Recovering Our Balance through the Body
To touch is to give life.
— MICHELANGELO
THE EXERCISES IN THIS CHAPTER are designed to help you learn to use body-based (somatic) tools to bring the prefrontal cortex back online and bring you quickly back into your window of tolerance. Once you have recovered your balance, you can use more somatic tools to help you rewire old body-based memories that might derail your resilience now.
When Cortisol Runs Amok, Oxytocin Calms It Down: Activating Oxytocin Release
The hormone oxytocin is the neurotransmitter of the “calm and connect” response and is the brain’s direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol. The fastest way to regulate the body’s stress response and return to a sense of calm is to activate the release of oxytocin in the brain.
When oxytocin is released by the hypothalamus (in the limbic system) into the brain and bloodstream, cortisol levels plummet and blood pressure drops. Oxytocin is the neurochemical basis for the felt sense of safety and trust, of connection and belonging. When we know how to activate the release of oxytocin, we can quickly return to our window of tolerance and feel reassured that “everything is okay; everything is going to be okay.”
Stephen Johnson, in his book Mind Wide Open, offers a dramatic story about the power of oxytocin to keep someone calm and in their window of tolerance. Stephen’s wife had given birth to their son just two days before the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. From their apartment in downtown Manhattan that morning, Stephen could see debris and ash floating past the living-room window. While he was pacing the floor, half-crazed with anxiety, his wife was calmly nursing their son in the rocking chair. Childbirth and breastfeeding activate oxytocin release, generating a feeling of devotion between the mother and the newborn and a sense of blissful contentment. Stephen’s wife was protected from the anxiety Stephen was experiencing by the oxytocin coursing through her system.
Oxytocin is a powerful helper in the process of maintaining equanimity and can be thought of as the neurochemical foundation of resilience. Researchers have demonstrated that a single exposure to oxytocin can create a lifelong change in the brain. The exercises below offer ways to intentionally activate the release of this neurochemical balm.
Skill 1: Activating the Release of Oxytocin through Touch
In a documentary film about Mother Teresa, I saw a two-minute segment of one of her nuns in a hospital in Beirut holding an eight-month-old baby who had been injured by mortar fire. He was screaming and thrashing about, his eyes darting here and there in pain and terror.
The nun was massaging his chest, cooing and calling to him until his eyes locked on hers. She continued gazing at him, massaging his heart, soothing him with her voice. In less than one minute his body relaxed; he calmed down and steadied his gaze on hers. He was still injured, but he was calm.
The fast way to release oxytocin and mitigate stress, even extreme stress, is through safe touch and warmth in a soothing relationship. Any warm, loving touch — hugs, snuggles, holding hands, partner dancing, cuddles with a pet, massage, or body work — can trigger the release of oxytocin and bring the body back into a state of calm. Even our own touch, as a reminder of the touch of others, can have this result.
Exercise 1a: Activating the Release of Oxytocin through a Head Rub
One fun way to trigger oxytocin release is a gentle, two-minute head rub. You can massage your own head, of course, and you can easily practice this exercise with a partner, friend, or coworker, sensual without being sexual. Use your fingers to gently massage the scalp, forehead, nose, jaws, and ears. The touch, warmth, and movement release the oxytocin in your brain, lowering your blood pressure and calming your racing thoughts. With a few moments’ respite from stress and pressure, you are primed to cope more resiliently with the next stressor.
Exercise 1b: Activating the Release of Oxytocin through Massaging the Vagus Nerve
The vagus nerve, loaded with oxytocin receptors, resides in the brain stem. You can easily locate that region by placing your fingers at the back of your skull where the top of your neck nestles into the skull. A gentle massage to that part of the neck (you can easily do this yourself ) can be a potent trigger for the release of oxytocin, increasing feelings of goodness and well-being throughout the day.
Exercise 1c: Activating the Release of Oxytocin through Hugs
Stan Tatkin at UCLA has found that when people feel safe with each other, a twenty-second, full-body hug is enough to release oxytocin in both men and women. Most of us don’t feel comfortable with a full-body hug with anyone except a partner, immediate family, or closest friends. We do the A-frame hug of arms around the shoulders at best. The closeness of a full-body hug maximizes the effectiveness, so exchange a full-body hug with somebody you’re comfortable with as often as you can. Twenty seconds is about three long, deep breaths, easy for you and your hug-ee to time on your own. Try changing head positions with each breath.
