seeding joy - a somatic practice
For over five years, I’ve been facilitating a somatic learning community, called Anchor Community. It has been a lifeline and a joy. Originally I offered sessions every two weeks, in keeping with the new and full moons. Then 2020 happened, and meeting weekly felt essential. I haven’t looked back.
Every season I hold our focus to a specific topic. In the language of living things, I call these seasonal teachings nodules, rather than modules - a small but significant way to use language to point us towards what is alive and growing, rather than what is static and compartmentalized.
I named the focus of the autumn 2023 nodule to be holding grief, and making space for impossible emotions. It felt heartbreakingly prescient when October 7th happened just days later, and the weeks were full of grief so huge it felt impossible. But with steady somatic practice, we helped each other feel it. Massive grief is easier to hold within community, and essential to hold with the body, I am certain of this.
In the winter nodule, I named our focus as being the discipline of hope. It felt important, but also risky, to hold ourselves in hope as a resilient and radical act, and it is certainly a fine line to maneuver, since hope can often be a way to fall back into our own privileges and safety. But by holding it as a discipline and a somatic practice, we mapped the ways hope and despair both live within us, and we grew our capacity to be present to the world as it is, without falling into despair. Despair feels like a luxury we can’t afford. Hope can give resiliency, if it is anchored into the body and the whole of the world.
In the spring, it didn’t feel right to move our focus away from this, so we’ve stayed here. This is the gift of growing things - sometimes their rhythm takes a different tempo. So we’re continuing to practice this discipline of hope, and joy as a radical and revolutionary act, as well as a way to increase our capacity for grief. We do this through the body, in patient somatic practices, because this is too much for the mind alone to hold.
Last week I offered a practice I called seeding joy - pulling joy from the past into the present, and recognizing it as a way to seed more joy into the future. Like seeds grow into blossoms that then contain magnitudes of seeds, what becomes possible if we root into a somatic practice of joy as a way of creating more joy for the future? Different than attempting to manifest a certain outcome or even envisioning a specific future, this feels like a finding a resonance with a future we long for, while giving our bodies the necessary gift of feeling it today.
The people in the live session of Anchor asked that I take that practice and make it shareable with the public, and so I have. I’ve taken out the parts of the session where we share together - that magic is only open to the community. But I’ve put the practice itself, which is about 15 minutes long, on the internet in a way that it can be freely shared, and if you enjoy it you are welcome to share it with your community.
On Monday, much of the Mexico and the United States will experience a full eclipse - here where I am we’ll have over 95% percent totality. I wrote at the full moon that eclipses aren’t times to try and manifest, and perhaps this practice will feel too much like a manifestation practice for you - but to me it feels different than that. Rather than trying to manifest a specific outcome, this feels to me like the ringing of a bell. It feels like a bringing of necessary light into these dark and very chaotic times. So I plan on practicing something similar to this on Monday during the eclipse. Perhaps you would like to as well.
And if you are interested in Anchor Community you are welcome to learn more and apply through this link.
