Ultimate Guide to Embodied Healing and Self-Liberation Part II

by | Jun 14, 2021 | Uncategorized

Ultimate Guide to Embodied Healing and Self-Liberation Part II

The embodied healing journey doesn’t have to be exhausting or intimidating when we remember to move in cycles, not a straightforward path.

In this week’s episode, I’ll be giving an overview of my embodied healing framework. I prefer frameworks to formulas because everyone’s healing journeys are unique and must allow for flexibility.

I call this framework The Four I’s of Embodied Healing:

  • Intentionality
  • Introspection
  • Integration, and 
  • Integrity

The purpose of this framework is to provide clarity for your healing journey. The self-liberation framework that I shared last week provides support and direction for the embodied healing framework.

I’ll briefly explore each of The Four I’s in today’s episode.

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For deep dives into both the self-liberation and the embodied living framework, check out the Embodied Living Center.

Designed to be a cave of wonders for embodied healing and self-liberation, the ELC has a plethora of resources to guide you along your path toward healing. It includes access to 160+ class recordings, two mini-courses, and support from a like mind-heart-souled community of women from around the world

Summer enrollment for the Embodied Living Center is open now through June 22. Reserve your spot today! 

After exploring the embodied healing framework, I discuss how honoring nature helps you to get the most from your embodied healing journey.

Our bodies are reflections of nature because we are in nature and of nature.

When we are aware of the energy of Nature’s seasons and cycles, we can be more intentional with our embodied healing. 

When we incorporate the energy of the seasons into our healing, we don’t have to expend as much of our own energy. We can let nature assist with some of the heavy lifting.

How does this work? Listen to today’s episode to find out! 

I also share the four laws of nature that I have personally observed (mostly from my plants!) that have helped me better understand embodied healing. We can learn a lot from Mother Nature about being gentle with ourselves and growing well.

Today’s episode isn’t intended to be a course (or even a crash course) in embodied healing. Instead, I’ve compiled a library of resources that I have either created or personally used. I hope they will resonate with you as you determine your next step.

If you’re listening to this in real-time, then I highly recommend that your next step be to join us in the #IShineYouShine challenge. 

There’s still one week left – including our summer solstice celebration! Join us for free here!

I’m excited to see where this next year takes each of us on our journeys toward embodied healing and self-liberation. 

Listen to episode 351 now!

In episode 351 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:

  • [5:12] Why Elizabeth focuses on women’s experiences with her embodied healing work
  • [10:09] The Four I’s of Embodied Healing and how they help clarify your healing journey
  • [14:49] How the embodied healing framework is intertwined with the self-liberation framework
  • [15:39] The resources available in the Embodied Living Center for diving deeper into embodied healing and self-liberation
  • [20:15] How women’s lives and bodies are a reflection of nature’s cycles and seasons
  • [37:54] The four laws of nature that Elizabeth has observed from being a plant owner
  • [42:56] Why Elizabeth celebrates the spring equinox as the start of the new year

Resources mentioned by Elizabeth in the episode:

 

    Quotes from this Week’s Episode of the Embodied Podcast

    • “Summer Solstice also marks a time for change, but it’s not about moving fast – nature is always inviting us to do everything at a pace that is gentle, kind, and natural meaning – not forced.”

    How was this episode for you?

    Was this episode helpful for you today? I’d love to know what quote or lesson touched your soul. Let me know in the comments below OR share the episode on Instagram, tag me your stories @elizabethdialto, or send me a DM!

     

    About the Embodied Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto

    Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

    In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.

    If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussion on Instagram here.

    Transcripts for Episode 351:

     

    Hello, everybody. And welcome to episode number 351 of the Embodied Podcast. My intention for today’s episode was gonna be to have like just a little short overview to dive a little deeper into embodied healing, to continue the conversation that we were having last week about embodied healing and self-liberation. But that did not happen as I was making my notes here because I love embodied healing so much, it is so deep and it is so vast.

