Coronavirus: Taking Care Of The Nervous System During Times Of Stress

A talk on regulating the nervous system from hypervigilance/anxiety back to a relaxed state of homeostasis and positive interactions using a variety of tools, both from contemporary therapeutic modalities and early Buddhist practices.

Transcript

Neural circuits of the brain,

Very ancient region of the brain,

Such as your brain stem,

The midbrain,

Are continuously monitoring the environment on an ongoing basis,

Checking internal and external sensations around you for three different kinds of cues.

What are those cues?

You're looking for cues of safety.

Am I safe right now?

Can I relax?

Cues of danger,

Risk,

Or vulnerability,

And that's a situation where suddenly we do not feel so secure.

And then the third type of cues is life-threatening cues.

And each different cue creates a different state of being with different capabilities,

Different behaviors,

Different thoughts,

Cognitive processes associated with each of those three different cues.

So if we detect around us and in our bodies enough safety cues,

Which is,

For example,

People with friendly expressions,

Signs of a reassuring space,

Comfortable,

Familiar surroundings,

Soothing tones,

Soft colors,

Soothing lighting,

And so forth,

We don't experience any sudden startling movements and so forth.

If we detect enough safety cues,

Then what happens is the parasympathetic nervous system allows your brain to fully function the highest,

Most advanced regions of the frontal cortex,

Especially your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

Which inhibits aggression,

Inhibits fear,

Allows you to make long-term plans,

And allows you to listen and engage with others.

In fact,

The great neurologist Stephen Porghas talked about this state as the social engaged state of the brain.

So when you detect enough safety cues,

You can relax,

You can listen,

You can communicate well,

You can collaborate with others,

You can pause and take your time rather than react immediately to stimuli,

You can consider your options before you act,

You can essentially have free will.

Free will is,

If it exists,

It only exists in this state of safety,

Calm,

Ease,

Sometimes also known as rest and digest.

So again,

Our very capability of the highest state of being a human being where we can listen,

Communicate,

Collaborate,

Connect,

Where we can experience ease,

Where we're not reactive,

Comes from this unconscious scanning of our environments and our body looking for signs of safety.

But what happens if you don't spot safety cues and instead you spot a bunch of cues or signals or sensations associated with risk and vulnerability?

For instance,

You're walking outside amidst a pandemic and suddenly someone is standing too close to you,

Or maybe there's somebody in your environments who,

When you look towards them is suddenly expressing an unfriendly look on their face.

Or if we've been staying indoors for too long,

Going outside,

Being out of our apartments or where we live can trigger agoraphobia,

The unfamiliarity of sensations and stimuli can trigger a feeling of vulnerability.

Or if we are well connected with friends and then there's a period of time where we don't feel so well connected,

Disconnection,

Lack of interpersonal engagement with others can be neurosepted,

That's unconsciously translated as a threat.

So what happens if we encounter these events and our nervous system,

Our brain stem and our midbrain switch us into a different state other than social engage?

Well then we wind up in a mobilization state.

That's a couple of things immediately happen.

The first is that the highest regions of the brain that allow you to be relaxed,

To communicate,

To elaborate,

To pause,

To not be utterly reactive,

To essentially pause and think before you act,

That inhibitory functions of the frontal lobe get switched off and we wind up in what is commonly known as fight and flight.

That's a mobilization state.

Free will is significantly curtailed.

We wind up in hypervigilance.

The right hemisphere of the brain takes over,

Especially the right amygdala,

Looking for more signs of threat,

For more signs of vulnerability.

The cingulate will pin your attention to threat detection and that in turn will trigger your HPA axis to flood your body over time with cortisol.

And another really bad drawback of being switched into a mobilization state associated with fight or flight is that the only area of your brain,

The frontal lobe that really functions well during mobilization is the midbrain,

Not the midbrain,

Excuse me,

The middle prefrontal cortex and that will trigger repetitive thoughts,

Fearful,

Self-oriented,

Repetitive thoughts that cycle back and forth and those thoughts actually have the unusual capability of being able to trigger the fear center of the brain and actually make the stress response,

The startle response,

The flooding of cortisol even worse.

So the regions of the brain associated with relax,

Inhibiting fear are switched off.

