014 – Mini Musings: Creating Conditions

[0:00] Music.

[0:08] I’m Sarah Tacy and this is Threshold Moments, a podcast where guests and I share stories, about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves.
The path is unknown and the pull feels real. Together we share our grief, laughter, love, and life-saving tools.

[0:27] Music.

[0:39] Hello, welcome to this mini musings. Today I wanted to talk about this idea of creating conditions.

[0:46] So it’s not unusual these days as people are talking about trauma resolution work that you might hear someone talking about screaming into a pillow or punching a pillow.
Idea that when we have an emotion, it’s meant to be moved into motion, right? It is a response that something in our environment doesn’t feel right to our body. And as we learn to self-regulate, sometimes that regulation can seem as if we, or feel as if we are repressing a feeling.
And I love this example that Peter Levine gives in his book, In an Unspoken Voice.
He talks about this idea of maybe we like let out a scream.
And for so many of us, we’ve repressed our voice. And so that is a difficult thing to do and unthinkable thing to do.
But maybe we let out a scream and we’re like, oh, now I’m going to feel better.

[1:49] He gives the analogy of that being similar to having water on a stove and you’re heating it up, and the fire is on and it starts whistling.
So this tea kettle is whistling and then you open up the top of the tea kettle and giving even more of an outlet, let some of the steam off, and the water comes down to a more regulated state.

[2:16] So a map that came from Peter Levine, that Bridget Vixenin’s added to that she now teaches in alchemical alignment and calls a three directions map, gives us beautiful example of, if you can imagine a rainbow, and at the base of the rainbow on the left side, this is where you’re feeling regulated.
If something were to come up, Not too big, not too small.
It feels manageable.

[2:50] Activation takes place. And the activation is measured on this map on the vertical.
So you start heading up, and I would say that the horizontal is time.
You start heading up in time as you’re activated, and this would be, maybe your heart rate starts going faster.
You’re looking around to see what the outlet is.
And if there’s no threat, you may come right back down. And if you have no past history that would alert your body that there’s a threat, then you come back down.
Or maybe there’s a story you tell in your head. So as you get activated, you get really close to a place of looping, which is like your mind is going in circles, you’re ruminating.
You may have a like this feeling in your gut. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this and not just the gut feeling, but actually it feels like a heavy weight for myself. I’ll say I have a heavy weight in my stomach.
I’m like, Ooh, what is that?

[3:53] Usually I can say, Oh, that is me thinking that because that person said that thing that I’m in trouble.
So that comes from a young me thinking I’m in trouble.
The threat response is you won’t belong. and without belonging it’s like a death response.
So we can start getting activated and going up and then a number of things might help to distract or soothe us.
So I would say like the scream or the punch might be a way to soothe ourselves.
There’s also a possibility with Peter Levine’s work, he might say if that punch or that scream goes directly back to the time in which you were unable to punch or scream, it might create a, completion of the response and actually give your nervous system like a complete healing, of that nervous system pattern. But I would say in general, it would be quite literally or not literally metaphorically letting off steam. So other people might soothe or distract with.

[5:07] Playing video games, going on Instagram. You can soothe and distract by doing a beautiful breath practice. You can soothe and distract by counting slowly. You can soothe and distract in so many many ways that we might say are healthy and in so many ways that we might say are unhealthy, but in the presentation of this map that I’ve received, there is actually no judgment of, oh this is a good soothing or distraction or this is a bad soothing or distracting. It’s just, oh this is the thing that you knew to do in order to stabilize yourself.
If in that moment.

[5:50] You don’t have a stabilizing technique or a soothing or distracting technique.
Bridget added this idea of looping. So before we get to the top of the rainbow, but pretty darn close to it, you can imagine this cyclone or this tornado that rises up out of the left side of, the rainbow. And in this place, there can be a sense of flooding, a sense of overwhelm.
My experience is that when I’m in this place, it feels so real and eternal.
In this place, there are physiological things going on in a body that would remind you of other times that those physiological things happened, which helps it to feel like forever.
Oh, he said this thing, and I remember three years ago when he said this thing, and I should have thought of it when he said this thing when we first met.
First met, this is going to be forever.
I have felt this way so many times, and this is the looping.
This is where we’re gonna meet our unmet needs. This is where we’re gonna meet our boundary violations.
And in this place, we’re often sitting with greatest difficulty without the presence of stability.

