Jessica Saperstone LCSW

02/21/2022

Sharing today about an instagram site/podcast that I think is wonderful.
is on Instagram, authored by psychotherapist Julie Menanno MA our of Bozeman Montana. If you don’t use social media, her website is the same www.thesecurerelationship.com . Her teachings and illustrations about attachment, managing triggers and emotional reactivity are user friendly and truly a road map for understanding and navigating relationships of all kinds.

Another author I have recently discovered is Beau Christopher Taplin. His writings are inspirational and demonstrate a deep understanding of the human spirit and psyche. Www.beautaplin.com

I’m reading Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart and though only 1/3 in, it’s great! I understand she just put out an audiobook narrated by her.

I am not endorsing anybody here nor do I know any of them personally. Just sharing….

A guide to getting unstuck from a negative cycle & finding attachment security with your partner.

07/08/2021

We’re at the halfway mark of our six-episode Summer Sister Series on “The Gifts of Imperfection,” and this week Ashley, Barrett, and I talk about how scary it can be to lean into joy and how many people “live disappointed” rather than risk “feeling disappointed.”

Constantly planning and preparing for pain doesn’t make the hurt go away when hard things happen. Squandering joy just means we have fewer stored-up moments of goodness to fall back on when we need them.

Practicing gratitude allows us to lean into the moment rather than be derailed by our fear that joy is only temporary. spoti.fi/UnlockingUs

12/03/2020

Yes, this is important to understand.

... any why it's easy for us to confuse them anyway.

09/11/2020

Love this!

You can't spell wholehearted without A-R-T.

Thank you Andrea Pippins for using your talent and creativity to help us celebrate the 10th anniversary of the by bringing the 10 guideposts to life.

You can download this gorgeous flower and a version YOU color here: https://bit.ly/2GN8MAp

03/25/2020

These are excellent resources💗🙌

Dear Friends ~ During this global crisis we all need pathways to calm, clarity and openheartedness. While it’s natural to feel fear during times of great collective crisis, our challenge is that fear easily takes over our lives. Mindfulness and compassion practices can help us find an inner refuge...

03/25/2020

https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a collective loss of normalcy.

03/22/2020

So many great questions and comments about our first Unlocking Us podcast episode on FFTs (effing first times) and how hard it is to be new at everything - from small things to pandemics.

I especially appreciate all of the comments from teachers getting ready to take their classes online for the first time and parents navigating all of the uncertainty. �

I’m sharing my thoughts in an article on the website: Collective Vulnerability, the FFTs of Online Learning, and the Sacredness of Bored Kids.

https://brenebrown.com/blog/2020/03/21/collective-vulnerability/

Open hearts. Clean hands. Spread calm.

03/19/2020

Join us for a unique online session with author, scientist, and mindfulness teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn.

11/19/2019

I love this! 🙏 once again Matt Licata.

It is not an error
that you have been born
a sensitive human being,
with a tender nervous system
and a heart that is sometimes
broken.

Inside the wound, a spiral.

The tenderness there,
the shakiness, the grief…
not an error
to be remedied
or cured…

But a doorway to essence,
a portal to life.

Photo by Matt Bluejay

09/21/2019

Once again, Matt Licata’s words resonate so strongly and ring so true that I am drawn to share them.

Within the spiral of healing, we will be asked to revision core beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world. To become a poet, painter, and sculptor of new life.

So many of our limited beliefs arose from an environment of empathic failure, where the brilliance of a little heart was unable to be held, where the majesty of the emotional landscape was unable to be recognized and mirrored back… seeding pathways of unworthiness and shame.

Even if we did not experience overt neglect or abuse, an environment of consistent misattunement accretes in the psyche over time, where even subtle traumatic organization can take root and flower.

Yes, these narratives and feeling states have their origin in the past. But they must be maintained in the present to stay alive. This is a liberating discovery as while we cannot change the past, we can reorganize perception in the here and now.

This is not easy, and requires the capacity to tolerate, contain, and integrate the underlying anxiety that these beliefs, feelings, and behaviors helped to keep us out of.

Though we may genuinely wish to transform our experience, we simultaneously remain invested in certain ways of thinking and feeling, in order to maintain the protective function they have served. As painful as this is, it has adaptively kept us away psychic experience that threatened to take us down.

We must discover to what degree we still require this protection, or whether it is no longer serving our deeper longing to feel alive, connected, intimate, and free. To what degree it is keeping us out of life, out of full embodied participation in the magnificence of the human form.

We can’t just tear the old organization down in one great enlightenment experience, think our way out of it, or “manifest” it away in five quick steps. It happens slowly, by way of the activity of love.

As always, just what this “love” is cannot be revealed to you by another, but only by way of a secret language that has been placed inside you, awaiting your discovery. It is by way of attunement to this whisper that the poetry of new life will flow.

Art by alto2

08/12/2019

This is so spot on! Another one by Matt Licata.

Early relational experiences are encoded in neural circuitry in the first 18 months of life. Stored as implicit memory, they are inaccessible by ordinary awareness, forming templates through which we engage the world. In a moment of activation, the templates come surging online. Before we realize it, previously sequestered material has flooded our perception.

Our expectations in relationship – whether we can count on others, are worthy of love, will allow another to matter or whether we can take the risk to lead with our vulnerability – are organized in a fragile little nervous system that yearns for connection. The neural pathways are tender and responsive, as we seek attuned, right-brain to right-brain resonance with those around us. We want to feel felt, have our experience held and mirrored, and for pure space in which we can explore unstructured states of being.

