Are you living at the pace of dissatisfaction?

All mammals are designed for pleasure. The sensations of pleasure are here to inform you that you are on the “right” track. It’s a reflection from your nervous system that your body likes the choices you are making.

I’m not talking about intimate pleasure. I mean being able to feel the satisfaction of eating just the right food, in the right amount, with the right people. The pregnant pause that comes when you find just the right moment of connection, where that experience of aloneness fully fades away. Being soft and present enough to the cool breeze making the hairs on your body stand up. Being slow and permissioned enough to relish in the beauty in front of you, and letting it fill you up without having to navigate feelings of shame or a pressure to be more productive. 

If you solely live with the idea in your brain that the choices you are making are the right one, you are missing the multidimensionality of life.

Living in grayscale was okay 40+ years ago, but it’s not the thriving that is actually possible today. 

Most of my clients show up with an upper threshold on goodness. For everyone I know, this threshold was set up for them. Set up by the limits of their mother’s body to experience wellness. Set up by what their father could allow to move through his body. Set up by the messages from culture about how much aliveness and wellness was safe and accepted.

If I lived with the thresholds handed down to me by my immigrant parents, school teachers, and the U.S. culture, I would be depressed as F**K. And I couldn’t do better until I looked at my limits and why they were there.

It’s our survival strategies that keep us from living at the pace of satisfaction. Full Stop.

Your mother survived the threat from unconscious men by hiding her aliveness deep within (and it’s sadly still happening all around us). Your father learned to keep his joy hidden since he was a young boy because he would get shut down by HIS father and his peers for being bigger and better.

The reasons are specific, nuanced, and unique to your family… and this uniqueness is essential to uncover.

My freedom to be me and as alive as I am today came from being with people who sat with me to learn what my unique way of shutting down was. What was my unique way of staying fast and avoiding the feelings that came when I slowed down? 

There are patterns to our survival strategies AND the you in there that is unconsciously holding a survival strategy in place needs attention.

Our social culture, our corporate culture, our media culture, our devices and screens and movies keep us entertained and distracted so we don’t have to be with what is underneath. 

I’m sick of accepting this as the status quo. Pretending that this is okay. It’s not the world I want to create and be a part of. 

The feelings you feel when you slow down MATTER.  The feelings you feel when you are alone are IMPORTANT. The feelings you feel when you stop moving are a clue to calling you deeper...

They need ATTENTION. They need LOVE. They need a space to be felt.

They are there for a really good reason. But, most of us have forgotten or never consciously understood the context of why they are there.

Avoiding those feelings is running the show, and so are our inherited survival strategies are as well, and most of us don’t even know where they come from. why they are there.

Freedom comes from unburdening. Freedom comes from loving what wasn’t loved. Freedom comes from self-understanding and compassion for what your parents and ancestors did to survive. And freedom comes from getting that you are not them, and you are not living their lives and you no longer have to be like them to belong. 

You get to be you. You, today, in the context of safety, get to thrive. And you get to feel pleasure.

And you get to move at the pace of life that fills you with the nourishing goodness that your body is capable of producing when it isn’t carrying the burden of the unintegrated past.

It’s your birthright to be free.

Everyone wants it, but most are scared to claim it and do the work it takes to get there.

The rewards of pleasure and peace are there waiting for you all along the way.

Claim your whole self and live at the pace of your satisfaction.

Consider working with me to unlock YOUR freedom and YOUR aliveness.

9 Things You Can Work On In a Womb Surround Besides Birth Trauma

Most people have no idea what “Womb Surround” means. A Womb Surround is usually a multi-day workshop for 4-6 adult participants to heal early life trauma. I would like to share what is achievable in a Womb Surround. Over 17 years, I have personally participated in 28 of these workshops, and they have completely transformed my life. The truth is that being a human is difficult. The human experience is filled with various types of burdens and traumas. Most people desire more freedom, more ease, and support for their most personal psychological and pain body challenges. They also desire more choice in how they show up in their relationships and careers, how they react to life, and how they feel on a day-to-day basis.

What I have learned is that the way our life begins sets the tone for how our nervous system works, how our minds perceive the world and others, and establishes most habits of self-care or self-sabotage. And what happens at the beginning of our lives? For starters, when we grow inside of our mother, our nervous systems learn how to sleep, rest, process emotions, what is safe, what is unsafe, who is safe, and who is unsafe. We learn how to receive nourishment and the love of the world. We learn where we cannot receive love from life, and all these things shape who we are.

