Nearly every parent I know feels overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with the juggle of it all. Working in full-time roles, parenting to the best of their capability and managing the stress and pressure of the current economy.  Nearly everyone I know is living in an over or under-responsive nervous system, due to the ‘always on’ mentality of our times. 
​
We are caught up in the juggle of being parents, bringing kids to school and extracurricular activities, managing the home, long working hours, increased mobility and economic pressures. Parents often take on multiple roles within the family and social structure from grandparent to aunt or sibling.  This is the status quo, and once we start to look at broader conditions such as aging elders and sick family members, financial, social and economic pressures, and family behaviours - the picture becomes even more complex.

The proverb “it takes a village”, speaks to the interconnectedness of all life, how much we need each other and be in community, supporting the development of our kids and the wellbeing of each other. One important role of families is to provide love, guidance, care and support for their members. The building of secure attachments and foundations in children starts with supporting the child’s prime carers, so they can be with their children and offer them the support they need. Even though parents may be a child's primary caregivers, a family does not exist in a vacuum. Social connectedness has been defined as those close bonds we experience with others including, for example, a sense of belonging and feeling cared for.  From my work in Somatics coaching and psychotherapy, this is so essential to our development - embodying safety, belonging and dignity as core human inherent needs and being with the interconnectedness of the village.   To be as present as possible with each other and our kids, to love the micro-moments and to enjoy our children as they morph and grow into adulthood.  

Western way of living does not support the village approach to child-rearing, self-care or deep self-love and care. Nor does it actively promote health over wealth. Very few parents I know prioritise self-care or ‘me’ time. Very few parents I know think about life outside of the juggling act and keeping their heads above water. Most of us are exhausted.  This can be coupled with the guilt of not being able to think and be with what is at stake in our current times, the social and climate changes we are facing, what we are losing and the longing to connect to something bigger outside of the day-to-day juggle.   That is a lot of contradiction and
​conflict to sit with.    

Our ways of living and being will not change from the top down our government is not saving us anytime soon. To build out more sustainable and life-affirming practices, we must continue connecting and broadening our village, while making time to be with ourselves and prioritise self-care.
​
Here are some self-care and village principles I share;  

• You deserve self-care and to deeply love yourself. Know you are enough. Know that you can spend time in self-care practice and that precious time is an opportunity to go inward and be with what you are experiencing whether it feels good or not
• Feel into the importance of presence, to be in this very moment, not in the past or the future, only in the now.  The practices I use and teach include slow nasal breathing and somatic centring. All can be used at any time in the day to come back to the present moment
• Become familiar with what pressures cause you to react over-respond. We are always practising something, and this includes how we defend ourselves, armour ourselves and be in stressful situations. Becoming familiar with your shaping and your response enables change.  This comes via awareness and noticing what is happening inside of you when you feel under pressure
•  Feel into the greater harmony of nature. We can consciously exchange and let go of our stresses while in the presence of nature and the cosmos. Creating a practice where you can spend time with plants, animals, trees and stars. It will nourish you
•  Connect with good people and bring them into your village. Don’t be afraid to ask for help in your trusted network. Don’t waste precious energy on people who are not committed to the greater good of your village and your kids. 
  
  

As an expatriate and solo parent, I made great friends in the community,  and they are our lifeblood. We work together on trust, building our kids up and letting each other rest.  I made inner work a priority. I did not want stress to be my life's definer and story.  I worked through and continue to work through transforming behaviours that are reactive over being responsive by instilling new practices and deepening my connection with people I am aligned with. 

At times, I leave the dishes in the sink and choose to hang out with my son instead. Sometimes I need to do absolutely nothing and if I get the chance, I prioritise rest.  This is juggling life and prioritising connection over perfection.  If anyone or any parent would like to connect and talk more about the importance of finding ourselves and our village among the juggling and the struggle, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected].

As part of a series of workshops around being in right relationship, one of the most valued discussions was the concept of mutual connection, the act of feeling deeply and staying connected to oneself and others.  Mutual connection allows us to hold the cares, concerns and needs of others and our own simultaneously. 

While the idea of mutual connection appears easy, it is complex.  Let’s begin with the self.  We first get to know the relationship we have with ourselves, from the inside out. There is a voice inside of all of us that is constant chatter and becomes incredibly active when there is an internal build-up of fearful or desire-based energy. The voices are often based on your experience of the world and its desire to problem solve. Are you able to witness the chatter and how many conversations repeat? Micheal Singer’s The Untethered Soul changed my relationship with my inner dialogue and reminded me I was not the voice of my mind, I am the one who hears it.  Next, our body’s stories. The body is a tapestry of stories, energy and emotions.  Our nervous system is always tracking for safety. Our resilence is inherent. We carry deep defensive patterns in the body. Those deep defensive patterns include ignoring our boundaries or we can deny feeling and experiencing. In this case, our life force energy is unevenly distributed in the body and can lead to disconnect from the heart. Being connected to the body is building awareness and listening to the language of sensation - temperature, pressure and movement. 

