Safe and Sound? Part 2

After reading this post, I invite you to experience the short, guided meditation video above. You don’t have to know how to meditate to follow along.

Warning: This video may contain empowering tips for cultivating calm (6 min. intro and 15 minute practice).

In mindfulness education, we begin multi-week trainings by asking participants to embody; deliberately turning attention from mental activity, to present-moment sensations.

Why would this be useful?

Sensations (external and internal), can be critical “in-the-moment” indicators of disruption to the nervous system.

The nervous system becomes disrupted when fear activates our primal mechanism of fight or flight (the stress response), wherein internal chemicals and hormones prepare the body to fight or flee a perceived threat.

Threat is the key word. When threatened — by events real, or perceived as real, our sense of safety dissolves and is replaced by fear.

If you read Safe and Sound Part 1, you may have participated in an exercise to jot down those things that cause your sense of safety and security to be tested.

When you revisit your list of root causes to feeling unsafe, you may realize that this cycle of fear, followed by fight or flight symptoms (elevated heart rate and blood pressure, flushed skin, tightness in the gut) repeats itself multiple times a day, and full recovery may not occur between these events.

This can produce a state of constant anxiety and overreaction to stimulation, aka chronic stress.

Over time, chronic stress has the potential to break down the body and mind.

That is precisely why it behooves each of us to practice the art of embodiment, recognizing when sensations are fueled by fear, and disrupting the cycle of stress, in order to cultivate resilience — in the face of all threats that come to call.

I closed Part 1 with, “help is on the way!

Mostly, that help can be SELF-administered.

Settle in and watch the video at the top.

Let’s take the next empowering action step together.