This blog post was originally posted on 7/1/2019 on the blog under our previous brand, Grand Rapids Healing Yoga. We hope you continue to find the insights offered here to be both fruitful and restorative.

Written by Raechel Morrow

It is time for you to remember your body’s innate freedom and wisdom. This may be a  way-out-there thought, and if you do not believe it, don’t worry. You are not alone. We do not believe it to be true because we have not experienced it to be so. We do not know how to access this deep knowing. I believe we can use our bodies as teachers to access this innate knowing. Are you choosing to find answers from your body? I am here to remind you that your body holds the answer you seek. It is instructing you to open your heart and open the flood gates to your breath. The guide you are longing to meet resides in your body. Start there, and later, you will be able to follow the same process without a body and a spirit. Your body is the container to your soul. Try using your body as the doorway to your soul. Here are some easy tools to add to your spiritual practices to get you started. 

Deep Feeling -3 minutes exercise

Take three deep breaths and let your breath fall out of your mouth. Sitting, notice how you are sitting. Do not change or judge your sitting unless you would like to. Place your hands on your legs and feel the sensation of your own legs. Set a timer for 3 minutes. Simply feel your whole body sitting for three minutes. What sensations did you feel? What sensations did you not feel? How may those sensations inform my day today?

 Body Scan – 20 minutes

This blog post was originally posted on 10/10/2019 on the blog under our previous brand, Grand Rapids Healing Yoga. We hope you continue to find the insights offered here to be both fruitful and restorative.

Written by Raechel Morrow

In 1996, I was fifteen years old. On the second day of school, my mother was killed tragically during her morning jog. Feelings of profound sorrow, fear, and heartache were present. I remained by pressing on, dissociating from my emotions and body. Back then, we understood very little about trauma and PTSD. After her death, I experienced dread that I could not be in my body. I now realize I was experiencing traumatic symptoms that my entire being could not process. By sixteen, I had learned to cope and escape the trauma symptoms through an eating disorder. For twelve years, every time the fear came back, so did the eating disorder and the shame associated with the behaviors of disconnection. 

Telling my story is difficult. However, it allows for the expanded opportunity for connection. The shame of disconnection held me back for many years. I could never move back. At a time, I locked my shame so far away, so no one could see. I did not know myself, let alone have a relationship with myself. I now recognize the influence of sharing stories. In this bite-sized world of social media, we share only specific features from our life to share. Our Instagram feeds and Facebook walls show all the beautiful features and achievements. However, our resumes and deliberately staged selfies only express half of the story. 

Here is my whole story. In my early twenties, I developed into a social worker. I felt a deep tenderness for people in hardship and wanted to eradicate it for them and me. The paradox is I had the license for tending for the emotional and mental health well-being of others with-out any practice on how to take care of myself. I had limited awareness of my internal experience and patterns. I craved so desperately to support. I did not know how to go near my pain and fear. Therefore, I could not be present for anybody else. 

Deep below the artificial layers lived a dense armor of shame. I would let no one in. I had one failed marriage at twenty-two, and then I worked harder at distracting myself by trying to fix pain for others. My efforts served as a selfish distraction that served my ego. I experienced a pattern of burn-out or compassion fatigue every few years. I did not recognize my value nor feel my right to care and pleasure.  

However minor, change was developing with each burn-out. I would understand a little better about what I needed to do to care for myself. Self-care is entirely unique for each individual. For me, flowing from a strict running regime into a yoga practice my body started coming alive. Yoga opened the inquiry about the disconnection I experienced living in my body. Through yoga, I received hope in my body. It is a practice of care. What I appreciate now is that some yoga can contribute to your mind into a neutral state. Therefore, I had awareness instead of the usual shame. This helped me process what I was feeling and carrying in my subconscious. I could interact with my body lovingly and compassionately if the instructor invited us to do so.

I sought professional help many times during those early years for my eating disorder. I would leave groups, treatment, and therapy feeling broken, hopeless, and full of shame. Not at all, how I felt about myself. The talk was always about the symptoms and behaviors. Since we experience the world and our emotions through our bodies, no one could teach me how to regulate, express, and process feelings in my body. Because of this, it intertwined my body image with shame. Self-hatred and self-loathing were lodged in my body. Yoga and my work were ways I could move the energy out in a healthy direction with awareness. Group and private therapy made me feel broken and less capable.  

We dislike talking about our shame. It is hard. It is uncomfortable. More than anything, it is painful. As a result, it is natural to shy away from vulnerability and openness about our shame. However, that is what we must do. I began seeking education and experiences that allowed me to experience more awareness about my disconnection and shame. When I touched those places and healed them within myself, there was never any question that I would do any other professional work after that. I was no longer a social worker, a wellness professional, or a yoga instructor. I would hold space for reclaiming and transformation. A conduit for the inner knowing. 

 I cannot change my past; I missed out on many opportunities. I cannot make painful situations go away. I could not cut off painful parts of myself and replace them with something else. What I could and would do is the inner work required to reduce the impact and expand my capacity for resilience in the face of painful life experiences. Year after year, I used my body compassionately as a tool to connect to my heart. I embodied compassion and strength, a way of being in my world. When there is an embodiment, it is in everything and therefore became my career. For all my struggle with burn-out and authenticity in my twenties and early thirties, now my work flowed naturally. 

 ​I know from my own direct experience, healing requires going deeper, beyond the symptoms, to our inner world, where we must become acquainted with ourselves. I was never interested in modalities that compartmentalize and superficially treated a person. I encountered enough of that myself. The transformation process is an inquiry of Self and discovery, taking into account the unique nature of the individual.

