What The Heart Knows

We build resilience and regulate our nervous system through awareness and practice. Through somatic listening we are aware sooner when we are becoming dysregulated, and we know what to do. We take several deep cyclic sighing breaths, look around the room for cues of safety, and feel the warmth and support as we hold our own hand. We are confident we can come back into awareness of the safety of the present moment because we’ve done it so many times before. These practices work!

We strengthen our capacity to remain as witness. Thoughts about the past and catastrophizing about worse case future scenarios lose their grip on us when we realize what’s happening. We’re holding our breath, clenching our teeth or we feel a heavy energy in our chest.

We open our eyes, put the thought into a frame on a wall on the other side of the room, let our eyes move around the empty space outside the frame a few times in each direction and voila! Our brain realizes we are not in immediate danger. We are looking at a thought. We come out of fight/ flight/ freeze and back into regulation.

Somatic practice has an immediate benefit in sharpening our neuroception, our sense of danger and safety. We are not back in that room or with that person or in that dangerous situation. Yes, we were at one time and that is no longer true. Our level of hypervigilance reduces and we regulate. Our direct experience is of safety in the present moment.

With this freedom and stability, we have more agency. We have the capacity to be curious about and present with the energy stored in our body without being carried away by it. As we develop more equilibrium and steadiness, the deep stillness in the mind reveals itself to us.

Most of us have moments of awareness interspersed with the minutiae of daily life and being caught up in hypervigilance. What we know through experience is that when we’re in fight/ flight/ freeze, we need to come back into regulation to access our higher wisdom and spiritual states. This we can do.

What does my heart know?

As my mind quiets, I become more comfortable with the energy in my heart.

My adult self is present and supports traumatized parts that are still experiencing fear without trying to avoid or “fix”.

I come back to witness consciousness, present to myself, my whole body, breath, energy.

I rest in the heart and listen.

Now you're ready to take your spiritual journey.” Michael Singer

If you would like company on the journey, join us this week for our Sunday free community class. We inquire and share. Details here.