We take a breath,
We look around,
We maybe move our body,
We get ourselves settled here.
How are you feeling at the beginning,
The middle,
At the end,
It's always helpful.
Taking a breath,
We might notice that we are breathing smooth,
Continuous,
Lots of volume,
Or we might notice we're holding our breath or we're barely breathing.
And as we breathe out,
We might breathe out a sigh of relief.
One of the effects of trauma is that we disconnect from ourselves,
Our sense of value and from the present moment.
So when we come back in,
It can be like,
I haven't been in here for a while.
Our nervous system is always aware what's happening in our body.
It's aware of the sounds we hear,
It's aware of things we see,
And it certainly takes note of thoughts in our mind.
But the nervous system has a negativity bias,
The only thing the nervous system really cares about is if our body's safe.
And so as we bring our whole mind into awareness of our body,
We might notice,
I'm sitting here all kind of cramped up and I'm hardly breathing and why?
So as we look around,
We might not see anything that would merit that kind of attention,
That kind of a response.
It's happening in the world right now,
It comes from this primitive nervous system,
It comes from all of our past experiences.
At the very minimum,
What we can do when we come into awareness in this moment,
Could I give myself a respite or a break from this level of hypervigilance or to come up a little bit out of freeze?
If we were completely relaxed,
Our body would be relaxed,
Our mind would be fairly still,
We wouldn't be in a survival mode.
And our breath would probably be smooth,
Diaphragmatic,
Continuous,
We'd have some ease in our breath.
So we could tune into the breath and just allow it to have more ease,
Which also helps to reassure our nervous system.
Well,
If she's breathing big enough to be seen in the motion of her body and be heard in the sound of her breath,
Then it must be okay.
Safe enough to move,
Like if we stretch and move our body,
We don't care about being seen,
We feel safe enough.
And if we make some noise,
Then that's also signaling I'm safe enough,
I'm not hunkering down for protection,
I'm just hunkering down because I have that habit in my body and I could move.
So that's a great thing to let ourselves notice.
And then as we're coming into perhaps a softer body,
Perhaps a bit of a deeper breath,
We notice how we feel now,
Might've shifted something a little.
And the other thing that happens too often is that when we're disconnected from our body,
We forget to relax our shoulders or lose that grip in our jaw.
So when we don't have awareness on a moment-to-moment basis of what's happening in our body,
Those habits kind of build up.
So if you were to think of what is my pattern that I could perhaps make a small shift in?
Could I stand up and maybe every half an hour I could walk outside and just stand for a couple of minutes and take some deeper breaths,
Relax my shoulders,
Tune in with my environment?
That's something that really supports you,
Gives you joy,
Bring in memories of beauty,
A song that just takes you back to a time when you felt really joyous.
Let's take a moment to bring something into our mind,
Visual,
Auditory,
Sense,
Perceptions,
Like smell,
Touch,
The smell of a rose,
But also the velvety softness of a rose.
And let's sit with that for a moment.
And if you have a lot of abundance in that area,
You could just pick one and then sit with that for 20 seconds and then go to another one.
What would you bring to mind as your gratitudes for the day?
That's another way to bring forward something.
What happened in your day yesterday that was sweet or helped you to feel connected or that you went,
Oh,
Took a deep breath?
Is there something that pops into your mind of,
Yeah,
I'm grateful for this.
But tuning to that,
Let yourself have some deeper breaths.
Move your body if you want.
Let yourself feel that in your body.