[7:10] Of stability, without the presence of healthy companionship, which I think is why this work of somatic exploration, just the work that I also offer and is the work that Alchemical Alignment trains students in.
And I’m sure there are so many other forms too, right? Like this is just what’s fresh and forward for me right now.
Is to be in the presence of a stable other who can help give you some coordinates when you’re up, in this place of looping. I’ve mentioned in the preparation podcast this idea of going back on the timeline and building in preparation where we didn’t think we had preparation before.
This would fall under the category of meeting unmet needs. So we won’t go into that one, one that could be its own podcast another day.

[8:12] In the looping, you’re having harmful neural patterns and we often find ourselves in a double bind, a double bind being like, I must and I can’t.
And a double bind that Peter Levine gives in one of his books is during, after the car crash, which again, I talked about this incident in the preparation one.
The natural thing as you are coming out that the disoriented place of shock, would be to orient to your surroundings.
So he starts to want to look side to side to orient himself, but there’s a paramedic, an off-duty paramedic that shows up who yells, “‘Don’t move your head,’ and kind of grabs his head and stabilizes it.
So there was a double bind of, “‘I must orient, I can’t orient.’” For others, it might be, I must leave my job, or I will die inside.
I can’t leave my job or my family life as we know it will disintegrate because my income is needed, that I must, I can’t.
So there are many tools. Again, this could be another podcast for meeting these double binds.

[9:29] But what I’m really, really into is what are the conditions that we create over time that can help us either as we’re coming down out of looping or that might even build in new patterning over time, so that we never loop to begin with.
I don’t wanna say never loop for anything, but that that can actually change.
This would go into the idea of integration and when you have enough positive experiences, of these conditions over time, that the neural patterning starts to change so that what you once perceived as a threat or a truth is no longer perceived the same way.
So I’m unsure, as you can hear in these podcasts, I’m really trying to give lineage to where many of the ideas that are like so fresh in me or maybe it’s been 20 years or maybe it’s been 30 years that it’s been in my life.
I love to give lineage as well as how it has woven into my life and or what has come up through me and not directly from lineage. And so I believe the term creating conditions is also a Bridget Vixen’s term.
And I freaking love it.
I love it.

[10:44] Some of the conditions that we talk about are from various practitioners.
And so I’ll name a few and maybe where those conditions came from.
And you could think on your own too, what is the condition that I build into my life over time?
So the idea is that, so I’ll name one condition, one condition being a pause.
The idea is that as we build these conditions, your activation can actually go higher without going into looping.
You might be able to feel some of your bigger feelings, possibly in the presence of another.
And be able to stay there with somebody else who is stable and make it all the way through to the other side until there’s integration of that pattern.
You get to actually finish out the pattern, finish out the activation.
You have to actually go a little higher into the activation and come through to the other side.
And this could happen in a single session. This could happen after three years of work.
It could happen at the end of a lifetime. timing is not guaranteed.
So pause is one of these conditions. And this one, you know, this one is not directly and only related to Ray Castellino.

[12:08] I know in the book, in a man’s search for meaning, Viktor Frankl talks about a pause.
He says something about the space between the event and the reaction of that event to that event.
There’s a pause, there’s a space. And in that space, in that pause, in that breath, is where our power lies.

[12:39] I love the idea that a pause might make life more digestible.
In the alchemical alignment training, if there’s material that begins to flood any one student, there’s a practice of saying, hey, can we have a pause?
Because as momentum builds, there is often, there are often feelings that don’t have time to get processed.
There’s information that doesn’t have time to be processed.
And so we may pause.