    So I don’t know how long the episode is gonna be today but we are continuing that conversation. And particularly, I wanted to go deeper into the layers of embodied healing. And I have a framework for that as well which I have not shared on the podcast before. I wanted to share how the embodied healing framework interacts and overlaps with the self-liberation framework that I mentioned last week.

    And I also wanted to get into a few other things about healing, healing lessons that we can take from nature like using cycles and seasons and phases. I wanted to talk about how that also those things, moon phases and menstrual cycles and things like that also interact and engage with each other on the different markers throughout the year like solstices and equinoxes. And there’s just so much juicy stuff. There’s so many different ways to embody our healing and to approach healing in an embodied way that ties into all these different facets and aspects of life to make it more real, to make it more grounden, to make it more practical, but also to experience more resonance as you’re doing it.

    And as always, what I talk about so much in the realm of embodiment is to get out of your head and get into your body because especially as women, we, our bodies are extensions of the earth, of nature, of mother nature herself. And this is also true for men and non-binary people, but because women’s bodies are built to cycle like the moon, right? And which by the way, even if you don’t cycle anymore for whatever reason, if you’re menopausal or if for some reason you just, you don’t lead, you don’t have a menstrual cycle, whether that’s due to birth control or a health condition or a complication or something like that, that’s still okay, this still applies. And that I know you all are out there all having different experiences and different relationships to those things. So as always, I will invite you to take what resonates and ditch what doesn’t.

    And I wanted to say something as well. I don’t know that I’ve ever talked about this directly at least on the podcast, but the reason why my work, I do focus on women and I do center women in my work ’cause embodiment is for everybody. But it’s largely because I am a woman, that is my lived experience, and it’s just my lane. And as well, in terms of healing containers to have a focused container for people with a shared experience like womanhood, really allows us to go deep and focus on certain things without having to navigate the complications or the distractions that can occur when we bring in, like when we bring men, for example, into the container, right?

    Because such a big part of womanhood is contending with the male gaze, contending with the societal norms and conditioning and programming that come from patriarchy and misogyny. So to remove that from the experience and have a container where that’s just one less factor, and ’cause it’s no small factor, really allows us to go deeper into our healing, deeper into our own experiences and focus in a way that we can’t focus in mixed gendered spaces. So it’s not meant to be exclusionary, it’s meant to be just focused and concentrated, and as well, focusing on women has just allowed me to really deepen my practices and my expertise in a very refined way, rather than going too broad, which wouldn’t allow me in some cases to go as deep.

    And so I’m not saying that’s right, that’s just the path and the lane that I have chosen for myself and for my work. And again, it’s not rooted in any lack of love or belief in the healing of non-women. It is just celebrating, honoring, focusing and centering women. So before we get into everything, I do wanna mention, if you’re listening here in real-time, this episode is airing on June 14th. It is a big day in the Institute for EMBODIED Living in the Wild Soul world. Summer enrollment for the EMBODIED Living Center is officially open through June 22nd.

    So if you’re listening to this between June 14th and June 22nd in 2021, you can head over to untameyourself.com/embodied-living-center to check it out. We’ll also put that link on the Show notes page which will be untameyourself.com/351, ’cause this is episode number 351. And as well, there’s still a whole entire week left in the free I Shine, You Shine challenge that I’m currently hosting, which I designed for every woman who wants to begin an intentional healing and recovery process from over a year in a frigging global pandemic.

    And we’re not just gonna pop out of this pandemic experience and back into some kind of normal life that we think we had before the pandemic, that’s also part of the point, to honor how much we’ve been through, that so much has changed. And all of that change deserves our respect and attention. So I Shine, You Shine will help you be intentional with your attention, and identify what needs to be released and as well to help you connect or reconnect with your soul’s desires for your life, now and into a future post pandemic life that might take some serious time for some of us to imagine and configure. So if you wanna join I Shine, You Shine, you can visit untameyourself.com/ishineyoushine-621. All right, let’s get into today’s material now. I am offering you a lot to ponder and explore in this episode.

