INNWORK: NATURE PRESENCE PRACTICE
Our inner work exercise focuses on experience and information useful for clients and yourself and for your daily life. Please work to your comfort level and a little beyond if that is right for you. Change steps as you feel might be needed. And ask for help or for us to slow down, or to repeat a step if need be.
1. Pace your own breath for a few breaths: place one hand on the top of your other hand and gently squeeze your top hand as you inhale, and relax your top hand as you exhale. Continue this for a few breaths.You can keep pacing or let go when you wish.
2. Now bring to mind a ‘learningful’ client situation or meeting with family or staff, a personal situation, or imagine a situation that might confound you around working with the dying or their families. A situation that you want to understand more and work better with. Pick one, then note it down. ~ ~
3. As you recall or imagine this situation, scan your body. Notice the area where you ‘feel it’ ~ the place in your body that calls to you with the most sensation.
4. For now, set aside the situation, and pay even more attention to that place in your body where sensations are the strongest. Really feel it, and notice how it feels, its qualities. You might notice heat, cold, vibrating, throbbing, pressure, wiggles, tension, or tightness, etc. Pay attention to that place where sensations are the strongest and note its qualities.
5. Now search out a place in nature that matches the energy and quality of the sensation in your body. Let a place in nature come to you, take time if you need to, that matches the energy and quality of the sensation in your body. ~ ~
6. Take care with your nature place, allow yourself to fully be there, all parts of it: ~ see it ~ feel it ~ hear it ~ and move as it moves, or be still like it. ‘Become’ your nature place. Breathe as it breathes. ~ ~ Let yourself even be the Mind and Heart of your place. ~ ~ Then notice what flickers into awareness – thoughts, images, insights, voices, sounds . . .
7. (pause) What does your place tell you . . . about yourself in your situation frrom step 2? (pause) About taking care of yourself in other complex situations? (pause) Use the wisdom of your nature place. Be ready to catch unexpected thoughts, feelings, and insights; especially the irrational / surprising ones. Keep going keep aware.
8. Make notes about your experiences and learnings and how you might use this wisdom piece during the upcoming month in your daily work and/or personal life. ~ ~
9. Ask yourself how the world might view you differently if you lived this wisdom more? Take a few minutes to make notes or sketches before we reconvene.
10. Share your nature place, if that is right for you, and how your nature presence wisdom might help you in your daily professional and personal life.
Deep Appreciation to Amy + Arny Mindell
Stan Tomandl & Ann Jacob ~ annstan@comacommunication ~