[13:15] In the past, I haven’t noticed it as much in the last year or two. In the past, when I would talk about things that are important to me or maybe very vulnerable to me, my body would start shaking and I don’t know that it was visible to the person across from me, but I could feel it in my jaw, the back of my neck would tighten up. I felt this micro shaking in my body and it seemed as if, my body was trying to protect me, right?
It was tightening, trying to hold on, don’t say that thing, don’t tell that story.
But there is a deeper truth within me, and there was a part of me that felt safe enough to share what I was sharing. So it was this on-off, I’m like, I’m doing it anyway, don’t do it, I’m doing it anyway, don’t do it.
And as I was in a session, I believe it was with Tell Darden, And I got to just pause, or maybe it was one with Bridget, and hey, I’m noticing the sensation in my body.
Can I pause? And instead of trying to make it go away, or instead of trying to do a breath practice, like these things of stabilizing, or using my mind to reason or rationalize it out as I just did, I just sat, and I just let it be, and I just noticed it, and I just sat with it until it began to settle.
Always kind of saying like, and you don’t have to settle, I’m just gonna sit beside you.

[14:43] And then when it would start to kind of act up again, I would ask for another pause.
And it’s just so interesting as I’m saying this, that I do believe there’s been some integration and completion of this pattern that I had from like age 11 until maybe a year or two ago, because I don’t notice it happening as much, maybe if at all in harder conversations or more vulnerable conversations.
I may even, just as I’m talking about something, pause to say, before I say the words, is this really what I mean?
Or I may have said the thing, I might pause to say, is that what I mean? that up to date.
So another one is choice.
In so many different groups I’ve been in, there’s a group agreement about saying no.
Hey, we’re going to have all these things we’re going to do together as a group.
And your first answer gets to be no. No, I will not participate. And then you can just wait for an impulse. Does a yes show up? And if a yes shows up and you want to change your mind again, and you and you don’t wanna share, no.
Don Stapleton used to say, the only way we have an authentic yes is if we have our no.

[15:58] I worked with a woman and she will be on the podcast we recorded at six months ago where we talked about part of her healing as she was really in the dark night of the soul was to recognize like, hey, look, you just paused.
And in that pause, you notice that you had a desire and your desire was to go sit in the other room instead of where you are, and this is huge.
In the reclamation of ourselves, to notice that we have a desire, and then to make a choice on behalf of that desire, is the path forward. It is a path home to ourselves.
Choice is a condition. We get to practice, we get to create.
Support and community. Community or being accompanied, being relational with another, with a win-win scenario.

[17:02] To me, I’d say seek this out above and beyond almost anything else.
Seek out relationships in which there is a win-win scenario, in which both people’s needs matter, in which there can be a pause, there can be a choice, which both people want the best for the other while also honoring their sovereignty.
As we practice creating relationships like this, when we come up against relationships that don’t match that, it’s an automatic mismatch.
So instead of thinking, I must be crazy, I must be such a burden, all the things that we think must be wrong with us when we’re in an unhealthy relationship and that people are doubting us, when we start building relationships that feel good.

[17:56] That are kind, that are loving. When we find a person who could be stable while we’re crying, while we’re falling apart, and they are not there to fix us, they’re simply there to be by our sides.
As we find more of that in life, our life gets richer, our life gets more stable, our nervous the system begins to heal.
There’s this idea of the polyvagal theory and Steven Porges, I think, I might be saying his last name wrong, that it’s not just a nervous system of like sympathetic fight or flight and then freeze, that there’s also health in each one of these places.
So the health and the parasympathetic, right?
There’s the freeze, which would be the hypo nervous system, but in the health and the dorsal vagal repair, we’re gonna start to have the ability to be with another and feel relaxed.
This is often looked at like breastfeeding, that a mother could be relaxed and that a baby could eat and digest, while being so close in such proximity to another person.

[19:19] That we could lay on the couch with our lover or with our friend or with a partner, and relax two bodies that close to each other.
That you could have a meal with friends and actually digest.
And it’s okay if these things aren’t available to you right now.
Michael Leary and I in episode one talked about this idea of a north star and maybe in episode four when I talked about the reticular formation just just having the, I wonder what it would be like, to eat with friends and feel relaxed and I could digest.

