Working With Fear, Shame, Insecurity, & The Emotions That Bind You

Hello and welcome.

The following is a guided meditation by Renée Sills,

A somatic movement educator,

Energy worker and astrologer.

This meditation is intended to help support your embodied meditation practice.

If in the recording you are prompted to do something that doesn't feel good for your body,

Please adapt and modify to make it work for you.

Please also note that the content of these meditations sometimes explores deep and subtle states and memories,

And sometimes guided visualizations.

You are encouraged to work with discernment as you practice with them.

If any of the guidance Renée offers feels too activating or uncomfortable,

Please listen to your body's knowing and pause the recording until a later time if you wish to return to it.

These guided meditations range anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and do not require any supplementary equipment to participate.

We hope you enjoy.

Hello and thanks for listening.

This is Renée and this is a somatic meditation.

Somatic meditation is an approach to meditating that moves through the embodied experience.

So it's focused awareness on a physical state of being and I use guided location awareness.

I'll ask you to bring attention to different parts of your body.

I also use visualization and imagery and I'll invite you to imagine different kinds of structures or spaces in your body that may or may not literally exist,

But you can imagine them.

And in today's meditation,

I'm going to be working with fear,

Shame and insecurity.

The magnificent powerful trio of emotions that I think all of us work with probably all of the time,

Fear,

Shame and insecurity underlie a lot of other feelings like jealousy or doubt or competitiveness.

And this trio of feelings and sensation is often inherited.

These are states of being that we learn through our lineages and through societal examples and modeling.

They're also states of being that we don't really have a lot of support or resources to work with and being that they're more shadowy states,

They're places that we try and hide that are commonly considered to be weak or unwanted or wretched in some way.

So we're really not,

Most of us aren't really given a lot of resources to attend to these feelings yet these feelings are so prevalent among all of us,

Maybe not at all times,

But definitely throughout our life when we get activated especially.

So in today's meditation,

I'll just be offering one way to work with these feelings and this way,

This route comes through noticing and noticing how these feelings manifest as somatic states or embodied states.

And then a pretty simple method of awareness to let them kind of express and get to a point where we can feel around them and maybe even help them resolve or at least help ourselves recognize if and when these feelings are part of our motivation or intent or something that we're not working with consciously.

So you can do this meditation anywhere and in any position,

But particularly because of today's content,

I want to recommend that you try this meditation out in a place where you can make some noise.

So if you have a private space to work with,

Or if you have a group of people who want to join you in making noise,

Sometimes that can feel pretty freeing.

If you can't make noise or are listening to it multiple times,

Totally fine.

You just take whatever the suggestions are and modify them to suit your needs.

So let's begin in whatever posture or position is most comfortable.

If you're using this meditation while you're in transit or doing something else,

Then see if you can let some part of your attention move towards rest and ease.

And then take a couple of deep breaths in and let your belly fill and expand.

And on your exhales,

Just sigh out and let the exhale come out your mouth and relax your jaw and relax your tongue.

And as you inhale,

Let your entire body fill and feel the breath stretch your insides.

And as you exhale,

Let your entire body release as much as possible and feel your relationship to gravity.

Take a couple more breaths like this,

And when you inhale,

Inhale fully into your shape.

And when you exhale,

Try and relax and soften or release your shape.

And this includes the shape of your face.

So as you exhale,

You can let go of any expression,

Feel that your eyes,

Your nose,

Your mouth,

Your ears,

And the skin of your face,

Let's go of any kind of posturing.

All right.

So now we'll begin to explore an inner sense or a felt sense of the body.

And what I'd like to explore is what I'm going to call the soft central channel.

And central channel is sometimes used to refer to the spine and also often used to refer to more of an energetic channel or a vertical axis.

But the soft central channel,

I want you to think of it as the relationship between your mouth and your pelvic floor and all the stuff in between.

So like your guts and organs.

And how we can do this is just by swallowing.

So if you move your tongue around and build some saliva in your mouth and then swallow,

And just notice how far you can track the sensation of swallowing.

And for some of you,

You might only feel it down to the bottom of your throat.

