it’s impossible not to use at every opportunity.  And I will get back to the email, promise.

* The basic centering practice comes from Wendy Palmer’s work described briefly  here (centering instructions start about 12 minutes in, the intro is useful too).  But honestly I’ve been a fan of Wendy’s work for fifteen years and I just didn’t get the power of it till this weekend.