Easing Anxiety and Dread Somatic Mindfulness Practice

This is a guided mindfulness practice of working with a more accurate neuroception (perception of danger or safety) and regulating through breath, tools for thoughts and sensations, and grounding and orienting into the safety in the present moment.

Transcript

We notice what's here.

What's here already is whatever we notice in our physical body,

We notice what's in our mind.

So when you're tuning into that,

We have a lot of continuity with noticing what's here.

We have felt sense in our body,

We often have tightness in the same places.

For me,

It's usually my neck and shoulders.

It used to be that I would clench my teeth.

I had to train myself out of that about 50 years ago because I was so tight in my teeth,

My teeth were hurting.

So we have this continuity in our bodies.

We have a lot of continuity in the patterns of our mind as well and our nervous system.

So we have a lot of familiarity when we tune into our system.

And then we have some variations too.

So sometimes we have a lot more ease in our life circumstances.

Sometimes we have a lot more difficulty or more fear.

We have that as well.

So checking in is a good idea to notice your physical body.

Is it kind of the usual?

Are you a little bit more relaxed than usual?

A little bit tighter maybe?

Take a couple of breaths.

Notice if you're breathing.

We tend to hold our breath when we're upset or anxious.

Or we might have a very rapid shallow breath or breathing in our chest.

Notice your breath.

Relax your shoulders.

Relax your body for a minute.

And then notice your mind.

When we witness the thoughts in our mind,

We'll notice,

Oh,

There's a lot of anxious thoughts right now.

Or I've really been going over the worst case scenarios.

And then that tends to,

Of course,

Increase the dread that we feel.

So all of those,

Whatever our conditions are right now,

We can work with that.

From this initial check-in,

Let's do a couple of minutes of cyclic sighing.

This is a double inhale,

A deep double inhale,

And then a long slow exhale like you're breathing out through your mouth,

Through a thin straw.

So deep inhale through the nose.

And some more.

And then long slow exhale.

Breathe out like you're breathing out through a thin straw.

And when we do that,

We find that we can breathe out for a long time.

Ideally,

We're breathing out at least six seconds,

But it might be longer than that too.

So we don't want to get into any scarcity.

But when we breathe in that deep double inhale,

It gives us a lot of air.

And when we breathe it out quite slowly,

That long exhalation signals our nervous system that it's okay to relax.

We'll do this for another minute or so.

Deep double inhale.

I tend to find that I get a little bit tight in the top of my chest and maybe into the shoulders and neck when I do the second part of the inhale.

So as we start to breathe out,

Really soften through your face,

The sides of your neck,

Down through your shoulders,

Top of your chest,

Top of your back.

One more.

And now check in again.

What does it feel like now in your nervous system?

In your body,

Your breath,

Let your breath come back to whatever rhythm it's coming back to.

And notice thoughts in your mind.

Just notice your overall general experience in your body-mind right now.

One thing that's common is that our breath would often be a little longer and more full after that.

We might find a little bit more stability or quiet in the mind.

That practice is really good for intervening with anxious thoughts or catastrophic thoughts.

So this is a practice that's been recommended to do for five minutes a day.

If you could do that for a while,

It would be interesting to see the effect that it has.

The cyclic physiological sign,

It's called.

And Stanford University and some other labs got together and tested a bunch of practices.

And this was the one that they found was most beneficial,

Reducing anxiety and increasing heart rate variability and relaxing.

It's better than just sitting in meditation for five minutes,

Better than box breathing.

So it's a good practice to know.

So now when we're doing our checking in,

Checking in again,

What are you noticing now?

And if we were to do a reading on,

I feel completely relaxed,

I feel a little bit relaxed,

I feel really anxious,

Where would you be on that now?

And how would you know?

What is it that gives you the signal?

Let's start with the body.

When we feel anxious,

What's happening in your body?

Is there a certain sensations?

But often anxiety,

We feel it in the stomach area.

We might feel it as restlessness in our arms and legs.