Others of you might feel it all the way to your stomach.

Your stomach is just below your left lung.

Others of you might feel the sensation travel down into your intestines,

Somewhere around your belly button.

And some of you might even feel the sensation culminate in a little bit of a pulse,

Maybe a second or two later in your pelvic floor.

And when you swallow,

Of course,

You're stimulating your digestive tube.

The digestive tube is complicated now,

And it has a lot of turns and twists and different organs that have been differentiated,

Like your stomach or your small intestine or your colon,

Et cetera.

But your digestive tube used to literally just be one tube.

And then as you developed as an embryo and as a fetus,

That tube became more and more complex.

But there is still to this day a pathway and a route in and a route out.

So mouth to anus is the structure of the thing.

And both of these places,

Your mouth,

Your anus,

Your pelvic floor,

Your throat,

These are gates in the body.

And when I say gate,

I mean that things come in and things go out in these places.

And they're places of decision.

And they're also places where things get stopped and blocked.

So when you notice what it feels like to swallow and when you kind of trace the line of your swallow,

The sensation of your swallow,

This is just one way to kind of feel into this tube and into this pathway.

Now as I was naming these places,

You may have noticed sensation that just happened when these places heard their names.

But let's go through them a little bit right now.

And I'm going to invite you to use your hands if possible.

And when you use your hands,

You're just helping yourself bring attention and awareness to the inner body.

So let's bring a hand or attention to the throat.

And again,

You can swallow a couple of times.

So feel the three dimensionality of your throat and your neck.

And notice what the inner sensation is here.

Can you feel the three dimensionality from the inside?

What are any other sensations that might be present?

Maybe there's a tickle in your throat or maybe there's a softness or maybe it feels like there's a blockage.

Open your mouth as wide as you can get it.

Stretch your jaw and stick out your tongue and then let yourself make some weird sounds.

And I'm going to give you some examples,

But I'm not going to do them too loud because I don't want to yell in your ear.

But you can roll your lips.

So you can have a really wide grin,

Pull the corners of your mouth back and go like an E sound and you can shift your pitch around.

So your E sound is really,

Really low or really,

Really high.

And then you can form all of the vowels,

A,

I,

O,

U,

Y,

And let the shape of your mouth inform the sound that's coming out of it.

And again,

You can just play with pitch and you can move your lower jaw around and move your tongue around and just let sound emit out of your mouth.

So you make weird sounds like,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

And as loud or soft as you want to make them,

Again,

I'm not going to go too loud because I don't want to blast your eardrums.

Just make some blah sounds and maybe just blah,

Like,

Blah it out.

And then rest and just feel the sensation in your throat.

And notice if anything has changed,

What still feels the same,

Where the new questions are,

Can you feel the three dimensionality of this place?

Okay.

So now we'll travel down to the next location.

And this next location is also a gate.

And this gate is called the diaphragm sometimes.

It's also a point of intersection between one part of your digestive tube and another,

Where there's a valve between one portion of the small intestine and the next.

So how you find this place is you can bring your hands or your attention to the base of your breastbone where your ribs come together in the front.

And then with your hands,

You can trace from this point all the way around the lower ribs.

And your ribs go pretty low down.

So your hands aren't traveling parallel to the floor,

But they might be arcing down a little bit.

And then back up a touch when you get towards your spine.

And then you can kind of spread your palms wide and just feel your lower ribs and maybe squeeze your ribs in on the side.

And then again,

Come back to the front space where your ribs come together in the front and find the corresponding place at your back and just hold your hands there,

Hold your attention there.

And so then just as we did in the throat,

Notice how this place in your body feels.

And for me,

This is one of the places where I often first register the triad,

Fear,

Shame,

And insecurity in my diaphragm if those emotions are present.

And if you,

Like me,

Experience anxiety in your life,

Then this might be a familiar place to you as well.

This is a place where I often,

If I'm going through a time where I'm having a lot of anxiety,

Then this is often where I'm feeling it.

So check in with this part of your body and notice what's there.

And then we're just going to open this part of the body as well through direct breathing.

And in this kind of breath,

You're trying to stretch your diaphragm.