If the mind and body are cut off from each other, there is a lack of overall awareness as to what we are experiencing, we are unable to feel deeply and be present. We often try to fix the discomfort we feel inside by reacting outwards or inwards.  Staying in the defence strategy means we never get to know ourselves truly.  
 
To be in mutuality with the self, we must be attentive to what is happening within ourselves and capable of extending love to ourselves. This is a practice, this is presence. 

Mutual connection with others is being able to feel ourselves (sensations, boundaries, emotions, commitments) while feeling and being curious about another experience at the same time.  Within relationships, can you stay present with your thoughts, feelings and sensations while being present with another? How do you deeply listen to what is happening inside of you and outside at the same time?  Many of us default in connection by leaving our own boundaries, values and commitments, trauma can train us to do this. Other times we can be responsive to other people’s needs and ignore our own where our boundaries are directed inwards, rather than outwards.
This can result in a power-over situation where another person can dominate the space.  We can say yes, when our body is screaming no – and vice versa.  Because mutual connection is not a practice most of us grew up with, we are unable to sense from a young age mutuality or not or even know ourselves well enough to trust our instincts. Can you consent – say yes, no or maybe based on your own needs while dignifying the other person’s needs, commitment and boundary as well?  Can you accept loving kindness and care, if directed towards you? 
 
Holding mutual connection in a collective is tricky, due to competing hierarchies, there are more needs, boundaries, cares and contradictions to attend to, while attending to ourselves. It is easy for a group to forget their purpose or only focus on their own needs none of which are sustainable. An aware/ embodied facilitator can encourage a container of mutual connection by reminding the group of their commitments, encouraging holding space for all participants and practices of boundaries and centred accountability all while feeling into their own back at the same time. A faciliator can also take care of themselves by moving their attention back and forth between their own cares and the groups. 

​Lastly, what needs to change in our economy to support connection and interdependence? This is a huge question, imagining if all of our relationships were built on mutual connection including those with nature, what would need to change?  Our economies have us practice things that encourage the opposite of mutual
connection. This is a topic I will expand on next. 

​So what are the things we can do? Connect with the self - body and mind.

​Practice mutual connection with others, observe yourself under pressure and where you defend or neglect your needs.

Be in community, help hold and shape communities. 

​Practice being in a gift economy.  

​These are the small things, I am sure there is so much more we can do together.  
 
 

We tend to default to our mostly hidden survivial strategies while under pressure. People feel most under pressure when there is a perceived threat to our inherent needs of safety, belonging and dignity**. Trauma and oppression can often leave us disconnected from our longings and who we are at heart.  We can be living day to day in a state of functioning hyperarousal, and not be aware of it.  Trauma is stored in the body and revealed in relationship. 

 One way in which we default in connection is by leaving our own boundaries, commitments and needs behind to get around relationships with others. Another is being reactive and over-responsive since we cannot contain the energy and spill out.  Another response to connection is to numb and not relate to others.  We also can look for distance, hide and react to the overwhelming feelings in our bodies. We can also be overly agreeable and shrink in hierarchy.  Whatever we collect over the years, filters our view of the current moment and our ability to be present and hold complexity, contradiction and joy. The view of the current moment, the story, the perception, form of mind, in my experience can shift and change through inner work and a desire to heal systemically for all life. Personal and systemic transformation are inseparable. They co-serve and support each other in healing. 
​
I have heard the expression ‘Being in Right Relationship’ over the last few years in several different contexts -spiritual, politised somatics, therapeutic and indigenous teachings. It has taken several years for me to make sense of and feel into. Firstly, it does not mean there is something we need to get ‘right’ or a destination we must reach, as it’s an impossible reach, there is never anything to get right.   
​
All of us are constantly in relationship.  Relationship is core to everything. We relate to our parents, kids, friends, peers, peoples. Even when we’re alone, we’re in relationship to ourselves (mostly mind chatter), to other beings, to things, to nature to spirit, the cosmos, and depending on our level of awareness, those relationships can bring wonder or heighten disconnect from our real self. Practising right relationship is at heart aligning ourselves with ourselves, with others, and with the world in such a way that these relationships will both create and reflect belonging, connection and care.  Being in right relationship is also interdependence. We need interdependence. Interdependence with people, but also interdependence with plants, with animals, with the atmosphere, with people who we don't know, with water, with land, with spirit. This is in our DNA, we are nature.  We have over 400 billion years of evolutionary wisdom at our backs. This kind of wisdom is beyond what our cognitive minds can handle alone, it is a felt sense. We heal and transform through the soma, not in isolated body parts.

