018 – Mini Musings: Embracing Resuscitation

[0:00] Hello, I’m so excited for this next episode. And before it starts, I wanna send out a little reminder that I am opening two spots.
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[0:43] Music.

[0:50] Hello, welcome.
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.

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[1:21] Join us.
Hello, hello, hello. Today on Mini Musings of the Threshold Moments podcast, I wanted to talk about resuscitation.
I’m just in this very moment, maybe for the first time, perhaps thinking, oh, I haven’t quite described to my listeners why I do these Mini Musings.
Maybe it’s obvious, maybe it’s not, because the podcast is called Threshold Moments and I’m not sharing Mini Musings about mini threshold moments.
I’m sharing in many musings, various orientations, coordinate points on a map, in hopes that anybody who is going through a threshold.

[2:07] Or even if you’re not going through, right? There’s that line in the Desiderata about practicing.
And I mentioned it in the preparation too, like while you’re well, practicing, creating conditions that are healthy for your nervous system so that when the challenge is big, you have created conditions and systems that are supportive to your wellbeing.
And so that’s what these mini musings are, I hope, is a place that you can fall back to, a place that you can build it into your life while you’re doing well.
And if you are in a place where you are overwhelmed, struggling, having a hard time, that there might be parts of these mini musings that you can hold on to and say like, okay.

[2:53] I’m not alone over here. I’m not the only one who’s experiencing this.
And actually this is a super normal part of the experience.
So I would say a year and a half ago, I started to get a little bit more sleep.
Maybe it was just a year ago.
I started to get a little bit more sleep.
I did some intensive sessions with a friend mentor, Therese Jornlin.
And I was trying to explain to her how there were ways in which I’ve always seen myself.

[3:33] That no longer seemed to serve me.
And it didn’t feel like an upgrade. It didn’t feel like an update.
Not like, oh, I used to be a people pleaser and that doesn’t feel good anymore.
And I’m gonna upgrade to saying no, which actually maybe that is actually part of what was happening.
But the way I saw it was like, man, I used to love.
Connecting people with other great people, like connecting great people with great people.
Love it. When I held leverage events, my hope is, wow, I got access to these, really incredible thought leaders. And I would love to create a platform in which, people from Maine who don’t have access to say the Omega Institute in Western Mass or Kripalu, I think also in Western Mass or the Open Center in New York City, or some of the conventions that that happen in San Francisco, New York City, LA, that we might also have access to those thought leaders and that those thought leaders could get paid what they’re used to getting paid.
And I would create a bigger venue and just make this happen.
And it was a lot of work and I did.

[4:46] And there was one summer where, again, I had this thought of, man, I freaking love, so many of these people that I know. and I think they’re incredible in their perspective fields.
And I just want all these awesome people to know each other.
And so I hosted something called Heart-Centered Entrepreneurial Women.
And we all gathered, oh my gosh, this is not where I was going with this recording, but I’m gonna tell the story anyway, cause I love it.
We all gathered at my house and I was in a place, I still had a young one.
I was also kind of moving through a grieving process. So I had enough energy and I had this desire and I had this vision to hold this gathering.
And I thought about a potluck and I thought, who wants to cook?
I wanna make this as easy as I can for everybody.
But then thinking about the expense of buying dinner for everybody, knowing that I didn’t have it in me to cook for, you know, 20 to 30 people, I also wanted the invitation to be out there to like invite anybody who inspires you.
If there is a woman out there that inspires you, I hate them.

[6:02] And so what I did, which I know my husband was like, I can’t believe you’re doing this.
I had a food truck come and I just made sure that the minimum was covered and everybody could just buy their own dinner.
Can you imagine inviting like people over to your house and be like, buy your own dinner?
But to me, I was like, this is like an upgraded potluck.
You can choose whatever type of food you want. You don’t have to actually cook anything, which I get when you have bigger resources, not financial, but I’m just saying, when you feel like you have a larger capacity where you’re like, I love cooking.
I would love to share food with other people. That’s great. I wasn’t there.

[6:41] So we have a food truck there. You know, just the act of setting up the tables and putting down the linens and getting the runners and picking flowers from all over our gardens and putting them in the centerpieces and putting up the bistro lights.
And that was like it, that was what I had to give. And we get together.
And I thought how, wouldn’t it be so wonderful if we could all introduce ourselves so that each person has a feel for what the other person does in case there was any cross-pollination that wanted to happen.
But at some point I realized, you know, sometimes our friends will say more beautiful things about us than we would be willing to say about ourselves.
So what happened and what we had happened that night was for each woman to introduce, either someone she had met that night or just like her best friend and just love on them for a few minutes.
Here’s this person, here’s why I love them. Here’s the most beautiful thing about them that you might not know.
I freaking loved it. It reminded me of weddings when there is a best person.

