This post builds upon the previous ones. Scroll all the way to the bottom to catch up.
Okay, enough with the nesting. Do you feel ready to move on to the next stages of human development, which will help you safely unleash your innate gifts and get to know who you really are and what deeply moves you? Let’s find out if you really are.
Check out the activities below. If you can comfortably do them without too much resistance, which could be coming up in the form of mental noise (i.e., extensive planning and to-do lists, whirring worry, or random thoughts that take you out of the now), or even outright anxiety or blatant discomfort, stay with nesting for a little while longer (read on to understand why this is important and to access some ways to deepen and reinforce your previous work in this domain).
1. Meditation: Can you focus on the present and move beyond initial thoughts that may arise to experience right now just as it is? This can be while using walking, a mantra, a prayer, or some other mechanism to quiet the intellect, but it is important that you can transcend mental noise to access innocent presence in the mind. In other words, can you reclaim some connection to a child-like capacity to just be, without agenda and pressure, maybe even with joy and spaciousness?
2. Mindfulness: Can you stay present with the sensual experience of just being? Can you slow down enough to feel your feet walking, your body breathing, or your mouth tasting? Can you tolerate idle time, or do you unknowingly protect yourself from the pain of your memories (explicit flashbacks or encoded discomfort in your body) by ensuring you don’t have space to feel? Can you be alone and awake to your human experience without constantly distracting, avoiding, and go-go-go-ing? The Dalai Lama himself reports needing to remind himself to be mindful over thirty times a day when he notices his attention drifting. The expectation here is not to be constantly mindful, but to be able to feel safe enough to access this capacity. These is really hard stuff. What we are going for here is the ability to safely be in your own presence and aware of what is happening in your body.
3. Alone Time in Nature: Can you take mindfulness one step further and spend time in nature and move as slowly as an elephant? Can you see the colors around you, feel the ground below you, and hear the birds chirping without escaping into your mind, being accompanied by another human or set of headphones, or titrating the experience by knowing just how long you will be in the woods, exactly what you will do in them, and what you will be doing next?
4. Let Toddlers Lead You: Can you play with young children without controlling the agenda? Can you just ask, “what do you want to do today?” to a child and join in whatever they have in mind without clinging to the need to be in charge or to be productive? Of course, if these are your children, this will be a time-limited capacity because you will then need to go back to clean-up or follow-the-schedule mode, but can you do it? Can you play just to be with them and share in the innocent magic and wonder? We will unlock play and creativity more formally as milestones next, but are you able to join in the creation of a block tower, or are you too distracted or even anxious about everything else there is to do? Can you behold the magic that is infants and toddlers and just marvel at the beauty of these creatures? Can you breathe those delicious deep-belly breaths alongside them and be slow, slow, slow?
If you can do these things without too much resistance or discomfort, you are ready to move on to the next blog (coming shortly). This means that you can reclaim sufficient safety, wonder, and innocence to create an entirely new foundation, or “homeostasis” in your nervous system, made up of these essential human building blocks. If you are still uncomfortable with unplanned time, there is absolutely no shame in this. In fact, shame is the very building block within you that we are trying to let go of. *
We must complete each life stage before we can move on the next. The expectation is not to be feel perfectly safe all the time. You can of course continue to work on the checklist items as you simultaneously foster the capacities to play, create, and follow joy. But, if you don’t have access to safety and if you can’t soothe yourself sufficiently to overcome initial discomfort being on your own to enjoy your own company, jumping to the next step too early can do more harm than good. If we don’t feel like we intrinsically belong and deserve cozy pleasure, we won’t be able to develop the capacities to safely play. Instead, fostering the capacities to play or create will become a “should,” aka another to-do governed by our youngest, most threatened hypervigilant parts. ** They may have dipped a toe in safety in the previous stage while still clinging to hyper vigilant, threatened stances from which they undoubtedly were able to identify something scary. If we start experimenting with change without really letting it in and allowing a new way of doing things, we significantly risk unconscious self-sabotage and perceived defeat. To our youngest, most fearful parts, the known misery feels safer than the unknown, even if on a certain level they recognize that the unknown could yield freedom or spaciousness. This launches a process of us imprisoning ourselves in a prison of our own making in which the old, stress- and depression-informed ways may even become stronger as we simultaneously lament how there is something wrong with us and our capacity to progress. It is for this reason that I break the first stage of human development into two parts: 1) nesting and 2) wonder and free play.
