Self-Care For Activists

This guided meditation helps you balance your urgency and call to activism by giving simple tools for breath and body awareness, as well as the reminder to receive and take in goodness as you also fight for change. Somatic meditation is a style of meditation that works through an embodied awareness, felt sense and imagination.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

The following is a guided meditation by Renee Seals,

A somatic movement educator,

Energy worker,

And astrologer.

This meditation is intended to help support your embodied meditation practice.

If in the recording you are prompted to do something that doesn't feel good for your body,

Please adapt and modify to make it work for you.

Please also note that the content of this meditation sometimes explores deep and subtle states and memories,

And sometimes guided visualizations.

You are encouraged to work with discernment as you practice with them.

If any of the guidance Renee offers feels too activating or uncomfortable,

Please listen to your body's knowing and pause the recording until a later time if you wish to return to it.

These guided meditations range anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and do not require any supplementary equipment to participate.

We hope you enjoy.

Hello and welcome.

Thanks for listening.

This is Renee and this is a somatic meditation.

Somatic meditation is a style of meditation that begins with the body,

And our focus will be on the physical awareness and guided imagery and locational sense or felt sense as I invite your awareness to travel through different parts of your being,

Your physical being and your energetic being.

Today's meditation is kind of a special meditation in that it's for certain people and my hope is that a lot of people identify as these certain people.

So this is a meditation for activists,

And when I say activist I mean you are someone who cares about the world around you and you care about the issues that concern you and concern your communities and you do what you can to take part in betterment of the world in one way or another.

So I don't mean that you have to be someone who goes and pickets or protests.

I don't mean that you're someone necessarily who needs to write letters and get on the phone.

Activism can happen in a lot of different ways,

But specifically this meditation is offered for people who feel themselves really impassioned and needing to participate in the world and with their causes,

Sometimes to the extent of not taking care of themselves and really living in a state of anxiety and urgency that is very prevalent and very common within activist communities.

So I just want to introduce this idea that urgency is actually a tool of oppression and when we feel urgent and when we get into spaces of gripping and really intense focus on one issue and the intense need to take action,

Oftentimes we lose sight of a lot of other things.

Most importantly our own sense of inner peace and well-being and relationality or the ability to just connect and be present with the people in the environments around us.

This is not to say that we should be inactive or placid or that some quest for inner peace and bliss is the better choice than being activist in the world,

But it is a question of balance and an invitation to inquire into the ways that we internalize systems of control even in our efforts to upend them.

This isn't a new idea at all.

I think a lot of activists and activist communities are waking up to the need for self-care and to the need for slowness and cultivation of relationship and gentleness within the connections of the community and the connections of the individuals.

So this is just an offering to this awareness that's starting to grow within our collective psyche of this need for self-care and care of others as we engage with all of the protests and actions and the different ways that we seek to fight and resist and participate in social change.

So if you're listening and this is for you,

Thank you.

Thank you for your efforts and thank you for your passion and thank you for your interest.

Let's begin and let's begin by just noticing wherever you are.

And I often say and probably should have said right at the beginning that somatic meditation is something you can do anywhere.

You don't have to sit in a quiet isolated space with a perfect posture.

It's a nice thing to be able to give yourself some time to develop an inward focus and to let go of the external distractions.

So if you can put it down for a little bit that would be the best.

And also maybe you can't put it down and you're listening to this meditation as you're en route somewhere else or as you're engaging with other things.

So wherever you are,

I encourage you to so wherever you are take a minute and just regard your surroundings and see what there is to see with your eyes and hear what there is to hear with your ears and smell any smells taste any tastes.

Tune into your skin and the way that you perceive your external environment through the container of your skin.

And as you come into attunement with your senses there's no need to do anything.

This is a space of just perceiving.

Notice if your mind wants to go into action.

You see something and then it makes you think of something you need to do.

You hear something and it recalls some kind of conversation and something you wanted to say.

When you notice your mind going into action just gently invite yourself right back to this moment and to the awareness of what you're perceiving.

The idea here is that we develop an open field of awareness and in that open field of awareness there's a separation between our senses and the objects that they're perceiving.

In this separation nothing ceases to exist but we untether ourselves from the stories that we make about the objects that we're perceiving.

So if you're seeing something and you notice that your mind goes into a place of needing to take action what's happening is that there are your eyes and there's the thing that you're seeing and that in and of itself is neutral right your eyes and then this object or whatever it is.

But the thing that's happening is that the object is not the object but the relationship between your eyes and the thing you're seeing.

This is a verb right and it's perceiving so you're seeing and in that seeing there's the situating of yourself in a narrative your eyes that object and as soon as you perceive it and you name it it's a kind of story and in the story there's the character of you.

