Episode Summary
What if I told you that it's possible to find grace and flow in the middle of chaos? What if I said you could learn how to dance in liminal space and be a rock star, a liminal kind of rockstar. It's all about releasing expectation and connecting to the things that matter the most.
Episodes by Topic
→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage
→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings
→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss
→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times
Support the Show
→ Subscribe In Your Favorite Player: https://kite.link/shamepinata
→ Rate & Review: https://ever-changing.net/rate-sp
About the Show
Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
Listen If
→ You’re feeling stuck
→ You’re going through a tough time
→ Something significant has happened and no one gets it
Full Transcript
We're nearing the end of the year. It's been 9-12 months in the COVID space, depending on what part of the world you're in. And we're not done. What if I told you that it's possible to find grace and flow in the middle of chaos? What if I said you could learn how to dance in liminal space and be a rock star, a liminal kind of rockstar. It's all about releasing expectation and connecting to the things that matter the most.
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.
I've been thinking a lot lately about peace and grace and COVID sanity. I was struck by something I heard from recently from Dietician and Chef Alicia Connor. She said, "Let go of the past. Accept the now. Hang tight." There's so much wisdom in that. Because we can't go back. Even though we might be wishing with every fiber of our being for restrictions to be lifted and life to go back to normal, really, there's no going back. We've come so far in this weird COVID journey that we know things will never be the same. They'll just be new and different at best.
Today we're going to break down Alicia's statement and spend some time reflecting on each part of it. We'll look at what letting go can mean, both in terms of COVID and in terms of regular life. We'll explore the now, with all of its discomfort and liminality. And we'll talk about what hanging tight in the strangeness of that now can be like, and how we can find our balance there.
As we move toward the end of the calendar year and those of us in the northern hemisphere deepen into the winter season, the stage is set to support us in a natural process of letting go. Winter is a wonderful teacher for rest and hibernation, releasing what's ready to fall away with the leaves and rest beneath the snow. At the same time the winter holidays focus us on light, life and connection, the earth grows quiet.
If we create some time to sit in the quiet, maybe even in the darkness which begins so early now, and notice what's ready to be released, we may find old things, old beliefs, old hurts, hard feelings that are still hanging around from old relationships, bits and bobs we haven't forgiven others for (or forgiven ourselves for). And we might even find some deeper things like old blankets of shame we've walked around in for years, or things we've carried that maybe aren’t even ours.
Letting go can mean many things. Letting go can mean honoring ourselves for holding these things, honoring the people at the other end of cords, grudges or miscommunications. Letting go can mean laying some things down, letting them drop into the earth. Releasing attachments.
It can also mean releasing expectations. Expectations for a return to normalcy, expectations for simple answers to the complexity of our world today. It can mean allowing the mandala of this moment to exist, all things existing at the same time in the same place. Happy things, joyful things, sad things, heart-wrenching things... all woven together as part of the whole.
Letting go is important for our mental health, our nervous systems, and our basic ability to cope with change. Releasing any rigidity in our body, our mind, and our heart can help us soften and flow with what actually is. But as we've been exploring this season on Shame Piñata, being in the now is not always comfortable or fun or even doable. We may find, when we try to quiet our mind or body that we're quickly distracted by thoughts or sensations. Similar distractions may pop up when we learn of some new scary fact or hear a hard story.
Our nervous systems protect us. It strives to keep us in balance and to block out overwhelm, at least mine does. Sometimes if something is just too much, or there's been too much intensity for too long, I kind of leave the room. My eyes glaze over. The person I'm with knows I'm not really listening anymore. I'm just beyond my tolerance level at that moment.
This is normal. Especially now. I'd love it if we could give ourselves permission, and give others around us permission, to stop for a moment when we pop a nervous system fuse and take a break. Maybe take a breath. Because resistance to overwhelm is actually a healthy and sane response to a crazy situation.
The thing about the now is that it's sort of timeless, right? It's "this now moment", which makes it both a single moment and all time and space at once. How do we make sense of a long string of "this now moments"? We can get kind of lost. It all can become sort of gelatinous. Most of us are used to a schedule or a rhythm of events.... this could be daily... this could be annual. We're used to making sense of things through life rhythms. Summer travel plans, weekly health routines, a daily schedule of meeting or other events.