So if you can bring your hands back to your outer ribs and gently press your palms into your sides and then try and press your palms away with your lungs as you inhale,

Like really spread and stretch your breath.

And then exhale completely.

And then you can bring your hands to the front where your ribs come together and to the corresponding place in the back.

And you can try and breathe into the front and the back of the diaphragm.

And then exhale completely.

And take some breaths into the circumference of your diaphragm.

So out to the sides of the front and the back all around.

And really try and fill up this midsection of your torso and spread your breath.

Breathe as wide as you can get.

And then exhale completely.

And your diaphragm is your main breathing muscle.

So when you're inhaling,

You are contracting the diaphragm.

You are stimulating the muscle.

It's moving into its bone pulling shape.

That's what muscles do.

And then as you exhale,

The diaphragm returns to its resting shape.

It gets softer.

We'll take a few more breaths like this.

Just inhaling to the width of your capacity and then exhaling all your breath out.

And then after your next exhale,

You can just come back to a normal breath.

And again,

Just notice what you feel here.

Notice what's present.

Has it changed?

Is it the same?

Your breathing might have brought up feelings that weren't there.

It might have changed feelings that were there.

So just noticing.

No goal,

Just research.

And then I'd like you to bring your attention to your pelvic diagrams.

And so this includes your anus as well as your PC muscles,

Your pubococcygeal,

Your pelvic floor muscles.

And a lot of people have confusion about the pelvic floor.

And this is very understandable because we live in societies that store shame in this part of the body.

And so most people from a very,

Very early age are taught to hide their genitals and be ashamed of their poop and stuff like this.

So knowing where these places are is not very common at all.

I'm often surprised at the lack of information that people have about their own anatomy.

So if you find this redundant,

I'm sorry,

But for the rest of you,

If you want to figure out where this place is in your body,

Then use your hands if possible and find the tip of your tailbone.

And the tip of your tailbone is just behind your anus for most people.

And so if you can find your butthole and move your touch back a little bit,

You're probably going to find the tip of your tailbone.

And your tailbone and your sacrum are not the same thing.

This is another point of confusion for a lot of folks that the tailbone actually kind of curves forwards and in for a lot of people.

The sacrum is a curved and pretty massive bone more towards the base of the spinal column and the tailbone comes down lower than the sacrum.

So feel where the tailbone is.

And then contract your anus and contract the whole pelvic floor like you're squeezing the pelvic floor,

You're trying to stop peeing or something like that.

And then relax everything.

And now what I want you to do is with your hand at your tailbone,

And again,

This is another vote for you doing this meditation in a private space,

But with your hand at your tailbone,

I want you to imagine that you can wag your tail.

And so this doesn't necessarily mean you're arching your low back because it's not about your low back.

It's about the muscles around your butthole.

And so can you get your butthole to kind of like open up a little bit and imagine you're going to move your tailbone back.

And then you can experiment with tucking the tailbone.

And this is again,

It's not a lower back thing that's happening.

It's much more subtle than that.

And tucking the tailbone is often a contraction of the butthole.

And this is part of my argument with a lot of yoga and Pilates teachers or fitness instructors that are using this phrase,

It's a ubiquitous phrase of tuck your tailbone,

When they actually mean support your low back.

And to say tuck your tailbone might cause a flattening in the low back,

But it's not the same kind of abdominal support that somebody needs to protect their low back.

What it does for a lot of people is disconnect them from their pelvic floor.

So let's all feel where the pelvic floor is and then feel the muscles around your butthole because this is the place where your body registers fear.

So I've said this in like a million meditations.

I'll keep saying it.

We are animals.

Human beings are animals.

And we have tailbones.

These are the remnants or the vestigial tail.

And animals,

When they're fearful,

Tuck their tail.

So feel what is happening for you at this place in your body and maybe just let it rest from any exploration.

Just notice what is present there.

For a lot of us bringing any awareness at all or talking about these places or naming these places can already bring up a whole stew of sensation and information and memory and emotion.

So I really want to advocate for everybody taking care of themselves.

