Over the past 5 weeks since the lockdown here in Oregon and around the world – my biggest craving has been for comfort.
The smell of the soap I brought that reminds me of home gives me comfort. “Old home” – it’s from the area where my grandmother lived and whose comfort was delivered in deep dish raspberry or strawberry or apple pies and pork roasts. “Young home” – sent to me by my mom, who makes the best cinnamon buns and green salad doused with cream in this same village, where I spent my summers growing up. “Home home” – where I live in Colorado and where I’ve been using it for years now.
Keeping the bathroom warm with the electric heat in the 70C position 24/7 so that my skin comes into contact with a gentle kindness at any hour of the day.
Having contact with my inner circle (facetime, email, telephone). The sense of their voices and caring and reaching out. Their enthusiasm when I propose something.
Noticing how the occasional contact I have with strangers feels more real under the coronavirus lockdown than in every day life: Waving to a solitary jogger or a couple at the beach and feeling unexpectedly grateful and touched when they wave back, as if we are long lost friends who are in the storm together. Telling the person at the bank how grateful I am for their help in resolving an issue and having them respond back with honesty of their own and with kindness. Recommending a book to order for our local library and having the librarian respond with “Thank you for the idea! We’ll order it. ….” and “You have no idea how much we miss our patrons.”
Taking breaks from writing to look at the ocean waves in the distance. Seeing an unusual cluster of gigantic birds on the tidal flats one afternoon and discovering that they are 5 – FIVE – bald eagles standing in the estuary together at low tide. 2 adults with white heads and tails, and 2 mottled brown immatures in one cluster. A third immature bald eagle 5 yards away from them. Unexpected emblems of how the impossible isn’t as impossible as I once thought it was when they were on the endangered species list in my childhood.
Observing how there can be up to 15 herons gathered in the eddies at a certain stage of low tide – all within a space the size of my house (it’s not that big of a house). When I’ve only ever noticed herons standing solitary before.
Picking up the binoculars to look at an unusually smooth shape gliding through the open water that doesn’t seem quite duck-like. And seeing the head of an otter. Then noticing as I pan through the grasses that the Canadian geese I’ve not given much attention to because they seem so common – are walking with 5 fluffy little yellow blobs of enthusiasm pecking around in the mud.
Turning the baseboard heat on occasionally in a room I don’t use because it smells of wood and earth and reminds me of my grandmother’s house.
Having a warm, fuzzy blanket around me in the mornings when I’m up early to write and my space hasn’t heated up yet. With a sprig of azalea and a twig covered in moss that I plunked into a glass to keep me company.
Reveling in clean clothes. Taking in the smell and feel of my warm laundry fresh from the dryer.
Holding my small bundle of dark t-shirts, gold-toed black socks, undies, and my favorite soft old (old) fleece. A warm lump of comfort I found myself putting up to my cheek. And then gently pressing to my chest while I curled up on my couch and listened to Malcolm Gladwell give a MasterClass. His excitement and passion so authentic and palpable that it gave me goosebumps and brought tears to my eyes.
It made me feel connected to him. As a result, it helped me feel more connected to myself.
That’s comfort.
I was glued to the screen as he described how David changed the rules when he beat Goliath. How Goliath – the impossibly huge, indomitable force that we all face on our journeys with purportedly incurable chronic diseases … or a virus … or with any of the seemingly insurmountable challenges in our lives – probably had an unrecognized achilles heel. Goliath, it turns out, may have been blind.
Goliath’s weakness represents the way some people … some things … some organizations – can become so big and strong and powerful that they lose their ability to appreciate the world around them.
It’s a way of seeing how we – the seemingly small or weak or sick – overcome obstacles in our lives by breaking the rules. By not believing everything we hear – or think – or are told. By trusting when something resonates and pulls us.
We break old rules or false beliefs or inaccurate dogma by listening for truth. By listening deeply to the voice within ourselves.
Malcolm stumbled upon this perspective in a journal article by an Israeli endocrinologist. He found it when he followed his passion and curiosity deep into the stacks of the library.
He listened to his curiosity.
