Six Steps to Self-Resonance

Self-Resonance: How “When people change the way they speak to themselves, they change the way their brain works.” - Sarah Peyton   In the last episode, I introduced the concept of resonance—that experience of relaxation we feel when we’re accompanied and truly understood by another—and I shared how self-resonance lays the soil in which all the other practices of radical discernment can take root. When we accompany ourselves with warm, precise attunement, it becomes so much easier to soothe our fear and pain, decipher our bodies’ messages, and chart a path that honors our needs and our values. In this podcast, I’ll introduce you to three fundamental aspects of self-resonance—self-warmth, self-accompaniment, and self-attunement, and six practices to help you cultivate self-resonance. As you read, I invite you to get curious about how you are or are not already practicing these, because The more awareness we bring to how we treat ourselves, the more choice we have to treat ourselves well. Aspect One: Self-Warmth I invite you to bring to mind someone, real or imaginary, who is exquisitely capable of offering you warmth and care. They see you through kind eyes, speak to you in a caring tone of voice, and if you would like them to, put an arm around your shoulders or hold your hand. You feel your body relax as they offer you love and hold you in unconditional positive regard. This is the feeling of warmth.  Aspect Two: Self-Accompaniment In his book, Narrative Medicine, Lakota-Cherokee shaman and psychiatrist Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona writes that the dominant culture’s focus on individual healing is a historically new phenomenon. In shamanic traditions, healing almost always takes place within community. Mehl-Madrona writes, Beyond any technique, relationships are what heal.[1] Trauma usually occurs in relationship, so healing ideally happens in relationship too. Accompaniment means to come beside or to go along with. Resonance requires a sense of accompaniment, the sense someone we trust is with us. We humans are relational creatures who need accompaniment from others to feel whole, and so, ideally, we receive resonance from other people we trust—friend, partner, family member, skilled therapist, coach, or practice buddy. If it feels hard to let ourselves be loved by other humans, we can also receive a sense of accompaniment from companion animals, trees, rivers, landscapes, other aspects of nature, songs, ancestors, or a sense of a greater spirit or the divine. We can also learn to accompany ourselves. Aspect Three: Self-Attunement To attune means to bring into harmony. Attuning to ourselves or another is like adjusting the radio dial until we find the signal we’re looking for. To find that signal, we focus our soft attention with genuine curiosity and ask gentle, open-ended questions to understand what is happening for us, without aiming to change the situation. We know we’ve found the signal we’re seeking when the other person or the part of ourselves we’re attuning to responds with Yes, that’s it! Now that we have the three aspects of self-resonance, let’s explore six practices for cultivating self-resonance. Before we go, I want to remind you that when people hold a lot of unhealed trauma, attempting to practice self-resonance can bring up painful feelings. Warmth can melt us out of a numb, frozen state, and sometimes, that can feel uncomfortable or scary. If that happens for you as you experiment with these practices, please take care of yourself. You might pause, scan the room for safety, wiggle your hands and feet, or do whatever else you need to return to a more comfortable state. You might also seek out a trauma-informed therapist or another professional who can help you cultivate a sense of inner safety before you dive in alone. It can be hard for us humans to offer ourselves resonance until someone else models resonance for us. Practice One: Turning Toward Yourself The Arabic word for heart is Qalb, which means to turn. Accompanying ourselves requires that we turn our heart’s attention toward ourselves. From now on, I invite you to pay attention—When you notice that you don’t feel so great, I invite you to get curious about whether it feels like your heart is energetically turning away from or turning toward the part of yourself that is struggling. If you sense that your heart is turning away from yourself, try getting gently curious about what might help you turn toward yourself. Ask yourself: What might help me welcome and turn toward this part of myself that is struggling? Listen for what arises, without pressuring yourself to shift in any given direction.  