If you feel like your attention in this part of your body is just so crazy activating right now,

Then resource yourself by opening your eyes if they're closed,

By coming back into the room around you,

Know that you always have your breath.

If you need to do this somatic exploration with a trained professional,

A therapist of some kind can help.

Okay.

So with honor and acknowledgement that this is a place in a body that we,

For the most part,

Have been taught to fear,

This is also the place in our body that first registers fear.

And we're going to try and get to know it just a little bit more by moving it around a little bit more.

And so let's just do some basic exercises and you can do this with your breath.

And when you inhale,

I want you to squeeze your butt hole as tight as you can get it.

And then when you exhale,

I want you to relax,

Relax your pelvic floor,

Relax your asshole,

Let your tailbone go,

Try and kind of spread it out,

Wag your tail,

Maybe shake it around a little bit and do that a couple of times.

And it's been my experience with myself,

Also with clients,

That sometimes working in this place of the body can bring up a lot of tension in the jaw and can also manifest as sensations in the other gates in the solar plexus and in the throat.

So if you need to yell at this point,

Like open your mouth really wide and make some sounds,

Or if you need to do some deep breathing to help you get into this part of your body or release in this part of your body,

Then you just go for it,

Have at it.

Don't worry about doing anything right.

The only thing that you're really trying to do right now is bring awareness to your pelvic floor,

Your tailbone and your anus.

It's the kind of meditation teacher I'm so happy to be,

Is someone that can tell you to bring attention to your butt hole.

Thanks for working with me.

Okay.

So then when you're done with that exploration,

Just let everything relax and rest for a second.

And notice what sensation is there.

Right.

So there are many places in our bodies where we register fear,

Shame and insecurity,

And everybody is going to be different in this regard.

And we're all also going to have our own stories that come up.

So whatever story it is for you that brings a sense of shame or whatever person it is for you that triggers your insecurity or whatever world events come in and your fear just gets fired up.

We all have the things that we're responding to and activated by and we'll register those sensations in all different kinds of places in our body.

However,

These three places are really common places to register the three emotions that we're working with today,

Fear,

Shame and insecurity.

And in the gates of our bodies,

And these are not the only gates,

But there are some primary gates,

We have basic energy transfer from the ground to the heavens through our vertical axis.

And you can consider that this is your empowerment.

This is your connection to source,

To the life source that we all come from,

The planet earth,

And to the heavenly source that we all are inspired by,

The sky,

The air,

What's above.

When we cut off connection through the gates of our bodies,

Stagnancy builds and we get really dysfunctional.

So when we feel cut off in our throat centers,

Feel like,

Oh,

I have no voice or I'm being choked or I can't breathe.

Right.

And those phrases are probably enough to stimulate memories and trauma for a fair amount of people,

Just even saying those words.

Notice what happens in your throat center.

And then resource yourself.

Feel the circumference of your throat.

Feel your vocal capacity.

Open your mouth and stretch your jaw and stretch your throat and stick out your tongue.

When we get locked up in our solar plexus and thoracic center,

And this is kind of a place where we can feel personal power and will,

When this place is collapsed,

So if you kind of feel that place where your ribs come together in the front,

See a lot of examples of this in bodies,

That this place is collapsed in the front and there's a heaviness in the front body.

So there is a depression in the lungs.

There's a heaviness in the head.

There's an inability really to feel resourced gravitation in the gravitational force.

And then you also see the alternate,

Which is this place being thrust forwards in a kind of display of bravado or machismo or ego.

To be really present in this part of their body,

We want to be in the front and the back and all of the sides and we want to feel the vastness of our breath potential.

This is pretty much the middle of the body in terms of its division between upper body and lower body.

And a lot of people work with very dysregulated breathing patterns and those breathing patterns are often inherited.

They're often taught to us by our parents and or they're inherited through trauma.

So we literally forget how to breathe or can't breathe.

So bringing attention into this place in the body,

Feeling the capacity of your own breath to expand,

Feeling the fullness of your exhale.

And then you can let this breath move into the other gates of the body so you can breathe all the way up into your throat and down into your pelvic floor.