It took him on a new path in which he describes “how much of what is beautiful and important in the world arises from what looks like suffering and adversity.”
As I listened to Malcolm, a part of me kept noting the physical sensations of my warm bundle of fresh laundry on my chest. The bundle I had unconsciously moved to the place where you hold the soft, precious, weight of a baby as their body conforms to yours when they feel safe and fall asleep.
It soothed me.
By listening to my seemingly tiny, easy-to-overlook little cravings, I found comfort.
The first moment a physical sensation of comfort made it through my senses and into my emotional being happened about a week ago when I was exploring in my own Malcolm-like way.
I was doing research for an ecourse I hope to offer on my blog and had listened to my favorite talk by Jon Kabat-Zinn about mindfulness meditation. I hadn’t remembered the music from the introduction to his talk and it had surprised me. It’s poignant. There is something deeply and tenderly hopeful about it. The pacing is slow and spacious. We first see him as he sits at a table with a gathering of the group and signs his book. He is unhurried. He asks each person their name while making eye contact. He seems to have no other care or focus in the world.
It makes my body tingle even now as I rewatch it.
This is what feeling connection is like in my body.
Listening to Jon that morning a week or two ago was like listening to an old friend. His voice and his rhythm soothed me. He felt kind. He was real. It made me feel that I was not alone.
Listening to Jon and feeling how regulated his nervous system is reminds my own system that everything is okay, just as it is.
This, too, is comfort.
Listening to Jon had also helped me remember that, right now when there is so much fear in our inner and outer worlds, it’s more difficult to “be with” my own fear as a way to try to help it heal.
It’s difficult to heal the layer of numbness and sense of disconnection that I’ve come to on my journey of recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) by “being with it.”
It reminded me that when there is a crisis in our lives or in our world, the way to work with fear and other difficult feelings that arise due to to our old traumas and new stress is to surround ourselves with comfort and connection to the best of our abilities.
To comfort and soothe our systems as though they are children. With compassion. Without judgment. With love and care.
To comfort ourselves with whatever it is that our systems respond to – whether it means curling up in bed earlier than usual most evenings with a book or our partner, or rewatching the same movie because it’s reassuring and there are no surprises or unexpected stressors (I finally bought Arrival last week after rewatching it 3 nights in a row).
When things are challenging, one of our biggest tools is to support our social nervous systems in whatever ways work for us in that moment.
It makes the pond bigger so that there is more room to hold and surround and comfort our fear or other difficult feelings.
When a big fear is held in a huge pond of comfort, connection or other support for regulation, it can become small enough that it is suddenly manageable or transformable.
This gives our bodies and physiologies and biologies and cells that extra margin so they can maximize their innate capacities to heal. To more easily and successfully fight off whatever they need to. And to then recover and return to the fun stuff, like producing energy.
The first moments that led to the sensation of comfort coming more fully into my being happened in little spurts over the course of a few hours last week.
I wanted to change how I was relating to my fear and something was shifting for me after listening to Jon. I was feeling a bit tender and uncertain and had gone on my daily walk. When I got to the beach, I sat on a log instead of walking any further. I just wanted to slow down. Stop.
Then to my surprise I started crying. Little bursts here and there.
They were bursts of deep pain.
Griefy-ness.
Interestingly, it was intense but somehow not overwhelming. Waves of tears would come and then subside. I would be crying and at the same time, I’d open my eyes and notice just how beautiful it was with the grasses waving and the frothy waves coming in onto the shore. The light was soft. I was sheltered from the wind by dunes on either side of me.
As I pendulated my attention in and out – sand dunes, deep grief. Soft beautiful light, aching chest … I started to get a sense of the “feeling” associated with the tears.
A feeling that had been too overwhelming to name or note in much detail before. A feeling from the past that was part of the forces that have lead to my feelings of numbness and disconnection.
What I was feeling that was being expressed in those tears was longing.
A deep, familiar, lifelong sense of longing.
I sat with the crying and let my attention come in and go out. Cycle in and cycle out. My body surprised me with its ability to appreciate. To notice what was not only around me, but to be able to take in its beauty even as I was also being moved by wails of grief.
