“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
Douglas talks about Be Activated as a philosophy with a technique wrapped around it. As a massage therapist and coach, that idea didn’t make a lot of sense to me at first. Over time, the philosophy has become my guiding light.
In 2017, at the first Be Activated course I attended, we talked about the idea of “stepping down the staircase.” The idea is simple: we have an inborn ability to be resilient to stress. At the top of this staircase are our states of overwhelm – our fight or flight and freeze responses. The further down that staircase we are, the more options we have when we encounter stress – the wider our space for resilience. If we are not conscious about the environments we live in and their effect on us, we take steps up that staircase, giving us an ever-narrower space of resilience. Through activation, we are able to access more of that inborn resilience. As we access more resilience, we take steps down the staircase, we have greater options, the world becomes a friendlier and brighter place.
I can recall specific moments where I felt myself taking those steps down – from my first experience of Reflexive Performance Reset where I grew (no joke) two inches from 30 seconds of work to my first Be Activated course and the calm I experienced (I don’t know that I ever in my life had understood calm), to my most recent Be Activated course where I uncovered a depth of empathy which had never been available to me before. It’s this story I need to share.
I’m an only child. Having a child was not easy for my parents. When I was five years old, I was with a bunch of other kids playing on a downed tree behind our school during a parent-teacher baseball game. Never the most coordinated child, I slipped and fell off the tree and slammed the back of my head against the tree. In telling me about it (always a painful experience for her) my mother said it sounded like a batter had just made better contact than anyone in the game to that point. I only have flashes of the next few days in my memory – vomiting in the entryway of our house, opening my eyes in a cat scan machine, opening my eyes in a hospital seeing a doctor hovering over me. They’re just still images in my mind. This incident has carried a lot of weight throughout my life. It pushed me toward fear.
In my last Be Activated experience, while the glute point on the back of my head was being activated, I felt an overwhelming surge of energy through my body. The energy shifted through anger, through fear, and became a fire. I left the room and started running, sprinting. I needed to let this energy out! When I came back into the room, I was pacing like a tiger in a cage. Douglas, knowing that I was on the edge of dangerous helped me channel it: “Do you need to hit something?” “No.” “Do you need to talk about it?” “No.” “What do you think you need?” “… I think I’m going to throw up.”
I go to the trash can and begin dry-heaving. The dry-heaves turn into a sound of pure emotion, specifically fear, and sadness, being unleashed after more than thirty years. I’m crying and shaking as these feelings leave my body.
The wave of emotion passes and I settle back into my body. I’m overcome with two feelings. The first is about me: Oh my god that concussion was so scary. I’d never fear like that before. The second is different: Oh my god my parents love me so much. At the moment I felt my own fear, I felt the fear that my parents had. I saw what happened through their eyes. At that moment, I learned what empathy really was. And it gives me goosebumps even now to think about it.
If all the previous experiences were steps down the staircase, this was a leap.
This moment was a turning point for me. It was an awakening that shifted my focus from the person I wanted to become to appreciating the person that I am. With this shift, the resistance inside, the limiting stories I tell myself, go away. The shift is no longer about becoming, it’s about being.
When Douglas talks about Be Activated as a philosophy with a technique wrapped around it, this is what I understand. My work with clients is rooted in the philosophy that we all deserve to live a joyous life. Joy can only happen in the present, so we must appreciate who we are and where we are right now. With this at the core, our work together can include whatever techniques are right for you, for now. My job is simply to be a guide. My job is to help you discover your staircase and help you take steps down it.