That's from the hypervigilance when we perceive a threat or danger,

And we feel anxious,

We often feel like we need to be ready to move into action,

We need to take action.

So notice that.

And whatever your level of restlessness is in your arms and legs,

You could maybe help that by stretching a little or shaking.

You could just do kind of a rapid shaking of your arms.

You could lift one leg and shake or do shaking for both legs.

You could stand up if you wanted and shake it out.

Just take 30 seconds or so to shake your arms and legs.

Notice what that feels like.

And then take a couple of breaths and tune into what's happening in your stomach area or somewhere else in your body.

Where do you feel anxiety or dread or fear in your body?

Sometimes it's a feeling of movement in the stomach area,

Like butterflies in our stomach.

But wherever the energy or sensation is,

You can notice that there's the sensation,

But then there's space on the outside where the sensation is not.

So if you have a feeling of some kind of movement in your stomach,

Like anxiety,

Notice does it go up into your chest?

Does it go down into your lower belly?

Does it go up into your head?

Does it go five feet across the room?

Like at some point that sensation finishes.

Usually the sensations kind of dissipate.

So it's like,

Yeah,

I can feel it really strongly right in the center of my belly,

But I can't really feel it so much out to the edges.

It's more of an internal right in the middle.

Notice the space around the sensation for now.

And notice what it feels like.

Is it moving or still?

Anxiety is often moving,

But not always.

Does it have a color,

A shape?

Some people have visual images of sensation.

If you were to describe it to a scientist,

What would you say about the sensation?

Is it painful?

Is it edgy?

There's something about the sensation that signals that there's some anxiety here.

So anxiety tends to be quite active.

It's like kind of a hypervigilance.

But what if it's dread?

So sometimes when we feel dread,

There can be more of a component of the freeze response.

So it's hypovigilance.

So it's,

There's kind of a turning back,

I'm kind of numb.

So we have this feeling of dread,

But where does that show up in your body?

Often it's the back of the neck and shoulders.

We brace ourselves,

Or we might get into kind of a depressive posture,

Kind of slump.

We stop breathing.

So notice where you feel dread.

And again,

Let's look at where is the sensation?

How would you describe it?

And how far does it go?

Where does it stop?

And then put your attention on the space on the outside of that sensation for a moment.

So if you're having a sensation in a particular part of your body,

Like if you notice that you're hunkering down through your back of your neck and shoulders,

You're bracing yourself,

Then it might be helpful to move your shoulders around a little bit.

If you notice that you have a lot of shakiness or restlessness in your arms and legs,

You might go back to shaking.

You might look at doing some vigorous exercise,

Go outside and walk for five minutes or something like that.

One of the,

One of the things that we're looking at here is how do I know how I feel?

So we know because of sensations and energy in our body.

We know because of what happens with our breath as well.

So if you were to right now be feeling a lot of anxiety or tuning into a memory of how you feel when you feel anxious,

What's happening with your breath?

What are the patterns in the breath?

Oftentimes our breath gets quite shallow and maybe quite rapid or we breathe up in our chest.

Notice what's happening with your breath right now.

Now,

If you have more of that dread,

That stuck kind of frozen,

Maybe the breath is not so rapid.

It might be that you're not breathing hardly at all and maybe you're holding your breath as well.

So notice right now what are your patterns and then no matter what your pattern is,

If you have that kind of rapid anxiety or the holding the breath,

We can always reverse the signal.

So our nervous system is getting the signal and it's giving the signal that there's something wrong.

So that rapid breath,

Holding the breath,

Rapid kind of chest breathing,

Or whether it's that holding the breath kind of stuck,

Frozen,

Both of those are signaling your nervous system that there's something wrong.

So it signals us and then it also listens to the signal coming back.

So right now we could signal something else.

So let's go back to the cyclic sighing for a minute.

So deep double inhale and then long slow exhale,

Breathing out through your mouth like you're breathing through a thin straw.

Relax your whole face,

Neck and shoulders,

Down through your stomach,

Arms and legs.

