Walk With Me is an ongoing video series where I invite you to join me while I take some time to check in with myself. It’s all spontaneous, just like Somatic Experiencing — I like to slow down and see where my mind and body take me. I hope you enjoy watching the video or reading the transcript below, and thanks for spending a moment of your day with me.
Hey there. Today, I am walking on an incredibly beautiful fall day that happens to be super windy, so I’m going to be testing out my microphone. I’m also walking in a direction that I don’t often walk when I’m recording these videos. So there’s usually a lot more people this way.
So I’ll probably end up just showing you the marsh off to my side instead of directly ahead of me, because, you know, anonymity and all that kind of stuff. But let’s see how it goes. So, this is the marsh. I don’t know how much of it is actually marshy.
Obviously, this is the little river that we see in the other direction, but it’s definitely doing the fall thing here. And, yeah, I have had a day preceded by a day, and I’m hoping that this walk gives me a little bit of relief from my day. Look at this. Just look at this. It’s so pretty. It’s just so pretty. All right. Yeah.
There’s some people up ahead of me, but I think they’re far enough that it’s not super important right now. So what I was thinking about talking about today is what happened to me yesterday in broad terms, and as a material lesson for me, take from it what you will, but this is important for me to catch, is that I had a great morning.
I had a few client appointments, and then I had another podcast video recording with my friends that were doing together. And then. And that recording ended up being all about me. So I was feeling great about me in general. And then.
So I love these berries. I’m not even sure that you’re gonna be able to see bittersweet berries that… I can’t get close enough, here you can see. I cannot get close enough to the tree to actually show you very well. Maybe I can zoom. Yeah. Look at those berries. They come out as these orange berries, and then this, like, shell comes off, and you can see that it’s just red inside with the shell. It’s almost like leaves.
And I’ve seen wreaths made from them and all sorts of stuff. They’re really pretty. And that was. Looks like grapevine. Yeah, very pretty. Okay. The little red beside me is sumac. And this area here around, Let’s see here, used to be or is really grown up in the spring and summer, but it’s mostly flattened now because of, it was, it’s ferns and, like, annuals that just kind of go in the winter and get really flat.
So, yeah, so I had this great morning, and then I had just a call with a friend who knows me well and is also a practitioner, so she knows what to, like, catch and listen to and listen for. And what she caught was me saying something about myself, a true belief, like, it’s not just, it’s not like I was just saying it out of being humble or whatever, or false modesty.
My true belief was that, you know, this whatever it was. And she walked me through how I was wrong in my belief and the outcome, like, what it meant is that something super, like, excellent about me or about, you know, what I’m doing in the world or about, you know, like, whatever it was. But it was amazing.
It was so cool. And I like, got it on every level. And then I started feeling really, really weird. And I happened to have an appointment with my own practitioner in the evening and kind of showed up to that appointment and again, feeling super, super weird and stressed out and lost and confused. And I needed to just kind of like say all the things that I thought might be contributing to this feeling weird thing.
And she like, as I was talking, the practitioner in me was like slotting things into place and going, “oh, yeah, yeah, you’re totally frozen.” So what happened was, I had a great morning. I was feeling good preceded, you know, like I was feeling really good on Wednesday and Thursday, and then this was Friday morning, and I was feeling really good about things and me and my work and all the things.
And then, and then this was like the last straw. I wasn’t feeling excited, but I was definitely feeling good. And I got blindsided by the fact that that was too much. My system couldn’t handle that much good, couldn’t handle the realization that I was handed that was unadulteratedly good. I think it was probably more than that, probably because it was a belief. Like I was messing with an actual belief. And that was weird. But it was also, too much of anything can be bad.
Lot of times too much of bad is what we think of: too sad, too scary, too, like, if we get too angry. But in this moment, as I was working through these beliefs, the set of beliefs that I had, like, set in my head, and in actuality I had, I was already, I had already surpassed this thing that I thought was a threshold.
And I was given enough evidence that my head actually got it and my body tried to get it, and froze up to the point where while I was on this call with my practitioner, I couldn’t make myself move to turn off an alarm that started on my phone. I had to actually call down the hallway to my partner and have him come in during my session, turn off my phone.
