Getting Unstuck

In this meditation, I guide you into physical awareness of fascia. Fascia is a connective tissue, prevalent throughout the body, that holds tension patterns, and is strongly associated with the nervous system. Working with fascia mirrors ways in which we can work with the mind. In the meditation, I present ways to mobilize and release stuck patterns.

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.

Hi everyone,

Thanks so much for joining.

This is Renee and today I'm going to offer a guided meditation called Getting Unstuck,

Strategies for creative problem solving.

The meditation today will still be a somatic meditation.

We'll still bring our awareness into the body and begin our research that way,

But we might also do some other things.

It would be good if you had a piece of paper and something to write with close by.

Feel free to pause the recording so that you can go and get it.

It would also be good if you had some space to move around and to be in a couple of different positions.

I'll suggest that for those of you that use my meditations while you're doing things out in the world,

You can definitely do that and just imagine yourself in different shapes,

But if it's possible for you to do this at home or somewhere that easily facilitates your creative expression,

That would probably be the best.

All right,

So today's meditation is going to begin with awareness in what's called fascia.

Fascia is a connective tissue that we all have and it's a kind of a webbing and you can imagine that this connective tissue wraps around every other kind of tissue.

So fascia surrounds your muscles.

It surrounds each strand or each muscle fiber as well as an entire muscle.

It will surround an entire organ.

It's webbing that's kind of just underneath your skin and the job that it does is keeping your body together.

It keeps your body parts in relationship to each other.

It helps things stay in the place that they need to.

In general,

Its functional purpose is to provide integrity for the body.

So the entire body is integrated.

It is one ecosystem made up of lots and lots and lots of little pieces all the way down to the molecular level if you want to think about it that way or different body parts,

Organs,

Etc.

But fascia is one of the main substances that keeps everything together and moving together.

You've probably heard about fascia at this point.

In the last decade or two,

A lot of people have become really interested in it and many body workers do myofascial release.

So myo is the root word for muscle and myofascial release is helping muscles release tension that has gathered in the fascia.

You might have heard somewhere that muscles themselves don't actually get tight.

What gets tight is the stuff around them.

So the connective tissue,

The fascia,

Can get really tight.

When fascia gets tight and it holds its shape,

It becomes solid and it takes on kind of a bony-like feeling.

It gets really hard and kind of congealed.

A lot of us have tight fascial patterns that keep groups of muscles constricted together.

If you get an injury or something like that,

Your body will naturally inhibit movement around the injury and then the fascia becomes this kind of protective connective tissue in that it keeps things in place.

The thing is that once the injury has healed,

There's not a mechanism in the body that says go back to what you were before.

We have to retrain.

The fascial is a very important part of the body.

Working with fascia happens when you do yoga asana.

It happens with any kind of exercise,

Foam rolling and using lacrosse balls or something to get into tight muscles is helpful as is body work.

To work with it in the way that we are going to do it,

We need to get into the body.

I'm going to invite you first to get really comfortable.

Wherever you happen to be,

Just take a minute and check in with yourself and notice what kind of position you'd like to be in.

If you're tired,

Go ahead and lie down.

If you'd prefer to sit,

Then sit.

If you want to stand up,

Stand up.

You can do whatever you want.

But find a way to be in your body so that right now you're comfortable and you can still be present.

Inquire into yourself what that shape might be.

When you've found a shape where you can be there without much considerable strain and it's comfortable so you can relax into it and you're not bracing against it or trying to hold on to it.

You can also be present.

If you've lied down and merged with the floor,

Then maybe take a nap and then do the meditation in a couple hours.

Now we'll either soften or close the eyes.

If you want to keep your eyes open,

Then let your gaze recede back.

The feeling here is that you're not looking at anything,

But anything you see is being delivered to your eyes.

No preference.

If your eyes are closed,

There's a similar sensation in your eyeballs.

There's the feeling that the eyeballs move back away from the eyelids and that the corners of the eyes can widen and get softer.

As you let your eyes relax,

Feel your inhale breath and if it's possible to breathe through your nose,

Then breathe through your nose and notice the pattern of breath as it moves up into your sinus cavities.

