33 Days

As promised… a week late… today I’ll give some insights into my 33 Day Process. As I mentioned in my last post, my childhood friend Chausey Leebron is offering this new online course. Chausey has shown up in a few of my previous posts, so maybe I could start by telling you a little more about her and our relationship. Chausey and I lived in the same neighborhood growing up… literally around the block so to speak. We’ve known each other since we were five. Not only did we go to school together from elementary school through high school, but we were on the same gymnastics team early on, again when we were five. We went on to be cheerleaders- yes, I said cheerleaders- together in both middle school and high school. Oh and we were on the yearbook staff together in high school as well. This is all just to say that we go WAY back.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of us playing at each other’s houses or at the neighborhood playground or pool, being at massive slumber parties together in elementary school, and going to gymnastics camps together. As time went on we each fell into our own paths and, well, I wouldn’t say drifted apart because we were like these fixed datums in each other’s lives. We were both just kind of always there, even if we were no longer really interacting on an authentic plane. I remember thinking in the midst of one of my last conversations with Chausey at the end of high school that I didn’t even know who she was anymore. It would be more accurate to say that I noticed she was simply checked out. Then again who isn’t at the end of high school… myself included. At any rate, I was heading east for college and she was heading west. Our lives were taking us to opposite coasts and I assumed that we would never see or hear from each other again.

To be honest, I didn’t give it a whole hell of a lot of thought after that either. I had moved on to the rest of my life. That was, until social media caught up with us about five or so years ago. Turns out Chausey had met my best friend Micki at a therapist shindig and they had become FB friends. Our paths crossed once again. Life moves in mysterious ways. I was shocked, actually, at the person who had emerged out of my childhood friend. Chausey had gone to LA to become an actress and had come back this deeply wise, spiritually connected, authentically loving, and super gifted therapist. Who would have guessed? Not me. But I am here to tell you, she’s got an impressive handle on this life gig. Truly, she does. In fact I find myself completely fascinated by the fact that anything that I might be able to share about moving into interbeing, she could speak to equally as well if not better. What’s even more fascinating is how our lives have been woven together at critical moments that we have had next to zero idea about at the time. Yet here we are. There are no coincidences in life.

All of that is to give my resounding endorsement of her new online course, 33 Day Process: Loving Your Beautiful & Miraculous Body. Here is the link again:

33 Day Process

While the entry point of the course is to open up communication channels with your own body, this simply serves as the portal to exploring the territory that I am covering in this blog- interbeing. If you are interested in this work, then I do highly recommend taking the course. I am on day 22 and have found it extraordinarily helpful. But before I speak a little about my own process, I’d like to put the territory covered into the context of what I speak about here.

I’m going to do that by taking you back to your middle school science class. Let’s talk atoms. Most likely your image of an atom involves something that looks like our planetary system in which electrons move in fixed orbits through a whole lot of space around a nucleus. Right? This model of the atom originates from the “Bohr model,” not to bore you, as proposed by Niels Bohr in 1913. In this model, the space that the electrons orbit through accounts for about 99.99% of the atom. That is to say that all material things- yourself included- are barely more than nothingness. Forget the fact that the human body is about 60% water. How about the fact that it is 99.99% nothing! Well hold on just a second. That was 1913. Unfortunately, that is the model of the atom still floating around in your head, isn’t it? Incidentally, I asked my Middlebury students if that was what they were taught and every single person confirmed that it was.

So what gives? Well, if you just take a second to check trusty ole Wikipedia, you’ll discover the words, “This model is obsolete.” Indeed it is. It has been for almost 100 years now. It was replaced in 1926 thanks to quantum physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. Let me just cut to the chase. What quantum physicists discovered is that subatomic particles (such as electrons, protons and neutrons) are not quite as solid as we once thought. That is to say that they sometimes show up as particles (physical matter), but more often than not they show up as waves (energy). The thing to understand here about waves (energy) is that they are essentially everywhere at once. Think about the cell phone waves that your phone can magically pick up anywhere… actually, if you live in Vermont then scratch that. But seriously, just try to imagine for a second the infinite volume of waves inhabiting the space you are sitting in at this very moment: light waves, sound waves, cell phone waves, wifi waves, heat waves, etc and so on. Are these waves in some discreet part of the room? No. They are everywhere at once.

