Guided by Glimmers
As we journey with a new myth each season in Root + Rise, much of our exploration is grounded in trauma-informed somatic alchemy. The story orients us in a larger, transpersonal context, while our sensation + embodiment based practice delivers our experience from being merely an intellectual excursion into the rich subjectivity of the felt-sense.
Like Nature, myth is a living organism of transmission and transformation. The integration of the medicine we receive can’t happen without embodiment, without the earth + soil of our bodies metabolizing what’s meant for us.
This summer, with the Greek tale of Echo & Narcissus, we’re compassionately meeting the frequency of our inner narcissist (if we’ve been raised in the dominant culture which is founded on the wound of narcissism, we all have one to varying degrees), as well as learning how to meet the narcissistic traits of the people in our lives and the world with understanding.
This isn’t always easy or fun. Triggers will pop up, constrictions will demand our attention and capacity. This is where the resource-giving balm of glimmers come in.
Glimmers are the opposite of triggers. It’s a term coined by somatic therapist, Deb Dana, which has become a popular touchpoint in somatic modalities and body-based trauma healing.
They’re those brief moments when we attune to the glimmers of beauty, joy, delight and wonder in our environment, and allow the time and space to feel them in the body.
I’m in a glimmer when I notice my dog Bodhi's focused intent as he digs himself the perfect hole, and then plops his body into it with a satisfied sigh. As I pause to feel the sheer delight of this, my chest and jaw and belly also open and sigh. I giggle.
Or when I stand barefoot on warm earth at dawn and feel like something heavy has been released.
Last week, on a hike up in the mountains, a stunning pair of yellow and black Monarch butterflies were flirting with each other over some bright red wildflowers growing by the side of a clear, cold stream of water. My heart opened, and the warm sensation of trust emerged.
Glimmers aren’t just cute Hallmark moments. They create an actual felt-sense of safety and capacity; and crucially for those of us who have experienced violence and CPTSD, a felt-sense of safety to inhabit our own bodies.
Physiologically, glimmers activate a specific part of our nervous systems, creating a calming of the stress response. We feel grounded, connected. Like we belong in the world.
Glimmers also create the capacity for us to be in resourced engagement with the triggers we encounter, rather than being run by or identified with them. This in turn allows the triggers to become portals into integration.
Consciously cultivating the practice of noticing and feeling glimmers can feel quite triggering and unsafe to a highly traumatized system at first - but slowly, incrementally, it works its magic.
It’s also radically disruptive to a culture that has us constantly poised for disaster, and to the rewiring of the ready-to-evolve negativity bias in our neurology. Here too, slowly, incrementally it begins to work its magic through us and into the collective.
One of Root + Rise’s Foundational Practices is regularly invoking the sacred Pause. This season, in supportive community, we’ll be bringing the Pause front and center, and filling it with glimmers to resource ourselves as we turn towards resolving + evolving of the narcissist wound, within + without.
What lies on the other side feels a lot like a frequency of liberation.