And you can exhale all the way out of your throat and out of the pelvic floor.

And feel the way that your breath holds space and holds support for these other places in your body.

And then the gate of the pelvic floor,

So anus and genitals.

I don't even need to explain this and I'll say it anyway.

The entire world as far as I understand is a rape culture right now.

So we live in an era of dominance and supremacy and male supremacy and misogyny.

Women's bodies are violated,

Men's bodies are violated.

We violate the body of the earth all of the time with our consumerism.

Sexuality is not held sacred.

It is violated all the time for everybody.

There's a constant war and assault on our bodies and our sensuality and our agency and power as sexual sensual beings.

Your poop,

Your shit is an important part of the ecosystem.

We're living in a world that has really developed around a fear of poop and we do not have responsible methods for composting for the most part throughout the world.

Pooping in water is one of the most ridiculous ideas I've ever come across.

But it's very ubiquitous,

Very common.

Poop or compost is magic.

It's fertile.

It is what stuff grows from.

Of course it needs to be treated.

We need to have good ways of dealing with it,

But it's not a thing to be fearful of.

So much fear and shadow content in our pelvises around defecation and elimination and sexuality – so many bodies have been violated in this place.

I was talking in the most recent Astrology podcast about how circumcision is the most commonly performed surgery in the United States.

This is hugely traumatic,

Not just for men,

But for every human that any circumcised man relates with.

This is a dissociation and a huge,

Huge destructive act of violence.

So when we bring attention to the pelvic floor,

We're bringing attention to the ways that our bodies have been systemically oppressed and subjugated and distanced from our own power.

There's a lot to work with in this part of the body.

There's a lot of ingrained responses.

So whatever comes up for you in this place is something to work with,

To be interested in,

To be curious about.

There's a lot of folks out there who are doing amazing pelvic floor repatterning work,

Really brilliant work with manual stimulation or visualization and of course activism.

So just search pelvic floor healing in your Google and you'll come up with a lot.

But in the meantime,

Just bringing attention to this place and to the ways that there might be habitual tightening or contraction is a place to begin.

And so you can do that by stimulating full contraction and then full relaxation or as full as possible.

And if you can figure out where your coccyx is,

And again,

This is a place that most people aren't aware of,

Where their tailbone is.

The tailbone has a cluster of nerves right around the end.

There's a kind of body there called the coccygeal body.

And this cluster of,

Excuse me,

I said nerves and I meant cells.

So this cluster of cells secrete something and it's probably an endocrine secretion.

And as far as I know,

There is not science yet to tell us what it is.

But stimulation of the coccygeal body can result in a pretty profound consciousness shift and perspective shift.

And the anus and the butthole are erogenous zones.

So if you're someone who's never explored this part of your body,

Get some gloves and some lube and get on it.

This is a part of your body that holds a huge amount of power.

So we can kind of think back to our ancestry as dinosaurs with big tails or something and just let them drop,

Feel their weight.

And then when you bring attention to all three of these places,

To all three of these gates,

Pelvic,

Thoracic,

Throat,

Notice how they respond to each other because they're all in constant dialogue with each other.

And then notice how they respond when there's some kind of activation.

And this is research for you to bring into your life.

And so fear,

Shame,

And insecurity almost always directly impact at least one,

If not all three of these gates and cause blockage in our bodies.

So we get insecure,

We collapse in the front body,

We lose our voice,

We tuck our tail.

We get fearful,

The throat gets really agitated,

We feel like we have to yell,

The tailbone gets really tight and constricted,

The chest center puffs up.

Shame,

What happens with shame in your body?

So these gates in the body hold a huge amount of power,

They hold a huge amount of information and potentially they hold a huge amount of healing and space for renegotiation or resolution.

So the method here is that when you feel yourself getting triggered,

And there's a lot of triggers out there for everyone right now in our current state of the world,

But when you feel yourself going into a place that maybe you're getting distracted,

You're feeling a little bit of anxiety,

You notice your breath is short,

Someone says something and it bothers you,

You're just listening to the news,

Whatever it is,

Check in with these gates and consistently work to feel that they can open and close,

That they can balance with each other,

That they can express and that they can release.

