How to Calm Your Mind with One Simple, Somatic Practice

When we’re facing chronic pain or fatigue, something inside us no longer feels safe. Our brain is trying to warn us of a threat. Our limbic system marshalls its armies so we can run or punch. Stress hormones flood our limbs. Digesting our sandwich or analyzing a formula takes a back seat to survival. But the reptilian impulses designed to keep us alive are over taxed in a caffeinated, blue-tinted, ‘hurry up but I can’t go anywhere’ era.

Pioneers in mind-body medicine like Dr. John Sarno and Dr. Howard Schubiner realized that many modern ailments, from migraines and fibromyalgia to back and neck pain, are physical manifestations of emotional stress. To recover, we want to reconnect with our body as friend rather than foe. 

First, we need to learn that indeed we are safe. With stress-related symptoms—meaning there is no tissue damage—the burning in our limbs or throbbing in our head is uncomfortable but not harmful. Once we learn the science and trust that our symptoms are caused by brain firing patterns, we can rewire it with our conscious thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Thank goodness neuroscientists realized our brains are plastic—as in retrainable at any age!

With mindbody symptoms, coined Tension Myositis Syndrome or TMS for short by Dr. Sarno, we focus on our psychology, rather than our physiology. We acknowledge and feel underlying emotions in our body. We tell our brain things like, “I am safe and okay.” (If you’re rolling your eyes, scientific studies validate the power of self-affirmation to lower stress and rumination.) We slowly return to activities we want and need to do. Are you doing all of this?

Let’s say you are and you're still not feeling better. Or you can’t stay on track because your nervous system thinks it’s being chased by King Kong and won’t chill amidst said threat. We need to learn its language. Which is to say, nonverbal, mammalian and sensory. We want to entice our nervous system to regulate itself, a fancy word for “we’ve outrun the predator and can curl up happily by the fire to roast mushrooms.”

You wouldn’t fly to Tokyo and ask for a baguette in french, would you? In other words, we must learn to speak nervous system.

A simple but powerful practice is to orient to our environment. Remember, we were living on terra firma a few hundred years ago. We were stepping on soil with nearly bare feet and scanning the horizon for furry things with pointed teeth leaping towards us. Our human biology has not evolved radically since Steve Jobs gave us the iMac. 

Try this “orienting” video when you’re feeling scared, spacey or scattered. Maybe your mind is buzzing with your kid’s homework, your boss’s deadline, a list of ingredients for dinner or a pending tax deadline. Or you can’t stop thinking about those bleary-eyed nights or your searing sciatica. You want to crash the rumination party and come into a felt experience of the here and now.

We’ll go through these three steps in the video:

1. Let your eyes explore your space as if for the first time.
2. Notice where you body connects with the environment.
3. Feel your breath moving through your body.

This practice originates from the work of trauma expert Peter Levine and I’ve adapted it for people healing from chronic symptoms. It’s best done with the eyes open, generally sitting. But you can be standing or reclining too.

Orienting is portable and powerful. As you calm your nervous system, you’ll feel that way too!

Would you like to try a relaxing somatic tracking meditation? Sign up for a free meditation here. That was one of the key practices in my recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME), insomnia, anxiety, headaches and more.