Reset Your Nervous System In 10 Minutes - Embodied Therapy

In this short guided practice, Katarina Gadjanski, co-founder of the Institute of Embodied Psychotherapy, will guide you through a 3-step Embodied Psychotherapy exercise designed to help calm sympathetic arousal in the body. Sympathetic arousal occurs when we experience a fight-or-flight response to life's challenges, as well as during periods of stress, fear, or anxiety.

Through this practice, your body will begin to release some of this accumulated activation, allowing the parasympathetic nervous system to become more active and bring a sense of calm, regulation, and ease in both body and mind.

Timestamps:
1:38 - Intro: Quick body scan
3:35 – Step 1: Shaking
8:05 – Step 2: Parasympathetic Breathing
12:00 – Step 3: Self-Holding
13:50 – Ending: Gentle Rocking

Transcript

This is a guided practice by the Institute of Embodied Psychotherapy. Facilitated by Kateryna Gajansky. Hi, My name is Katerina Gajansky from the Institute of Embodied Psychotherapy. Today I'm gonna take you through a short embodied exercise to help you regulate your nervous system. This is a very simple exercise that we use in embodied psychotherapy and it will take only 5-10 minutes to help you calm your nervous system. So this exercise is good to do if you're in a sympathetic arousal so-called fight-or-flight mode, So if you're stressed out and there is lots of arousal in your body, Restlessness, Anxiety, And this exercise in three steps will help you to bring in the parasympathetic nervous system, So stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, Which will calm down your nervous system. So we will begin by just taking an inventory of how you're feeling right now. So if you feel okay to close your eyes, Please do so. If not, You can keep your eyes open, But please try to shift your focus from looking or from being in your thoughts and your head into your body. And if you're feeling this sympathetic arousal energy in your body, Uh that might be really difficult because there are unpleasant feelings in the body so you don't need to delve into them you just do a quick scan of how you're feeling in your body and where in your body Are you aware of that you're feeling triggered? So where are you feeling this sympathetic arousal? It could be in your knees, It could be in your belly, In your solar plexus, In your chest, In your neck and shoulders, In your jaw. And sometimes it helps to bring the attention into body by putting your hands onto your lower abdomen. So put both of your hands there. And take a couple of deep breaths into your abdomen, Into your belly. So deep breaths. The abdomen is rising and falling. So this is not a breathing exercise. This is just to help your mind descend into the body. So moving from thinking and processing in your head, To being more with the sensations and the energy in your body. So taking few deep breaths into your belly. And then scanning as you're breathing, You're scanning your body just to notice how you're feeling. Okay. So the first step in this practice is shaking out. So shaking out this sympathetic arousal energy from the body like the animals in the wild do. So what I will do now is invite you to stand up If you have your shoes on, Please take them off. And stand up. Shoulder width apart. And with the knees slightly bent, So not like completely straight legs, But slightly bent, And putting a little bit of weight into your feet to connect you to the ground. Because often when we are in this sympathetic arousal energy all the energy is rising up into your upper body. So you might feel very ungrounded and not feel your feet on the floor, In which case I'm inviting you to put a little bit of weight into the front of your heels and the back, Into the soles, Front, Shifting the weight, Back. You can also do side to side, One foot to the other, Just to help you to start to feel that connection to the floor. So this is the beginning. And then we will start the shaking. So we'll first start with shaking our wrists. So just start shaking your wrists gently. And then put a little bit more energy into it. You start shaking all of your arms. And breathing throughout this practice. Is in through the nose and out through the mouth as you're shaking. And then start shaking the rest of your body by bouncing your knees gently up and down, Up and down, As if you're pumping the body. Loosening everything up. See if you can loosen your shoulders as you're shaking. Loosening your spine. And loosening your legs. Up and down, Up and down. And you can hear my breathing while I'm shaking. So we invite the sounds as you are exhaling through your mouth. You can make a sound to just release even more. So in through the nose as you're shaking, Bouncing, And then out through your mouth. And as you're bouncing and shaking your arms and legs, See if you can shake your spine too. So loosening the neck and shoulders. Can you make a little bit of