Most developmental theorists put these two steps together as the first stage, that of innocence, but I think they must be tackled linearly to ensure we truly feel safe and at home in our body before we start trying to do things with it. We must really truly change the narrative surrounding safety before we can learn new skills and go to the next stage. If nesting is unfamiliar, the narrator in your mind is very likely a planning-oriented, young survivalist part. Slow down and take time to really nest and discover your innate, calm, self-accepting true Self capable of safely giving and receiving love. You may not have had the luxury in life to operate from this place, but it is in there. And, it is You.
Okay, ready for the nesting hack? Imagine getting everything you needed in utero and early babyhood and see if you can feel into what this would have been like. Because your parents may not have gotten what they needed in their infancies to have had calm nervous systems that would have been safe to be around, it can be really helpful to imagine growing in the womb of Gaia/Mother Earth personified as a full-bodied tree being or “wombing” in a grotto or nest in the earth itself. Tap slowly back and forth on your thighs or with your feet on the ground as you do so to soothe your body and quiet your intellect. Allow in the felt sense of nurturing support from a mother who loves you unconditionally. Feel desired and wanted. Imagine that all your nutritional needs are being met such that all there is to focus on is the comfort of the experience. Allow yourself to marvel at the wonder and joy of developing a body and the awe of coming into this world. Tap back and forth until you can feel this alternative positive early experience in every cell of your body. If memories of your actual early experience or other forms of discomfort or distress arise, flush them out of your feet and into the earth to be composted and transformed into something beautiful. This is old, survival baggage you don’t need anymore. You are safe now. Once you can embody the earth nesting, notice what positive self-beliefs this would have allowed for and tap these in until they feel true. If you had felt safe and desired in utero, what would feel true for you today? I belong? All is well? I am lovable? I can trust myself and determine who to trust? I choose to rejoice in life? I love and accept myself and where I am in life right now? Tap back and forth until the positive beliefs feel as true as possible.
As you can see, what we are doing here is healing your inner most child. We will heal the other children, or ego states, in the following developmental stages by giving them what they didn’t get. Then, we can unlock the deep gifts you didn’t know you possessed because you didn’t feel safe at the age at which these would have expressed themselves for them to make themselves known and blossom. If you truly feel ready to do this and are frustrated by the tease that is this article, here is a hint to get you started with the next stage. Follow joy and wonder as your North Star. This is the key to unlocking your intuition and living an authentic life. These are not childish, unproductive ways of living, but actually the basis of the most sagacious, spiritual practices. The joy of living involves childlike play and whimsy, but you can also follow joy and wonder throughout your workday, marveling at the fact that you are an adult with a job typing at a computer, grown-up, impressive, and competent. In free time, allow what feels truly joyful to show you what you deeply enjoy doing. See the world around you through this lens.
* On Shame:
Shame parallels feigned analgesic death in animals (think rabbit caught in a snare or a deer in headlights) and is what we humans fight hard to avoid because we experience this mechanism of playing dead or hiding in plain sight as akin to death. Our brain draws on the neurocircuitry shared with animals to automatically perceive our external environment(s) as automatically life threatening, with no way out except to shut down. Unbeknown to us, behind the scenes, our nervous system then fights hard to get us out of and avoid the shutdown that is shame. We do this via sympathetic arousal, or facets of our fight-or-flight mechanisms (those delightful emotions we get addicted to (in addition to getting addicted to the ‘I am bad’ messaging of shame): fear, anger, sadness, panic, and seeking an external solution). See previous blog for more on these addictions.
A rabbit can fake death and go back to living his life amongst his colony as if nothing happened because of his simpler, instinctual brain. Though we share his mechanism of trying to hide in plain sight, our brains are much larger and more complex and thus had to develop analytical mechanisms as part of their growth. All a rabbit needs to do is move the initial energy of the fear and ensuing faked death out of his body to go back to stress-free playing with his colony. In the animal world, this energy release is called “spronking.” Have you ever seen videos of the amazing leaps antelopes take after escaping a lion? This is what it entails, and for animals it is as simple as this. Big jump. Back to joy and innocence. If a threat arises again, then it’s back to survival mode, but there is no preemptive planning for the next attack or rumination in the interim. But, our brains are too complicated to exist without an “I” analyzing how we are operating in relation to our internal and external landscapes and making decisions [this “I” is really many “I’s” when we have experienced trauma (which we all have), and they don’t usually work together, creating distress – a major issue of human development that this blog seeks to unpack and provide hacks to]. What this means is we want to make meaning of everything that happens to us. We are not mind readers, we don’t have the full picture, and we tend to bias towards negativity or self-blame, especially when we have attachment injuries at our foundation, so more often we analyze a scary external circumstance as meaning that we are shameful.
