The Importance of the Body in Mental Health
This article is part of our weekly TGIF newsletter series. To get these in your inbox weekly, sign up below:
Hi community,
It’s been a pretty good week of connection and synergies. With the sweltering heat, my family enjoyed quiet evenings in the AC watching shows, a few (too many??) ice cream shop trips, and we took advantage of early morning cooler temperatures to get outside.
But mostly this week, I was reaffirmed how much the body does in fact keep the score. I was in loving gratitude for the Reset way of doing this work and for witnessing profound transformations with panic, injury, chronic pain, and trauma this week. Let’s dig in…
TOOLS
“The body talks and meditation helps” - Nahko & Medicine for the People
There is a very important reason why Reset is called Reset brain and body. When I was in graduate school I used my yoga practice as a stress reliever for full-time school and full-time work plus a new dog, an expensive downtown Chicago apartment to afford, a recent break-up, and building credit card debt. What I was experiencing in yoga aligned with what I was learning in grad school about acceptance, discomfort, finding my edge, non-attachment, and gratitude. I knew that yoga could be a formidable tool to aid in mental health care and thus set out upon graduating to forge a new path of treatment.
As my life got busier, my yoga practice dwindled. However, a component of yoga that I ended up resonating with most was the meditation part of yoga. I knew that even if I couldn’t get to a full vinyasa class if I could meditate for 15 minutes then I could still get the benefits of my full practice.
And what are the benefits of meditation and yoga? You can find tons of resources to encourage the practices but I’ve found a handful:
experience difficult emotions without shutting down
offers a way to gently train the brain to rest in the mode of thinking and experiencing what is happening now
help you recognize when your mind is being consumed by emotion and your body symptoms too
cut the intensity of difficult or overwhelming emotions and pain
GRATITUDE
I’m incredibly grateful for the clinicians at our practice who are obsessed with the brain-body connection as much as I am. I feel fortunate to be surrounded by a team that inspires me to keep learning. Last week we had our all-team retreat and we learned the specialties of each of our team members. I cried, learned, laughed, found Emily’s EFT to be the bomb, meditated a lot, and played the best game invented by Erica.
I’m grateful that Marte is a wise old soul that infuses creativity and outside-the-box thinking to push the limits of my comforts. I’m grateful that Jonah can reach the tough-to-admit places that keep me in my own way from progressing towards my goals. I’m grateful that Jim can take all my jumbled thoughts and feelings and put them into something beautiful, compassionate, and insightful.
I keep learning. And this week I learned, yet again, how my body was holding trauma still from my accident 18 months ago. I’ve worked with PTs, massage therapists, chiropractors, and talk therapists to overcome the physical and mental pain of getting hit by a car. However, the pain persisted in my hip. Finally, I was told to really be with the pain and Blaise led us through an incredible exercise and it just clicked. I knew the reason I was still in pain. I knew why I was holding on. I knew why my muscles wouldn’t relax and the tension remained.
I let go…and so did the pain.
INNOVATION
You see, well-researched clinicians have been studying the brain-body trauma response for years. Deb Dana, Bessel Vander Kolk, Stephen Porges, and Peter Levine are some of the pioneers in this work but I’d say that the work keeps building and it’s so fun to be a part of it. Not only have I been a recipient of the brain-body solution but I get to facilitate it with my clients too.
Recently I had a client who was experiencing panic attacks and flashbacks related to sexual trauma. We really had gotten to a standstill in her treatment with just talking alone. We had done some meditating and mindfulness exercises but we couldn’t crack into the physical symptoms she was having.
Then, I mentioned a stretch targeting the inner thighs and hips and she had a visceral reaction of constriction and fear. I then knew we had found our opening.
In the next session, I led her through a guided hypnotherapeutic relaxation, and utilized energy healing, and meditative mantras to connect her brain and body. She was agitated, tensing her fingers as we moved through the process, and in spite of her discomfort, I told her, “I will not rescue you”.
I do not fear “retraumatizing” because I believe (and have witnessed so many times) in our ability to heal ourselves even in times of extreme discomfort.
FEELS
I know that we can trust in our ability to heal ourselves.
So often we just need to be in a safe container and gently guided to courageously access our pain.
After the experience, my client said, “usually when I feel the panic, I rush to get rid of it. I do anything to avoid the feelings. But I learned today that I can sit in the panic feeling and still be okay. It goes away all on its own”.
AHH. Therapy gold. Magic. Amazing.
Learning how to be in a relationship with our feelings and our physical pain is a gateway to restabilizing our nervous system and releasing our deepest wounds. “Relationship” means we do not avoid, push away, or distract ourselves from the parts that are uncomfortable.
We are in a constant relationship with our bodies and our brains (even though many of us try to pretend they are not connected!). We need to listen to when the body speaks. We need to observe the thoughts. We need to sit with the feelings. As we listen and stay relaxed when agitated, we learn that it passes. It all passes. The feelings, the thoughts, the trauma, the pain … we must keep creating pathways to allow for passage.
Yoga, somatic work, art, music, meditation, and movement are all vehicles to promote safe passage.
It’s exciting to be here. I’m excited to keep offering you these tools and experiences. The work truly is, life-changing.
Forever geeking out. Hugs.