release from there? And then your middle back. And loosening your lower back, Really shaking it all out. But your feet are still planted on the floor, So you're just bouncing through the knees, Up and down. So a couple of more of those deep breaths. And then pause. And once again, Putting your hands on your belly. And taking inner inventory just to see how you're feeling now. You can probably feel some energy starting to move through your body. And we will continue with the step two, Which is parasympathetic breathing. So at this stage, You can sit down if that feels more comfortable. With the back upright, Feet on the floor. And I'm going to take you through this parasympathetic breath which is basically where the exhalations are longer than inhalations. So we inhale on four and we exhale on eight. And what it does is send the messages to your brain and to your nervous system that you're calm, That in the here and now you're safe and that the nervous system can start to calm down. So I will start with counting just for a couple of rounds. And then you count in your own head. This breathing again is in through the nose and out through the mouth. So breathing in On 1, 2, 3, 4. Breathing out on count of 8 or 6 if you can't do 8. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And to help us slow down the exhalations, As you are exhaling through your mouth, Imagine that you have a very thin straw and you're trying to blow out the air through this really small straw. So this will help you to prolong your outbreath up to the count of eight or sometimes even ten. But even if you manage just six, That is good enough. The whole point is that the exhalation should be longer than inhalation. So we'll do this a few more times. Inhaling. On 1, 2, 3, 4 and exhaling through the straw through the mouth on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 inhaling on 4 exhaling on 8 Inhaling on four. Exhaling on eight. Inhaling and full. Exhaling on eight, Slowly through the mouth imagining that you're blowing the air through the straw. Inhaling on four. Exhaling on 8. And one last one, Inhaling and four. And exhaling on eight. And then letting go counting and returning to your normal natural breath and what you will notice is that your breath has naturally slowed down a little bit. Hopefully your nervous system is calmer by now. And we move to the step three which is to continue this slow breathing while you're holding yourself in a certain way so I will describe what you need to do so you take your right hand and you tuck it in your armpit so underneath your arm so that you're holding the side of your body So your palm is a little bit over your head. Over your heart and your fingers are holding underneath your armpit. And then you cross your arms, So your left arm, You cross over your heart and you hold either your arm, Your upper arm or your shoulder, So whichever feels more comfortable. So it's like giving yourself a self-hug. And just see what type of pressure is needed. If you like this hug to be quite tight or relax and loose. So this is a self-soothing technique and we are just breathing. Deeply if you can. Again, Continue breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth. But you don't need to make it as long as we did before. Just natural deep breaths in through the mouth, In through the nose and out through the mouth. Just holding yourself as you do that. And you might want to also add a little bit of rocking back and front, Back and front as you're doing that. So again, This is sending a message to your nervous system and your brain that you're safe. That the danger is over and that in the here and now you can just relax so this x3 exercises stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system The part of our autonomic nervous system which are in charge and rest and digest and relaxation comes on from this branch of our nervous system. So just continue to hold yourself like this for as long as you need until you feel your nervous system has calmed down. If you have your eyes closed you can open into this stage and orient yourself in the here and now, Look around the room. Become aware of your surroundings and then letting go of holding yourself we will just And with how we started, Putting both of our hands in our abdomen and taking a bit of an inner inventory of how your body is feeling now, How your nervous system is right now. And those sensations that you were feeling at the beginning of our guided practice, How are they now? And you can do this guided practice on your own. In just 5-10 minutes in the 3 steps, I will just remind you what we did. The step 1 was shaking it out from your body. The step two was parasympathetic breathing in on four and out on eight and the step three is holding your body so the self hug and gently rocking yourself back and forth. So I hope this practice helped you and that you're feeling better and you can take this into the rest of your day.