What I gradually came to recognize was that this longing was for comfort.
The crying continued in more waves on my walk home. This arising of deep feelings has been magnified for me – and I imagine for many of you too – during this time of suffering that is happening around the world.
I listened to the peepers starting to sing in a marsh. I took in the brilliant blush of a deep pink azalea and the intense blue of what might be a Veronica at its base.
When I got home, I pulled out my purple mat that David gave me a few years ago and did my yoga. There were more, smaller waves of tears and I continued to have room to feel my longing for comfort.
It was when I pulled the cushion under my cheek as I prepared to do a leg raise on my side that something shifted. I felt the soft caress of the fabric on my skin and suddenly – I FELT comforted.
In a tiny, unexpected moment that I had slowed down enough to be available for, my world tilted a little on its axis.
The comfort that I so longed for was no longer something out there that I wished or longed for. It was in the softness of the blue fabric supporting my head.
The comfort was here. Inside of me. Already present. Accessible right in my NOW.
The world shift was that this comfort was within me and within my capacity to orchestrate. While this is something I’ve understood cognitively for a few decades now as I’ve been on my healing journey, there was something new in FEELING it.
Something inside of me had shifted so that it was able to TAKE IT IN.
To RECEIVE.
Something inside of me had softened enough to take in comfort. The caress on my cheek had reached me through my social nervous system – that most powerful yet gentle source of protection that operates through connection. A defense system that sends nerves to our faces so we can communicate through facial expression. A set of nerves that also TAKES IN the information of safety through sensation on our cheeks and faces.
Sometimes when we’ve had to defend ourselves with boundaries – for our physical bodies, our actions, our feelings – the “No” can become so strong that it also keeps out all the other things. Things like love. Comfort. Connection.
These unexpected and so easy-to-overlook moments are what we’re working for. This is how we heal. This is what our practices are for. Our practices of mindfulness and meditation, yoga and tai chi, chi gong, eating “clean,” taking walks, exercise-for-oxygenation-or-for-any-other-reason-and-in-whatever-way-works-for-us rather than because we’re supposed to, present moment awareness, self compassion, self care and all the rest. This is how our bodies show us just how much they are able to heal. How much they want to heal and are willing to heal.
This is how we thaw out of freeze or fight and flight states and come more fully back into our lives. Into who we are underneath the layers. This is how we metabolize the intensity of a crisis in the present moment and minimize the chance it will be traumatic.
“You can find gold in the smallest of details if you’re willing to be patient,” says Malcolm Gladwell in the trailer for his class.
Maybe being with fear has been helping after all :-) So that when I made even more room for it by feeling the other feelings – like longing AND comfort – it took off another smidge of a layer and brought me one more step closer to “home.”
Baby steps.
Because doing it small makes it manageable. Digestible. Transformable.
Because doing it in little doses and with mindfulness and self compassion can make more of the impossible Possible.
Thank you world – and new paradigms – for these unexpected and weird, so often convoluted opportunities to keep growing and healing.
A deep sigh as I read this, Veronique. That forgotten sense of comfort as I recognise the tension and contraction in my body.
Thank you for the reminder of physical comfort despite symptoms. Listening to the birdsong, enjoying the spring flowers satisfy other needs for comfort, but touch….that is such an essential part of our beingness.
Elaine – a deep sigh. That’s exactly it. Yours engenders a lovely deep sigh in me too. Distance being a non issue. Connection happening on so many levels :-)
As I am responding to you just in this moment a blue jay, who hops across the porch every morning, arrived for their daily visit. Totally bedraggled and sopping wet (it’s pouring right now and I’m loving it). It’s looking completely unperturbed by it :-) Here’s to more of that essential beingness xoxo
Dear Veronique,
You write so well of your beautiful experiences. I too have been getting similar experiences, but have not put them into words. I too find that staying in connection with myself is more about letting the connection come in waves, and being willing to reconnect. That ‘staying in connection’ is not an endurance marathon of constant will and effort as I had thought but a special kind of patience, where my strong will now combines with self-kindness to get through the discomfort of disassociation.
