La Shanda Sugg: Election Brave Space Series

The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and structures of belonging.

This 8 weeks series consists of mini episodes which are being produced in partnership with The Hive, A Center for Contemplation, Art, and Action, as a part of an ongoing class they’re offering locally called Election Brave Space: Compassionate Resilience For Our Shared Future. The intention of these episode is to introduce a variety of simple tools and practices to help you navigate this politically tumultuous moment, leading to and through the election.

La Shanda Sugg is a healer, trauma-informed therapist, and consultant. La Shanda is passionate about creating safe spaces for exploration, healing, and growth. She is an expert at bringing people into their bodies and developing a nurturing relationship with their own nervous systems. 

The Hive is a grassroots mindfulness community curating multi-week classes, workshops and a Membership community. It has been formed by facilitators asking the question, "What are the resources that lie within our vast lineages, traditions, and modalities of healing, and how can we place them in service of the common good?" In this series we’re hearing from The Hive’s 6 core faculty members.

This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.

Transcript

Hey everyone.  I am coming today with an exercise that I like to do personally for myself, as well as share with other people. I call it the five minute exercise. And this is typically done when we are having a lot of experiences, but we don't have a lot of words for them. For me personally, I have access to many, many words, but there are times when I'm experiencing something inside of my internal ecosystem. And I consider my internal ecosystem, my emotions. the different parts of myself, my littles is what I call my inner children. And sometimes there are various parts of myself that's having an experience and they don't have words to whatever they're experiencing. So the five minute exercise is what I will go to personally or when I'm in session with someone and they recognize that there's an experience happening, but don't really know what to do with it. So I would like to share what that exercise is in hopes that maybe you find it helpful. So the first thing is your inner ecosystem has three options to communicate with you during the five minute exercise. They can write you a letter, they can draw you a picture, or they can move your body. And essentially, whoever needs to speak with you, whoever is trying to communicate with you will have the option to unfilter to give you that information. So if you choose write a letter, I would encourage you to get a pen or pencil and something to write with. We're going to set a timer for five minutes.  And you are going to lend your hand to whoever is trying to speak with you. The question I typically ask during the five minute exercise is, who are you and what do you need me to know?  A very clear distinction is I am not asking you The person writing to speak on behalf of your anger or your fear or your anxiety or your four year old. I'm asking you to simply write the question down and continue to just allow whatever flows. That's end of the would love to hear from you. To write it down. Sometimes this isn't easy. It's not instinctual for people. So I recommend if it seems pretty hard. To see if you can just continue to write the question over and over again until something else comes out. If you elect to, say, draw a picture, same process, grab something to draw with and draw on, set a timer for five minutes. And then you're just going to ask the question. Maybe it's out loud. Maybe it's in your head. Who are you and what do you need me to know? And then just allow your hand to make whatever lines on the paper that you need to. And if it's move your body, same question. Who are you and what do you need me to know? I highly recommend that people set a timer for five minutes, begin standing, maybe have a slight sway back and forth, and then just follow whatever your body wants to do. At the end of that five minutes. finish up your last sentence. If you're writing, finish up the last lines. If you're drawing, finish up the last moment, if you're moving. And then for a couple of minutes, I encourage people to journal. Perhaps if whoever in your inner ecosystem wrote you a letter, you can read what they wrote and then journal about it. If you moved your body, you can journal. If you drew a picture, you can journal about it. And then you have that information. Why I think this is important, one, setting the timer for five minutes is very important. We don't need to go down a very long  rabbit hole, I guess is what we would call it. Five minutes is enough.  If in the midst of the exercise, you find that this part of you has a lot to say, then you can communicate back to that part of yourself, I'll be back. And then maybe later that day or the next day, you can go back into the five minute exercise. It's also important because often we intellectualize. What we're experiencing, we try to put our cognitive frame on what other parts of us may be saying. And I, along with countless other people that I've done this exercise with, have been genuinely surprised at what our inner ecosystem has to say just stop and listen. few things to make this your own. Sometimes I know exactly who I'm talking to. So I don't have to say, who are you and what do you need me to know? I might say teenager, my teenage self. What do you need me to know right now? Maybe it's my fear. Fear, what do you need me to know? So if you know what parts of you are activated, it's okay to specifically ask that. The reason I specifically ask the question, what do you need me to know? Is because sometimes we, again, are projecting onto The parts of ourselves that are trying to communicate. And then we narrow the question down. Sometimes we get the answer we think we're looking for when, what do you need me to know allows kind of an open frame for those parts of us to talk to us in any way,  now, what do you do when you get the answer,  the first thing I recommend doing once the exercise is done, once you've journaled and you've been able to process the little is have gratitude.  Maybe it's a gentle touch. To a certain part of your body. Maybe you say it out loud, or maybe you say it in your mind, but thinking the parts of you that were brave enough to speak with you that were willing to be honest. Gratitude is a huge part of this experience. And then we can communicate back. I highly recommend, particularly if writing was your choice, you can become a pen pal with the parts of you that want to talk and what I mean by that is they may express I need you to know that I really am afraid or this reminds me of something that happened in the past or I'm actually excited. Whatever they communicate, you can write back with your gratitudes and thanks for them communicating with you but this would be an opportunity to let that part of yourself know what you're experiencing. But also you might write back and say, is there something you need from me? How can I help you feel safe? How can I help you feel seen and heard? And then you can do the five minute exercise again and see what they say. This feels for me like a way to honor that I have a very complex internal system with varying parts that have varying needs. And sometimes those needs are not always clear to me. And sometimes they're in direct, I don't want to say competition, but they're in, yeah, they're in direct competition with what I feel like I need in the moment and what my inner ecosystem needs. And this has been one way that I've been able to kind of smooth that out with my current existence. As well as everything that's happening inside. And so I wanted to share that exercise with you. Feel free to adjust it to make it your own, but we're in a time period right now where I know people are feeling a lot and we can sometimes minimize or in an attempt to synthesize what we're feeling, we can, put it all under a couple of labels. I'm afraid I'm angry. I'm frustrated, I'm outraged, I'm happy, but there's so much more to our experience than sometimes the limited words that we have. And I think you would be surprised at how informative our parts and our emotions can be when we genuinely listen.  So I hope this is helpful, applicable across many areas of your life, and I hope you get to know yourself better through this exercise.