Event Details
In this three part, 12-session certification course, you will learn to recognize and safely resource the tension patterns of these survival responses. This course provides strategies for managing the nervous system that can help us deal with anxiety, overthinking, emotional flooding, and being overwhelmed.
CLASS 5 - MAY 10TH
Finding safety through the orienting response, and releasing anxiousness through the fidgeting response
- Safety is to be found in the external environment. “Safeness” is what we feel on the inside, when there is safety. For many trauma survivors, there is a “gap” between safety and safeness.
- Orienting to our environment through the eyes (and then through the body), allows the nervous system to land in safeness
- Practice a simple vagus nerve reset exercise
- Working with rising sympathetic energy of anxiousness: recognizing and releasing the fidget and find responses
CLASS 6 - MAY 17TH
The vitality of the hands, face, ears, and scalp….and additional exercises for dissociative responses
- The somato-sensory neocortex of the brain has a disproportionate number of nerve endings to the hands, face, and feet.
- The fright and freeze responses can cause tension in the face, ears, jaw and neck in order to maintain a visage of unperturbed stillness in the face of possible danger
- By releasing tension in the hands, face, scalp, ears, jaw, and feet, we are able to not only come out of a low-grade dissociative response and fright-freeze response, we also able to reconnect to the vitality of our ventral vagal nervous system (social engagement system) which emotes and connects through facial expressiveness.
- Engage bilateral cross-body responses in order to help ourselves come out of low-grade dissociative responses
CLASS 7 - MAY 24TH
Releasing tension in the neck, shoulders and diaphragm
- One of the areas that initiates sympathetic activation is the area between the shoulder blades. Low grade sympathetic responses can manifest as chronic tension in the shoulders and neck, ears and jaw.
- The other areas that initiate sympathetic activation are the outer hips and the inner core muscles (ilia-psoas). These muscle groups not only connect the lower body to the upper body, they are also the prime movers, initiators of fight and flight.
- The diaphragm is a core stabilizer muscle that is also the engine for sympathetic activation. Gently connect to and resource diaphragm tension to restore well-being.
CLASS 8 - MAY 31ST
Experiments for resourcing fight, flight and frozen-ness
- The freeze response has been described as being stuck between our needs and our fears. When there has been stillness in terror, still in safety is near impossible, and the action systems of daily life is back dropped with anxiety and fear.
- We will cover some exercises to compassionately move the frozen-ness through the body.
- A truncated flight response can be experienced in the body as anxiety, easy distractibility or simply as too much energy in the body. I will share with you a simple exercise to discharge a truncated flight response which can then reset the nervous system and restore the thoracic diaphragm’s capacity for fuller, more restful breathing.
- In order to survive, many of us may have learned to suppress our anger, the life force energy underneath the fight response. Others of us may have learned to react instinctively and immediately. Either way, these habitual conditioned responses may be inhibiting aliveness and/or safety. We will learn how to safely connect to anger in order to move a truncated fight response and/or an over-active fight response gently out of the nervous system. By learning to recognize the physical tension patterns of our low-grade fight responses emotionally, mentally and somatically (e.g. irritability, wanting space), we can effectively restore the nervous system to a peaceful, embodied aliveness.
