Returning To Safety - Somatic Practice For Overwhelm

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 secon exercise is working specifically well when you feel overwhelmed and are having a sense of being "alien" to the world.

Picture by: Masaaki Komori

Transcript

Hello and welcome to a new practice on how you can regulate your nervous system really easily and move from a state of anxiety,

Mobilization and not feeling safe and being in survival mode,

Wanting to fight or flight or feeling paralyzed into a state of safety,

Feeling social and happy to engage with your environment around you.

So we're using those body centered exercises to teach our body that our body is safe.

We have connected moments with that perceived feeling of unsafety and we don't really know why we feel agitated or anxious,

But that usually is connected to a sense of feeling not safe.

So I would like to share that little exercise with you.

It's really easy,

You can do it wherever you are and you probably have noticed already that feeling when you were somewhere else or you know before in your life.

So we're speaking about rocking back and forth.

You might have been on a rocking chair or you also know that when you were a baby you were hold and being like rocked back and forth and usually that's done by a parent or by caregiver or even when we're children and we're like on those little horses and play we're rocking back and forth.

And rocking is stimulating our vestibular system and our bodies kind of experience that physical motion combined with a visual system that is adapting and changing the perspectives and that creates that sensation of balance.

And the vestibular system is important for our body because it is used to regulate balance and movement and when we speak about balance often our body follows our brain but also the brain follows our body.

So if we feel unbalanced and dysregulated in our life,

Supporting a sense of balance physically can help to support a sense of balance mentally as well.

So you know you can rock yourself back and forth in the rocking chair or you sit down on a yoga mat and you rock back and forth on your back to a seating position then to a lying down position or you can also just sway or you can ask someone who you feel really safe with to hold you and to rock you slowly back and forth.

This is a great way of getting in touch with your nervous system and to restore balance.

You can always come back to that exercise and do it as much as you need and always remember you're safe and you're supported.

Reviews

I started rocking myself in bed just on my side and after only a few seconds I began to feel calm after moving nervous energy!! So cool to know!!