Pendulation. It's such a beautiful word, isn't it? It feels good on the tongue, and it's been sweet food for my mind. My friend Calah taught it to me. Pendulation was coined by Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing. It met this word in a meditation exercise. We were invited to allow our attention to pendulate – swing like a pendulum, back and forth – between our internal experience and our sensory experience of the little meadow in the forest in which we sat.
In reading about pendulation in Somatic Experiencing online, I see it described as cultivation of movement between contraction and expansion in the service of healing trauma. "Contraction" in this case is being used to describe distress or activation, and "expansion" as ease and openness. You can read more about Somatic Experiencing and Peter Levine’s work on his website. If you are local, Calah offers sessions at Port Townsend Chiropractic, her practice, and you can hear how much I've adored this if you check it out on her website. Absolutely wonderful stuff.
I am finding pendulation a fruitful concept for exploration, which makes sense as embrace of tidal movement is a fundamental principle of my living. I am tickled to turn you on to it as well; we're all practicing pendulation all the time, swinging inward and outward, contracting and expanding; every breath is a form of it!
One common practice of this sort arises from CBT, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, where it is often called the 333 Rule: when feeling an upswing of anxiety, you list to yourself 3 things you see, 3 things you hear, 3 things you can touch. In doing this, we move in a pendulation from the internal experience of anxiety out to the external environment, which can be grounding. Turning attention away from the arising anxiety swirl can help to keep it from spiraling, from growing in intensity.
I see pendulation, too, in the yogic exploration of what in Sanskrit are named dvandvas – pairs; in English this is often referred to as the pairs of opposites: happiness and sorrow, pain and pleasure, heat and cold. In bringing our contemplative attention to pairs of opposites, we often find how they belong together, how they make sense together; how they connect. In doing this, we often find greater peace in relation to them.
This kind of pairing can bring comfort and perspective to grief. That pair of opposites is profound: grief and love. We grieve because we love. Awareness of the impermanence of our existence leads us to cherish our living all the more. Love and grief feed one another; they are tied. Syzygy is a beautiful word that describes this kind of pairing in English: a union of opposites. Contemplating a dvanda, a syzygy, a pair of opposites, enriches our understanding of both sides of it. I've got two books on my read-soon-list which explore the relation of grief and love: Martin Prechtel's The Smell of Rain on Dust and Joanna Macy's World as Lover, World as Self. This is a powerful thing to hold in this time, the knowledge that we grieve the horrors that are afoot because we care. Sometimes when the pain is strong I remind myself of this: that it is healthy for me to feel, that it is based in love, and that this pain and love are what will in time bring better days. The more we lean into that, the faster it will come.
The human response to distress is often described as fight or flight. This was expanded to fight, flight, or freeze. Then, further: fight, flight, freeze, fawn. I am grateful to Rebecca Solnit for pointing me in a recent post toward the knowledge that this is based in study of male responses, and that female responses are often different. An entirely different response is proposed in a 2000 paper by Shelley Taylor tend and befriend. I apologize for the binary presentation of this idea. I prefer to speak of gender as a spectrum, but this paper exists in a binary construct. Queer community is a profound expression of the skills to tend and befriend and I look forward to the expansion of the concept of tend-and-befriend, which is clearly not only a female thing.
According to this paper, "A little known fact about the fight or flight response is that the preponderance of research exploring its parameters has been conducted on males, especially on male rats. Until recently, the gender distribution in the human research was inequitable as well. Prior to 1995, women constituted about 17% of participants in laboratory studies of physiological and neurological responses to stress." The paper goes on to note that female responses often differ: tending to offspring and creating social affiliation for mutual safety. "We propose a theory of female responses to stress characterized by a pattern termed 'tend and befriend'. Specifically, we propose that women's responses to stress are characterized by patterns that involve caring for offspring under stressful circumstances, joining social groups to reduce vulnerability, and contributing to the development of social groupings, especially those involving female networks, for the exchange of resources and responsibilities."
This resonates with my own experience. If you read last week's missive, you may recall me mentioning that I felt a burning desire to build community at that time. I reached out to connect to a new friend, led the Community Reading of Hope in the Dark, and offered a set of Restorative Yoga sessions in my local practice. I can see in this the instinct to respond to distress with tend-and-befriend so clearly.
Pendulation weaves a tapestry of ways to care of ourselves, one another, and our communities in this time. We can turn to our own lives to care for ourselves and we can turn to our communities to strengthen our networks of mutual care and protection. We can turn to our inner, personal experience when we need to rest or recover from the state of our collective life. We can turn to external senses if our inner state is anxious. When culture breaks our hearts, we can turn toward wild nature. A gentle swing, a tidal movement, a pendulation: inward and outward. Onward, onward.