I am finding in myself a new need to steady with myself has emerged as I temporarily disconnect on sudden impulse as a wave releases me from my focus. And this I find is healing. Staying steady as I wobble or jump out of close contact with myself is changing the automatic reaction habits of my lifetime (literally). Holding that steadiness helps me to keep my internal space softer and more willing to open.
I am so grateful for this time of external slowing down, since it has enable me to allow myself to discover what happens when I too slow down even further.
Stay well.
Dear Cathy,
“Staying in connection is not an endurance marathon.” What a mind blowing idea. I love it when someone reads what I’ve said and by their own interpretation helps my own learning continue to deepen :-). And your thoughts about holding steady – that’s just it. Like a parent might do for their child perhaps? It’s about letting our own systems shift gears and supporting these natural shifts to happen that can help us keep getting more and more unstuck from our patterns. What a nice way to think of it.
It’s also so different from that place of strong will you describe. And with kindness – that is one of the things that my body and soul find the most soothing and heart opening. Kindness. One of the biggest gifts in the world. So amazing when we can give it to ourselves.
Stay well too!
So lovely to hear this from you, dear Veronique. I’m in the middle of a confusing challenging long weekend with all kinds of medical possibilities (and all of them challenging) and sitting with the uncertainty and digging deep for self-care, self-compassion, self-regulation. So it was perfect timing to receive this and hear it from you. Not new but powerful, especially in the little details. Thankyou.
Dear Penny,
Ohhhh those times of digging deep. Sometimes it seems like the “opportunities abound” with these challenging things. So glad this supports your courageous work and self care, self compassion and self regulation. Holding you in my heart and wishing you care and love as you find your way through. xoxo
Beautiful article, I too am becoming aware of the small things that are so comforting – like just standing under the shower, I did not realize how comforting it is just to experience the continuous spray of water on my body, literally washing away my worry.
Another comforting thing is simply listening to youtube talks while doing my housework. My favorite is listening to Bruce Lipton, just listening to him I can literally feel my biology changing.
Hi Cheryl,
It’s amazing how many things can feel good, isn’t it? I know what you mean about the shower – such a privilege to have hot and running water when you come right down to it. And Bruce!!! Bruce is a such a gem. I love that you can feel your biology changing! I listened to someone while preparing supper last night – they kept me company :-)
Hi Veronique,
I am in awe of your strength and staying power: to still be in your Oregon retreat through all of this, and to still be using the time to actually work through all the layers. You are inspiring me to get back into retreat mode, myself…
I took a three part course through Lumos Transforms about the stress response. They use a chart that divides it into freeze (at the top), fight/flight (in the middle), and the social engagement system (at the bottom) to help you discern and learn what stage your system is in. I loved everting about the course. But I felt (and told the instructor) that when I am doing work on my system, and my nervous system, that actually proves successful, I seem to spend quite a lot of time (either for hours or even days at a time) in some fourth mode that doesn’t feel consistent with any of those stages. I labeled it “settling/beginning to heal/exhaustion/release” and, I definitely associate it with a very particular cleansing sort of crying.
I know that when I enter this stage, if I can keep myself there long enough, I begin to sleep more and more deeply, and gain energy, and an overall sense of health. And, I begin to feel things, like longing, and comfort, and loneliness, and also an inherent okay-ness – all the things I was feeling all along, but also not feeling – more than I could when my system was caught in the higher states of activation or freeze.
It’s feels like “thawing” out and “finally resting”.
I feel like the world tipped on its axis however many weeks ago now, from the impact of Covid. And it somehow shook me from all the most important lessons (or self-supporting habits) that I have learned over the years. I’m not sure yet why it has had such a profound effect on me, other than all of the obvious reasons that are affecting us all. But I think a sense of loneliness is at the center.
I’ve come to realize slowly over the last several years, and now acutely even more so over the last 5-6 weeks, that I am severely lacking in community. And not just any community, but a community, specifically, of people who have been awakened by illness (or anything) and transformed into proactive seekers of health and happiness and neurological and spiritual peace. I was on a quest to find this community (though I didn’t know where) before Covid, and, quite intentionally so, after my nearly two year long “urban monk” retreat.