You can follow that sensation through your face and as you feel the touch of your breath in your skull,

In your face,

Allow your brain and face and organs of perception,

Your eyes,

Your nose,

Your ears,

Your mouth,

To relax.

Wherever you feel the touch of your breath,

Let it be a soothing touch.

Any tissues that receive that breath,

Allow them to relax with it.

Tightness as a state of being,

When our bodies are tight,

Contributes to tightness in our minds,

In our brains,

In our hearts.

If the body is feeling tight or uptight or constricted,

There's usually a pretty good chance that our minds are as well and vice versa.

For these next couple of breaths,

Try and relax your brain,

Literally.

Feel the space inside of your skull and imagine that that space is even more spacious.

You might feel that the front of your brain can,

Just like your eyes,

Drift back away from the bones of your forehead.

You might feel that the base of your brain,

Down at the brain stem,

Is more or less the same.

You might feel that the base of your brain,

Down at the brain stem,

Is wide and open.

Just with this kind of really simple instruction to feel your breath and to relax your face and head and brain,

Notice what happens for you.

Notice your internal state of being.

Then we'll do the same thing with the nose and with the mouth.

If you're somewhere where there's obvious scent,

Then this might be easier to withdraw your nose away from any smell.

You can also just,

Again,

Feel the passage of breath as you inhale through your nose.

The idea here is that whatever sensation arises in your nostrils or in your nose,

That you experience the sensation but that you don't move towards it.

You kind of just allow it to flood in.

Notice it and then wherever you experience that sensation,

You create kind of an opening and releasing.

And the opening,

You might be able to feel a little bit more on the inhale and the exhale,

You might be able to release.

When I say the word release,

What I mean is release tension.

So any feeling of constricting or bracing or holding in,

It's kind of like you just relax everything.

You can do the same thing with your mouth and feel your lips and the skin around your lips.

And if you breathe through your mouth,

Then you can feel the touch of your breath move through your lips and into your mouth and wherever your breath touches,

You're just allowing that sensation to be there and relaxing around it.

As you exhale,

You can totally relax the hinge of your jaw and your tongue and don't worry about letting your mouth just stay agape.

Allow that to happen.

Your tongue might even slide right out of your mouth and that's fine.

And you could even let out a sound on your exhale if it's comfortable for you.

And the quality that I'd like you to invite right now is that there's no need to try for anything and there is no need to move outside of your own experience.

So your inner experience,

The inner landscape is the thing that is the most interesting right now.

And for the time being,

It's simply sensory and it's the feeling of breath and it's the intention to relax and let go of any constricting instincts or constriction that you just find there.

And you might notice that as you do this through your head and your face,

Relaxing the root of your tongue or the flesh of your cheeks or your eyes,

You might notice a very immediate response somewhere else in your body.

And so how fascia works is that it is this continuous web that moves through our entire body.

There's no distinguishable beginning or end to it.

It's all connected to itself and sometimes when we relax one thing,

We'll feel it somewhere else and it's the same with tightness.

So when there's constriction in one part of the body,

That will pull on the tissues in another part of the body.

In the next couple of breaths,

I'd like you to continue to just track the sensation of your inhales and feel the relaxation of your exhales.

Also allow your awareness to include any other parts of your body that are responding to this.

So if you feel some kind of corresponding sensory information in your shoulder as you're paying attention to your nostrils,

Then allow the shoulder and the nostrils to both receive your breath and to both relax on your exhale.

And you might even notice the relationship between them also sensing and releasing.

So we'll just do this for maybe another minute or so.

And I'll invite you to really try and just be present with this very,

Very simple sensory awareness.

You feel your breath come in.

Wherever your breath travels,

You invite it.

There's a softening and relaxing to allow the breath to touch you.

And then as you exhale,

There's a conscious willingness to release constriction.

And you can let that flow through your entire body.

As I begin to talk again,

Let yourself stay with this practice.

So even as you hear my words,

And I'll start talking a little bit more abstractly,

Try not to leave your own sensory experience.

See if you can really stay with awareness of the touch of your breath and receptivity and relaxation.

