Things I have accomplished under stay at home orders:
- Finally read “The Little Prince”
- Organized my write-your-own cookbook
- Planted a spring victory garden
- Joined Instagram
I was feeling good until that last one. A problem has just presented itself: How do I set and maintain clear boundaries around media intrusion into my life?
As I see it, herein lies the problem: when we become too immersed in ego driven constructs, too focused on the material world as a barometer of worth, we lose sight of our true nature. Social media destroys our connection with source by shifting our mind toward a concept that the self is separate from the we, the whole. It demands that we give an extraordinary amount of facetime (pun intended) to the ego, and the ego depends on valuation from outside itself.
Even with the best intentions, logging too much time on social media deadens our ability to identify with and feel our true essence as a spirit having a human experience.
Meditation is an excellent counterbalance. Breathe deep. Turn off the thinking mind, the part of you that cares how many likes your latest post has or why a colleague’s carefully curated page has more followers than yours. When you do that, you have the opportunity to see modern life and all it’s trappings as an illusion. Sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful, but an illusion and a distraction nonetheless.
Bodywork like The Cotu Method is another tool to help you reconnect with your true self. When you lie down on the massage table, you bring with you a lifetime of character armoring. Wilhelm Reich defined armoring as habitual posturing, attitude, and unconsciously held muscular contractions that we wear as a self protective suit of armor in interpersonal relationships. Dr. Patricia Frisch with The Orgonomic Institute of Northern California writes, “As Reich’s work progressed scientifically, his focus turned to the body and the way it mirrors the character in all systems. He found that our bodies embody the template of our personalities and conform to those dictates. Reich discovered the basic pulsation in the universe and that healthy organisms and organs have natural expansion and contraction. That life energy pulsates. When we are armored, our pulsation is interrupted and the movement restricted; the energy flow throughout our body is impeded. We may experience this as a lack of sensation, aliveness, a stiffness or tension. Armor can develop into painful sensation if places in our body have chronic holding or are under-charged. So our physicality speaks as well as our voice. Our armoring reduces our creative capacity, our natural expression of our unique Self.”
In my humble opinion, too much social media is harmful to the psyche and emotional body in that it triggers long held deep seated ego wounds . Deep tissue massage combined with breath work, guided imagery, and energy work can help by interrupting the cycle of armoring, and dissolving old patterns of coping and holding. When muscles are no longer trying to protect the fragile ego, they relax into their natural state; life force (chi) flows freely, and chakras are opened and rebalanced. Feeling tethered to your screen? Come see me for a session when this is all over.
ONE HEALING 