Healing Fight, Flight, Freeze: Somatic Reset

In this guided practice, we gently explore the sensations of fight, flight, and freeze, honoring your body’s natural ways of keeping you safe. Through mindful movement, breath, and a reflective writing exercise, we stimulate neural pathways to create new, healthy ways to respond to stress. Allow yourself to release old patterns, integrate your survival energy, and come home to calm, grounded presence.

Transcript

Hello, My name is Peggy Koukassian, And I'm a somatic practitioner with a focus on nervous system regulation practices. I'm based here in Los Angeles, California, And I love working with clients to be able to support what is coming up in between sessions. Because when we get the triggers or we get the survival responses that come up for us, We definitely want to lean into those moments as a form of exposure therapy. So we can increase the capacity to hold more of ourselves. So much of this work is inner child related and reparenting of maybe a part of us that we lost touch of at some point, Maybe in our childhood or developmental years. So today's topic is going to be around the fight, Flight and freeze response. And what we're doing is we're just expanding the opening of this so we can look at this as more information for us to work with. So I always like to encourage my clients to first start addressing what is coming up for you and what is that incident that caused the fight, Flight, Flight, Freeze response to activate? What gave it charge? What gave it that, You know, That pressure in the body? So when we feel that charge, The body is going to want to go into this safety. What will keep the body safe in this moment? And so we're going to start with just addressing what that is for you, Because we want to find out and figure out where these sensations are living in the body. I call this body tracing, And this is where we take the mind and the thoughts and we trace it down, Downward, Away from our mind and our brain. So maybe we give it a validation and a word we say is it where is the tension? Where is the restlessness? Maybe there is a numbing or a stillness or, You know, Something that is really you're able to touch on. And I think one of the most important factors here is remembering our nervous system's natural way is always to keep us safe. So if our body is not ready or prepared to handle the complexity of the felt emotion, Then we're going to go into a fight, Flight, Or freeze or even fawn response. So if your body knows that to be familiar, And maybe it's a response that you've had from a really young age, It's really that relationship between your experience and the nervous system. And so what we're doing here is we're just recognizing, We're creating a lot of self attunement, And we're doing a lot of observing. So we just notice what is happening beneath the body. What is it that maybe there's some fear around? Maybe the heart is racing, Maybe there's muscles in the body that are tightening, Or maybe there's nothing. There is absolutely almost like a frozen feeling in the body. I'm going to invite you into taking a long, Deep inhale through the body, And then long exhale. And remembering that in this moment, As you orient yourself to the space, You can look around and you can ask yourself, Am I in danger? Am I in a safe space? And hopefully if you are in a safe space, This will give you that opportunity to go inward and look at and pinpoint what is going on inside. So as we lean into, Maybe there's this imagining of something being wrong, Or maybe there's a compulsion to want to move or escape or abandon this felt experience. And what I'm going to invite you into is leaning into creating more safety within. And this part of you that deeply wants you to acknowledge what is there in this moment, Because this is that beautiful moment that you can lean into. Knowing that this has come up, We can also address that most likely the body doesn't know how to connect with this in any other way. So in this moment today together, We're going to look at some of the triggers that are coming in from that external stress. Maybe there was a conversation or some kind of stress around a deadline, Or just something that suddenly put your nervous system into a shock response. And so I'm going to invite you here into this moment, Maybe out loud in your space, Maybe speak into the space you're at right now. And hopefully you have somewhere private, You can do this work together with me. And just bring up in your conversation to yourself and address what happened. Maybe it's a long term memory, Or maybe there's a pattern that your body is really tired of holding. And I believe when the fight, The responses, These traumatic responses start to get more and more suppressed, The body starts to get more and more aggravated. So what we can do here is go inward and respond and ask the body, What is here for me? What wants to be shared and spoken out loud? So this truth that is in me is able to come out. I don't need to hide it anymore. I don't need to not share my pain, Especially to myself. Recognizing this is the very first step in bringing yourself back into that state of safety. So this exercise really is more of a vocal, Really connecting us to our throat chakra. So as you continue to breathe into the body, We're creating safety enough that we're not in that reactive state anymore. So now we can start to retrain the brain and the body to work with what is actually available. When we start giving our emotions and our reactions deeper meaning, When the next time we're exposed to a situation that triggers us, Now there's a different memory tied to how we respond. So we might have an opportunity to speak up, Share more of our truth. So an exercise here I'm going to have you do. Before we get into the exercise though, I want you to stay in an inhaling and exhaling process until the body feels quite safe and regulated and in a more calmer state. Once you're ready to come out of that, I'm going to have you grab a journal or a piece of paper. And over the next few days, Maybe even the next week, I'm going to have you write to the left side of that journal. Some of the triggers or some of the things that you experienced that took you into the fight, Flight, Freeze, Or fawn response. And next to the reaction, You're going to write, What did your body's automated respond look like? So if it was the fight, I want you to draw a line after that and then bring in to the calm state of the body. What would your higher self want you to respond with? Instead of the fight, What if you were able to connect to that part of yourself that wanted you to speak your truth? What would that look like? So when you start to write that out, What we're doing is we're rewiring the thought process around the reaction. And this is such a beautiful way that we can start to bring in positive healthy neural pathways that are responding in a way that is helpful for us to encourage and open up our relationships to go deeper and deeper. It brings us more into attunement. It helps us become better leaders and better lovers. And so we are opening that gateway to how our body wants to communicate. So this is a written exercise that you get to do every time the trigger comes up. Notice how that unhealthy way that your body wants to respond because that's what it knows. That's all it's ever known. And so we get to lean into more love. We get to lean into more truth and understanding and create deeper opportunities of relating to each other. And this work really is about having yourself be seen by someone else in your truth versus going into your survival response. I hope this was helpful. And I have many other practices under my teaching portal for you to check out if you'd like some more somatic body based practices. But I felt this to be very helpful because it's been a practice that I've personally integrated for many years in my own healing journey. Thank you so much. Hope you have a blessed day. Namaste.