075 - visualization

getting your fur all going in one direction =^..^=

In the next few posts, I’m going to be writing about different techniques I have found to be incredibly helpful in dealing with emotions, thoughts, and sensations. Think: autobiography meets how-to.

I want to share the things that have been most helpful to me this year in (a) surviving physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually and (b) healing from Long Covid so ‘miraculously’; including the new skills and worldview that has completely changed my life for the better. I.e., the one big positive thing to come from a year that SUCKED.

I’m presenting these techniques and understandings in more or less the order in which I was exposed to them and incorporated them into my experience. I truly hope you find something that is helpful to you in them. They have unequivocally changed my life for the better, and I hope the same for you.

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I was eighteen when I first figured out how to process my emotions. There was something from high school that needed some healing and it became clear that the time had come. It wasn’t matter of flashbacks not letting me rest, it was a conscious choice to go back in my mind with the purpose of processing. I allowed myself to really think through the situation, remember how I had felt, and then feel and think about whatever came up. Whatever came up, I followed it doggedly. I sat on the floor by the window of the practice room in the music building and cried and then made myself cry some more until it had all come out and run its course.

I’ve felt scared of my big feelings all my life. As a child I would push them off as long as possible until it all overflowed into a crying/talking session with my mom. And then I would feel better. But that day in the practice room was the first time I made a conscious choice to meet my fear of feeling head on. That was when I discovered that if you go through the dark tunnel on purpose, there is light and relief on the other end.

I had discovered how to excavate my feelings, clean house, heal, move forward.

Over time, I became a very good excavator. I learned how to have a thought and then follow it deeper and deeper. How to take the initial emotion and follow it with emotions as my compass until I eventually arrive at the source. How to take triggers or activations in my regular life and connect it with incidents or patterns from my childhood or earlier in my life. I began to call it “inner work.”

I expanded my repertoire to include emotional imagination. In my imagination, I could go back in time to little Leilani and see what she needed that she couldn’t source for herself. Safety, protection, agency. Then grown up Leilani could go back there and give little Leilani what she couldn’t get for herself. I could fight off the dangers and soothe the little me who was scared.

I learned how to use emotional triggers to identify, work through, and change longstanding patterns of behavior.

I learned how to identify when feelings were arising and make time to deal with them. When something comes up and I don’t have time for it, I take a moment to promise it that I will get to it as soon as possible. And I am faithful to my word. I do come back and bite the bullet, eat the frog, do the thing that scares me. The more times I’ve been through the tunnel and come out into the relief of the other side, the easier it is to choose to push past the fear and aversion because I know how much better I’m going to feel afterward.

For the next 22 years, this basic template for processing my emotions and doing inner work held me in good stead.

And then Lia got sick.

One day in the fall of 2021, we’d had a really rough morning with the eating disorder. I dropped Lia off at treatment and even before I made it out of the building, I began to cry. I just wanted to make it home, to be in my safe space. By the time I had gone a mile or two down the freeway, I was crying so hard it began to feel unsafe to keep driving. I pulled off the freeway and sat in the parking lot of the Child Support Services building in Loma Linda and did what had always helped before: I cried harder and dug deeper and opened further. I cried so hard and wailed so loudly I was sure I was going to have broken blood vessels in my eyes and face. I sobbed and wept and kept waiting for it to reach the peak and slowly subside.

But, it turns out, when your child has a life threatening illness, there is no end to the grief. There is no peak and subside. There is only an endless well of grief and fear.

My carefully honed skills of emotional processing and doing inner work were of no use to me here. Endless wells of grief take a different set of skills.

A month or so later, I hit the breaking point. I came out of that realizing that for the rest of my life, no matter what was happening with my children, I needed to find a way that I could be okay within myself.

At the same time, I was learning that, like addiction, eating disorders are essentially a dysfunctional coping mechanism. They are the way the brain has found to keep you safe from what it has mistakenly identified as the biggest threat: strong emotions. Anorexia, at its root, isn’t so much about fat as it is about feeling.

All this time, 17 years into parenting, I had thought that the important emotional skill to pass on to my children was how to process their feelings and do inner work. I didn’t realize I had skipped over the foundational first step: how to handle the feelings themselves. Distress tolerance.