All of these exercises prime your brain to release oxytocin before a flood of excess cortisol knocks your prefrontal cortex out of commission. Safe touching with loved ones is the best possible antidote to stress and a great buffer against trauma.
Skill 2: Activating the Release of Oxytocin through Loving Connection
We may not always have someone around to give us a hug when we need it most. Fortunately, we are learning from neuroscience that we can also activate the release of oxytocin, calm down our stress response, and return to our window of tolerance by connecting or remembering connections with others. Feeling safe and loved in turn activates the release of oxytocin in the brain. We can intentionally change our neurochemistry to change our physiological state.
The earliest survival response to fear is to connect — in John Bowlby’s words, to “seek physical proximity to a caregiver in times of perceived threat or danger.” We can regulate our fear response by immediately turning to others for help in regulating our distress. When Samantha’s mom calmed her down after Barney’s over-exuberant doggy greeting, the regulating effect of oxytocin was at work. Even calling, emailing, or texting someone who is a touchstone of safety, asking for a response, can release the oxytocin if we are securely attached enough to that person.
We can give our brains baths of oxytocin whenever we are with someone we truly love and who truly loves us. Neuroscientists have demonstrated many times that even remembering or imagining someone we love, by whom we feel loved, is enough to release small but regular doses of oxytocin. This effect can come from feeling “held” by a spiritual figure or religious deity as well. When the oxytocin is flowing throughout our system, when we again feel safe in our body and in our world, we can once again think clearly and respond wisely.
As Dan Goleman says in Social Intelligence, “Repeated exposures to the people with whom we feel the closest social bonds can condition the release of oxytocin, so that merely being in their presence, or even just thinking about them, may trigger in us a pleasant dose of the good feelings that this molecule bestows. Close, positive, long-term relationships may offer us a relatively steady source of oxytocin release; every hug, friendly touch, and affectionate moment may prime this neurochemical balm a bit. Small wonder office cubicles are papered with photos of loved ones.”
Exercise 2: Activating the Release of Oxytocin through Hand on the Heart
We come into the steady calm of our window of tolerance by experiencing moments of feeling safe, loved, and cherished and letting those moments register in our body and encode new circuitry in our brain. This exercise offers a way to evoke those feelings.
1. Begin by placing your hand on your heart, feeling the warmth of your own touch. Breathe gently and deeply into your heart center, taking in a sense of calm, peace, goodness, safety, trust, acceptance, and ease. You may elaborate these feelings as you wish. Breathe in a sense of contentment, well-being, kindness for yourself, gratitude for others, self-care, and self-love.
2. Once that’s steady, call to mind a moment of being with someone who loves you unconditionally, someone you feel completely safe with. This may, of course, be a partner, child, or parent; but if the dynamics of those relationships are complicated and the emotions mixed, you may choose any true other to your true self: a dear friend, a trusted teacher, a close colleague or neighbor, a therapist, your grandmother, a spiritual figure like Jesus or the Dalai Lama, or your wiser self. Pets are also great for this exercise.
3. As you remember feeling safe and loved with this person or pet, see if you can sense in your body the positive feelings and sensations associated with that memory. Really savor a feeling of warmth, safety, trust, and love in your body.
4. When that feeling is steady, let go of the image and simply bathe in the feeling itself for thirty seconds. Savor the rich nurturing of this feeling; let it really soak in.
You can do the first part of this exercise — quickly placing your hand on your heart — thirty times a day if you need to: when you hear bad news on the phone, when you’re about to open an envelope from the IRS, when you’re stuck in gridlock, when you realize you just left your laptop on the bus, when you see the disappointment in your son’s face after telling him you can’t take him to the baseball game tonight after all.
You can incorporate the second part of the exercise — feeling loved and cherished — at least a dozen times a day: before you get out of bed, over your first cup of coffee, before a serious conversation with a parent or a boss, regrouping after a potential contract or romance falls through.
A variation of this exercise comes from the Buddhist meditation teachers and authors James Baraz and Tara Brach: place your hand on your own cheek and say gently, “Oh, sweetheart!” The touch and kind intention of yourself toward yourself will also release oxytocin.
I teach couples to practice this exercise any time things feel calm and loving between them. (One couple did it every time they passed each other in the hallway.) By practicing it when things are going well, you can wire in a new coping strategy that can then be brought into play any time your old coping strategies flare into a fight (survival response) or bring you to the precipice of one.
