The term somatic means “of the body” and refers to focusing on the body as distinct from mental constructs associated with your perception of your body. It’s a muddy space and as the term gains more mainstream attention, it might help to clarify this.
It helps to distinguish what I call the Universal Body vs your Personal Body.
We all inhabit a body that is designed to balance on two small platforms call feet. It has a big task of balancing a heavy bowling ball called a head on a stack of small bones called a spine. This body is below the surface of your personal narrative. It’s a body we all share as humans - it’s what I call the Universal Body.
Your personal experience of the Universal Body is colored by all the experiences in your life and all your interpretations. The meaning you associate with a collection of body signals is very personal to you and you don’t know it any differently.
The Universal Body is best navigated by the lower brain because it has evolved over millions of years to do this well. We interfere in this efficient operation through our personal perception of what we fear, what we desire, and how we organize ourselves in response.
The purpose of anything labeled ‘somatic’ is to help you drop down into what is happening in the Universal Body, below the Personal Body. It’s not a simple process because we experience the Universal and Personal Bodies at the same time. The act of pulling apart what is Universal from what is Personal requires a quality of attention that often means slowing down because our conscience perception is a million times slower than the innate organizing systems in our lower brain.
Distinguishing your Universal Body from your Personal Body provides a clarity that helps you do this skillfully and reliably. In my book, When Things Stick: Untangling Your Body From Old Patterns, I present a system that starts with focusing on the fundamental challenges you face in your Universal Body - how to stand on your own two feet and how to move forward. After you refine these skills, you can use these skills to move past the patterns that are embedded in the stories that drive your Personal Body.
Why posture matters (the answer might surprise you)
You’ve heard about the importance of posture - how it impacts your mood, breathing, spine, etc. Frankly, that part of posture can be a bit bland, which is why you end up not terribly concerned about it until you glance in the mirror and look hunched over. Or until your neck hurts and you can’t pick up your child. Or your back hurts and you have to sit with all sorts of contraptions to be in an ‘ergonomic’ position.
But you know what matters more than that? It’s how posture shapes your inner experience.
Posture is how you interact with the world.
It’s how you animate your body.
It’s how you take up the space - how you matter.
It’s how you pay attention to others.
It’s the way you organize yourself to be present.
When you organize the whole of yourself in a way that connects you to the forces larger than you (gravity, light, sound), you expand your presence.
You inhabit your body in a new way. You don't just take a new posture, you become a new posture. Feeling and meaning intersect in your body to dictate the new posture you become.
In my book “When Things Stick: Untangling Your Body From Old Patterns, you learn new concepts that take you into your new posture.
You learn:
*how to feel your internal support
*how to find your power without strain
*how to find your ease of breath
*how to move forward
*how to take up your space
It's not mere data - it's your living breathing body that speaks back to you and says
"You're supported."
"You're safe."
"You're capable."
"You're more than you think you can be."
You'll trust it because you'll feel it. You won't have to fake it to create it.
Are you ready to find your personal power, the posture you were meant to be?
Top 3 Posture Mistakes
Are you making one of these top 3 posture mistakes?
1. Thinking posture is what you do instead what you feel.
2. Fighting the support that is built into the human system.
3. Focusing on one area instead of taking a global approach.
If you've read my book When Things Stick: Untangling Your Body From Old Patterns there is of course something that you 'do'. But the change that endures is recognizing that what you feel is stability, power, ease - what that means in your life and becoming familiar with how you get there.
Think of a common situation during your normal day when you typically feel defeated, overwhelmed or in need of support. Where does that feeling express in your body? Can you feel the position you take when you feel you have to do everything, that you have no support?
Can you instead organize your pelvis as if you are about to take a seat? Not in a way where anyone outside can see, but internally, make that postural change and notice what happens?
It's a simple shift, but changes your entire spine and gives you access to your ankles. Do you feel it?
Your body is designed to offer you specific support that is highlighted by understanding the 3 Keys. How do you organize yourself to take advantage of the internal support your body creates when it works with gravity, instead of against it?
That is a concept that many of us need to learn again and again, because this level of habit is deeply ingrained. But it's a surprisingly quick fix. Knowing when to use that fix when you need it is part of what you learn in my book (read an excerpt HERE).
Vulnerability vs. fragility
As a culture we are learning the power of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. Here are some thoughts, both from myself and others. Include yours in the comments below and join me in a talk, Aug. 31, about embodied vulnerability.
Being vulnerable is …
.…a strength
…a positioning
…transitory
…a choice.
Being fragile is …
…life-threatening
…a state
…being brittle
…an outcome.
Learning to be present through your body
When you say “I need to learn how to be present”, what does that mean? That you mentally feel scattered or fragmented? That you get distracted from overthinking about a memory, problem, situation? That you have a hard time staying still or focusing?
