Your body

Hands on your belly, breathe so that it moves, and listen. A gurgle down there is a real sign that you have stopped bracing.

Digestion is one of the first things to shut down when you feel under threat and one of the first to come back when you do not. That is why the noise…

You rarely need the whole tour. Pick the one place the tension actually lives for this person today, and work there.

A real session has no room for a long sequence and no need of one. Watch where the holding shows itself: a jaw that never rests, shoulders up near…

Keep offering these small practices and people start asking for them. When someone requests one by name, something has changed about who is running their regulation.

Responses also speed up with repetition, so what needed ten minutes in the first month can take two later on. Name that shift out loud when it…

There is a real difference between a practice you add to your treatment and one you use in place of it. Massage, breathing, acupressure and the rest belong in the first group.

Nobody minds you tapping, stretching or seeing an acupuncturist. What matters is that none of it quietly takes the place of the medication, the…

Most people are already doing something for themselves outside your room: herbs, a chiropractor, breathing videos, a weekly massage. Ask, plainly and without a raised eyebrow.

If you treat it as fringe behaviour, you will simply stop being told about it, and then you are working half blind. You want to know what is…

Words for feelings tend to arrive after the body has been noticed, not before. Find the sensation first, then see what it wants to be called.

Try it in that order: tight across the chest, hot in the face, heavy behind the eyes. Then a name, if one comes, and no forcing if it does not.…

Not all of this is a matter of how you say you feel. Breathing, exercise and hands on work shift things that can be measured from outside: heart rhythm, stress hormones, muscle tone.

That matters if you are the kind of person who suspects their own good moods, or if you have to make a case to a colleague who wants numbers. It also…

You choose what to work on and how big a piece of it. A sore shoulder, a low mood, the belief that you are too much: all of them are allowed, and so is starting small.

The useful phrase is whatever is standing in the way of you being all right just now. Some days that is a headache and some days it is the thing you…

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…

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…

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…

If you went blank or floppy while something terrible was happening, that was your body conserving you. It is the oldest survival setting you have, not a failure of nerve.

This response gets chosen when fighting and running are both off the table, and it is built to spend as little as possible until the danger passes.…

Whatever you did in the worst moment, your body chose it faster than thought. You did not decide it and then get it wrong.

The selection happens deep in the brain, in a fraction of a second, before the part of you that weighs options gets a look in. People spend years…

Being strong, trained or brave does not decide which way your body goes. People who could easily have fought have frozen instead.

This one matters for anyone whose sense of themselves was built on being capable: soldiers, police, door staff, athletes, older brothers. The shame…

The steadiness you are training shows up in more than your mood. Sleep, digestion and how quickly you come down after a fright tend to move together.

Worth knowing when progress on the thing you came for feels slow. People often notice they are sleeping better, or snapping less, before they notice…

Body based practices sit alongside medication rather than replacing it. If you take something, you can do both.

They are worth having on the menu for people who cannot take medication, do not want to, or want something of their own to do as well. The skill you…

None of this needs explaining to work. A child who cannot say what happened can still be helped by breath, movement and sound.

That makes body based work useful right across the ages, and for anyone who finds talking hard, including people whose language is not the one the…

Sound based work is aimed at a particular set of troubles: noise that feels too loud, voices that turn to mush, jumpiness, difficulty reading people. If that is you, it is worth asking about.

It gets chosen by what your system does rather than by a diagnosis, which is why the same programme is used with very different people, from toddlers…

Irritability, a hot face, itchiness, a mild earache or feeling slightly off balance are common while doing this. People often say it feels like getting off a long flight.

Knowing that in advance matters, because unexplained body sensations are easy to read as harm when your alarm system is already sensitive. Say what…

Most of the research on this programme was done with autistic children. For trauma, what exists is case reports and studies still under way.

That does not make it useless. It does mean you would be trying something promising rather than something established, and you deserve to know that…