Practices of Somatic Intelligence
Breath, Touch, Movement, Visualization, Social Engagement
You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
— SWAMI SATCHIDANANDA
We’ve been talking about finding ways to cope skillfully when things go haywire. Our most basic responses to all of life’s challenges and adversities begin in our bodies. So, to strengthen resilience, we begin with body-based tools, our practices of somatic intelligence.
Cast your mind back to high school biology and you may recall learning about the autonomic nervous system, or ANS. Your ANS constantly scans the environment, including your social environment, for cues of safety, danger, or threat to your physical survival or psychological well-being. This scanning and signaling comes from deep in the brain stem and spinal cord. It operates 24/7, even when you are asleep, and always outside of your awareness. Your higher brain can, however, become aware of this signaling. In fact, the oversight of your higher brain is necessary to interpret what the signals mean, based on your experience and conditioning. But while your higher brain is more complex and more comprehensive in its evaluation of what’s happening and what you should do about it, it is also slower at its job. Whereas the body-based ANS responds to a signal in milliseconds, your prefrontal cortex takes more time to respond: a few seconds to many minutes.
You’ve probably learned along the way that the ANS has two branches, the sympathetic branch and the parasympathetic branch. The sympathetic branch revs you up to take immediate action when you feel uneasy or sense danger: the fight-flight response. This rapid, protective reactivity gets your body moving now to tackle or flee from the danger, to confront or flee from a person who seems unsafe or toxic.
Your lower brain tells your body to move before your higher brain is even aware that something has just happened. Your nervous system reacts to keep you alive before your conscious brain can even register that you might be in danger of being dead.
Along the same lines, you’ve probably learned that the parasympathetic branch of the ANS allows you to calm yourself down to “rest and digest” when the danger is over. These two branches operate like the gas and the brakes in a car: activating the sympathetic is stepping on the gas, and activating the parasympathetic is hitting the brakes.
There are many benefits to activating the sympathetic branch (SNS) when there is no danger. It’s what gets us out of bed in the morning, makes us want to get out of bed in the morning, and motivates us to engage with people, explore the world, play, create, and produce. Thanks to the SNS, we create governments; we write symphonies; we design and construct buildings and work to solve the problems of climate change. Positive activation of the SNS, regulated by the prefrontal cortex, is the basis of human civilization as we know it.
Similarly, activating the parasympathetic branch (PNS) when there is no danger allows us to feel centered and grounded, at peace and at ease. Positive activation of the PNS, regulated by the prefrontal cortex, is the basis of personal well-being. This is the feeling you get when you take a nap on the beach, relax in a contemplative stillness, or fall asleep after making love.
It’s when either the SNS or the PNS overactivates in response to a perceived danger or life threat that things can get tricky. A sudden spike of the SNS can rev you up into anger and rage or anxiety, fear, and panic. A sudden over-activation of the PNS can cause you to numb out, shut down, withdraw, or dissociate. That over-revving up or over-shutting down can derail the functioning of your higher brain altogether, at least temporarily. At that point you are reacting solely from your automatic survival responses and whatever conditioned learning has been encoded in your brain’s neural circuitry early in life. This neurobiological response is instant, and it’s potent.
This chapter introduces practices of breath, touch, movement, and visualization to strengthen your somatic intelligence so that you learn to recognize, interpret, and manage the signals sent by your nervous system to your higher brain. You can return to your baseline physiological state of well-being — your range of resilience, your window of tolerance, your equanimity. You are once again calm and relaxed, engaged and alert, coping just fine, humming along. In that state of equilibrium you have the response flexibility you need to interpret the signals coming from stressors in the environment (or even your own internal messages about those stressors, or about yourself in relationship to those stressors), discern additional options, and take resilient, wise action.
These days, rather than having to deal with acute threats to our physical safety, as generations of our ancestors did, modern humans more often face chronic threats to our psychological safety and well-being. Through these practices you’ll also learn to strengthen the social engagement system in your brain (also unconscious) to regulate your nervous system specifically in response to those threats.
Stuck in “On” or “Off” Mode
A range of stressors can cause the SNS to get stuck in the “on” mode: relentless pressures at work; constant complaints and criticisms by people from whom you take your cues of self-worth — your partner, your boss, even your children; falling short in achieving goals, in comparison to others or to your own expectations. You rev up and don’t take a break, don’t get a break; you are constantly anxious, vigilant, and stressed and can’t recover the sense of safety and calm that is essential to your well-being.
Other circumstances can cause the PNS to get stuck in the “off” mode: relentless boredom at work, too many losses or disconnections in too short a time, too much shaming and blaming, criticism and rejection — or experiences you perceive that way. Rather than showing up to engage and deal with the situation, you can fall into dissociation, denial, passivity, and despair; you can collapse into a state of learned helplessness or depression, unable to find the energy or motivation to try and try again. This response is part of our neurobiological legacy from millions of years of our ancestors playing dead so the lion wouldn’t eat them, and hundreds of thousands of years of evolving in social groups, withdrawing from conflict or appeasing others so that the tribe wouldn’t throw them out.
Just twenty years ago, the neurophysiologist Stephen Porges discovered a third branch of the ANS, the ventral vagus pathway, which he calls the social vagus: a neural pathway connecting the body and the brainstem, then connecting with nerves in the neck, throat, eyes, and ears. This pathway, communicating between the face and the heart, creates an unconscious neuroception of safety when you are with safe others. Human beings are social beings, born and raised in families, kinship groups, and communities. The brain has evolved to automatically reach out and connect with others to seek reassurance when its sense of safety and well-being has been disrupted. The social engagement system can perceive, even unconsciously, signals like “It’s okay,” “False alarm,” “You’re fine,” or “You’re safe.” This is the neurobiological basis of secure attachment and an inner sense of safety and calm. It’s also the neural foundation that enables us to take risks when necessary.
