Somatic Tracking goes by many names and has had many incarnations. In the 1983 book, Taming Your Gremlin, Rick Carson teaches about the extraordinary power of simply noticing. Sound familiar? Today I'm leading you through an experience of somatic tracking with a strong sensation, an ice pack. And you can do your own version. Getting good at the skill of simply noticing can create huge shifts in your physical and emotional life. Listen as I lead you through the exercise and some examples of how I applied this work to my life this past weekend when dealing with some internal conflict and holiday stress.
Feeling better is possible for you and I hope that this podcast is a useful tool in your collection of mindbody practices.
Enjoy Rick Carson's book - https://www.harpercollins.com/products/taming-your-gremlin-revised-edition-rick-carson?
A great description of The Twin Peaks of Pain - https://longevitypt.com.au/blog/how-to-explain-chronic-pain/
If you're ready to explore hiring a coach - I've got spaces available for new individual clients working one on one. I'm looking forward to connecing with you!
Book a free half hour curiosity call with me - https://calendly.com/paincoachdeb
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/curiositycure.coach/
Website - https://www.thecuriositycure.coach/
[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder, fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity.
[00:00:29] So you can feel more better. more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:58] Hello. I'm going to practice somatic tracking with a sensory home base. What my colleague coach Callie talked about in last week's episode. So I just thought it would be fun to do. And then I'm going to talk about some emotions and a little pain thing that I had going on for me last week, and then I'll just show you a little bit of how I use somatic tracking my process for dealing with it. Because I think these stories are helpful, right? We can read about it, but I find hearing people talk about their experiences using these tools can be incredibly helpful. This stuff isn't a secret and you'll hear me talk later how even these concepts aren't new. Right?
[00:01:45] So I just think let's just jump in right now to this somatic tracking. We're going to create this sensory home base or, or maybe it's like somatic tracking with a strong sensation. So we're just going to explore what does it feel like to become aware of how it is to pay attention to something that we know is not dangerous?
[00:02:07] So sometimes it's too hard to practice somatic tracking with our problem, like our pain problem, whatever it is. And it's different for everybody. So sometimes it's too hard. It's too scary. We have a lot of history with it. We have a lot of thoughts about it, maybe beliefs about why it's happening, what's going on.
[00:02:28] But if you're doing this mind body work, what we do know is the way that we relate to our sensations is part of unwinding them so that the basics of it, like if this is the very first episode that you have ever heard, what we're talking about is working with neuroplastic pain. What we're talking about is teaching the brain that these sensations are not dangerous, that we are safe, that our body is strong and that, you know, even if we've had a past injury, it is healed and we're trying to train and update our brains predictive code of what is happening.
[00:03:05] And there's so many parts about that that is perception. Perception, leading our brain's attention to what's going on. And then deciding whether what we're experiencing is a threat or a danger. And these things are happening subconsciously, they're happening super fast, right? It's really essential that we're, you know, if there's some, a ball coming to like at my face to not be like, Hmm, I'm wondering if that ball is, uh, that's coming at my face is really dangerous or not.
[00:03:39] Like, right. We. Respond and react, uh, really fast and the brain learns over time how to make that reaction more automatic and more fast and happening below our conscious awareness.
[00:03:55] So all of this is creating a conscious practice that then we can update our subconscious beliefs experiences and that kind of body sense of whether or not what we're experiencing is dangerous or a threat.
[00:04:12] We're going to consciously train our brain to pay attention to sensory experiences and maybe ones that are unpleasant. So there are practices in which you teach the brain to pay attention to pleasant sensations, right? But we're going to start with unpleasant ones. We're going to get familiar with this practice and we're going to use an ice pack. And now I know that an ice pack is not dangerous. I mean, there are ice things that are dangerous. So don't stick your hand in dry ice. That's not good. So ice packs, you know, I'm going to touch it. It is really cold. If at any point you actually are feeling a sense of alarm, like that's a great place to stop.
