Hello,
Welcome to this session on choosing calm over chaos.
It's a very important choice that we can consciously make within the 21st century where psychosocial stress is our main form of stress.
So if you're feeling overwhelmed,
That you are on constant alert or have anxiety or agitation or even coming close to or into past burnout,
Then looking at ways that we can create space,
Ways that we can come down from that heightened response that makes sense in the face of all the inputs,
The information,
The expectation,
And the constant input of noise and stimulus we have from screens,
We have from lots of people and huge amount of information that's around in the 21st century.
So you may be having symptoms that also relate to this constant alert,
This hyper vigilance that the nervous system finds itself in.
And symptoms that relate to this are things like IBS,
Insomnia,
Anxiety,
As I mentioned,
But that anxiety that we really feel in the body.
So that can be things where the nervous system just stays in a heightened state and we feel that in the gut.
We feel that within difficulty getting to sleep,
Difficulty being able to come down and in inflammation where the immune system just stays in a heightened survival sense.
And we just get caught up in those tones.
It's difficult to come down.
So some simple things that we can do to help come down out of those heightened responses and start to find calm amidst all this potential doing and the chaos of just feeling that we have more to do,
To do this,
Et cetera,
Can be really simple.
And creating these pauses in our life and these really conscious stopping and creating space can have huge ripple effects for you.
They can really be the difference between just feeling up and up and up and have difficulty letting go and for you to be really able to feel that you've come down,
That you have space,
That your heart rate can drop,
That you can start to feel more connected to your breath.
And a real sense that there's a possibility of a piece of space and a calming,
Erasing mind.
So one of the first things to do really is to create that pause.
And as I'm doing here,
Placing your hands on your body creates a really palpable,
A really true and real sense of being here.
And I have my hands on my heart and it's also the place of where you might find palpitation,
Where we go into the stress response.
You can get quite up here.
We can get up in the shoulders and breath goes up into the jaw.
So placing our hands on our heart starts to allow a sense of calm around the heart area.
It's a very real sense of self-care.
And it starts to let the shoulders release and it starts to let your breath drop into your belly and a place where you can start to feel you connect.
So that means you can put one hand onto your belly,
Really feel that that's where you are.
That's where your center is and get start to get a real sense of grounding.
From that place,
We can connect to the breath and the exhale,
The out breath is where we get a sense of release.
Where we have a space and a calm and you can even make an ah sound and ah is a very releasing sound to come to.
And from there,
It might feel really natural to start to release the jaw,
Release all that tension that we feel around this area.
And you might notice then that clenching the jaw is a really habitual part of being in overwhelm.
And if we start to notice that,
We notice that with the breath,
We notice that with the body,
Then starting to create a release around this area really helps those pauses that we come to,
To have a real chance of relieving tension and coming to a place where the mind can also start to settle.