As Porges’s collaborator Deb Dana says in A Beginner’s Guide to Polyvagal Theory,
In this [ventral vagal] state our heart rate is regulated, our breath is full, we take in the faces of friends, we can tune into conversations and tune out distracting noises. We see the “big picture” and connect to the world and the people in it. [You can experience yourself] as happy, active, interested and the world as safe, fun, and peaceful. This state includes being organized, following through with plans, taking care of yourself, taking time to play, doing things with others, feeling productive at work, a general feeling of regulation and a sense of management. We have the ability to acknowledge distress and explore options, to reach out for support and have organized responses.
Using your social engagement system to generate an inner sense of safety doesn’t necessarily mean circumstances are safe — you may still be facing the threat of foreclosure on a house or your back going out just from bending over to tie your shoe, and you need to be resilient in coping with those threats — but there’s an inner neuroception of calm and equilibrium.
When the ventral vagus pathway is fully mature and functioning well, it acts as a “brake” to modulate the surges of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, preventing you from spiraling upward into panic or down into the swamp of withdrawal. Your body may react, but your brain can maintain a sense of equilibrium and recover from a wobble fairly quickly. You trust yourself enough to say, “I’ve been through worse before; I can learn to deal with this now.” You trust other people around you as resources: you return to calm because they are calm; you trust yourself to cope because they trust your capacities to cope.
The exercises in this chapter are designed to help you learn to use the many tools of your body-based somatic intelligence — which include breath, touch, movement, visualization, and social engagement — to return to your natural physiological equilibrium. Even in the face of repeated challenges, upheavals, losses, and traumas, when it can seem impossible to catch even a moment of equanimity, these tools can help you return to your range of resilience and prime the neuroplasticity of your brain for learning and coping. Here’s an illustration of this return to equilibrium:
One Friday afternoon I picked up my five-year-old goddaughter, Emma, from school. I was carrying her in my arms to the car when I tripped on a crack in the sidewalk. I recovered my balance and didn’t fall. Neither Emma nor I were hurt. On we went; business as usual. The next day I shared the incident with my yoga teacher, Ada, who said, “See, yoga isn’t just for fitness. It’s for life.”
That’s the point of all of these practices. Resilience training is not just a set of skills; it creates habits for life. You may trip but save yourself from falling. Even if you do fall, you can get up again. And even if you fall and break something and you can’t get up again for a while — or ever — you can muster the energy, skills, and resources to recover your sense of well-being.
New Conditioning
These practices will help you respond to challenges with more resilience and flexibility. Even when things are going haywire, you’ll be able to consciously create new choice points in your brain that enable you to manage your responses more flexibly.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
These tools strengthen existing neural pathways that maintain a stable range of resilience, where you don’t wobble very much. You can avoid being thrown off balance by an unexpected or unwelcome situation, or you can recover your balance quickly and return to your natural baseline of equanimity. You can more easily keep calm and carry on. One of the most fundamental tools is paying attention to your breathing.
Slow breathing increases vagal activation and parasympathetic tone, leading to better physical and psychological well-being. Slow, deep breathing can effectively inhibit distress. Slowing and deepening the breathing during moments of distress brings a return of ventral vagal control, and as our autonomic state changes, so can our story.
— DEB DANA, Rhythms of Regulation
You breathe all the time. To breathe is to be alive. Every inhalation activates the sympathetic branch of your nervous system just a little bit (or a lot, when you overreact to something and hyperventilate). Every exhalation activates the parasympathetic branch just a little bit (or a lot, when you feel scared to death and faint). You can learn to use this rhythm of breathing in and breathing out (longer exhalations) to cultivate more calm in the body and access a deeper sense of well-being.
EXERCISE 2-1: Mini Breath Meditation
1. Breathe naturally, gently, for five to ten breaths. Pay attention to the sensations of breathing in (notice the cool air in your nostrils or throat and the gentle expansion of your belly and chest) and breathing out (notice warmer air flowing out and the relaxation of your belly and chest). Remember the practical power of “little and often.” Pause and repeat this practice many times a day.
2. If you wish, you can say these phrases from the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh silently to yourself as you breathe: “Breathing in, I am home. Breathing out, I smile.”
3. As you inhale, you can imagine “coming home” to yourself, saying, “I am here. I am home.” As you exhale, imagine connecting safely with the world outside yourself, coming into ease and harmony with others. Imagine breathing in to the word me, breathing out to the word we. Repeat this rhythm for a full minute.
This exercise can help you relax into a comforting sense of well-being and connection, deepening the ease or calm in your body and in your mind. You may even notice a sense of safety in the moment: “Nothing is happening in this moment to undo my sense of well-being.” Relax into that ease and safety, even if it’s just for this moment.
EXERCISE 2-2: Affectionate Breathing
Here you use kind awareness of your breathing to strengthen a sense of safety and calm in your body and your mind.
1. Find a comfortable position in which your body is supported and you don’t need to make an effort to remain in that position. Close your eyes if you wish, or allow your eyes to soften their gaze. Come into a sense of presence, relaxing in your body. Take a few slow, easy breaths to release any unnecessary tension.
2. Focus your awareness on your breathing, noticing where you perceive the breath most easily — perhaps through your nostrils, through your throat, or through the rise and fall of your belly. Let yourself notice the simple sensations of breathing, just feeling your breath for a while.
3. See if you can orient toward yourself and your breathing with openness, curiosity, and care. If you notice any discomfort in your mind or body, see if you can simply be with that discomfort, soften toward it, accepting that this is so in this moment. Bring a sense of kindness toward yourself.