Middle regions associated with obsessive,

Self-oriented,

Fearful thoughts like what's going to happen to me,

What's my future going to look like,

What do other people think about me,

How am I going to survive,

Those thoughts will spiral.

Finally,

In the unfortunate event that we unconsciously perceive or perceive consciously life-threatening situations where it feels like someone is about to attack us or we're in a situation that can become overwhelming,

Our psyches and bodies respond with an ancient parasympathetic immobilization state known as freeze.

We stop,

We've experienced physical weakness,

We lose connection with any cognitive processes whatsoever,

We go off into a dissociative realm associated with depersonalization where you lose awareness of your body and you start feeling very far away from anything that's happening to you.

That is the classic freeze state.

And all of these different states,

It's essential to note,

Are unconsciously switched into.

We do not have a voluntary capability generally.

These are out of control processes.

These happen preconsciously before the regions of the brain associated with conscious volitional acts which is of course again left prefrontal cortex are generally not a part of this process.

This is why we can suddenly have a panic attack or suddenly go into a freeze shutdown state.

We can suddenly feel very excited,

Be lifted out of anxiety and we don't really know why.

That is because unconsciously very,

Very ancient regions of the brain,

Your brain stem,

Autonomic nervous system have on their own connected with cues of either advantage or threat or danger and so forth and switched you from one state to another.

If you'd ever like to read more about this,

There's a lot of wonderful,

Wonderful science.

It's basically known as the polyvagal theory and talks about how all of our cognitive processes are determined by our autonomic nervous system.

It is now the default set of insights into how people function and act.

Now if this wasn't a challenge enough,

I should also note that we can be conditioned or primed to neurocept threat when there isn't threats and we can go into a state of mobilization,

Fight or flight where we become extremely reactive and patient,

Fidgety,

Incapable of listening and we can also be conditioned and primed into going into freeze states.

Now one reason this happens is due to our evolution.

As a species,

Natural selection conditioned us to what's called negativity bias and there's a lot of wonderful science that shows that for every single negative event we experience,

It requires many multiple positive events to rebalance our nervous system.

So we give undue neural weight to negative events in our life.

Gottman's ratio in his studies of couples show that for every negative interaction in a relationship,

It requires five positive interactions for a partner to undo the emotional wound and to prevent future discord in the couple.

This is why all forms of couples therapy as a central practice reorient couples to bring to mind positive experiences,

To focus on the positive interactions at times where their needs were met and so forth because there's such a predilection towards focusing and remembering the negative.

The amygdala has two-thirds of its neurons dedicated to perceiving threat,

So we orient towards threat stimuli far more than we orient towards safety cues and so forth.

Negative facial expressions are encoded with so much more neural over determination than positive that if you show people photographs of people with negative expressions and photographs of people with positive expressions,

In a week later everyone will remember the negative facial expressions.

Only about 20% of the people who were smiling,

Their faces will be remembered.

So we have this ingrained negativity bias where we orient more as a matter of survival.

We think that it's better to orient towards threat and to perceive threat than it is to orient towards safety.

For example,

In our species history,

If you heard a sudden sound,

It was safer for you to assume that it was a bear or a rattlesnake than for you to look for signs of safety.

Generally natural selection always prefers being safe rather than sorry,

And that's why we have negativity bias,

Even though by now,

In general,

Our species is far less endangered than these natural selection processes developed.

Now another way we can be primed or conditioned to constantly spotting negative or threatening cues and switching ourselves into fight,

Flight and to create hypervigilance and chronic stress is through repeating external circumstances.

So for example,

A childhood spent with an unreliable caregiver who was only sometimes sporadically available and other times completely disinterested in the child or not available.

A stressful job with unrealistic demands that are constantly changing.

Certainly there's been a lot of articles on the devastating chronic stress that EMTs during the pandemic have experienced where they've been constantly deluged with vulnerable risky situations and it feels eventually,

As one person said,

That their brain won't switch off.

Chronic stress,

Anxiety,

Insomnia sets in.

And so that's a classic external repeating situation that over time can create a brain that is for a long duration afterwards primed to spot threat cues rather than safety cues.

