The Teeny Tremor Newsletter
Insights, moments of awe, and collective stirrings that shift the way we think and feel about what's possible. Embodying integrity, rooted in our dignity.
Welcome Dear Reader,
To The Teeny Tremor Newsletter. I’ve been dreaming this space up for a while.
A space where I can sit my arse down to share insights, tips and trick from my practice as an artist, dancer, somatic educator and coach, in a way that I hope is useful, valuable, compelling, and perhaps even disruptive in generative ways, to all of you.
BRACE YOURSELVES.
Lots of run on sentences, commas and poetic meanderings to come!!
In all seriousness, thank you for being here.
It really does matter. Your presence, your eyes, your heart. I thank you from the bottom of mine for showing an interest, for you blindly following along if that’s the truth, in whatever shape it may take, for your support.
The name “Teeny Tremor” was born from the concept of a ‘Butterfly Affect’, where seemingly small trivial events eventually add up to something much larger — the way the non linear impacts on complex systems.
But in this case we are not bound to the ether and the abstract space to realize change, rather grounded, on the earth, ready to feel and receive the waves of change in our flesh!
I’ll be sending out this newsletter with some regularity. I won’t write mindlessly to meet a quota, and I won’t keep things sitting in my outbox crafting to the point of perfection never allowing it to see the light of day.
I will write to respond to the world and to the people in it, to share my experience and what I’m learning, to express myself and my weird little heart, to bring you into the coaching container and share some of the magic I experience there with my clients.
I’ll keep you up to speed on my teaching schedule, I’ll explore the esoteric and the mystical and I will definitely share my art!!
We’ll see where the inspiration takes us.
For those of you who are interested in this space and seeing what it will become, welcome! I’m glad you’re here.
If at any point you want to unsubscribe, feel free.
My work is evolving and expanding to allow for more of me and the things I love that have helped me along my own path of healing and self development to come through.
This will be a space to share the things that bring me joy. I also LOVE hearing from you. Please share your questions, insights, heart here too.
If you feel it.
So here is my first offering: a thought about thinking.
“What matters most to our psyche is not WHAT we think, but rather HOW we think about WHAT we think.”
And the meaning itself, is in the feeling.
It is our overthinking, our ruminating, our making sense of things without feeling things, our assumption that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we are, how we feel, how we react, our instincts and impulses, the truth of our flesh, that leads to our burn out, leaves us feeling disconnected and unwell.
Thinking about our thinking is what it sounds like, a waste of our precious energy.
SLiMe MOLDS don’t have a central intelligence and yet here they are….brilliant…keeping TIME. Check them out in this article published in Harvard Magazine.
Photo from Harvard Magazine
HOW we think, especially the ways we resist ourselves, hide from ourselves, doubt and judge ourselves, rush to reframe our perspective to avoid discomfort, impulsively defend the labels, compare ourselves, cling and attach our sense of identity to a fixed unchanging story, seriously limits us.
And it is OH SO NATURAL. So human. So, ironically, wise.
I have found, that thinking to be a product of our system adapting…to unforseen circumstances, to acute feelings of isolation, to seriously scary stuff, moments where we perceive threat and it is simply too much to handle.
When we can’t be with all of it honestly, and see and accept that it’s happening in the first place, we can’t evolve beyond it.
We do not get there alone.
We have to be shown the way.
What I most often hear in the mainstream new-agey healing spaces is rhetoric that describes our bodies and our minds as problems to solve. It’s a lot of shifting states, and reframing the mind to feel or think something more pleasant than what we’re currently experiencing (bypassing).
It’s a lot of talking people out of the experience their having, weird subtle gaslighting.
Taming their instincts and impulses.
Optimizing or biohacking their biology.
This rhetoric renders people irresponsible for their bad behavior because it suggests our discomfort is always our inability to tolerate someone else, that it is a failure on our part if we can’t. It suggests we SHOULD be able to tolerate anyone and anything, find the silver lining, that our discomfort is wrong, “low vibration”.
It suggests we make exceptions for people who do us harm.
This is where we get talked out of our boundaries, out of our anger, stuck in situations where we are being manipulated, turned against ourselves and conditioned to stop trusting our own inherent wisdom.
This is where we forget we have power and we begin to disappear, where we unknowingly hand it over. Wether out of survival or out of our own resistnace to do a hard thing, if we stay past due, past our own sense of “this doesn’t feel quite right”, we learn to not trust our bodies, we cultivate unchallenged relationships of dissonance with our own existence, which moves us towards numbness and freeze.
It makes us susceptible to someone else’s idea of what is right gaining more control in shaping HOW we think about what we think than us. In the end this keeps us from truly knowing ourselves on our own terms, it keeps us thinking and acting like we are powerless to the forces that be because it defines our sense of self in the eyes of the other.
It is in learning how to stay connected to our bodies, in paying attention to how we feel, we learn the difference between what lands with resonance and what creates dissonance in us…what helps us come into integrity to be who we are, fully ourselves and what creates distortion and keeps us performing a more palatable version.
It’s from this place we learn how to communicate well, get our needs met, put up healthy boundaries, establish secure attachment, and receive the nourishment available to us when we can stay connected—to ourselves and each other.
Sometimes it’s our thinking about our thinking that get’s in the way of us seeing things clearly, WHAT we are practicing, the way we are being.
When I see my clients talk about themselves as a “problem” and then watch them try to get to the bottom of the thing, solving the problem of who they are with their thinking I ask them… “what would getting to the bottom of your why give you?” “Would it change anything?”
If I try to solve every problem that comes up with my thinking, I enter an endless interrogation process. I wage a war against myself.
I have a hand in the suffering.
This kind of spiral isn’t generative, it doesn’t show me a new way forward, it simply shows me how I got here and how I feel about that. It’s life defined by the Tragic (the crisis), not by what comes next, what I am able to do about it.
In this way we can mistake our thinking for life itself. When we don’t check in with our bodies, with what we are feeling, we keep our attention on our thinking.
We get so hyper-focused on the meaning we are making with our minds in the abstract space we forget to acknowledge we are also bodies having an experience in the 3D space.
When we deny our embodied life we can’t actually be with things as they are, only our projection.
When we start to trust everything that is happening in our body is intelligent, we creat space on the inside for a different story about who we are to emerge.
It is in this clarity that we feel well, because it is in this clarity that we are truly free.
Thanks for being here dear reader,
Excited to have your company on this wild ride,
xx
Z