Reconnecting Back With Your Body
Anxiety, stress, depression, trauma – we can feel the presence of it all in our minds and hearts, but it is essential to acknowledge the pressure it puts on our bodies. You know when you’re anxious and you feel your blood pressure and heart rate accelerate? Or you suddenly feel the urge to run in a situation that reminds you of something from your past? Our bodies are trying to communicate with us, whether we know how we are feeling or not.
Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist and author, uses the metaphor of the “elephant and the rider” when describing the relationship between the emotional and rational sides of the human mind. The emotional (the elephant) is going to react on instinct, based on past experience, trauma, and, most importantly, emotion. If the elephant reacts strongly, all the rider (or the rational side) can do is hold on for dear life, despite the semblance of control that the rider likes to believe they have.
"Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader. But the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched." – Switch: How to change things when things are hard
When we use this concept to think about our emotions, we can understand that when we are triggered into an emotional state, the elephant (in this application, the elephant is the body) takes control and we (as the rider) feel increased stress, anxiety, and a loss of control. We are feeling the scars of our depression, anxiety, and trauma, as our bodies try to protect us from what it perceives to be danger.
By improving the relationship we have with our body it will allow us to better understand what we are experiencing and why. It allows us to build a bridge between our unconscious and conscious, our nervous system and our mind, and ourselves and our emotions. Through practice, we will learn to identify our triggers, name our emotions better and understand why we may be feeling agitation or other physical sensations.
So how do we reconnect back with our body? How can we create a stronger relationship between the elephant and the rider, so when the elephant gets spooked, we are able to calm it?
There are many ways of building and improving our relationship with our bodies. Many of these are based on mindfulness. As life can be complicated and many of us have busy schedules and many commitments. Because of this, it may be preferred to utilize strategies that are accessible, flexible, and don’t take much time. One of the most well known is a Body Scan.
To do a Body Scan we start with focusing on our breathing. Breathe in your nose for 6 seconds, hold for 6 seconds, and then breathe out of your mouth for 6 seconds. Take as many breaths as you need. Focus on your breathing, and allow it to spread through your heart, stomach and lungs, flowing through your muscles all the way to the tips of your fingers and toes.
In order to better understand our emotions and our body let’s ask ourselves questions about what we are feeling. At first, it may be difficult to answer these questions or to know what our body is trying to communicate with us. Over time, by continuing to practice listening to our body the questions may get easier as we get more in touch with the sensations and feelings that we are having.
Ask yourself the following questions:
What areas of your body are you feeling energy from? What color is the emotion or energy? What does it look like?
If you were to color it on an image how would it look? What do the colors represent?
If the color and the sensation could speak, what would it say?
What does this tell you about yourself in this present moment?
Now that you’ve checked in, try to use this in moments of stress, feeling triggered, uncertainty, or even in the morning when you wake up. Pay attention to how you answer the questions differently depending on what is going on, the time of day, your emotions, or precipitating events.
Something as small as a Body Scan can help start bringing the relationship between our body and our minds from the unconscious to the conscious. Other methods of connection can be found in methods of mindfulness such as meditation, yoga, controlled breathing, walking, guided imagery, and other practices used to relax the mind and body and bring them together.
Try taking 5 minutes out of your day to participate in some form of reconnecting with your body; listen to what it is trying to communicate with you, the message may be more pertinent than we realize.
By Gracen Kelly, Candidate for Masters in Clinical Mental Health Counseling
