Somatic Experiencing

What does safety feel like to you?

For some people, the answer is 'I don't know'. Particularly for people living with a lot of trauma, or for those under a lot of stress or going through challenging times. The idea of feeling safe seems a bit abstract and unknowable in a real world sense.

Sometimes it's hard to know what safe feels like in our increasingly complex and fast paced world.

One way to begin to find a sense of safety is by starting with your imagination…

There's a concept in Somatic Experiencing (the gentle nervous system regulation and trauma healing work I offer) called 'coherence'. Coherence in this context is a measure of wholeness, as the various physiological systems in the body function together to create a feeling of wellbeing, where we are self regulating in an optimal way. Our bodies are doing what they're supposed to be doing, working as they should.

Sometimes, to oversimplify, I explain it by saying it boils down to 'what's working'. For nervous systems that are chronically under a lot of stress or holding a lot of trauma, there are so many spot fires that focussing on putting out fires really just creates more fire, more dysregulation.

I love the sound of humming bees. For a while, I lived in a house with a flowering citrus in the yard. Not quite an orange, not quite a grapefruit. When it flowered, all the bees would come. At those times, I called it the humming tree. I would go sit under it and listen. I'd hum back to the bees and I think the bees liked that. After a while, it made me feel like the hum was under my skin, like I was made of hum, and the humming felt like happiness.

There's a reason why humming feels like happiness.

Here's one of my favourite somatic (body based) tools in my own magic stress-relieving toolbox.

This is also a tool that I regularly use with and teach to clients for easing stress and regulating their nervous systems so they feel more calm, present, easeful and able to see more creative solutions to the challenges they're dealing with (because sometimes it's hard to see the creative way out when you're stressed out in survival mode).

This particular tool is known as orienting.

You might've heard the phrase: what we resist persists.

And it's true, but why does it happen?

'What we resist persists' is one facet of a deeper truth: what we place our attention on grows.

Here’s today’s experiment - zoom right in.

It’s a kind of antidote to the vague dissociation a lot of us live in, focussed on scrolling screens and distractions.

Zoom right into right now.

Give this experiment a try, and see what you notice.

What does ‘good’ feel like in your body?

Many of my clients are very familiar with this question!

When someone asks us how we are, it’s easy to say ‘good’, but how often do we stop and think about (or feel into) what ‘good’ actually means as we say it?