056 – Mini Musing: Titration & Glimmers of Hope

0:05
Hello, welcome. I’m Sarah Tacy. And this is threshold moments, the podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown. And the poll feels real. Together we share our grief, laughter, love, and life saving tools. Join us

0:37
Hello, and welcome to threshold moments. Today is a reflection on titration. And pause. These are again conditions that we can begin to think about in season two as we go through various thresholds. And as we’re looking to increase our capacity to be with activation. I’m smiling because I’ve actually felt activated over the last two days. And sometimes when I’m activated, I forget my own tools. And and and and there are some of them that I’m integrating better and better and more and more often, which actually is very much on theme with the season we’re in and the theme of the podcast. So again, the conditions we look for are welcome, like welcome, as you are welcome with what is real, be look for pause to just slow momentum.

1:36
Choice, possible relational healing, Win Win pacing, self care.

1:44
And again today, as I begin to share with you my experience of maple, see you then

1:53
I can share with you the symbolic aspect of it and the actual feeling of tangible hope that it gives me. So here in Maine, the month of March, often we’re having snow sometimes it’s the beginning of mud season. It is at least six months out from us really feeling like we’ve had like good quality sun. And, you know, like consistent enough that our vitamin D might be affected and our moods might be lifted by it. And the days might be gray. And when we ever have a sunny day. Today is a sunny day after many cloudy days. It feels like we’re so dependent on it and we can rejoice and oh my god, I feel so alive. And we’re also thankful and then I can go back to like gray and rainy and maybe a snow storm. So there can be these feelings of great hope and we’re on our way to spring and I bomber, still gray still wet, still cold. And this felt especially poignant to me. This going forward towards spring are kind of coming out of our own cave and wanting it to be a straight path to where we want to be as opposed to welcoming, where we are the moments that are seeming like progress forward as well as the retracting back or returning back to a previous state. One that we might wish that we weren’t in anymore. Sometimes it’s like wanting to leave familiar for optimal. But we fall back into an old pattern or our demands become higher than our resources again, and it can feel really debilitating.

3:34
So I’d love to read a letter that I wrote two years ago. It was a newsletter I wrote after almost three years of not writing any newsletters, maybe like 10 or 12 years before that of writing newsletters maybe once a month.

3:54
And so there’s this aspect of like, oh, bend away, I’ve needed it and then as I start to talk about the Sweetwater, the maple water.

4:04
It goes something like this once a year, we get to have water straight from the source. It comes filtered, and remineralized.

4:15
It’s sweet and it pours from the maple trees.

4:19
It must be below freezing at night and a balmy 40 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter during the day.

4:28
It takes all winter to cultivate the sweet water

4:33
in the quiet of the day in the dark of the night. And in the cold freeze of the air and the earth.

4:43
And I wonder

4:45
could we perhaps be like the maples producing sweet water throughout the harshest season.

4:52
A water that can only be tapped at the threshold of a new beginning.

4:59
Winter of course

5:00
There’s an analogy for a season in life in which we get quieter.

5:05
We use the resources that we’ve gathered in earlier seasons and we work through or surrender to challenges presented. On the outside, it looks like nothing’s happening.

5:18
On the inside, it’s possible that there’s both a bitter freeze and a deeply nourishing resource coming into creation.

5:28
You may have experienced your own version of winter burnout, isolation, grief, a purposeful slowing,

5:38
exhaustion, deprivation, snuggling and cocooning warm soup.

5:49
To ease a tired body

5:53
as we round a corner from winter into spring, you may feel like me, bring on the warmth than the color please bring change and signs of life. My winter has been years of sleep deprivation, and I this was written two years ago, my winter has been years of sleep deprivation and a desperate attempt to fix it.

6:15
I’ve experienced a disappearance of sorts.

6:19
So when I get a night of sleep, or an inkling of inspiration, I want to hold on to it and never let it go.

6:29
I want it to be a straight path towards spring.

6:33
And as I come back to life, I feel a little burst of remembrance coursing through my body feels amazing. Dreams and Visions are reemerging.

6:46
When a freeze follows that much needed thaw can feel devastating like it was all a tease. I may never get to embrace what I had hoped for. I may never get the emergence I had hoped for.

7:04
Of course, anyone who has lived more than one year in the northern hemisphere knows nothing is permanent. Everything is Tidal and cyclical. So for anyone who needs to hear it the cycling from a thaw back to a freeze is not a backward movement, but a titration that allows us to gather the sweet water tidally. The freeze clarifies what’s been cultivated over the winter, so that we do not leave behind the wisdom in our rush to escape discomfort.

