Holding space for the heavy and difficult content of this course requires your body to be nourished, tuned and rhythmically balanced. The practices below are basic recommendations that can help you process and move complex emotions somatically (through your body). The practices can also support you with “the four Ds”: to de-center your ego, to disarm affective landmines, to declutter your gut, heart and headspace and to disinvest in harmful patterns. The practices may feel very different each time you do them so we suggest that you commit to repeating them more than once (ideally on a daily basis through this period). You may want to stick to only one of the practices and/or try them all, and repeat at least one of them consistently. 

Food: 

Observe how many times you swallow things after only the first wave of flavouring. We invite you to eat your food at half the speed you normally eat it, and chew twice the amount. If you only have limited time to eat, eat just as much as you have time for. As you chew, take the time to taste each flavour and trace back all the places this food came from. As you taste, consider the life-line of the beings that make-up your dish, and all the labour involved (of the land, water, sun, fossil ancestors, human growers, packagers, stockers, drivers, finance and sales people) in getting these beings from the soil to your guts.

Sound: 

Humming is an ancient technology that is used to regulate the nervous system. Every day for a week, we invite you to hum intentionally for at least 5 minutes (continuously or not). Pay attention to what vibrates in your body when you hum: you can alternate with just noticing where the humming resonates and also experimenting with directing the vibration to different body areas. Notice what changes as you repeat this exercise under different contexts (times of the day, surroundings, emotional stimulus etc.). You can also experiment with identifying which passenger on your bus is humming and which need to hum but are resistant or reluctant to do it. 

Movement: 

This exercise invites you to interrupt the conditioned desire to process emotions through narratives. Instead it invites you to engage your body in the movements, sounds and rhythms that can support you to hold space for the complex emotions that may have arisen in the unlearning bundle. The invitation is not to escape or get stuck in the emotion, but to be with it and allow it to move.  Invitation: Every day, for a week, dance to this same song, tuning in with the movement of rain. For the duration of the song, you should go from light rain, to regular rain, to tropical rain, to thunderstorm, to hail, to snow, and finally back to a drizzle. Try different movement experiments every day (e.g. start with something simple like tapping on your legs, then move to more dramatic dance moves as you gradually develop more intimacy with the different rhythms of the rain in your body). Song options: Iansa + Timoneiro