by Mark Walsh
• Learn how to be alone. You can’t be with anyone else, let alone help anyone else until you can do this.
• Don’t worry about what you’re doing with your life until your late twenties. Up until then, just get drunk with interesting people, do fun jobs, pursue your hobbies fully, live abroad and learn another language (don’t just “travel”), sleep around if so inclined, take some drugs (but don’t let them take you), climb mountains, take risks. After thirty, start worrying about your health and learn to make money from what’s meaningful to you.
• Don’t apologise unless you really mean it. Speak the truth, no matter if your voice shakes. By speaking the truth, you will make and lose the right friends. Spend time in silence. Give thanks.
• With a few exceptions that only you choose, know that other people’s opinions of you are not any of your concern.
• Love your mum and know that if you’re older than 12, she can’t help you be a man. She may try and that’s noble, and she’s likely doing the very best she can and should be honoured of that, but part of her wants you to remain a little boy. She may well hate the fact that she can’t help you to be what she is not, and that doesn’t matter. Don’t try and replace her with the first girl/boy you meet. No partner can give your life meaning.
• Come to terms with your dad, even if he’s an arsehole. He’s a part of you, like it or not.
• Do not try and understand women. But do listen deeply to them. Nothing will teach you more about yourself. And sometimes, ignore everything they say (including their responses to this piece), but never what they do. Pay attention to what women are really attracted to (again, not what they say they are). It’s your job to try, and her job to choose. Don’t feel bad for the former and respect the latter impeccably. Use poetry, humour and condoms. Always pay, if she sincerely offers to pay; don’t pay if she doesn’t offer to.
• A gentleman always offers to go down first. If you’re gay, this all still applies. Being gay does not make you any less of a man.
• Be loyal to your friends; let go of those who do not keep this same rule. The quality of your life will be partly defined by the quality of your boundaries on bullshit.
• Devote yourself to the work and those that you love. Be useful. All the rest is babble. Tend to one’s own garden; that’s the proper area of concern. Seek the meaningful life; happiness and success will very likely follow.
• Know that all advice is bullshit.
• Learn all this the hard way.
15 TIPS FOR TEENAGE GIRLS AND YOUNG WOMEN
– from my colleague Jane Dancey who does embodied work with this group
• Know that you are enough just as you are. If you’re feeling the need to be more or less than you are, that’s highlighting an imbalance in the situation or relationship. If this is a recurring theme find someone to talk this through – someone wise and clued-up or a therapist.
• Make friends with your body, all of it. Notice the parts of yourself that you find unacceptable and explore this gently with self-compassion. Get professional help if it feels too much to do on your own.
• Find a mentor, or two. Wise older women who have your back and give you advice and guidance when you need it. Don’t be afraid of asking, us older women find it an honour to help our younger sisters. Pick mentors wisely of course, age isn’t enough to confer wisdom.
• Cultivate great friendships with your fellow sisters, based on mutual admiration, support, love and fun. Drop the old paradigm of jealousy and competitiveness amongst fellow women; its disempowering.
• Stay active, move your body in ways that delight you. This will be so useful on many levels. Movement practices and exercise keep the body and mind healthy. Don’t be afraid to try something new and different to what you usually do. It helps keep things fresh.
• Cultivate and trust your intuition and gut reaction. Movement and meditation practices will help with this.
• Get out in nature. It’s one of the most effective ways of looking after your mental health. Get your feet on the grass!
• Take responsibility for your actions, own your misendeavours and celebrate your achievements.
• Embrace your menstrual blood and chart your cycle; it’s one of the best ways to look after your physical, emotional and mental health. It’s your own inner barometer of what’s going on for you and it’s the gateway to your power and creativity. Find your local “red tent” to get support and knowledge on this or check out the Red School (https://redschool.net/) online.
• Learn about the workings of your female sexual organs; there are some great books out there! Don’t be afraid to learn about sex and intimacy; it’s not knowledge that we are born with and learning about it is empowering.
• Part of that knowledge is that it can take female genitalia up to 40 minutes to get aroused. Yes 40 minutes! So it’s really ok to take your time.
• Get comfortable in touching yourself before others touch you. Find out what you like by yourself first, so that you can communicate this to your lover; don’t rely on telepathy!
• Explore consent. Notice how your body says yes or no. Find your strong yes and your strong no and get comfortable with using them when you want or need to in all situations. Know that it’s ALWAYS your right to say no and your privilege to say yes.
• Spend time with yourself, and if you find this difficult go gently with it. Start a meditation practice, take up journaling, knitting or other lone-time pursuits. This is part of self-discovery and is essential to mental wellbeing and maintaining good relationships with others.
• Get creative. Draw, paint, sew, bake cakes, garden…Being creative is not about producing masterpieces. Just enjoy the process of it rather than being attached to the outcome.
