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Do you ever feel like the world has sped up and you… freeze? The body seems to be working, but inside you feel tension, emptiness or being cut-off? It could be more than “fatigue”, perhaps it’s your body’s protective and wise response to excess stress.

When stress ceases to be mobilizing

Stress in itself is not bad, it is a natural defence mechanism. When we feel threatened, our body mobilizes to act. The heart rate accelerates, muscles tense, adrenaline is released. These are the well-known reactions: fight or flight. But what happens when we can neither escape nor fight? Then the body chooses the third option: freeze. This is not laziness, nor “lack of character”, this is the wisdom of biology that says, “I can’t do anything. I have to disappear to survive.”

What does freezing look like in everyday life?

Freezing is not just an “emergency”. It can be a chronic disconnection from the body and emotions, which manifests itself subtly through:

• lack of energy, despite sleep
• difficulty making decisions
• feeling “foggy” or not being present
• withdrawal, emotional numbness
• perfectionism as an attempt to regain control

Sound familiar? It doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you. This means that your body, then or now, has lost its sense of security and has done what it does best – protected you.

Somatic coaching – talking to the body, not just the head

Somatic coaching can help you regain regulation and confidence in life. During sessions, we start with sensing, because before you change something, it is worth first sensing and feeling where you are.

How does it work?

During coaching sessions:

• you learn to notice signals from the body (tensions, breathing, microreactions)
• You begin to recognize what state you are in (whether the body is “running away”, “fighting”, or “frozen”)
• explore safe ways to get back in touch with yourself
• you build new paths through curiosity and compassion for yourself

It is not a “return to the past”, it is being with what the body carries today.

Can the body be released from freeze?

Yes, but not by force and not by shortcuts.

The body needs security, gentleness, time and… conscious contact. Somatic coaching teaches how to create a space in which the nervous system can return to balance. Your body begins to trust that it is different now, and you are an adult now, safe and supported.

This is the way back – from freezing to living fully.

If you feel that:

• Your body has “stopped” even though life goes on
• It’s hard for you to be in the here and now
• you need a safe place where you can feel yourself without judgment

… then you’re in the right place. And you’re not alone.

If you are interested in somatic coaching and this form of work resonates with your needs, don’t hesitate to contact me: kontakt@exploreself.pl. Make an appointment for an online or in-person session.

More about somatic coaching.

Somatic coaching sessions.

At the first session, during a conversation with clients, I often hear the sentence: “I already have it all sorted out and arranged in my head, but when I find myself in a problematic situation, my body reacts in the old way, as if I hadn’t worked on the issue at all. I don’t know what to do about it.”

This is something that I also experienced myself, having the topic “analysed thoroughly in my head”, but not integrated in the body. My body just couldn’t keep up with my analytical mind.

We experience ourselves through the body. Our body remembers and we carry this memory within ourselves, in our cells, systems, body fluids. In order for the change to be permanent, our body needs to feel too, to create a new “chemistry”, new neural pathways. Our mind will not do it alone, it needs the body.

In a world that favours staying “in the head” – analysing, planning, solving – more and more women are beginning to feel the need to get back to themselves. But not to the “mental” self, but to the self on a deeper level, to the self also connected with the body. To the Somatic SELF.

What is the Somatic Self?

The somatic self is a way of experiencing oneself through the body – senses, emotions, tensions, impulses. It is an identity that is not based solely on thoughts, beliefs or what we say about ourselves. It is the “I” that first feels and then knows.

It’s a deep, bodily presence that allows us to really feel who we are, what we need, where our boundaries are, and where we want to go. The somatic self is not a theory – it is an experience.

Where is my home?

From childhood, we are taught that “reason” is to be our guide. Feelings need to be controlled as well as the body. Crying, anger, expressing one’s needs were often denied or shamed. Over time, we learned to cut ourselves off from the body and its signals in order to function effectively from our heads – analysing, predicting, adapting.

What is the effect of this? It is becoming more and more difficult for us to trust ourselves. We don’t know if the decisions we make are really ours. In relationships, we lose ourselves, giving more than we want. The body has ceased to be our home, and has become something that needs to be repaired or controlled.

Embedding yourself – feeling your own center

Feeling your own center is not a metaphor. It’s a real, physical experience of being “at home.” You can feel it as a space in the pelvis, a gravity center in the body, you can create your own image of the center and connect it with the sensations coming from the body. It is a place within you, that is only yours, and to which you can return at any time.