4. Notice how you don’t have to remember to breathe. Your body breathes for you. Your body is breathing you.
5. See if you can feel your whole body breathing. Notice how your breathing expands into your entire body and nourishes every cell in your body.
6. Give yourself over to the breath. Let yourself become the breath. Rest in the ease of this moment for a minute or two.
7. Perhaps allow a moment of appreciation or gratitude for the breath that sustains your life in every moment.
8. Finally, release your awareness of your breathing. Allow everything that comes to awareness to be just as it is, for now. When you’re ready, open your eyes.
This exercise can help you appreciate your own intentions and wise effort in creating or deepening a genuine sense of ease and equilibrium. Know that you are learning a tool that will help you reliably regulate the revving up and shutting down of your nervous system.
A gentle focus on the physicality of your body can ground your awareness in the safety of the present moment. Awareness of subtle movement in your body wakes up your brain and primes its neuroplasticity for curiosity and learning.
EXERCISE 2-3: Focusing on the Soles of the Feet
1. Stand up and focus your attention on the soles of your feet contacting the floor or ground. (Remove your shoes if you wish.) Notice the sensations in your feet as you feel the floor or ground.
2. Rock back and forth a little, and side to side. Notice any changes or shifts in sensation. Make little circles with your knees, feeling the changes of sensation in the soles of your feet.
3. When your mind wanders, simply focus your attention on the soles of your feet again.
4. Begin to lift one foot up and place it back down; lift the other foot up and place it back down. Notice how the sensations in your feet change as you lift each foot and return it to the ground while standing in place. Notice any sensations you feel in the rest of your body as you do this.
5. Begin to walk slowly, step by step, noticing the changing sensations in the soles of your feet. Notice the sensation of lifting each foot, stepping forward, and then placing the foot on the floor. Walk for thirty or sixty seconds (or longer if you wish, of course).
6. Return to standing. While standing still, notice the sensations in your feet, in your body now.
7. Recognize how the small surface area of your feet supports your entire body. Perhaps allow a moment of appreciation or gratitude for the amazing work of your feet, carrying you through your life, all day long.
You can apply this exercise while standing in line at the grocery store (you will have to get creative about step 5), or anywhere, to come into a sense of presence, calm, and safety in the moment. Even the subtle movements of this exercise will help reset your nervous system.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
We experience wobbles every day. Even if our inner base is stable, some distress or difficulty, even a minor crisis or major catastrophe, can cause us to lose our footing so that our resilience is derailed for a short time, and sometimes longer.
The following body-based exercises strengthen the social engagement system that reassures your nervous system, “You’re fine; you’re okay; everything will be okay,” even when things don’t look okay at all. They will help you recover your resilience and find the resources to try again.
According to Dacher Keltner, founder of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the fastest way to restore ease and calm to your nervous system is through warm, safe touch. This is the “primary language of compassion, love, and gratitude, the central medium in which the goodness of one individual can spread to another.” Warm, safe touch activates the release of oxytocin, the hormone of safety and trust, your brain’s direct and immediate antidote to the stress hormone cortisol.
A warm hug may not be a new practice for you, but sometimes we forget its power to soothe our jangled nerves.
1. Identify people or pets in your life that you would feel comfortable hugging or asking for a hug. (I have borrowed my neighbor’s dog on more than one occasion.)
2. Exchange a twenty-second, full-bodied hug with this person or pet. Twenty seconds (about three breaths) is enough to release the oxytocin in both hug-ees when there is a sense of safety and trust. It creates a self-reinforcing loop of bonding and belonging for each person.
3. Repeat, repeat, repeat with as many different people and pets as you feel comfortable hugging, as many times a day as you remember to.
Hugs are a “little and often” practice par excellence for your nervous system. With each hug, you’ll become more relaxed and engaged, and you’ll stay more relaxed and engaged as you move through your day. You are strengthening the neural pathways of your social engagement system in one of the most enjoyable ways possible.
Neural cells are part of the structure of your heart. Warm, safe touch activates those neurons; your body feels the comforting energy of your social engagement system.
EXERCISE 2-5: Energize Your Heart Center
1. Ask someone you feel safe with to sit beside you.
2. Place your hand on your heart. As you do so, ask the other person to gently place their hand on the middle of your back, on a level with your hand on the front of your body. You can also experience the energy shift of this exercise by remembering the feeling of connection with another as you lean your back into a cushion while sitting on a firm couch or chair.
3. Breathe gently in and out. Feel the sense of stable energy in the center of your torso. Relax into the ease and comfort of an active social engagement system.
4. After a minute or two, you can switch roles with your partner if you wish.
The social engagement system works nonverbally. The warm, safe touch communicates safety, returning the nervous system to calm, even without words.
This tool is powerful enough to calm down a panic attack in less than a minute.
1. Place your hand on your heart. Breathe gently, softly, and deeply into the area of your heart. If you wish, breathe in a sense of ease or safety or goodness into this heart center.
2. Remember one moment, just one moment, when you felt safe, loved, and cherished by another human being. Don’t try to recall the entire relationship, just one moment. This could be a partner, a child, a friend, a therapist, or a teacher; it could be a spiritual figure. (Remembering a loving moment with a pet can work very well, too.)
3. As you remember this moment of feeling safe, loved, and cherished, let yourself experience the feelings of that moment. Let the sensations wash through your body. Let yourself stay with these feelings for twenty to thirty seconds. Notice any deepening in a visceral sense of ease and safety.
4. Repeat this practice many times a day at first, to strengthen the neural circuitry that remembers this pattern. Then you can repeat it any time you need to, any time at all.