And so going into a neutral situation,

Somebody who has been through repeated stressful interaction or circumstances will always gravitate towards signs or signals or cues that people are too close or that they will find any sensation in the room that denotes risk or vulnerability.

People who've been through early traumas,

Infants who were frightened of their caregivers,

People who have complex PTSD,

These are people whose brains are actually very prone to turning threat detection into a life-threatening situation,

Feeling overwhelmed and triggering dissociation and freeze.

They will hear sudden sounds and convert them into a sensation that is associated with overwhelm and their brains can be so set for threat detection that overwhelm is almost invariably a possibility.

Those who due to early abandonments experience what's called in adult life chronic or toxic or core shame,

Who believe that they are always at fault for anything that goes wrong in their life and have an internal inner critic that constantly criticizes,

Demeans and attributes every negative experience to there's something unlovable about me or something wrong,

Orient to stimuli that prove their inadequacy.

So they will go into a room where they'll give a talk or they'll be at a new gathering,

If we ever have new gatherings again,

They'll go into those situations and they will find the single unfriendly face that's looking at them with criticism.

Even if 19 people are looking at them with a welcoming expression,

They will find the one person who is critical.

If they are looking for a relationship and they go to a party where there are 20 or 19 available partners who are wanting a relationship,

They will find the one person who is emotionally avoidant,

Doesn't want a relationship,

Is critical.

They will orient towards the stimuli that repeats the core shame and the core feelings of inadequacy and they will again trigger an anxious state.

There's a lot of really powerful science showing that how we routinely or habitually direct our attention influences our mood and in influencing our mood influences the way we think.

That's known as mood congruence.

So focusing on self-related thoughts,

Allowing our minds to wander for too long almost invariably activates that circuit I told you about earlier,

The middle prefrontal cortex that activates repetitive intrusive thoughts and eventually activates the amygdala and can actually trigger the stress response.

On the other hand,

If you focus your attention on task positive behaviors that lowers stress and is soothing.

So what's a task positive behavior?

If you pay attention to anything you're doing with your hands or anything that you're working with externally such as cooking,

Gardening,

Pottery,

Drawing,

Playing an instrument,

Task positive behaviors activate that dorsolateral region and switch off the self-fixated stress,

The default mode operation of the brain as it's called.

There's a wonderful series of research by two guys at Harvard,

Gilbert and Killingsworth.

They wrote a wonderful paper called A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,

Very catchy title that talked about that when people are,

Even if somebody's doing something that they don't like if they really pay attention to the external sensations and don't allow their minds to wander they will be happier than if they're actually some place that they really like but they've allowed their mind to wander.

So if you're at the dentist going for root canal surgery and you're really paying attention to the sounds,

Probably you wouldn't want to do that but suppose you did and you paid attention to the sensations around you,

You would actually over time be happier than if you were lying in a hammock in a wooded area but allowing your thoughts to wander to what's going to happen to you in the future.

So essentially focusing our attention away from self-oriented,

Self-reflective thoughts towards task positive behaviors or towards ongoing sensations is always associated with a diminishment of stress.

Other research has shown that ruminating about too many choices causes cognitive overload and cognitive overload then of course triggers stress.

Focusing attention,

Here's a big one,

Focusing attention from affect awareness which means awareness of your body,

Your emotions,

Your state of being.

In the short term that can diminish distress.

So for instance somebody comes home,

They feel very lonely,

They're not particularly well socially connected especially these days and there's this feeling of hollowness and loneliness in the chest,

Tightness in the belly.

They don't want to pay attention to those sensations so they essentially distract themselves by binge watching TV in the short term that can minimize the feeling of loneliness but in the long term it's been shown that habitually distracting our attention away from our feelings and our embodied state leads to anhedonia and dysthymia.

What are those?

Anhedonia is a lack of joy and pleasure in our life.

Dysthymia is a low grade depression.

Essentially if we develop the process of continually running from our feelings eventually in blocking awareness of subcortical stimuli in our body,

Blocking awareness of our feelings leads us to feel hollowed out and empty.

So even though in the short term focusing attention away from our emotions and feelings can feel better,

In the long term it sets us up for a far worse outcome.

People can switch awareness from foreground stimuli to background awareness and that can be very,

Very skillful at times.

