Posture

You may have heard that the body hangs onto emotions long after events have passed. Traumas from childhood — even seemingly minor things like a friend’s snide comment or your mother snapping at you one morning over breakfast — take root in your muscles and affect your thoughts well into adulthood.

But how does this cellular memory work?

The fact is, embodied memory isn’t some airy-fairy, woo-woo, magical phenomenon. It has real basis in your neurology. This makes a lot more sense when you reassess your view of the mind-body connection and realize that, in fact, your brain is embodied.

The Embodied Brain

Those three pounds of gray matter lodged between your ears don’t just stop at the base of your skull. Your neurons condense down into a thick rope that runs through the core of your vertebra. We call this the spinal cord, but it’s really just an extension of your brain.

And then that spinal cord branches out into thousands, maybe even millions, of tiny nerve fibers that innervate muscles, organs, joints, and bones. Your brain lives in your body exactly as much as it lives inside your head.

And here’s the really interesting thing: your body is sending data to your brain almost more often than your brain checks in with your body. The heart, for example, contains sensory nerve bundles that send information to the brain about nine times more frequently than the brain sends signals to the heart.

The Basis for Trauma

I’ll be honest, I don’t love the word “trauma.” Why? Because it’s really loaded. We have all kinds of conditions around what we consider to be a “traumatic experience.”

In reality, trauma is subjective. As psychologist Peter Levine says: trauma is in the nervous system, not the event.

Meaning: the event is actually irrelevant, and what actually matters is how the person processes the event. If a person has sufficient resources at the time of an accident, injury or emotionally charged event, their nervous system will undergo a normal activation followed by a discharge and then move on without negative impact.

Dr. Levine has observed this process in wild animals. A tiger chases a gazelle, and the prey manages to escape. After the tiger gives up and goes off to stalk his food elsewhere, the gazelle shakes her whole body, discharging the stored fear in her nervous system. Moments later, she’s calmly grazing with the rest of her herd.

As humans, however, we don’t always have sufficient time, space, or resources to process our traumatic experiences, and that’s when scars form in our bodies.

The Story Is Irrelevant

I know that can be really triggering for some people. Unfortunately, a lot of therapy focuses on the story so heavily that many people begin to identify with their past in a deep way.

They label themselves: I am traumatized. I had this horrible experience. Because I had this experience, I am damaged. And then that becomes part of their personal identity.

I’m not denigrating the negative experiences that people have. There are some terrible, heart-wrenching things that happen in the world. What I’m saying here is not that you should just buck up and be stoic but rather that we have to expand our treatment of trauma to include the body for whole-person healing.

Here are three steps to cellular healing that will clear painful emotions from your body.

1. Choose a memory.

The first step to embodied healing of your past is to select a memory that you would like to work with. I recommend starting with something small at first. You can make a brief list of emotionally charged memories and then categorize them as green, yellow and red.

Green memories are things you may have found irritating or annoying, but they don’t cause you alarm or panic. Yellow memories are a bit more charged. Red memories are those that you feel profoundly scarred you and affect your thoughts, beliefs, and current relationships in a very deep way.

Trust me, you don’t want to go for the gold on this one until you have your sea legs. Just start with a little memory until you get a feel for the process. In somatic healing, less is more.

I’m going to say that again for the overachievers in the room: less. is. more.

2. Feel it in your body.

Once you’ve selected a memory, mentally put yourself back into that situation. Maybe it was a friend saying something hurtful, or an offhand remark from a relative that cut you a bit too deeply. Or maybe it was a time when you fell off of your bike and scraped your knee.

Whatever the story, start to think of what happened before the event took place, and like a movie, play back the event in your mind’s cinema.

As you do this, shift your attention to your physical body. What do you notice happening? What parts of your body stiffen, tighten or respond as you recall this event?

List the sensations you feel without analyzing or judging them. Just describe them. Sensation is your body’s language, and the mind has a tendency to want to interject all kinds of interpretations on top of your body’s communication, so try to curb that.

Ask yourself, where do I feel this? How big is this sensation? Is it heavy or light? Does it have a color associated with it? Does it feel dull, sharp, jagged, ropey, thick or something else?

Once you have a clear sense of your body’s response to the memory, move on to step three.

3. Clear the memory.

This is where the magic happens. Now we’re going to clear the memory from your body. Because the mind loves to jump in and control things, we’re going to give it a mantra to keep it busy while the body does its healing work.