Remembering a moment of feeling safe, loved, and cherished by another person or pet activates the social vagus, reassuring you that indeed you are safe, you belong, and you are welcomed. Your blood pressure decreases, and your heart rate stabilizes. You return to the sense of safety that comes from a feeling of connection and belonging with safe others, even when you are alone.
Of course, you can experience this bonding and belonging, this “calm and connect” feeling, whenever you are with people you trust and feel safe with. You can also activate the release of oxytocin whenever you remember or imagine such moments. I suggest you practice this exercise whenever you experience the first signal of a startle or an upset. With practice, it will enable you to back out of a difficult emotional reaction before it hijacks you. At a minimum, practice it five times a day for a full week to train your brain in this new response to any difficult moment. It’s portable equilibrium.
EXERCISE 2-7: Savor a Moment of Connection
Note: This exercise works extremely well even in the midst of overwhelming trouble or tragedy.
1. Identify a trusted friend (or therapist). Sit face to face with this person, in comfortable physical proximity. Smile at each other in an open, friendly way, maintaining eye contact.
2. Feel a sense of care and concern for the welfare of the other person, and let your facial expressions convey that. Let yourself sense that this person cares for your well-being too; observe this caring in their facial expressions.
3. Savor the sense of relaxation in the connection. Focus on the experience for thirty seconds, and let the feelings deepen. Notice the felt sense of relaxation in your body.
Savoring connection is a neural exercise, using the ventral vagus pathway, that generates a resource of safety and thus resilience in your brain. Savoring gives your brain the time it needs to transform the positive experience into positive feelings.
Sometimes life whacks you really hard. “Fall down seven times, get up eight” is an inspiring Japanese proverb, but it’s not always easy to pick yourself up from a trauma, a series of traumas, or a lifetime of traumas. When you’ve been dumped out of the boat and need help climbing back in, it’s especially important to strengthen and use your social engagement system to find refuges and resources in safe connections with other people.
EXERCISE 2-8: Equanimity for Two
Each breath cycle gently exercises the rhythm of regulation of your social vagus. Breathing in, activating the SNS, supports social engagement and connection; breathing out, activating the PNS, evokes a sense of well-being. In this exercise, you synchronize your breathing with another person’s to add interconnection to the practice.
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.
2. Place one hand on your partner’s hand or forearm, the other hand on the crown of their head. Your partner breathes slowly and deeply.
3. Begin to synchronize your breathing with their breathing. Simply breathe together for two to three minutes, noticing the life force of the breath entering and leaving their body and yours.
4. After two to three minutes, you and your partner can switch roles.
Repeated use strengthens your social engagement system. You can more easily drop into a shared equilibrium, an equanimity for two.
You gain stability and strength when you recognize your kinship with other human beings who are in the same boat you are — or who have been dumped out of the same boat you have. You realize the shared humanity of your situation. “I’m not the only one. I’m not alone.”
EXERCISE 2-9: Join or Start a Support Group
1. Find a support group in your area for people who have experienced the same trauma as you have, or a similar trauma — a support group for people with cancer, for Alzheimer’s caregivers, or for parents who have lost a child to violence, illness, or natural disaster. You gain support, encouragement, and role modeling from people who know what you’re going through without your having to say anything, justify anything, or explain anything. These are people who, in the words of Brené Brown, have “earned the right to hear your story.” Being with safe others strengthens everyone’s social vagus; you are helping regulate one another’s emotions even as you are supporting one another.
2. If no such group exists in your local area, consider starting one. The eighty-four-year-old mother of a friend of mine moved into a senior facility after she lost her husband of sixty-two years. She started a group there for recent widows in a similar situation. Sharing stories and offering support eased an otherwise painful transition.
Decades of behavioral science research confirm the efficacy of support groups. However, reaching out to a larger number of people is a larger-scale experience of new conditioning. Apply the little-and-often principle even here. To find a suitable group, ask friends for recommendations. Try the experience once to see if it works for you. You might take a friend with you the first time you meet with a new group. If it does work for you, please continue. If not, try sharing your experiences with just one other person for now.
Reconditioning
Any time you move your body and shift your posture, you shift your physiology. Any time you shift your physiology, you shift the activity and state of your autonomic nervous system. You can experience this shift when you place and hold a pencil between your nose and your upper lip (which requires your facial muscles to frown a little) and then place the pencil between your teeth (which requires your muscles to smile). Notice the felt sense of the forced frown and the forced smile; notice the shift between the two. With practice, you can learn to notice the shift in your inner state from this shift in your physiology. (Thank you, Dan Siegel, for teaching me this practice.) You can use this kind of reconditioning — a juxtaposition of negative and positive physical movement — to return to the physiological base of your resilience. In the process, you may even rewire your experiences of your physical states.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
The exercises below are simple tools with big effects. Practice them little and often to create the new pathways in your brain.
EXERCISE 2-10: Savor a Moment of Relief
Let your body sigh: exhale deeply, releasing tension from your body. A deep sigh (or several sighs) is the body’s natural way to reset the nervous system. You can practice responding to any moment of tension, even a frightening one, with a deliberate sigh to shift your physiology into a relieved and more relaxed state.
The pairing of tense and relaxed states, when the relaxed state is stronger, strengthens the “muscle” of your vagal brake and allows more calm, even in tense moments.
EXERCISE 2-11: Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Because you cannot activate the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of your nervous system at the same time, your body cannot be simultaneously anxious and relaxed. Progressive muscle relaxation activates the parasympathetic branch and helps you relax your entire body, step by step. These instructions work from foot to head, but you can also practice the sequence from head to foot. The entire exercise takes about seven to ten minutes and can be done lying down or sitting.
