I am not referring to your pet, rather, I am referring to YOU as the beautiful, resilient, magnificent animal that you are, that we all are.
It has been an intense few weeks judging by my inbox, sessions with clients, and my own internal fluctuations when I choose to tune into the collective.
Some days when I reach out, they’re planned but mostly it is intuitive and guided. This newsletter took a lot of patience to arrive through me.
As Mother Earth continues to birth herself, on the outside, this may look to many like a series of relentless cataclysms. Close to my home, we have witnessed unprecedented flooding, hundreds of deaths and missing bodies, and damage to lands in Europe. Everywhere in the world, the effects of climate change are conspicuous.
We are also at the peak of segregation, or what I call, “the ultimate illusion of this life”, which is the game of separation. Many are trying to reinforce schisms according to race, nationality, culture, religion, and skin – in hopes of securing a more flourishing economy for oneself “after the crisis”.
All this in addition to the forced restrictions of movement and constant pressure to comply and hand our sovereignty.
A number of people have voiced to me their anxieties and fears about what is to come as though it feels like the ‘end’ is nearing.
Enter, The Sustos
Throughout Latin America, when a person experiences a fright (asustado), it is known that it causes their soul to stagger out of the body (el espíritu se fue). This absence of soul leads to a range of symptoms that can appear instantly or gradually over time, this is referred to as sustos. These commonly include, but are not limited to, fatigue, hypervigilance, headaches, diarrhea, disturbed sleep, loss of appetite, bodily aches, sadness, and physical weakness.
Sustos is highly linked with infants, whose souls have not developed a strong attachment to their body and are startled easily, but adults are also often affected by it more severely.
As a naturopath, I can give scientific explanations that make one more susceptible to sustos such as stealth infections, in particular viruses and parasites, nutritional deprivation, hypoglycemia, and/or a dysregulated nervous system, however, what is clear through research and the exploration of folk illnesses that our fears are culturally and socially shaped, subjective according to our perceptions and emotional experiences, and are heightened by exclusion and isolation.
Today, we easily correlate sustos with trauma as it is associated with a strong emotional shock response, possibly based on past-life history we’ve had.
Sustos always activates our instinctive center that chronicles our life information – including our fear programs and houses the primordial, innate intelligence of our autonomic nervous system. This activation allows us the access to clear it out.
In addition to activating our instinctive center, sustos also creates shock patterns of its own. They’re the main source of material in your instinctive center in your archive of lifetimes. Shock in the body is initially a survival technique, after it’s done its initial job, if left untreated, it can manifest as illnesses in the long run.
From a shamanic perspective, a sustos sets the energy in a particular holding pattern that is related to the event. It freezes the energy and if it is not cleared, the event keeps repeating because you are an energetic match.
Above all, the repetition of sustos is the body’s desire to achieve completion of a past stress response.
Allow Your Animal To Express
The body is seldom random, it is always looking to express itself.
Allowing the expression of the body can look different for everyone but I like to keep it simple with one piece of advice: allow your biological impulses to happen and follow what excites you.
Personally, I have been far away from screens engulfed in nature, where I have been practicing intuitive tracking, communicating with land spirits, and creating my own apothecary of herbal remedies for clients. I have also taken up surf-skating (till I’m near an ocean again) and loving it!
Here’s the thing, your biology is awaiting your listening. Whether it is asking you to release gas without need to curb the impulse or apologize (yes, seriously!), shake, rest more, stop eating when full, be outdoors and play, say “No”when you want to..the list is endless, and your only duty is to listen and trust. The more you do that, the easier it gets to be in your body and understand its language.
Stop curbing, start allowing.
Stop apologizing, start taking up more space.
Stop delaying joy, start chasing and embracing it.
The more connected you are to your aliveness, the easier life flows through you shifting you out of freeze.
Ask your body, the beautiful, wise animal it is: What does it need? What is it seeking to express and how would it enjoy doing so?
Find Places Of Existing Wellness As Your Resource
It’s worth repeating, there is only one safe place to be and that is your body.
If you experienced deeper levels of trauma that has not been resolved, then you’re set up in a way where you’re more susceptible to the external controlling you.
Yes, the environment greatly shapes one’s states of being but you also have the power as an individual to co-create a reality you desire. This begins with your return to, honouring, and anchoring in your body. The commitment is staying loyal to your experience and in reverence to life.
If your body does not feel safe to be in, nowhere in the world will.
If who you are, how you feel, and what you desire is not clearly decided, broadcasted, and boundaried, no relationship with a partner, family member, land, Earth or Source will feel entirely resonant or nourishing.
A simple somatic experience is to sit down comfortably, presuming a stance of openness through a wide chest. Gaze slowly, using your entire range of peripheral vision as you orient to your room. Feel your feet on the ground and body supported. Then check in with your body as you guide the process with breath. What do you notice? What are you holding and where? Can you breathe into it? I invite you to shift from focusing on the discomfort, tension, or pain and to find a place of ease, even if it is a mere tip of your finger. When you find that place of ease, focus and stay with it, again, guided by your breath. Practice this for even just two minutes a day, every day, till you feel safe in your body. Many people notice an immense shift in feeling better simply by being still with their body focused on ease.
Healing trauma does not happen by focusing on the places of fragment rather, by finding the places of existing wellness. Tending and enhancing what is well acts as a positive resource and informs places of distress in the system.
Commune With Your Animal
Another simple practice is to spend a few minutes each morning acknowledging, nurturing and appreciating your body.
Begin with bringing to awareness the judgmental voice in your head and declare an invocation. For example,”I revoke, reclaim, and renounce all that I’ve done to deny my body what it asked for. From this moment forward, I will actively practice kindness, compassion, and love towards my magnificent body.” Find the words that resonate with your language and honest intention.
When you look in the mirror in the mornings, make a conscious choice to stop the criticism and judgment instead, thank your body for all its put up with. Touch the part of your body you judge, thank, and bless it like a newborn baby, fragile and tender.
Commit yourself to seeing the beauty that we all were created from. Follow the energy of the source of unconditional loving that birthed your existence. Let that grace submerge your senses into an elevated experience of connection, being, and love.
Check in with and speak to your body throughout your day, for it is a fractal of divinity illuminating your experience as human.
Remember: You Are Safe, Healed, Whole And Wild
Our job continues to be reaching for resilience and our capacity to stay in the unknown, this is a process, and our body is our best friend through it. We must take care of it now more than ever.
When you are in your body, you don’t try to protect yourself by being careful, rather, you take care of yourself by being aware. Your safety lies in your openness to surrender, widen your gaze, perceive differently and receive the energies surrounding you instead resisting and/or being on watch out for harm.
You are safe.
You are healed.
You are whole.
I’ll end this newsletter with a reminder from the wonderful Brene Brown:
“There will be times when standing alone feels too hard, too scary, and we’ll doubt our ability to make our way through the uncertainty. Someone, somewhere, will say, ‘Don’t do it. You don’t have what it takes to survive the wilderness.’ This is when you reach deep into your wild heart and remind yourself, ‘I am the wilderness.'”
You were born wild.
Stay wild dear one,
Salma
Image: © Erik Mandre, Bear Shaking