[7:50] Who really loves on somebody and gets up and publicly shares why they love that person so much.
It’s like my favorite thing. So this would give you maybe a feel for how I identify.
I identify with being somebody who loves to connect great people to one another.
I was at a place in which I had very little capacity.

[8:18] I had just, you know, it was during COVID. I would say I was about seven years, of very, very deep, deep, deep sleep deprivation did not really hold the weight of what I was feeling.
I was like, is it deprivation? Is it desperation? Is it demolition? Is it destruction?
The destruction of sleep.
Then feeling like sleep is, there’s breath, then sleep, then water, then food for survival.

[8:51] So it was there and I was coming out and it was post COVID as well.
So then, you know, second baby, going through COVID, second baby, parents aren’t around, childcare is not around, schools are not open, two kids, Steve’s at work, had some really, really painful friendship things happen for the first time.
I wanna say like one of the first times in my life and not really having the capacity to deal with it, to really just be like, oh, it must be me.
I must be sensitive. And so I’m coming out of this place and feeling kind of like cruddy that my shadow side has so many fingers to point at so many people, so much finger pointing, like the voices that I don’t want to air.
I want to air the conscious side of like, oh, I get it. Everyone’s having a hard time.
Of course, these are the actions. And of course, this is my response.
And then there’s like a little one inside who has all these feelings of being unsafe.
And.

[9:53] I went to a temple that my friend Sarah Jenks was hosting and I stayed overnight with her and it was just so good for my soul. And I came back and a friend asked like, oh, that looks so fun. I’d love to go. And normally I would be like, yes, yes, let’s do it. The more the merrier. And, the more people that go to Sarah’s, the better. It’s great for her temple. It’s great for her business. And then it’s great for the people who go and it’s just a win-win for everyone.
And I was saying to Teresa, I don’t know what to do because I actually just want something for myself.
At this point in my life, I felt like there wasn’t a room in the house that was my own.
It was like my body belonged to my baby and my nights belonged to my baby and my child and each room was shared with my husband and I didn’t have an office.
And it just felt like there was nothing that was mine.
We could say higher frequency Sarah, bigger range of regulations Sarah, bigger window of tolerance Sarah, wouldn’t care, it’s probably because she would have had things that she could call her own.
And Therese said, you’re in resuscitation phase, and I just want anyone to hear that, anyone who needs to hear that, resuscitation phase.
And in resuscitation phase, it might not be your most generous self.

[11:20] I said to her, I feel like when I get together with friends, like I’m the one who’s talking instead of listening.

[11:27] And she said, yeah, just tell your friends, like it might be a while, I’m probably going to have a lot that I need to talk about.
In resuscitation phase, things start to flip and I just wanted those two and a half hours that it took to get there by myself in the car.
Didn’t have to have anything to do with my friend or how wonderful she is.
And going back to the creating conditions was actually that she was a friend who could hear that and say, yeah, okay, I really respect and honor that.
How lucky that I could be, or maybe mindful, this maybe that’s a preparation of over time, creating conditions to have friendships that could hear a no and be grateful for that.
So I want to speak to resuscitation a little bit. Peter Levine, window of tolerance.
If you think of, if you put a line, if you put one hand parallel to the ground, and you put it at the level of your heart and then you put another hand, maybe just at your forehead.
And if you pull that away from you six to 12 inches so that you can really see that range.
If you imagine that that is a really large window of tolerance. That in this window, your child could throw a cup of milk and you You might take a breath, hmm, wow, you must be really angry to throw a cup.

[12:50] Breath, can I sit with you? No, I hate you, mom. Breath.
Hmm, wow. And in my mind, I might go, oh, my child is really overtired.
I went, wow, my child just has a lot of emotions and they need time.
And if I’m well-regulated, I know like, this is not the time to talk to them or school them.
Later, we can talk about what else could you do other than throwing your glass of milk?
If that range of tolerance is smaller, maybe I scream and I run out of the room.
That would be like a really small range.
In a really small range, and this part is, Bridget will call it a range of regulation or resonance.
In a really small range, I love when she shared that your I statements will change.
So in a really small window, so that window that was forehead to heart, if you were to then bring your hand so that it was like nose to chin, and then bring it out, and it’s like, ooh, in that really small range, where you have much less capacity, somebody throws a cup, and the statements, instead of them being this like widened view, become very narrow, and we become more of a victim.