    So please remember what I always encourage, which is to take what resonates most, that really lights up your curiosity, and just start there. There’s no need to synthesize or understand everything that I’m gonna talk about here. This episode is really meant to be like a giant resource. It’s not a course, it’s not even a crash course. It’s just a kinda choose your own adventure type of thing. So let’s go deeper into embodied healing first. When I work with people on embodied healing, I focus on four Is, like the letter I.

    Although, metaphorically, how people, when people say, when someone wears glasses they call ’em four eyes, and glasses help people to see better. That metaphor works here because these four Is that I’m going to describe here in a second will absolutely help you to see, I’m putting that in air quotes, by the way, for anyone listening, ’cause I don’t wanna be ableist about this. And I’m speaking of seeing, not necessarily as like visually seeing like the sense of seeing, but also in the sense of experiencing, of getting clarity in whatever way clarity is available to us, regardless of our physical ability to see with our eyes, okay?

    So the four Is in my embodied healing framework are intentionality. So this is the why, why are we doing healing work? Why even bother? Personally and collectively, why are we engaging in healing work? So getting clear about that, ’cause intention is not everything, but it does matter. And it does give us guidance and focus and an anchor to return to on our healing paths. The second I is introspection. This is about developing the ability to honestly assess, observe and evaluate yourself so that you can hone in on what actually needs healing, so that you can prioritize the best, most effective and efficient things rather than entering into this never-ending hamster wheel of healing, or creating any narratives around perpetually needing to fix yourself.

    The next I is integration, and this is, I believe this is the I that so many people skip over when they get in that healing hamster wheel, and they’re just like obsessively wanting to heal the next thing, heal the next thing, heal the next thing, almost like an addiction, and I do think it becomes an addiction for some people. Integration is how we actually heal. It’s where the unsexiest parts of healing happen because this is rest, practice and reflection. This is getting in our reps. This is getting dirty on the field y’all, so you could see how things work for you. You could apply and you can see what works for you what doesn’t work for you, and you can develop and cultivate the self love, respect, trust, acceptance knowledge, and awareness that will be sustainable for growing and evolving in your life without making healing a full-time job or a full-time distraction.

    And the last I is actually the glue that binds it all together and is really woven throughout the other three and this one is integrity. So we do the other three things intentionality, introspection, and integration with the highest integrity available to us. So this means in alignment with your values with your priorities and in service to the greater good. And the reason why this is so important is because this then means that you can on your own embodied healing journey be prioritizing the things that define your life and your lived experience.

    So this is why I love frameworks, but I don’t love formulas. Because again, like I said, last week when we were talking about the self liberation framework, a framework is a map and you can use the map to decide what’s appropriate for you based on who you are, where you are in your life how you’re built, what resources are available to you. So it factors in all those different conditions that a lot of self-help, healing, spiritual development overlooks and bypasses, and effectively then excludes a lot of people. So we’re about including people and inviting you to make it your own. Always, always, always in my work.

    Now, the self liberation framework that I talked about last week, which if you didn’t listen to that episode, it’s episode number 350, you can listen to it after this if you want that deeper context. There’s eight tenants to the self liberation framework, surrender, release, trust, receptivity, wild dreaming, desire, love, and truth. And that framework works with the embodied healing framework like this. Intentionality calls for wild dreaming and desire. Introspection calls for surrender and release. Integration calls for trust and receptivity. And integrity calls for love and truth. So, everything I just talked about, again, it’s an overview not a deep dive.

    If you want to deep dive into these things and actually have some help and guidance working that stuff that happens in the EMBODIED Living Center. That’s why I designed the EMBODIED Living Center to be what I call like a cave of wonders. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Aladdin.” It’s a cave of wonders for embodied healing and self liberation. At this point, at the time that I’m recording this in June, 2021 we have close to 200 classes in our on-demand library from healing meditations, to wild soul movement practices, erotic body classes, sacred bodywork.