Cut back to the atom. It turns out that electrons are not so much particles orbiting in empty space so much as they are waves that inhabit the entire electron cloud around the nucleus… and just happen to show up as particles in orbits of probability. Which is why it is just easier to just continue to teach the old model… we can’t handle the uncertainty (principle)! I won’t even get into the observer effect here, but suffice it to say that the two together upend our entire objectified worldview. For the sake of this post, it’s enough to simply understand that you are not 99.99% space. You and every material thing you encounter is 99.99% energy… as in NOT material.

Context set, I am now ready to talk about these 33 days. Should you decide to delve into the course, I recommend taking with you just a little uncertainty about the worldview we were all given. You know, the one that says that your body is your body and your mind is your mind and that the former is just a host to the latter. Or perhaps you are of the mindset that it’s all just a matter of matter and when the body dies, so goes the mind. Either way, what Schrödinger and Heisenberg discovered ought to give us pause. We know even more now than then, and from multiple realms of inquiry. But I’m going to keep this simple. The bottom line is that there is no separation between mind and body, or energy and matter. The one is the other, and vice versa. There is only one thing. In order to heal ourselves and the planet, we must come to grips with this at last.

But now to bring it down to earth. As I have talked about many times in this blog, I have been working intensely for well over a year to heal my inner childhood wounds. I have been doing this by stepping myself back in time, one step at a time. However, my wounds extend all the way back into the womb. I have no conscious memory of that time through the first few years of my existence. But you know who does? My body. Yup. She sure does. So all I need to do to figure out what needs to be healed is to talk to her. She knows. After all, she is the one who has been carrying the brunt of it all this time. Rest assured, she knows!

One thing that Chausey does is to help us to identify the various aspects of our body/being so that we can get to the specifics. This also helps us to recognize and support each aspect of our body/being in the role that it is playing to keep us alive. I say “keep us alive” intentionally as for the most part this is what the various primordial aspects of our being think they are doing… fighting for our survival. The issue with being stuck in survival mode is that it precludes us from stepping into our full potential, or thrival. That is why our healing must involve revisiting our old patterns and way of being. These patterns are so deeply ingrained that we are hardly aware of them. We function largely on autopilot. In order to get to thrival we have to reprogram, shifting to patterns that better serve us.

I’ll give you one personal example of the many things that are coming up for me. My Solar Plexus has been functioning in overdrive to protect me since my inception. This is due to the fact that I started life in a blood battle, my red blood cells being attacked by my mother’s immune system while in the womb. I was truly in a fight for my life and my Solar Plexus was given the job of doing the behind the scenes work to get me the intel and energy that I needed to survive. As a result, nothing and no one was to be trusted, leading to an intense guardedness carried out via my power center (Solar Plexus). The role that my Solar Plexus has been playing is to be my very own highly trained Secret Service. Good luck getting past that!

Well, these days you do have more than a snow balls chance in hell! But if I want to truly move into a state of interbeing, to evolve into a state that will support the world that I want to live in, then I need a new modus operandi. That new M.O. involves a new role for my Solar Plexus. It is going to take some time to implement with a whole lot of practice and reinforcement necessary, but my Solar Plexus has been promoted to Sensei. No longer is her job to keep me safe via separation. Her job is to keep me safe via connection. She can now be who she always wanted to be…a tai chi master. Instead of shutting out all of that energy- 99.99% of everything surrounding me and moving through me!- her new role is to learn how to move with all of that abundant, beautiful energy in such a way that helps both me and everything around me to live into our true potential.

So that’s the work. Establishing new roles and new patterns takes time and dedication. That is why this particular process takes 33 consecutive days. It’s worth it. We are worth it. Huge thank you to Chausey for sharing her gifts with the world so that we all might live into our true potential. You go, Girl!