Orienting Practice: Regulate Your Nervous System

This gentle practice is perfect for when you are in Fight, Flight, or Freeze - when you feel tired, lethargic, angry, or anxious. Regulate your nervous system through Orienting & Vagus Nerve Stimulation. You'll feel a gentle, yet deep release that can manifest as yawning, tearing up, feeling like you can hear or see better, feeling more calm & present.

Repeat as often as necessary: the more you practice, the easier your nervous system can shift back into a state of Regulation.

Transcript

Welcome to this orienting practice.

This practice is great to use whenever you want to fully land in a place,

In a moment,

When you want to embody mindfulness,

Being present right here,

Right now.

This practice is great when you are in the freeze state or when you are in fight or flight.

It gently regulates your nervous system and brings you back into this present moment where there is no danger and nothing to worry about.

So allow your eyes now to just float around the room very curiously,

As if you are very curious and as if it is the first time that you are in this place.

Allow yourself to drink in all the different colors,

Different shapes,

Sizes of the different objects and maybe you find one particular object very interesting.

Maybe it's the light that they shine,

Maybe it's the type of color or the texture and allow your eyes to just stay with this one object now.

If you notice yourself yawning,

This is a good sign that your nervous system is starting to release some tension.

Allowing your eyes to float again and find the color brown in the space that you are in.

Noticing if there is any shade of brown and then landing on one spot.

And you can stay here just like we did before or if your eyes are very curious today,

You can continue again.

And then finally,

Ending our practice today with a little bit of vagus nerve regulation.

So keeping your head straight,

Looking forward,

Allow your eyes to turn to the left,

To look to your left side.

Keep focusing on one point,

Feeling a gentle stretch in your eyes.

Your eyes connect to your brain,

Connects to your vagus nerve,

Connects to your mind-body connection,

Your brain-gut connection.

Taking a gentle,

Comfortable breath here while looking to your left and then slowly returning your eyes back to the middle,

Back in front of you.

And then allowing your eyes to flow to your right,

Looking to your right side.

Picking one point to focus on,

Keeping your head straight,

Feeling a gentle stretch in your eyes,

Taking a comfortable breath here.

If you're yawning,

That's a great sign of release.

If you're yawning,

That's a great sign of release.

And then gently bringing your eyes back to in front of you.

I have to yawn a lot while I'm doing this.

You can repeat this if you haven't yawned yet and you wish to release and to have that effect.

Thank you so much for practicing with me today.

My name is Anais.

It's truly a pleasure to be here with you.

If you're interested in more nervous system regulation,

You can check out my course here on the app.

I wish you a beautiful day and I'll see you soon.

Reviews

I didn’t yawn but I’ll keep practising it as I recognise that yawning is often something that happens when I release tension. Thank you for this tool to help me regulate my nervous system.

This was very helpful. My nervous system is very much out of Alignment. A struggle each day to put it back into alignment. The eye exercise is not new to me, however yesterday at yawned. I do have a question, any thoughts as to how to reset the nervous system over and over during the day? This was helpful this morning as I did not sleep well and that has been part of the problem.