However,

If you hear me saying things and you notice that your body responds,

And typical responses would be attentive responses,

So your ears perk up or your eyes try and focus,

Or you feel some part of your body reacting,

Either,

You know,

Maybe feeling in agreement or feeling in disagreement,

Doesn't matter,

Either way,

It will take you until you realize that you're feeling in disagreement,

Doesn't matter,

Either way,

It will take you into a different kind of sensory experience.

My invitation for you right now is to stay in a fairly open field of awareness so that there's no pushing of your inner body in any one direction.

There's a very vast and spacious receptivity inside,

And all the information you need can flow in.

It can flow in through what you're hearing,

It can flow in through the light,

It can flow in through any smells or on the air,

It can flow in through thought,

But you don't need to leave to find it.

Whenever you feel yourself kind of pushing out of your own experience,

Your mind jumps somewhere else,

Or you feel an eagerness in your body to move into the external experience,

Just come back,

Come back to your breath,

Come back to the sensory awareness of it,

Come back to the receptivity of your breath,

Feel the relaxation of your exhales.

So what happens when we get stuck on something?

There are lots of different ways to get stuck,

And one of the most common ways that we get stuck is with our own indecision and the inability to decide either which choice to make or to see past or conceive past a certain outcome.

Stuckness is an uncreative space.

It's when we've come into either an absolute or a binary or a set of binaries and we're not finding the solution that actually feels really good.

Good solutions tend to feel generative,

Open,

And expanding,

Whereas compromise often feels restricting.

It feels like it can add a layer of resentment or hardness to our inner bodies.

So the invitation now is to call up in your attention and imagination one or let's just start with one,

But a situation in your life where you feel stuck.

And if there's no present situation where you feel stuck,

Then you might bring your attention to a place in your body that feels stuck.

And if there is no places in your body and no situations in your life that feel stuck,

Then you can do this meditation for someone that you love.

And for sure there's someone in your life who's stuck on something in their body or in their minds or in their relationships or heart,

And so you can do this meditation for them.

So let's call up that idea,

Whatever it is,

The stuckness.

And as we call up the idea,

Notice where it lands first in your body.

And so for me,

I started to think about stuckness and immediately I felt my left shoulder and neck begin to ache.

And this is a familiar sensation for me.

It's a part of my body that has been injured,

But it's also the part of my body where I experienced the most tension.

And I wasn't trying to think of somewhere in my body.

I was actually going more towards my relationships,

But that's the place that caught me first.

So whatever catches you first when I say it's a situation that's stuck,

And then notice where it lands in your body.

Okay,

So now let's take the next couple of breaths and let's observe the sensation that's here,

The sensation of stuckness.

And what I'd like you to do is to move your mind,

Your awareness,

All the way around this sensation.

So you can feel it as a three-dimensional object in your body.

Even if it's a relationship thing,

If it's a mental thing,

You'll feel it somewhere.

Some kind of anxiety,

Some kind of restlessness,

Feeling of despondency,

I don't know,

Some physical sensation.

So that's what I'm asking you to explore.

And then as you're ready,

Go ahead and write down any words that can describe this feeling.

So when you write,

Think about the quality that you're describing,

The shape,

The temperature.

You can describe it very literally and you can describe it more figuratively.

And there's no editing needed,

So I'd like you to just write down whatever words come first.

And if you need more time,

Then feel free to pause the recording and continue.

So when you've written down the words that describe the feeling of stuckness,

Go ahead and look at those words.

And as you regard these words,

Consider what correlations these words have to any other states of being.

Mental,

Emotional,

Psychic,

Relational.

Are there other places in your life where these words are apt descriptions or where you come across them with some amount of regularity?

And then write that down.

So anything that you would associate to these words,

Just write it down.

Any relationships,

Any other situations,

Etc.

And again,

No editing,

Just write down what you're thinking about.

All right,

Feel free to pause if you need more time.

Now as you look at this collection of words,

These sensations and whatever your associated situations or thoughts are,

I'd like you to ask yourself where you learned this.

So where did you first learn about these sensations?

Who taught them to you?

If there are associated situations,

Are those situations your primary experience of these sensations?

Or have you had other kinds of experiences and relationships that these experiences are familiar with?

And go ahead and write all that down as well.

All right,

So feel free to pause.