Practice Two: Imagining Giving & Receiving Warmth I invite you to imagine that there are two parts of yourself—1) an emotional part that feels all your emotions, such as sadness, fear, loneliness, confusion, anger, disgust, and even happiness, and 2) a second, resonating part of yourself who accompanies the emotional part and offers warm attunement. Self-resonance can feel either like 1) seeing through the eyes of your emotional self and receiving warmth and attunement from your resonant self or 2) seeing through the eyes of our resonant self and offering warmth and attunement to your emotional self. For years, I only practiced the latter, strongly identifying with the loving, resonant witness, because I believe that that’s who we are at our core. Over the years, however, I’ve found that many clients have an easier time starting with imagining themselves as their emotional selves and in their minds’ eyes, receiving love from a resonant self witness or even from a competent protector such as a future self, ancestor, or spiritual being.[2] I invite you to play with trying to access these two perspectives now. I’ll guide you. To begin, I invite you to imagine someone who you trust to offer you warmth and care. This may be someone from your family line, a caretaker from earlier in your life, a friend, partner, teacher, mentor, companion animal, character from a story or book, famous person, spirit or deity, ancestor, or another being from the more than human realm. Imagine that this being is beaming upon you radiant, glowing care and affection, and notice how it feels to be held in their loving gaze. If this feels challenging, please know that you’re not alone. When we haven’t received much warm accompaniment from other people, of course it can be hard to imagine receiving warm accompaniment from other people. For now, I invite you to approach this practice with a sense of experimentation, knowing that it can take repeated practice before we’re able to start imagining and experiencing receiving love. If you’re able to feel this sense of warmth and care, I invite you to linger a bit in the sensation, allowing yourself to bask in their love for you. Then, slowly, I invite you to play with imagining that you are looking through the eyes of this being who is shining the light of this warmth and care upon you. Imagine that you are this being who loves you so much. Notice what happens in your body when you do that, soaking in any pleasant sensations you feel. Then, slowly, I invite you to allow this image to fade. Now, I invite you to bring to mind someone you experience warm, uncomplicated love for, such as a child, companion animal, dear friend, beloved place, or something or someone else that you love. Imagine turning your attention toward this beloved being in your mind’s eye, welcoming them with your presence and shining a light of affection upon them. See if you can sense in your body the warmth and care you feel for this beloved being, and notice where you feel these sensations in your body. Experiment with amplifying the warm sensations, turning up the volume., and imagine absorbing them, as if your cells were tiny sponges. If you notice feelings of pain or sadness, see if you can imagine holding the part of you that is hurting with tenderness and care. If it feels relatively easy to access this sense of fondness and affection for another, I invite you to play with swapping out the image of the one you love and replacing it with an image of yourself, shining the light of warmth and care upon yourself. Notice what happens in your body when you do that, not trying to push anything, taking any pleasant sensations you feel. Then, when you feel complete, slowly allow the images to fade away, and bring your attention back to the present moment. As you go throughout your days, I invite you to keep experimenting with embodying your resonant self, offering warmth to your emotional self, and with embodying your emotional self, receiving warmth from your loving, resonant self. You might even toggle between the two perspectives, choosing whichever feels most supportive at the moment. Practice Three: Greeting Yourself by Your Name We start most conversations with other people by saying hello, and we deserve the same care and respect from ourselves.[3] When you notice an uncomfortable feeling arise within you, rather than ignoring or trying to change how you feel, experiment with greeting the feeling like an old friend or a young child who you love, offering an open-hearted hello, and greeting yourself by your name—like, Oh, hello, Katherine! Greeting ourselves by name can help us do what development psychologist Dr. Robert Kegan called the subject-object shift.[4] We shift from being subject to our experience and lacking choice to gaining the observational distance that helps us consciously choose our response. Practice Four: Soothing Self-Touch Back when I taught childbirth classes, one of my favorite lessons was about oxytocin, adrenalin, and how love acts as an antidote to fear. Here’s what I told my pregnant clients:  There are two major hormones at play in birth: oxytocin and adrenaline.