So for example you're at a party one of these days,

People will have parties again.

I don't know why I keep on,

I wish fulfillment I'd come up with all these examples of what life used to be like when we could go to parties.

So suppose you're at a gathering and you see an X and immediately your stomach tightens and the hair on the back of your neck tightens and you start to feel this pounding in your chest maybe because you associate this person with a degree of emotional unrest or a painful breakup and so you pull your attention away from the person and you just orient towards the background of the entire party.

So you're not distracting yourself away from the X or the trigger but you're just widening the perspective to take on the entire party.

Well that has actually been shown to be a very skillful use and in many somatic and other modalities,

Therapeutic modalities is a very skillful way to help people who have chronic avoidance or fear to walk through threatening situations.

Don't try for instance if you go into an environment where you know there will be a threat cue,

Don't try to ignore it,

Don't pin your attention to the threat cue,

Keep awareness dispersed taking in the entire environment.

Now the Buddha was well aware of how important how we focus our attention is in the entire chain of paticca samapada of suffering that follows.

He noted with phassa which is when you pin attention to an object,

When attention lands on something it creates immediately a feeling which is in Buddhism called Vedana which is in clinical psychology known as a somatic marker.

If it's something that in the past you associated with connection,

Love,

Appreciation,

Security,

Physical pleasure then your body will relax.

If you pin your attention to an object or a person or a situation where in the past you experienced vulnerability,

Risk,

Disconnection,

Judgment,

Shame,

Feelings of vulnerability then your body will create automatically feelings of stress,

Tightness,

Your abdomen,

Your abdominal muscles will tighten,

Your chest will contract,

Your shoulders will lift up to put you in a mobilization state,

Your jaw might clench,

You might feel you're in a mobilized state,

You'll breathe in with greater force than you breathe out,

You will or greater length,

You will feel energy flowing up the body rather than down and so forth.

So the Buddha in the Dharma talks about how to skillfully reorient our attention away from or towards that which does not cause undue stress.

In other words,

To how do we refocus attention in a way that's skillful.

Now the most well known is the Buddhist teaching known as Akagata which is bringing your awareness to a neutral sensation when especially we are having repetitive cycling thoughts.

What is that neutral sensation?

Well you guessed it,

For most of us it might be the breath,

For some of us it might simply be an ongoing awareness to sounds in your room,

For some of us it might be an awareness of other sensations like contact you're making with a chair or a cushion and so forth.

As a second approach to disconnecting from stressful repetitive thoughts that our brain will almost,

The right hemisphere,

The right cingulate,

Excuse me,

Will pin attention to negative visualizations or negative self-centered oriented thoughts,

It requires a lot of practice to move awareness away from risk or vulnerability cues towards safety cues.

One of the Buddha's wonderful teachings are on the recollections which are reflections of topics that cause ease and so the Buddha in the Vitakasanthana Sutta talked about how important it is to flip stressful thoughts to positive.

So what are the positive reflections that we can think of that the Buddha said do not cause needless stress?

Well,

One is reflecting on people who've been generous to us,

Kaga Nusa-ti,

Sila Nusa-ti,

Reflecting on times we've helped others,

That we've been beneficial,

That our actions in some way benefited somebody else's life.

Santi Nusa-ti,

I'm going off this by the top of my head,

I know I'll forget a bunch of them,

Santi Nusa-ti,

Reflections on places we've experienced peace,

So that place by the river,

That trail in the woods,

That spot on the beach with a blanket,

Really bringing it to mind,

Visualizing the sensations that were present,

The quality of light,

The sounds and so forth,

Recreating in our mind.

Deva Nusa-ti,

Bringing to mind times where other people were protective of us,

Came to our rescue,

Were allies.

Sangha Nusa-ti,

Remembering and reflecting on spiritual friends of yours that are wise,

And so forth and so on.

There are ten of them,

You can look them up,

I'm not going to list all of them.

A couple of others are reflections on the Dharma,

I'm a Buddhist pastor so I can do that for hours on end,

I can just at the drop of a hat turn,

If I start to get lost in stressful thoughts I can just reflect on some Buddhist teaching and it's almost amazing how I can just get lost in those thoughts which are far less stressful than allowing my mind to wander to,

What's going to happen to me in the future,

Or what do other people,

Or how do I fit in in the world and so forth,

Or how do I compare with other Buddhist teachers and blah blah blah,

Who needs to think that,

Right?