These are all descriptions of the same thing. And they all have the same elegant solution - learn to use your body.
Let me explain. The distractions from the present moment are not bad in and of themselves. You need to plan for the future, to remember your history, and to discover solutions to problems. However, when you do so out of distraction, compulsion, or avoidance, you are doing without using one of your greatest assets - your feeling capacity.
Feeling is the main gift of having a body. It’s the feedback system that allows us to be the observers of our experience. Being able to observe your felt experience is how we are able to choose how we experience life.
Without conscious choice, we feel frustrated or stuck, so we move away from the feeling. And we “do” without feeling. And we feel fragmented, distracted, stuck, compulsive, restless.
When I teach people how to be still in their bodies, they get better at it as they learn how to move in a way that is organic and whole.
Ironically, learning to move with feeling is one of the best pathways to stillness. Moving while feeling is the definition of somatic movement.
Over the past 20 years I have sought the most direct, effective, and lasting ways to make global changes in a body. When I started teaching classes online, I discovered that doing so through a digital medium - one that had no dimension - naturally demanded that people listen differently. When you learn embodiment online, you experiment more, you listen differently, you are naturally more self-reliant. In fact, you uncover your strength, your ease, and your resilience.
Are you ready to access more of yourself? Read an excerpt from my book to learn more.
Smell recovery: physiotherapy for the nose
Training your senses is training your brain. Your senses are by design adaptive. Smell training has gained wide interest since loss of smell is now recognized as a sign of COVID. The good news is these people might be more likely to produce the COVID antibodies.
Professor Thomas Hummel’s research in olfaction has shown that you can recover your sense of smell with training. You can buy the components to make your own kit in the links after the video. I recommend you use a 5th jar filled with coffee beans to use as a “palate cleanser” before you move onto the next scent. (Note these links are Amazon affiliate links, so I earn a small commission if you buy.)
Auditory health and your brain
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The capacity to improve perception of sound is why I'm excited about a new Tomatis Method tool. It allows you to listen to your voice, filtered through Tomatis software, and delivered into your system via bone conduction. This approach to hearing is one that influences posture by training your attention to your own sound production.
This eye-opening article in the NY Times emphasized the significance of hearing on brain health. "Hearing loss is the largest modifiable risk factor for developing dementia, exceeding that of smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise and social isolation."
This testimonial by an ear-nose-throat doctor and this one by an opera singer will probably be most relevant for the majority of you. You can feel it working and it's simple to use - read aloud for 10-30 minutes a day.
Google Your Body: The answer to chronic discomfort
The stories you tell yourself and the stories your body tells you should sync but when they conflict, the body wins. Do you crave more ease in your daily body? Where do you start? If you have chronic pain or discomfort, if you’ve tried many modalities but keep bumping up against the same restrictions, consider learning the language of the body to discover how to change its story through the plasticity of your perception.
A body tells stories of comfort, safety, and survival. They are generic and universal. Our bodies go into survival mode when conditions seem life-threatening. On a fundamental level, your body is designed to conserve energy the best way it can. Your body will do what it can to organize you to be upright and not fall down. It’s going to make sure the images from your two eyes create one image in your brain. All these things are body functions that signal comfort, safety, survival, and they are largely unconscious.
The conscious story you tell yourself is one of self-identity, belonging, ancestry. These stories are personal and unique. The brain builds these stories through memories and meaning. When the brain can’t make sense of what happened, when you can’t tolerate or process something in the moment, the experience lives on until you are ready to unpack it. In the meantime, per trauma expert Van der Kolk, the body keeps the score.
These stories together build a narrative that you live in every day. The conversation between your body and your brain are happening whether you pay attention or not. That conversation is accessible to you through your perception. Your brains speaks in words and abstractions, but your body speaks in feelings and sensations.
Sensations are by design adaptive. They are your entry into the plasticity of your brain. Feelings are more complex, so it is easier to work with the building blocks of sensations.
How do you start? Here are two key steps to overcoming conflicting stories within you:
Learn to listen to your body from the inside
Discover your internal strengths in order to authentically experience your vulnerabilities.
The first step means bringing subtle body cues up into conscious perception. Being able to pay attention to your body signals is a learned skill. In fact, it may work best once your central nervous system is fully matured. We now know that full maturation of the pre-frontal cortex doesn’t happen until the ages of 25-30yrs.
Children speak the body story. You get better at applying the brain story when you have more years of practice digesting or integrating body signals. But the body story cannot be blocked out. Dr. John Sarno was an MD who famously relieved back pain in patients by helping them identify their repressed rage. He became so effective in his approach that people have experienced recovery from back pain by merely reading his book.
We put aside body signals all the time, and we need to in order to get through a normal day. It’s natural. But you need more tools than disconnection from, or dominance over, your body in order to manage the ups and downs of a full life.