[00:04:54] It's really important that we begin to practice and work on that edge of capacity and awareness, right? We don't have to do everything like full on, like go hard or go home, right? Like we can actually touch in. This is about teaching the brain safety. So we do need to come up to the edge of unsafe.
[00:05:21] Right, of just tracking our nervous system's response, but we need to be able to do that in a way where we can be in that curious embodiment and not just blow through that. We are not blowing through anything. We are actually trying to increase our capacity to feel safe having multiple experiences.
[00:05:48] I'm going to touch the ice pack and I'm going to describe what it is that I'm feeling when I'm holding this ice pack.
[00:05:56] So I'm just holding it with my hand and like my brain's attention is like right in my hand. Like, there's almost nothing else that I'm aware of right now, except for maybe talking, um, and it's interesting. So there's, uh, and I might close my eyes because that helps me kind of go inward and focus on sensations.
[00:06:18] Um, so there's like a burning sensation. My fingers are cold. My palm is cold and burning. Burning is the primary experience that I'm having. If I were to imagine that there was a color, like an icy blue color, maybe white, like that white hot color. And I can start to feel like a throbbing or a wave of sensation moving through my hand.
[00:06:51] And the more I hang out with it, the less alarming that it feels. Like, it's uncomfortable. It's unpleasant but I know that it's not dangerous and I feel pretty safe doing this right now actually as I am not so in the experience as I'm talking about the experience It's actually feeling less cold less burning if that makes sense. So I'm just gonna get into the curiosity of it and now I'm gonna let go and see what I notice afterwards. I can just kind of feel this like cool breeze flowing over that hand and kind of a pins and needle feeling and like a sense of tingling and, um, kind of feels like a liveness or vitality.
[00:07:47] And that's so interesting because when I, um, came back to the East coast, I was really afraid of the cold weather. And one of the things that I did was. Train myself to go outside in the cold and teach my brain that I was, it was not like cold in a negative way, but that this is what vitality felt like, this is what aliveness feels like.
[00:08:10] So now all of a sudden, I think that belief has really transferred into this experience and it's actually meant that I could like. Go outside, not completely bundled up, feel really relaxed, feel really calm, have even like cold wind hitting my face and just be like feeling kind of good and alive, like in that quality of, um, health and wellbeing, like that this is part of my, I mean, I keep coming back to the word aliveness and I think that that maybe is a value of mine.
[00:08:46] Like I really value feeling. And so feeling more, feeling safe, feeling more really corresponds for me into feeling alive. Now I'm noticing, my other hand and actually let me just place this on my cheek. Ooh, that's kind of an interesting feeling and just noticing the cool hand on my warm cheek.
[00:09:09] And actually that, that felt really lovely. And just like, I noticed my, my breathing relax and my body calm. And maybe it's just that somatic experience of having a hand on my cheek. Sometimes we do that work also when we're working into creating a sense of comfort and ease, put the hand on our cheek and a hand on our heart and really just noticing whatever it is that we're feeling.
[00:09:39] Yeah, just kind of enjoying that. Noticing the rest of my body now as that coolness and sharpness and burning feeling, the burning feeling is gone. It's faded. I'm not really noticing it anymore. Actually, if I can kind of want to remember it, I can bring it up again a little bit.
[00:10:01] Sometimes, with my mindbody clients I'll ask them to turn up a sensation, right, because it really shows us, yeah, we always are focusing on turning it down. But when we actually are able to turn it up, that's when we know that our brain and our perception and our awareness plays such an important role in what we're experiencing.
[00:10:28] So I think sometimes that's really useful and maybe doing it with an ice pack is actually really handy way to do that, which is like, okay, as the feeling fades, can you actually kind of revivify it? Bring it back up. What do you notice then? And just noticing like, okay, now it's just fading. I'm placing my attention now on my other hand. I'm just noticing how warm that feels, how relaxed, how not burny it feels.