It is restoring a balance of reciprocity, to give and receive with all life and accepting of what is, so we can heal and transform.  An opportunity to come into right relationship is a change and action towards accountability on the part of the person, people or state systems that have or continue to harm. 

What do you need to keep cultivating right relationship? To be in a more and more natural state, be more and more accessible or to bring in your social change work with you? 

At a personal level, I believe cultivating right relationship is critical for mental health and wellbeing. I started by questioning what it means to feel safe in my own skin and reconnecting my core needs of safety, belonging and self-worth. I respectfully accepted my survival strategies were no longer serving me. This came through my relationships with my mentors, somatic work, cultivating presence and practice of mutual connection. I connected with my community and family in deeper ways. This was experienced through a felt reality over cognitive sense-making. I made space for joy and doing so remembered my connections to land and spirit. By Spirit I am referring to nature, the vastness of the cosmos, the unknown, the mystery.  Through this work, I began to remember belonging, to be present with self and others, make space to handle the good and the bad, see the world for where it is at and our social challenges; The impacts of a capitalist society. The impacts of colonisation. The impacts of climate changing.  The impacts of work over health, genocides and wars, system collapse. Staying in the complexity of it all, I believe we need to be as connected to ourselves, each other, the planet and spirit as much as we can stand.  I bring this thinking into the world via the intersection of Somatics, Design and Transformation. 

​"The concept of “right relationship” is central to many indigenous cultures and is a way of talking about living in a sustainable, loving way with all living beings. But what does “right relationship” mean, exactly, and how do we cultivate it?"   Jai Medina,  The Balanzu Way School of Shamnic Arts. 

My role as a facilitator, I know how important it is to self-regulate, to be present and open. I create conditions that can promote a well-intended container by equal distribution and awareness of the dominant culture, identities, and hierarchy.  Observe body language and non-verbals during collective interactions, to note who feels safe and who may not. I support generative conflict and holding of contradiction. I recognise my role is to hold space over being the expert. We are here to connect, to feel, to relate, not be right, an expert or to tick boxes of accomplishment. If I help shape a right relationship container, I am doing good. 

In community, I understand a successful and sustainable community relies on the co-creation of that community by many people, ideally with many different backgrounds, lived experiences, age, traditions, faiths, intimate relationships, neurodivergence and cultures. A dominant culture will not reflect the identity of the community. We also have forgotten many of our traditions in community. How do we deepen our connection to each other and land? How do we remember ancient traditions that enriched our connections to each other? How do we support each other in this busy and anxious world? 

In land and spirit, I am in deep reverence. Nature wants to be seen. I take care of my garden, my plants. I source where my water comes from. I take time to be in and with trees, life, birds. I join communities of change. I spend time understanding the land, indigenous spirits, rites of passage, traditions, cultures, the animate. Where does your water come from? What garden do you care for? 

My role as a designer, I question the perspectives of customer centricity, growth and visions of the future. Does the customer include marginalised communities and those customers who are not able to afford premiums or even those who are not buying, yet still impacted? What about the planet as a stakeholder? Our water, our oxygen? There are different dimensions to right relationship when we strip back customer centricity. 
 Exploring what it means to be in right relationship with ourselves, each other, the planet, the cosmos.
What does being in relationship mean to you and what you create?  

*I acknowledge my apprenticeship in this work, its vastness as a topic. I am researching indigenous ways of right relations and harmony with all life and ways to integrate to everyday life. If anyone else is, I would love to hear from you and build shared knowledge in this space. 

**Thanks to the Strozzi Institute, Embodient Institute, Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer

I have been fortunate enough to study somatics/embodiment with the greats - Staci Haines, Richard Strozzi Heckler, Andrea Alexander and Amber Hawken. I am still under their care as an apprentice. This experience is a lifelong journey of deep discovery into the wisdom of not just our mind-body connection, but how we connect deeply beyond words, we have so much more reach than within the boundaries of our skin. The work also regenerated my deep connection to land & spirit, connecting to the vastness and mystery of something so much bigger than us. Despite how magnificent we may be, we are pretty tiny standing in the wisdom of the cosmos and the arms of Mother Nature.

Soma is a Greek word for wholeness. We are mind/body/spirit/rational social beings. Our embodiment, our ‘shape’ is developed in interaction with our life experiences and our environments.   Our stories, behaviours, traumas, belief patterns and those of our ancestors are stored in our somas. Our nervous system is always tracking for safety and connection way ahead of our cognitive thinking. 

Our environment, culture, social norms and organisations shape us whether we serve to acknowledge it or not.  Most of our world views are shaped by our privilege, consciously and unconsciously whether we like it or not. 
Our ways of living today have mostly scrubbed out our ancestors’ traditions and cultures, rites of passage and connection to self and have been replaced with survival strategies, objectivation of the body and continuous growth over an equitable society. While this comes across as well - devastating, not all is lost. This is not who we are, at heart. We have embodied practices over time via social norms and historical forces and together, we can undo them.