1. Begin by curling the toes of your right foot, holding that tensed position for a count of seven. Then relax that tension and uncurl the toes as you count to fifteen. Then curl the arch of your right foot as though pointing your foot, holding that tensed position for a count of seven. Relax and let go of tensing the foot as you count to fifteen. Then flex your foot, raising the toes back toward your shin, holding that tensed position for a count of seven. Relax and untense the toes as you count to fifteen.
Counting to seven while tensing a part of your body and to fifteen while relaxing it ensures that you are relaxing more than tensing. That’s part of the reconditioning. The counting also keeps your brain from wandering into the worry and rumination tendencies of the default network. When you breathe in on the tensing and breathe out on the relaxing you are activating the parasympathetic branch more than the sympathetic, bringing your body to more calm.
2. Continue tensing and relaxing various parts of your body, breathing in and counting to seven as you tense, breathing out and counting to fifteen as you let go and relax. Tense and relax your right calf, your right thigh, your right hip and buttock. Then tense and relax your left toes, your left foot, your left calf, your left thigh, and your left hip and buttock. Tense and relax your torso, your pelvis area, your belly, the muscles around your ribs and your spine. Tense and relax the fingers of each of your hands, the palms of your hands, your wrists, your forearms, your elbows, your upper arms, your shoulders and neck. Then tense and relax all your facial muscles in turn — jaw, throat, lips, cheeks, ears, eyes, nose, forehead.
3. End the session with another deep sigh; rest a full minute in the relaxed state.
Try practicing this tool at night: it’s excellent for helping you get to sleep.
EXERCISE 2-12: Yoga — Child’s Pose
One of the asanas, or poses, most appreciated by yoga practitioners for rest and restoration is balasana, or child’s pose. After a good forty-five- to ninety-minute session of leading the body through many different poses and accompanying breath work, the practitioner gets to rest and integrate all of that physical activity into a calm, coherent resting state, nourishing the mind as well as relaxing the body. But you can use this pose to consciously relax your mind and body even if you never go to yoga class.
1. Stand on a yoga mat, carpet, or other padded surface.
2. Lower yourself to all fours, with your hands and knees supporting your body in a “table” position.
3. Sit back. Stretch your derriere back toward your feet. Rest your butt on your heels (or on a cushion between your butt and heels, if that is more comfortable). Your arms will naturally stretch out in front of you. Rest your forehead on the ground (or on a cushion).
4. Relax and rest in this position for two to three minutes, breathing softly, letting your mind focus on the ease in your body.
You can do child’s pose after any physical activity, (or even if it’s just been a long day). Experiencing the relaxation of your body helps you anchor in the natural baseline of your resilience.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
Your body naturally tenses when you experience distress or disaster, and that tension is part of what derails your sense of well-being. These exercises juxtapose that tension with the powerful relaxation of immersion in nature to shift your psychological state as well as your physical state.
EXERCISE 2-13: Friendly Body Scan
This exercise was originally designed as a core practice of the mindfulness-based stress reduction protocol developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, medical school to help patients better manage stress and chronic pain. If possible, do this practice outdoors, or with a clear view of a beautiful natural landscape. Research has demonstrated that even ten minutes being in or viewing a natural landscape relaxes the body and improves cognitive functioning.
1. Lie comfortably on your bed or on the floor, or on a blanket, yoga mat, or cushions outdoors. Feel the back of your head, your shoulders, your back, your hips, the backs of your legs, and your heels touching the ground. Let your body relax and sink into the ground supporting it. Breathe naturally, gently, deeply.
2. Begin by bringing your awareness to the sensations in your feet. Say hello to the big toe of your right foot, listening for any aches or pains in the toe, breathing gently into any tension in your toe, compassionately wishing it a sense of comfort and ease. Say hello to all the toes on your right foot, the arch, and the ankle and heel of your right foot, carefully noticing the sensations in each part of the foot, breathing a sense of comfort and ease into every part.
3. Do the same thing slowly for your left foot, 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, and all the tender parts of your mouth; to the hair on your scalp and to the phenomenal brain inside your skull that is allowing you to be mindful, compassionate, and steady in this moment.
4. As you scan your body, breathe in a compassionate caring and acceptance to any part of it that needs comfort and ease. You can slow way down, mindfully notice, and breathe compassionate caring to each knuckle if you have arthritis, or to scars from an old football injury. The body scan helps you mindfully and lovingly inhabit all parts of you, to become safely aware of every experience of your body.
5. Practice being especially mindful and compassionate toward sensations in your belly, your genitals, your heart center, and your throat and jaw, areas that may hold unconscious somatic memories of tension, shame, anger, or fear. Breathe 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 your body.
6. 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.
Through this exercise, you are creating a larger awareness and acceptance of your body. Later, if you begin working with any troubling somatic sensation or memory, the friendly body scan creates a safe setting for any feeling that arises and allows it to dissolve and move through.
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
— John Burroughs, Studies in Nature and Literature
As stress levels rise in our modern, urban, overly plugged-in society, people are seeking the calming effects of immersing the body-brain in nature, and science is documenting the validity of that intuitive wisdom.
1. Find a forest or a park with plenty of greenery to walk in for thirty to ninety minutes. (According to Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix, longer periods have been shown to have a more positive effect on the brain.) You can walk by yourself; you can walk with a friend or with a group of people. But silence is also helpful to the brain in recovering its equilibrium: with less stimulation for the brain to process, there is more restfulness and restoration.
2. Begin to walk slowly, bathing in the input from all five senses:
• seeing the shape of a leaf, the variety of tree shapes, the clouds in the sky;
• smelling pine needles or the fresh air or the damp earth;
• hearing bird song or the rustle of the wind, and perhaps the lapping or babbling of water if there is a pond or stream nearby;
• touching moss on a twig or lichen on a rock or sand/pebbles beneath your feet;
• tasting a berry, if available (and edible).