[00:10:59] I'm going to try it again, same hand. And just I'm going to get into like, noticing if there's a shape or, um, again, a color. I already went through a color, but like just noticing as I'm holding this ice pack, uh, if I were to imagine this feeling as a shape, what shape is it kind of feels sharp and pointy, maybe like ice crystals, maybe I'm not that imaginative. Um, so just noticing that there's this kind of sharp and pointy feeling. And again, the rest of my body seems to drop away and just taking my hand off of it. And just again, noticing the difference between my two hands. Kind of my left hand feels a little, almost like swirls and warm and like gentle waves and like something that just feels really good to be in.
[00:12:04] And my right hand is still feeling kind of cool, but the sharpness is gone. So now I'm just noticing, yeah, it kind of feels like a really flat, almost like a plane of ice, like what you would ice skate on. Just noticing that feeling of coolness without the sharpness. Um. Yeah. And just maybe I'll rub them together and, uh, yeah, just noticing, Ooh, my arms are feeling tingly and just noticing that sensation and, and bringing in warmth and like bringing the coolness to my warm hand and my warmth to my cool hand and just noticing how things change, noticing this quality of aliveness.
[00:12:55] Right. Really being able to feel without fear, without worry, without concern. Um, that part is just so, for me, it's, it's one of the most beautiful gifts of mind body work is this capacity to relate to myself. Kind of outside of fear. And so this is how I would use kind of somatic tracking with a strong sensory experience.
[00:13:28] Um, and it's not the only way, but that's the way that I just did it right now. Just a perfectly wonderful place to start to just practice and ease into that sense of curiosity. Just noticing, noticing the sensations without trying to change them.
[00:13:50] I think you can really personalize it and have it be different each time for each person with, with each sensation, like do it in a way that makes sense for you.
[00:14:03] The premise is we attend and tune in to ourselves with this quality of curiosity. And so sometimes we're asking ourselves, Oh, does this have a color? Oh, what am I experiencing? Not like I'm experiencing cold because the ice pack is cold, right? Like we're not really looking for the reason. We're not looking for the why we're looking for the, what am I experiencing right now?
[00:14:34] We're pulling the camera back and being more abstract. Like we're letting our subconscious pop in and maybe describe something. And if you're really visual, maybe there's like a whole journey that you get taken on or it could just be super simple. There's no wrong. Answer, or maybe if there's a wrong answer, the wrong answer is not trying.
[00:15:00] So I also think it's fun to practice with somatic tracking in an expansive way and not just in a like, this is going to get me the results kind of way. And this came up for me last week. I was having some knee pain in my left knee and I was laying in bed and my left knee was tight and tense and really painful.
[00:15:26] And I hadn't done anything, I'd gone to the gym and I had done a workout and that felt great. It felt great when I was doing it and, but that weekend, I was having some stress about, some plans that I had and. So Friday night was when I felt the pain. And interesting thing about nighttime is, you know, as I'm like trying to fall asleep, the next thing that's gonna happen is you wake up and it's the next day.
[00:16:04] And I was having some inner conflict about things that I had said yes to, that I, you know, was going to do. on Saturday or not do. And there was this kind of emotional conflict going on inside of me. So there was one part of me that felt like I should do this thing. And then there was another part of me that didn't want to do this thing.
[00:16:25] And I just, that kind of push pull, that's that kind of divided mind that Dr. Sarno talked about as a trigger for this kind of embodied pain, that it's a great distraction from the emotional pain, right? So the, the body kind of like, it's like, I got you. You don't want to feel this conflict, this sense of self being challenged.
[00:16:55] Uh, so I'm just going to throw you this like physical pain and boy, is that just going to put your attention right there? And, uh, you know, and when you're a seasoned mind, body practitioner, you kind of are on the lookout. For these things.
[00:17:10] I was just like, okay, well, let's at least 1st tell my brain that I'm safe. And so I did some grounding. I did a little resourcing. I was laying in bed. I just said, let's feel this sense of relaxation. So I really brought in this quality of how good it felt to be laying in my bed and, and I had just bought like all these new pillows. Like I bought these pillows that were really like soft and fuzzy.
