In Latin the word solstice means sun (sol) stopping (sistere).At this solstice time the sun appears to stop moving in the sky. It is a time of stillness.
Stillness is a major key to healing. In Craniosacral Biodynamics, we perceive that this is where change happens. Rollin Becker, an osteopath who laid the ground for much in the field of Biodynamics, perceived during treatments movement followed by stillness followed by movement. During the pause of this stillness, something would happen. The formative forces affecting our form would shift. The potency, embodied life energy, would do its healing work. When movement re-emerged, it was usually more balanced and vital.
In life, too, we find healing in stillness. We cannot function for long if we don’t sleep. Our bodies become tired and achy if we work them too hard and too long. We need rest. Founder of Continuum, Emilie Conrad, noted that we need to be “hibernative.” We need to have times to retreat from the world, as if hibernating in a cave. In the quietude we can recalibrate. Taking a retreat from life can be challenging in the 21stcentury. Many of us are over-committed, multi-tasking, over-stimulated even in our time off. Electronics speed us up. The phone rings just as we are sitting down for dinner. Or do we even sit down? Or do we eat on the run, consuming fast food, or popping pills. When do we slow down? When do we stop? Even the sun needs to stop sometimes!
We can blame our fast pace of life on the world we live in and to some extent this is true. Characteristic of our modern western culture is not only the speed of life but also the resistance to being with our inner experience. We may avoid deceleration because when we slow down we are in danger of feeling. We run the risk of meeting our deepest pain, grief, shame, rage and even memories of what may have originally generated those feelings. Without our awareness these shadowy feelings have little chance of being resolved or integrated.
Healing begins with awareness. Pausing. Being still, even for a short time, enables us to be more aware.
Slowing down can also facilitate healing as the sympathetic fight-flight nervous system settles and the parasympathetic rest and rejuvenation nervous system can come forward.
Stillness and Trauma
As we are intending to slow down, it is important to also note that we may have experienced trauma in the past that has established a tendency to freeze, as we needed to back then in order to survive. For someone with this pattern, beginning to slow down can be frightening or even overwhelming.
While gentle practices like mindfulness meditation, yoga and Continuum can be extremely helpful, they need to be practiced in a trauma-sensitive way. If you know that you tend to freeze, dissociate, disappear, become foggy, confused or otherwise less present when you slow down, it can be helpful to keep your eyes open in such practices. Let yourself be aware of your current surroundings. Check if you can feel the support of gravity under you. Can you feel your feet, your seat, or where your body makes contact with what is supporting it?
Can you be curious and kind to yourself in relation to your dissociative tendencies? It can be helpful to acknowledge that, at some point in the past, perhaps when you were a vulnerable defenceless little child, dissociating was a wise reaction to what was happening to or around you. It enabled you to not have to feel intolerable pain and therefore to survive.
For many of u
s, our mothers were unable to rest adequately when we were in the womb. We marinated in her stress. Then birth came along, conducted at the birth assistant’s pace, rather than ours. Babies are easily overwhelmed by the speed and urgency they too often meet at birth. Their only way to handle this insensitive welcome is to dissociate.
Can you thank this intelligence in you that knew how to protect you back then? Can you acknowledge the safety of your current context? Or can you accurately assess if there is real danger and that you as an adult can now negotiate that differently?
Shorter forays into stillness can be easier to handle if you tend to dissociate and may also be easier to fit into your life. Stillness is always present. How do we sense it?
Stillness in Every Moment
As you read this page, can you take a moment to notice the space between the words?
In this empty space, there is stillness.
What happens within you as you orient to the spaces between? Can you sense your body? Your breath? Your feet?
If you sense your breath, can you be aware of the slight pause between outbreath and inbreath and between inbreath and outbreath? If there isn’t a pause apparent, can you create one?
Even in this moment we can begin to rest. How can you rest just a bit more in this moment? Where does your awareness go when you read this question? This may give you clues as to how to rest a bit more.
And is it possible to rest even a bit more in this moment?
Just pausing. Allowing this moment to nourish you. Allowing this breath to fill you. Allowing yourself to be aware of and perhaps appreciate the stillness here.
At this solstice time we are reminded of the rhythms inherent in all of nature, including us. At the end of one phase of a cycle, there is always a slight pause before or during the change in direction. In the northern hemisphere the days have been getting longer. Now they begin to shorten. Although it is opposite in the southern hemisphere, the pause is universal.
I invite you to embrace this solstice time to remember the stillness and consider even just slightly extending the pause. Can you rest here?