3. Walk even more slowly, breathe more slowly, perhaps pausing to stand still, noticing the changes of light and shadow, movement and stillness around you. Pause to notice shifts within you, your energy, or your mood.
4. At the end of your walk, take a moment to reflect on your overall experience, especially any shifts in your bodily, felt experience.
This exercise can reliably produce decreases in blood pressure and cortisol levels. Researchers in Finland have found that immersion in nature for five hours per month (that’s about ten minutes a day, or thirty minutes two or three times a week) is enough to yield positive long-term effects on physical and mental health.
Level 3. Too Much
It may seem counterintuitive to seek positive experiences in the midst of a tragedy, but juxtaposing positive experiences with negative ones is the basis of reconditioning and of all successful trauma therapy. It is essential to coping, healing, learning, and growing. The point is never to deny, push away, minimize, or forget what’s happening. But even small positive, relaxing experiences, especially when things are truly going haywire, help shift the brain out of contraction, reactivity, and rumination into a sense of possibilities and a larger perspective.
EXERCISE 2-15: Skillful Distraction
1. Look for moments of positive experience even in the darkest, grimmest hours, especially body-based experiences, which will help you shift your psychological state by shifting your physiological state. These might include sipping a warm cup of coffee, feeling a cool breeze on your skin, returning the smile of a friend, walking in nature, or playing with a puppy. Let the felt sense of the experience register and linger in your awareness. Savor the refuge. Look for these experiences little and often. Even brief experiences can create an immediate shift.
2. When thoughts, feelings, or sensations begin to seem unworkable, shift the focus of your attention temporarily but completely away from the trouble of the moment. Again, the point is never to escape into denial or dissociation, but to consciously and deliberately switch to another channel of activity. Watch a favorite TV show, cook a good meal, go swimming or bicycling or dancing, work out at the gym. Let your mind and heart have a respite without any guilt: this is essential self-care.
Consciously diverting your attention offers a temporary respite from difficulties and trials that need to be faced. You still have to reengage with your losses and trials afterward, but hopefully you’ll be feeling recharged and able to fight the good fight again.
EXERCISE 2-16: Pendulation — Toggling between Tension and Ease
This exercise involves a deliberate, safe juxtaposition of negative and positive physical states to rewire somatic memories of a negative experience.
1. Identify a place in your body where you might be holding a somatic memory of a trauma, or just something that feels negative or unpleasant. Notice the physical sensations — a churning in the stomach, a tense jaw, a tightening in your back or shoulders.
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 intentionally toggle your attention back and forth between the pleasant physical sensations of the place in the body that is not traumatized and the unpleasant physical sensations of the place in the body that is holding the network of the traumatic memory. Focus your awareness on each of the two locations for thirty to sixty seconds, focusing on the unpleasant only as long as you can comfortably “hold” the experience without being overwhelmed.
4. Repeat the toggling between the unpleasant and pleasant sensations for several rounds, gradually increasing the amount of time you spend focusing on the pleasant experience. Notice if the unpleasant sensation shifts or fades.
5. When the intensity of the unpleasant seems to have faded a bit, pause and reflect on the entire experience, noticing any shifts.
When you switch between awareness of these two different body sensations, you are practicing a technique called pendulation, so named because it resembles the pendulum of a clock swinging back and forth. Pendulation is an excellent way to safely recondition a trauma memory through body sensations alone. Do this exercise little and often. The effects can be immediate; they can be permanent.
Deconditioning
With deconditioning, you let your brain’s attention relax into the spaciousness you naturally feel when your nervous system is in equilibrium. From this state of well-being, your brain can more readily play and generate new insights, new wisdom.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
Fully 25 percent of your brain’s real estate is devoted to visual processing in the occipital lobe. Researchers have observed that when we remember seeing a banana or imagine seeing a banana, the same neurons light up in the visual cortex as when we see a banana in real life. This means that visual memories and imagined scenarios can be as real to the brain as actual observations. You can use this power of visualization and imagination, as well as actual observation, to establish equilibrium in your neural circuitry, creating a safe base to come home to.
Years ago I was hiking in the backcountry of Yosemite National Park when I came upon a park ranger with a small group of hikers sprawled on the ground, face down, each of them completely absorbed in observing one square foot of ground from a height of six inches. The ranger called this a five-minute exercise in “belly botany.” You can practice belly botany almost anywhere to create a shift in perspective between the small and the vast, and to sense your place in the overall scheme of things.
1. Find a one-foot-square patch on a favorite beach, in a meadow, in a forest, in your own backyard, or in a city park (just be very careful where you decide to lie down). Lie comfortably on your stomach so that your eyes can focus on your patch from a height of six inches.
2. Come into a sense of presence. Defocus your attention from any concerns for self; concentrate on what’s happening in your patch. Notice the dirt or sand, the plants and bugs. Notice any activity, any stillness, any change of the light and shadows. Notice the relationship of things one to another; notice harmonies of colors and shapes; notice any oddities. Notice signs of life and death, aggression and beauty, all on a tiny scale. Observe your patch for two minutes or more.
3. After two minutes, stand up and refocus your attention on the horizon of the larger landscape all around you. Trace the shapes of the trees, hills, and buildings that you see. Observe this larger horizon for two minutes or more. Notice activity and stillness, changes in light and shadow. Notice the relationships of things one to another. Notice the harmonies of colors and shapes; notice any oddities. Notice signs of life and death, aggression and beauty, all on a vast scale.
4. You can toggle back and forth between these micro and macro landscapes as much as you wish. Let your mind play on its own for two minutes or more with the contrast of the small and the vast scale.