And you might notice that then your perceptive capacity and the way that you're responding to whatever the trigger is shifts.

There's a little bit more choice and a little bit less reactivity or going into habitual postures or ways of being tightness.

So just to finish up,

Let's take a couple of breaths and bring attention into all three of these places.

And as your breath travels through your nose or through your mouth,

Feel it move into your throat and then into your ribs and all the way down into the pelvic floor.

And then as you exhale,

Allow all these spaces to relax as much as possible.

Feel them soften.

Take a few more breaths like that.

So as you inhale,

Feel the touch of your breath traveling into your throat,

Spreading your lungs,

Moving down into your pelvic floor.

And as you exhale,

Relaxing.

If you feel a blockage,

If you feel stagnancy,

Breathe deeper,

Stretch a little bit,

Move a little bit,

Open your mouth,

Let out weird noises,

Contract the pelvic floor,

Open the pelvic floor,

Work with your twists.

Notice where the stagnancy is and then try and move it around,

Release it a little bit.

If you can release it a little bit,

Then come back to your breath.

Come back to the attention.

How do these three places in the body relate to one another?

So you can feel free to continue with this exploration.

And if you're ready,

Then I'm just going to offer a little bit of a prayer to the body and we'll actually start down in the pelvis.

So again,

If you want to use your hands and bring your hands to your genitals,

Your anus or your low belly or something like this.

And this prayer is that we ask for a right perspective.

And perspective is knowing that we have an important place here on earth,

That our perspective is limited and that we feel safe and sane enough to take note of our perspective,

To feel how we're rooted,

To feel the ways that we are planted and then how we grow,

To know our own biases,

To understand our own fears.

And then bringing your hands or your attention into your thoracic,

To your diaphragm and breathing there.

And the prayer is now,

May we have right intention.

May we use our willpower and intention and personal motivation to do good in the world,

To not perpetuate suffering and harm any more than we absolutely have to just by circumstance of being alive.

To turn our ambitions and our aspirations towards the betterment for all,

Towards everyone's shared health and wellbeing,

The wellbeing of the planet.

And then to bring your touch or your attention into your throat and again,

Feel that your jaw and your mouth are open.

And the prayer here is may we have right voice.

When we speak,

When we give voice,

When we share truth,

May we be coming from a good intention,

May we be coming from a balanced and self-aware perspective.

To give voice to something is to release it into the world and all manifestation is resonance of sound.

So when we give voice to something,

We are manifesting,

We are creating.

We want to manifest and create from good,

Grounded,

Whole,

Healthy places.

And then we'll reverse our prayer and keep the attention at the throat and just ask that whatever we consume,

Whatever we choose to swallow and absorb into our bodies is truly good for us.

And that we have access and discernment to consume what nourishes us.

And then to bring the attention back into the diaphragm,

Into the breathing space and whatever we take into our bodies,

Whatever we swallow.

May we trust our body's ability to digest and to absorb,

To process and to transform.

May we trust our ability to take in if we swallow something that's not good for us or that's not true.

May our bodies know this is not for me.

Whatever we need,

May we absorb it well so that our will and our motivation and our intentions can spread out into the world in good ways.

And then bringing attention back into the root,

Into your pelvic floor,

Into your anus.

May we easily release and let go of the toxins that we carry and the ways that we are all carriers of our inherited karma,

Our fears,

Our shames,

Our insecurities.

May we easily release what is toxic and what is unneeded.

And with whatever it is that we release and let go of,

May it return to the earth as neutral.

And in the releasing,

May we release any energetic charge that would cause further harm and may this energy simply serve to reimagine itself or reform as a new life further along on the evolutionary path.

Right,

So thanks so much for listening and for practicing with me.

And if you appreciate these meditations,

If they bring health,

Healing,

Wellness into your life,

Please consider donating.

A one-time,

A recurring monthly donation helps me to continue these offerings and continue to give them for free.

Thank you again for listening.

Thank you again for practicing.

And I'm wishing you all the best in your health,

Healing,

And empowerment.

Bye for now.