Those are thoughts that go nowhere quickly.

So there's other tools for reorienting away from threat cues even though we have natural negativity bias.

One is if you're at home and you're sitting in a chair,

First encourage your body to expand into space,

Relax any tightening in your body,

Then allow your eyes to wander across the room and find the first color that you can spot and then once you identify that color look for other examples of color,

The same color in the room.

You can,

If you want,

Bring your attention into sounds that are going on.

Sounds listening has an amazing capability because listening requires almost as much processing as sight and certainly requires more processing that allows us to think at the same time.

So if you really bring attention to the sounds present and really try to find the farthest sound away from you and then the nearest sound to you,

That helps to disconnect from stressful,

Repetitive,

Intrusive thoughts.

Buddha talked about bringing attention to body sensations,

Kaya-nusa-ti,

Feeling the feet on the floor,

Feeling your contact with the chair and so forth.

So those are all useful tools.

If you're outdoors and a lot of us these days have been experiencing a low grade of agoraphobia due to spending a lot of time indoors and it can feel vulnerable being outdoors,

Ways to reorient is one,

Titrate,

Walk slower,

Feel each foot making contact on the ground.

The slower you walk,

Interestingly enough,

The threat detection circuits actually tend to abate a little bit and you can actually spot,

You're more likely to spot safety cues around you if you walk slow.

If you walk fast,

You will spot actually people in your way or obstacles and so forth.

Pay attention to the back of the body,

The back of the body.

To the back of your head,

Your neck.

Allow your back to soften first.

So relax all those muscles in the back when you're outside.

Allow your arms to fall lifelessly and then soften your core.

The abdominal muscles,

That's the seat of your vagal nerve and that will inform the midbrain that you are safer than it might naturally believe.

Also really important,

I know this sounds like an old saying that people give each other,

Possibly because it is,

But it's important to keep your head up.

When people look down,

They are actually more likely to spot danger cues than if they keep looking up above other people or looking at the sky or looking at signs of space.

So locating signs of nature as well switch us from threat detection to safety detection.

Nature is rarely considered to be a threat.

These are a whole lot of ways to undo our habitual routine priming to spot unconsciously and orient towards danger cues and to focus us away from those to balance us more towards positive or to spot safety cues so that we will then switch ourselves into social engage.

It's always useful if you are in an uncomfortable social interaction with another person to focus attention away from maintaining a narrow focus on people's eyes and this area of their face because if you are in a conflictual situation that will trigger the fusiform gyrus in your brain,

It will start overloading and that can also cause stress.

So maintain a pendulation where you look around the room,

You spot the windows,

You spot anything on the walls and then look back at the person's face.

Again,

If we try to avoid a threat cue around us,

Whether it's someone who we feel is standing too close or looking at us unfriendly in an unfriendly manner and so forth,

Your right singular will pull your attention back and reorient you towards the threat.

On the other hand,

If you allow your attention to pin yourself to the threat cue,

That will also trigger more stress.

So what we want to do is develop either when we are in an interaction or a situation or circumstance where we are being triggered is to pull attention wider or to pendulate between the trigger back to the threat away from the threat to the environment.

On the other hand,

If you are alone and your attention is pinned towards a triggering thought,

Generally what's going to happen to me in the future and so forth,

Self-oriented thoughts,

Bring to mind a reflection that is not self-oriented or go into a task positive behavior,

Something where you can use your hands.

Both are effective.

So as usual,

That's a lot of information and my job now is to lead you through a guided meditation where we can practice some of these tools so that you can actually get the experience of using them and there's no better way to practice than in a meditation.

Just reminding you,

Actually I'll keep my jacket on,

If you would like to support my work as a Buddhist pastor in New York,

Everything I do is by donation only.

The Venmo is dharmapunx,

D-H-A-R-M-A-P-U-N-X,

N-Y-C,

And this is how I survive is by teaching and offering counseling.

And if you want to hear all of the talks that I've given,

They're on the website,

Dharmapunksnyc,

And there on that side is a PayPal button.