    There’s some wild soul sweat workouts, I stopped doing those but there’s a decent library full of those as well, along with all kinds of workshops from over the years, my archives of workshops that I’ve taught from 2014 to 2020, and then from 2020 on workshops that I’ve been teaching specifically for members of the EMBODIED Living Center. And so again you can check all that out at untameyourself.com/embodied-living-center. And just to give you an idea of some of the themes and topics we covered. In our healing meditation library we have meditations on things like forgiveness, moving through resistance, energetic boundaries, connecting to your wild soul wisdom, healing from a breakup, softening your heart, embodying divine love, raising your vibration, cultivating inner peace, wholeness, acceptance, dealing with big emotions.

    In the wild soul movement classes those all focus on those self liberation tenants, surrender, release, trust, receptivity, wild dreaming, desire, love, and truth. We use a specific mantra for each class so that we can start to embody those themes and we can release any conditioning we have that would block us from being able to embody and practice those things and the erotic body and wild soul sweat and single bodywork classes are designed to energize, empower, strengthen, and revitalize your whole body. While also freeing you from things like stuck energy, emotions, paradigms, and reliefs especially things related to womanhood. And again, we do all of that always, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritually.

    We focus on the different areas of your consciousness. And then the workshops we have are on things like dating in your 30s and 40s. How to have a courageous conversation connecting with your divine support squad, again, dealing, feeling and dealing. While we focus on emotional intelligence and emotional maturity, boundaries, self-love, again, cave of wonders. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that that space is a freaking cave of wonders for healing. And then plus you get the community which are women, are people are so amazing and so supportive. They’re all over the world and it’s just, I love that we can’t none of us can heal in isolation. So again, I’m obsessed with the EMBODIED Living Center.

    I highly recommend checking it out and this is the time to join. When enrollment closes on June 22nd it will not open up again until September. So, make sure you don’t miss out on that. If it resonates for you. So now let’s get into honoring season cycles and nature as ways to guide you and assist you and anchor you in your embodied healing. So I wanna start with the menstrual cycle and again, I know not everyone bleeds. And so this part will be for those who do for the most part, although some of you who don’t might just be interested in it. And I won’t spend a lot of time on this but I do wanna give you a reference to two books that really helped me learn this back in like 2013, 2014. One of them is called “WomanCode” by Alisa Vitti.

    That’s a great book if you want to understand the science and the physiology more deeply. And then “Love Your Lady Landscape” by Lisa Lister is more gonna be on like the spiritual and embodied side of things. And these, I love these books together. Lisa also has another book called “Code Red” but “Love your Lady Landscape” was my favorite in really deepening the understanding of the cycles. And then I also, I wanted to do a little bit of a walk through because something I love so much because I love anything that connects us to the mysteries of how amazing our bodies are built and how we are built to be a reflection of nature. So, the moon cycles in 28 day cycles and women’s bodies when they menstruate roughly menstruate on a 28 day cycle. Some cycles might be shorter, some cycles might be longer.

    But the average is probably around 28 days and the moon also has phases just like there are different phases of the menstrual cycle and these phases, both of the phases of the moon and the phases of the menstrual cycle also connect and relate to the seasons of the year as well as some feminine archetypes which some of you know, I’m obsessed with archetypes. I love them so much. I even released my own archetypes last year The Wild Store Archetypes. You can check out that quiz by the way, if you haven’t taken it yet at untameyourself.com/quiz. And again, I know I’m tossing out a lot of links, a lot of references, books, articles all this stuff in this episode, all of that lives at the show notes at untameyourself.com/351. So don’t worry about having to remember everything just go to the show notes page and get whatever you need after you listen.

    But okay, so the phases of the menstrual cycle, and again I’m never gonna be the one who’s gonna get all up in the deep science of things. But I did, there’s a tracking app that I use for my own cycle. That’s called Clue. And I got this, I pulled up an article from the Clue website to just help us go through this and also to remind me of the scientific names of things. And so, technically day one of the menstrual cycle is the day you start bleeding. So this is when the shedding of the uterine lining is happening and your levels of estrogen and progesterone are low.