Gently put your attention on the sensation you identified in step two. Stay with that while you say, either in your head or out loud: I forgive you. Thank you. I’m sorry. I love you.

(h/t to Denise Duffield Thomas for this forgiveness mantra.)

With your awareness, track the sensation in your body. How is it changing and shifting? Note: it might get worse before it gets better. That’s okay.

If you need a break, just shift your attention to the feeling of your feet on the floor. Open your eyes and take in your surroundings. Once you feel calm and centered again, you can return to the practice.

Remember, less is more. Don’t gut it out — seriously. You don’t have to suffer in order to heal.

While repeating the mantra and focusing your attention on your body, I find it very helpful to alternate gentle tapping on the top of my head and on my sternum. While tapping is widely used in ancient healing practices, I learned this one from Bodytalk.

Theoretically, tapping the head stimulates the brain to build new connections, and tapping on the heart “saves” this information in your body. Does it really work?

As Denise Duffield Thomas says (total side note, her book is awesome, highly recommend), who cares! All of it helps a little bit.

Anyway, continue focusing, tapping and mantra-ing until you feel the sensation in your body shift, dissipate and dissolve. If you’ve selected a green-light memory, this may go very quickly. Or, you may discover that what you thought was a green-light memory is actually covering a snake pit of red memories.

No worries. The tension in your body doesn’t have to dissolve completely. If it does, fantastic, but even a tiny shift toward relaxation is progress.

When you feel the tension dissipate, you can stop tapping and mantra-ing. Open your eyes and notice how you feel overall.

Bonus Points

Now is a good time to create a more constructive mantra to take the place of this old story you’ve just cleared. Choose something positive, avoiding words like “don’t,” “won’t,” and “can’t.”

While syntax does play a role in your brain’s ability to process negative words, positive statements take less energy to interpret.

If you’re stuck, here are a few good basics:

I am safe.

Every cell in my body is completely healthy.

I am a kind and loving person.

I am doing my best, and that is good enough.

For extra credit with this mantra, revisit step two above. As you repeat these words over and over to yourself, what do you notice happening in your body? Do your muscles relax, your jaw stop clenching? How does your breath respond?

Spend time reveling in these positive sensations. This is more than just a mind exercise. Pleasurable physical sensations signal to your brain that you’re safe and that you can relax. They activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for rest and digestion.

Living in parasympathetic rather than in chronic sympathetic — fight or flight — lockdown also boosts creativity, deepens interpersonal relationships and empathy, improves gut function, slows heart rate, decreases blood pressure and generally improves your mental and physical well-being.

Parasympathetic is where you want to live on a daily basis for optimal focus, energy, and happiness.

To Go Deeper, Get Support

Whew. That was a lot.

If you want to go deeper with this practice, I recommend adding intentional movement into the mix. Here’s the thing: when trauma takes up residency in your body, usually that can be seen as frozen places that don’t move well.

Over time, the muscles in this area become tense, stiff, dehydrated (like beef jerky — really, it’s kind of icky) and ultimately painful. Then, most people get this random advice to stretch more. That’s great. We should all move and stretch a lot daily.

The problem is, you’ve got this giant frozen area of your body that your nervous system can’t access. It’s like a piece of you went missing.

(And yes, this has distinct parallels to soul death or soul loss as viewed from traditional shamanic healing practices.)

You can go to the gym and do yoga and even get contortion-level bendy but still not move through and release these frozen areas of your body.

I work with yogis, weight lifters, crossfitters, circus arts performers and even contortionists all. the. time.

They still have these frozen areas in their bodies. They all benefit from this intentional defrosting of their muscles.

The truth is that exercising simply isn’t enough. To really, truly, fully release frozen areas of your body, you have to kind of sneak up on them in a non-threatening way. Seriously. I know that sounds weird, but think of it this way:

The trauma in your nervous system is a scared cat. You’ve seen one of these before — eyes wide, jerky movements, tense all over, crouching and cowering, ready to run for safety if you should even so much as breathe wrong.

You’re going to walk up to that scared cat and pick it up. (Substitute dog, bunny, horse, or whatever other animal you love if you’re not a cat person.)

(Maybe not horse. Those are too big to pick up.)

Do you run up to the animal with big movement yelling loudly how much you love it? Probably not. It’s going to run away.

Instead, you approach quietly, softly, speaking in low tones. You may avert your eyes. You certainly don’t broadcast “I’m going to pick you up” body language. You’re in stealth mode.