[00:17:42] I love fuzzy comforting, tactile things, so I bought these like pillowcases that are fuzzy and I was just like rubbing my hand on them and like that felt really soothing and relaxing and I'm just being present with what is. And my knee was throbbing and for a moment I was like, yeah, right now what I'm noticing is I don't actually believe that I'm allowed to feel good. That kind of popped up in my head and I was like, okay, I hear you. We don't know that we're allowed to feel good when we're going to disappoint somebody. And I was like, yeah, that's actually like a really big thing for me.
[00:18:35] So it's like we're going to do some somatic tracking. So I just brought my attention to my knee. And, to myself started to describe what was going on and try to attend to it with curiosity. And the first thing I noticed was it didn't really work. Now here's the thing. It is a paradox. Somatic tracking is not meant to get rid of the pain. It's not meant to be a magic trick. But I fall prey in the same way that so many people do.
[00:19:08] Which is like, it didn't work and feeling disappointment, right? Because sometimes you do somatic tracking and it actually goes away. The pain goes away or it changes. We notice the shift. We start to feel better. And of course, that's what we want to have happen every single time. But it doesn't happen every time.
[00:19:28] Sometimes it happens. Sometimes I just start to laugh at myself because I'm like, yeah, of course we want the sure thing. We want to be the magician. We want it to be magic. And we want the result that we want, which is not pain.
[00:19:47] So I like to with body parts, I have two of, uh, I often like to shift my attention to the not pain. You mean you could do this with any part. You can shift your attention to the not pain part in your body, but so I just like shifted my attention to my right knee, which was not hurting and I just like relaxed in that.
[00:20:09] I was like, I still love this knee. Like, I love my left knee. We're going to hang out in my right knee and just feel that sense of calm, grounded, sense of safety and like.
[00:20:23] Here's what's ironic is the right knee is the one that when I went to the orthopedic surgeon, he was like, you have osteoarthritis, it's going to get worse and worse every year. And that was the knee that I was thinking felt great. That felt no pain. That felt calm and relaxed and not in danger. So, there's that. It's very useful to take a mind body approach when you have a doctor who wants to tell you you're going to feel worse and worse every single year and it's only going to, you know, Be a disaster.
[00:21:02] I think I just fell asleep at that point because I don't remember anything else. So when I had shifted my attention to my not pain knee, um, I fell asleep because I was not in distress because I was not in a hurry. I was not trying to fix things. I really just told myself like, Hey, subconscious, I'm just going to let you work on it. Like I'm going to trust whatever is happening. I trust that I'm going to be okay. And sometimes that's a really hard statement.
[00:21:41] Sometimes that's a really hard statement to believe. If you can't believe that, maybe you can say, I believe it's possible that I'll be okay, or I've been okay. Like I've survived a hundred percent of my days so far. It's just about this way of talking ourselves down.
[00:22:03] And for me, the goal was actually to fall asleep. Like it really wasn't about changing the pain or getting rid of the pain. My, I was laying in bed to go to sleep. My goal was to go to sleep.
[00:22:16] I do that often now to help my thinky brain. I just tell my brain, Hey, I really trust my subconscious we'll keep on working this, like we'll keep working on this while I'm asleep. And so I'll say to my like conscious brain, I love you. But it's time for you to go to bed and let our subconscious do its thing during sleep time. And sometimes like when I do that, I got kind of weird dreams. I had a dream recently that my coach Kara gave me an arm full of puppies.
[00:22:51] And then I went on Facebook and I was like, what does this mean? Like tell me the right or the wrong answers, please. And people were giving me all kinds of funny answers. So one of them was like, you're going to be given both something that's delightful and chaotic.
[00:23:05] I like that one. And then Kara was like, there are all new thoughts that you get to think. I was like, you know what? I love that. I would love a bunch of cute and cuddly thoughts that I get to practice, like some sweet and adorable thoughts that I get to keep with me all the time and have, uh, this giant ball of love to think and practice with. So I was like, okay, cause it's a dream. It can be anything I want it to be.
[00:23:38] One of the things that I really like to practice is this deepening that sense of okayness. Deepening that belief that there's nothing wrong with my body. And, you know, this is a concept that can be difficult for people, especially when you're experiencing chronic pain.