    This is why, again for those who bleed or those who have bled, like your energy could be pretty low during your periods sometimes. And then the follicular phase this is the time between the first day of the period and ovulation. What’s happening during this phase is estrogen can begin to rise and the egg is preparing to be released. Then after the period, there’s this proliferative phase where the uterine lining builds back up again and then we ovulate. And the ovulation phase is the release of the egg from the ovary which happens roughly in the middle of the cycle.

    This is where the estrogen is at peak levels and just beforehand and then it’ll start to drop again afterwards. This is, ovulation is the most fertile phase. And then there’s the luteal phase which is the time between ovulation and before the start of menstruation again when the body is preparing for a possible pregnancy progesterone is produced that peaks and that drops. And so I wanna, for me, that part is like, okay, great here’s the scientific and here’s the hormones but I wanna go back and overlap the moon phases and the seasons and the archetypes with these things.

    So I look at it and I break it down in like four. Like there’s the period, there’s a time when you’re actually bleeding and then there’s the space between when you bleed and when you ovulate and then there’s ovulation and then there’s the space between when you ovulate and when you bleed again. Which is often referred to as PMs and gets a really bad rap. But PMs is actually my favorite part of the menstrual cycle. Doesn’t mean it needs to be yours, but I’ma tell you in a minute why I love it so much. So, when we are bleeding, this is similar to the energy of the new moon, the dark moon and the season of winter. And in terms of a feminine archetype this is kind of like the crone phase and the energy that ties all that together.

    The common elements there are, it’s a darker time, it’s a darker season, it’s a more inward focused season as well, it is also said that the veils are thinner during that time which means this is why it correlates to crone. You have deeper access to your wisdom to your intuition, which, crone is a word that could be used in derogatory sense and like the greater wider culture. But when you study archetypes crone is the elder, crone is that wise medicine woman kind of energy that we should honestly all be revering and respecting and seeking out in our lives, not rejecting and like putting out to pasture ’cause a woman has aged. Wisdom comes with age, can come with age and so when you’re bleeding, that’s that phase, that’s that time.

    After you bleed just like the seasons it’s like coming into spring. What comes after winter? Spring. The energy starts to go up a little bit more and the feminine archetype for spring is maiden. It’s kinda like that youthful, energetic, light. Light is returning phase. The light after the darkness, even seasonally there’s more sunlight after we have the spring Equinox. And so that is phase there of the menstrual cycle and then the ovulation phase this is going to be like summer and this correlates to the feminine archetype of mother. And it’s not necessarily birth mother but the energy of mothering, of taking care of things, of being super capable and able and multitasking and energized and I know some of you that are birth mothers or that have children might be like, that’s not my experience of motherhood, but again I’m talking in the sense of the archetypal energy not necessarily the day-to-day energetics of motherhood.

    In Lisa’s book, “Love Your Lady Landscape” she calls ovulation this phase she calls it being the queen of fricking everything and so if you cycle, if you try to schedule your life around your cycle, to the best of your ability ovulation is the time for if you have a speaking gig or a photo shoot or an important meeting or a presentation or a job interview during the ovulation phase is a great time to schedule stuff like that. And then finally that phase after ovulation which is that PMs phase, this core, Ooh, I forgot to give you the moon cycles. So the spring phase, the phase after you bleed is like the waxing moon.

    The moon is moving towards fullness and then ovulation is like the full moon. And then after ovulation, when the, I think of this as the dip, I always experience the dip because when the energy starts to drop again and we are in PMs, phasing towards bleeding again, this is like autumn or fall and the feminine archetype that correlates here is like that wise wild woman. And you know how some people during PMs, PMs gets a bad rap because often women get labeled as bitchy or irritable but it’s not that we’re bitchy or irritable it’s that our filters are off. Our, normally where we might be able to be a little bit nicer or a little more like appeasing or polite. We don’t have that so much in us during that PMs phase.

