Happy Wednesday Reader!
Here's 1 teaching, 2 questions, and 3 resources to explore this week:
1. Teaching
Today's teaching is from Richard Strozzi-Heckler, a leading expert in the field of somatics and body work for more than five decades.
His teachings and his organization, The Strozzi Institute, focus on how we can develop a greater capacity for embodied awareness and therefore work for justice in more effective and sustainable ways.
As you read the following teaching from his book, The Art of Somatic Coaching, pay attention to how your own stories connect and resonate.
Where we put our attention accentuates and amplifies the energy in that place. Take your attention to your sit bones where they contact the seat of the chair. Stay for a bit and you will notice that there is a world there of temperature, shape, movement, and then narratives, memories, images, and beliefs about that feeling.
Life feeling life becomes life.
It becomes more life, which is not a goal, but it’s the architecture of the process of life. Life is inexorably and furiously building new shapes—sometimes explicitly and visibly, other times so subtly it seemingly challenges the nature of change. Yet change is always there, birthing something, building something, containing something, harvesting something in a continuous wheel of movement whose arc forms a historical and felt narrative of an individual, a family, a team, an organization, a landscape, a nation.
What we attend to will become more. It will inform us, and eventually we can embody it.
2. Questions
- Take a moment to practice: look around and find something in your physical space that draws your attention. What is its look, feel, smell, vibe, purpose, connection to other things in the space, etc. How does its presence or story interact with your presence or story?
- What parts of your story do you find yourself intentionally not giving attention to? Be gentle with this. How is this non-attention serving to protect and/or constrict you?
3. Resources
I highly recommend both books listed below, especially for coaches, teachers, activists, mental health professionals, massage therapists, and clergy.
- The Art of Somatic Coaching by Richard Strozzi-Heckler (book)
- The Politics of Trauma by Staci Haines (book)
- Shadow Work: Getting off Autopilot and Learning to See Deeply (course begins in just two weeks!)
⏪ If you missed last week's email:
Sending you good vibes,
Andrew
P.S. I'm really excited to co-host the following event with my friend Caryn Berley on October 1st! If you're interested in exploring ways to learn from your experience of defensiveness and move into a more healing posture, I'd love to see you there. 🙂
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