Root Chakra 'I am'
Psychological repair work to move you into ventral vagal
So now that we know how we can physiologically help manage our stress hormones time to turn to the embodied psychology piece.
For me this started with talking therapy. I didn’t even realise I had been stuck in survival mode, for as long as I had, until it was pointed out to me in a therapeutic space. The best place to look for a therapist here in the UK is here. Wherever you are in the world most countries will have a professional body for registered counsellors and therapists with a website that should allow you to search by therapeutic requirement/geographical location (although with the acceleration of virtual connection options discovered in Covid, not even geographical location is necessarily a barrier to engagement any more).
But I found talking therapy could only take me so far, as this work is with the mind, and it is important we also work with the body. Understanding the connection between the mind and the body is a cornerstone as once we understand we can then work with the body by learning to recognise, and then use that knowledge, skills and tools, to help self-regulate our physiology using our embodied psychological insight.
Seminal texts include:
Bessel Van Der Kolk The Body Keeps The Score
Gabor Mate When The Body Says No
I attended an online course run by Lauren Baird called ‘Nurturing Your Nervous System’ which was really beneficial in expanding my understanding and introduced me to simple techniques to support self-regulation.
And then I was introduced to somatic massage. Again there is a professional register of somatic experiencing practitioners here in the UK & Ireland which I’ve linked here.
As the SEA website explains:
‘Wild animals are regularly threatened with death yet rarely become traumatised. This highly charged energy released in their body to enable them to fight back or run away is discharged when the threat has passed. It is this primitive discharge process that helps the animal return to full normal health and not become overwhelmed.
We are equipped with the same capacity to overcome an overwhelming experience. Yet we also have a rational brain that frequently ‘rejects’ the powerful primal instinct of the body. The result is that huge fight/flight energy gets trapped in our nervous system where it can lead to symptoms; sometimes immediately, sometimes years later.’
For me completing the stress cycle (this primitive discharge process) looks like going for a run and I had no idea that that was what I had been using running for all these years even though it was classic flight response!
Another trick that was recently shared with me by Nicola @KneadtoLetGo is to gargle a glass of water as it’s like screaming (without scaring your neighbours!) and activates the vagal nerve that runs through your neck moving you from sympathetic to para-sympathetic (read about vagus nerve gargling here)
And the final piece of the jigsaw for me came most recently. I had always been a dancer, as part of the old rave generation, but what I didn’t realise until I attended an ecstatic dance event (thank you Georgie!) was that in the same way that the body can store traumatic memories, it also stores joyous memories that you can tap into from the past. You can use dance to create new joyous memories within your body as well as using it as a way of processing old stored trauma …..
What’s not to love about that? <3
(Audio to support healing here)