Self-Soothing For Stress: Somatic Practice

A gentle touch based practice, designed to soothe the nervous system and release stress held in the body. This calming technique can help you reconnect with a sense of safety and relaxation. Touch can be such a soothing experience and yet we forget we can do this for ourselves.

Transcript

So I'm going to teach you today how to use your hands to really get into the body and to use it as a soothing tool because believe it or not these hands that we all have this is a way that we can really energetically soothe ourselves and again this is all about getting into the body so the more you know how to do that the more empowered you're going to be so this can really be used especially I like to use this if I've had maybe a stressful day or maybe if I've been really busy and especially if you can feel tension kind of all the way around your head maybe around your eyes so all we're going to do is we're going to start by just rubbing the hands together and let's just get some heat flowing let's just feel what it's like to actually get into the hands and straight away you will hopefully start to feel some heat flowing and then what I want you to do is I want you to just then gently place those hands over the crown of your head so maybe just closing down the eyes as you do this and coming into the headspace and just starting to breathe as you do this and just feel that connection with the head and feel almost as though your hands are soothing or taking away any tension there you're placing them there as this kind of reassurance this stability and just play around with different placements so I've brought my hands down to the back of my head play around with what that feels like and then maybe even take it to the ears especially if you've been hearing a lot listening to a lot this can be soothing and then rubbing the hands together and generating a bit more heat again we're going to do the same over the eyes so let's just place the hands over the eyes again breathing and feeling what that feels like just to soothe this space and then maybe just now across the eyebrows notice how that feels you might want to go anywhere else your body particularly needs and when you're ready we're just gonna bring the hands now back down to the lap so check in with yourself like already I can feel oh definitely here feels actually really different it's like I didn't realize how much maybe where I've been filming where I've been using like my eyes right now it's actually really needing it around here whereas for you it might be somewhere else it might be like a lot of thoughts that have been up there in your mind now obviously it might not just completely get rid of stuff but this is about you going do you know what again rather than needing to look outside of myself or to just keep going or to get faster and frantically go do something or need to use unhealthy coping mechanisms actually what is it like to just take a moment to kind of self-soothe and to self-heal you know all these things we receive or we hopefully receive when we're very very small as babies physical touch cradling rocking this is why it gets us into a feeling of okay I'm safe again I'm okay again so see what it's like to use that physical touch and I'll show you lots more placements and routines we can do to soothe the body

Reviews

Thanks Scarlett. Being able to see you demonstrate helps. ❤️🙏🙏

Lovely quick and gentle practice. Feeling less foggy and a little softer and looser around those tense areas. Thank you 🙏🕉️