TRAUMA HEALING
The body is integral to trauma healing. In fact, it’s been the failure of traditional talking therapies to address trauma, that has brought the body back to therapy generally in recent years. Coming from an alcoholic household and working in various areas of conflict, I developed a very personal interest in this subject. First to help myself and then to educate others. I have now worked with the militaries of various countries and numerous major aid agencies, and studied a number of somatic modalities related to trauma.
This short piece is intended for the untrained reader, so professionals in the field may find it simplistic.
Trauma symptoms
Trauma symptoms can be very diverse but, concisely put, overwhelming experience can lead to:
• Being stuck in the psychological fight, flight, freeze or fold response (or some combination of FFFF). We are all familiar with this from threatening experiences or just daily life stress, but when stress is overwhelming, we can get stuck in this mode for a short while (often trauma responses fade in a few weeks) or an extended period of years.
• Being “fired up” from trauma, sometimes known as hyper-arousal, can lead to problems with sleep, concentration, anger and anxiety.
• Numbing, dissociation and disembodiment.
• Poor boundaries and other communication issues. We do not relate well when in this state.
• Intimacy and sexual issues. Trauma is toxic to close connection.
• Psychosomatic health issues: these can be very wide ranging but digestive, skin and breathing issues are all common. Chronic tension or “armouring” is also very common in the body.
• Secondary coping mechanisms, such as addictions, where people try to regulate themselves through drugs or alcohol, for example.
This list is far from exhaustive.
Trauma treatment
So what to do? Perhaps a good way into the large and delicate subject of treatment may be just to state the things that I’ve found useful for my own trauma healing, in no particular order. Different things work for different people, and while I’ve done a fair bit of research into the topic, I have a clear embodiment bias. That being said, a wide spectrum of approaches is usually hel
pful to heal the wide bio-psycho-social-spiritual nature of trauma.
Here’s what’s worked for me:
• David Berceli’s Trauma Releasing Exercises: empowering as you can do them yourself anywhere.
• Long-term relational therapy. We heal in relationships and traditional therapy can be part of the picture.
• Bodywork: most recently Craniosacral therapy and The Rosen Method.
• Dancing 5 Rhythms regularly.
• CBD oil and good “sleep hygiene” for more restful nights.
• The work of Peter Levine and his students, like Betsy Polatin and Irene Lyon (both have other influences). I also hear good things about NARM, which is a development of Levine’s work.
• Dogs.
• Paul Linden’s Being-In-Movement work.
• The love of a good woman…and some bad ones ;-) Intimacy can heal.
• Nature generally. Forests and bodies of water especially.
• Trauma sensitive yoga for building body awareness and self-
• regulation.
• Martial arts done intelligently: see the work of Paul Linden.
• Trauma sensitive meditation: see David Treleaven’s book.
• Helping others with trauma, but get the timing right if you’re thinking of this. Don’t just bring your issues to others!
• Twelve-Step Program for related addictions.
• Creative writing, others may prefer drawing, painting or other creative outlets.
• EMDR: especially good for single traumatic instances.
• Bad jokes. Really, humour helps.
The last thing I’d like to say on trauma for now is just a message of hope. If you have issues around it, while you may well not have access to all the things that have helped me, there is much you can do that really makes a difference. There are even cheap workbooks and apps that can be really useful, available online. It’s work but well worth it, trust me.
There’s more on trauma for facilitators in the next section.
THE BODY OF RECOVERY
– Vinnitsa, Ukraine
I’m 36. The look in the soldiers’ eyes changes, as I give my talk. My fiancée Daria has asked me to come in and chat about trauma to some men she knows, who were drafted to the war in the east of Ukraine and who have come home worse for wear. I have an hour and I share what I know. Gradually, cynicism and mistrust fade, as I tell stories from Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, the Middle East, Brazil, Ethiopia and West Africa. Eyes go from empty pits, to angry, to sad, to hopeful. I pepper in lessons about trauma and PTSD that may be helpful. Afterwards, a female psychologist army officer called “Momma Tornado” hugs me goodbye and all the men shake my hand firmly. One tells me in broken English how he didn’t know why he couldn’t make love to his wife, or why he hits his kids since he came back home. He is determined to get help now. It’s clear he’s on a good path.
I met Daria while teaching therapists working in the war here. It was a bit of a set-up, actually. The war crashed the Ukrainian economy and my psychologist host wanted me to keep coming here, despite having very little money to pay me, so she had invited several attractive single women to be my interpreters in the hope I’d get involved with one of them and come back for free. Daria was used to interpreting for her dad’s importing business and had also studied a lot of dance therapy. So, she took the job, none the wiser either, despite thinking it was a little strange. We were locked in a train together with nothing to do but to get to know each other for 12 hours on the way there…and bodies take their course. She reminds me of some weird mysterious cat-like creature.