Probably five-ish minutes after that, I was able to move enough that I could have done that, but that would have meant my alarm going off for five minutes. And thank goodness for partners, really, right? Especially partners that are aware of the process. So that was amazing. But it’s just that material lesson of, we’re gonna back up a second.
These are the woolly bear caterpillars that I have been seeing everywhere, where there’s more black in the front, long brown, and little bitty black in the back. I’ve seen all kinds of memes about what that means for the winter. I’ve always known. I’ve always understood that if the middle is long, it means it’s going to be a long winter or something like that.
And apparently, I don’t talk about folklore, right? But I don’t know if that means that we’ve got a long start to the winter, and then it’s gonna be a lot of winter, and then it’s gonna be fast out of it. I don’t remember. I don’t know.
I don’t care. But every woolly bear caterpillar that I’ve seen looks like that, which is pretty awesome. All right. I just got lost. I got lost in nature, which is precisely why I come out here. Exactly. Precisely why I come out here is to get lost in nature. Perhaps that realization might have been able to be handled better.
I mean, my friend is not a somatic experiencing practitioner. She had no idea. She was just doing what she knew how to do, which was perfect, because it got through to me, and maybe it has gotten into my system well enough that I got it now. But that afternoon, evening of full freeze.
So first it was a functional freeze where I could do stuff, start dinner, and get ready for my appointment and take a walk. And then when I got into a safe place, which I’ve been working with my practitioner for long enough that she is a safe place, it was all over. I just seized up like crazy.
Okay, so that’s all of that here, look. There’s another covered bridge here. Like I said, this is the trail going the other direction. So there’s another covered bridge. You can kind of see it through the woods, and it leads up to the library, which I just think is the most adorable thing in the world. I actually don’t like living downtown, but it is very cute. Yeah. So, anyway, I’m gonna turn around and head back.
So you’re wondering, I know you’re wondering, how did you come out of freeze? So the first answer is with support. The second answer is with time. And we went back and forth between noticing where the freeze was and where the freeze wasn’t.
For me yesterday, it was in my skin and had me completely locked up. What was interesting is I could talk. Other times, I can’t talk. I could move my head the tiniest, but I could move my eyes, but I couldn’t move the rest of my body. And another thing is resources.
So, for instance, for me, the dogs needing me or whatever can tug me out of freeze pretty quickly. So, you know, I had to gesture to a dog, and that got me a little bit out. It wasn’t out out, but a little bit more mobile. And then I started to be able to move my head just the tiniest bit.
And so it’s. It was a very long process of watching, tracking what was stuck and what wasn’t stuck. And then the things that weren’t stuck, focusing on them. And then slowly, ever so slowly, the rest of me thawed. There was some tears. There was some movement, like contractions, and then relaxation. And then slowly, it probably took, I don’t know, 25 minutes for me to get completely back to my normal posture, I guess.
There’s a farm here. This used to be. Be like, you know how. You know how old, um, old towns have places that were huge farms, and then eventually it gets all broken up. So right here is like the back of the huge farm with the farmhouse above it. And then there’s just little chunks of land still used, and the rest of it is populated by house. Yeah.
So I came out and we, my practitioner and I just tracked the whole thing. We didn’t go back to what it was that had made me freeze. We stayed in good stuff, in pleasantries or in interesting things. I talked some. She talked some, um. But we just, like, anchored my body in the present and in feeling here and good and fine and not being frozen.
Isn’t this cute? I don’t actually know. I know that it goes up and there’s more farmland on the other side of there, and sometimes they drive the tractor through there, but it doesn’t look like it’s been there. So I don’t know if people get into the water and mess around in the summer there or not, but, yeah.
So, like I said, that was mostly for me. And take from it what you will. It’s a hell of a process, this thing. The fact that if your body has so perfected the art of freeze. That a good surprise can throw you into freeze just as quickly as a bad surprise. But it’s harder to notice because you aren’t expecting it. Such a pain in the ass. All right.
Thank you for walking with me, and I hope you have a good rest of your day.
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