Lisa Stegman Integral Psychotherapy and Coaching

10/26/2021

Join us Sunday, November 21st in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, for a half day of healing and ceremony!

We invite you to join us for a day of ceremony, creative sharing, embodiment, and shamanic journeying. Gather with us gather for a day of healing at a beautiful private residence in Boulder, Colorado. Together we will cultivate a spontaneous community of safety and support where we can activate the....

10/11/2021

Would love to have you join us on this mini retreat!

We invite you to join us for a day of ceremony, creative sharing, embodiment, and shamanic journeying. Gather with us gather for a day of healing at a beautiful private residence in Boulder, Colorado. Together we will cultivate a spontaneous community of safety and support where we can activate the....

09/15/2021

09/07/2021

It’s an act of mercy and compassion to step back and acknowledge how much we’ve been through over these last couple of years. Just to be alive as a human being on the planet right now carries with it a certain tone of activation in the body and nervous system.

It’s like there’s been a continuous drip of a soul-level cortisol or adrenaline, on the one hand, and a collapse into hopelessness/helplessness on the other – an alternation between hypervigilance and a numbing or shutting down.

Each of these responses and the bodily felt arousal that accompanies them are coherent and make sense. In addition to our verbal narratives and stories, there are the stories of the body (somatic narrative) and also those of the nervous system (autonomic narrative) that weave together worlds of meaning.

Underneath it all, a deep longing to rest and to feel safe again in our bodies, to re-tune and enter consciously into the next phase. Something has fallen away that we will never be able to return to, but the exact nature of what’s coming next has yet to be given.

This not-knowing where we’re headed can generate that deep, even cosmic sort of restlessness that many are experiencing. We are in that period of liminality and transitional space, in between the way things used to be and the birth that is yet to come.

The temptation is to get out of the in-between and into the rebirth as quickly as possible. But if we bypass the reorganization prematurely, we will not be able to receive the gold that is found only within the core of that which is falling apart. This is the invitation into the rich, alchemical yellowing.

This is a difficult realm to navigate as it is not held as valid and honorable in our conventional world. But it is one of potential and creativity, a doorway to experience that is not always available in times of certainty and flow.

In the very center of the paradox and contradictory energies is the water of life. It is a courageous journey into that territory and one that will surprise us.

It may grind us into dust, but it is the particles that survive that initiation that form the golden neural and soul-scaffolding of a new world.

08/13/2021

“We have a tendency to think in terms of doing and not in terms of being. We think that when we are not doing anything, we are wasting our time. But that is not true. Our time is first of all for us to be. To be what? To be alive, to be peaceful, to be joyful, to be loving. And that is what the world needs most.”

Thich Nhat Han

02/27/2021

The great work before us is to learn to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die. Our work is to apprehend the timing of both; to allow what must die to die, and what must live to live.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, from Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.

06/02/2020

Whoa. Time to pull back, slow down the mind. Time to re-establish a connection within our own individual being, distinctly located within our self. Our own soul.

Time to engage fully our physical, psychological and emotional boundaries. Boundaries are not fluffy talk. Boundaries are about your survival.

Time to manage our allostatic load. Allostatic load is a neuropsychological term that refers to the cumulative wear and tear on our body and brain that results from excessive expenditure of emotional energy especially due to chronic trauma-induced stress. We would be hard-pressed to find anyone right now who is not in a state of allostatic overload. Traumatized. Exhausted. Scared. Anxious.

Time to make fundamental distinctions about where each of us ends, and everything else begins. Time to tune up our boundaries — not shut down or wall-off — but to be in this world, AND not of it. Not merged with it. But engaged.

Notice what personal wounds have been triggered/torn open within your own being. Tend to those *first*/oxygen mask to you first — before attempting to tend to the collective wounds with your energy and/or words. Otherwise, we become overloaded and cannot function in a conscious and healing way.

Time to get re-grounded. To pull back a minute. Get quiet. And clear. Quiet. Clear. Quiet. Breathe. To breathe quietly is not a throwaway idea. It is through the breath that all archetypal Warrior energy centers itself.

Only from this quiet and clear place can hearts and minds open to purposive and pro-creative change.

-Mellisa La Flame