Discovering where your brain and body are in conflict doesn’t have to be a dramatic process. We all experience some degree of it. You can try measures here and there as you try to keep stress at bay.
Or you can learn a deeper skill: to dynamically center and empower yourself. When you can experience the deep systemic strength you have within a well-organized physical system, you can untie the knots of conflicting stories within you.
I have been teaching a full body-mind awareness approach that efficiently snaps your attention into the moment. In this approach, I apply a technique to learn the skill of moving from strength to vulnerability. It’s a simple and potent approach. Experience this work through my online courses.
Tiny Habits® and Bob Ross
Lovely testimonial of someone who found inspiration doing his own Tiny Habits® challenge. Tiny Habits® is a process of developing new automatic behaviors using emotional self-encouragement. To participate in an email-guided 5-day challenge, you can register for free on tinyhabits.com.
Droplets, aerosols, and virus transmission
The 6-ft rule applies to droplets, which fall to the ground. Aerosols transmit differently. Seems that physical barriers and staying outdoors or having good ventilation are your best defense right now.
Prolonged exposure in enclosed areas can create a build-up of aerosols, which, when breathed in, can go deep into the lungs without triggering the immune system, i.e. you have the virus but are asymptomatic. Here is an informative interview of Kimberly Prather, PhD. At 9:40 min she points to the events that indicate aerosol spread.
Tiny Habits for parents of autistic children
In the early days of the shutdown, our Tiny Habits community offered over 100 free sessions to a global audience to help people deal with rapidly changing circumstances. Learning to change behavior in concrete ways is one of the best antidotes to stress during times of uncertainty.
I teamed up with Occupational Therapist Maude LeRoux in this session to help parents with children on the spectrum.
Skin hunger during isolation and how to combat it
Skin hunger is a psychologically recognized condition, something that many people might be experiencing for the first time during the lock-down. The variety of touch receptors in our skin serve to communicate safety and comfort, sometimes in ways you may not recognize. For example, the full-body contact offered by water in a bath is one of the reasons it’s so relaxing. This article does a nice job of breaking down the science behind it.
In this post I’ll talk about two solutions to skin hunger during lock-down. Whether for your children or for yourself, these simple solutions address the physiology in a direct way. You cannot talk yourself out of having innate sensory needs.
The first solution is to use exfoliating shower gloves on bare skin. Use as long and as continuous strokes as possible. Remember that you are doing this to create soothing input into your nervous system, not necessarily to exfoliate. You can do it on your arms during the day. If you are doing a full-body lymphatic flush, move from back to front and always towards the heart.
The second solution is to put something weighted on top of your torso why you lie on your back. You can do this during the savasana at the end of your yoga session. You can do it for a 3-minute grounding break from the computer during the day. Use something that is not too heavy, but has enough pressure that is satisfying. You can put a heavy book on a flat pillow.
Or you can buy a buckwheat pillow and use it as the weight, which means you can also lie on your side and hug it as well. The deep pressure is calming. The ability to hug something that is not too mushy in essence “hugs you back” through the deep pressure you create inside of yourself. Your child might find molding herself to the buckwheat pillow more satisfying that hugging a soft toy.
Tape your mouth at night for better sleep & dental hygiene
A client reported feeling healthier after practicing mouth-taping at night to ensure nasal-breathing during sleep, which produces nitric oxide. I learned this technique in a Buteyko breathing workshop years ago with Robert Litman. Read more about mouth-taping in a post by functional dentist Mark Burhenne. “If you’re breathing through your mouth while you sleep at night, it’s a big deal.” Regular scotch tape is fine in case you do not have specialized tape.
boltondental.com
Keep your lymphatic system flushed for better immune function
I’m a big fan of taking care of your lymphatic system, and its importance right now might be greater than you think. The lymphatic system is part of immune system.
You hear less about the lymphatic system than say, the cardiovascular system, because of the difficulty doing research on it. However, it is equally important. In fact, think of it as a vital part of the circulatory system. A congestion or sluggishness in the lymphatic system makes you feel stiff, make your feet feel sore, makes your brain foggy.
Unlike the cardiovascular system, which has the heart, the lymphatic system does not have a central pump. Instead, it flushes through movement. So moving your body (which we are doing 12% less during the lock-down) is one way to move lymph.
Besides movement, here are my top 3 lymphatic system care techniques. Enjoy and share this info!:
Dry brushing BEFORE bed at night (demo starts at 1:00 min in):
2. Chi gong immune boost (the swing of the arms, the swing of the torso, and the tap all work together to move fluid).
3. Liquid chlorophyll: use dropper and add one or two dropperfuls into water
Where are your greatest risks for catching the virus?
When you are barraged with information and facing a lot of uncertainty, being able to translate anxiety into action is productive and helps you cope. In these posts, I am continually seeking points of action that you can take and hope you find them useful.
