A flicker of the old pattern – micro-dosing the pain exposure

I was sitting down by the beach at the end of the day, taking in the setting sun.  I had been reflecting on how stable my inner world had been of late, then an old pattern showed up, just as a flicker, the whole journey of it, there in a flicker.  Triggered by some uncertainty inside a friendship, unsure how trustable things were, and an old pattern that shows up as terror, abandonment and chaos flickered to life inside me.

I was able to speak to it with words of logic and allow it to feel held by the general sense of community around me and the grace of nature.  There was much more of me in a resourceful state than was attached to the flicker of the traumatic memory.

I saw my old pattern of wanting to get busy and put things in place to stop the abandoned chaos from being there, then caught myself and met the feeling sense of this pattern in my body again, round two, and allowed the rhythm and waves of the ocean and nature space around me to soothe the unsettled rhythms in my body.  Then I became very aware of the larger, calm wise whole being back in the driver’s seat.  Able to act or not act.  At choice.  Holding and soothing the traces of pain.

This is ideally how we want processing sessions to be – a microdose of the pain pattern and lots of soothing and resource to surround it.