Do one or two more and then notice how do you feel now.

Did that make a difference?

What we're doing with this practice is we're noticing what is it that gives me the cue that I'm anxious or feeling dread?

And then how can we reverse the cue and give our nervous system the knowing that in fact we're not in an immediate danger right now.

We're breathing longer.

The longer breath signals to our nervous system that we're safe enough to breathe longer.

So having that anxiety or the held breath signals danger,

A longer fuller breath signals safety.

The nervous system doesn't really respond to words so much.

It responds to sensations,

Energy,

The amount of breathing that we're doing,

What's the pattern of the breath.

That's how we signal the nervous system that we're safe.

Take a few more breaths and just let yourself sigh or release that.

Move your body around a bit more and then let's bring in our visual cues and the thoughts in the mind.

So look around the room just as you're looking around.

Let your eyes take it in.

Is there any immediate danger here?

If you're in a familiar place where generally your experience is that you're safe there,

Would be reassuring to your nervous system.

You could look behind you to the other side.

Sometimes when we're quite anxious it also helps to do a practice like the 5-4-3-2-1 with our senses.

The beginning of that is five things we can see.

So with your saying it out loud you would say,

I see the trees out the window,

I see a picture on the wall,

I see the kettle on the stove.

So name five things you can see.

So let's all just do that.

There's something about saying it aloud that helps but also our eyes are a big part of our evidence.

Our eyes are always scanning the environment for safety.

So noticing cues of safety instead of cues of danger will help us to come back to a more accurate perception of right now.

And another thing that often happens with the eyes and with our visual sight is that we see all kinds of images of danger and our brains were not set up to know that the danger we're seeing in videos,

On screens,

On the news,

On social media is not an immediate threat to us.

So we're seeing something out of our own eyes and in the past until 100 years ago it was always an immediate threat.

It was happening right in front of us and now it's not.

So we're seeing all these videos of danger and it alarms us and then we get into these patterns and some of the thoughts that might be,

Well look at how hard it is for them over there.

Every time we see a natural disaster we might think about climate change.

We have all of these patterns that are going on in our mind and then we get into trying to make ourself feel safer.

One of the ways we do that is we do catastrophic thinking.

One of the things that we can do just now then is if you have a dread or if you have a more active,

That edgy hypervigilance around worst case scenarios,

Bring one of them up right now.

Keep your eyes open,

Bring one of them up right now and put it like you're looking at it in a frame on the other side of the room.

Pick an empty spot over there somewhere.

Put the image into the frame and then again notice that there's space all around the frame.

So there's the image,

The frame,

The space on the outside and now take your eyes around the outside of the frame a couple of times in one direction and then a couple of times in the other direction.

And then when we look back into what's in the frame,

Notice now what's your response to that.

And sometimes we have to do it two or three times.

We might also look at the image and imagine that it's kind of blurry,

Like someone has smeared Vaseline on the lens.

We might do a focus shifting where we look at the image and we broaden our perspective to notice everything else that's on the wall or the color of the paint behind it.

Then we look back at the image.

So what we're doing is letting our brain know that we're looking at an image.

What we're looking at is not actually true in terms of it's not happening right now.

So then we come back and we come back into the body and notice now how you feel.

Take a few longer breaths,

Long slow exhales in particular.

And some of these patterns of the mind,

I have a three minute and some longer practices on Insight Timer around catastrophic thinking.

That can be really helpful to work with that.

Every time we do that,

We develop deeper grooves in the mind and more alarm in our nervous system.

So we do need to be somewhat aware of what possibly could be a danger so that we can take action when we need to.

But we don't want to go down that rabbit hole of worst case scenario thinking.

One of the ways that we can prevent that is to stay grounded in your body.

Notice your breath.

Notice the thoughts in your mind.

Notice the energy in your body.

And notice,

Okay,

This energy is signaling something to me.

What's it signaling?

And then we could go into really looking at why is that energy here?

What is it trying to warn me about?

