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Deeply OK.
Our therapeutic cornerstone, Deeply OK, is HOME’s celebration of safety, presence, and groundedness. It recognizes that for families to heal and flourish, there must be a lived sense of emotional and relational stability. Many of our families arrive on HOME’s metaphorical doorstep because, despite many resources and privileges, they feel untethered and are not sure how to find their footing. Despite financial and professional security, there is relational insecurity. Despite grand experiences, there is a fear of not being good enough.
Therefore, the very first thing we invite people into is a safe container. As much as humans crave safety, we can, oddly enough, run from it when it is offered. Chaos and disconnection, isolation and pain feel more familiar, especially in families where there has been such a profound emphasis on achievement and performance, the toxic kind that closes the door on emotional vulnerability and relational truth.
The beauty of Deeply OK is that it is just offered, over and over, tirelessly, like a teapot that is always ready to pour out warmth and comfort when a person is finally ready, despite their relentless rebuffs and RSVPing “no” to healing and change.
When I think of Deeply OK, I think of our golden retriever, Daisy. Wherever she is, she is. She has big feelings and does not hesitate to wag her way through them. Her anxiety, when it thunders, is unapologetic. Her joy when one of her people walks through the door – even if they have only been gone for 2 minutes – is over the top. When she sees the suitcase emerge, she retreats to her safe space and grieves. She is completely connected to her embodied feelings. Everywhere she goes, she spreads joy. When she senses sadness or tears in someone else, she is immediately present and keeps the vigil. She flows through her days.
When I think of Deeply OK, I think of our clients here at HOME learning to move into a deeper sense of regulation, experimenting with practices that link the body, heart, spirit, and mind. Practices like mindfulness, yoga, breathwork, and soundbath. Practices like speaking from the heart, vulnerable and real, instead of regurgitating a thought heard on a podcast, or finding ways to fortify defenses.
When I think of Deeply OK, I think of:
- A 35-year-old man telling his mother he is looking forward to the future they will create together, as they also explore, with compassion, the hurtful mistakes of the past.
- A father telling me the family vacation they just returned from was the best in years because it was filled with grace and ease, letting people be who they are.
- A father and son meditating together and then discussing ways to repair emotional connections as a result of work being a historically all-consuming priority.
- A mother infusing her day with mindfulness practices so she can show up less reactive, more curious.
- A sibling who reached out to another sibling to let her know he wanted more frequent communication on a deeper level.
With Deeply OK comes a befriending. When we befriend, we attend to our pain, mistakes, needs, and joys. When we befriend what is going on within us, we can more easily be present to others. When we attend to our inner life, we move out of suffering, fraught with resentment and bitterness, into pain, which is simply living with the emotional experience. Once we befriend the experience and live with it, it is felt …it moves … and then we can move towards integration and safety.
Or as Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic and poet, wrote, “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
When we befriend our inner landscape with all of its valleys and peaks, a sense of purpose and renewal is unlocked. We feel more equipped to be courageous in our relationships because we are learning what it feels like to be aligned with our whole selves. With this comes an awakening that allows our nervous systems to exhale and settle into a relational and physical sense of well-being. Self-awareness and trust beget a sense of safety, which enhances groundedness; we feel Deeply OK despite external circumstances.
Deeply OK is also a practice and a remembering of our natural way of being. Underneath the emotional currents, sometimes torrents, there is a part of us, some call it awareness, that is undisturbed – simply Deeply OK with whatever life throws at us. The more we can hold the tension of feeling deeply and learning from our emotional signals, while also remembering that this too will pass and that fundamentally “I am OK”, the greater capacity we have to live fully. All storms eventually subside, offering lessons for integration, and the practice of Deeply OK offers a path of less suffering and more resilience and peace along the way.
Deeply OK is contagious. Research shows we can calm each other in a practice of co-regulation. The more regulated and grounded I am, the more regulated and grounded others are in my presence. One person’s calming breath and affect can create the same in others. When my son was born many moons ago, I would hold him, as a newborn, inviting him to feel my breath, mirror my inhales and exhales, breathe in my contentment, and feel the safety.
As a new mother, I became an apprentice to the power of Deeply OK. I learned how my emotions were picked up on and mirrored. I felt disturbed by the power of my unprocessed stress or frustration, seeing quickly how my baby reflected my feeling state. As he moved into childhood, I learned even more powerfully how he was a sponge – and there were so many things I did not want him absorbing from me. So I began to get up at O-dark-early, two hours before he woke, to settle into a meditation and prayer ritual – still in place twenty-three years later – so I could be an empathetic witness to myself.
The more I approached myself with empathy, the less my son had to carry my unregulated stress or unprocessed wounds. God knows I could not heal myself fast enough, so he most certainly has had to carry more than his fair share of my pain.
However, the more steadily I commit to an unwavering practice of daily reflection and repair, the more I am (and he is) Deeply OK.