The Neuroscience of Activating Oxytocin through Hand on the Heart
Breathing deeply, gently, and fully activates the calming branch of our autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic branch. The parasympathetic modulates the body-brain’s fight-flight-freeze response when we feel threatened or agitated, helping to keep us in our window of tolerance. Breathing, or pranayama, has been a core practice in yoga and meditation to relax the body and steady the mind for over 3,500 years.
Breathing positive emotions into the heart center steadies the heart rate, restoring the equilibrium of the body so that we can remain present and engaged. Neural pathways from the heart to the brain signal the brain directly to release the oxytocin, which evokes a sense of safe connection with others; the oxytocin immediately reduces our stress.
In evoking a memory or image of feeling loved and cherished, we activate the prefrontal cortex, which triggers the hippocampus to search for explicit memories of moments when we have been held, soothed, protected, encouraged, believed in, times when we have reached out for help and received comfort and support. In chapter 5, I tell the story of the calming effect of using an imaginary circle of friends to alleviate my anxiety during eye surgery. Thinking of my friends caused the release of oxytocin in my brain; the calm caused by the release of oxytocin lasted through the entire surgery. That event in turn has become a memory I can use to soothe my anxiety in any new situation.
Through safety and trust in connection, we come back into our window of tolerance. From there, with our higher, thinking brain calm and alert, we can mobilize quickly, act skillfully, and take care of business.
Other Body-Based Ways to Return to the Window of Tolerance
Besides activating the release of oxytocin, there are other, slower-acting tools that help you to return to your window of tolerance: body-based tools that “remind” the prefrontal cortex how to come home to this state of calm and reinforce our steadiness there. Although these are somatic exercises, your higher brain has a role to play, too: a sense of mindful awareness and compassionate acceptance will make the exercises easier and more effective.
Skill 3: Somatic Resourcing through Breathing
The autonomic nervous system regulates our heart rate, our rhythm of breathing, and our digestive processes without any conscious processing whatsoever — thank goodness. But we can consciously use our breathing to activate the parasympathetic branch of the ANS. We do this in meditation and yoga when we breathe deeply to calm the body and the mind. We can consciously affect our heart function: researchers have found that when we breathe a sense of positive emotions — goodness, safety — into the heart, the heart rate not only slows down but comes into a stable and coherent rhythm that reliably supports resilience.
When we intentionally slow down and deepen our breathing, we are activating the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system in a positive way. We are conditioning the brain to calm down and return to our window of tolerance. Breathing slowly and deeply can deescalate a full-blown panic attack in a matter of minutes. Doing it throughout the day helps us establish calm rather than stress as our new baseline.
Exercise 3a: Deep Breathing to Relax the Body
1. Lie comfortably on your bed or on the floor, closing your eyes if you wish. Take a moment to come into a sense of presence, being here, in this moment, in this body. Notice the sensations of your head, your back, your pelvis, your legs, and your heels touching the bed or floor, feeling the groundedness of the earth itself supporting you. Place one hand on your heart, the other hand on your belly. You can also place a small pillow under your back behind your heart center, corresponding to the hand on your heart in front. Awareness of the space in your torso between the pillow and your heart can evoke the sensations of ease and well-being.
2. Notice the sensations and movement of your breath filling your belly as you inhale, rising through your lungs and chest to your throat and nose, then releasing through your throat, chest, and belly as you exhale. (Your heart actually rests on your diaphragm, so these long deep breaths give a gentle massage to the base of your heart as well.)
3. Notice the pauses between inhaling and exhaling. Allow your breath to expand, filling every part of your body, moving into your shoulders, arms, and hands, your sacrum, your legs, your feet. (When you focus the awareness of your breathing on a particular area of your body, you can consciously release tension in parts of your body that have been tightened by implicit memories of stress or trauma.) Become aware of your entire body breathing.
Over time, this exercise conditions a new, more relaxed pattern of breathing you can use in any posture — sitting, standing, and walking as well as lying down. As you bring a compassionate awareness to your breathing, notice whether you experience a spontaneous welling up of gratitude for simply being alive as well.
Exercise 3b: Breathing to Create Resonant Connection
Here’s another simple exercise that uses breathing and touch to create a resonant connection between you and another person that can relax your reactivity and help you return to your window of tolerance. After two to three minutes you and your partner can switch roles.
