Chronic Stress manifests differently for each one of us, and can lead to various forms of breakdown. Bottom line, too much stress high-jacks your brain and body and eventually leads to sickness. When you get your stress under control, you get access to the innate abilities that we are privileged to experience as human beings.
Rather than avoiding the discomfort, seeking pleasure or entertainment, or perceiving “upsets” as meaning something is wrong, we must instead turn towards ourselves and begin the process of dismantling the stories and beliefs and fears that are driving our cyclical patterns of suffering.
"The core emotional experiences of the past that have an impact on our current experience are by their nature uncomfortable. Our automatic impulse is to push them out of our awareness so that we can get on with our life. This is called suppression and is achieved through sedation and control. This is akin to a jar full of water, as your authentic self, the awareness of our authentic true present nature. And the oil in the jar is the uncomfortable emotional, physical and mental experiences. Shaking the jar endlessly in an attempt to change our experience just mixes the water and oil so we can’t see where they separate. All our endless doing and thinking results in a murky mixture. Reactivity is shaking the jar. Response is allowing the jar to come to stillness, so we can slowly scoop out the oil. Put the jar down, watch it, and allow the oil to come to the surface"
- Michael Brown, The Presence Process
To develop the skill of holding space for ourselves and witness the “oil” separate from the pure “water” of our Essence, we must practice Interoception. Interoception is the scientific term for the ability to feel what is going on internally, inside your own body. It is a vital skill as we cannot address or understand what we are not aware of. Through interoception we can discern what is fleeting, what is familiar, what we need more of or less of, what is an important feeling to pay attention to, what can be simply enjoyed, and what requires more time and attention to avoid a compounded future glaring issue. As a skill, interoception is critical in order for us to be in charge of integrating and consequently releasing emotional charges.
How do you know when you have to pee? Can you feel your heart beating? Notice gas bubbling up your esophagus before a burp? What about the sensations that arise right before you yawn? Have you ever noticed a heart-ache when experiencing grief? Do you notice sensations that tell you you are full? How about the tingles or weightlessness when in immense joy or bliss?
The more you practice noticing, the more fine-tuned and granular your abilities become. Some say we can get so good at this skill that we can be in direct contact and conversation with our organs, tissues, various systems and potentially viral intruders. If you are not aware of something, there is not possibility of control or intentional change.
Building interoceptive awareness is as simple as being with each bodily sense and feeling what arises without analyzing and story telling or getting into action right away. When the left side of the brain is dominant (analyzing, problem-solving, thinking, etc), it is quick to chime in whenever something is uncomfortable. Yet, for us to get to know our depth and what is going on beneath the surface of the exposed ice berg, we must be willing to feel unconditionally without immediately getting busy in our mind to figure it out. It takes patience to be with what is there and allow it time to unfold and guide you into its depth and nuances.
"Interoception is your brain’s representation of all sensations from your internal organs and tissues, the hormones in your blood, and your immune system...This produces the spectrum of basic feeling from pleasant to unpleasant, from calm to jittery, and even completely neutral....
You might wonder what this hotbed of continuous, intrinsic activity is accomplishing, besides keeping your heart beating, your lungs breathing, and your other internal functions working smoothly. In fact, intrinsic brain activity is the origin of dreams, daydreams, imagination, mind wandering, and memories...It also ultimately produces every sensation you experience, including your interoceptive sensations, which are the origins of your most basic pleasant, unpleasant, calm, and jittery feelings."
- Lisa Feldman Barrett
Try this:
Pause for two minutes
Get comfortable and close your eyes
Direct your awareness to your breath
Direct awareness to the palms of your hands and sustain for 1 minute to notice the various changing sensations
Mindfulness is the antidote to our human tendency to get lost in doing, which directs us towards an unsatisfying cycle of needing more of everything and anything to feel good, a constant striving and struggling and getting stuff done instead of living. Mindfulness is waking up out of autopilot and taking the steering wheel of our loving attention.
"The process of embodiment is connecting the channels between the body, brainstem and limbic areas up to cortical awareness and begins with the felt sense of noticing our inner experiences. Daniel Siegal refers to this as the 'subtle music of the mind, the ebb and flow of energy and information that we sense during the moment-to-moment shifts in our internal state throughout the day...that continually color your subjective sense of being alive.' However, the process of reconnecting to our inner experience can be coupled with fear and danger.
As we move our awareness inwards we can often re-experience past unresolved hurts, pains, and traumas. Sensations are often over-coupled with fear and danger messages. Clients may be fighting for survival to avoid this awareness and it can feel destabilizing. Yet, staying in our Window of Tolerance as we re-experience our past pains, hurts and traumas is the path to healing and clearing these samskaras."
-Prem Robin Campbell
Embodied Mindfulness is not aiming to control or suppress or stop thoughts, instead it is a state of being where we aim to pay attention to our experience and sensations as they rise without judging or labeling. Allowing the waves of our internal environment to move through to completion rather than continually stopping the wave and storing unfinished business, wounds, fears, and unhealthy patterns in our body.