[00:23:55] So that's a line that I like to use. And if it doesn't work for you, like you'll find something else that works for you. Really, that is the important piece. It's not that you have to adopt my language or my beliefs. It is about finding what fits and feels resonant for you. I've done enough of this pain reprocessing work to just really notice that what I believe about my body is sometimes so wildly different than what my body is actually doing.
[00:24:27] Like, even like yesterday, I went to the gym and I'd gone to the gym on Friday. And usually it's just like Tuesdays, Tuesdays are my day. But last week I was sick from a cold. My trainer was nice enough to take me on Friday. I had done a whole bunch of, like, walking over the weekend and some stairs.
[00:24:46] I delivered Christmas presents to people in my neighborhood and, like, so, so much walking. And, um, and I was sore. I was sore from my workout. And I was noticing as it was like Monday night, Oh, I'm still sore. What is my workout gonna be like, should I go to the gym? And one thing that I decided was I'm not going to pre decide.
[00:25:15] Like, I'm not going to pre decide based on how I feel on Monday, whether or not going to the gym on Tuesday was the right thing. And I really just trusted, like, I'm going to show up and we're going to see what happens. Let's go to bed we'll wake up and see how we feel. And then when I woke up, I felt a little sore, a little creaky.
[00:25:37] And one of the tips that I got from a mind body therapist, Hassana Fletcher, is the first hour of the day doesn't count. And that's a thought and a belief that I've been practicing, you know, that I noticed when I get up sometimes I feel a little creaky. And, you know, I'm 54 years old and I don't want to say it's a part of aging, but I mean, I've also felt that at different times, but what I now know is the most important thing is to not let that one feeling when I first get up, tell me how the rest of my day is going to go. Um, because as I start to move around, I'm like, Oh, you know what?
[00:26:19] I actually feel pretty good and I went to the gym and I did all my squats and I went up five pounds on my squat and the squats felt great. And even though I was sore before that, even though I had all those things, my workout was fantastic. And actually today. I don't really feel sore at all.
[00:26:41] Um, and so I'm just blown away by the capacity of my body, regardless of my thoughts about my capacity. And it's not to say push through, like I'm very present with myself. It's more that I have an open frame and I'm going to just show up and see what happens and leave the possibility open for maybe it's just going to be great.
[00:27:06] I think that part is really, really helpful. It's really helpful for me when I am unraveling pain behaviors. It's helpful for, helping the predictive brain get updated and just like, yeah, we're not telling ourselves some kind of shitty story about what's going to happen, but even just settling into this curiosity, right.
[00:27:29] Of like, I don't know, I don't know everything, but I do know that I have me. And I also like value my relationship with my trainer. So I also really trust her and I just feel like, you know, whatever, we're going to communicate together. We're going to be in this experience together. We can make adjustments if we need to make adjustments.
[00:27:53] I really value that relationship. And as I mentioned in the past, kind of one of my triggers is when I feel like I don't have help. That actually is a pain trigger for me. When I feel Like I'm alone in some kind of physical stuff. So I'm really like healing this relationship, this story, this narrative in my mind, body work, both my relationship with my physical body and then my relationship with my emotional body.
[00:28:29] And they all came together for me this weekend. I think holidays are complicated. Christmas is complicated. Family time or lack of family time is complicated. It's also a great time to create some awareness, to start to understand how these habitual patterns show up in our bodies.
[00:28:50] So maybe like suppressing our emotions and not letting them be felt and be safe for us to feel. Right? So we're not letting them out or letting ourselves be safe to feel. Maybe we have strong feelings or conflicted feelings like what I was talking about. Like if we're seeing our parents we just leap into that teenager child relationship with them and we almost even forget who we are.
[00:29:19] So creating safety is really, really important because if we don't create safety feeling. Right? Like we don't create some process for us to be with what we notice. Our body is going to feel it for us, right? Our subconscious is like ringing alarm bells and giving us the like no go feeling and there's really important information in there.