1. Have your partner lie down comfortably on the floor with eyes closed. Sit comfortably on the floor nearby. Come into a sense of presence, of being with this person, here and now. Place one hand on his hand or forearm, the other hand on the crown of his head. Your partner breathes slowly, deeply. Begin to synchronize your breathing with his breathing. Simply breathe together for two to three minutes, noticing the life force of the breath entering and leaving his body and yours. You are strengthening the capacities of your resonance circuit and dropping into a shared equilibrium, an equanimity for two.
2. A variation of this exercise is to contemplate the reality that the molecules of air entering and leaving your lungs are the same molecules of air entering and leaving your partner’s lungs, and indeed, the same molecules of air entering and leaving the lungs of anyone in the same room, in the same car or bus or plane, in the same office or store or theater or world. To open up to this kind of intimacy with beings all over the planet can radically expand our minds and open our hearts, creating a larger perspective and relaxing our bodies into the window of tolerance.
Skill 4: Using Somatic Resources to Rewire Old Somatic Memories
The body stores somatic memories of previous stress and trauma: the tension in our arms if we have had to protect ourselves from intrusion; a clenching in our fists or jaw from when we wanted to strike out or speak out in self-protection but learned it wasn’t safe to do so; the collapse in our gut when we have been shamed or humiliated. We can use the exercises below to release these implicit memories, without even needing to bring them to conscious awareness to do this reconditioning. These somatic exercises help us return to and stay in our window of tolerance and rewire old patterns held in the body that might push us out of that window of tolerance. From our regained equanimity, we can choose how we want to consciously address any past stress and trauma as well as current stressful situations.
Exercise 4a: Rewiring Old Somatic Memories through a Body Scan
This exercise is a simple and reliable way to increase both awareness and compassionate acceptance of whatever you might be experiencing in your body at any given moment.
1. Lie comfortably on your bed or on the floor. Feel the back of your head, your shoulders, your back, your hips, the backs of your legs, and your heels touch the ground. Let your body relax and sink into the ground supporting it.
2. Begin by bringing your awareness to your feet. Say hello to the big toe of your right foot, listening for any aches or pains in the toe, compassionately wishing it a sense of comfort and ease. Say hello to all the toes on your right foot, the arch, the ankle and heel, carefully noticing the sensations in each part of the foot. Do the same thing slowly for every part of your body up through your torso, hands and arms, and every part of your face and head; to each ear, each eye, your nose, all the tender parts of your mouth; to the hair outside of your scalp and to the phenomenal brain inside your scalp that is allowing you to be mindful and compassionate in this moment. As you scan your body, bring a compassionate caring and acceptance to any part of it that needs comfort and ease. You can slow way down, mindfully notice, and send compassionate caring to each knuckle if you have arthritis, or to scars from an old football injury. The body scan is a practice to mindfully, lovingly inhabit all parts of you, to become safely aware of every experience of your entire body.
3. Practice being especially mindful and compassionate toward sensations in the belly, in the heart center, in the throat and jaw, and in the genitals, areas where we can hold unconscious somatic memories of tension, shame, anger, or fear. Use your mindfulness and compassionate acceptance now to hold any distressing sensations or memories. Say hello; listen for aches and pains, physical or psychological, and send care and the intention for comfort and ease to any troubled memories held in the body.
4. End this practice by becoming aware of the energy field of your body as a whole — your whole body breathing, in equanimity, alive, relaxed, and resilient. Creating a larger awareness and acceptance of your body creates a safe setting for working with any somatic memory that arises and then deconditioning or dissolving it.
The Neuroscience of Rewiring Old Somatic Memories through a Body Scan
The anterior cingulate cortex is the brain structure we use to focus attention on anything — in this case, on physical and emotional pain. You may have noticed places in your body that felt tight, rigid, or painful. When we focus our awareness on physical sensations, we are also helping areas that hold emotional pain to relax and release tension. We don’t even have to know the story behind the pain or give it a name: the mindful empathy of the body scan is rewiring the circuitry that holds the pain.
A variation of the body scan is the relaxation-response exercise, popularized by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School and pioneer in mind-body medicine. It takes advantage of the fact that our bodies cannot be anxious and relaxed at the same time. The alternating tension and release of tension in the muscles of our bodies helps bring the entire autonomic nervous system back into the window of tolerance. Allow seven to ten minutes for this exercise. It can be done sitting (great for a long bus or train commute) or lying down. Many people eventually become so relaxed doing this exercise that they fall asleep before completing it. In time, you will strengthen your capacity to stay in the window of tolerance, both deeply relaxed and fully alert.
