Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow 9am EST ~ Working with Numbness
Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow 9am EST ~ Working with Numbness
When we become aware of numbness as a sensation, we realize how often we default to this position to protect ourselves in a world that can be overwhelming.
Dear Friends,
Tomorrow morning we’ll gather for our weekly talk, meditation, and community share. Please feel free to join even if you’re new to meditation. This practice of Coming Home is an intersubjective meditation practice that emerges based on who attends and the quality of our collective presence. Everyone is welcome.
What I’d like to work with tomorrow is numbness, or what seems like the absence of sensation and feeling. This physical/ sensory experience can also trigger or be accompanied by dissociation, which is the mental process of disconnecting from thoughts, feelings, memories, other people, or your environment and circumstances. We might call it checking out, numbing out, feeling spacy, daydreaming, absence (in contrast to presence)…
The main thing I want to bring forward is how prevalent this state is for all of us. And how the experience is so common, we’ve created cultural “norms” around it. We relate in ways that actually reinforce numbness and dissociation all the time—in ourselves, in each other, with our children, etc. Becoming aware of this state—how it arises in the body and the effect it has on the way we interact with others and how we perceive our environment—is the key to understanding our own agency and intuition, and getting closer to Truth.
I used to think checking out was something I did only periodically when I was very bored (in a meeting, for example) or when I was feeling overly stressed and needed to unwind. I wrongly assumed it was something I chose to do; a process I had full control over. I now see those instances are only the tip of the iceberg; that’s just the numbing I am aware of.
There is so much more of it happening—on a daily basis—that I am completely unaware of. Bringing this to light is what interests and excites me because the fog of personal, generational, and collective trauma is the primary thing we must address in order to navigate the current transition and make a new world. We have to heal and integrate in order to SEE what’s actually happening and to KNOW where we want to go. Discernment is impossible from a state of numbness. Genuine creativity (not the solution-finding born of fear) is impossible from numbness. CARING is impossible when we are numb.
Numbness is trauma. Something happened in the past that was overwhelming and so we shut down or “down-regulated” the nervous system—the freeze aspect of trauma response. Because of this, a part of our subtle nervous system is “frozen” in time and not fully operational. There are parts of us that have been frozen for so long we don’t even sense the problem. We go about our work contracted and at half capacity, and we think that’s “normal.”
The problem is much bigger than a personal one. All of us alive at this time are swimming in the collective and ancestral sea of trauma created by many generations of violence, oppression, pain, fear, famine, exile, survival…that were not felt. We’re trying to live our lives and solve problems we can’t even fully feel.
One of my practices these days is to notice when and where I am numb. I simply take my seat on the meditation cushion and begin to feel into the places I literally cannot feel within myself. Numbness is not nothing—it’s an actual sensation. When you begin to recognize it, you can then feel it and keep feeling it until it yields and becomes something other than numbness.
I am always gentle in this process. We want to respect that numbness has an important function. Usually, it is protecting wounded or sensitive parts of ourselves. Eventually, with a lot of care, I can begin to thaw some of the numb and frozen places and bring more feeling, more of my awareness back online. It’s liberating, refreshing and extremely reassuring. What I begin to feel is that the numbness, which I’ve put in place to protect myself at a certain point in my life, is now not only unnecessary, but actually counterproductive in that it prevents me from feeling what’s actually happening. When I am numb I cannot feel when there is a real and imminent threat to my being. I’ve begun to see that the best way to keep myself “safe” is to be awake and aware, to have full access to my sensing and perceiving power as often as possible. This is also what makes me a better mother and partner. I am present for more of life when I am not numb.
I love to watch animals in their bodies. Animals, even domesticated ones, are still more connected to their “animal body” and the perception of environmental cues they need to navigate and survive. Animals like cats, dogs, and horses are extremely attuned to their environment, to people, to emotions, to thoughts! How many of you have a “psychic” dog or cat who seems to read your mind when you’re preparing to go for a walk or feed them? We can learn a lot by watching how animals use their senses to navigate the world and how those senses are a full-body function, not a mental process.
Tomorrow we will create a space to explore the ways we’ve numbed ourselves and how we hold that numbness in our systems. We will gently investigate and invite an opening and thawing in the places where we are ready to come back into our body and be more in touch with our experience. It will be a process of warming up and opening up the flow of life through the subtle body. It may be challenging, but I promise it will be illuminating and hopefully, also invigorating.
A note on payment for Coming Home sessions…
I appreciate donations for Coming Home sessions if you feel called to give. Suggested donation is $10-20. Venmo @ElizabethSchuyler-Brown and PayPal is eschuylerbrown@gmail.com. If you are a paid subscriber, you’ve already done your part. Thank you!
Join us tomorrow from 9-10:00/10:15am EST