joy

Cultivating joie de vivre

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

As an autistic person, I find there is a definite link here between my particular wiring for high sensory processing, which can make me feel more overwhelmed than some other people might be in the same situation, along with a tendency to live in my thoughts way too much, plus also the need to actively process those senses though my body in such a way that the body fully registers them, but without overwhelm, on the way through…because, otherwise, I can tend to bypass the body altogether. Not least because of issues with chronic pain, learning to bypass the body can become a really big issue. Also gentle grounding activities, such as letting energy passively drain through me into Mother Earth, doesn’t feel quite enough.

Rather, I tend to need to actively participate in the processing part in order to remember what my body is there for…and that it is important and useful for me to have one (something I tend to forget…), which is where the power of dance comes in for me. Dancing, quite literally, puts me back in touch with my body and helps me to remain more grounded for a long time afterwards. Yet whilst this especially applies to someone like me, as in highly sensitive person with autistic wiring, I suspect it applies to anyone that lives in their head and has become detached from their body to a very high degree…which is more common that you might think; a typical modern phenomenon.

I plan to share much more about the proven benefit of dancing, for autistic people, soon in another post that I’m working on for Living Whole.

To start off this topic, here is a post I shared yesterday, in my other blog Spinning the Light, on the importance of GROUNDING joy into the physical body (an absolute essential for health and for navigating these times), whatever that happens to take in your particular case.

Cultivating joie de vivre

spinning the light

…has never been more important, or elusive-seeming, so how do we conjure up, specifically, grounded joy, rooted in the body, during such challenging times?

(As doing the research that led to my retrospective post the other day reminded me) a relentless sense of my own joy of life has always been one of my defining traits, as it were, rescuing me from some very hard times, even way back when as a child feeling quite helpless in situations that traumatised me. As an adult now dealing with chronic health challenges, I have come to regard it as an utterly essential ingredient of life, so much so that I cringe when I watch so many people loose their grip on it (not that I blame them in the circumstances) because of perceiving themselves as victims of those circumstance, knowing as I do that unless we take our own personal steps to…

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What’s your alchemy? (Mine is dancing.)

~ Helen White ~ 3 Comments

Our personal version of alchemy is so often performed without even thinking about it, when lost in those tasks that take us deep into ourselves, into our innate knowing and our joy. So often, we learn to treat such activities as self-indulgent, pointless or plain weird and yet, the paradox is, they often hold he key to our deepest transformation...in other words, they are exactly what we need to be doing right now.

Do it for you

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

There is a level (and its the fourth dimension, where ideas about ourselves become reality...) where we have to be fully prepared to heal, at a moments notice, and no "ifs" and "buts" about what that leaves us holding in our hands or who we would let down or leave behind when all we have been for a number of years simply vanishes as if it was never even there. Its only once we are fully accepting of this possibility and all its ramifications, as laid in front of us on the table of all potential, that it can get even close to us (though this is the territory of spontaneous remission so allow some excitement to come into it since this is its very rocket fuel). If you are serious about this, you have to feel into what it is that is keeping you attached to this thing that has so-long defined you and make sure you are 100 per cent happy to let it go...and this can take some serious amounts of inner probing but once those sacks of ballast are identified, you can find yourself in an upward spiral that will blow you away and leave others watching you with their jaw-dropped.