While this encoding is deeply embedded, it can be rewired. While it may feel entrenched, it is not as solid as it appears. Even if your early environment was one of empathic failure, developmental trauma, and insecure attachment, it is never too late. The wild realities of neuroplasticity and the courage of the human heart is unstoppable and an erupting force of creativity.

Through new relational experiences – with a lover, a friend, a therapist, a baby; a star, a mountain, the moon, an animal-guide from the other world – love is hidden inside the caverns of neural circuitry. It is the substance which forms the neurons and their synapses, lighting up heart-cells in a moment of connection. Each time you attune to another – or to the unmet inner “other” within you – a new world is born.

As long as breath is present, you can update the narrative, recraft your perception and re-envision a new story. You can make new meaning of your life, re-imagine your purpose, and renew your commitment to being here. Slowly, you can revise your circuitry with pathways of holding awareness, flooding it with empathic attunement, presence, and warmth.

No matter what is happening in your life, you can start right now, in this moment. The opportunity for reorganization is always here and wired deep within you. Don’t give up. Love will never give up on you.

Art credit: Moose as guide and portal by Krista Marleena

08/08/2019

I thoroughly enjoyed the NAI Front Range program today hosted by Boulder County Open Space and Mountain Parks on Forest Bathing and the important role nature plays in our overall health and well being . I have found myself drawn more and more to the natural world and was overjoyed to connect with so many kindred spirits.

05/30/2019

So many need to hear this right now!

The next time you notice that you’re attacking yourself, caught in a looping storyline about how you’ve failed, how you’ll never get it right, how there is something just fundamentally wrong with you …

When you’ve become lost in a repetitive narrative about how someone has misunderstood you, how you are not being seen in the way you’d like, or when find yourself complaining about your life or another person …

When you find yourself under a waterfall, sinking into quicksand, in a cascading of claustrophobia, urgent, hot, sticky, out of control emotions...

Slow way down.

Before you abandon yourself and leave your immediate experience, parachuting into the unstable waters of rumination, shame, and blame, just slow way down. For this is no ordinary moment. You are being asked to care for yourself in a new way, to cleanse your perception with space, with kindness, with compassion – to pause and to encode a new pathway.

With the ally of the breath, shift your awareness out of the overwhelming narrative, for it is no longer safe there. It is not serving you to travel down the conditioned rabbit hole of unworthiness and self-abandonment any longer. These are the leftover grooves of an earlier time, and ache to be reorganized by way of empathy, attunement, and embodied presence.

Conserve your precious life energy, remove it from that which is no longer working in your best interest, and direct into your belly, your heart, your throat. And ask: what feeling is wanting to be met now? In what way am I being asked to care for the vulnerable, the tender, and the shaky within me, to no longer project it outward in the movement of self-abandonment and self-aggression? How am I being asked to tend to myself in a new way? To touch the erupting, raw, achy life that is surging now for holding.

Look carefully, with curiosity, patience, kindness, and compassion and see the ways you leave the embodied world of pure feeling, bailing on your vulnerability as you escape back into the conditioned narrative of complaint, resentment, shame, blame, and self-attack. Return home.

While it may seem you are longing for something outside you, in these moments you are only longing for your own presence. For you need yourself now more than ever. This world needs you now more than ever.

Photo by Ester Marie Doysabas

02/16/2019

Something for us all to think about!

Today I asked my body what she needed,
Which is a big deal
Considering my journey of
Not Really Asking That Much.

I thought she might need more water.
Or protein.
Or greens.
Or yoga.
Or supplements.
Or movement.

But as I stood in the shower
Reflecting on her stretch marks,
Her roundness where I would like flatness,
Her softness where I would like firmness,
All those conditioned wishes
That form a bundle of
Never-Quite-Right-Ness,
She whispered very gently:

Could you just love me like this?

💗💗💗

Author: Hollie Holden

12/28/2018

I really resonate with his description of grief, “not as a process, but as a non-linear unfolding partner of revelation”

In my experience, grief is not something we “get over” by following pre-prescribed stages, but an activity within the heart that we may be asked to tend to throughout our lives. It is very individual and takes a unique expression for each person.

The timeline for this voyage is not given by the psychiatric community, nor by insurance panels or teachers or healers, but written in the stars, in a language that can only be deciphered by each person. To pathologize the experience of grief is a work against nature.

The grieving process may not have an endpoint, a goal line, or state of completion in which we come to some final resolution, where we “finish” and land in some untouchable place, free from falling apart and breaking into pieces yet again.

While some forms of spirituality and healing have this fantasied end state as a targeted objective, the heart is endless and grief may be a companion for the duration of a life, a fellow traveler into the depths, revealing light that the non-grieving state could never contain.

Grief is not so much a process as it is a non-linear, unfolding partner of revelation. It moves not by way of straight line, but by that of circle and spiral.

Art by Hans Braxmeier

07/19/2018

This is such an important message that we need to be reminded of regularly! 🙏 to Brene Brown.

07/11/2018

Keep this handy. Watch (dose) as often as possible to help regulate your central nervous system. Double dose after exposure to any news about 45.

05/09/2018

Always need this reminder💗

Please Share :)