When we are embedded in ourselves, we become less reactive and more present. We begin to hear ourselves. Decisions cease to be forced analyses and become natural responses of the body. Intuition ceases to be a vague slogan and becomes a voice that we feel and her clearly.

How to build your Somatic Self on a daily basis?

• Stop and feel your body
  You don’t have to meditate for hours right away. A few moments a day are enough to ask yourself:
  How am I in my body? What do I sense now? Where is the tension? Where is the space? Where is the heat/cold?
  
• Move your body
  Let your body guide you in motion. Don’t invent how you want to move, follow the movement you feel in your body. Dance, stretch, experiment.
• Listen to emotions in the body
  Anger can be tension in the jaw, fear – a tight throat, joy – warmth in the stomach. Emotions are energy in motion, when you start to feel them, you regain power.
• Practice trust in sensations
  Maybe something seems irrational “in the head”, but the body says: Don’t go there, or on the contrary – Yes, it’s good. Trust in yourself starts with trust in your body.

The Somatic Self and Our Relationships and Decisions

When we are connected to the body, we feel our own boundaries and are able to set them without feeling guilty. It is easier for us to say “no” where we need to, and “yes” where we want. We are starting to choose more consciously with whom we want to spend time or not. With greater calmness and trust in ourselves, we make decisions that are important to us.

***

The somatic self is not something that needs to be “worked out”. It’s something that is already in us, and we just need to rediscover it. When you are connected to your body, you become a more authentic, coherent, and present person in your life and in the world. Allow yourself to start feeling your body.

If you would like to try a 1:1 somatic coaching session, online or stationary, don’t hesitate to contact me: kontakt@exploreself.pl

More about somatic coaching

Somatic coaching sessions

Getting to know your own body and its reactions allows you to build a positive self-image, and this strengthens your self-esteem and self-acceptance.

Self-acceptance and self-esteem is a key component of the development of personal and emotional well-being.

Getting to know your own body better and understanding its reactions translates into a positive view of yourself. If you know your body, recognize its needs, limitations and capabilities, the level of uncertainty and anxiety related to one’s own appearance or functioning is significantly reduced. And this affects the building of a positive self-image, self-esteem and self-confidence in various social and everyday situations.

Being aware of your own physiological and emotional reactions allows you to better cope with stress, negative thoughts or criticism. You value yourself more and more and strengthen a positive attitude towards yourself.

Self-acceptance and self-esteem translate into the ability to express your own needs, achieve your goals and build good and supporting relationships with other people.

If you would like to try a 1:1 somatic coaching session online or in person, please don’t hesitate to contact me kontakt@exploreself.pl

Read more about somatic coaching 

Somatic coaching sessions

We live in a world where we have to make faster and faster decisions with less and less information. The stakes can be high.

If inner cohesion is important to you, being in touch with yourself in different life situations, whether on a professional or personal ground, then you cannot forget about your body.

The 3 most important tools of personal integrity in 2023

• CENTERING
• GROUNDING
• BOUNDARIES

It is your body that provides you with these most important tools. They are available when you listen to your body. In any situation, you can appeal to your own body sensing, and these three tools will help you develop this skill.

In the body, you can feel your centering when you make decisions in harmony with yourself; It’s the sensations in the body that tell you when your boundaries are crossed and when they’re respected. It is the sensations in the body that tell you when to say “stop”.

Body sense is the same as a sense of being, a sense of being ourselves. It is our first identity that we develop as children. The child thinks and experiences with his/her whole body. Without a body, emotions do not have a container in which they can be and through which they can express themselves. Without a body, it is impossible to survive on earth, and this means that there is no possibility to experience life, learn, develop your abilities and consciousness.

The body is present when I feel my emotions.

I feel a cramp in my stomach when I’m scared. My jaws clench when I’m angry. When I’m happy or curious, I experience a tickle moving up and down my belly. Contact with the body requires closeness with oneself and taking care of oneself. Without it, we won’t sense the signals by which the body tells us how we react to what’s happening. And then we lose the ability to consciously relate to what is happening and make our own choices.

A person who has poor contact with the body is more likely to be overwhelmed by feelings and lose the ability to distinguish what is within their area of ability and what is outside it. Similarly, the sense of the body works when we think – it grounds our thoughts. When the feeling of the body does not hold thoughts, there is a risk that we will get lost in them or we will not be able to revive these thoughts – put them into action.

Use these tools. This can be a “game changer” in your functioning.