[20:03] Wonder what that would be like. And that we might find our safest people.
And I’ve said this in other podcasts and interviews that, and again, actually in episode one with Michael, we talk about when he was nearly mute, that first, as he became relational, he was watching CrossFit on YouTube.
And then there was trying to do those physical things like box with a boxing bag.
So now it went from screen to a physical thing that he’s punching.
Then it went to being in nature. Can I be relational with nature?
Can I go outside and notice the seasons changing? And then it might build up into, Can it be relational with another human being?
And it might start with if you have access to a therapist, if you have access to a school counselor, people who are trained in this way, or maybe there is a grandmother in your family or a neighbor who does kind things and listens.
Maybe there’s an animal and you start with a dog that we get to build slowly into these conditions.
And with this comes boundary repair, another condition that we create.
That somebody listens to our no when we say no. Everybody hears our yes and celebrates quietly.

[21:33] Boundary repair can go back into the somatic exploration, which I haven’t touched in much yet on these podcasts, because that feels a little more pre-verbal and hard to explain those experiences. But the idea of going back in time, meeting unmet needs and actually feeling into our field, like how much space do we need? And so that comes into right distance as a condition.
Right distance being like, hmm, I just want to say this is not true for my family, but I’m going to give an example.
I can be in a healthy relationship with my mother from 3000 miles away, where somebody might be like, I need my mother right by my side, for me to be in good relationship with her.
I can have this friend, if you can have friendships and concentric circles and like my third circle out, and we can touch in quarterly, and we can do it at a restaurant outside of my house.

[22:34] And we won’t talk about politics, or I know we will talk about politics, so I can do it for a half an hour, or that really turns me on, so I wanna do it for three hours, and after that, I’m gonna go for a bike ride, or I will not do it.
Here’s a condition or a boundary, which would be like, I will not do it on Friday.
Everybody loves to go out on Fridays, but for me, I’m so overwhelmed.
So a boundary repair would be like, you all can do what you wanna do, Fridays, I’m not available.

[23:06] I’ll name one more. Oh gosh, there are so many good ones. Self-care.
Sel Darden once said, self-care as the basis of community care or for community care.
Sometimes I feel bad when people say things I love And I’m like, I believe I asked her permission many months ago. Can I repeat that? Cause I love it.
I have heard people talk about, and I have felt it myself actually, the insecurity of when we take care of ourselves.
So many of us have been raised to think that the way that we are going to make it forward in life and the way that we are most valuable and worthy is when we are doing things and getting things done and doing things for others, things that are measurable, things that are making money.
So if we were to take time for self-care, if we put joy as a priority, instead of say, maybe people get joy from making dinner, but say you don’t make dinner for your family because you’re gonna go out with your girlfriend, or you’re gonna go lifting, or you’re gonna go on a bike ride, or you’re gonna walk through nature.
And for your family for that night, you might say, hey, can this person or that person figure out dinner?
Maybe we’ll do takeout because tonight my joy matters.

[24:27] Our self-care so deeply affects every single person around us.
In one of the last episodes with Tameka Shilbi-Koel, she talked about truth aches and how when we’re not in alignment with our truth and we’re not speaking them honestly, that it’s contagious.
And I think that’s true with self-care too. When we’re not taking care of ourselves and we show up with extra anxiety, Then our kids might wonder, oh my God, what did I do?
I must have done something wrong.
And we think that we’re showing our kids hard work or that we’re taking care of them, that there will be the story of my mom always sacrificed everything for me, which is a beautiful story, right? But then what does the next generation do?
They sacrifice everything for the next generation. And then we’re living lives of sacrifice, which could be looked at as beautiful, But what if there was some in between where it’s not an either or, it’s a both and?
My mother found her joy and demonstrated that for me.

[25:35] And I felt comfortable in my body around her. And I felt more joy in my body when I was around her.
We would dance in the kitchen together.
We would sing songs, we would bake together. And sometimes at night I was sad when she’d go out, but she was so clear that she would be back and she came back happy, right?
That our happiness might ripple out to make others feel like it is safe to be happy, that your worthiness is worth it, that your wellbeing is worth it.