"You will get to a point in your growth where you understand that if you protect yourself, you will never be free, you will not grow "- Micheal Singer
As you tune into the sensation(s) in your body, be warm and open with it, hold loving space for it, and describe it with words (to support the detachment from the story or the intensity of the feeling). Create space for it with your breath. Get curious and intrigued by it. Watch where it goes, how it might shift or stay put. There is wisdom in those spaces. The sensation may spark a thought, something that this feeling or this sense of openness reminds you of from your recent or not-so-recent past. Be in the flow of your thoughts and neural connections as long as it comes from an embodied space. As soon as you notice you are solely in your thinking mind, the meanderings and afflictions, get back into your body, back to your breath. The wisdom comes from the embodied mindfulness. The space that is created when you meet your sensations with your full-heartfelt attention. Integrate the unfinished business stored in your body and land in a clear path towards further alignment in your mind and body. Slow down, get quiet, get curious, and listen to the whispers and nudges that are there to guide you.
“Developing the lens that enables us to see the mind more clearly stimulates the brain to grow important new connections...How we focus our attention shapes the structure of the brain.” Daniel Siegal
We can practice mindfulness by maintaining a moment by moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings bodily sensations and surrounding environment. An observing without judgement. Noticing patterns of thought and action without believing everything we think and without shaming ourselves in our hypocrisies.
"To extract ourselves from the maze of the mental plane requires that we choose to drop the story and instead pay attention to feeling its causal emotional charge unconditionally. As long as we cling to our stories, we choose the past over this moment....
The stories we tell ourselves, which we began telling once we start developing our mental capacity, established our current library of core beliefs. Because much of the charge that drives these beliefs was imprinted in our energy system before we had mental, and hence conceptual capacity, none of these stories are valid. They are all effects, which means our beliefs form an illusory mental passageway, we mistakenly walk along as a desperate means of making sense of the apparent chaos and unpredictability of our circumstances.
Because our stories are rooted in what we believe happened in the past, what we suspect this means for the future, it means that until recently, we have been designing the quality of our human experience based on fearful ‘guesstimations’. We have allowed the unintegrated aspects of our child self to be in charge of determining what is best for based on its undeveloped interpretation of the world. Since none of these stories are valid as a means of interpreting our current human experience, and definitely not of any use for integrating, it's self-defeating to continue to allow these unconscious core beliefs to function as the parameters by which the quality of our current experience is determined. For this reason, we now become conscious navigators of our life experience.
The first step in this new direction is to DROP THE STORY. Even if we believe our stories have the validity to stand up in a court of law, they are still mental interpretations of charged emotional predicaments. Clinging to any story is clinging to the past. No story has the capacity to free us from the past. Only feeling what is, without condition, empowers a return to an awareness of presence and the radiance of present moment awareness that emanates from us whenever we identify with this authentic expression of our being." - Micheal Brown
How do we engage in this practice in a tangible and clear process???
Utilize BRITA to scoop the oil off your pure authentic nature that is the water
B - BREATHE; functionally, fully and with PolyVagal theory in mind so you can BE WITH whatever is real and arising in the NOW.
R - RECOGNIZE you are feeling something. Perhaps you have been triggered. Acknowledge you may have just "flipped your lid". Soften as you remind yourself that you are a human having a human experience. Triggered by something external which has touched an internal wound, surfaced a memory from your unintegrated past. What a blessing it is that this unprocessed emotion is now at the surface for you to be with it and integrate it. Dismiss the "messenger" of the upset and send gratitude for the set-up. Following the re-action of blame or anger (or any other habitual re-action) is equivalent to accusing the mirror for the content of its reflection.
I - IDENTIFY the emotion and any sensations that are readily available to be felt. Identify where you are on the spectrum from Hyper to Hypo (or from Green to Yellow to Red)? Where in your body and/or mind do you notice the activation? Where are you on the mood meter? If an alien who has never experienced sensation was asking for descriptive detail, how would you label what you are feeling? Anxious? Angry? Frustrated? Disgusted? Fearful? Numb? Sad? Go deeper and meet the raw sensation beneath the emotion.
With Self-Compassion and patience, identify and describe sensation beneath the Emotion:
pulsing, temperature, density, weight, color, direction, open, expanding, contraction, tension, familiar, new, tingles, prickles, sharp, dull, ache, shape, flow, jagged, deep, surface, loud, subtle, numb, clear, intensity/mild, shooting, movement, squeezing, pointed, pushing/pulling, dense, stuck/shifting, localized, sound, light/dark, empty/full, etc
T - TRACK IT! Be with and feel the sensations unconditionally. Just as we cannot attach to any moment of our breath, we must witness and track sensation in a similar way. Observe without judgement as the sensations arise, move, shift, pulse, tingle, grow, transform, etc. Can you sustain curiosity, awe, wonder and love as you create space around whatever it is you are feeling? Just witness the natural flow without agenda, without manipulating it, without trying to fix, heal or understand it. Shifting from projection to integration. Allow these sensations to transform back into their true nature; energy in motion. "Integration is the conscious digestion of the unintegrated aspects of our childhood." Micheal Brown
A - ADDRESS IT by practicing self-compassion. Turn towards what you feel and meet it with loving awareness. (depending on the situation, there are various avenues for this integrative phase. Upon moving through the previous stages, you have guided your nervous system back to safety, and your higher thinking capacities are back online. This is where we need to step into new habits of self-soothing and engage in conscious communication, rather than cover the emotion back up with our old coping mechanisms.)
"The goal of the practice is not perfection, it's to be a compassionate mess" - Kristin Neff
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xoxoxo