Is there anxiety and depression that creeps in no matter how hard you try?
Do you feel unsafe in your body?
Does your mind race and tell you scary things?
Would you like to understand how to feel calm and present with your emotions, your feelings, even the ones that can tend to feel a little bit yucky?
By using your calming box tools to bring awareness to allowing your body to help you process your emotions and calm your fight flight response to trauma in situations in life.
Safety and calm begins in our body; we are not disconnected. Our body is there for a reason, our mind is there for a reason. They can be allies if you start being aware of how they respond and how you can gently shift patterns.
Learning these skills will improve your capacity for connection, presence, your relationships with others and yourself.
We are using the Body Awareness Workbook For Trauma, by Julie Brown Yau, to release trauma from your beautiful body.
This can take a bit of time but that’s okay you can start today just to think about nurturing your body from the inside out and being aware of its healing properties for you to go out in the world and experience joy and fun.
To provide the opportunities to control the more primitive survival responses and access your feelings of safety.
Once you create your sustainable anchor of safety in your body and remember and feel that experience even if it’s only for a little while this is teaching your body to become familiar with feeling safe and to provide a sustainable foundation for you to regulate yourself you will find that you will start to regulate others as your voice facial expressions your tone your body language and your eyes will convey that safety.
An exercise for you to try:
Use your imagination to create a person or a place that feels safe to you now.You will anchor that feeling in your body to begin the feeling safe within process. Read over the entire exercise first and then take your sweet time to go through it.
1. Choose a comfortable place to sit in and a comfortable position. Now,think about where and when you feel safe. Be creative. It might be a place in nature, a favourite room, perhaps it’s the library, your car, snuggled on your couch.
2. In your safe space, in your imagination, see what sensations are in your body when you think about being safe. Those can be feeling tingling. They may be an image perhaps it’s your dog or flowers or a loved one or a quiet beach.
3. Think about where your body feels warm, where it feels a little bit more relaxed, some parts of your body may feel more open, more expansive. Your breath may deepen ever so slightly, as you stay in your imagination in your safe place.
4. It’s possible that you still don’t feel safe in your body and in this case remind yourself it’s okay to give yourself grace. You can always circle back and try again. It’s a process and will unfold as is necessary.
5. Consider keeping a journal and recording what ‘safe’ feels like for you, specifically what it feels like in your body, not necessarily where the space is that you feel safe but to shift and introduce the idea of feeling safety in your body.
A reflection as you go throughout your day; be on the lookout for the times in your day, where you noticed feeling safe.
Questions to ask:
How do I know I’m feeling this way when I feel safe for less anxious or less numb?
Where in my body do I feel safe?
What are the sensations of feeling safety in my body?
Safety is not the absence of threat it is a feeling experience you are training yourself to cultivate within your beautiful body, to allow connections to happen naturally.Keep building your calming box for your sustainable platform of peace. Keep going.