So closing the eyes and just feeling into the body with,

If you could imagine your attention is kind of like a fishing line that has been out in the ocean too long and you're reeling back in the bait,

You're reeling it back in,

So reel back your attention away from the world around you,

Back into the eyes and then allow the awareness to begin to widen so you're not just aware of the sensations in your face but you can also feel the sensation in your throat,

The front of the throat,

Spreading awareness so you're still aware of how your forehead and eyes feel and the mouth but now you're also aware of the throat and then spreading down into the chest and let's take a nice inhalation and lift the shoulders up for a moment like you're trying to touch your ears with your shoulders and drop your shoulders and just open up the chest,

Allow the hands,

Arms,

Excuse me,

To drop really heavily and just feel into that open space in your chest,

Making it as comfortable as possible to receive the breath,

Spreading awareness down beneath the chest into the abdomen,

The belly and see if the belly feels really soft,

Pliant,

The soft belly is so influential in sending messages up via the insula to the right ventral medial that lets us know whether we are in a good situation or not so softening the belly really sends a very neutral,

Safe message up to regions of the brain you'd like to impress with the fact that you're secure right now,

You're not in this moment in time in any danger so just keeping that chest really nice,

Open,

The arms relaxed and the belly very soft,

Spreading awareness into the sit bones,

Buttocks area and just release any clenching of those muscles,

They sink into the chair,

Releasing any tightness in the muscles of the legs,

Releasing any clenching of the toes,

Just allow your feet to make a nice,

Full,

Open contact with the ground and bring your awareness to either the left or right palm,

Generally the palms are for me the most relaxed part of my body at the beginning of any meditation so if you bring attention to the left palm just imagine the ease there to spread through the fingers and then up the arms,

Spreading the ease as much up towards the shoulders as you can,

Using this ease to flood into muscles that might be habitually tightened and bringing awareness to the right palm and feel the ease there and allowing that to spread to the fingers of the right hand and then up the wrist,

The forearm,

Elbow and so forth up towards the shoulders bringing awareness to the shoulders and if you need to use your awareness to massage any tightness in the upper back,

Sometimes if we work long hours in front of a computer we might find that there's this tightness right below either the left or right shoulders,

Mine's in the left and I generally have to just imagine I can soothe and breathe into that area to soften,

Bringing awareness to the front of the face starting with the jaw we're going to unclench it,

Release it so that it hangs comfortably allow the mouth to settle into the most comfortable,

Neutral expression trying to keep the lips from being pinched so it's a very wide,

Relaxed mouth and then bringing attention up to the eyes and just encouraging them to settle,

To relax,

To not shift around behind your eyelids,

If your eyes relax the cranial nerves that move the eyes relax and then that allows a lot of processes in the occipital lobe to downshift so just softening,

Relaxing,

Encouraging the eyes to just float in the eye sockets and then smoothing out any tightness or contraction in the forehead just allowing it to settle.

Now orienting our awareness,

Our attention to the breath and neutral sensation,

If you don't like working with the breath then pay attention to the sounds around you,

Finding the breath,

If you're paying attention to the breath just feel the inflows energy moving from the belly upwards in the body,

Bringing awareness and energy,

Vitality and then awareness of the outflow as this release,

This downwards softening ease like a wave returning so the inhalation could be like the waves receding from the shore and then the exhalation could be the waves returning and you can ride down those waves like you're surfing on them,

Ride the sensations of the front of your body so when you breathe out you ride the energy up,

You're paddling out away from the shore and then as you breathe out you're riding that gentle wave of release all the way back and just focus on surfing the energy in the front of your body,

Focusing on riding that exhalation all the way as far down the body as you can,

Breathing in you paddle away from the ground up to your throat,

Up from the belly up to the throat,

You breathe out and you just ride that wave of release down the front of your body,

Softening the chest,

The clavicle,

Abdominal muscles all the way into the earth below.

You you you you you you you you you you you you you So at this point we can practice using visualizations and reorienting techniques so I'd like you if you're up for it to bring to mind a situation recently where you felt yourself emotionally triggered,

Can be an interpersonal situation and of course it could be during a zoom meeting or a FaceTime call or hangouts call,

Doesn't have to be in the same room but just a interpersonal interaction where you felt yourself suddenly switched into a mobilized state where you didn't feel safe,

You might have felt a desire to leave or a sudden flash of desire to attack or just this feeling of vulnerability that can come over us when we are unconsciously triggered.

