Friends With Your Mind: How To Stop Torturing Yourself With Your Thoughts

Neuroception is our unconscious assessment of safety and danger. Our brain has a negativity bias and uses evidence from our past to decide. When we sense danger, our nervous system activates a fight/ flight/ freeze/ fawn survival response. With somatic (body) mindfulness, we can become aware earlier of this unconscious process and work with it more skillfully.

We practice tools to witness thoughts (words and images), and to help our brain realize that traumatic images and memories from our past are not a threat in the present moment. Try framing and tracing for images. With your eyes open, mentally place the image in a frame on a wall on the other side of the room. Take your eyes around the empty space outside of the frame a few times in each direction to help your brain realize it is an image, not something happening in the present moment.

We don't talk ourselves out of feeling unsafe, we use somatic tools to experience regulation. This guided practice includes visual cues of safety, touch - holding our own hands, and grounding and orienting to the present. Exhaling at least six seconds activates our relaxation response, and we can do that through breathing practices, singing, or talking in longer sentences.

A reverse inquiry is a statement we know isn't completely true. It is a way of finding out what is in the way of it being more true. We might get a NO! or our body might tighten up. We listen to a series of statements and see our responses: I am at home in my body and enjoy my life; I have a sharp healthy mind; I am willing to be patient and kind with myself.

We store trauma in our body along with associated thoughts and memories. We cultivate somatic (body) awareness and learn tools like locate/describe to realize we are in the present moment where we are safe. Building on the tools for thought, we can self-regulate, learn why this energy is here, and work with it to heal.

Children can't afford to turn against their parents so they blame themselves. When we regularly experience feeling unloved, we begin to believe we are unlovable. We disconnect from ourselves and our sense of value. We feel like we're on our own and some develop a mean inner critic. We can see through these false beliefs.

Most of the content in our mind and the tension in our body comes from hypervigilance in our nervous system. This lesson guides us through several effective practices for self-regulating. We use our senses in the 5 4 3 2 1 practice. We can hold our own hand or give ourselves a hug. We can catch ourselves worrying and soften our forehead. Try these!

When difficult or alarming thoughts come up, we can be hijacked into hypervigilance. In this lesson, we do a guided walk-through of tools to work with thoughts and sensations and learn how the nervous system is always trying to protect us. When we hold our breath because we're anxious, we signal danger to our nervous system. As we breathe with more ease, we signal safety and our whole system relaxes.

Our mind believes what we think. Repetitive patterns like ruminating and catastrophic thinking create strong negative neural networks and deep grooves. Ruminating is a way to change our past and experience feeling more agency. Catastrophic thinking is an attempt to keep ourselves safe in the future. We'll identify and practice breaking the trance to use our brain in a more helpful way.

Somatic inquiry is one effective way to become friends with our mind. What is your tendency? Do you more often ruminate about the past, or do you entertain worst-case scenarios about the future? This is a guided practice of noticing and challenging unhealthy thoughts, and strengthening our resourced, kind, adult self.

Remember to use regulating practices like cyclic sighing when we're working with shame. Shame causes us to disconnect from our sense of value. We have experiences of feeling unloved or unworthy and then form beliefs that we can see and challenge. We are having a trauma response. We are not bad or broken. It is natural to feel threatened when we are shamed or "don't fit in".

As children, we stored experiences of feeling excluded, judged, powerless and hurt because we were overwhelmed. Adults have more resources and agency. In this session we invite our younger self to come forward and experience the love and protection of our adult self. We can realize our inner goodness and build a relationship of kind connection with all of our parts and our hurt younger self.