So there's a lot of ways that we can work with this.

Even just in a 15 or 20 minute inquiry like this,

We can really see,

Okay,

How did I start out?

What was my experience as I started?

And then we did the cyclic sighing.

What was my experience during and after that?

We looked into sensations,

Energies in the body.

We want to break our experience down into components.

So instead of just saying,

Oh,

I'm really anxious right now,

Or,

Oh,

I just feel like something awful is going to happen.

We want to break it down and go,

Okay,

How do I know that?

Well,

I'm holding my breath.

That signals danger.

I can reverse that by breathing more deeply or doing the cyclic sighing.

I have a lot of thoughts in my mind about what if this happens?

What if that happens?

I don't think I can cope with that.

We might get into despair.

So we look at the thoughts and thoughts are images and words.

Images are still pictures or cartoons or drawings or video clips.

And our brain tends to believe what we see,

Even though it's imagined,

Even though we're visualizing something or remembering an image.

It's not happening right in this moment.

So we can look at that.

Another way to do that is tap on your forehead.

When you have persistent thoughts,

Especially if there's sounds,

Bring your two fingers to your forehead and just take your attention away from that and into the sound and sensation of the tapping.

Another way we can reassure ourselves is through touch.

You could hold your own hand.

You could give yourself a hug.

You could do a butterfly hug.

Crook your thumbs together and just tap alternately on your chest.

Bilateral brain stimulation helps to break the trance of catastrophic thinking and it's reassuring as well.

There are many,

Many grounding and orienting tools that we can use and we can practice.

First we become aware,

Then we look at the components and then we take each component and there's something we can do to turn that around so that we can signal safety and we can bring ourselves into a more accurate assessment of our level of threat right now.

So I'm not at all trying to make it look like nothing is real,

There's no threats that are real or that when we're anxious or afraid or we feel dread that it's not real.

It is real.

And we need to work skillfully with the nervous system we have.

In this world it's not an easy job to stay regulated in our nervous system.

So let's just do the best that we can to be here,

Be present,

Use our breath,

Relax our body.

There's so many tools now even just to right now bring your awareness into your seat and your feet.

Notice that you're here on the earth.

Take a few deep breaths,

Relax your body,

Look around,

Notice that you're safe.

And that really helps us to bring ourselves back into regulation.

Reviews

Very helpful during a flashback and a panic reaction to it. Thank you.

Honestly this is the most thorough and helpful meditation I have ever done for my daily dread and anxiety. It helps me so much to understand the science of our nervous system and that we do have control. Thank you.

Oh my goodness, I cannot thank you enough for this. I was absolutely suffering in my body, and this brought it down by at least a third.

I am so grateful to find this practice today, I appreciate your calm, soothing voice and this nurturing practice. It had so many great techniques, some reminders, and some new ones that I will return to this track. Thank you for sharing love and light, Sarah

That was very helpful . Thank you so much , Lynn . I am trying to understand how I may help my daughter who had a panic attack this Wednesday . I am working with her and using your breathing technique to help her understand herself . She is a perfectionist and also has OCD so catastrophic thinking drives her insane . Thank you again . 🙏🙏🙏❤️❤️❤️

Sooo helpful. My speciality is morning dread which is so weird as I sleep really well and have no ‘real’ stressors in my life ( apart from age! 78) Thank you so much, I’ll be back, for sure.

That was exactly what I needed for this overall morning dread I experience. So many tools loaded inside this one meditation! Thank you for sharing your kindness and wisdom to help us heal 🙏 ❤️

Excellent work by you.
Thank you for sharing your experience with me. I’m going to put it to good use in my own journey
Namaste 🙏

Very helpful and soothing for my whole system. Thanks Lynn!

This was great. I realize it's my thoughts 💯 %. I found myself relaxed after the breathing exercise.
Thank you! Once again. Gbless you.
🙏👼😘

Thank you for this and your other talks. I didn’t realize that I was feeling unsafe until listening to them. Very helpful 🙏