Layering in Love and Safety

We do not heal by understanding the past. We heal by layering safe and loving experiences into our bodies that contradict the past.

When I think about the transformation of Sacred Intimacy, layering safe and loving experiences is how the healing works. In every session, there is time to tell the stories of our pain and pleasures, but when it comes to the actual agent of change, there is a limit to how much that talking can actually do. There is a limit to the role the mind can play.

The mind believes that it has all the answers. It’s such an important and powerful tool. It wants to convice us that it has all the answers but we cannot talk our way to intimacy. We cannot talk our way to feeling safe or connected or at peace. At some point, we need to move beyond the minds need to understand to allow the body and spirit complete the journey.

For many years, I toyed with idea of becoming a talk therapist or counselor of some type. Transformation and healing are the work I am called to do in this life, but to join the field of psychology would mean that I could not touch the people that I work with. No longer could I allow them to touch me. I would be required to keep my body and my embodied wisdom out of the healing container. That is not only unacceptable to me, I believe it would also sabotage the entire process.

In the Native American tradition, they believe that the body holds truth and that the mind receives truth. In this way, they believe that to create real and lasting change, the body must be involved because that is where the truth is stored. When safe and loving experiences that contradict the past are layered into the body, they eventually rise to the mind as a new truth. One that is known and felt and understood on a cellular level.

Talk therapy is great at creating clarity and sharing stories buried in the psyche, but it is not effective in changing those stories or creating the resilience to navigate around them. That is the work of the somatic. Of touch, movement, sound, pleasure and ecstasy. These medicines may be just a little more than thought but they leave a trace in the body that we can remember as a feeling. And feeling a new truth in our core trumps thinking about a new truth in the slippery synapses of the mind.