    So we’re often just more direct and less, what’s the word? Less polite, I guess. That’s not really the word I’m looking for but I’m not locating another word. Hopefully you get the gist of what I’m saying, but we also give less of a shit what other people think during that phase. And the irony of that is also though it could be a time of our insecurities really coming up. So that’s something I always notice during that PMs phase is when if I’m feeling insecure stuff’s like really bothering me. I’m like, okay, this might be true, but it’s also amplified by the phase where I’m at in my cycle. So paying attention to these things is pretty cool. And then that PMs phase I think I already said this correlates to autumn and it correlates to the waning moon.

    It’s dipping, it’s moving back towards that dark phase. Autumn is moving us again towards that winter that we’re hibernating that lower energy time. So that, I love, it’s just a cool thing to see how those things overlap. And so to come back though to just spend an extra moment on the seasons on their own unrelated to the menstrual cycle. Honoring and celebrating the wheel of the year the solstices and equinoxes, summer solstice, fall equinox winter solstice, spring equinox, these things help us again, just tune into, and get the natural energy. This is why it’s also cool to work with the moon phases because the, we have our own cycles and our own seasons and phases of things that go on in our lives. But there’s also these energetics at play depending on the season of the year that we’re in and the phase of the moon cycle.

    So, and I’ll give you an example, actually as I’m recording this, I’m currently in I am menstruating and it was recently a full moon. And what’s interesting is those two energies are seemingly in opposition to each other. The full moon is like the big bright like kinda energized part of the moon cycle. But the menstrual part of the menstrual cycle when you’re actually bleeding is the lowest energy. And so this period, I have more energy than I do when I’m bleeding around the new moon and the energy is lower. And also we’re in spring here coming up on summer pretty soon.

    So I have more energy during this period than I normally do because there’s also those other energetics going on and impacting my body other than just that I am bleeding right now. And as well, I love, I’ve seen, memes and gifs about this over the years. So I’ve seen people write about it, but one of the coolest things, when people wanna be like, “those things aren’t related, it’s just coincidental” or anything like that is, I mean, this is science y’all. If you look at the ocean the tides are absolutely affected by the cycles of the moon and our bodies are something like 70 or 75% water. So of course we would also be affected by the cycles of the moon, which is kinda cool. It’s not even kind of cool, I think that is so fucking cool I can’t even stand it sometimes.

    I really geek out on that in case you can tell, and it’s cool. You don’t have to think it’s as interesting or amazing as I do, but I really do think that’s quite spectacular. And so the equinoxes, so here’s the difference. I looked this up because again, I just don’t have the best memory for these types of details sometimes. And I found this article at, I don’t know how to say this. It looks like it’s Byju’s, byjus.com on the differences between the equinoxes and the solstices. And we’ll link this article up in the show notes as well. But an Equinox is a time of year when the sun is nearest to the equator giving equal lengths of day and night. And so that’s why these start at the beginning of the spring and the beginning of the fall, it happens twice a year.

    The spring Equinox is called the vernal equinox. The fall is the autumnal equinox. These usually happen around March 20th and September 22nd. And then the solstices are the times of year when the sun is farthest from the equator resulting in the longest nights and the longest days. So solstice has happened during summer and winter also happens twice a year. Summer solstice is typically June 21st and winter solstice is typically December 22nd. And so it’s cool right now as we’re coming up on the summer solstice, which by the way if you look at the full wheel of the year there’s also Imbolc, Samhain, Mabon and Beltane which happened at the halfway points between the seasons. I’m not gonna get all up in that, but again, there there’s books there’s other places to dig deeper into that stuff if you’re interested.