Well, your nervous system needs the same quiet, cautious, reassuring treatment in order to feel safe enough to release deeply held scars. Anything less will only perpetuate the tension and the problem.

So, what do we do about all of this? This is precisely why I created the videos in my Posture Rehab course. On the surface, it’s about standing up straighter. But these practices communicate deeply to your nervous system, gently dissolving all those old patterns that you’ve been holding onto for years — maybe even decades.

Why videos? Let me be frank: the hands-on work that I do in my practice is life changing. But, not everyone can come to see me. And, in all honesty, this process is not a one and done kind of deal.

You don’t lift weights once and suddenly you’re strong. One yoga class does not a yogi make. Well, one bodywork session doesn’t dissolve your entire life history, either.

Practice makes perfect. You can take this process as deep as you would like. There is always a new level of healing available if you would like to grow there, but fortunately the basics work at every level.

And that’s why the videos. Because you need access to these not for a week or a month or a year, but for a lifetime. Because this process is life changing, if you let it be.

Right now, I’m offering access to 31 body-healing practices personally led by me for $295, which is less than the cost of two in-person sessions with me.

If you’re just so over being stuck in your past, and if you’re looking for something that works differently from everything you’ve tried before, click here to buy the Posture Rehab program now >>

Seriously, you have nothing to lose, except your limitations.

Over and over again, I hear this from my clients: “I have been to physical therapy, tried yoga and Pilates, seen a chiropractor and had massages, but by far the best results I’ve found have been from working with you.”

Why do I get results for people suffering with back pain, stiff necks, tense shoulders, sciatica, scoliosis, and a bunch of other uncomfortable conditions when other methods fall short?

While I’d love to tell you I’ve got some sort of exclusive magic, the truth is it’s a lot simpler than that. The reason this work works is because I focus on the nervous system.

The Neural Factor

You see, muscles aren’t just meaty rubber bands that randomly get tight for no reason. Your muscles are controlled by a sophisticated software system — your brain. It’s nerve signals that tell muscles to contract or relax.

The problem is that accidents, injuries and chronic stress all contribute to muscle tension, and over time tension becomes the habit — your default neural set point.

Ever heard the saying “everywhere you go, there you are?”

Well, everything you do, there’s your neural pattern. So when you plant your hands in down dog or crank out a Pilates 100, you’re activating your unique neural pathways — almost like a personal movement signature.

That’s why traditional approaches often make good changes initially but sort of plateau at some point along the line. You get stuck in your own neural patterning. In order to break through this plateau and restore flexibility, you have to create new neural pathways.

A Different Approach to Improving Mobility

Fortunately, it’s a lot easier than it sounds. While this is the basis of the work that I do one on one with clients, there are also exercises that you can do on your own at home.

They’re easy, require virtually no equipment, and you can start to see changes in five to ten minutes (that’s about the same length of time it would take to watch two adorable cat videos on Facebook, for reference).

This is why I created Posture Rehab, a video suite designed to dissolve tension in your body and hit the reset button on your brain. That way, you can stand taller and move freely without tension, aches and pains.

Sound good to you? Click here for everything you need to know about the program — what’s included, a complete table of contents, FAQ, etc.

Posture Rehab isn’t yoga or Pilates — and it’s not designed to replace these practices either, but rather support them so you get more benefit out of doing them.

Learn more >>

The Bottom Line

Listen, daily pain that saps your energy, degrades your focus, makes you cringe when your kid jumps into your arms, and wakes you up at night does not have to be your reality — no matter what your age. You can feel good in your body.

In fact, you have the right to feel amazing. Life is ridiculously short. Don’t spend your precious days in a fog of pain, limited by what your body can — and can’t — do.

I have never quite understood why psychology and physical medicine are separate branches of healthcare. It’s not as though the brain were a separate entity floating out there in the ether, merely tethered to a lumpy, unintelligent body like some supercomputer chained irrevocably to a vehicle that carts it around.

No, in fact, your brain and body aren’t distinct. They’re the same freaking thing. Your brain is your body, and your body is your brain. That’s basic anatomy.

The gray matter of your brain condenses down to a ropy cord of neural material that runs through the core of your spine, branching out along the way into millions of nerves that terminate in muscles, bones, and organs.

It is impossible to have a thought or feeling without a corresponding physical reaction. Impossible.

When you have an experience — any experience — every cell in your body mobilizes to support that. Fear does not exist merely in your mind. It resides also in the tension of your muscles, the clenching of your jaw, and the shallowness of your breathing.

