Calm Body, Calm Mind

This episode discusses how the mind and body are one, and how linking the two can create a greater calmness in you.

Transcript

Hello,

Welcome to this session on Calm Body Calm Mind.

Now I wanted to do a session on this just because it's so usual in our language and thus in our society to separate out body and mind and often when we think of ourselves or talk about being stressed we are singling out a sense that that is of the mind,

It is psychological and often the body is kind of brought along as well but it's not seen or felt even as an intrinsic part of what's going on and it's really important from a physiological point of view to just accept and understand that the mind and body are absolutely one,

They are not something separate that are reacting differently so if we ever separate out or say oh I think this one might be just psychological there's no such thing as just psychological it's not possible it's not possible to have an emotion and the body to remain inert or completely unaffected by it and we really know this on an intrinsic level you know that if you feel worried or you get a sudden shock or you hear a bad piece of news that the body will tense up,

Things you gather in and that's a very important part of self-protection what happens then is we have a gathering in of body tissues to the centre and we are drawn in and are ready to respond in a survival protective way the expectation of having to do something physical and broad using broad limbs rather than fine motor skills to protect ourselves and we also know that if we have something physical happen to us then emotionally that has a massive ripple through.

I fell,

I slipped in the snow yesterday and it was either the shock in terms of my emotional landscape was really massive and the protection that my emotional body as we would say in yoga went into was absolutely akin to that I described happening physically so there's a holding a freeze that was almost like a you know holding a time and space where you just check if everything's okay you kind of wait and that freeze response which can be part of a shock like that or people can hold on to as a response into trauma very much comes with that whole body either freeze and stick or dissociation and not quite being there physically and emotionally we might feel cut off disjointed and not be able to feel our body or feel it as numb or feel that we don't have a sense of it in its time and its size in the time and space that it is so we can feel experientially these things are true these things are happening together but from our inner landscape it's very easy to see that the mind is something separate because it's not capable that we we place our mind outside our body so we sense our external and where the world around us is physically but we're also looking at that and then taking that in processing that into the body through the eyes but also through how we sense that in the skin and the space around us and if we start to have that understanding that feeling of where our boundaries are where our inner landscape and our outer perception meet then we start to that that's the place that we really start to feel there's a sense of mind body connection and I even have to say mind body connection because that's the language we use and we separate it out so that's one of the reasons that in kind of embodied physical practices often called somatic practices or but they're often part now of what's called body psychotherapy do a lot of stuff we just realize where you know the boundaries are so we realize as in we we actuate we make a sense of our physicality there might be in touch it might be rolling around it might be our relationship to the ground and gravity but it's also why it's really important if we do go something through something like stress that we we touch ourselves and hugging feeling another is really really crucial and how we're able then to calm our body to give us ourselves a sense of safety where we are is really important to start to allow our emotional our mental landscape to join that so a lot of the stress that we have in modern life and particularly because we can be very heady very caught up in mental processes thinking rather than feeling our way through life is this fracturing of mind body this this sense that they are separate but the more that we can feel and we can really bring our mind to occupy our body where it is in the here and now the more we can get a real sense of absolute inherent safety because the mind panics when it doesn't know where the body is when it loses that inherent connection that coming back to whole that we always have but we just lose sight of and we lose our way back to sometimes and particularly if we're tending to live head up we can be quite disconnected to visceral feelings to feelings in the gut that tell us if we're safe or not safe and because we hold a lot of trauma in this area often we don't want to feel what is down there it serves us it's a survival strategy to cut off from the neck down and that can then play into this feeling unsafe because the mind doesn't have a sense of necessarily where the body is and if we feel that in terms of feeling clumsy or disconnected or we often like maybe hurt ourselves or injure ourselves or bang into things then we can really notice there is that disconnect and that need for grounding so that need for feeling our place on the ground and feeling where we are in the here and now so that might be with touch that might be with stroking it might be with tapping it's one of the reasons that there's tapping part of Tai Chi Qigong practices why EFT works really well emotional freedom technique tapping for many people works really really well but a sense of where we are here we are squeezing touching padding our feet on the ground getting a sense of where our hands and feet are to really hold us in the present moment and then of course the ultimate thing that really gives us a sense of mindfulness sense of presence and is our anchor to the present moment is the breath so this rhythm that we can most easily tap into that holds us in the here and now and is a guide to how we're feeling so with our breath gets caught and sharp and shallow and we're gasping for breath it's a really good sign that we might be in a stressed or hypervigilant mode and we need to find a way to calm either through the breath inviting slow breathing inviting a full exhalation or starting to bring the body down so that the breath can be allowed to come down and just working where those two things play into each other to start to get that sense of coming down to a sense of calm and dropping the breath down from being caught up in the shoulders and chest and allowing it to drop down into the belly where we can start to feel safe and allow the diaphragm to move in a really calm and efficient and safe safety bringing way for the body and that bringing down of that up gathering things in an up I mentioned at the beginning also involves releasing the jaw so it's one of the key things we can do for calm body and mind is to release the jaw have space between the back teeth and then we start to release any tension we might hold around the temples which is keeping up that quick blood flow that we need for hypervigilance for that increased acuity increased focus and concentration that is part of the stress response and part of protection and survival vigilance to see what is around us so coming back to touch to grounding to the breath to a sense of where we are to hugs from others from looking around the room knowing where we are in the here and now all of those things that bring safety to the body also bring safety to the mind and allow us to invite the mind back to where the body is and come back to cohesion come back to whole which is the root of the word healing coming back to where we are coming back to our essence nature