Feelin’ The Feels
Dear readers, you’re in for a treat. Somatic Therapist, Andria Lea, is in the house to shed some light on the oh-so-trendy mind body connection. Using solid science, she takes the fluff out of feelings & gets real about the body. Plus, she gifts us with a practice to listen to our body’s intelligence for answers we might otherwise seek in a logic trap.
It seems that everywhere we look in the wellness industry there is some talk or peppering of the term “mind body”. While this is not a bad thing it can lead many people to wonder, well what does that mean? In my early years of education on Somatic Therapy even I myself struggled with not only understanding what the mind body connection actually is but also how to communicate it. I fluffed it or talked around it because the default answer is that it’s hard to explain because you have to experience it.
You may or may not be engaged in some form of mind body connection and in fact you may not even realize it. I will touch on that towards the end of the article though; first let’s get some orientation.
You are your body. Read that again, slowly. You are your body. Your thinking mind (neocortex) is not somehow separated from your feet. Your feet are composed of 156 components each sending your brain constant information. Your brain and body are talking all the freaking time which is good because your brain also lives in your body. Emotions are not ethereal, they happen in the body as peptides and receptors firing according to neural pathways, which to me is pretty magical. Neural pathways (sciencey things) are formed based on experiences and the more you have an experience the more those pathways wire together. Good news - we are plastic so those hard wired pathways that you live with can adapt new ways of being and change.
From this sentence on when you read the word “body” begin to redefine that word as “all of me”, okay?
Your body (all of you) is an imprint of your collective experiences, as a living, adapting, human being. Your story, history and emotions are all there, wired in wonderous and changing ways. This is what makes us unique, because no one else in the entire world has the same experiences as you did, and your body was learning the entire time because your body has one mission.
Your body is designed for safety, survival and protection. That’s it everyone. As complicated as things may feel, there is a yearning in all of us for safety and protection - so we don’t die. Here is a big caveat though: your body cannot differentiate between physical, mental, and emotional danger. It only has so many modes of operating which can be boiled down to “that feels bad” or “that might feel bad so let’s avoid it”. That simple tenant of life is ancient. In the record of human history the neocortex is a relatively new addition and the last part of our body to get the message. This is why we can know something, and yet feel totally differently.
“I know I shouldn’t care that my bangs are a little too short, they will grow out in 2 week but I feel so ugly”. Or maybe “I know I am good at my job but I am terrified of my boss”. It’s in those discrepancies that something so totally and utterly resourceful resides - a story.
This is the cookie and juice you came for; this is the whole point of the mind body connection. It’s a conversation. The mind body connection is a conversation between that big ole neocortex and how your story has influenced you to feel things. If you ate clams and got super sick, your body was learning and now the smell of clams makes you react in disgust as you feel the desire to never eat them again.
Your body is communicating with you all the time. Because we learned to speak and the body uses feelings, we forgot how to listen. By giving those feelings some awareness, expression and language - whether they are sensations, emotions, intuitions or knee jerk reactions - you can get to know them and resource them for change and guidance. Understanding your emotions and sensations means you can learn where they came from, and in what way they are trying to keep you safe and protected because they are on a mission to avoid the bad. It’s with this mind body connection that you can help them reorient from your story (aka what it learned from your historical experiences) to the present and change the way the story goes. Your body’s way of keeping you from feeling anything bad can sometimes be disruptive to how you want to live this life of yours. Experiences over our life become hard wired in our neural pathways and can activate responses you no longer want or need.
Going back to clams, you could take a breath when the revulsion is screaming about the last time you got sick from them and let your protective body know you are not going to eat clams again, maybe get tested for allergies, remind yourself not all clams are evil, and you can protect yourself without the revulsion response. The goal is to let your body know it can trust the brain part of you to take care of yourself so it doesn’t have to react on your behalf. You can replace the clams in this story with whatever reaction or feeling you like.
I hear all too often that someone knows why they feel a certain way and the buck stops there. It’s the difference between knowing why and exploring whatever it may be with a mind body connection. It’s in the conversation that the story is revealed and can be rewritten.
The entire point of therapy in all it’s glorious, albeit at times confusing, forms is about the same thing: becoming more comfortable with the uncomfortable. Here is a fancy term, it’s called the window of tolerance. Let’s say Leslie hates being angry, this is because her window of tolerance with feeling anger is so uncomfortable she can’t tolerate it (the definition is in the term).
Your nervous system is actually 3 systems and it helps to understand that as we go a bit deeper. You have the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). It’s important to know all three are working at the same time. Here is a short crib sheet:
ANS - breathing, your heart beating, blinking, digesting, things you don’t think about but respond to perceived danger including emotional.
SNS - FEELINGS
PNS - The part that keeps you chill. It’s often referred to as the rest and digest part of the nervous system. If your feelings get too big and start to mess with you the PNS system tries to shut that down which is helpful and scary sometimes.
The window of tolerance is in the PNS when your feelings are not running amuck. Let’s go back to Leslie who has a small window of tolerance for feeling angry. Leslie feels angry and it feels bad. Remember how the body is basically designed to avoid bad things here. Leslie also has a history of receiving dysfunctional anger over an extended period of their life. If you go back up and reread you may have figured out that this means Leslie has some hard wired neural pathways designed to avoid the bad that is anger. This can play out many ways in Leslie’s life, perhaps by becoming a people pleaser that doesn’t stand up for themselves and has a tough time communicating needs because the risk of people being angry is not tolerable.
Circling back to the mind body connection, use your awesome brain to imagine Leslie had the chance to get to know this anger. Here is an abbreviated exercise you can try at home:
Lay down on your back, eyes closed with your knees bent so that your feet are on the floor. Let your body settle in, let the floor be the floor and all the tension in the body be supported by the floor’s permanence. When you are ready start to ask the following: I feel_______________. It feels like (get creative, images, analogies, etc)_________________. I feel______________ as often as________________. This feeling has been a part of my system, my story for ________________long. It may come from_____________(play around with this, check in with the feeling to see it feels right). What does _____________need to feel soothed? What can you tell this ______________ to help it feel that you will be safe, protected and alright? Does something need to change? What question would you ask ______________ to learn from it.
There, you just did it, this is the mind body connection. You may be doing this in some form or another already whether it’s intentional or intuitive. Be creative, listen to what your senses are saying instead of trying to make sense of them.
