In our app and coaching services, we teach people embodiment practices.
Embodiment practices help you bring calm, curious awareness to the difficult sensations occurring in your body. These practices facilitate exposure to the sensations of pain/symptoms; your brain has an opportunity to reappraise what’s happening and regain a sense of safety.
With consistent embodiment practice, you stack up healing wins, desensitizing your brain out of pain/symptoms.
These healing wins look like:
- Viewing symptoms as neuroplastic, not structurally dangerous
- Observing symptoms with less nervous system dysregulation
- Less fear, fixing, frustration, despair, or hopelessness
- Exploring sensations with a regulated nervous system
- More curiosity, ease, and lightness
- Pain/symptom reduction
You can take the power back from pain and symptoms through embodiment practices!
Your brain doesn’t expect you to respond to pain or symptoms with a sense of safety. You actually confuse your brain…in a helpful way! You starve the pain or symptom of its fuel sources: negative self-talk, nervous system dysregulation, and avoidance1.
What are the 4 Elements of Embodiment?
- Drop In & Describe
- Deepen Connection
- Stay in the Healing Window
- Shifting Between Safety & Danger Signals
1. Drop In & Describe
Drop-in by bringing your attention to your body, exploring different sensations. You’ll start to locate the different sensations of pain, symptoms, and your nervous system state. Sensations are the language of the nervous system; we want to listen!2,3
Describe the sensations you can feel. This can be tricky! Become aware of the location and qualities of the sensations. With practice, you’ll build your skill, creativity, and vocabulary at describing the sensations. The table below provides a jump-start for describing sensations.
EXAMPLE DESCRIPTORS OF PAIN/SYMPTOMS:
“Achy, airy, alive, bloated, blocked, breathless, brittle, bubbly, burning, buzzy, chilled, clammy, closed, cold, congested, constricted, constricted, contracted, cool, cozy, crampy, damp, dense, dizzy, dull, elastic, electric, empty, energized, expanding, faint, flaccid, fluid, flushed, flutter, frantic, frozen, full, furry, goose bumpy, gurgling, hard, heavy, hot, icy, intense, itchy, jagged, jittery, jumbly, jumpy, knotted, light, loose, moist, moving, nauseous, numb, open, paralyzed, pounding, pressure, prickly, puffy, pulled, pulsing, quaking, quiet, quivering, radiating, ragged, raw, rolling, shaky, sharp, shimmering, shivery, shudder, silky, smooth, soft, spacious, spacious breathing, spasming, spinning, sticky, still, stretchy, stringy, strong, suffocating, sweaty, tender, tense, thick, throbbing, tickly, tight tightness of skin, tingling, trembly, tremulous, twitchy, vibration, warm, wobbly”
(Somatic Experiencing, p. 52, 2021a)
2. Deepen Connection3
- Increase your awareness with each exhale, moving your observation closer to the sensations you’ve decided to explore
- Feel not just the intense sensations, but all the subtleties occurring around them
- Watch and describe how the sensations shift, sit still, move, ebb or flow
- Notice what happens in different parts of your body as you observe
- Be aware of both pleasant and unpleasant sensations
3. Stay in the Healing Window
There are limits to the amount of pain/symptoms you can experience before becoming too dysregulated.3 Staying in the healing window means you engage in exposure to sensations of pain/symptoms, while still maintaining a sense of safety.
To begin, we recommend practicing when the pain or symptoms are mild to moderate and you feel able to be curious and present. This facilitates healing wins during exposure, retraining the brain. The principle of staying within the healing window is key in all exposure practices, whether it is for fears, phobias, trauma responses, or pain and symptoms.
4. Shifting Between Safety & Danger Signals
Trauma and chronic pain/symptoms cause dysregulation in the nervous system, interrupting your ability to easily shift from danger to safety.3 Your goal is to retrain your nervous system to shift with ease.
When you feel safe-enough, you’ll shift to danger signals – bring your attention closer to the sensations of dysregulation, pain or symptoms.
If you’re exiting the healing window because you’re feeling too dysregulated by intense pain, symptoms, thoughts, or emotions, shift to safety signals.
- External Safety Signals
- Connecting with people and animals
- Activities and environments
- Foods, sounds, smells
- Internal Safety Signals
- Present moment sensing
- Breathwork
- Tapping & massage
- Somatic movement
- Safe Self-Talk
- Savouring pleasant imagery, sensations, self-touch
The Desensitize App is your complete, science-backed guide to somatically retraining your brain back to safety.
Our step-by-step exposure exercises help you practice embodiment and develop safety signals that retrain your brain and regulate your nervous system.
The result? You experience healing wins that desensitize your brain and nervous system out of chronic pain and symptoms!