Gravity matters. Not simply to keep us physically grounded here on Earth, but, at a fundamental level, our relationship with gravity affects our lives from start to finish. We start life floating in amniotic fluids. It’s easy to assume a sense of buoyancy, free from gravity’s impact. Yet, gravity is necessary for our physiological development during the second half of our lives in the womb (Sekulic’, Lukac, and Naumovic, 2005). We sense gravity’s force from birth forward as we experience our verticality. Standing upright, we learn to manage the polarity of motion and stability. As primary resources develop, such as grounding, balancing, orienting, centering, and more, we build the capacity to orient to the space around us. According to Darrell Sanchez, Ph.D., “Our verticality relates to our sense of security. The ability to orient vertically to our environment enables us to see the full 360 degrees of our surroundings to identify and distinguish between threat and safety to determine if we should approach or avoid a situation. Successful orienting from functional verticality combines our internal proprioception system with the perception of information from the environment. Well-being and confidence follow from this success as we connect to a more profound, fuller sense of ourselves” (Sanchez & Gettliffe, 2016). READ MORE HERE

Feelings were not allowed in my childhood home. We learned how to numb out, to banish emotions to the realms of distancing and dissociation. Peppermint fudge ice cream and chocolate chip cookies soothed pain-filled tears that quivered but never came to pass. We lived a bland life, no salt, no pepper, spices made my mother’s fingers swell. No highs. No lows. Pure and simple neutrality. Not in the state that Buddhists reach for to end selfinflicted suffering but rather a state of nonexistence. Writing today, I still struggle at times to sit with my emotions, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I still tend to block bodily sensations that start the experience of feeling something. My throat constricts when tears start. My neck is so tight my acupuncturist gave up trying to release it, and my massage therapist tenderly touches it without trying to dig in and create change. In the rare instance that someone asks me how I feel, my response is a courteous, “fine”. Unless I’m hiking and then I’m “happy”. When I look in the mirror, metaphorically and/or literally, I see my inherited neutrality. Stoic? Absent? Numb? Or perhaps never present and accounted for. Emotions are a conundrum. I know I’m not alone. READ MORE HERE