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Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
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Approach · Body based
Deep change tends to follow self acceptance rather than the other way round. Waiting until you have fixed the thing before you are allowed to be kind to yourself usually keeps the thing exactly where it is.
This shows up most clearly with eating, drinking, and everything else people do to manage a feeling. Shame makes the feeling worse, and the behaviour…
Instead of a diet, take one craving and stay with it: the food, the moment, the pull. Tap or breathe through it until the pull itself loosens.
Pick a single situation rather than a whole eating plan. Six in the evening, the cupboard, the third biscuit. Restriction tends to make the forbidden…
If tapping feels too jumpy, use the same face points differently. Feel for a tender spot inside the eyebrow, under the eye, or just below the cheekbone towards the nose, then make slow small circles there.
Vary it: lighter, then a little deeper, circling one way and then the other, and see which direction the tissue seems to prefer. Slow steady contact…
There comes a moment when the tissue under your fingers gives a little and allows more depth. Wait for that instead of pressing your way to it.
It sounds fanciful until you have felt it once, and then it is obvious. Rest your hand, keep the pressure steady, and let the softening decide the…
Pick one word for what is bothering you and let that word stand in for the whole thing while you do the soothing. You do not have to run the memory to work on it.
The word can be plain: the hospital, that message, Sunday. Bring it to mind once, then let it sit in the background while your hands and your…
Picture somewhere peaceful and then walk in it. Feel the ground under each foot, your legs moving, and count the steps up to twenty.
The counting keeps you there instead of drifting off, and the feet are the important part. A calm scene that stays a picture in your head does very…
Cross your hands to the opposite shoulders and stroke slowly down to your elbows and hands, like a hug you are giving yourself. Three to five strokes, unhurried.
Then, if you want the rest of it: from the middle of your forehead out to the temples and along the hairline to the ears, from the crown down towards…
Pain is rarely one thing. There is the raw sensation, the memory of every other time, how you feel about it now, whether you think you can cope, and what you conclude about yourself.
Pulling those apart is useful because they do not all move together. You may not be able to change the ache itself, and you can often change how…
Ordinary harmless sensation competes with pain on its way up. Rubbing, squeezing or stroking near a sore place gives the nerves plenty of other traffic to carry.
This is why everybody rubs a banged elbow without being taught to. The useful part is that you can do it deliberately: firm strokes along the limb, a…
If pain is the thing you live with, start the session with the stroking sequence rather than the conversation. Arms, forehead, crown, cheeks, slowly.
It does two jobs in one go: gentle wide contact takes some edge off the pain, and it brings a person out of guarded alertness into being able to…
Squeeze slowly down one arm with the opposite hand, then the other, and work over whatever muscles you can reach. No table, no appointment, nobody else in the room.
Firm and rhythmic beats fiddly. Give the forearms, upper arms, shoulders and thighs a proper squeeze and release, a few seconds each. Doing it…
There is a route the calming nerve takes through you: eyes, then jaw and mouth, then throat and neck, then shoulders and chest, then belly. You can visit each stop in turn and simply notice what is there.
Give every area a moment before you move on. Soften around the eyes, let the jaw hang, sigh the throat loose, feel the chest lift, then rest a hand…
Talking is not the only door in. Exercise, massage, acupressure, yoga, tai chi and the rest go at the body first and let the mind follow, which is the opposite direction from most therapy.
That is why they sit well beside talking work rather than competing with it. If words keep circling the same ground, changing what your body is doing…
The best ending is often that therapy stops and the practices carry on. People finish their sessions and keep the yoga, the bodywork, the acupressure, the sitting quietly.
It is worth building towards that from early on rather than at the end. If everything that settles you happens in one room with one person, then…
Body based approaches have been linked with better physical and mental health, easier relationships, and in some settings lower use of painkillers and psychiatric medication.
That last one tends to interest the people holding the budget, so it is worth knowing if you are trying to get this kind of work taken seriously…
Most of the traffic on the nerve joining your gut, heart and lungs to your brain is heading upwards. When your stomach turns or your chest tightens, your body is reporting in.
It helps to treat those sensations as messages rather than faults to be got rid of. Next time your stomach drops before a difficult phone call, try…
Not every kind of quiet is calm. Settled feels warm and present. Shut down feels flat, far away and oddly fine.
Learning the difference in your own body is worth the trouble, because the two states need opposite things. If you are settled, stay there. If you…
Before picking a calming technique, work out which way you are off. Revved up and shut down need opposite things.
Wound up: slow the out breath, lower the lights, less input. Shut down: more input, movement, sound, a change of room. The common mistake is running…
Try saying it plainly, out loud if you can: my body did what it needed to do, and I am still here.
Say the specific version rather than the general one. My body went still so it would be over sooner. My body kept quiet so it would not be noticed.…
You can tell you are settled by small signs: your breath sits low in your belly, feelings arrive in waves rather than floods, and you can think and feel at the same time.
Other markers: your voice has some tune in it, you can take in new information, you can read what is happening on someone else's face. Knowing your…