But by this point,

You maybe are already seeing that there is a pattern.

And the pattern probably has some kind of historic precedent.

It might be something that you already know,

Like this is not new news to you,

And it might be something that's kind of surprising to see these associations coming together.

And either way is fine.

So let's come back into an internal exploration now.

And you can put down your pen,

You can close or soften your eyes again.

And let's take the next couple of breaths just to re-enter the internal experience.

So again,

Feeling your breath,

Letting the touch of your breath come in and wrap around.

As we evoke memories and ideas of our stuckness,

And as we invite the physical association to make itself apparent,

Of course our bodies take that on.

So can you relax anything that just got tight?

And if your mind is attached to something or if it's started to travel somewhere else because of what I asked you to think about,

Then very gently bring it back.

If there is an emotional quality,

Hold the emotional quality and see if you can simply accept and affirm it without needing to investigate it further.

And then stay with this practice as I continue to talk.

So your awareness continues to stay with your inhale as it moves into your body as you receive your breath.

And your awareness continues to stay with your exhale,

As you consciously let go of tension.

So because fascia is a web and there's no obvious beginning or end to it,

When we have a holding pattern in one part of the body,

The entire body is affected.

And compensation and activation will ripple out from wherever the stuckness is,

Wherever the tightness is.

It's a human instinct to focus on sensation,

And if that sensation is painful,

Our focus becomes greater and greater and greater.

And it's the way that we kind of pick at our scabs and push on our bruises and continue to poke at the same old painful spots in our relationships.

This instinct is counterproductive to healing.

So consciousness,

When it gathers around distress,

Will continue to create distress.

We'll tell ourselves the same stories over and over and over again.

We'll affirm to ourselves how stuck we are.

And the more we believe it,

The more that it's true.

So what I'd like you to do right now is allow yourself to experience whatever arose for you in that very simple exercise of writing down sensations,

Associations,

And teachers or roots.

And without opening your eyes,

Without starting to write again,

I'd like you to let all of that surface in your attention and your imagination.

And then feel how your body responds and notice the way that your entire organism will group around those feelings,

Those imaginings,

Those memories.

And notice what happens with your energy and with your attention.

Feel its directionality.

So for me,

When I do this,

It's very immediate when I allow,

You know,

The stuck sticky places to come up in my imagination.

All of the old arguments immediately come up.

All of the lapsed and stalled conversations.

All of the times I tried to be effective and wasn't.

There are so many stories right away and lots of emotions that accompany them.

And of course,

Relationships that they're involved with.

I imagine it's probably the same for you.

So what do I want to invite right now is not necessarily to leave any of this.

It can stay there.

But what I want you to imagine and see if you can begin to create with your imagination are threads or little kind of tentacles,

Reachings out from this tightness,

From the tension,

Elsewhere.

And the threads or the tentacles are just going to start to reach out from the point of the greatest tension.

And as they reach out,

They're just kind of reaching like seaweed floating in the ocean.

So there's a dispersing quality and a spreading quality.

And it might be that the tension itself is spreading and if that's fine,

If that's what it feels like.

And then what I'd like you to imagine is all of the space around you being receptive.

And it's almost like the space around you is calling your attention towards it.

And the tense spots are going to continue to reach out into the space.

And what I'd like you to do is imagine connections beginning to happen.

And these are kind of structural connections.

So you might imagine how the space around you also has threads.

And those threads are meeting up with the threads of your tension or tightness and they're becoming connected.

And if there are certain parts of your body where you felt an accumulation or certain parts of your kind of energetic body where you felt an accumulation of tightness,

Then see if you can create relationships to the parts of yourself that feel kind of empty or nonactive right now.

And those parts of you,

Again,

They just,

I'm imagining these like smoke-like threads that are reaching towards each other and when they touch,

They just become the same thing.

And then we'll bring our breath in.

And so from the kind of nexus of your tension,

Right from the center of it,

Imagine that you're inhaling and breathing from that place and expanding all the way out into all the space around you.

And as you exhale,

You're allowing your body to release wherever it needs to.

And then here's where I'm going to invite you to start to move a little bit.