    Especially if you’re interested in ritualizing those things and doing like ceremonies and celebrations and you’re really into those earth based practices and earth based spirituality or goddess centered practices or goddess based spirituality. So my friend Lisa Lister, who I mentioned earlier has another book called “Witch” which gives you deeper dives into those things and also offers some rituals and practices and ceremonies and things like that. Which I’m not gonna super duper get into today although I will say because we’re coming up on the summer solstice that, summer solstice is a time where we really get to celebrate more light. That longer days, shorter nights literally the sun is in the sky longer.

    There’s less dark, there’s less nights. The energy of summer is generally more active as well and this is why our theme for this I Shine, You Shine that we’re currently in right now is get your shine back. I designed it to work with the energy of the season anyway and this is one of the cool things about working with seasons and cycles. When you’re aware of the seasons and cycles and the energy of the seasons and cycles you can kinda plan and be intentional with your embodied healing to use the energy of the season or of the cycle that you’re in to help support you so you don’t have to do as much of the heavy lifting or the energetic expenditure on your own. So in a lot of the world, the summer is all so hot so which means we might wear less clothing. So it’s also a time for showing ourselves more both literally and metaphorically, physically and in other ways, and of course, whatever ways are appropriate and aligned for you, you don’t have to do that or subscribe to that. But again, and this is why.

    So when we do our Summer Solstice Circle and ceremony on Saturday, June 19th, which is part of I Shine, You Shine. And by the way, you can join I Shine, You Shine just for that if you want to. ‘Cause I’m not posting that anywhere else, it’s free, but it’s only gonna be for people who join I Shine, You Shine. So if you are interested in doing that summer solstice ceremony with us, it’s at untameyourself.com/ishineyoushine-621 to get the details and get the access for that. We’re gonna do it on Zoom. ‘Cause it’s a beautiful thing to ritualize and also again, with our theme of intentionally healing around you starting this transition out of pandemic life and looking to the future of what post pandemic life might look like, we get to lay to rest the things that have been dark.

    The things that we have been through that have been so hard and so challenging and disruptive and heartbreaking, and come back into the light and bring the light back and use that energy of the light, of the sun, of like that fiery change energy that comes with the season of summer. And even though this is a time for change, I want to emphasize that it doesn’t mean you have to move fast through and with your change. Nature is always inviting us to do everything at a pace that is gentle, kind and natural, which just means not forced, right? Think about birth, human babies are meant to incubate for about nine months. And sometimes when they arrive prematurely, there can be complications. Our lives are full of personal death and rebirth cycles.

    And if we rush the birth and rebirth parts, there could also be complications, just like with physical birth. So again, even with that fierce, fiery energy of summer, it doesn’t mean we have to speed up, hustle hard or push unnecessarily, though, if pushing is appropriate for you, the energy of the season will support you in doing that. So I wanna, I mentioned nature and I want to share. So there’s two more things I wanna talk about in terms of seasons and cycles and embodied healing related to these. And one of them is these laws of nature that I’ve come to over the years, simply by being a person who owns plants. By observing my plants, I geek out on this a lot. And I am gonna make a little note about astrology.

    Although some of you may or may not find interesting, but the plant and the nature thing first, being a plant owner has taught me a lot about the laws of nature, and there’s four main ones I love to reference with my clients and students. So these are not definitive or exhaustive. Again, they’re just the ones that I’ve observed and implemented and integrated into my own life over and over again, and also used for my own introspection. So again, coming back to that embodied healing framework, intentionality, introspection, and integration. So the first one is that nature doesn’t function in a linear fashion. Again, she operates in cycles and seasons, which we just spent a bunch of time talking about, menstrual cycles, moon cycles, seasons of the year.

    Nature also doesn’t do anything particularly fast, except for destruction and disaster. Even our plants. I planted a bunch of wildflower seeds back in October or November when I first moved here into the place where I am currently. And they started, I started to see even within a month or two I started to see a little bit of like, it’s not germination, but like the sprouts, the sprouts coming through the top, right? But it literally wasn’t until about a month ago that whoof, they came up, and now there’s flowers and buds and colors and all this amazing things, and there’s bees and there’s butterflies in the garden now which is cool. But what month did that happen in?