After the talk for the soldiers, Daria and I married two days later, in her hometown, in a glitzy kitsch hotel. I woke up that morning to the sound of a small gunfight outside between some local gangsters and police. Daria and I were denied a visa for a UK wedding, but my father made it to our hastily-arranged Ukrainian alternative, and despite being very unwell, he partied hard with my Scottish uncle and the locals. Again, no shared language but love. Clare, the best friend of my first love Sally, was there too, and was clearly happy to see me happy. There were some weird Ukrainian rituals like me having to “abduct” Daria from her house, and to go under Daria’s dress and get her garter belt with my teeth, at the party. Fun and games. After a honeymoon in Georgia together, where I slipped in a bathhouse and split my head open, I flew back to the UK. Daria couldn’t join me which was horrible. There’s power in ritual and to go against it is a crime. I was reminded of the couple from North and South Cyprus at the time. On the way home, my plane narrowly avoided crashing as there was another plane on the landing runway.
EMBODIED PEACEBUILDING
These are the notes I used for a job working with ex-combatants in Belfast. Many of those present had been in The Maze prison before the Good Friday agreement or were community leaders in Belfast. This job was a career highlight, as I’m from an Irish family with a history of people on both “sides”. The job was shortly after my father’s death and took place at a venue that used to be a British military barracks and housed my uncle as a soldier in the 80s.
Much is directly from my main mentor Paul Linden, who pretty much invented the field of embodied peacebuilding. This work is sorely needed and still horrifically obscure, so please spread the word.
“Conflict is generally experienced as threatening in some degree, and the body’s reflex distress response to threats or challenges is contraction or collapse of breathing, posture, attention and movement – fight-flight-freeze-fold (FFFF). In situations of conflict, these powerful physical response patterns undermine people’s ability to think rationally, interact empathically and act peacefully. They narrow people’s choices to oppositional ways of behaving. Through balancing and opening breathing, muscle use, posture, attention and movement, people can create a state of expansiveness, calm alertness and compassionate power. These body skills enable people to stay peaceful during conflicts, which provides a foundation for resolving conflicts in harmonious and productive ways.”
– Paul Linden (taken from his book
Embodied Peacemaking book)
The scope of the body
As the body is involved in how we think, what we feel, how we perceive and how we relate, it is vital to peacebuilding. Embodied intelligence and peacebuilding can be divided into four related skill sets. Embodied peacebuilding can be done just “on” oneself or with a cooperative partner/group.
Body awareness
This is the foundation of embodied peacebuilding and requires practice, as we live in a world where trauma and technology-induced dissociation is common. Awareness is needed of both short-term state (e.g. emotions) and long-term disposition (trait).
Self-management
Centring is a way to moderate the fight-flight-freeze-fold (FFFF29) response, as this response makes constructive dialogue near impossible. There are many techniques, some focusing more on relaxation, expansiveness, posture or movement…All require awareness. The ABCC technique is one example:
• Aware: be mindful of the present moment, using the five senses and especially feel the body, notice contact with the ground (through a chair and/or the feet) and your breath.
• Balance: in posture and attention. Aim for an expansive quality.
• Core Relaxed: relax your eyes, mouth, throat, stomach and lower abdominals. Breathe deeply into your belly.
• Connect: look at or imagine others who care about you.
Embodied social awareness
We listen with our whole bodies. Various exercises can promote this. A felt empathic response to others is necessary for constructive dialogue and peacebuilding.
Embodied Leadership
The foundations for this are self-awareness, self-regulation and empathy. Influence happens through the emotions and the body, as much as words. Communication is mostly non-verbal.
Psychoeducation
Stress is what happens when we perceive that the demands we face outweigh our ability
to cope. It is experienced bodily. Trauma is what happens when we are exposed to something that we find deeply threatening or when we witness something horrific; it can be seen as FFFF getting “stuck”. Both stress and trauma are “bio-psycho-social” and many of the reactions overlap. Resilience is our ability to “bounce back”, manage stress and avoid trauma.
Trauma symptoms
These include avoidance (physical, psychological or with chemicals), hyper-arousal (e.g. anger, anxiety, sleep disturbance) and reliving (e.g. flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, nightmares). Trauma can also be linked to depression, loss of meaning, repetition compulsion (seeking danger), memory and learning problems, shame, guilt, psychosomatic illness, sexual dysfunction and relationship problems related to trust, intimacy and control. These are all embodied.
Uses for embodiment as a peacebuilder
1. Developing your own embodiment through:
• Long-term awareness practices
• Healing your own trauma and working with your own “shadow”
• Short-term state management, which will impact others around you
2. Methods to use with clients/participants:
• Body awareness raising (e.g. of emotions and disposition)
• Techniques for self-regulation (e.g. centring)
• Embodied coordination exercises (explicit or implicit – like singing, group movement, breath syncing, etc.)
• Embodied listening exercises
• Embodied shadow-work (e.g. moving like “them”)
• Embodied yoga postures (e.g. letting go, yes and no, making a stand …)
• Setting up embodied “simulators” for insight (e.g. leader-
• follower exercises. Some examples are available on my YouTube channel (search “Mark Walsh leader follower”)
• Trauma releasing exercises (EMDR, EFT, TRE …)
A final note
Be aware of the fundamental error: the separation of power and love as opposites. This is the mistake of thinking that love is weak, or that true power can be hateful.