[14:11] Why am I the only person here dealing with this? Why is my child acting like this? Why me?
I am the only one.
The statements might go as far as like, what is this worth anyway?
Like what is living worth anyway?
This is too hard.

[14:30] And I’m appreciating the word resuscitation because there’s a possibility of coming back to life and resuscitation the way that I imagine it from the movies is that you don’t do it alone, and that self-care and receiving is a huge part of coming back to life.
It’s a huge part of returning.
So we can talk all we want to about taking responsibility, about meeting our own inner child, about all the ways we have to meet ourselves, that we have to come home to ourselves, which I so deeply believe in.
But when I imagine resuscitation, I imagine someone saying, I need all the vital nutrients, and I’m going to claim those vital nutrients.
And as I’m laying here claiming those vital nutrients, I clearly am not also making dinner.
I clearly am not also saying I’ll throw that party. I’ll take that trip down to Florida for, you know, I just went down to Florida for a friend’s birthday because I had the capacity to a year later.

[15:53] And also honoring that saying no does take up some capacity for us too.
The no is generally not easy because we were generally taught to say yes to people, to serve people, to show up that our value is in us saying yes and us being strong.
So I also want to honor the fact that learning to say no.

[16:13] Doesn’t mean that that’s actually the easy way. The easy way may be to say yes and just drain more energy. To say no takes a little more energy on the forefront in order to honor the resuscitation that needs to happen. I will give myself oxygen. I will lay on the earth. I will let someone put an IV line in me with vital nutrients. I will let someone bring me food. I will take that heavy blanket. I will rest a little longer. I honor that my vitality matters. I also give myself so much grace.
In the last two weeks, or maybe three weeks, I’ve heard people use the word mercy.
And it’s so powerful.
Could I have mercy for myself when I’m in a resuscitative state?
I’ve heard people ask for mercy, not just one, multiple.

[17:21] Can you imagine if you said no to something that somebody might take personal that you don’t show up to, and you say, please have mercy?
I can think of somebody who didn’t come to my wedding who was close to me and I could not understand.
And it took about 10 or more years later until she shared with me a little bit more of what was going on because the explanation she gave me at that time didn’t make sense.
It took it personal and she didn’t say please have mercy, but I could then say, oh man wow, congratulations that you said no. You said no probably knowing that I was going to take it personal and that there’s a weight and there’s an energy to that to know that somebody is out there judging you. I could take mercy, but actually I just had so much like empathy And more than anything, I had so much pride in her.
I was so proud of her that she did that thing that many years ago, before I could understand.

[18:24] Oh, it almost makes me wanna cry. How strong, like while she was sick, while she wasn’t well, she was strong enough to stand up for herself. She was strong enough to say no.
I really think no is sometimes so much harder than yes. I know that can flip-flop.
I know that can flip-flop. I know that sometimes we’re so used to saying no to everything that to say yes to life is also a really big freaking deal.
So as we’re saying no to the, I will not go, we’re saying yes to I matter.
Yes, my wellbeing matters.
Yes, I am worthy.

[18:59] Oftentimes, people who are entrepreneurs, there are really incredible events out there, and it’s often sold like, get into the room, and there’s something to that.
100% there’s something to that. Get into the room, and most people will meet people there that they’ll stay friends with forever.
Most people will have a vision that they wouldn’t have had if they were only on their own.
Super, super powerful. I think what we could start to build into these things.
So this is like you go into the room and suddenly if you are a caretaker for that day, someone is caretaking for you, right? Somebody has ordered lunch for you.
If you’re a parent, you don’t have children with you. If you are caretaking for a parent, you don’t have them with you, you’ve lined up help.
Imagine if we did this for ourselves in various ways without it having to be this huge retreat that we’re investing in.
Like we invested in layers of help and I know it’s not accessible to everyone.
I’m even thinking like, how would we reorient? Like what is most important to invest in if we had a little extra to invest, where would it go?