So wherever in your body you located tension,

Kind of the place where your story or the physical habit lands and roots,

That's the place I want you to imagine that your inhale begins.

And as you breathe in,

I want you to let your inhale spread into all the surrounding area and to kind of move you into a different shape.

And so there is the idea here that you're taking tension and letting it expand and letting it stretch and spread and travel somewhere else.

And then as you exhale,

Whatever needs to relax and whatever needs to release can just release.

There is no right way to do this movement.

The idea here is that you practice drawing the tense feeling away from the place where it accumulates,

Exploring it as a movement pattern that can reach into other parts of your body.

And then as you exhale,

You're simply practicing kind of a global relaxation so your entire body can surrender and yield.

If you're in a space where it's appropriate to make sound or to use words,

There might be things that you need to say or things that you need to sound in order to release or to relax or maybe even to move this sensation.

So feel free to bring your voice in.

If you're working with relational dynamics or situational dynamics in your life,

Tension in non-body spaces,

Then you can feel it in your body as I described earlier.

And you might also now in your imagination see the tension travel through people and into spaces.

And what I'd invite you to imagine is the pattern that it travels.

So as an example,

If you're dealing with family tension and there is one person in the family that is the epicenter of this tension,

Maybe something that they do often or a way that they are.

You might imagine how that tension ripples into the relationships and the patterns that it moves in.

But then as you exhale,

You can imagine everybody relaxing.

And it's like a draining quality where everything that's been built and held with the tension then just drains out,

Releases,

Yields,

Surrenders out.

If you're working with this imagination,

Then you would begin to add in other relationships,

All the spaces that are around.

And the spaces that are around can take some of the load.

They can take some of the tension.

And then everybody just relaxes on the exhale.

In your body,

The thing that we're doing is an imagination of how you would retrain after an injury.

So if there's somewhere in your body that you have an injury,

You might feel this too.

If there's been an accumulation of tension,

Therefore immobility in that part of the body,

You might imagine how that tension can reach out into surrounding structures.

And then it becomes what's called tensegrity.

And so it's an interconnected kind of inter-permeating support where if one point is really tense,

That can cause kind of a destructive habit where everything gets pulled into that point.

But if we can find a different pathway and a movement from the point of tension out into connecting spaces or open spaces around,

Then the feeling of tension often becomes more supportive or supported.

And then when there's a conscious relaxation,

There's a noticing of what remains.

And this is where new pathways can get built.

So if we feel the way that we can move tension into other places of our body,

We find pathways.

We find pathways of support,

Pathways of communication.

But we don't necessarily want to hold on in that tightness.

We want to then let it relax and see what arises,

See what pathways stay.

As you're working in your life with problems,

With the unsolvable problems or with whatever you happen to be stuck on,

One of the things that you probably do is focus on the problem.

And this is normal.

We all do it.

We get stuck on something and then we begin to focus on it.

And when we focus,

The sensation of focusing creates hardness in the mind.

It often creates a sense of impermeability in the heart and the psychic space,

Tightness and tension in the inner body,

The organs and the energetic body.

Often,

The solution to an unsolvable problem or a place that you've been stuck is to walk away for a while,

Is to let the problem just be unsolvable.

Often,

If we just let something kind of be what it is,

When we look around it and when we look outside of it,

We might come across things that we didn't expect.

And so as you let your attention kind of dissolve or reach out or thread into the surrounding spaces,

You might feel that there are connections and support that you didn't realize were there before.

Sometimes that meeting into the connecting spaces is really functional.

It's really useful.

And you'll know it right away because it feels relieving,

Feels good.

It's like,

Oh yeah,

There's a friend here to help.

Those are the places that will stay when you consciously relax everything.

An energetic memory will remain,

An idea,

Maybe a new friend.

So we remember here that consciousness gathers around distress.

This is how the body functions.

When there's an injury,

Our body,

In order to heal,

Needs to gather around that distress.

Fascia reaches out into the connecting points and pulls muscles into tighter shapes so that bones are less mobile.

The way that connective tissue or scar tissue grows is in many,

Many directions and that's not the kind of tissue that normally grows in the skin or muscle.

It's more organized than that.

But when we need to heal,

We have to reach out in all kinds of different ways.