But somehow now I feel blocked in every direction that I try to seek this out. (I’ve tried to join a few select groups in the past weeks, but there is an emotional absence everywhere I look.) Has anyone else felt this, I wonder?
Reading your blog now, I am reminded that the world is collectively going through a trauma, and for many, for the first time, and I realize that I must wait with patience for them to emerge from the other side, rather than trying to meet them where they are, which is only landing me back into earlier stages of my own trauma cycle and development, and not serving me well.
You have inspired me to be patient, and go in for another round of work, and, the re-thawing that I now need after my fruitless search of the last weeks, even if it means several weeks or months of further monk-hood than I’d hoped for, or planned.
…If you can do it, then I can as well…
Thank you, as always, for sharing your thoughts and experiences.
Martha
Hi Martha,
Oh my – so many articulate and beautifully articulated thoughts and awarenesses. ie: the world collectively going through a trauma. I agree. And that you are therefore using patience while you make room for this so you can meet others when they emerge. Brilliant on so many levels. It sounds to me like adult-based-urban-monk Self Care at its highest.
As for your 4th state – I wonder if the concept of “Freed” would feel more in line with what you are experiencing. Coined by Sage Hays (a somatic experiencing practitioner), this is part of her definition (and I wonder if this waiting you are now doing also relates to it).
“Freed. Emergent in the turnstile of threat responses. You know it when you feel it. You’re not running, you’re not fighting or dominating, you’re not appeasing and you’re not shutting down. You are capable of choosing. You are able to stay connected. Your nervous system system is freeing itself from conditional fear.
Evolutionary intelligence with hints of grit and grace moving the conscious collective body towards physiological binary collapse – us/them/we/all/none. Freed.”
Here’s more on her definition.
Glad to “meet” you in this place :-)
PS – Martha, here’s a just recently updated (April, 2020) chart like the one you saw, that includes many new terms for each of the three phases (although no 4th phase in this one but does include FREED – and I wonder if it’s another “layer” of the social nervous system as we keep emerging through one layer after another, perhaps something related to what Jazz says in the next comment and my response there too. From another fellow Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Sarah Schlote and colleagues – it’s the second graph I’m referring to.
Hi Veronique,
Thank you so much for all of the thoughts and links. I think the concept of “freed” is very much in line with what I feel in these times that I described…along with a deep physical exhaustion that results from having been trapped in the opposite state for so long. It is so interesting that that particular word should have been chosen…As I slowly write down aspects of my own story, both in text, and in my head, I have instinctively known for many years that what I am working towards in life is the day that I can write, “and then, I was finally free”. This is the phrase that repeatedly appears in my mind, as I look forwards, and backwards, both, at the pivotal turning point.
I certainly identify, also, with the concept of the many layers that we must work through. I gradually work my way down, and out…and feel this sense of extreme relief. Only to have it, and my progress, always slip back out of my hands. But each time I do, I add notes to my map, and over time, the path out feels more and more familiar. Quicker to follow.
I was thinking about your comments to me above, yesterday, and they combined in my head with a podcast I’d just listened to featuring a Jungian analyst, and her descriptions of “the wilderness” representing a place in between who you once were (and will never be again), and who you are to become (even if you don’t know what that will be, yet). I started thinking about the last weeks, and my internal feeling of being swallowed back into the darkness of where I’d already been. (But also feeling like that wasn’t quite right, either.) And then I realized it wasn’t so much that I had been pulled back into my own wilderness, it’s that everyone else’s wilderness had suddenly expanded around me. (Filling in all of the places of the “normal life” and “city” and the sense of community somewhere ahead, that I had been so desperately working my way back to. (“And then, I was finally free.”) Now, all I see is wilderness in every direction…
So, last night, I decided, ok, it is now time to use my carefully gained “wilderness skills”. Because I believe what so many are saying: we are fundamentally changed, by all of this.