The relationship with customers is transitioning from ‘participant’ or ‘end user’ towards building  continuous connection, where we are in deep respect to those who courageously step into a design space and co-create with us. Sharing, their time, experiences, heartaches, and contributions is humbling, it’s a journey together. 

To be in gratitude, it is important to be aware of how we are shaped by economic, political and historical forces, and how our shaping may be different to those we are designing with and for. 

I came across a model ‘sites of shaping/sites of change’ via Staci Haines/ Generative Somatics.  It is originally based on a public health model to stop the spread of HIV Aids and Generative5, to understand the multiple layers of child sex abuse. This framework helps us understand ourselves and who we may be designing for in the broader social contexts that shape them. It also helps us understand what we may take for granted or be completely blinded to because of our privilege. 
​
Outside of understand our shaping, it is a strategic transformation tool.  As each site grows bigger, it is harder to create change. We need more people, change makers, organisers, designers and policymakers.
 























I first used this model to understand my shaping, then as a coaching tool and experimentally as a design tool. From my experience, the tool can support work across different cultures, genders and other social group memberships with great humility and deeper understanding. It can faciliate a deep sense of analysis of ourselves and our biases and potentialy opens new customer sub-segments where we can offer the right services to the right people within the right context because we have a greater understanding of their shaping and holistic needs. A social context can help us understand what needs changing. 

How the model works is at each level, is we start to question the ways by which we have been shaped by each of these sites. Each site incorporates social norms.

Starting with the individual, what constitution were you born with? Different cultures interrupt this differently. Some say it is all genetics. Others say it depends on the safety of the mother and the nature of the community. Some say it is a result of reincarnation. We could start by asking ourselves, what did I come into this world with? 

Moving out to family, these are the people we are part of or form close bonds with in our youth and family lives.  How were you shaped by your family of origin? What gender norms played out? What did you learn about safety, belonging and dignity?  How were the social norms of that time, taught to you through family? 

Popping out to community. This can be many things such as the region or place you grew up and live as well as connected to what you practice (yoga, gardening, martial arts), racial or cultural identity (Australian Indigenous, Jewish, Arab, Irish) and sexual orientation (queer, trans, LGBT) Most of us have several communities, what collective shape did your first communities embody (working or middle  class, regional or city)? What about transition to adulthood away from your family of origin? Most of us have a number of communities by which we are shaped by. 

Moving out to Institutions. Institutions are larger systems that impact many people and communities. This includes Universities, Financial institutions, Superannuation, Private Education, The Media, Corporations, Agribusiness, Prisons, Mining, Tech.  Some of our institutions are based with a power over (as opposed to power with) paradigm, we are shaped by a Capitalist society, whether we like it not.  I don't like fossil fuels but it still delivers food to my local grocery store. Consider two institutions that have shaped you. How have they in anyway shaped your ideas and actions? What parts are good and what may cultivate oppression? Systemically, what connections do you see across institutions? 

Social norms and Historical forces. Social norms are the definitions of reality we are contextually placed in. What/who is considered the ‘norm’, ok or not ok?  What are the collective stories we live in? Historical forces are the trends of history that shape us and continue to shape us even though we think they are of the past and of no relevance. The impacts of colonisation continues today. What did you learn as normal and not normal? What relationship to money and the economy, nature and landscape did you learn? 

And finally, Spirit/Nature. These forces are beyond human. The landscape in which we grew up in (city or country, vast or constricted).   How are we in relationship to land/spirit? Wilderness and nature rate as one of the key resilience factors for humans. Nature is always shaping us yet we mine for finite resources, pollute our oceans and continue to exploit our natural resources.

As a result of this work, I now have an incredible appreciation and humility for indigenous cultures’ leanings and wisdom. I am also so much more aware of our current culture and when we continue to take what is not rightfully ours.  The cocoa ceremonies, psyllium ceremonies, and new wellness apps – many of which at times, are stripped of the lineage and historical contexts with little recognition or compensation towards the original owners. I was unaware of this until recently,  and when it landed it was felt. Building awareness around how we have been shaped by our culture is key to understanding what we mean by privilege and oppression.  
​
We can start to build our awareness around our impact by continuously looking at our ‘shaping’ and if we are designing products and services with deep reverence and respect for our customers and a desire to do the right thing by humanity beyond just this current time.  

I invite you to review the sites of the shaping model and apply it to yourself at each level asking the relevant questions including social norms at each level.  Can you apply it to the people you’re designing for? What if we knew more about the communities or how the institutions we work for shape our customers both directly and indirectly? 
​
If anyone has used this model in their design work or chooses to, I would love to hear what shows up. There may be an opportunity for it to evolve and have more widespread use in design as we keep designing for all peoples and our planet. 
 




​

​


​
​
​
​
​
​