We have to reach out from the habituated spaces of tightness and see what else is there.

And this is important for changing habits and changing patterns because often the habits and the patterns create the injuries.

Habits and patterns we might have learned from movements that we've done our whole lives.

Maybe you've played sports and now you have a repetitive strain injury.

They come from family scripts and cultural norms.

We do things in the same way over and over and for many of us this repetition becomes painful and it wears something out.

When we're in those places,

It's very easy to implode,

To let our focus get smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter and we become defensive and protective around the places that hurt.

In that smallness and tightness,

It's almost impossible to find a good solution.

When we're in those small protected defensive places,

That's what we're thinking about.

We're thinking about protecting.

We're thinking about survival.

We're not thinking about options.

We're not thinking in open creative spaces.

So the first step to working with creative problem-solving,

Releasing tension,

Is to find the center of it,

To find the center of the tension.

Often there's a physical sensation.

Often there's an idea.

Sometimes there's a name.

But if it's something that's external to you and you want to work on it through meditation,

Then you have to find the internal anchor for it.

That's the physical home,

The energetic space where you can feel this thing,

Whatever it is.

Then once you've found it,

Notice the way that it protects itself.

Notice its density.

Notice its strategies.

Notice what it pulls on and what it avoids.

Notice everything you can notice about it.

Notice what you associate to it.

Notice who it reminds you of.

Notice what situations it recalls.

Everything in nature works in patterns.

So as you notice all there is to notice,

You'll also notice the patterns.

This is just information for you.

Then when you're ready to work with the releasing,

You want to feel the patterns.

Feel the way the patterns themselves are places of tension,

That they accumulate habit,

That they form these kind of gutters that our energy is constantly rolling off into.

From those spaces you can reach out.

You can explore surrounding space and make connections.

You can inhabit surrounding space.

This is a physical exercise,

A somatic experience,

As well as an activity that you can do.

It's to feel everything that's outside of the habit,

Or everything that's outside of the pain.

Then allow all of that,

Everything else,

To connect in with the point of tension.

What we're doing here is providing community support.

This is a big part of resilience.

How do we heal?

We heal when we have support.

You're collecting the community inside of yourself and reaching into the places that have been isolated,

Or have isolated themselves,

And inviting connection,

Inviting new habits to form,

New stories to occur.

As you inhale and you see where does the breath move and how many connections can you make,

And then as you exhale and you relax everything,

You notice what stays.

Sometimes it's just one new connection that can provide the solution.

Sometimes it's just the memory of feeling something different.

There are many ways to do this meditation.

You can purely work with it on a somatic or physical level.

You can work with it through your emotions.

The emotions reside in the body,

So then they become somatic.

You can work with it in your thoughts and in your relationships.

Thoughts and relationships also reside within the body.

I find it personally useful to externalize them a little bit and write them down,

Or draw pictures,

Or make maps where you can see the patterns that are arising in your thoughts and relationships.

I hope this meditation and exploration is helpful for you.

I always appreciate any feedback.

If things work,

I like to know.

If you have any requests,

I also really like to know.

If I ever say anything or do anything that doesn't work,

I also appreciate that kind of feedback.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoy these meditations,

Please share them.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Much love,

Peace,

Blessings,

And until the next time,

Bye for now.

You you

Reviews

This was absolutely incredible! I felt tension leave my hip and sacral area and understood so much of how my stomach and abdominal area is the friend I’ve been looking for 🥺 thank you so much Renee, I truly appreciate your work and the effort you put into each of these meditations!

I'm new to IT and this was one of my first "sessions". Thank you so very much! It was exactly what I needed and more! I look forward to listening again.

It’s surprisingly interesting to know that every part of your body you mentioned where stress and tightness are stored are the exact same ones as in mine. I mean, could it ever be possible that as human beings, we relate a particular stress to a particular part of our body? There are people who feel stress in their stomachs, personally I do feel it in my diaframma (and you do as well if I remember), some as headaches, and others as hair loss. What if we belong to a certain category of humans who responds to stress in the same exacting way? This would definitely open new interesting scenarios. I don’t know... I’m just wondering here, probably it’s like that and I wasn’t aware of.