5. Return your awareness to the state of your own nervous system, noticing any felt sense of awe, any shifts in your perspective of your place in the world, and any changes in your sense of well-being.
Repeatedly shifting your visual perspective also builds the “muscles” of response flexibility in your brain.
EXERCISE 2-18: Memories of a Soothing Natural Landscape
This exercise can install a resource in your brain that can last a lifetime.
1. Go outside to a place that has been calming and soothing to you, or a place that has been the scene of moments of courage for you — an encouraging place.
2. Spend thirty seconds or more gazing at the landscape and committing the view to memory.
3. While still at the site, practice evoking the image repeatedly in your mind.
4. Practice evoking the image again later, when you are somewhere else. (If you can revisit your soothing or encouraging landscape several times to reinforce the experience, that’s excellent.) Practice calling up the image many times until it becomes a reliable resource in your brain.
5. When you sense even the slightest whiff of a wobble, evoke this image in your mind’s eye. (You can place your hand on your heart as you do so, if you wish.) Let the felt sense of the soothing or encouraging landscape help you steady your equilibrium now.
You can, of course, create an entire library of memories of soothing landscapes, just like the memories of soothing and encouraging people, to help you recover your range of resilience even as circumstances change.
EXERCISE 2-19: Creating a Safe Place
This exercise uses visualization and your brain’s neuroplasticity to create a reliable refuge and resource for coping.
1. Sit comfortably and quietly. When you are ready, imagine that you are standing in front of a gate. Imagine in rich detail how tall the gate is, how wide, how thick, what it’s made of, what color it is. Make this gate as real as you can in your mind’s eye.
2. Then imagine yourself opening the gate and walking through. When you are on the other side, visualize what lies ahead: a path, a hallway, a trail, a sidewalk, or a street that will lead you to a place that is very special, just for you. This is your safe place.
3. Begin to walk along the path. As you walk, notice what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, and anything else you are experiencing.
4. After a while, you come to a place that you know is your safe place. It may be a meadow, a cottage, a favorite room in your home, a garden courtyard, or a table in a café with a friend — anywhere that is a special place for you. Allow yourself to walk up to your safe place and enter.
5. Take time to look around: notice all the things that help you feel safe and comfortable here. Relax and enjoy being here; savor the sense of confidence and inner strength your safe place gives you.
6. If you like, find a place to sit down. Add anything you want to this space to help you feel safer and more at ease. Remove anything you don’t want. You can change anything you want. Then simply relax, feeling at ease, enjoying your safe place. You might let yourself feel a moment of gratitude that your safe place exists and that you can feel safe here anytime you need to.
7. When it’s time to leave, imagine standing up, saying a word of thanks to your safe place for being there, and then leaving it by the way you came in, walking back along the same path or walkway you took to get there, eventually passing through the gate, turning around, and closing it. Your safe place is on the other side, but you know you can return there anytime you need to.
8. Practice evoking this safe place in ordinary, nonstressful moments so that it is available to you when the flak hits the fan. Recognize that you are using your brain’s neuroplasticity to create a new and reliable resource for coping.
Your safe place may change over time; that would be natural. By practicing this exercise, your brain is learning how to create refuges and resources for coping any time you need them.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
When my eighty-year-old dad had a stroke serious enough to land him in the hospital and a skilled nursing facility after that, my anxiety level went right through the roof, and my higher brain was really not driving the bus very well at all. My meditation teacher, Howie Cohn, advised me to simply stop, lie peacefully in bed, and allow whatever body sensations were present to come into my awareness, but not to feed them with stories and what-ifs. He advised me not even to label them as fear, panic, or terror, but just to let the body sensations be there. These sensations might be uncomfortable, disturbing, or scary, but they weren’t going to do anything except be there.
I practiced noticing the agitation in my chest, the contraction around my heart, the tensing of my jaw, without trying to change or fix it. Just being with the sensations created the space for them to loosen up and shift on their own. It wasn’t that the shifting solved my dad’s health issues: it simply helped me avoid creating my own emergency about his emergency. I could come back to my good-enough regular state and make wise choices from there.
EXERCISE 2-20: Soften, Soothe, Allow
This exercise helps you access a kind of spacious awareness that allows whatever is disturbing your nervous system, and thus your functioning, to arise, be recognized, sit there for a while, and then move through.
1. Let your body find a comfortable position, sitting or lying down. Gently close your eyes and take three relaxing breaths. Being comfortable physically helps you manage difficult sensations or emotions as they arise in your body.
2. Place your hand on your heart for a few moments to remind yourself that you are present and safe in this moment, and that you too are worthy of kindness.
3. In the spaciousness of this kind awareness, identify any situation or circumstances that might be disturbing your equilibrium and well-being right now, and let it come into your awareness.
4. Notice and label whatever emotions are being triggered by those circumstances — perhaps fear, anger, sadness, loneliness, or shame.
5. Then focus your awareness entirely on the sensations in your body being triggered by these circumstances. Let the story go for now. Let the emotions go for now. Just focus on your experience of the sensations. You can name the sensations in a gentle, warmhearted, understanding voice as though you were validating a friend’s feelings: “That’s tension,” “That’s constriction,” “That’s an ache.”
6. Expand your awareness to your body as a whole. Scan your body for places where you are most aware of these difficult sensations. Choose a single location where you feel a sensation most strongly, perhaps as a point of muscle tension. Incline your awareness gently toward that spot.
7. Now let the muscles holding the sensation soften, as if you were applying heat to sore muscles. Softening . . . softening . . . softening. You are not trying to make the sensations go away, you are just holding them in a tender embrace.
8. If the discomfort of noticing the sensation becomes too great, return your awareness to the sensation of breathing. When you feel calmer, you can try again. If it works better for you, just soften around the edges of the sensations. There’s no need to go all the way in.