Liminality itself can be kind of brutal. Marking time, floating... it's almost like we're treading water while we hang out waiting to see how things will land. I was thinking about navigating liminality and an image popped in my head from a music video by the band OKGO.
Stick with me here because I know this is a bit of a jump. If you haven't seen the OKGO video for Upside Down & Inside Out, you need to. Not only because it will help illustrate my point, but also because it's an amazing video. It's the only music video I've ever seen that was filmed in zero gravity, excepting of course Commander Chris Hadfield singing Space Oddity on the International Space Station.
When I think of liminality, I see the OKGO band members swimming around the inside of a plane as it flies in parabolas in the skies over Moscow. The video was filmed on a jet plane that was flying up and down in great sweeps called parabolas. Each parabola gave the band 27 seconds of weightlessness to perform a piece of their zero g choreography. They filmed the video in one take as the plane completed 8 parabolas, pausing in place in between weightless peaks and then cutting out the paused sections.
The video was directed by lead singer Damian Kulash and his sister Trish Sie. In one of the many behind the scenes videos, the two spoke about the process the band went through in learning to move around in a zero gravity environment. Damian said, "Most people's response to weightlessness is just to start swimming," to which Trish added, "It takes some time to train your body not to flail around. Kicking and paddling when you're in the air is not the same as kicking and paddling in water. You just look panicked."
And there are many frames of the band members kicking and flailing around, looking pretty uncomfortable in their first test flights. But by the time they filmed the video, they had found their way around and learned how to glide here or push off that thing to head over there. They were doing complex choreography in periods which bridged the divide from double gravity into weightlessness. They moved almost as efficiently as the aerial dancers they brought in as flight attendants.
I share this image with you to illustrate that it takes some time to find our grace and flow in liminality. We're not born to it. We're used the reliable gravity of our everyday lives. When that basic force is gone, we can feel lost within the task of simply moving from point A to point B. But once we get it, we can do it. We can even find grace in liminality. And as song says, "Gravity's just a habit that you're pretty sure you can't break."
So here we are hanging tight. In this moment. And now in this moment. How can we support ourselves in keeping on going as the moments go by?
Here's a simple ritual sketch you might try out and adapt in any way that support your current situation.
So first we might take a deep breath and sit with the concept of centering. What does centering feel like today? What is center? Where is center? And then we might ground down into the earth and allow our bodies to land and quiet a bit.
As we sit in the stillness, we can begin to notice any energetic cords we are connected to, cords that others may have placed on us, cords we may have put out into the world to keep track of things or to keep our balance. Things we love. Things we fear. Things we're attached to. We can notice those and let them dissolve, connecting instead to ourselves and to the earth, growing a bit heavier as we connect again down.
Amongst the cords we may find expectations or attachments to outcomes. Rigid expectations we might have for ourselves or for others. Rigidity. Need. Attachment. We can play with releasing those, just play, and see what it feels like to be floating safely in the now.
Then we might call to mind a place where we feel safe and good. Maybe a place we've been, or a place we've seen pictures of. A place where there are no worries. A place where we can vision and dream for a bit. And in this place we can ask ourselves, "What's important? What do I know in my core? What's one thing that really matters to me?" and see what comes.
And as images arise, we can quietly let them wash over us. Things we love. Things that matter. Things that define us because of our unwavering connection to them. Timeless things. True things. Core things. And we can welcome these things into our consciousness and thank them for being part of our life and our heart.
And then we might make sure we're still connected to the good earth, take a few deep breaths, and return to the room where we can do some journaling about how to create more connection to those things on a daily basis. How to let them become our anchors during this floaty, liminal time while we're still paddling around in zero gravity.
We can't go back. And there's no forward to go to yet. So for now, we wait. And we float, and we Zoom, and we knit or bake, and wash our hands, and wear masks and make thoughtful choices. There's kind of really just the now. There is simultaneously no return to what was, to the life we had before COVID, and no next life yet.
Let go of the past. Accept the now. Hang tight.
Our music is by Terry Hughes. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player to make sure you're notified when new episodes are released. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.