All emotions are the same. Joy, grief, anger, love…they manifest in your movement.

And while you’re probably familiar with the concept of “mind over matter” where your brain can influence the state of your body, the opposite is equally as possible. The set of your body — your posture, if you will — influences the state of your mind.

Just as smiling when you feel down can lift your spirits, so too can standing tall elevate your mood and even improve focus, productivity, and your capacity for solving complex problems.

The Software in Your Muscles

The generally accepted view on muscles is that if they’re tight, you must stretch, roll, and pull them like taffy until they agree to lengthen. Muscles are more or less considered to be a sort of rubber band that has, for some reason or other, become mechanically too short.

Muscles aren’t inanimate objects that spring back into place of their own accord like elastic, though. In fact, a muscle in and of itself has no ability to maintain tone. It requires a signal from your nervous system in order to contract.

Tension isn’t a muscle problem — it’s a software problem. Yes, there are mechanical influences on your tissue. At the site of an injury, the body lays down dense layers of fascia to “bandage” the area. This is what we refer to as scar tissue. It can effectively restrict mobility because the fibers tend not to follow the original grain of the muscle and instead run in every direction, thus fortifying the integrity of the muscle or tendon but restricting mobility.

However, barring any actual scar tissue, muscles become tight because the nervous system tells them to contract. There are many reasons that your nervous system sends these signals, including to perform basic movements like sitting, standing, walking across a room, or reaching for a mug of coffee.

But tension is also a readiness response. Your body tightens muscles to prepare for action, and perpetual readiness, which accompanies chronic stress, results in perennial tension.

Living in Fight or Flight

Everyone is busy. That’s a function of modern, urban life. We all have too many places to be, too many tasks on our to-do lists, and a slew of things that never even get attempted because, priorities.

This kind of modern frenzy results in chronic activation of your sympathetic nervous system — your stress response. This is the branch of your autonomic (meaning, beneath conscious control) nervous system that deals with threat.

The sympathetic branch has a correlate that helps you relax, rest, and replenish your energy: the parasympathetic branch.

In a balanced nervous system, these two have an inverse relationship, meaning they’re not both active at the same time. The sympathetic branches readies you for action while the parasympathetic branch helps you to relax and recover.

Sympathetic:

• Increases heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure
• Mobilizes blood away from digestive function into skeletal muscle to prepare for quick movement
• Constricts blood vessels
• Dilates pupils and focuses eyes

Parasympathetic:

• Reduces muscle tension
• Lowers heart rate and blood pressure
• Aids in digestion
• Slows and deepens respiration
• Supports immune system function
• Aids in the secretion of bodily fluids

Your sympathetic nervous system is like your gas pedal, mobilizing you for action, while your parasympathetic branch is the brake that allows your body to slow down and rest. A healthy nervous system swings, as a pendulum would, between activation and relaxation, never getting stuck to one side or the other.

Sympathetic Lockdown

This pendulum dance is how we maintain what’s called in fancy-schmancy science talk homeostasis. Homeostasis is a balance. Your body is constantly working to preserve it.

But, just like standing on one foot, it’s not a static place. There are millions of tiny micro-adjustments happening in every moment to keep you upright. Balance—or homeostasis—is actually a process of coming into and out of your center, over and over again.

But here’s the thing… when you’re chronically stressed, and thus living in perpetual fight or flight, you don’t get that natural, normal pendulum swing from activation to deactivation. You just stay charged all the time.

And because your body cannot physiologically exist in perpetual activation, it uses your parasympathetic nervous system like a lid to hold down your escalating fight or flight response. It’s a bit like a pressure cooker where the steam is your neural activation and the lid is keeping it in.

When that lid comes off, the whole system blows up.

There are a few side effects of living in chronic activation with your parasympathetic nervous system “covering up” all this stress. One is a type of numbness — officially called dissociation — where you feel sort of disconnected from yourself and lost, or floating.

People who are dissociated often don’t really feel truly alive. Nothing really touches them, and they’ll require ever increasing levels of stimulation to have any sensory experience at all.

In my observation, our whole society is living in this state, which explains why we keep reaching for ever higher levels of extremity — deep, deep tissue massages; extreme sports; bio-hacking; etc.

What I believe we’re reaching for is not higher levels of achievement, but a sensory experience of being alive.

Another common side effect of dual autonomic neural activation is having a hair trigger — sometimes called moodiness or explosiveness. Have you ever met someone who seemed super chill, but randomly flew off the handle at the smallest thing?