Attachment injuries can be understood as events that shatter our belief systems. We believe people to be safe and trustworthy and then something happens that makes us question this safe foundation of joyful connection, and our innocence is lost. We no longer can engage with the world without vigilantly scanning for threats, analyzing who is safe, or skipping over this taxing work altogether by putting up walls between us and others. As social animals, we rely on belonging in the herd for survival, but shame makes us think we don’t belong, are utterly alone, and thus are at a primal risk of death. This is why the sustained relational “little t traumas” that we feel ashamed for being impacted by are actually just as significant if not more so in terms of lasting distress in the mind as the “Big T Traumas.” Sustained relational traumas result in Complex PTSD, making us believe we can’t trust anyone including ourselves, causing our hypervigilant, danger-scanning mechanisms to always stay on, even when we’re sleeping, scanning for internal and external threats.
Shame is bad enough when it happens later in life. Take a girl who believes herself to belong socially her whole life, reinforced by supportive, loving parents and easeful peer relations until she faces a sudden event where, at thirteen, a friend or group of friends deems her “uncool” and cuts her off. This is paradigm altering, and she now is anxious about attaching to other people. This is an explicit memory that the brain is aware of (even if she tries to suppress it because she is embarrassed to be so impacted by it). What this means is that sometimes the brain will flashback to this memory for the rest of this woman’s life and automatically play it like a movie in the background when something looks like, smells like, sounds like, or otherwise reminds the woman of the initial core memory (unless it is adaptively processed using bilateral stimulation a la EMDR). She will feel anxious in the present that somebody is not texting her back because an old story is playing in the background, not realizing that she is thirty-five, married with children and friends, and part of a safe tribe. But then the trigger will subside, and she will remember she is safe. She had a foundation of safety and she has safety now, even though a specific insecure ego state (thirteen-year-old locked in time) will frequently be reminded of the past and automatically jump into the driver’s seat in her brain and steer the car into danger land.
But when attachment injuries occur before age three, these are implicit memories, “the issues in our tissues.” We can’t identify a flashback because these preverbal memories are often uniquely felt and not stored in the mind with images or thoughts. Thus, starting before the age of three and as early as in utero, one stores a felt sense of terror, abandonment, and/or hurt, confused about when it is happening, often thinking that it is always happening, and that there is, and has always been, something fundamentally wrong with him or her. In cases of preverbal relational trauma, shame is thus ingrained at the base of our operating systems because we didn’t get the safety we needed to be an innocent baby or young child; it is all we know, and it is what we deeply get addicted to (in addition to its protectors). This is very different than the event that occurred for the twelve-year-old, which was paradigm shattering and constituted a major attachment wound, yet only threatened her capacity to trust others or connect in certain settings. Babies typically develop attachment capacities via the ventral vagal system, or social engagement system. We need our caregivers to calmly engage with us and lovingly nest with us in order to develop the capacities to connect with not only others but also others. These capacities are learned via early social engagement; this system does not come online automatically. There is nothing wrong with us if we are socially anxious. We just didn’t get what we needed to know how to not be. Your mother had a mother too, and she very likely didn’t get what she would have needed to mirror a safe nervous system to you, so these issues are often intergenerational.
It is crucial that you slow down enough to grieve what you didn’t get. By grieving, you can learn safe social engagement first and foremost with yourself and, in doing so, overcome the self-criticism at the core of shame. Ideally, you can also invite others into this vulnerability, drawing on the safety of their social engagement system to develop your own. You can also pleasure your way out of this early foundation if you allow yourself to feel deserving of cozy yumminess because this level of self-prioritization directly counters the beliefs inbedded in shame.
* * I have said this before but it bears repeating. We all have child parts or fragmented ego states. This doesn’t mean you have Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously called multiple personality disorder), just that your brain was overwhelmed at certain points in your life and aspects of your consciousness got locked in time. You brilliantly developed ways to protect you that were necessary then but now, because they don’t know that what happened is over, they are clinging to the protective structures that not only do not protect you anymore but keep you in a prison of your own making. The protective functions become symptoms of mental unrest (e.g., scanning for threat becomes anxiety, shutting down overwhelm becomes not feeling joy aka “anhedonia,” and shutting out unsafe people becomes attachment difficulties and social/performance anxiety, etc.). Do not get frustrated when these emerge, or they will feel more unsafe and fight harder to protect you. Instead, try to approach them from your most loving, adult parts and orient them to your present safety, thank them for everything they have done to keep you safe, and invite them to get their job done more effectively by taking on a new role. Ask them what the function of their role was at the time that they developed it. If they judged others to feel less insecure, for example, would they now want to help you feel confident by highlighting your strengths that surface throughout the day, given that it is now safe to more directly feel secure about yourself (you are now in charge of who you surround yourself with and not beholden to people who make you feel badly about yourself)?