Returning To Safety - Somatic Practice For Connection

In this series of three talks, I will guide and explain to you three simple somatic exercises that will help you to self-regulate your nervous system from a state of survival (fight, flight, or freeze) into a state of calm. You can do them easily from home or wherever you are having a calm place for yourself. This final exercise is working well when you feel like you have lost a sense of connection to yourself or the outside world. It is cultivating connection to your body and through that fostering a sense of being in this place.

Picture by: Masaaki Komori

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this practice.

Today I want to show you another tool of somatic healing and somatic exercises on how you can regulate your nervous system from a state of survival to a state of safety.

So it is a type of pendulation.

Pendulation is an exercise where you consciously focus on putting tension on your muscle and specific muscle groups and then you're consciously releasing that tension.

So we want to implement that in movement today and I'd like to invite you to cross your arms over your chest and then you bow your head and then you notice the sensation and the posture.

You observe where does your gaze want to go.

Maybe your eyes were closed.

What is your breath like?

Is it regulated?

Fast?

Heavy?

Are you sitting on the ground?

Do you feel the floor on your legs rather than your feet?

And now try to sense where that signal that triggers the beginning to uncurl comes from.

Is that from your gut or your spine,

Your head,

Your abdomen?

And then really really slowly move so that you can experience every sensation of that uncurling of that releasing the tension of the muscles and allow yourself to open as you breathe.

Notice your face muscles,

Your neck,

Your chest and your legs and your feet.

Sit up straight and you can repeat that movement a few more times and always focus and be conscious about moving slowly and staying present in the experience.

When your thoughts go somewhere else that's fine but just come back and restart again and try and notice the sensations all over your body and the images that come into your brain and your head and emotions that might come up and everything is allowed here.

We're in a safe space.

We're just regulating our nervous system so that our body is signaling back from a bottom-up signaling that we're in a state of safety.

I hope you enjoyed that practice and I'm looking forward to see you soon and you can always come back to that whenever you need.