That’s a symptom of this kind of dysregulation. You may have heard of really extreme cases, such as the kind of PTSD that soldiers returning from war exhibit, but it exists on micro-levels, too.

Living in a perpetual state of activation—which you probably just call being stressed—is what I term Sympathetic Lockdown. It’s a state where you’re just getting through, moment to moment, without actually discharging the stored tension and neural activation in your body.

Burnout and the Brain

Nobody wants to be stressed, angry, explosive, and emotionally absent from their life. This is not a pleasant place to live.

So, what do we do about it?

We’re just not set up for mental relaxation in our daily lives. There’s constant stimulation from smartphones buzzing and beeping, televisions in every restaurant, and little face to face contact with other humans.

With no built-in triggers for slowing down and dropping into peace, our world is fraught with catalysts for activation, all of it driving us further into burnout.

Burnout is a frightening place to be. Participants in studies on burnout have demonstrated measurable changes to their brains, showing an enlarged amygdala — the fear center¹.

In short, burnout doesn’t just make you feel like crap, it also destroys the very structure of your brain.

Most approaches to dealing with stress and fixing burnout focus on controlling either your thoughts or your external circumstances. You either need to think and feel differently about the life you have, or you need to change your reality.

But in a modern world fraught with perpetual triggers, it can be next to impossible to escape the hamster wheel of stress. There’s always one more near-disaster waiting in the wings to give your nervous system a good solid zing.

There is a third strategy that pretty much everyone overlooks: reducing physical stress to calm your mind.

Stress — especially the chronic, perpetual stress that results in burnout — is a form of micro-trauma. In fact, the brains of people diagnosed with burnout mirror those of people who have experienced severe childhood trauma when examined with fMRI¹.

The interesting thing about trauma is that it isn’t traumatizing, so long as an organism (person or animal) has sufficient time and resources to release the resulting charge in their nervous system — i.e. to down-regulate the fight or flight response in the sympathetic branch and activate its correlate, the parasympathetic branch.

This is according to the research of Dr. Peter Levine, author and founder of Somatic Experiencing, an embodied trauma healing approach. His research focuses on the ability of wild animals to process trauma. He has found that when the sympathetic charge is released after a traumatic event, there is no lasting effect on the animal.

However, if that activation isn’t fully released, the sympathetic nervous system remains charged and active on some level. Essentially the animal—or the person—remains locked in fight or flight mode.

This is what’s happening to stressed out, burned out people day in and day out.

You’re living on some level as though there were a literal tiger on your heels. And existing in this perpetual state of neural activation results in ceaseless muscle tension, disrupted sleep, an inability to focus, lack of creativity and inspiration, difficulty connecting and relating to others, digestive issues, and even your plain old garden variety generalized anxiety.

Body Over Brain

While mindfulness strategies such as gratitude journals, meditation practices, affirmations, and even psychotherapy are helpful, the reality is that their ability to effect change can only reach so deeply when it comes to your biology.

The aspects of your brain affected by stress and trauma are ancient, primordial. You can’t have a rational conversation with them. Not only do they not speak English (or any other human language for that matter), they also don’t even know that language exists.

But you CAN talk to them — if you learn their language. And when you do this, you have access to the greatest free bio-hack that no virtually one else knows about.

Because just as your mind can influence your body, so too can your body influence your mind. In fact, the body sends signals to the brain far more frequently than the brain does to the body. The heart, for example, contains sensory nerve bundles that send information to the brain about nine times more frequently than the brain sends signals to the heart².

The body and brain are constantly “checking in” with each other, asking how things are going, ascertaining whether a state change is necessary. Thus, you can think all the happy thoughts you want, but if your body is chronically sending fear and threat signals upward to the brain, it will be nigh impossible to achieve true relaxation.

Balancing Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Activation

While accidents, injuries, and traumatic events usually happened in the past, there is no need to mentally travel back to them. The stored charge in your nervous system is current and happening in present time, so that’s when and where we’ll deal with it.

We’ll use a body-up approach. Rather than trying to talk sense to your nervous system and explain that the tiger in the bushes is simply a figment of its imagination, we’re going to instead learn and make use of its own language: sensation.

Felt sense is a powerful communication tool, but many people have a diminished ability to actually feel their own bodies. Reestablishing this connection can take a little practice, but it’s not hard and anyone can do it with just a modicum of time and attention.