7:39
When the thought comes, tap into the source and bring the sweet water with you.

7:47
It’s overflowing.

7:49
Drink it,

7:51
let it come at its own pace and rhythm.

7:55
If you want to distill it more, this wise Sweetwater can become a metaphorical syrup that integrates and adds to almost any future offering.

8:08
I love this reminder. And again, so often I need the reminders, I need to learn it more than once just like this metaphor here

8:17
of thinking that you’ve got the idea thinking you’ve got the concept, thank you, you’ve laid down the boundary, and then something that may feel like a slide backwards, but you remembered it again. And it integrates a little deeper and a little deeper.

8:32
To define titration, as Peter Levine wrote about it,

8:38
he spoke about if you had an acid and a base, so say you had familiar and optimal and you put them together, that there could be an explosion, it could be too much. But if you had the acid and you put a drop of the basin,

8:57
the base could then integrate in

9:01
and then you could put another drop in and it could integrate in

9:06
and you could keep adding drops slowly over time. And the water or the liquid would begin to neutralize

9:17
which is very much you know, as I use more specifically Bridget’s phrase small doable pieces over time.

9:27
This is similar to that phrase and what we have with a sweet water and with the temperatures needing to be just right

9:34
is also a pendulum motion

9:37
where you’re going from kind of one extreme to the other titration tends to be going more into one direction.

9:47
So there is also could be looked at as cyclical or pendulum swing from one thing back to the other.

9:55
But truly, you know weather wise we are moving more and more towards warmth more

10:00
and more towards the spring, more and more towards hope.

10:04
I love when we tap our trees, because truly for many people, the northern hemisphere this time of year can be quite hard and so to have Sweetwater to take it into my body to feel like I’ve received something from the source to be reminded that it can only come with a freeze and a thought and a freeze and thaw. And as soon as it’s more thaw, and freeze, it stops, or other way around.

10:34
I’m thinking of two people in my life who also really, I know there are more than two but who also really love the wintering energy. So to go from winter, and suddenly be spring, who’s out, I’m not ready for the pace to pick up

10:51
for the energy all around me to pick up I really love the tea and

10:58
the resources that they find in, we could call it containment or even contraction drawing in.

11:07
So this might be an opposite analogy for a person like that.

11:13
Where it’s again, we don’t have to rush, we can move slowly, in pieces over time without denying the change.

11:24
There’s also in this for me, the person who wants it to be spring and the person who wants to come out of my shell, the person who wants to emerge, there is a reminder of purposeful contraction, I used to teach like eight privates on a Monday and I think like two to four, I think four on a Tuesday split between the morning and the evening. classes in the morning, with a few privates after it on Wednesday, Thursday was similar to Tuesday, Friday often had five, but sometimes I would teach three privates and then I would drive all the way down to DC, like five hours from New York. And I teach two hours that night, wake up the next morning, and it would be a 17 hour weekend. And I would drive back on Sunday. And I would do my eighth session on a Monday. And I should say I can do it, I got all this energy. And so many of my peers would say build in they wouldn’t say building contraction time, but essentially, always have those periods on the other side. And I would more like collapse because on the Tuesday in the middle of the day when I had my Am I feeling so down, why am I feeling so ah, I don’t you know it just because I didn’t build in. Going back to the freeze. I didn’t go build in the purposeful contraction, I pushed through more. And so for me, there’s a beautiful lesson in the purposeful contraction, and Kate Northrup, who was on the podcast, and we’ll come back on the podcast soon. Because such a beautiful job to that when she does something really fun with friends that lifts her up and she feels so connected or if she’s doing a big launch, she’ll post online about putting in her calendar, day or times to just tinker around to purposely contract after big expansions.

13:16
These are kind of the ideas of titration.

13:20
Next week, you’ll hear from Camille Saint Martin who wrote the book, spilled poetic confessions of drinking self discovery and recovery. And she gives us an amazing example of having a big Ayahuasca experience and feeling like she was changed at a cellular level where she was no longer going to want alcohol. And she didn’t go in with the intention of leaving alcohol behind but really had this powerful experience and was sober for a few months after and then I had an experience of going deep, deep back in the other direction, from what I understand possibly more harmful than before. But then making a choice again, a mindful choice now integration.

14:06
Now small steps over time. And if there was a relapse, I believe she put a new name to it, that it could be more of a moment for reflection.