We absorb the undigested challenges of our parents and the unprocessed traumas of our ancestors. We take these on out of love and belonging and the non-optional need to survive in the family and culture we're born into. Then, when any major challenges in our childhood or later in our lives arise, we rely on these early survival strategies and imprints to respond to the challenge.

What I found is that I was more able to unwind and heal from later traumas in my life when I also worked on the earlier ones and the familial survival strategies. I am saying all of this to emphasize a few points:

1. All the things that happened to you and the things that you took on in your life from others can be transformed.

2. The human spirit and body are incredibly resilient, and underneath everything you think you are that you don't like about yourself or are suffering from is an untouchable, perfectly lovable essence of innocence and Godliness.

3. There are people in the world, containers, and communities that can hold you in that and help ease any suffering or pain you are experiencing.

4. The body keeps score, and you will have the most significant impact on transformation when you include your body and nervous system in your healing journey.

The Womb Surround format was created to support the healing of an infinite number of challenges. I am going to share some things that are outside the traditional box that people think of in Womb Surrounds, which can also be thought of as an Early Imprints or Complex Trauma Healing Workshop. The obvious things that Womb Surrounds can help with include birth trauma, embryological trauma, and ancestral trauma. And, there is so much more.

Womb Surrounds are a great place to work out the following issues:

1. Attachment style evolution: Transform anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles by working on the actual family and parent bond dynamics that created them.

2. Harmful and mis-attuned parenting: If one or both of your parents struggled with alcohol, mental health, or psychological disorders (such as bipolar, manic, depression, violence, abusiveness), were absent, or overly medicated, this would definitely affect your young inner parts and your adult life.

3. Family secrets: If there are disowned family members, shame-inducing or incestuous hidden events, and unspoken losses in your family history, they will impact your trust in and openness to life and relationships. They will also create internal fragmentation and self-secrecy.

4. Undigested ancestral trauma: If your parents, grandparents, or those further back survived or fought in a war, survived famine, immigration, genocide, etc., these experiences will impact your existential sense of safety.

5. Harmful and abusive siblings: If your siblings (biological, half, or step) were harmful or are a result of complex life situations, this will impact your intimate relationships, friendships and belonging in community.

6. Self-sabotage, self-hurt, and self-love challenges: When we aren't treated well or have experienced harm or neglect from others (even if we don't remember), we will re-enact our young experiences as adults upon ourselves.

7. Chronic body or nervous system challenges: Chronic pain or nervous system dysregulation patterns often begin inside the womb in a mother's body that is already challenged in similar ways. Plus, continuous family systemic stresses over the first 18+ years of life anchor these deeper.

8. Not wanting to be alive or thrive: Sometimes life begins in such a level of challenge or ancestral overwhelm that the core part of us gets imprinted with the strong desire to not be here. This existential trauma will impact how much we thrive and potentially leaves us feeling unexplainably numb or perpetually dissatisfied with life. Thoughts of suicide or actual attempts do not appear in a vacuum (ancestral and early history create the conditions for this).

9. Sexual dysfunction or challenges: When our inner baby nervous system experiences overwhelm or interventions, or there is childhood sexual abuse, it impacts our ability to experience pleasure and move life force through our bodies and our level of trust and safety.

10. Anything else, and I'll tell you why…

The actual secret of why Womb Surrounds are so versatile and powerful is that the form and structure model how incarnation works. That is, the steps we follow in a Womb Surround match how a Soul (or Spirit) enters a fertilized egg and forms it’s body and identity. Life creates itself over and over at every moment, and everything that happens is organized through intention. There are important developmental steps that happen one after the other. In a Womb Surround, facilitators invoke these natural processes and forces sequentially in a way that unlocks both what interrupted your development and the miraculous blueprint energies that created your particular identity and body. See, in the trauma is the life force that frees you. With attuned, skilled somatic facilitation, you are supported to evolve beyond the original imprints and land in the blueprint possibility of what you actually are. It may sound "woo-woo" to some, but it is also incredibly effective and practical.

In my first Womb Surround, I didn't work on anything that happened to me before three years old and didn't allow the facilitator to touch me. The facilitator, Ray Castellino—the creator of Womb Surround work—was totally awesome with it, and it created safety for me to be able to go at my pace.

The other special sauce of any good therapy and space-holding is to move at the pace of the nervous system.

I offer both group Womb Surrounds and personalized one-day experiences.

Ray Castellino and Elan Freydenson in 2015 during a Body In to Being training in Ojai, CA.

.

Check out when the next scheduled Womb Surround is here.