Safety & Self Leadership

This week we are going to build another foundational capacity: building a relationship to our nervous system and leaning to discern between its different circuits.

Feeling safe is not a new age fad about comfort and well being, it is the gateway that decides if we respond with human cognitive capacity, self awareness and creativity, or primal animal instincts and unconscious reactions.

The capacity to notice our nervous system’s state of arousal and regulate it into a state of safety at will is allowing us to step into self-leadership and agency, which is the prerequisite for a sovereign life and conscious participation in the collective movements of evolution!

Enjoy the lecture!

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Books:

Stephen Porges - The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation

Goals:

1. Becoming aware of the different states of our nervous system and learning how to track them in your body

2. Making some first experiences with regulating our state into more capacity through breath, sound, movement and touch

Exercises:

Pay attention to your perception of safety. What is happening in your body when you feel unsafe? How do you experience the three states in your body? What happens when you're triggered? Do you feel contraction, heat, vibration, tightness, what are your bodily sensations?

Start incorporating long and deep breaths with a loud exhale into your daily life. Take deep breaths throughout the day, try even starting your day with them. Pay attention how your body responds to them.

Try out to spend 5 minutes every day just naming your bodily sensations to become more attuned to your subtle sensations.

If you become aware that you are in an activated state, try out the following practices:

• If you feel angry (FIGHT), try taking a stable stance and push your hands against someone else's hands, making eye contract, allow your self to growl like an animal, engage your facial muscle and make loud sound. If you are alone, practice with a wall or move your hands with extended arms around you as a gesture to guard your space
• If you are scared (FLIGHT) try actively engaging your legs, moving forward and backward, left and right, moving through the space or even start running!
• If you are stuck in between those states (FREEZE) try both resources for flight and fight!
• If you feel numb, collapsed, depressed, dissociated (IMMOBILIZE), try tapping your whole body, shake out your limbs, jump up and down for 1-2 minutes (especially when you feel resistance!), actively straighten your spine, lift your head, open your shoulders wide, raise your arms, make yourself big. Try to get as much sensation and sensory awareness into your body as possible.
• In all cases: take as many deep, long, slow breaths with loud exhales as possible!

Notice what is shifting in your experience as you try out these resources. Is your perspective shifting? Are the bodily sensations changing? What about your focus? How do you relate to the stories in your mind?

Don't worry if you don't feel dramatic changes immediately, keep practicing and learn to get more sensitive and attuned to your nervous systems state and your subtle bodily sensations!

Try out to spend 5 minutes every day just naming your bodily sensations to become more attuned to your subtle sensations.

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