Body Awareness as a Life Line

Do you find your Self stuck in a thought? Do you have times when the thought is circling, looping, and sometimes even comes with images?

Maybe you have images without thoughts.

Do these thoughts and images make you feel a certain way?

What do you do?

Do you ever – instead of focusing on the thoughts, images, and emotions – just sit still and give all your attention to your body instead?

We are often told that, when we have a negative thought, we should “replace it with a positive”. To focus on the thought and try to change it.

Well…that hasn’t always worked for me, nor for many of my clients.

I believe Dr. David Hawkins’ metaphor about the balloons. He says that...

...negative emotions as balloons are temporary. They pass through our minds but have no power to hurt us in the long term – unless we hold on to them. He recommends that we open our hand and let go of the balloon.

Modifying his metaphor slightly, I would explain it like this:

If we look at the thoughts as the balloons, the strings by which we hold them are our emotions, and the “grip”, our hand, is a sensation we feel in our body.

All we have to do is bring ALL our attention onto the sensations and the “grip” opens up, and the balloons go with the wind.

We do not look at the balloons and analyze what they mean. “Why is that balloon blue?” “What does the image say?” We do not look at the strings and say, “Why does that balloon make me feel this way?”

We go straight to the hand, the grip, and bring all our attention to the grip. And the weird thing is…when we do, the “grip” that holds the balloons opens up, and the thoughts fade away. We don’t have to replace them with anything.

In my world, it works something like this:

For years, I sat in talk therapy and discussed why I was a bad mom. After six years, the thought was still active.

When I learned about Somatic awareness and the benefits of Interoception and the ability to pay attention to my sensations – instead of my thoughts and emotions – my life changed.

I found a way out of my mental and emotional straight jacket!

For example, I had a thought that kept on “looping”. It said, “I was a bad mom.” When that thought arrived in my consciousness, I immediately felt emotions of sadness and feelings of shame, and I got stuck there for quite a while. I would fight the emotions and sensations that came with the thought and get stuck in the struggle of trying not to feel them.

However, WHEN I learned about Somatic awareness (how to remember bringing all my attention to my body and identifying the physical sensations that arose…AND…keeping my attention on my body sensations), the thoughts and emotions lost their power.

Then…by giving the sensations all my attention, they resolved…just like that! And then…the thoughts faded away.

Often the thoughts come from the past: remorse, “I should’ve…”, “Why didn’t I…”. Sometimes the past creates fears for the future as in, “What if…”. And sometimes, we can just experience sensations in our bodies without thoughts or images.

Let’s say that you don’t drink alcohol. You have a drink of Tequila, and you have a negative reaction to it. “Eeww!”

Trust me! If someone says, “Just replace it with a positive and think that it’s orange juice,” you will think as hard as you can, but it will still taste like a drink of Tequila. The body’s “impression” (meaning, how the body experienced the Tequila) is still there. The biology of the experience (including the nervous system) gives your body a “shock”, a “rush”, and creates muscle tension that imprints into a “body-print” of the experience – all that from a drink of Tequila.

Unless the body-sensations from the Tequila have been resolved, neutralized, released, the whole experience still says, “That was Tequila, and it tastes awful!”

Now, say, it’s 10 years later, and someone offers you a shot of Tequila. Your memory of that first shot will come up as a body-print memory, and. even if you’re told, “Just think it’s orange juice,” that won’t work because the body-print is still strong. The body-impression is the trigger for the initial experience and will not leave by a mental replacement of a thought because the trigger lives in the body.

Here’s where Somatic awareness comes in. Remember how, at the beginning of this article, I said that trying to replace negative thoughts with positive ones doesn’t always work?

In my experience, I have to go to the source of the negative thought, the sensation, because I have to give all my attention – not to the thought – but to the sensation and feel it…and, then, do nothing!

That’s when the magic happens. The source (the trigger) gets resolved. Bingo! No more negative thoughts from that particular trigger. (Of course, there will be other triggers, but the beauty of Somatic awareness is that it works for all of them.)

Now, let’s think about this in terms of real-life trauma whereby the body-prints are a thousand times stronger.

Up to this point, we’ve been talking in terms of David Hawkins’ model. But, again, in my experience, B. F. Skinner has something to teach us as well about triggers.

Hawkins’ metaphor about the balloons has shown us how negative thoughts originate and cannot always be eliminated by simply replacing them with a positive thought.

Skinner founded the ABC model of behavior. (ABC stands for Antecedent, Behavior, and Consequence.) My experience of what he calls an antecedent to our behaviors goes something like this:

Simply releasing the balloon (resolving our triggers) is the beginning of taking ownership of our behaviors.

Skinner takes us that one step further by showing us how our behaviors are initiated by those triggers.

People, places, things, and situations are often triggers that happen before we behave a certain way. To go back to our Tequila analogy: If you are body-aware, and you enter a place and get a whiff of Tequila, you will notice the smell and your body’s reaction, and because you’re aware of your body, you will not unconsciously react. You will know that you don’t like Tequila, but it will not negatively affect your behavior.

However, if you do not have body-awareness, you may notice discomfort in your body (in other words old unresolved triggers), scan the place, and find a “reason” for your discomfort that may even cause you to leave. You are not aware that the place holds no threat and that your brain simply made up a story based on the body-sensation that made you uncomfortable.

In other words, body-awareness helps you stay present in the moment.

You are aware of people, places, things, and situations, and your behavior will not be set into motion by triggers from past experiences. You’re freed from the past and able to live in the moment.

Somatic awareness has done more than save my life. It has given me a way to face life’s challenges without reverting to drugs, alcohol, or other means of numbing out. It has helped me to stay emotionally balanced and respond to the world with more kindness and acceptance.

This body-awareness and personal experience have become a powerful part of the BEAM process and the way I work with my clients.

 If you are interested in learning more about the BEAM process, contact me on my website at www.evaangvert.com or email me at [email protected]