So bring to mind that situation,

Visualize it,

Especially the first visualize whatever you believe was the threat cue,

The risk danger cue that you spotted,

Maybe an unfriendly look or sudden change in someone's demeanor or maybe you were outside and something caught your attention and I'd like you to do is just freeze this image so everything is frozen but you can look around and you can either imagine or actually move your head towards the left and just see if you could visualize what would have been present towards the left,

Something just create in your imagination some sensation that you might not have noticed,

Something that was neutral.

So if it was during a Zoom meeting,

Imagine what the background,

The other parts of the room outside of your screen look like and then still with the situation frozen,

Move your head or imagine you're looking to the right and spot all the sensations to that side of the context.

You can then bring your attention and swoop it through from the far right,

Seeing the center where the threat cue is present and then move all the way to the far left.

Bring your attention to the sensations of your feet on the ground,

Bring attention to your belly,

Soften it even though you're still holding the threat cue in your imagination,

Soften your belly.

These are pendulation techniques where we focus attention away from a trigger and then back to a trigger and then away from a trigger and then back to a trigger,

You're pendulating back and forth,

You're slowing down the pendulation so you can do it at a speed or a pace that is very calm.

Again with pendulation you spot what is triggering or what you believe is pinning your attention.

Generally if you feel unsafe,

Wherever your attention naturally goes will be associated with the trigger or the feelings of vulnerability and then what you do is you move attention away to the full context and then allow yourself to scan through the trigger and then to another side or another sensation and then go back and forth and so forth.

Now let's practice with another.

I'd like you to bring to mind a thought that's been worrying.

It could be about finances or about our career or about a situation in a relationship or just the general uncertainty associated with this difficult period of time.

You'll find that if you actually welcome a thought rather than battle with it,

It won't come with as much force,

But just what is the thought that's been triggering and then if you were really in the throws of it,

You could do what's called a brain dump where you write out all of the most threatening ideas on a piece of paper just to get them out and take a nice long soothing relaxing breath.

Just acknowledge the thought,

I see you,

And then I'd like you to bring to mind one of the skillful recollections.

So we're going to start out with recollecting someone who in the past has been kind or generous to us.

So just bring to mind anyone who's ever expressed sympathy,

Empathy,

Kindness,

Has been generous with their time.

Just try to visualize them and if you can visualize their image or if you can't just repeat their name and then soften your belly.

And then second,

Bring to mind some person that you've helped in some way,

You've been generous towards.

Someone who's benefited from knowing you,

From your efforts.

And then as you recollect this,

If you want,

You could put a hand on your heart center and just connect with that feeling of compassion,

Or care that's in you.

Just spreading that sense of recognition of your efforts,

Anybody that you've helped.

And then bring to mind an image of a place where you feel really,

You've experienced peace.

There's a place on a retreat center on the West Coast,

A bench on a rolling hill.

I remember having a vast sense of ease and comfort and well-being.

I can now bring to mind that the sense of the sun and the sights I saw and even the sensation of being on that rolling hill.

Just bring to mind your own place where you can go and relax and then really attune your body to the sensations.

So if you imagine a beach,

Just imagine yourself sinking into the blanket,

The sand supporting you,

The sound of the waves just releasing.

Using your imagination to create safety cues to switch you back into a state of well-being.

So in a moment I'm going to ring the bell.

And so when you hear the sound,

Try to find in your body the most comfortable sensation that you've cultivated,

Any place or space or sensation of ease.

And as you open your eyes slowly,

Try to bring that sensation with you.

A kind of a safety cue to bring with you into the rest of your evening.

Reviews

Very helpful.
Thank you so much.

So informative and healing. Going to share❤️

Powerful & practical. I grabbed the pen & started to taking the notes. Many usefull hints. Thank you😊🙏

thanks Josh! awesome talk & meditation, love the paddling breath, blessings to you 💛🌞😷

Enjoyed applying the concepts to situations. Thank you. 💐🙏🏼