14:16
And that there was this beautiful titration not this like healing all at once. But the is like oh, there’s a thought thank god, oh my gosh, the other side. It’s so good. And then falling back. And just I think the message that I feel so strongly here for that I often need to hear myself is that as we fall back either into an old pattern or something that we thought that we healed before

14:41
that in some ways it’s a deeper call for our remembrance

14:46
of a lesson that has a sweetness to it that possibly possibly that there is something for us to take.

14:53
And I love the analogy of this because this water that pours it literally if you saw it in a glass

15:00
As you wouldn’t know that it’s not water, it doesn’t look like SAP, which is why I’m not calling maple sap. But that’s what it is. It only comes at the threshold,

15:11
we have access to it for maybe two weeks, possibly four, and then it’s gone. And then we wait a whole nother year for this beautiful form of titration. And nature has titration and many other ways. But this one in particular, where I actually get to like, not just see it, but taste it. And something that my girls pointed out to me when they drank it this year, I always tasted the sweetness. And so this is something I’m learning about myself too. And they were like, Ah, it’s taste so earthy. And then a different friend of mine, drank some, and their first thing was that this is so earthy. So the water is both sweet and earthy. I love that combination, it makes me appreciate it even more.

15:57
I think the one other thing that I would say about it is that when I was coming out of my sleep deprivation period, which I could still see I’m not fully healed through it. And I still have my nights of sleeping on the floor with my girls. But when I was first coming out of it when our window of tolerance is smaller, because the demands have been so much higher than the resources, we can go into a foe window in which we think we think that we’ve got this and we think we have capacity for it. And a sign that we might be going there may be that we like collapse really quickly after or assign that we could even say forget about the fo window for this podcast. It that our window of tolerance is small, which is similar to a range of regulation range of resonance is that we could go from like, I got this, we can do this. I have this image to like collapsing and being like I’m never gonna get better. So these extremes is all or nothing if you are experiencing that would be a sign that one could

17:04
possibly,

17:06
as a resource asked for one more grace for oneself, recognize that even more rest than we think. And

17:15
again, in the the interview that’s coming up with Camille, there was this part of how slow it can go.

17:24
And so offering that up as part of the medicine too.

17:30
And with that slowness,

17:34
and we’re that titration and we’re the back and forth,

17:38
is woven in that element that when we’re in our darkest moment when we’re at the end of the winter, when we’re in the cold as there are these little glimmers of light, little glimmers of life is moving proof of life, more birds are singing, the water is flowing.

17:58
And so as a listener, I’m wondering if you would be willing if you’re not driving, if you would be willing to

18:07
look around with your eyes

18:10
and maybe even include your head

18:14
and move real slow if you can, maybe your torso even turn

18:23
and begin to get curious with a question of

18:30
what is pleasurable like what is the smallest pleasurable thing that I can notice?

18:39
And again to be slow with it

18:43
what is the smallest sign of hope

18:48
of life

18:53
almost imperceptible.

18:59
I’ll close us out with a little prayer

19:05
may we be gentle with ourselves? May we know that we are nature

19:13
may we see how nature rarely takes a straight path forward

19:19
that titration is normal

19:26
that we may have small signs of hope and progress and feel like we’re sliding back.

19:35
They we take that opportunity to be a remembrance or reflection and to know that we’re not alone.

19:45
This happens for everyone and everything.

19:51
May we gather the sweet water

19:55
may we drink it with ease? May we know that it’s abundant.

20:02
And perhaps, perhaps even take time to distill it,

20:08
to sit with it, to let it burn to let what’s not needed burn away.

20:15
To find the core essence,

20:19
parts, we want to really hold on to the parts that we want to nourish the resources that come from it. And may that be our syrup to help us through the remainder of the year when things feel bland, or we begin to forget.

20:38
Cheers to all of you. And as Teddy King reminded us who I think was episode three or five, he is my friend who was a cyclist in the Tour de France, and he has a maple syrup energy out for I always think for distance athletes. And when I asked him about maple water, and people buying it in the stores, he said at that point, it’s actually better just to get some organic, high quality syrup and put a little touch into the water if that’s what you’re looking for. So if you want to try a taste of it that way, and to have this remembrance and maybe say a prayer or set an intention, that could be a really beautiful ritual. I haven’t done that I kind of doubt it would have the earthiness that the water straight from the tree would have. But I think that it would be possibly worth doing, especially at this time of year if you’re looking for a ritual

21:35
for gentleness, for kindness, for love, and appreciation. Thank you so much.

21:48
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. 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.