9. Now offer yourself some soothing words and comfort as you struggle with these sensations. “Ooh, this is hard. This is truly unpleasant. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I accept this moment, these sensations, exactly as they are. May I hold them in loving awareness.” Soothing. . . soothing . . . soothing.
10. Then simply allow the discomfort of the sensations to be there. Let go of the wish for the discomfort to disappear. Allow the discomfort to come and go as it pleases, like a guest in your home. Allowing. . . allowing. . . allowing.
11. Soften, soothe, allow. Repeat these words like a mantra, holding the discomfort of the sensations in a larger spacious awareness.
As you allow the sensations in your body to simply be there, and approach your experience of them with a relaxed kindness and curiosity, any feelings of tension or contraction will eventually ease on their own, and move through.
EXERCISE 2-21: Focusing (adapted from an exercise by Ann Weiser Cornell)
Focusing is a process of listening to your body in a gentle, accepting way and hearing the messages your inner self is sending you.
1. Find a place to sit comfortably where you will not be interrupted for about twenty minutes. Take some time to find a comfortable, supported position. Gently close your eyes if you wish.
2. Take the time to become aware of your whole body, here and now. You might notice your hands and what they are touching. Notice your feet and what they are touching. Feel the contact of your body on what you are sitting on. Allow yourself to rest into the support that is there. Become aware of your breathing.
3. Gradually let your awareness travel inward, focusing on the inside of your body, including your throat, your chest, your stomach and belly. Just let the awareness arrive and settle in there.
4. Now quietly ask yourself, “Is there something in my body, in my life, that feels off, or wrong, or uncomfortable?” Wait until you get a feeling response. If the answer is no, and that feels good, just enjoy that feeling.
5. Most likely, if you have a felt sense that something isn’t quite right in your life, whatever that might be, a memory or story of it will probably arise in your awareness. Let the story go for now. Just allow the bodily felt sense to become stronger. This often takes a little time. The body is slower than the mind.
6. When you begin to feel something, say, “I am feeling something.” And now describe it in physical terms, exactly as you feel it right now. Acknowledge the feeling. Let it know you feel it. You get it. Allow the feeling to be exactly as it is. Stay with it for a while, just feeling it, and being open to anything more that comes into your awareness, like images, thoughts, or more feelings.
7. Notice if something changes. (It may not, and that’s okay. After a while, it will be time to stop. Do this slowly, thanking your body. Become aware of the room around you. When you are ready, open your eyes.
8. You may want to write down anything that you learned and any shifts that you noticed.
Your bodily felt sense not only conveys what is important in your life right now; it can also begin to indicate new directions in which you might want your life to be going. New responses create new choices.
In every other exercise in this chapter, you have chosen to engage in practices designed to shift the state of your nervous system and return you to a more balanced, body-based state of being. That proactivity, even with a good outcome, takes effort. In the exercise below, you give yourself permission to fully disengage, to unplug, to take a break from coping or having to do anything else. It’s another kind of wise effort. You use the positive process of the default network to drop into as much ease and relaxation as you can; you use the positive side of the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system, the “rest and digest” branch, to slow down or even stop. By metaphorically hiding under the covers for a while, you take refuge from everything that is bombarding and overwhelming you, to just lie still and do nothing as a way to replenish yourself so that you can go on.
1. Set aside three or four hours on a day when other people are showing up to deal with whatever is happening and you don’t have to.
2. Find a physical place where you feel safe and comfortable and won’t be interrupted: your bed, the bath, your living room, going for a drive in the countryside, or sitting on a bench in a park or on a hill overlooking the ocean.
3. Turn off all devices that keep you connected to your world. Leave them somewhere else for now, in another room if you’re at home, at home if you are out.
4. Simply let your mind empty itself of all worries, duties, and obligations. That’s not simple, but give yourself permission to let go of as much as you can. You can walk somewhere during this break if you wish, but you don’t have to. Let your awareness fill with whatever is pleasant and uncomplicated in this moment. You are alive and breathing. The electricity is on (if it is). You already walked the dog, who is now comfortably napping while you are taking this break. Let yourself experience something other than the constant overwhelm you have been experiencing. Let your senses savor any pleasant sensations you notice: the cushiness of the bed or couch you are lying on, the quiet of the house when no one else is at home, the smell of fresh air. (You may find that you fall asleep during these rare moments of refuge, and sleep may be exactly what you need. Do notice whether you feel restored by the nap or still feel overwhelmed. Taking this kind of refuge is meant to “fill up the well” so that you can return to your circumstances with renewed energy.)
5. When the three or four hours are up, you may be reluctant to leave your refuge and return to whatever you must face. But you will face it from a more rested, balanced state. This exercise of deconditioning may even bring new and potentially useful perspectives on the dilemma.
Take this kind of break as often as you can. It’s not a complete break from your troubles, but a little break is far better than none. You will reset your nervous system, recharge your energy and revitalize your coping. You are rewiring your resilience.
This chapter has offered many tools for accessing your somatic intelligence — through breath, touch, movement, social engagement, and visualization — that reliably reduce your brain’s reactivity to any level of challenge or stress. With greater resilience, you’ll have more choices about how to respond.
That the birds of worry and care fly over your head, this you cannot change; but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.
— CHINESE PROVERB
When you practice these body-based tools, little and often, you strengthen the neural pathways of feeling safe, centered, grounded, and at ease. These feelings prime the neuroplasticity of your brain, making it receptive to further learning and able to try new, more flexible behaviors and take new risks.
This inner equilibrium, achieved by accessing your somatic intelligence, becomes the basis for exercising all of your more complex intelligences — emotional, relational, and reflective.