My work allows for a conversation with the body. The heart of healing shame and disconnection for me is turning inward toward pain and nurturing our capacity to relate to ourselves with a sense of inquiry, kindness, and care. I now use my body as a source of wisdom and hold space for the same with others.

My life has been an exploration, which I am a student. All parts of me get to be present in my life. I make movements toward wholeness—which must include the light and beauty and the dark and imperfect. 

This is why I do what I do. This is the other half of my story. We can take our trauma to make it a part of who you have come to be. Moving towards and forging meaning in our lives makes our traumas not right but sacred. My trauma teaches me love, compassion, and a knowing of deep contentment. It is my greatest wound and my most significant achievement. Today, I feel genuinely called to create space for others to discover their own stories.

Now it’s your turn, tell me your story.

This blog post was originally posted on 11/4/2019 on the blog under our previous brand, Grand Rapids Healing Yoga. We hope you continue to find the insights offered here to be both fruitful and restorative.

My story is not linear. In fact, it began by playing itself backward, because in middle school, I recovered repressed memories of being repeatedly molested as a very young girl. Over the years, bits and pieces have come back to me, and for a very long time, I couldn’t tell if the events were something my head made up or if they had actually occurred. Once my memories started tumbling back, I didn’t feel them. It felt like there was something wrong with me because the abuse didn’t make me angry. I was able to feel through writing. I started to write poems about my assaults in high school, and this is when birds started showing up in my life. My abuser would make me choose an animal to pretend to be, and once I became old enough to process the events for what they were, I pretended I could go back in time and choose a bird. I wanted the innocent girl of my past to fly away from it all. I’d imagine my four-year-old self doing so, and it still brings me deep healing.

As time went on, I started to face mental and physical repercussions as I began to desperately crave the reciprocation of men. Once I started college, I became addicted to exercise and slipped into episodes of anorexia to become physically appealing. I dated men that were controlling and forceful in bed, even though sex still scared me. I drank a lot to numb my mind. I woke up naked in the bed of an ex-lover one morning with bruises and bite marks on my back. I didn’t remember seeing him the night before, and he didn’t offer me a ride home that day, despite me having lost one of my shoes and my keys. I tried telling others what happened – the things he used to do and say. Word got back to him, and the consensus was that I was just crazy. I believed it. I thought it was only my fault for not being careful. One thing that continued to strengthen the walls of the safe-haven within me was writing. Poems began turning into songs.

After college, I began having flashbacks of my childhood assaults during intimate moments. I rarely told any man to stop during a freeze-up. I didn’t know how to say no. You can be taught to say it, but when you’ve locked into the flight mode of the “fight or flight” dilemma, you have no idea how to take control over your own body. During the years 2017-2018, my body started to really push back. I had six surgeries on my left knee and one emergency laparoscopy, all separate accidental occurrences. I was living alone in a new city and threw myself around on crutches best I could. When I became “better”, things just got worse. My body would tense up with every step I took, scared my leg would be swooped out from beneath me again. I started feeling immense pain all over my body. Some days I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sit or stand still without my whole body throbbing. Craters of pain down my back. I was so scared something bad would happen again to my body that I’d lie awake focusing on every little twitch my body made, worried I’d need an ambulance. An inflamed rash would form on my face from cheek to cheek over the bridge of my nose – loud, hot, and angry. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, so they tacked me with “fibromyalgia”. At least they started to believe me, I thought. Visually, I was going through a lot. But there was a deeper pain. I could not get my assaults out of my mind.

Later, I began my Yoga Teaching Certification with Grand Rapids Healing Yoga; I didn’t know why I was there, or what it would do for me. That group of women became an extension of the haven I had initially created only within myself. I could speak and be supported. I learned how to send the pained parts of me compassion. I learned I needed to slow down. I learned that anxiety affected my health. I learned I had dissociated my leg from the rest of my body, and traumatic thoughts of my assaults were driving my physical pain. I learned how to confront my trauma – how not to push it out, but how to accept it as part of me. I learned how to acknowledge a part of me as broken and sick and let her remain part of me, but not let her take over me. I let the more fruitful parts of my being bring themselves forward from my shadow.

I wanted to pass on these tools, so I began teaching trauma-informed yoga at a healing collective. While it is difficult to hear other stories of traumatic pasts however when similar words and energies to mine are present, it makes the work so meaningful. There’s this shared understanding that behind closed doors, we create a safe space together, and our throats need not clench so hard onto what feels good to have released. We can remain in our bodies but can express through movement any piece of us we hold inside that we want to be mirrored outwards.

I started to share my work; playing my songs at gigs and reading my poetry at showcases. To be on a stage with everyone else silent, you’re not only heard, but you are amplified. There have been many times that someone in the crowd speaks to me afterward, wanting to tell me their own story. I share my writing, not for myself, but because I want others to feel they can have their voice amplified, too. Creativity streams from any darkness in you that still lives. Creativity is accepting that darkness as part of you, without allowing it to consume you. Without an edge at which to meet yourself and release your vulnerability, you may surely drown in it.

With the women of Grand Rapids, I’ve found a family of one beating heart. I always used to think the world needed to heal before it hears, but now I know it’s the reverse that is true. To heal, it needs to hear. Those that have built themselves back up with tools of resiliency have such a wonderful opportunity to pass those tools on because now is the time. The most important guides to seek are those that know, and that may not have been left unscathed. I now feel sacredness where I once felt shame. My words that were once silenced are now heard, and that seems to increasingly be the case with others in the community. It’s such a beautiful thing!

Now tell me your story

Such a beautiful thing.
This is my story now tell me yours……