(I don’t know where I am going, but I know I am not going backwards: too much uncharted territory ahead.)
And, yes, I will have to be patient as so many people must now develop their own set of wilderness skills. And then maybe we can make a new type of community all together. (I guess that is where I am now headed.)
So, nice to “meet” you in this space as well. :)
If you happen to like podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/transformed-with-britta-bushnell/id1481926864
Best of travels to you, on your own continued adventures.
Martha
Hi Martha,
Oh my. Yes. Here’s to continuing to grow our wilderness skills and to continue to have curiosity about this whole process we are experiencing globally. I suspect our “tribe” will be growing. Thanks for the link – one never knows, I may need me a podcast fix :-) Best of travels to you too on this journey we share!! xoxo
Thank you for writing this, Veronique. Your wisdom always inspires. And it often speaks to the parts of me that are closed off from allowing any comfort to sink in. You landed on something so profound when you wrote: “While this is something I’ve understood cognitively for a few decades now as I’ve been on my healing journey, there was something new in FEELING it.” So often I think I understand things because I know them cognitively, then suddenly there’s a whole new knowing, a heart-knowing, that illuminates how circumscribed by fear my previous knowing had been. I find I need to learn this over and over again. Also, your word “Griefy-ness” is simply perfect. I’ve had moments similar to the one you describe and never quite manage to articulate a single name for the complex experience of simultaneous feelings of longing and appreciation, of pain and beauty. Often I berate myself for feeling pain in the midst of so much for which I feel grateful, and your post reminds me that one can feel both/and.
Dear Jazz,
Both/And. Indeed. I wonder how much the world just keeps opening up for us as we move through our layers. Layers that make it hard to feel fully present – and that block our even knowing that we’re not fully present to what’s truly happening. I find I know I’m still blocked because I still have symptoms :-) and sometimes that’s the only way I know… and then I start to get glimpses that there’s something MORE out there. So nice to meet you here :-)
Hi Veronique,
I loved this! It felt comforting for me to read it :-) So good to know someone with whom I have common ground, who has such a good command of the research and who is walking the walk with me. Thanks for all you do! Garth
So glad Garth! I have felt similarly – I heard about 3 people say they had recovered from food intolerances in the months before it happened for me. People who were working it like you and I – Glad to be sharing the walk with you!
These days I remind myself: “I am worthy of comfort” thanks to your blog post. Along with Rick Hanson’s “I am worthy of safety, satisfaction and positive supportive social connections”, it helps me better understand what self-love is.
“Love myself and watch, today, tomorrow… always” is a key reminder for me. It’s apparently Buddha’s 1st Sutra. Allowing the love I receive in the form it is given and filling in the blanks as much as possible by myself helps me heal. Thanks for your support! :-)
Cheers,
Garth
Worthy Indeed – Thanks Garth!
Such a beautiful post. Thank you, Veronique. I have been thinking a lot recently about the need for comfort, especially when the experience of physical discomfort is the norm for many who are living with chronic illness. Whenever I see “pushing yourself outside your comfort zone” put forward as something good and aspirational, I always think, “Why not aspire to get INTO your comfort zone?” Surely, from comfort comes the ability to feel into oneself and then to experience the desire for greater expansiveness that feels good, rather than pushing oneself (possibly into the ground) because that is supposedly the way to advance?
Hi Helen,
I love that, “Why not aspire to get INTO your comfort zone?” Yes! Imagine what THAT would be like! My email program just helped me continue to do that this morning – it wasn’t working on my desktop and I couldn’t access it from the online host. So instead of pushing through like I used to, I did what I’ve started to learn – which is to wait and see if it resolves itself. It took only 30 minutes of waiting haha. So nice when the world gives us positive feedback to do things differently and with more ease :-).
How nice to get that positive reinforcement for your decision to approach that problem by simply waiting to see what happened! Good for you, Veronique! :-)
Surprisingly, all this stay at home helped me bring more comfort to my life and become calmer.
– That’s wonderful! I think this has been the case for many – an unexpected source of support, comfort and reaping. Having the time to get to BE home is, I think, a real gift for many.