The Power of Feeling Alive Together
I don’t think I’m wrong when I say, many of us have started relating to joy as a luxury instead of a very basic need. I’m a pretty joyful person, but as I got older with more responsibility, I normalized the shit out of stress, isolation and survival mode. This is a story about what it took to break out of that pattern, and the lesson that we can’t really do it alone.
Lauren invited me every year she held a retreat in Costa Rica, saying I could join in the yoga classes and have a (gorgeous) place to stay if I could get myself there. I accepted zero times due to aforementioned normalized insanity. It wasn’t until she hired me to go and photograph her Santa Teresa house, and since it fell into the work category, that I finally allowed myself to go.
It would be just the three of us girls on that trip, the dates of which fell right in the middle of a crossroads-moment I was having personally. Plus, I hadn’t traveled internationally in a decade, my Spanish is terrible and I get anxious at airports so my spirits were dampened by uncertainty. I just focused on getting the content we needed to start the listing for Airbnb, still in a contracted state.
Lauren talks about disruption a lot. The way something (thought, action, practice) can jostle you out of frozenness and plug you back into living. This is what the tiny 4-person jumper plane did for me. Crawling in, squished with my friends, I felt the tingling sensation that I was on an adventure creep into my awareness.. the plane took off and flew us over the peninsula and the view blew my mind. I looked over, saw those girls looking back at me and felt like I wasn’t in this alone. I softened.
When was the last time you went on a international friend’s trip? I was tricked into this one with the lure of having work to do, which I did, and we did it… but even though the friends were the models, we all had our personal stories along for the ride, and things came up. One by one, our situations, crisis, personal breaking points and heartbreaks came up for air as we walked miles all around, to cafe’s, beaches, classes. We cried tears into the ocean and had personal meltdowns in San Jose taxi cabs. We laughed and danced and had dinner with the locals. Here we were with the full range of feelings, and the support of others offering safety expressing them.
The power of feeling alive together is that we are a co-regulating species, which means our nervous systems respond to each other and we find regulation with others. When we share core-memory experiences together, ones including awe, wonder, a sense of adventure and fun, we become healthier individuals. Our systems have a banked history, proving to ourselves that we indeed have the capacity for joy, and that we can and should do big things, together.
