Soothe Anxiety: The Butterfly Hug

A gentle somatic practice to calm your nervous system and soothe feelings of anxiety and overwhelm. The Butterfly Hug is a gentle touch based practice, to help the body feel safe again. Follow along as we use rhythmic tapping to settle the mind and body.

Transcript

Today I'm going to teach you something that's called a butterfly hug. So you may or may not have heard of this as with I guess all of these practices but this is incredibly soothing on the nervous system and it's actually specifically used if we've gone through any traumas or any difficulties that really come up and get triggered. So it could almost be especially for things like past memories, Past old triggers, You know those things that come up where all of a sudden we feel maybe really unsafe and this is again why we need to get into the body in those moments because as you might find almost no amount of talking to yourself can sometimes help and so your body needs to know it's safe. This is why we need to activate our vagus nerve. We need to activate our parasympathetic nervous system. This is the stuff that really really soothes so I'm going to teach you the butterfly hug and what that looks like and I would say just kind of follow along with me. You might really really find it soothing especially if you are actually feeling quite stressed or anxious right now or you might just think this is quite nice I might you know might use it at some point. So what I want you to do is I want you to take your hands and you're just going to place them in front of you so with the palms facing towards you and we're going to take the thumbs and then we're going to interlace the thumbs so what you'll see is we're almost making this like it looks like a butterfly this is why we're calling it the butterfly hug. So once you've found the butterfly the thumbs interlacing what we're going to do is we're going to then place the hands right to the heart. So I would say almost some people say that almost where your thumbs are sort of down from the soft part where your throat would be to the hard part right when you reach that that's where we might want to place the thumbs and then hold the hands over but I would say just go where feels actually right to you. It might be that actually you just intuitively feel like you want to place your hands a little bit further down and that's okay like all of this stuff right is about intuition and going with what your body actually personally needs. So I'm going to place mine a little bit higher up because I feel okay to be somewhere around there and then what we're going to start to do is we're going to start to just sort of pat the hands side by side. So we're going to just kind of pat the chest either side and just take your time to do this take your time to really feel into this and you might want to close your eyes and just allow yourself to pat. So these are just gentle pats nothing too hard but we're getting back in touch with the body we're balancing the body out and we're getting in touch with that all-important vagus nerve parasympathetic nervous system the stuff that really tells our body we're safe and we're soothing. Now you might want to stretch your hands out to actually try what it feels like to do this either side of the body on say the shoulders because this is almost like a bit of a hug too this is when I like to kind of not worry about what the thumbs are doing but you're almost just placing again crossing your hands over the body like this and you might even feel like I'm really aware say for example of the warmth I can now feel from my hands on my arms and even that can feel soothing in itself to sort of feel like instead of I need someone else and I need someone else to soothe me which we we all do right we they're going to be times where we definitely need someone else to see that this is you recognizing I can actually soothe myself so what does it feel like to actually be in this position with yourself where your arms are hugging yourself and can you feel that warmth can you feel that you know that safety you may even just even give yourself a little bit of a rub like you would to someone else if you were trying to comfort them and then let's come back into the butterfly hug so let's try it here with just passing either side and again I'm going to close my eyes and just feel into what this feels like although most say just don't even try to think about this this is not about you being in rational head this is just you passing either side of the body wow just some deepness as you're doing this maybe come back to the heart space again and go with what feels good so I'm just going to kind of cross over without again worrying about the thumbs and just play around and experiment with what this feels like this could be so grounding to just come back into the body especially if we feel heightened you can use this wherever you are really you know you can use this if you get a moment to yourself even at work you can just take a step aside maybe go to you know the bathroom or take a walk outside and just do this do this way and you're feeling triggered I can feel for myself it just connects me back to my body and those nerves that we've got running along our body that tell us we're safe tell us okay that we're okay this is what you're activating okay so when you're ready maybe just dropping the hands back to the lap and again just checking in with how do I feel now you might want to repeat that again and check okay again what feels good what feels you know not so good and this this one may be something that you think oh this is going to be my go-to whereas for other people it might be like actually I don't feel it so much of this one and what really suits me is a different one I'll leave you with that I'll leave you with the butterfly hug and come to this anytime you need