[20:13] But say that’s not even a thing. So with this big window of tolerance, the world is our oyster. I didn’t even get to talk about like, how do we think when we have a huge window of tolerance, a huge range of regulation.
With Bridgette Vixen’s range of regulation, there’s like slow, medium and fast health.
I don’t think that we have time to get into that today. So that’ll be another one.
So that’s why I’m just gonna stick to the term window of tolerance.
We have this huge window of tolerance. And in this place, it’s like, the world is my oyster.
Amber’s saying, if the dream is in you, it’s for you, which she has updated to say something along the lines, it may not look like what you think it will, which I love that addition.
Thank you, Amber.
This is like, the universe has my back.

[21:03] I feel like I can do anything. There are so many amazing people in this world.
This is the place where you hear me like, I wanna connect amazing people with amazing people.
This is a place of dreaming with excitement, being pulled towards something.
So this is often the space when we go to a retreat where all of our responsibilities, if you go back to that thing of, I say stability, is when you have more resources than demands.
And stress, this is not mine, This is what I heard from Jerry Molitor.
Stress is when you have more demands than resources. So you go to this retreat and this equation flips.
So suddenly you have more resources than demands for that day.
And then you go home.
And if you haven’t set it up, if you haven’t set it up for that five-point sequence where there’s, you prepare to go there, you have the beginning, middle, end of the retreat, And then on the other side, it’s not unusual that we just get back to life.
We have full childcare, like we are the full childcare, or we are going back to a full-time job, or you’re going to your full-time job with no help with childcare.
What if you pretended like the retreat were a few days longer, and you kind of titrated into it and tapered out of it?

[22:26] This does come back to this idea of resuscitation because it’s not unusual, that window of tolerance is really big.
And then you get home and the equation flips and now you have more demands and resources and they’re higher because you’ve been gone. There are things to get to that you couldn’t get to before.
And it’s not unusual to then go into a collapse.
Can anybody resonate with this?

[22:51] At the end of the trainings of each alchemical alignment training they’ll send out an email that says something like, practice containment. So we’ve been in expansion. This is like when you’re giving birth. It’s expansion, right? There’s, there’s maybe some people didn’t yell, but there’s, and actually a lot of times it’s like a low guttural sound that comes out as more than a scream, like a low guttural scream, moan, and your body is opening and your chest is opening and Everything is opening and a baby comes into the world.
Expansion, expansion, and expansion.
And then we swaddle the baby. Could we swaddle the mother?
Could we take care of the mother for 40 days, for 40 years?
Expansion, contraction. And when those emails came out for so long, I’m like, I don’t know what that means.
What does it mean to practice containment?

[23:44] And Kate Northrup, who was, I believe, episode five, she recently had her 40th birthday, and I’m sharing this because she shared it on Instagram, so I know that it’s a public share.
And I was so appreciative of it. She showed, you know, I just went on this huge high.
I had all the people I love, so many of the people I love.
Of course, not everyone could be there, right? So it’s so many of the people I love at my party, and it was such a high for so many days in a row.
And then on the other side of it, instead of getting right back to work, she built an integration time.
She built in time for containment, where it’s not doing anything special, allowing time to tinker around and building that in.
And I just wanna say like a person who actually could very easily say, everything is dependent on me. I must get these projects out.
I must make this money.
Very easily, like we could look from the outside and say, oh, well, she can do that.
She could just as easily say, I need to pay for all these things. I need to, right?

[24:47] It takes so much courage to build in space, to build in time for containment.
Because when we don’t, we do fall into collapse, we do end up in resuscitation.
It’s not always our fault. I want to say that too. It’s not always like, oh, you didn’t build it in. It’s your fault. You’re in resuscitation. Life can give us things.
Life can hand us thresholds that feel impossible. And it doesn’t mean that we’re doing something wrong. But for me, this idea of resuscitation gave me so much permission. It gave me so much permission. And sometimes that’s what our bodies need. Our nervous systems, our minds, our bodies that are built to protect and belong and continue patterns might need permission to understand the importance of us doing it a new way, a way that hasn’t been done yet in our family, a way that maybe hasn’t been done yet by many of our friends.
And it is helpful to look on the outside and find a few people who are doing it.

[26:04] Thank you so much for listening in today. It’s such an honor as always. Have a, beautiful day or simply have a day, then may you know that you are worthy of all the things that come with resuscitation, even when your window is big and when.

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[26:41] 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, to support. It’s pretty awesome. It’s very easy. It’s very helpful. You can find it at sarahtacy.com.
And if you love 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.

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