So the invitation right now is to let that character retreat from the object and it doesn't go away but the relationship between the character and the object becomes more neutral and so you can see and you can notice if your mind wants to go into action and then you can gently call yourself back from the instinct to take action from that urgency that arises and be with the state of perceiving and you can do this with seeing with hearing the smelling with tasting and with sensing in any other way and just as we consider all of the sense organs are organs of perception emotion is also a sensation and so you might notice an emotional quality sadness arises then there's a story then there's the need to take action or the movement towards the action maybe that was in the past or the future when you notice that your mind jumps into some place that's not here a really easy recall method is to just feel your breath so let's now just focus on the breath and you can close your eyes if it's helpful and you don't need to do anything to your breath but just by noticing you might notice also the desire to take a deeper breath notice the quality of your breath and feel your inhale and your exhale and just as we are practicing a moment ago withdrawing our narratives our stories our sense of self from the objects that we're perceiving you can also do that with your breath and you don't need to control it you can simply allow your breath to come in and come out be as present as you possibly can with the sensation notice the instant that your inhale begins the sucking of air through your nose or through your mouth and how the air is cool as it comes into your body the instant that your exhale begins and as it leaves your body through your nose or through your mouth the air is warm and in the next few breaths just be with those feelings cool air coming with the inhale warm air with the exhale so it can be very challenging to stay present for most of us and how many times in the last 30 seconds or so that i was saying let's just feel these qualities of breath did your mind jump to something else keeping your attention steady is just like any other exercise that you do it's a muscle it's a strength that you develop over time and for those of us who experience a sense of urgency or anxiety on a regular basis this steadiness and its development is something that we can benefit a lot from urgency and anxiety have a physiological effect in the body this is called stress when you feel urgent and anxious your body releases hormones into your blood and these hormones put your nervous system on a state of alert and other important systems like your digestive system or your circulatory system they recede into the background they get less attention they have less capacity and they're very dangerous they get less attention they have less capacity your mental and emotional and physical health all depend upon your ability to rest and to be present and not be in a state of high alert if you're someone whose body and lived experience puts you in places of danger or the need to be alert quite regularly or if you choose to enter into situations where you need to pay a lot of attention and where you are taking action it's absolutely essential that you develop inside of yourself a little bit of balance to all of that stress it's essential for your health it's essential for your relationships and truly it's essential for your causes and for your needs and for your needs and truly it's essential for your causes and for your communities because of course you are a part of the community and you are a part of the cause or the action that you're taking in response to a cause and of course we all want to be vibrant and healthy parts of our communities and to participate in the ways that we can best in all of our causes and actions when we're in a state of alert and urgency we are not in the places of our beings and brains that can comprehend long-term consequence and so often in states of alert and urgency we make choices that later we regret and those choices are often small choices the choice to be sharp or short in our communication to look away rather than look towards small choices that build up over time into more hardness or hardening or further a sense of urgency come back to your breath invite gentleness with your breath feel the way the inhale enters your body and spreads out allow your breath and receive it it's so important that you can receive that you can absorb that you can take in and accept that which nourishes and sustains you so that you can be vibrant and vital and whole and that you can give this in return can you invite your breath to be in your body with gentleness and as you feel your inhale can you invite your being to receive in any ways that you probably know intuitively that you need to receive rest care affirmation love relaxation playfulness sustenance what do you know that you need to receive can you open your being as you feel your breath come in when you feel your exhale can you let go for those of us who are sensitive and impassioned and concerned it can be real hard to let go hard to let go of what feels like injustice and pain hard to let go of urgency so remember that it's a community not an individual that will really change and of course communities are made of individuals and so we're all a part of this change how can you participate and engage to the best of your extent an important part of that will be being able to let go able to let go of all that you cannot affect able to let go of the need for others to do things differently able to let go of anger in the letting go there's settling and this isn't letting go and ignoring it's a settling into whatever the feeling is if you sense your urgency for people or things to be different on some level this is an idea of control how can i get things to be different maybe i can do something maybe i can control this is not to say your actions are in vain or ineffective or unneeded but it is a little bit of perspective and an invitation to feel what those thoughts are or those sensations are in your body when i feel really focused on something or someone who i want to change i leave myself i leave presence with the actual feeling of whatever it is that's causing this need for change causing this need for change i become defensive and aggressive and rigid as you let go can you tell yourself that you will take right action at the right times can you simply let go of carrying what is too heavy to carry by yourself and what lodges in your body as inflammation and toxicity when you inhale receive what you need to sustain and nourish and nurture and when you exhale let go let go of the ways that you hold it all within yourself let go of the ways that it sits and festers or becomes hard and immovable in your own body remind yourself that as you inhale and you receive that you're worthy of this reception you're doing good in the world you need to take care of yourself and as you exhale remind yourself that you're working in collaboration with others that when any one part tries to hold it all on themselves the collective becomes dysfunctional we have to share the the load with one another so of course there's fear and despair and at the root of the urgency is a feeling that we must act and if we don't that some horrible thing will happen or continue to happen and so as you work with this meditation know that you will act that you will take action for what matters the most to you and know that your actions are as important as they can be in a world that is greatly beyond your control and at a time when many things are kind of spinning out of control the choices you make to act and engage are choices that you want to make in the moment and with whatever capacity you have and as you act and as you engage can you also continue to receive can you see and remember where there's goodness can you hear it can you taste it can you feel it in yourself if your eyes have been closed allow them to open and again look around and observe your surroundings see what you see hear what you hear feel what you feel notice the feeling now how or if it's shifted in the last 20 minutes feel your breath how it's cool the inhale and warm on the exhale as you breathe in remember any goodness that's in your life bring it in as you breathe out release everything that is beyond your control as you breathe in remember any goodness that is in your life as you breathe out release anything that is beyond your control the essence of this meditation is not a call to disengage or to care less or to cease taking action but an invitation to remember the goodness that's in your life and to take care of yourself as you engage and as you take action and as you feel all of the feelings and the urgency that's here your health and well-being will be an important part of any change that's made may you honor and respect yourself and in that honoring and respecting may you exude that into your communities and into all that you care about thank you so much for listening and practicing please continue with this practice often and whenever you can thanks again for listening if you enjoy these meditations please do share them much love and be well

Reviews

I really needed this. The sense is urgency sometimes takes away from feeling joy. Thank yiu !

Well done, really grateful for this reminder 🙏🏼

Thank you 💚