[00:29:47] And so I think when we're talking about kind of how emotions drive pain, it can be really helpful not to get super fixated on the pain, but we want to really explore again, I'm just going to say this like a million times, that feeling of safety, that evoking a sense of safety and when we notice that there's Not safety or less safety, right?
[00:30:18] So I was thinking about my emotional, that kind of conflict and I was messaging with a dear friend of mine and, um, I had a big kind of emotional reaction when I was telling her this story of feeling stuck in, I had said yes to something and I really kind of was a no and, or it was like a partial yes.
[00:30:39] Um, and you know, I was crying. And if you've ever listened to this podcast, that should not be a surprise to you. I think for me crying is a way that my body really deals with processing stress, so crying is a part of my stress physiology and it's not that way for everybody, but it is for me. And she sent me this really great message afterwards, which we.
[00:31:07] After we had talked and kind of like I got to kind of, um, like be witnessed with love. I got to offload some of what was going on and she asked me some really useful questions. Um, a little bit like coaching, um, but you know, also we just have friends who show up for us. Like, you know, coaching or therapy is not the only place that we can get support from people.
[00:31:34] Uh, so she wrote and she texted me this message, which is, I love you, you're doing great. And it is so good to have feelings. They are our internal guidance system and help us find our way in this gloppy world. Which I think is like hilarious, gloppy is such a great word. Right? And I was like, yeah, they are, they are our internal guidance system, right?
[00:32:01] Our emotions, our physical sensations in our body, they're communicating something. And it's up to us to become this kind of translator, this internal translator. And it takes time and it takes practice and it takes the willingness to notice and pay attention to things. And she shared with me this book that she loves called Taming Your Gremlin.
[00:32:28] It was like a 1983 classic book, but it's been updated and it's on Kindle and it's on audiobook, which, oh my God, I love an audio book. So I downloaded it immediately and this guy totally sounds like Ted Lasso. So it's really fun. Uh, his name is Richard David Carson.
[00:32:49] There's something comforting about it, something comforting about what he says and the way he says it. And even though this book is written in 1983, the main tool in it is somatic tracking. He just calls it noticing. He calls what I'm calling somatic tracking is the extraordinary power of simply noticing. It says among the techniques that you will learn are getting a sliver of light between the natural you and the monster in your mind. And he uses this idea that gremlins are those kinds of monsters, those negative voices that we have, you know, whether they're kind of externally given to us and then kind of internally, Repeated, and then he talks about the extraordinary power of simply noticing and playing with options.
[00:33:44] Then there's 6 keys to maintaining emotional balance, and I will leave that for you to discover. I will post about. I'll post a link to the book in the show notes, but so much of that was a parallel to this mind body work, this quality of noticing, just paying attention, teaching our brain how to become that loving external witness to what we're experiencing, not having an opinion, not trying to fix things, just starting to have awareness.
[00:34:20] and curiosity, and maybe even love and caring. Sometimes we just need a giant fucking hug, uh, really from ourselves because I will tell you that my brain is amazing at judging. And it's something that I've been noticing for the past few months really is like how really strong my brain is at being judgmental to myself.
[00:34:51] I'm sure I've said this before in another podcast, but I've really just been playing with, noticing, noticing how mean I am to myself. Noticing, what I'm saying to myself and then just going right into soothing and saying even like, yeah, maybe you are that, maybe you are lazy. Maybe you are a loser.
[00:35:15] I love you anyway. And just kind of that my brain immediately is like, well, you know, you're not a loser and like, it doesn't even ring true anymore, but I don't go to debate club. Maybe in my earlier podcast, you listen to me talk about debate club versus drama club, right? Drama club is where we go to feel, where we go to just practice.
[00:35:41] Emotions, practice feeling as if we are actors, right? It's not really fake, right? We're not pretending in a fake way, but we're just like practicing so that we are skillful and adept that we can be with ourselves and not be rejecting. What is arising was debate club. We're arguing with ourself. We're arguing.
