6 Ways To Reassure Your Body That You're Safe, Even When You Feel Anything But
The trauma-informed approach with worldwide acclaim that anyone can get started doing.
Liz Weddon | Unsplash Few things are more unsettling than feeling unsafe. Sure, there are times when it's natural and even helpful, but when you find yourself feeling unsafe or unsettled in your own home or other places where you wish you could just feel secure, the discomfort starts to multiply. You may wonder, "Why can't I ever just relax?"
Fortunately, there are options for finding a sense of internal safety. As the founder of the Somatic Dance Institute and creator of the Somatic Activated Healing (SAH) Method, Sah D’Simone teaches people how to feel safe when their nervous system is telling them they're in danger. He does this by blending Buddhist practices, contemplative psychotherapy, kinesthetic learning, and clinical spiritual care.
Sah joined Andrea Miller on Getting Open to talk about how to reassure your body that it is safe, even when your past trauma has convinced your nervous system that doom is imminent. The secret, he says, is "Stop chasing and start dancing."
6 ways to reassure your body that you're safe
1. Say, 'Dear body, I'm ready to let go of the past'
D'Simone says to literally, "Put your hands over your heart, and you just say, 'Dear body, I'm ready to let go of the past'". This action communicates with your body as you breathe and helps you tune in to where the past is still living in your body.
Ask the body:
- Where do you feel?
- What do you feel?
- Where does the past live in you?
These questions help ground us in body and emotion in the present to completely experience what our bodies are trying to communicate. That part of your body, those nerves, will want to express through movement.
But first you have to stop.
2. Stop conceptualizing the future and just move
D'Simone advises to stop doing. Stop wanting, stop desiring. Stop trying to exert your way through life. Stop trying to add things together. Just stop and be in the present moment, let your emotions be felt so your body can express how it feels. Your body expresses these feelings through movement.
Trauma gets stuck in our bodies, and the emotions of the past live there if they are left unacknowledged. When you let the feeling move, you tell the emotional cycle that a traumatic memory stopped by, needed to be expressed, and be recognized. By letting the emotion move, you can help it get unstuck from the body. If we never allow ourselves to complete the cycle, the energy of the emotion will come up and keep getting stuck.
Stop. Be in the present moment and dance what you are feeling.
3. Dance to let go
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D'Simone cautioned about this type of dance. To be effective, "it is not a dance for an ecstatic state. It's not a dance to reach a joyful state. It's not a dance to look a certain way. It's not a dance to perform the steps. It's not a dance for applause. It's a dance to let go of the past."
Somatics is the language of senses and emotions. Somatic style dance brings the mind and body connection together. When you bring emotional attention and intentional expression of that emotion to your dance, the dance becomes somatic, and you can let the past go. And it is not so much letting go of the past or the traumatic emotions; it is more how the emotion no longer needs to come up because it has been felt, heard, and expressed, and can move on to wherever it needs to go.
Stop. Dance the past on its way.
4. Drop the story
When you listen to what the body needs to express, a story will begin to develop in your mind about what that feeling means. You might start telling a story of how it means you are depressed, anxious, victimized, or abandoned. Stop. Drop the story. The story your mind is telling is not the emotion that needs expressing.
This is the key, so the emotions can tell you what they're feeling. You have to stop giving extra meaning to every single feeling. Then the feeling can make itself known to you and your body. When you drop the stories, you allow the feeling to move.
Big feelings in the present moment often point to something significant. But the history behind the feeling doesn't belong to you. It belongs to parents or other familial role models, or a previous version of yourself.
Stop, drop the story, and dance the feeling.
5. Let yourself look ugly
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When you bring your emotions out through dance and let the feelings move through you, you allow the past to make itself known. Those emotions are not the pretty ones or the good ones. We all are playing the social role of a good person. We are playing along nicely that we are happy when we are not. We are playing the social script that says we are perfect. We are playing along nicely, that everything in the world is OK as long as it is not happening directly to us.
But in all that playing, we mask, hide, and suppress the ugly emotions. These are the emotions that get stuck. These are the emotions that need to be most expressed. These are the emotions we have programmed our bodies not to feel and not to show because it isn't pretty when we do.
You have to allow yourself to dance the ugly emotions; the experiences that created these feelings were unpleasant, so allow the dance to be strange, be weird, be off-balance, be ugly, and be an honest expression of the emotion. This is how those traumatic stuck emotions get processed and can move on to wherever they are headed. You can't make peace with unprocessed emotions; they get stuck and wreak havoc.
Stop. Let yourself be ugly in your dance.
6. Don't pathologize your uniqueness
If you're not clearing stuck emotions out of your body, it is more difficult to manifest what you need. The problem is, we get stuck in those past emotions, and they have a past script, so you end up manifesting somebody else's dreams. D'Simone compares it to "copy-and-pasting someone else's dream". Of course, you need to stop because manifesting someone else's dream means you are likely pathologizing your uniqueness. You need to find your own dreams and embrace them.
This happens because the past is deeply stuck in the body. It takes over the way you seek to get your needs fulfilled because those needs have stopped being your own. Letting those stuck emotions physically express their ugliness through movement in a safe environment gets you in touch with the authentic parts of you that got hidden in the recycling of the past. This also gets you back in touch with your uniqueness, so you will generate more original ideas and other manifestations.
We have more clarity and peace when we let our unique puzzle piece into the world. As D.Simone put it, "That is what manifestation is all about. It's bringing your unique piece of the puzzle to the world, and you can't do it until the past has been cleared."
Stop. Just dance.
Will Curtis is YourTango's expert editor. Will has over 14 years of experience as an editor covering relationships, spirituality, and human interest topics.
