Do you consciously notice when you feel angry or resentful, exhausted or helpless? Or do you push them down, aim to ignore them and push on?
The route to recovery
Now that we know the true root causes of chronic pain & other persisting conditions are frequently connected with unexpressed emotion and stress, it’s integral to our recovery that we become more attuned to our emotions in the moment they’re happening.
If we can feel our stresses & emotions as they happen and allow them their safe & naturally appropriate expression in the mind & body, they have the opportunity to be processed and so “released” from the mind and body. This prevents them from accumulating within the complexity that makes up us & becoming an underlying source for chronic pain or another persisting condition.
When we continuously push down emotion, consciously or unconsciously, physical symptoms can eventually be generated.
Felt-sense
By consciously practising tuning into the various subtle sensations we feel in our body, we are helpfully observing the physical/body responses of our emotions - and permitting the emotional charge to be processed & released from our system.
The way I simplify it, our thoughts are active nerve circuits in the brain which are connected to many other nerve pathways and cascades of chemical processes, the effects of which both cascade into the body.
Different thoughts create different cascades & different effects in the body which we can feel as different bodily sensations. These sensations are our natural emotions in action – and which we can identify with a description from a vast scale ranging from despair & fear all the way up to elation & joy.
What to notice
· breathing rate and depth changing
· heart rate & pumping changing
· tension changing in muscles
· a change in gut activity
· tension & heaviness in the chest and/or abdomen
· lightness & expansion in the chest and/or abdomen
· sweating, feeling cold, hot
· perhaps some tingling
· a niggle, an ache or discomfort somewhere
The list goes on.
Somatic tracking
Somatic tracking is the process we can use, when we feel safe to do so, to openly & curiously notice, explore and follow those subtle changes. It’s part of a key practice that has allowed many people with long-term symptoms to achieve relief and often full recovery.
Sometimes challenging, but worth it
When we are first introduced to somatic tracking, it can feel quite alien & challenging.
For some of us, we may not even be aware of our emotions & their physical presentations in the body. This is often because we learned or perceived - usually in early childhood - that our feelings were unwanted. Perhaps our feelings were shunned, ridiculed, ignored or just not considered important by the carers around us. So we learned to ignore & suppress those emotions as they arose.
Freedom awaits
With patience, practice and often professional guidance & support, somatic tracking gets easier - & speaking from experience, enjoyable - and becomes an important strategy in the route to recovery.
Somatic tracking is one of many strategies we teach, embrace and gradually integrate into a new and empowering way of living that can help lead to lasting freedom from persisting/chronic pain.
Come and join me in my interactive & live Freedom From Pain online programme to do just that. I’d love to guide and support you towards your freedom.
Photo by Elisa Ventur on Unsplash
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