Where can you start now?

Ask yourself – what am I sensing in my body right now?

And ask yourself this question as often as possible in different situations. This is a good start.

Read also:

Boundaries are not defensible – they are for exchange

This is my discovery from recent times, based on my own work with the subject of setting boundaries, crossing borders, and most of all feeling them in any way.

Setting boundaries is a very important topic. When I can say “NO”, I can set a boundary, but when I say “YES”, do I still have my boundaries or not? Because that’s how we can understand it. And yet sometimes it happens that in some role, e.g., at work, we can say “no”, and in our personal life, with close people, we fail. It can also be the other way around. The combinations are many and at that point things get a little complicated, at least for me.

And how do I know where my boundaries are if I don’t feel them, understand them? I have been thinking about it for some time because I had a great inner need to touch them, to build some image of them. Be it a wall, or a wooden fence, or a moat, or maybe something transparent, luminous or velvety to the touch. I was wondering.

What are they REALLY for?

According to the Bodynamic system that I study, our ability to set boundaries runs on 4 levels, at different stages of our development as children, although in practice we develop this skill or recall it throughout our lives. These are:

• Physical boundaries
• Boundaries of personal space (energetic)
• Territorial boundaries
• Social boundaries

We learn physical boundaries by sensing the skin; energetic boundaries are the feeling of one‘s own personal space separated from other people‘s spaces. We usually mark territorial boundaries with our own things, geographical places, our property. The boundaries of social space are related to belonging to a group, and this at the same time is in connection to creating a place for oneself being in a group, filling one‘s space – being visible. Not occupying space makes us invisible.

Setting boundaries is seen as the ability to clearly distinguish between what is me and what is not me and is supported by the sensations coming from the body.

Boundaries protect my center, what it is, what is important to me.

If I don’t have a center because I don‘t know what’s important to me, I don’t feel myself and I don’t have a connection with myself, then I don‘t know what needs protection and when.

Then either I have no boundaries – everything flows to me and from me, whether I want it or not, or I set my boundaries exaggeratedly. I close myself to everything, because I do not know what serves me and what does not, and this also means closing myself to what is good – to receiving and giving. We often need to do a lot of our own work to get to know ourselves in this aspect.

What is illusory is the expectation that someone else will take care of my boundaries and will not cross them. This is my task and my responsibility to know them and take care of them. But it also works the other way around. It is not my job to worry about the boundaries of the other person, because how can I know where they are, I can only imagine them, and this is often confusing and leads to conflicts and misunderstandings. They must be communicated both ways.  

Boundaries are not something that separates me. They are something that marks my space and serves the exchange between me and the environment on different levels. If I am aware of my center, of what is important to me and I can feel it in my body, then boundaries arise naturally, they just are. I don‘t need to have any ideas about them anymore, I need to be in touch with myself and my center. Then I can be in conscious contact and exchange with the other person on a level that serves both parties.

And how do you sense your boundaries?

If you want to remind yourself about your boundaries and how they serve you, I invite you to work together. Do not hesitate to contact me.

We are born with a specific gene pool, but they do not determine us at all, because they can turn on and off during our lifetime.

Our genes and their expression, and consequently the functioning of our body, are also influenced by external factors. External factors, including the environment, diet, physical or mental activity as well as stress, especially chronic stress, can affect those parts of the genome – our DNA – which under balanced conditions would prevent inflammation in the body, and under stress, with disturbed internal balance modify their action. Therefore, many diseases from stress are inflammatory disorders.

How can you help yourself? Take care of your TELOMERES 🙂

These are protein fragments at the ends of the chromosome that protect DNA from damage, when it is copied, during cell division, Telomere length affects overall longevity. Telomeres shorten during each cell division, which is why they become shorter and shorter with age. But not only with age.

It turns out that the length of your telomeres is also affected by epigenetic changes. Telomere length shortens under stress, fatigue, exhaustion from work, and this process can occur to such an extent that at some point there are not enough telomeres to keep and combine genetic material intact when the cell divides. And when this happens, the cell dies and your whole body starts to get sick. Inflammations such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus erythematosus have been shown to affect telomere length regardless of disease activity.

What we want for ourselves is long telomeres, because then we have a lot of units that protect genes. But it is not that simple, because telomeres can’t be too long to, so it’s crucial to have telomeres with the optimal length, and that means that we need to maintain the optimal amount of the telomerase enzyme, which repairs short telomeres.

