Unlock The Healer Within

There are many different skills to use throughout the day to act as the observer of both pain and emotions and move your brain toward the neuroplastic changes necessary to change your perception of what is occurring in the body. This directly helps to down regulate the autonomic nervous system from a sympathetic state (fight or flight) to a parasympathetic state (rest and digest) where both our mind and body achieve homeostasis restoring us our physiology to the balance we seek to feel good in our lives.

BASE technique:

• This is a technique I learned in the book The Secret Language of the Body. It is simple and best to practice throughout the day when you catch yourself anxious, fearful, sad, ruminating, dissociating, obsessing, or in a state of 5 F’ing (focusing, fixating, frustrated, fearful, fighting) pain or symptoms. Practice for a few minutes at a time, several times throughout the day. If you are obsessive, do your best not to make this an every time, perfectionistic/fix it performance.

• B = breath: notice your breathing (i.e. shallow, deep, in the chest, sucking through the nose, fast, etc.)

• A = action: what action does my body want to take (it wants to expand, contract, ground itself, fold over and rock, be hugged, fight and crush something, be soothed, “haven”, hand over heart, take a deep breath, etc.)

*images may come to mind of massaging a painful area, rubbing your hands up and down your arms, being hugged; however if they don’t that’s fine too. These images can be a way of attending to what your inner child needs and did not get in childhood and a way of ‘redesigning’ your response to triggering stressors for which you developed behaviors that are no longer serving you (i.e. berating yourself, repressing, distracting, shaming, coping with addictive behaviors, etc.)

• S = sensations: this is similar to mindfulness or pain reprocessing therapy (see more on this in another technique section). The idea is to act as the observer of sensations and simply label what is going on in the body and where. These labels may include burning, softness, tension, vibrating, tingling. You can play with using more neutral words which the mind is not so reactive to such as heat for burning, or sparkling for tingling and see how your mind responds. You can also use colors which for those of us who are more visual may automatically come to mind like red for heat or blue for coolness. See if you can actually see or feel these colors. If not that is fine, everyone is different.

E= emotions: this may be difficult to detect or wildly apparent at times. Do not worry if you cannot find an emotion for what is going on. Sometimes the S for sensations helps to discover what emotion may be occurring. If your jaw is tense and shoulders are hunched, you might be frustrated, angry, your action may indicate you are ready to fight. If you hands and eyes are soft you may feel relaxed or at peace. Simply notice, label and if you don’t know, simply observe you don’t know, or may feel neutral.

The goal of these techniques and all techniques is to practice acting as the observer and increase awareness of yourself and your automatic responses or unconscious habits. From there it is the change your response to something that is more neutral or loving. Sometimes awareness itself is enough to start changing the response (you may notice your breath deepens when you observe it’s shallow, or your heart slow down if it’s racing due to anxiety).

The goal is NOT to shoot yourself in the foot for having maladaptive responses that are a very human response to situations. The goal is also NOT to fix what is going on or change it. This is called outcome independence. Outcome independence is one of the most essential, albeit difficult parts of the entire process and entails focusing on merely practicing the techniques and not caring if something gets better, worse or doesn’t change. It’s here that you learn to be with things and not resist them (whatever we resist persists). When you can truly master this skill and live your life no matter what is going on, is where things truly begin to change (links below to more on this, blog to come).

Outcome independence: – – https://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/a-word-about-outcome-independence.562/

_{Credit: Dan Buglio, painfreeyou.com}