[00:36:10] Am I a loser? Am I not a loser? Like we're arguing the content of our mind, you know, what makes us a loser. And then we were like, you know, want to go make all these achievements and change ourselves. And then we wouldn't be a loser. Cause in the end, what we really, really want is this feeling of love, acceptance, wellbeing, connection, belonging... with curiosity you can find for you, what is the part where you want to jump out of your own skin? Because whatever it is that you secretly believe is true, you know, you're, you're the most afraid of, and that you're trying really hard to create the opposite.
[00:36:55] But now I'm just like, yeah, so what if I am a loser, really? So what? How can I exquisitely love myself as I am? Right now in this body, in this mind, and then really just feel love and use those emotions as that internal guidance system, because they're telling me something.
[00:37:26] So a lot for me is about learning how to feel safe, disappointing people, using my voice, saying no, and really exploring is this a yes?
[00:37:40] And feeling like I want my yeses to feel true and not just, A yes, because I'm afraid of saying no. And there's just a lot of like, there's just a lot in between that, right? It's not a light switch. It's a dimmer switch. But really getting familiar with ourselves. So how do I not just make myself do stuff, but how do I decide for me and then articulate to the world or to whoever it is that I have to talk to? And even if they're mad at me. Really believing that it will be okay no matter what. That if there's rupture, I can make repair if I want to. And also reminding myself, I am not in charge of other people's feelings and sometimes also like, what if I'm wrong?
[00:38:37] Yesterday when I was going in the gym and the night before, you know, really like thinking like, Oh, should I go? Should I not go? Should I go? Should I not go? And really just being in that space of, let me just show up and see what happens and trusting myself that I can attend to myself with love.
[00:39:02] And I was wrong that there was going to be some kind of big limitation. So I'm really glad that I didn't pre decide, and I didn't pre decide that I wasn't going to feel good. I didn't need to be protected from not feeling good. Um, no matter what. I know that I'm going to show up, I'm going to have my own back, I'm going to be loving and caring and supportive to yourself.
[00:39:33] Sometimes saying no is not going, not going in the gym, saying no to the thing that I had said yes to. This is about expanding our window of tolerance, both our physical window of tolerance. There's this concept called the twin peaks of pain and I'll post that in the show notes too. There's this beautiful visual where you have this kind of these two peaks. And before we have some kind of learned pain, right?
[00:40:06] We have this pain that becomes, learned in the nervous system, right? We usually have this wider threshold of experience before we get to pain, but then when you're in this protective state, we actually have a narrower window before pain is triggered. And I find that is also true with emotional pain.
[00:40:30] So this work is always about getting back to that more expanded capacity, that window before Pain is triggered, right? So that really does involve learning how to be with some discomfort, but also just being adept at moving our brain's attention. Like I told the story about moving my attention from my left knee to my right knee.
[00:40:57] And we can do that in social situations too. We can shift our attention to what is working, what does feel good, where we're not under threat, so that we're not always being in a hypervigilant state of being, we're actually practicing being in that ventral vagal state, being in that relaxed state and moving ourselves through states, which I think is really important skill to have.
[00:41:27] Making more room for things to happen. And just being with myself as they happen, and it really gives me so much room to just, again, notice, attend, make discoveries and I think that's what this podcast is really about, which is to encourage you. To do those things, tune in, make discoveries and get really, really curious.
[00:41:52] So maybe that's your homework. You can do it with a cold pack or even with something warm. If you have a heating pad and just notice the sensations, just start to practice the skill of loving awareness and attention, noticing what happens, whether it's with an emotion or a physical sensation and just teaching your brain that you're safe.
[00:42:16] That's what I got for you today. If you'd like a guide. If you want to do this work with a mind body coach, who's trained in pain, reprocessing, if you want to work with me, because you, I mean, there are other people, but if you like what I have to say on the podcast, if you like hearing stories about my client successes, if you like it if my turn of a phrase or the way that I invite you into loving curiosity, I am, uh, working with new clients so you can book a free curiosity call and let's chat about it. Let's talk about what is possible for you. I hope that there's something that I've shared that really resonates with you. Uh, I appreciate your listening and I'll see you later. Thanks.