The good news is that we can influence the elongation of our own telomeres and strengthen them by enhancing telomerase activity.

How to get it? The answer is MINDFULNESS

The key is PRESENCE and being aware of your body. Mindfulness-based practices affect your telomeres. Regular and preferably permanently incorporated into your life, mindfulness practice, e.g., meditation, supports the maintenance of optimal telomere length by increasing telomerase activity.

Today we know that what you do with your mind and your relationships with other people changes the molecules of health. It literally changes your enzymes, improves – lengthens telomeres – optimizes the production of substances that help protect you from inflammatory diseases. Being present in the here and now creates an integrated state of mind – the flow of energy and information in the body and brain as well as in connection with other people and the environment.

There are more and more studies that show that mindfulness can help prevent inflammation! With mindfulness and meditation practice, you can influence those areas of DNA that are responsible for inflammation.

Interestingly, studies comparing relaxation techniques and mindfulness practices show that only through mindfulness practices, mindful meditation, can you influence the epigentetic regulation of your genes and thus prevent inflammation and the development of inflammatory diseases.

Your mind is not just your brain – it is also your whole body and your world of relationship with the environment. If your body’s microcosm and social world are part of the same field of energy and information, they can be integrated by the presence of your mind in the here and now. In this integration, you influence epigenetic processes, optimize the telomerase process, influence the change in the level of enzymes in your body.

Everything is connected, you can create your habits and you can change them too. You can change your way of life, sometimes with the help of a therapist, coach, and often completely on your own.

Your relationship with yourself is the most important thing and affects everything in your life.

Transforming relationship with yourself you must address two key issues:

• lack of self-love
• lack of security in the body

and in order to achieve a permanent change these two issues need to be worked through effectively.

WHAT CAN YOU START DOING ALREADY NOW?

• Observe yourself and learn to recognize in what mode your system BODY – MIND is in; Are you calm and balanced or in constant stress?
• How did this state come about, what happened?
• Replace unhelpful patterns and habits with those that help you and practice them every day to make them a part of you
• Heal the emotions that underlie mechanisms and patterns that don’t serve you
• Strengthen or rebuild your relationship with yourself and your body

I also encourage you to release from the memory of your body retained energy and blocked emotions that cause many tensions in the body and affect its functioning, through body work i.e. – craniosacral therapy.

This is a very gentle and at the same time effective and powerful technique. It supports the work of the nervous system and cooperates with the body without forcing anything on it. And this is in my opinion very important when the body is overloaded with stress.

If you want to release tension from your body, give some space to your nervous system so it can regain the balance, don’t hesitate to contact me at kontakt@exploreself.pl

All the best,

Agnieszka

Body and mind are inseparable. The natural state of the body is harmony. When we respond with acceptance to various situations that arise in our lives, we remain in balance. When there is a problem and the tension associated with its solution or the inability to solve the problem, our thoughts and accompanying emotions give internal information to our nervous, endocrine and immune systems. And this makes us feel stress with our whole body. If such a state lasts a long time, then our suffering begins to manifest itself with health and pain problems.

More and more people suffer from various pains, unexpected, recurrent, chronic, or related to autoimmune diseases. Especially women. Shelves bend from painkillers, they will help for a while, but what next? What if your migraine no longer responds to medication, what if your shoulder hurts like hell, you can’t sleep, you barely get over it day after day, and at the doctor’s appointment you find out that you have inflammation of unknown origin or that it’s strange that your knee hurts so much? Maybe you’re exaggerating a bit? How do you deal with such situations?

Pain is a sensory and emotional experience, it is subject to learning processes, which leaves traces of memory at various levels in our nervous system and throughout the body. Your body remembers, and because of this, previous pain experiences can affect your current experience of pain and the intensity of your pain experience.

The anxiety of waiting for pain when you wake up in the morning and wonder how it will be today can significantly enhance the pain sensations. The emotions you experience then cease to be just a reaction to the disease, but become an important element in the struggle with pain. The emotions that most often accompany pain are: fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, denial, feeling helpless. Importantly, different emotions are experienced by a person experiencing acute, sudden pain warning that something is wrong, than experienced by a person suffering from chronic pain. In the case of the latter, the pain ceases to be a warning, but still evokes emotions, maybe of lower intensity, but still. Fear that I will not be able to cope with the pain, the unknown of how long it will last, a sense of helplessness, can turn into a constantly accompanying depressed mood, sometimes depression.