Exercise 4b: Rewiring Old Somatic Memories through the Relaxation Response
1. Breathing gently and fully, begin by curling the toes of the right foot, holding that muscle tension for the count of seven. Slowly release the tension as you count to fifteen, breathing gently. Then curl the entire arch of the right foot as though pointing the foot, holding that muscle tension for the count of seven. Gradually release the tension as you count to fifteen. Then flex the foot, toes back toward the leg, holding that muscle tension for the count of seven. Slowly release as you count to fifteen.
2. Continue tensing and relaxing various muscles of the body, progressing through your entire body as you tense and count to seven, then gently release as you count to fifteen. The counting focuses attention, allowing the worries and concerns of the day to fall away. Breathing into each area of the body as you let go of the tension helps that area relax.
3. Tense the lower right leg, and let that go; tense the upper thigh of the right leg, and let that go. Tense the hip and buttocks muscles of the right leg; let them go. Repeat for the left leg. Move through the torso, tensing and relaxing parts of the chest and belly in turn. Tense the fingers of the right hand into a fist, then relax them; tense the forearm, the upper arm, the shoulder, then relax; repeat for the left hand and arm. Tense the muscles of the back, the neck, the face, and release. You can also reverse the exercise, starting at the head and working down to the feet.
4. End the session by blowing air through your fluttering lips — blowing a nice raspberry. This is yet another way to activate the PNS (who knew?). Savor the sensations of relaxation as you breathe gently. Rest one full minute — or longer — in this relaxed state.
Exercise 4c: Moving the Body to Rewire Difficult Emotions
This is a simple experiential exercise I learned from the psychologist Natalie Rogers to mindfully and compassionately use varying body positions to rewire (recondition) difficult emotional and mental states.
1. Identify an afflictive state that you would like to explore, process, and shift. It could be an emotion like fear, anger, or sadness; it could be a mental state like confusion or agitation. Come into awareness of the body sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts of this state.
2. Allow your body to lead you and come into a body posture that embodies this state. Stay in this posture for thirty seconds. Don’t do a lot of thinking or figuring out here: just let your body express what you are feeling, or the state of thinking you are working on. For example, you might allow your body to assume the posture of collapse: perhaps bending over, curling shoulders inward, hiding your face in your hands. Feel your way into your body’s experience of this posture.
3. Now, without thinking, without going to your head at all or putting anything into words, allow your body to lead you into a posture that is the opposite of this state. Remain comfortably in this second posture for thirty seconds. For example, your body might select a posture opposite to collapse that involves standing tall, spine straight, arms outstretched in exuberance. Feel your way into your body’s experience in this posture.
4. Without thinking, return to the first posture, and hold it again for fifteen seconds. Then resume the second posture again and hold it for fifteen seconds.
5. Allow your body to find its way into a posture that is midway between the first two. The middle posture may incorporate elements of the other postures, or it may feel entirely new.
6. Take a moment to notice the sensations and feelings in this middle posture. What are you experiencing? Notice any differences between the postures, between the states they embodied. Reflect on your experience. What shifted? What state are you in now?
The first time my client David did this exercise, he began by exploring an embodied sense of depression. “I expected the opposite of my feeling of depression would be joy, or something that felt happier. But it wasn’t. It was reverence. I never would have thought of that; I never expected that. But it felt right somehow.” David’s experience of reverence helped him be more flexible and resilient in coping with his down moods. From this bodily experience of moving through depression to reverence, he also knew that he could choose to rewire his mental state.
The Neuroscience of Moving the Body to Rewire Afflictive Emotions
The body has its own wisdom and knows how it needs to move to “correct” something. You use this somatic wisdom intuitively when you take a break from working too long at your desk or from weeding too long in your garden and get up and stretch or go for a brisk walk around the block. We can access this intuitive body wisdom by letting the body move first, without thinking, and then reflecting on what the movement might mean. This exercise is a prime example of how we can use our body’s wisdom to rewire our brains from the bottom up.
Skill 5: Rewiring Negative Body Memories
Part of what determines whether we are able to choose adaptive strategies in a moment of threat, like activating the release of oxytocin, or fall into default patterns of reactivity, with cortisol coursing through the body, is the implicitly encoded patterns of response we have learned. Our resilience can be thrown off when old, trauma-based somatic memories push us out of our window of tolerance, sometimes without our even knowing what has happened or why we’re suddenly so reactive.