Resources
As Above, So Below
Or, as I spoke of it in this morning's Zoom yoga session: inner space and outer space. Did you know that the cosmic web, the universe's structure, is remarkably similar to that of the neuronal networks in human brains? A 2020 study about this proposes that"The tantalizing degree of similarity that our analysis exposes seems to suggest that the self-organization of both complex systems is likely being shaped by similar principles of network dynamics, despite the radically different scales and processes at play." I've been practicing grounding to both the finite and familiar Earth and the vastness of the cosmos for perspective in this time; a sort of large-scale use of the idea of zooming in and zooming out to manage powerful feelings. A pendulation! Feeling into the cosmos and wondering about it makes the Earthly terrible small in comparison, which makes it feel more feasible to take action. Every. action. helps.
I Need More Birds
I've found myself recommending M.I.A.'s Bird Song several times this week. How can you not love a rap that opens:
I'm a parrot
I'm robin this joint
Not a lyre bird
Sure ain't a vulture
Don't swallow that cause I make the culture
I'm not a lyre bird, I'm not a lyre bird,
Staying, staying rich like an ostrich
Love ain't a albratross hanging 'round ya neck
Drink a sparrow, love is food, take a peck
Let's go to Turkey, swift like a rail
Can't pigeon hole, I'm epic like a Zeus tail
Another beautiful exploration of our more-than-human brethren in music is the Dover Quartet playing Woodland Songs (that image above is a link) by classical composer and member of the Chickasaw nation Jerod Impichcha̱achaaha’ Tate. "I just wanted to have a blast making character sketches of five of our woodland animals," Tate tells Morning Edition host Leila Fadel in a charming NPR interview. Classical and indigenous music and culture, weaving. Thanks to Leah
Peace in the Body
I've been going deeper with my longtime practice of muscle scraping this year, personally and in my teaching. It's been useful for folks dealing with plantar fasciitis, tennis elbow, and calf tension. I often scrape down in the shower before bed to ease my body toward rest and rejuvenation.
This healing art originated in Traditional Chinese Medicine, where it is known as gua sha, which blew my mind by becoming popular in the beauty world because it is so effective at moving inflammation out of the face to increase definition. A version popular in physical therapy is called Graston Technique. In the fitness world it is often simply called muscle scraping, where it valued to speed tissue recovery and release tension patterns before or after workouts.
I use Lanshin's stainless gua sha tool on my face thanks to Jennifer Lynch, who I raved to you about last week. Stone is traditional but breakable, and having shattered my first one, I'm grateful for stainless. Sandra Lanshin has tons of free material on YouTube and classes you can buy on her site. Her strumming technique for the chin, jaw, and neck has done wonders for me.
The Sidekick is a popular, expensive (over $100/piece) tool for body use. I have this $16 set . Sidekick's videos are free and a great resource for learning. Their video on foot scraping has, in combination with strengthening for the feet, been useful for easing plantar fasciitis for several of my students.
Resistance
One of the beautiful things that happens when someone sets their body down is that the love in which they are held lifts them up and spreads them through the world, and we have lost in bodily form some heroes of the resistance in recent weeks.
I attended a small collaborative retreat for artists and healers last weekend at which we realized half us were carrying Andrea Gibson's poetry; mine was You Better Be Lightning, which has been weaving in my classes this week. She'll light you up for love and justice!
Another name being spoken often right now because she has set her body down and joined the ancestors is that of Joanna Macy. She made a podcast recently with Jess Serrante. We are the Great Turning: Love, Courage, and Connection in the Climate Crisis is a great way to meet or go deeper with Joanna, who makes resistance of destruction a wonder of love and joy motived by love and sorrow. If you want to get active and are struggling to begin, this might be useful.
“If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”
- Joanna Macy
Local folks, another option for book-buying is to order through our local Imprint books. Their web form takes me less than a minute each time I use it. They'll put your book on their next order and it'll often arrive in a couple of days, which of course supports our local bookstore.
How I Eat
In recent newsletters I've made my invitations for you to become a paying supporter stronger. I dislike the common method where folks send half of a post, stop just before the good part, and make you pay to read the rest. I am trying simple directness; I give this for free and ask in return that you consider subscribing. It had been a couple months since anyone stepped up to pay, and I was feeling a big low about that; hence my stronger asks. Well, it turns out that part of my website had been broken by a change our platform made without notification, which was why I wasn't seeing any subscribers. Whoops! If you ever find anything broken on my site, it is a kindness to let me know; thanks to Aimee for the headsup on this one. This has been fixed. You can once again subscribe for less than a fancy coffee – $5/month. If you choose to buy me a coffee once a week, $20/month, you get a free hour with me which I shall be utterly delighted to discuss creating to serve you with compassion and zest.