Along with Lia, I learned emotional regulation skills through Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Ice on the face: helps with anxiety. Opposite action: doing the opposite of the emotion you’re feeling, i.e., getting out of bed when you want to stay in bed. Mechanical eating: making yourself eat because your body needs it, not because you want to. I became more aware of not just feelings that needed to be processed, but how and when I experienced distress and my preferred methods of emotional regulation.

One of the main ways that I built a baseline of “okayness” and returned to it was through something I called “meditation”. I didn’t really know what meditation was other than sitting still and quieting the mind and that sounded pretty impossible to (a) do and (b) make myself do regularly. So I created my own routine of talking myself through breathing and visualization. I sat in a patch of winter sunlight every morning with my cat Beatrix on my lap and brought myself back to center. It felt for all the world like I was a disheveled, cat coming wearily home from a fight and getting all its fur brushed and going in the same direction. The energy in my body flowing without obstruction. Mind and heart calm.

Several people have asked about how I do that, so I’m including that here for if you’re interested or if you’d like to try it for yourself.

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Find a comfortable position, sitting or laying down. Allow your body to begin to become still and heavy.

Begin with a few slow deep breaths, relaxing tension.

Phase 1: Light/Energy

Inhale, imagine light pouring on to the top of your scalp. With each inhale, it penetrates farther into of your head. With each exhale, the light gets brighter, like you’re blowing on a spark. With each inhale, the light drips down, beginning around the crown your head, then down your face, then through the center of your head. With each exhale, the light gets brighter.

With each inhale, the light always starts at the crown of your head and flows down to push the edge of the darkness, whatever is adjacent to the work of the previous breath.

You can take your time and stay in one area until the light permeates it before moving on to the next area. A faster way is to infuse one area at a time per breath cycle, always starting at the crown:

Breath 1: Crown of head

Breath 2: Head

Breath 3: Down your neck, across your shoulders

Breath 4: Down the arms

Breath 5: Into your chest and your heart space

Breath 6: Into the solar plexus

Breath 7: Through the abdomen

Breath 8: Into the pelvis, down to the perineum

Breath 9: Down the back muscles, down the spine into the tailbone.

Breath 10:  Now down the thighs, maybe concurrently, maybe separately

Breath 11: Into the knees, down the calves

Breath 12: Into the ankle, into the foot, all the way to the toes.

Now that energy can flow through the whole body, with each in breath, the light flows and saturates from the top of the head to the toes. With each out breath, it burns brighter.

*Sometimes it makes more sense to switch the breath. The inhale makes the light burn brighter, the exhale moves the light down the body.

Phase 2: Chakras/Energy Centers

Inhale energy to the root chakra (perineum). Exhale and the energy gets stronger.

Inhale from the root to the sacral center (below the belly button). Exhale stronger energy up from from root to sacral.

Inhale from the root to the sacral to the solar plexus. Exhale stronger energy from root to sacral to solar plexus.

And so forth, starting from the root with each breath and going up through the seven centers:

Breath 1: Root

Breath 2: Sacral

Breath 3: Solar plexus

Breath 4: Heart

Breath 5: Throat

Breath 6: Third eye

Breath 7: Crown

Phase 3: Inhaling Qualities

Inhale light. Hold it in your belly until you feel it seeping out into the rest of your body. Exhale light all around you.

Inhale strength. Hold. Feel it permeating your arms, legs, heart, head. Exhale strength all around you.

Inhale love. Hold it in your core. Let it expand until it fills your body. Exhale love all around you.

Inhale peace. Hold and let it ground you and slow all the swirling in your body and mind. Exhale peace all around you.

Inhale vitality. Hold and feel the life gathering force in your cells. Exhale vitality all around you.

Phase 4: Listening

Let the breath return to normal. Begin to tune in to listen to your Self or to God. Every time your mind begins to wander, silently say, “Listen.”

Listen with your whole self or listen with your body: Listen with your root chakra. Listen with your sacral center. Listen with the solar plexus. Listen with the heart. Listen with the throat, the third eye, the crown.

Phase 5: Stillness

Let it all go and just float.

Smile.

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This is an amalgamation of things I’ve learned or read about or figured out on my own. I.e., I made it all up. Sitting still and breathing is difficult for me, so I talk myself through each step and that keeps my mind busy enough to focus. If I get bored or need something different, I switch things around, do them backwards, try it with a new twist I read about on instagram, skip something, add something in. The point is that there’s no right or wrong way to do it—the practice is mine…or yours. <3