[26:09] So this idea of self-care, the basis of community care, how does your self-care affect the wellbeing of everybody around you.
So again, all of these things like yes to healthy outlets for screaming or, you know, I would even say screaming that it could be violent to your vocal cords. So being aware of like, when do you need the full volume on that? And there can also be like an energetic scream.

[26:38] When or how do you have healthy outlets for fight or flight? Again, this would be maybe a different podcast is that you have healthy outlets because it’s important we let off the of steam and maybe even as we have more healthy outlets, maybe healthy outlets would be a condition that we create.
That’s exciting.

[26:58] So that it’s not just a reaction in the moment to stabilize, but it’s a healthy outlet that helps heal our nervous system over time.
And I’m just gonna put this inquiry out there. I’m wondering it myself, how do we know if it’s a condition that’s helping us heal over time or not?
Like I’m thinking about running, how it can be such an amazing outlet for people.
I’m not putting this out as an answer, just truly a curiosity.
If over time we are healing, would there be less of a need to run as hard or work out as hard?
I sometimes think that people, I’ve felt this, I’ll say this for myself too, are afraid that if they slow down and if they find more joy, that they’ll lose their motivation, and they know how much their motivation has got them, their job, their finances, so many of the things that they love in life.
If I slow down even more, if I don’t push on this deadline, if I say no to more things, will I become sluggish?

[28:10] And I am into this idea of the tidal nature that possibly as we slow down, that as we actually gain energy and we begin to fill up and we begin to bring things to life, as we are brought back to life ourself, we start to have intrinsic motivation pouring out of us versus pulling from a dry well.

[28:40] So if I got lost in the question there, the inquiry, I’ll go back to that for a moment is when do we know, how do we know that healing is happening?
For me, I know this when I start responding to the same, I’d call that, this is what I would call my quantum leap is like same situation happens, different response to the same situation.
I don’t have to cool myself down. I don’t have to yell. I don’t have to punch a pillow.
I don’t have to breathe. I don’t have to have a rage journal. I don’t have to, self-calm. I don’t need to call a therapist. I don’t need to go for a run.
Like the thing happens and it doesn’t, it’s not a freeze either.
It’s like, oh, that happened and wow, doesn’t bother me at all.
That would be a sign that if something that you used to send me spinning just doesn’t.
It would be maybe the extinction of that pattern.
And then I might find, yeah, maybe I don’t have to run to deal with that, but I’m now running because I want to run, just because running feels good, because I like moving my body, because I like the fresh air, because I like the sun on my skin.

[29:58] When we have to do it for an outlet, when we have to do it to regulate, which great, awesome that we have those skills.
First feeling the pull, oh, this would feel so good to do this.
So that’s all I have for today. The three directions map by Bridgette Vickstens about chemical alignment modified from Steven Levine.
The three points being the beginning, When we’re calm, we get activation, at which point we can soothe, stabilize, and distract.
This is a choice point where looping may happen. This is a second direction.
And the third direction is bringing us towards completion, integration, and extinction.
And the way that we might possibly be able to handle higher activation is through the conditions that we create.
And I think I want to really say that the presence of another can be such a huge condition that we are, so heavily trained against an, idea of independence being our way out. I would say over independence is also a trauma response and, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that ability and thank you for those skills and, When is it safe to update that pattern?
Thank you so much for listening in.

[31:21] Music.

[31:33] Until next time.
Thank you for tuning in. It’s been such a pleasure.
If you’re looking for added support, I’m offering a program that’s totally free called 21 Days of Untapped Support.
It’s pretty awesome. It’s very easy. very helpful. You can find it at sarahtacy.com. And if you loved this episode, please subscribe and like. Apparently it’s wildly useful. So we could just explore what happens when you scroll down to the bottom. Subscribe, rate, maybe say a thing or two. If you’re not feeling it, Don’t do it. It’s totally fine.
I look forward to gathering with you again. Thank you so much.

[32:13] Music.