My client Andrea created her own somatic resource to recondition her survival response to problems involving technology. She had already done a lot of work on early childhood traumas and had come to a fairly strong place of equanimity. And yet she could still have a sudden startle response when a document she was working on at the computer suddenly disappeared into cyberspace, or her plane reservation disappeared from the check-in screen at the airport. The revving up of Andrea’s nervous system and the subsequent cursing at the computer — not pretty, not equanimous, not useful — was creating a technophobia that was derailing her resilience in coping with modern life.
We began by searching Andrea’s explicit memory for an early, frightening experience involving machines or appliances. One memory came readily to Andrea’s mind: her family had moved to a new home when she was three and a half. The living room was empty except for a radio. Andrea thought she must have accidentally turned the volume on the radio up rather than down, for her dad suddenly came charging into the living room and pulled the plug from the wall. Her mom was in the bedroom on the other side of the living-room wall, not feeling well, and her dad may have feared that the loud music would disturb her. His dramatic reaction had clearly upset Andrea.
We began searching for positive memories related to that event that Andrea could use to recondition any lingering trauma from it. She remembered how she used to stand on her dad’s toes so that the two of them could dance. We speculated that perhaps Andrea had turned up the radio that morning so she and her dad could dance together around the empty living room. The somatic memory of Andrea dancing on her dad’s toes, and the accompanying sense of love, safety, and trust, could evoke the flow of oxytocin that could calm the automatic startle response in her brain to difficulties with technology.
Andrea began practicing lifting up her toes as though she were dancing on her dad’s toes, saying out loud, “Toes up!” and then pairing that physical gesture with the surge of oxytocin from remembering the joy of those moments with her dad. The next time Andrea’s body went into a startle response at the computer, she lifted her toes off the floor, telling herself, “Toes up!” and the reaction instantly stopped, leaving her calm and able to cope. Andrea had found a somatic way to break the pattern.
Exercise 5: Rewiring Negative Body Memories
You can experiment with a very simple form of reconditioning for rewiring those body-based negative memories, based on the technique of somatic experiencing developed by Dr. Peter Levine.
1. Identify a place in your body where you might be holding a somatic memory of a trauma or something that simply feels negative or unpleasant: a churning in the stomach, a tense jaw, a tightening in your back or shoulders. Notice the physical sensations.
2. Now locate a place in your body that is not feeling any distress or trauma at all — maybe your elbow or your big toe. Notice the physical sensations of being in the window of tolerance: feeling calm, relaxed, at ease. If you are currently experiencing the body-based sensations of any trauma, this window might be quite small. Focus attention on that calm, untraumatized place in the body, steadily feeling the sensations there of ease and relaxation.
3. Now switch your attention back and forth between the physical sensations of the place in the body that is not traumatized at all and the physical sensations of the place in the body that is holding the network of the trauma memory. When you switch between awareness of the two different body parts, you are practicing a technique called pendulation (like the pendulum of a clock swinging back and forth). It’s a way for you to recondition a trauma memory through body sensations alone.
The Neuroscience of Rewiring Negative Body Memories
As you focus your attention on the physical sensations in your body, you are lighting up the networks encoding the memory of the experience, a process essential to rewiring it. As in the reconditioning described in chapters 2 and 3, when the sensations of the untraumatized place in the body are stronger than the sensations of the trauma memory, the trauma memory can be rewired. With practice, you can draw on a somatic resource to completely dissolve a trauma memory held in implicit memory in the body.
You have just learned nearly a dozen body-based skills that will help you stay in, or quickly return to, the state of equilibrium in your body-brain so that you can respond to the startles and upsets in your life with greater equanimity and resilience.
• You have learned how to activate the release of oxytocin — through touch and loving connection — to use the brain’s direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol to help you return quickly to your window of tolerance.
• You have learned to use somatic resources like breathing, body scanning, progressive muscle relaxation, and movement to remind the prefrontal cortex how to regulate the body into calm.
• You have learned ways of strengthening the prefrontal cortex to use positive somatic resources to rewire negative experiences held in body memory.
Being able to remain calm in the face of difficulties is one of the five Cs of coping, and it makes it far easier for your brain to learn new strategies of deploying the other four Cs. Somatic resourcing also creates a platform for learning additional skills of somatic intelligence, priming your brain to preempt your reactivity before it even arises, to learn more self-confidence from previous experiences of competence, and to be willing to risk making mistakes and trying something new. As you practice these techniques, they keep rewiring your brain for more resilience.