So, what is a Frame?

A “frame” as I use the term here is literally a way of seeing the world.  Each of the 12 frames of Showgirl Awakening are like a pair of glasses you put on to see the world through that lens.  These are ultra powerful lenses that help us understand on both an intellectual level, and equally or more importantly a felt-sense level – an embodied level – what has been so tricky about being ourselves.  And more than just understanding on any level, the way we approach these frames through Showgirl Awakening Life Practice, we begin to live them, to reorient ourselves from the ground up, to live our true and unique radiant essences through our bodies, relationships and whole lives.

The 12 Frames of Showgirl Awakening:

1. Sensitive vs Hardy

Our world is geared for the 80% of the human population that is wired with hardier boundaries and sense of self than the remaining 20% genetically highly sensitive among us.  When we learn to respect our sensitivity and employ it as our superpower, rather than something we need to overcome, we begin to stand in the center of ourselves and be able to both receive and give the gift of ourselves, rather than try to pay for our existence by making ourselves as elastic as possible to please others.

2. Collapsing vs Posturing

As highly sensitive folks, we are acutely aware when someone is Posturing – when they are taking up space in a way that eclipses others – and we’re so afraid of doing that that we can overcompensate by taking ourselves completely out of the center of ourselves by Collapsing into shame.  Turns out that us collapsing doesn’t help anything, and only complicates the matter.  And it’s also not that obvious how to stop, and cultivate a way of staying in the center of ourselves. Showgirl Awakening practice is one such way.

3. Drip Drip Trauma vs Boom Boom Trauma

For definitions of these two types of trauma scroll above to the The Great Roadblock To Reveling, Revealing and Receiving: Trauma section. As we begin to exit our trances, and identify and care for our Drip Drip Trauma, our lives begin to ....  well, come to life!

4. Pleasure + Play vs Reward + Punishment

We learn the rules of Belonging at play in our family and clan very, very early early in our lives.  And since our families and clans are peopled by humans, we learn to avoid being guilty – when possible – and to reach for innocence, as much as possible, to reinforce our Belonging.  This causes no end of pain.  In Showgirl Awakening, we delicately and with utmost care turn our attention to the conundrum of being human – with its competing needs for both Safety and Belonging AND Full Expression of Self (whose idea was it to design humans this way??).  But rather than try to reaffirm our innocence – hoping for the reward of Belonging, or at least the absence of punishment – through ‘getting it right’ (whatever “it” is), we use play and pleasure as our means of developing our Well-Being, which is the greatest gift we have to give to the world.  It’s where our true service can begin.  The more we can revel in our own bodies and creativity, reveal ourselves and reach for what we desire in life, the higher our tolerance is for own our pleasure and play. It seems that in general, especially for HSPs, our play and pleasure muscles need much more exercise.

We do not live in a rewarding or punishing universe; we live in a mirroring universe.

5. Subject vs Object

Just like in a sentence in English, where you find a subject and an object, we can be either a subject or object in our lives.  Often, until we have discovered our own edges and boundaries – where we begin and end – we are by default the object, and acted on and used, by our own inadvertent design.  In Showgirl Awakening, we strengthen our sense of self, our alive sense of our own “I AM”-ness, thereby occupying the space of subject in our sentences, and our own lives.

6. Right Brain vs Left Brain

We live in a decidedly Left hemisphere-shifted world – more precisely stated: an instrumental hemisphere-shifted world.  You could say that much of Western culture, in any case, is suffering from avoidant attachment. We need both our instrumental AND relational hemispheres alive and well and working interdependently to live from the center of ourselves and live as sovereign, embodied, compassionate, creative women.  This means experiencing ourselves as both differentiated AND linked to each other.  We practice this right, left and center (no pun intended! HA!) through Showgirl Awakening.

7. Rebelling vs Submitting

Rebelling and Submitting are 2 sides of an equally toxic coin. When we are acting through rebellion, we’re asserting and expressing what we are not, who we are not, and maybe even who we are flipping off, instead of expressing who we ARE.  By submission, I mean caving into the desires or demands of whoever is the Other, because you think will create harmony for all.  Neither stance encourages health in a system, rather both, by default allow the reigning system of oppression to solidify and perpetuate.  We practice the middle way of the Awakening Showgirl, in which we generously reveal our radiant essences to each other, in service of us all contributing to rich collaboration and complex systems of camaraderie and mutual support that celebrates both our similarities and our differences.

8. Special vs Not Special

HSPs are taught through so many channels – family, school, society, media, etc – to tone it down, feel less, take up less space, be less visible, be less sensitive, be LESS, BE less.  To tone down our “Specialness.”  Couple this with how aware we are of the needs, feelings, desires of others – often we’re much more intensely aware of others’ states than our own – and you have a recipe for a lot of heartache and autoimmune illness and painful attachment experiences.  We can easily mistake someone else’s experience for our own.  And thereby miss consciously responding to our own experience.  We care so much.  About the state of the world.  Our fellow humans.  Our mama earth. All the inhabitants of mama earth, including animals and plants … all of it!

And what I’ve noticed is that until we come to terms with and acknowledge and embody and ultimately savor and design our own lives around the individual Specialness of our unique selves, we can’t genuinely show up for all we care about.

9. Immancence vs Transcendence

So many established spiritual traditions that are still practiced today emphasize transcending the body, rising up into pure spirit, rising above the mess of feelings and needs and interpersonal nuances.  These practices favor getting free of our messy interconnectedness with each other and all that dies.  There is a striving for some sort of neutral peace. Immanence is the less spoken of, on purpose descent INTO the body, into our dense and specific human experience.  As HSPs – unlike our hardier counterparts who start in the physical and slowly make their way up to the transcendent – we begin in the transcendent, and can never not know it.  It is our journey as HSPs to slowly incarnate fully, and arrive in the most physical way we can, so we can bring to our actual lives the visions and dreams we arrive on earth swimming in.  In whatever messy way they show up!

10. Systemic vs Singular

We live in a vast and complex web of relationship, with all of creation, including the living and the dead, and unspoken but airtight vows we don’t even know we ever made. Try as we might, we are *not* like silos, purely independent.  And we are not served by collapsing into dependency.  We are interdependent, intra-psychically within our own brains and bodies, inter-personsonally between individuals, and inter-socially between groups and inter-specially between species, the list goes on.  Paradoxically, the more we truly individuate, the more we can participate in the complex ecosystem faced by navigating as a human among humans on earth.  When we have healthy and appropriately permeable boundaries, we are responding authentically and fluidly to all the systems of which we are a part, making choices and reaching for what we truly desire along the way.

11. Creating vs Fixing

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12. Magic vs Mysticism

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