Tomorrow: Embodiment Hour @ The Stoa at noon ~ Being with Ukraine

Creating a community of unconditional presence can help emotions move and trauma come to light for healing and wholling.

Photos from Ukraine

Dear Friends,

Tomorrow at noon I will host my weekly embodiment experience at The Stoa. Each week we gather to feel our way into a deeper understanding of the news of the week and to leverage essential skills of embodiment and empathy to help us understand, heal, and respond to key movements and moments in the culture.

I have to admit, I felt conflicted about how to approach our session tomorrow. Part of me wanted to offer you a reprieve from the challenge of digesting difficult and controversial news. I wanted to give us a chance to practice the skill of inviting joy, bliss, and positive regard into the system. I thought it might be nice to watch something hopeful, like this beautiful short video by Ari Kuschnir and his daughter, Luna. Ari released this movie the day before the Russian invasion.

But, as I sat with it I knew I needed to offer a space tomorrow to process what feels most alive in the culture now: the war in Ukraine. This is something I need and I’m sure many of us could benefit from: a place to be in unconditional presence with what is arising for each of us, all of us, around this horror and tragedy.

Aside from this being the primary news story of the moment and a truly unbelievable historical turn (I never thought I’d see another war in my lifetime), I’m aware that this war is asking something sacred of us. It’s asking us to show up and to witness what is unfolding with the whole of our being. It’s asking us not to turn away; to FEEL our own connection to what is happening.

The simple framework of fight, flight or freeze has been alive for me this week. Do you know this classification of the neurobiological effects of trauma? It’s a good one to be aware of. We can be more precise with how we understand our response to trauma and the steps we need to take to restore equilibrium. I have been watching myself fight with my daughter (she is becoming a teen), try to flee from overwhelming social dynamics, and freeze in the face of terrifying news. How are you responding?

Beyond the geopolitical maneuvering, this war is an expression of the unprocessed trauma of two world wars and countless acts of violence and aggression in our modern history. It is a symptom of our dysfunctional relationship to power, scarcity of resources, fundamental sense of separateness/isolation, unprocessed grief, and fear. It is arising out of generational trauma, collective trauma, and personal trauma. This is what must be healed if we are to avoid further destruction.

The way to work with trauma at scale is to turn towards it in community. We need each other to coregulate. Deep, empathic listening and tuning into the feelings that are arising with precision and love… is the medicine needed now. To create spaces where we can surface our feelings and hold each other in the light of truth… is a great act of service that can restore coherence to the collective. Even a small group of us, gathered in a focused way with the intention to feel what we feel, what needs to be felt, can have a huge impact on the collective field of consciousness. As the great teacher of collective trauma healing, Thomas Hübl, often says: WE ARE THE IMMUNE SYSTEM OF THE PLANET. We strengthen our resistance to evil, ignorance, and violence by bringing the light of conscious awareness and compassion to bear on the situation. If you are not familiar with Thomas’ work or if you are, I highly recommend his recent talk on Ukraine and trauma. It’s beautiful:

It is understandable to turn away at times; especially if we are inhabiting our small and individualized bubbles, tending to children, or keeping ourselves stabilized and not overwhelmed. But together maybe we can let in a little more.

I commit to holding a safe space for feeling tomorrow. If you’ve been having trouble processing what is happening in Ukraine or the news of the war, or if the news is bringing up trauma in your own family history, please know you are not alone and we can do it together. If you feel this would be helpful to you or you feel you have the capacity and resilience to help stabilize the group, please come. Please join us tomorrow for an hour dedicated to the people of Ukraine and Russia, but also to the healing of the trauma of war that lives in all of our bodies.

Note: I may share some photos of the war from this NPR article.

Moving forward, I hope to bring into this series some more teachings related to embodiment and empathy that can help us develop highly refined perception, but also more resilience. I’d love to work with positive affirmations and practices that can fortify the light body or subtle body. Trauma causes repetition and habitual patterns in the individual and collective. That old adage about history repeating itself - that’s trauma! It doesn’t have to be that way. As we heal and integrate fragments of unprocessed feeling, frozen parts of our energy body, we release the potential for new futures to arise. We release more free energy into the system and we make space for miracles to happen.

This event is free for all Stoa Patreon members and for subscribers to my Substack.