In this article, Professor Erin Bromage assesses current (as of May 7) information to help us understand where and how we are most likely to catch the virus.
“Remember the formula: Successful Infection = Exposure to Virus x Time”
“Anyone you spend greater than 10 minutes with in a face-to-face situation is potentially infected. Anyone who shares a space with you (say an office) for an extended period is potentially infected. This is also why it is critical for people who are symptomatic to stay home. Your sneezes and your coughs expel so much virus that you can infect a whole room of people.
…Any environment that is enclosed, with poor air circulation and high density of people, spells trouble.
…The main sources for infection are home, workplace, public transport, social gatherings, and restaurants. This accounts for 90% of all transmission events.
…Indoor spaces, with limited air exchange or recycled air and lots of people, are concerning from a transmission standpoint.“
My take away is to stay away or be extra careful in bathrooms that are not in your home, to keep your distance or hopefully stay outdoors when conversing with friends, and to know the risk is greatest when I’m enclosed for extended periods of time with people (no groups inside).
Nasal breathing and humming for nitric oxide production
My friend, a retired respiratory nurse, alerted me to this info on nitric oxide, chemical symbol NO (that is different from laughing gas which is nitrous oxide, chemical symbol N2O).
Nitric oxide is produced during nasal breathing. Here is a list of benefits. Notice the items in bold that can be particularly significant given what we know to date about COVID-19:
Nitric Oxide Benefits
1. Regulates vascular tone and blood flow
2. Delivers oxygen to the mitochondria for energy production
3. Supports healthy blood viscosity
4. Supports healthy arterial lining, preventing cardiovascular disease
5. Generates antioxidants for repair, like SOD (superoxide dismutase)
6. Supports healthy blood sugar and better insulin sensitivity
7. Lowers BMI (Body Mass Index)
8. Regulates brain blood flow and neural plasticity
9. Supports cellular immunity
10. Regulates and lowers blood pressure
11. Regulates gastric motility
12. Supports healthy endothelium (blood vessel lining)
What you can do with this info? Hum to increase nitric oxide production!
You can do this using humming vocal warm-up techniques such as this lip buzz from Heather Lyle’s Vocal Yoga CD.
Or follow these videos:
Must have in your COVID prep kit: pulse oximeter?
COVID patients are confounding the doctors. They can have low oxygen saturation levels but show no signs of distress. This article by a veteran ER doctor explains how monitoring O2 levels with a pulse oximeter could be a significant tool in the early stages of monitoring COVID exposure.
But here’s a caveat for asthmatics: you can have normal O2 levels even if you are having a flare-up. Respiratory therapist Theresa Cannizzaro explains that in practical application, asthma is about airway passages, not the O2 levels. In fact, instead of focusing on O2 intake, in the Buteyko Technique, the focus is on allowing CO2 buildup to trigger the natural inhalation response.
In the end, the significance of consuming information in a time when so much new and conflicting information is coming at you is this: what can I do with it?
The pulse oximeter is a way to get feedback on how your control of breathing influences your heart rate and your felt sense of ease. Use a pulse oximeter to measure your baseline and get familiar with your recovery rate.
Do you have have an underlying hypoxic condition? Does your breathing pattern increase your heart-rate? If you have not specifically worked with your breathing and feel anxious when you do, this could be a good tool for you.
But you have to develop the skills, not just have have the measurement. I am offering workshops and classes on three different aspects of breathing to help you learn. More offerings coming soon.
NERVOUS SYSTEM REGULATION: Learn to manage your nervous system in a simple and unique standing meditation practice called “Finding your anchor”.
MOVEMENT: The lungs cannot expand when the ribs are tight. Learn to find mobility in your thoracic spine, shoulders, and ribs in my “Free your lungs!” workshops.
CHALLENGE: You can challenge your cardiovascular system in a balanced way during my Quarantine cardio sessions.
Why Walking Matters...
If you’ve attended a “Finding Your Anchor” session with me, you know the power of using left-right integration as a way to metabolize anxiety. One of our hallmark left-right integration activities is walking. In this article, Dr. O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research, elaborates on that point as it relates to brain function and creativity.
“A walking brain is a more active brain, and more activity in the brain can bring colliding ideas and associations at the edge of consciousness to mind—resulting in the “a-ha” moment of insight.”
Cardiovacular exercise and COVID-19
Study Suggests Regular Exercise Can Prevent Coronavirus Patients From Developing Severe Complications
To summarize, cardiovascular exercise is “preventative medicine” against COVID-19. It is also protective against dementia and an effective treatment for depression. So many reasons to start today. Even if it’s only a tiny step, it’s a step in the right direction.
How to breathe if you have a respiratory infection like COVID-19
Allergist Jonathan Bayuk, MD, ACAAI member, discusses the importance of deep breathing and getting up and moving if you have a respiratory infection like COVID-19.