How to Create Depth Within

Life is moving faster daily, volumes of information are available on your phone and change is the only thing we can be certain of. Being social means sitting at your computer and relationships are happening through text messages. The economy is in a sad state; the news seems full of violent and indiscriminately tragic stories and the future of our environment is precarious. When everything around us leaves us questioning the meaning, it is time to create depth within.

So how do we look inside of ourselves for meaning? A really great way to do this is to connect with our own body and to let it reveal its unique wisdom to us. Our bodyminds are processing all the energy of everything going on around us and it can be overwhelming. Often, we are over-stimulated, under-rested, stressed out and hoping for things to change. For most of us, the easiest thing to do is to disconnect from it all. Just turn off the feelings and tune it out.

This can work well in the short term so we are able to keep going. The reality is though, our bodyminds are still processing the energy and it’s getting trapped inside and creating a mess. While we unconsciously keep pushing on, we find ourselves getting tired, feeling anxious and becoming sick.

This happens to everyone at different times in varied capacities. Frankly, even when we are feeling fine, there are parts of us that are completely disconnected and turned off. I know this sounds pretty dismal—especially when we can’t see life getting any easier or less stressful. Fortunately, there is nothing more gratifying and energizing than reconnecting with parts of our bodies that have shut down to hide the stress and the other things or feelings that we subconsciously wish to avoid.

When we reconnect to our bodies, we tap into the energy that we used to push things down in order to suppress the emotional responses that have been too overwhelming to deal with. We gain the motivation, stamina and emotional fortitude to observe ourselves and to learn about how we have been protecting ourselves from our lives. We discover that while a lot may be swirling uncontrollably around us, we can choose our internal response. And we develop a new relationship to the things happening in, or that are affecting, our lives.

We establish a new level of depth inside that we can use to add meaning to everything in our lives. This new found skill makes us wonder what more we have been doing that has kept us on auto-pilot. As we discover more about ourselves, we recognize how we have projected our problems onto other people and circumstances. We recognize that we have a responsibility for how we respond to what happens around us and that our patterns of behaviour and response have been stuck for a long time.

As we get deeper, we begin to raise our standards. We decide that we want to get into the driver’s seat, so we can start directing our lives. Things that were problems in the past become challenges and actually motivate us to find solutions. Life gets more exciting as things that were once stressful, instead, start to energize us. We start creating solutions to all of the obstacles that we used to perceive as problems and we welcome more challenges, so we can build ourselves up. We begin to see new opportunities and to create, or renew, our sense of purpose and direction.

Deepening our lives in this way, by going inside and connecting to our bodies, can show us plenty of resources that we did not know we had. We find tools that were always there for us, but that we did not know how to access or use. Incredibly, we see that we have everything we need to create more meaning in ourselves and our lives.

How do we connect to ourselves in such a manner? An amazing technology that I have been studying for the last 11 years can help us sift through all of the junk that we have built up inside ourselves to help us tap into a wealth of energy and meaning. This technology, known as Somato-Respiratory Integration (SRI), includes a series of exercises that increase self connection, using focused attention, breath, touch and movement.

These exercises are called the, “12 Stages of Healing” and are described in Dr. Donald Epstein’s book of the same title. This book is available in our library, or you can purchase your own copy to learn from and guide you in your self connection. We are also very excited to be introducing our new experiential SRI workshop series, which will go through the exercises and explain the consciousness of each stage in detail. Please check our website for the schedule.

When everything around us gets more and more uncertain, we tend to go inside for assurance and security. To feel safe, we can choose to shrink our worlds and drop our standards, so it does not hurt so much and we don’t feel the pain of failing. Conversely, we can develop our own sense of certainty and power, by going inside to find and draw upon the resources we already possess that will strengthen ourselves, allow us to feel more depth and add meaning to everything around and within us. Which would you rather do and feel?