Dear friend! Thank you for joining me here. It has been a wild ride for so many of us, and it is my great hope that this raucous experiential river is actually leading us in the direction of a kind of new collective birth. I am too grounded to imagine that in simplistic, perfected terms, but I do see signs of an awakening that is rooted in a hunger for something more than the emotionally armored and culturally manipulated ways of being that we have grown accustomed to. I do believe that we are seeing through the veils, and readying ourselves to co-create a world that reflects our inherent value and the wealth of possibilities that live at the heart of each human birth. Imagine that world.
I see those shifts leading us in two essential directions. The first is backwards, in the direction of our accumulated trauma. I often wish we could just stop everything for a while, and declare a worldwide healing sabbatical. One where we all get the chance to catch up with our unresolved material, clear our emotional debris, and regulate our nervous systems, before stepping back into the world, fresh and ready to effect change. Of course, most of us can’t afford to go on sabbatical, but what we can do is consciously carve out more space for individual and collective healing. With less unresolved individual and generational trauma weighing us down, we will then have the energy that we need to find our sacred purpose and co-create a world that serves us all.
The second step is forward, into the moment itself. No matter how messy or confusing or maddening that moment is. Once here, we can cultivate a more expansive relationship with reality, both with respect to calling out and dismantling the structures and systems that oppress us, and to actively working together to construct the world we long for. Boots on the ground, hearts on our sleeves. The dismantling stage is utterly essential. If we don’t boldly identify the ways that we are worked and played, if we don’t see and name the game for what it is, nothing will change. That’s how effective and sophisticated those systems are at limiting our possibilities and dimming our light. Has it not become glaringly obvious that our overwhelm, our agitation, our dissociation, our internalized shame and self-hatred, are all deliberately woven so that we can be utilized to benefit a small and unconscionable few? Yet there are so few of them, and so very many of us. To regain our rightful sovereignty, we must now advance to the cutting edges of truth speak. We must ready ourselves to speak from the boldest, bravest, and most courageous parts of us. I spoke to this vision of possibility in my initial podcast:
At the heart of our individual and collective transformation is a process of genuine re-embodiment. Many of us have been living too far away from our bodies. This serves the powers-that-be, but it does not serve humanity. Our intuition, our sacred purpose, our re-empowerment, are all essential if we are going to transform this species in a positive direction. And we cannot tap into our intuition, excavate our sacred purpose, and empower our voice, if we are not deeply inhabiting our bodies. This excerpt from my book, ‘Hearticulations’ speaks to this:
It is my hope that you experience the coming year, as an invitation to go deeper with respect to your re-embodiment process. To not only take care of your body, but also to deeply inhabit it as a felt experience, as an antenna for your true-path, as your way of knowing and deepening into reality. To clear your emotional debris so that you can embody yourself as the self-possessed and self-expressed human that you were born to be. Your magnificent body. This is where you are born again.
In the last few years, I have struggled with a very confusing and complicated situation that alienated me from my own body. I inhabited it in a consistently vigilant and armored state, and it is now my work to regain my emotional and physical fluidity. So, I don’t share these ideas of embodiment from a place of imagined perfection. I share them from the heart of the struggle itself. I will share more of the context of my struggle elsewhere at a later date, but suffice to say that I am joining you on the path to re-embodiment.
One of the methodologies that has been helping me is David Berceli’s TRE (Tension and Trauma Release Exercises). If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it highly as an invitation back into your body. And as an opportunity to discharge some of the emotional holdings that might be weighing you down. It’s one of those methodologies that is quite simple on the surface, and quite depthful in practice. Here is the main website for… TRE
I am also a big fan of the work of Philip Shepherd, cofounder of The Embodied Present Model (TEPP) with his wife, Allyson Woodrooffe. Philip has written three brilliant books (check out ‘Radical Wholeness’, in particular) and has developed a whole series of exercises that support our re-embodiment journeys. You can check out his offerings at… T.E.P.P.
Finally, I invite you consider my wife Susan Frybort’s ‘The Poetry Healing Course’, which begins again on Tuesday, January 10th. A transformative and affordable 4-week online workshop designed to help you discover healing and resolution through writing poetry. You don’t have to be an experienced writer to take this course. You just have to long to express yourself and explore poetry as a healing path. Susan lovingly provides encouragement and support for anyone ready to embark on a personal journey to access their inner voice and poetic expression. It’s a wonderful opportunity to explore the relationship between healing, and re-embodiment. Here is a link, if you feel called to check it out: https://www.soulshapinginstitute.com/events/the-poetry-healing-course-12/
And if you have any recommendations with respect to re-embodiment, feel free to write me at jeff@jeffbrown.co. I want to devote much of this year to supporting your re-embodiment journey, and to writing from deep inside of my own. Let’s “wake down” together, and share our experiences. My first step is to fully express things that have been bothering me. To shake myself loose of the somatic imprint of other’s wrongdoing. To experience the difference between an emotionally repressed experience of my body, and an emotionally expressed experience of my body. I have been sure for some time that “repressed emotions are unactualized spiritual lessons”, but I am also sure that repressed emotions have the effect of blocking our energy, our fluidity, our aliveness. I want all of that back, and I want all of that for you. Bright eyed, bushy tailed, alive to the moment and ready to bring your gifts to the world. Let’s strive to make that the baseline for our lived experience in the year to come.
With love, Jeff
Excited to see how this goes! Take it easy everyone 🙂
Thank you guys!! We've got this! <3