Our negative emotions about living with pain reinforce our perception of pain and the circle closes, the vicious circle of experiencing pain. And this is not the only vicious circle, because at the level of our physiology we also wind up a spiral of pain. Pain increases muscle tonus, which leads to impaired functioning of the endocrine, immune and nervous systems. Interestingly, researchers of these issues believe that the mechanism of the physiological vicious circle can occur both when the root cause of pain is somatic in nature and when it is of an emotional nature!

The immune system of a healthy person can heal the body when the balance in the body is maintained. If it is blocked by stress, destructive patterns of emotional reactions, beliefs that do not serve you, and there is also the memory of cells in which the emotions of our reactions to the original experience of stress have been stopped, then the body constantly reacts to internal and external stressors, and our immune system is not able to cope with it.

But perhaps, pain or illness are a lack of our acceptance of life as it is and the fact that life is a movement, a constant change? Maybe it’s our attachments to the old way, or our expectations of how things should look like, that create tensions in our minds and bodies that hurt more than physical trauma? And our soul, or some forgotten part of us, seeks our attention and asks us to stop and listen.

Your body wants to tell you something important. But what?

Stop and ask yourself: WHAT’S GOING ON HERE? What’s the point of that? WHAT REALLY HURTS ME? Is it “just” the body?  Or perhaps, through the body, your soul, the Self, or something, deep within you, is calling out to you and asks for your attention. What do you say to that?

To begin with, I encourage you to take a piece of paper and something to write, find a quiet place, calm your mind, and then answer the following questions with honesty. You can answer all questions or the chosen ones, and maybe only one that will move you the most.

• Do you listen to yourself?
• Do you respect yourself?
• Are you on your side?
• Do you take care of yourself?
• Do you know what you want?
• Do you feel yourself?
• Do you love yourself?

Do you experience any sensations in your body when you read these questions or when you answer them? Those sensations, even subtle, can be an important signal to be interested in what is happening in you and why at this particular moment.

How well do you know yourself? Do you know how you physically react to different situations, what emotion or emotions accompany you, how you feel them in the body and where, as well as what effects they cause?

Write down your sensations, draw, express with movement. Ask your pain, “What do you want to tell me?” and let that question accompany you every day. One day the answer will come, because it is already in you.

I also encourage you to release from the memory of cells, tissues any blocked emotions, which cause a lot of tension in the body and affect its functioning, through the body work, for example, craniosacral therapy. This method supports the nervous system and thanks to its gentleness works with the body without forcing anything on it, which in my opinion is very important when the body is strained with pain.

I wish you patience and trust in the process, gentleness for yourself in weaker moments and add to it what else that you need.

And if you are struggling with pain, you want to release tension in the body, give some space and balance to your nervous system, and open yourself in a search for an answer to the question “what hurts me” then I invite you to contact with me.

Take care of yourself,

Agnieszka

Depression is the soul’s cry for attention, urging you to go deeper and listen to what is, and what you don’t give yourself, and what you really need. It is the impossibility of accepting life as it is.

De-pressing is blocked emotions, because of unconsciously avoiding or ignoring them. As a result, you do not feel emotions and unconsciously ignore them. Emotions are energy in motion. Energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, moved.

Every emotion that we experience and that we do not allow to flow is stuck in the cells of the body.  When the body “notices” that emotions are stopped, it “compresses” them even more so that more of them can be stored. This is the de-pressure of emotions, experienced as mood depression, behind all the symptoms of deep sadness, negative thinking.

It comes at different times in one’s life. This is usually a “postponed” reaction to the traumatic experience in childhood, lack of support from the environment and inability to cope with life. In such circumstances, an automatically encoded emotional pattern of the reaction that paralyzes is revealed. There is no other alternative: escape (withdrawal), paralyzing fear, helplessness, a sense of low esteem literally overwhelms and commands you to “hide in yourself”. And then self-destruction begins – a massive emotional reaction that attacks the whole of oneself – giving a sense of meaninglessness, worthlessness of oneself and life as such. The more situations and problems, the more a person perceives them as very difficult, withdrawing more and more, self-annihilating until she/he reaches the wall, when there is nothing more.

This moment is the turning point – either of total annihilation of absolute desperation, or the beginning of everything – a new birth.  The awareness of reaching the bottom can be very liberating and self-discovering.  It shows all the possibilities – how to get out of the crisis, to be reborn, to start a new life.

Gentle work with the body that supports psychotherapeutic work can be a beautiful beginning of this new path.