RECLAIMING RECALIBRATION AND RESTORATION
TAKE THE TIME TO REFLECT ON THESE QUESTIONS:
What is your relationship with recalibration and restoration?
When was the last time you recalibrated?
When was the last time you felt restored?
What thoughts, sensations, images, words, sounds, and memories come to mind when you think of recalibration and restoration?
Where do you feel recalibration or restoration in your body?
I grew up in an environment where recalibration and restoration were non-existent. The practices I grew up in were about persevering to survive, a hustle culture where "there is no rest for the weary", or worse, “you keep at it until you die."
On one level, being in survival mode breeds resilience and perseverance. Paired with a culture with a deep colonial history resilience, courage, and perseverance became tools for internalized oppression. No wonder for marginalized communities, these practices became trigger topics. We have been courageous, persistent, and resilient for a long time.
I remember holding this judgment for decades: “I don’t have the luxury to take the space I needed. To rest is to be idle and when I rest, it means I am not productive. When I am not productive, I am less worthy.”
So we carry on. Until we can not anymore.
This is one of the reasons why I knew I had to reclaim my relationship with recalibration and restoration. When I got diagnosed with breast cancer 10 years ago, it started me on this path of curving time for deep reflections and deeply sensing where I need to focus my time, energy, and attention.
I became diligent in giving space for figuring out how my 90 days would be, a cycle that I felt manageable during that period. Hence the 90-day action planner was born!
I also became a student in learning how to use my resources and even more so, in resourcing myself.
Recalibration and restoration supported me in that challenging period.
It is supporting me now as I am again in recalibration and restoration mode with this second breast cancer treatment.
I learned so much in my exploration and reclamation of my relationship with recalibration and restoration that I wish others make space for these deep reset in their lives.
This is why I facilitated two circles around recalibration and restoration yesterday. One is for Vision 20/20 alumni - a special community of impact and soul-driven entrepreneurs. The other one, was a sacred women’s circle for my REFUGIA initiative where we had elder matriarch Maria Josephine Johanna Schilt share her wisdom on recalibration and restoration. You can listen to her message in the video below.
PAHINGA
The Filipino translation of the word rest is “pahinga”. It incorporates the concept of hinga or breath.
The term paghinga in Filipino carries a deeper meaning; that in breathing, there is rest (pahinga); that in rest, there is life. - Pag-hinga: linking the Filipino sense of rest and the environment by Rafael F. Fernando
But how do we “rest” especially when we feel deep tiredness seeping through our bones?
How can we feel restored enough to move forward with ease and grace?
In one of my posts, I wrote about “Deep Rest Emerges from Deep Collective Care” I introduced this model by Alexandra Crosswell (et al)on Deep Rest: An Integrative Model of How Contemplative Practices Combat Stress and Enhance the Body’s Restorative Capacity
It is challenging for us to move to optimised levels when we are still in surviving mode and our nervous system is on alert. Feeling safe is essential to our positive and optimal functioning in the world (Porges, 2022).
According to Alexandra Croswell’s paper, to enter into deep rest is a two-step process:
We suggest that there is a two-step process to entering a state of deep rest. The first step is a felt sense of external safety—physical and social safety. Physical safety means the environment is free of threats to the physical integrity of the person. Social safety means the environment offers experiences of acceptance, belonging, and inclusion and is free of social threats in the form of emotional distress or social status harm such as judging, shaming, or excluding (Slavich, 2020). We hypothesize that when the physical and social environment is perceived to be free of people or stimuli that may cause harm, then the metabolic energy and cognitive attentional capacities that are no longer spent predicting and planning for an upcoming threat or assessing risk, are conserved. We propose that the availability of these cognitive resources creates a second layer of safety—psychological safety. By psychological safety, we mean that the mind is free from distressing thought patterns such as worry, rumination, self-criticism, and shame, that promote threat arousal states (Brosschot et al., 2006; Gruenewald et al., 2004; Nealis et al., 2020).
RECALIBRATING WHAT WE ARE CARRYING
In my most recent post “Is it really mine to carry?” I mentioned about the ‘core complaint” and how to explore it from Mark Wollyn’s book “It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle". Last night’s circle was very special. Elder Matriarch guided us in a constellation process where we went into a process of unpacking what we are carrying. We were able to look at both the core complaints/challenges as well as the joys/strengths from our ancestry. We then gave back to our parents what does not belong to us.
“When a child takes on a parent’s burden - whether consciously or unconsciously - he or she misses out on the experience of being given to, and can have difficulty receiving from relationships later in life. A child who takes care of a parent often forges a lifelong pattern of overextension and creates a blueprint for habitually feeling overwhelmed. By attempting to share or carry our parent’s burden, we continue the family suffering and block the flow of life force that is available to us and to the next generations that follow us.” - Mark Wollyn It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle"
The constellation session was a touching and profound moment of recalibrating what we want to move forward with and what we want to leave behind.
Optimising our nervous system for deep restoration doesn’t only mean attending to our present moment. We also need to look back and heal our histories. For us to be able to hold space for each other in this collective responsibility of rest, we need to give space to the historical healing of our personal, familial, and collective traumas that propel us to selflessly do more, give more, produce more. In this deep, exploratory and soul-searching manner, can we truly begin to slowly relax the system and with it, encourage restoration in others as well.
💭HERE ARE MORE PROMPTS TO DEEPEN EXPLORATION ON RECALIBRATION AND RESTORATION
What memories of recalibration and restoration from your ancestors do you remember?
What are memories from your culture?
What do you expect of others when it comes to recalibration and restoration?
What do I expect of myself when it comes to recalibration and restoration?
What do others expect from me when it comes to recalibration and restoration?
What do they think I expect from them?
Take the time to explore these questions with yourself, your partner, your family, your team/collaborators.
If you want to know more about REST, here are other articles I wrote about this topic:
DEEP REST EMERGES FROM DEEP COLLECTIVE CARE
WHAT DOES VITALITY REALLY MEAN?
How was this exploration for you? What came up for you?
Do reach out, connect, or drop me a message with your thoughts, feelings, and points of resonance with this post.
Hiraya manawari,
Lana