    That happened in April, and I planted those seeds in November or October. So what is that, November? December, January, February, March, April. Took like five or six months. And even though little sprouts started happening much sooner than that, the full bloom took five or six months. And we are like this in our lives, right? Sometimes we have to plant seeds and for the seeds to germinate, they gotta be in the dark. You gotta feed it, you gotta water it, it needs sunlight. This is like us with all of our self-care and nutrition and tending and the things we need to do for ourselves so we can germinate, so we can have our own processes. And then we start to sprout, blossom, bloom a little bit, but then it takes, again, more energy and focus and process and integration and all this stuff to fully bloom.

    And then guess what’s gonna happen in a couple months, those flowers are gonna die. We’d have to pull ’em up. We’re gonna have to plant new things again. So this is our life, right? A lot of things do not happen fast, again, except destruction and disaster. Every once in a while, something comes through. It could be a big storm, it could be a fire, it could be a flood. And again, that’s in the nature aspect, but in our own lives, they were frigging storms and fires and floods that happen in other ways, traumatic events, tragedies, frigging pandemic, right?

    That really, that will mess with the cycles and the natural flow of things. Next is that nature is the queen of using what she has. Listen, I forget to water my plants sometimes and somehow they live on. Some of these plants are more dramatic than others. If any of you are plant owners and you’ve never owned a piece lily, peace lily is dramatic as fuck. She’ll be just like super droopy and wilty and then you water it, and it’s almost like she comes back to life. There’s also another one called a Photinia, which the nickname of this plant is actually the drama queen, because that thing also will wilt, you’ll think it’s dead and then you’ll water it and it’s like fully back to life within a day. And so plants can survive.

    Things in nature can survive a long time. Even our bodies, by the way. Bodies can survive quite a while without food, although eventually that can certainly, no food and water can do us in. And not that we have to function in survival mode, but we can. But the point of this one is why a body can last or why plants can last without food or water for a long time is because they are amazing at using what they have. There are stored up resources, which means they don’t have to constantly be hoarding for resources that they don’t frigging need. And this connects and relates to the fourth and final lesson, which is that nature teaches us how to not take more than we need, which is a beautiful thing that I really wish a lot of this world would really pay attention to and prioritize. So those are the laws of nature that I’ve observed mainly from my plants.

    And then last but not least, I just wanted to mention astrology because the astrological new year begins with the sign of areas which is essentially the Spring Equinox that happened in March. And personally, I really resonate with that time of year, spring being the new year. I don’t resonate with January 1st being the new year, especially as a person who lives in the Northern Hemisphere, because January 1st, we literally just came off of the winter solstice. We are right up in the season of winter. So that is counter-intuitive to like busting out and starting new things. Winter is the time for hibernation, rest, going inward.

    The days are shorter, the nights are longer, it’s more dark. It’s like the new moon. Not a time for coming out hot, starting fresh or new, right? That really is spring energy. So for the last several years, I really have started to set up my life around spring and that Spring Equinox being more of a new year than January 1st. So if that resonates for you, take that as well. So that’s it, y’all we did it. We did the deep dive. I hope you enjoyed and found that even a fraction as interesting as I do. I think that stuff is so cool. And again, not meant to overwhelm you because there were so many different things, but just meant to give you some reference points for things that might resonate for you or that might support you in your embodied healing and self-liberation journey.

    So again, all the links to all the resources, books, articles, I Shine, You Shine, EMBODIED Living Center, all that stuff will be at untameyourself.com/351. For this episode, feel free to listen to this one more than once, share it with your friends, use it like a book club and be like, “Wow, that was interesting to me. That was interesting to me. What do you think about this? How do you practice that?” Again, there’s just, there’s a lot of juicy stuff here to unpack and explore and use for your own experience, however it works for you. So thank you as always for listening to the show, we will be back next week and I’ll see you later.