Working with Felt Sense

If I were to ask you what you feel right now, you’d likely tell me that you either feel nothing (or nothing of note) or you would indicate areas of your body that are tight, tense, aching, or painful.

This is true of most people. We either hurt, or we feel nothing at all. But there are tons of sensations happening in your body all the time that have nothing to do with pain. It’s just that you haven’t trained yourself to pay any attention to them.

Developing your sensory awareness is a skill, and the best way to enter into it is through objective description of your present moment sensory experience in your body. For our purposes, you’ll want to describe sensation as though you were a scientist in a lab examining a specimen.

Tight, dense, heavy, warm, dark, gummy, thick, or bubbly are examples of descriptive sensory language. These are helpful. They allow us to get a handle on your body’s experience. What’s not useful are stories about sensation.

Things like…

Sometimes I notice my left shoulder feels a little tight, like when I do an overhead press at the gym.

What usually happens when I’m sleeping is that my arm goes numb and it wakes me up.

My yoga instructor said my pelvis should be more tucked under, like this…

When I’m sitting at my desk, I tend to hunch over and lean on my elbow and I really just need to strengthen my back muscles more, I think.

These are an intellectualized version of your experience. They come from floating above your physical sensations and analyzing them in a detached, clinical way. What we want is for you to connect to the sensory experience directly. In this way, you’re able to converse with your biology.

The Felt Sense of Feeling Good — Resourcing

We’re conditioned to seek and destroy problems, but when it comes to stress, trauma, and burnout, this problem-fixated focus is actually causing you a lot more pain. If the underlying tension and tightness that are causing your discomfort are related to sympathetic lockdown—and they are, I guarantee it—then focusing on the pain perpetuates the threat response, and thus the tension.

One way we can back ourselves into pain relief is by using a little reverse somatic psychology and putting your attention on the areas of your body that feel really good. In this way, we’re creating a sense of safety for your biology which effectively allows it to discharge the stored sympathetic nervous system activation.

This is a form of resourcing — using people, places, things, experiences, and even sensations that have a positive impact on your well-being to create a sense of safety and connection that soothes your nervous system.

This is a relatively easy practice that can be done anywhere, but until you develop your skills a little bit, it’s best to be in a private, quiet location where you won’t be disrupted.

• Sitting, standing, or lying down, scan your body with your attention. What sensations feel pleasant?

• Because it can be difficult to notice your sensory experience in a vacuum at first, I like to employ one of Dr. Peter Levine’s practices to jumpstart your awareness:

• Place your right hand under your left armpit, flat against the rib cage. Place your left hand on your right shoulder. You should now feel as though you’re giving yourself a hug. Notice what feels pleasant about this position.

• Use sensory language to explore the feeling. Describe the pressure, temperature, and weight of the sensation if you can. Remember to use words like warm, tingling, sticky, dense, thick, light, empty, firm, etc. and not to delve into mind chatter or stories about why you feel the sensations that you do. Stay in your body.

• Focus your attention on positive sensations—things that feel pleasant, safe, and secure. When you have a firm grasp of a positive sensation, see if you can expand the feeling just a little bit further into your body. For example, if you have a warmth surrounding your heart that’s comfortable and cozy, see if you can spread that glow a bit, maybe extending it out to your shoulders, up to the base of your throat, or downward into your abdomen.

Spend at least a minute, but longer if you like, exploring this pleasant sensation expanding in your body. Once you feel complete, release your arms and notice how your body feels overall.

What has shifted? Is there less tension in your shoulders and neck? Have painful symptoms dissipated? Do you feel calmer and more centered?

Focusing your attention on pleasant sensations in your body is something you can do at any time of the day, no matter where you are, to down-regulate stress responses and restore neural balance.

You’ll notice the tension in your muscles dissipate, your breathing will slow. Often, colors become brighter as your vision clears and mental focus improves. These are all effects of discharging sympathetic lockdown.

Resourcing as a Skill

Resourcing and working with felt sense are tools that take some time and practice to develop, but they have a profound impact not only on your physical and mental well-being, but also on focus, productivity, and performance.

Of course, as with anything, developing skill in this practice takes time and effort. Somatic Experiencing practitioners can help you to finesse your technique, but you can also work on your own.

There’s an entire chapter in my ebook dealing with neural regulation, including detailed information on working with felt sense and specific practices to help you calm your stress response. You can order it here.

1. https://www. psychologicalscience.org/observer/burnout-and-the-brain
2. Blake, Mandy. “1.2 Heart Brain” Body=Brain.