The other day I received an email from Karen asking me for some advice. She said that she had just experienced a very strange reaction to a conversation that she had just had with a coworker.
The conversation was slightly contentious but her reaction afterwards was way out of proportion. Afterwards her voice was uncontrollably shaky and her arms and hands were quivering. Karen couldn’t understand why her body was having such a big reaction to something that seemed almost insignificant.
Karen also expressed how she wants to be able to live her life without being interrupted by her body blowing things out of proportion.
Stress – some people notice it, for some it flies under their radar, so the tension is there but they’re not feeling it. As the nervous system gets healthier and you’re becoming more aware, it’s normal if you have these kinds of bodily reactions (not that you want to keep having them). These bodily reactions are there to signal to us that a story is running in the background, like an app on your phone that is not closed.
A stories is a bit like a stereotype. With a stereotype, a person associates a certain meaning with certain stimuli. It’s from a basic form of brain learning where we can more quickly call up information. A story is more complex than a stereotype but it still involves the same basic aspects of brain learning. With a story, we learn to associate a certain meaning from a group of stimuli that we’ve associated together. And just like a stereotype, a story resides in the subconscious so it’s challenging to become aware of it.
Typically stories that affect us negatively, have been created in the first place in order to protect us from feeling or thinking beyond our comfort zone. They initially serve a purpose: A story harnesses the automatic Operating System in order to protect. However as time goes by, that same story that used to protect us, can now limit us. A story can limit our expression of feelings, our experience of closer/deeper relationships and it can help to maintain us in a energy poor or neutral state.
One of the ways to become aware of a story that’s “running in the background” is to notice our thoughts. For example, I used to have moments where I noticed myself replaying memories from my life; memories that were “negative”. These memories had energy poor feelings associated with them. In other words, these memories that would play like a movie in my head, left me feeling ashamed, guilty, feeling less than.
When we notice our thoughts running in this way though, it’s challenging to shift them to something different, perhaps more positive. This is where meditation really comes in handy. I would recommend looking at https://drjoedispenza.com/ as an example of meditation that works for many people, including myself.
But when we start to become aware of the stories that are running in the background, through sensations in our bodies, like Karen did, what do we do with that? Is there a way to harness the experience to help us open doors into the subconscious?
Absolutely!
What I suggested to Karen was to find a safe space (or create one) where she could feel the sensations. If you don’t give your body a chance to shift from survival/stress to safety/healing/growth, then you won’t be able to fully embrace the sensations. If we get in our heads and try to “understand” where they’re coming from or where we question and try to analyze, we will limit our ability to feel those sensations fully.
What happens when we can fully feel the sensations? In Karen’s case, I asked her to feel the shakiness of her voice by talking out loud or to someone that could hold space for her. And to feel the trembling in her hands. Allowing the body to shake more if it needed to. She could also try to notice what else was happening in her body at the same time such as: is there any tension in her neck, shoulders or chest while her voice feels shaky, does she feel like she’s holding something back, what’s her breathing like, is she able to breathe into and through her throat?
This type of inquiry starts to disrupt the story because when you’re in observing mode, you can’t be in stress mode. The brain starts to associate more feelings and sensations than the story holds.
Where does this lead?
This helps us to take what’s subconscious and to bring it to the conscious. As we do this more and more, we actually start to rewire the nervous system and the story ceases to run. In Karen’s case, she will find in time that her body doesn’t blow things up out of proportion as much. She will be able to trust her body more.