recalibrating through breath and body
Notice your breath.
What is it doing right now?
Where are you breathing into?
Feel it. Feel it change as you give it the gift of your awareness. How does it expand? How does it want to expand? Where does it reach, and where does it not?
Feel your whole body, here now, in whatever shape it is taking. It might feel good to breathe into the whole body — don’t wonder what that means, just do it.
Give yourself the gift of not thinking for a moment.
Breathe into your whole head. Allow any thoughts to dissolve. Relax the physical muscle of your brain. Feel the weight of your body, its full mass sinking into the earth, and being supported by the earth.
See if you can feel what gravity does to your body. Notice where you are not allowing yourself to be supported by the earth. Notice the tension, the clinging, the pain, or the numbing.
Where we withhold our breath, we withhold life.
These are the places where, for whatever reason, we have not felt safe to feel or experience aliveness in.
Think back to a tangible experience where you felt stressed or panicked. Perhaps an overdue deadline, a disagreement with a colleague or friend, finding out some bad news.
Recall how that feels, not by labelling emotions, but by recalling how it literally feels in your body. Where do you clench up? What does your breath do? It might be subtle — a tightening jaw, a hardening belly, a constricted chest, a gripping hand.
For lack of appropriate terminology in the English language, I call these sensations emotional charges. Emotional charges are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — they are a form of energy that arise as a response to what happens around us, and we are generally able to ‘digest’ these charges as part of a natural process, by giving them due attention and allowing them to be expressed and released — in other words, by feeling the emotion.
But what happens if we are in that state for a prolonged period of time, without even noticing? The sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as ‘fight or flight’ or ‘survival mode’, is only meant to be activated in short bursts. When the perceived threat subsides, our bodies are designed to relax back into parasympathetic mode, to rest, to digest, and to feel.
Survival mode is a natural response of the nervous system designed to protect us, and it serves a valid evolutionary purpose — literally, it is what has kept us alive as a species.
As probably everyone has noticed, however, modern society doesn’t make much space for rest mode: on some level we are operating under this sense that we ‘should’ always be ‘doing’ ‘something’. Many of us are in survival mode for years at a time. We get lost in our work or other duties, even when we are ‘off’, feeling compelled to be doing something ‘productive’, be it seeing people, going places, learning things. This compulsion becomes hardwired to the point where, even when we want to rest, we end up on screens, scrolling and refreshing, or doing the same thing in our heads, on endless anxious repeat.
When we are in this state of constantly ‘doing’, we leave no room for feeling — which means that we are not digesting our emotional charges. These charges then accumulate somewhere in the body.
Some bodies are more sensitive than others, and express undigested emotions more rapidly — as anxiety, exhaustion, or autoimmune (including skin) conditions, for example. In others, it may take longer to build up and manifest as tumours, cysts, or other chronic conditions later in life.
To be clear, illness isn’t an indication that something is ‘wrong’ with the body — in fact, illness is a sign that the body is functioning perfectly and asking us to pay attention to deeper messages. Our bodies are wise, and our bodies are honest.
As Krishnamurti said:
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Emotional charges are permutations of energy, and they can be alchemised in beautiful and useful ways, if we know how.
However, our education system does not teach us how to engage with our emotions in a healthy way, nor how to regulate our nervous systems. Our education system, on the contrary, is heavily focused on intellect, and even ‘physical education’ is almost always competitive, which does not help us to embody our physicality, the emphasis always external. It teaches us to ‘work harder’, pinning our sense of worth to productivity and ‘achievement’ within a narrow definition.
My personal journey of emotional processing began with yoga in 2013, in my final year at Oxford, which was, needless to say, all about intellect and competition. Fortunately, my body is sensitive. My sensitivities led me to explore meditation, breathwork and nature therapy in Japan, India and Taiwan. In 2018 I discovered what has been the most potent form of somatic therapy for me, known as taichi daoyin. It is a form of neigong, an internal martial art, and I studied this intensively in Taipei. These modalities, alongside 1–1 therapy sessions, have helped me to navigate extreme anxiety, exhaustion, and autoimmune disease (eczema).
The world now is a bit confusing. There is talk of things going ‘back to normal’ without a real inquiry into what ‘normal’ is, and whether we even want to return to it. We have been inundated with information, often contradictory and conflicting. We turn to authority figures and institutions in hope that they might provide solutions, but find that they too are floundering. We have had an odd year+ of collective psychedelic* reckoning, the calibration points of familiar world ways quaking en masse, and we are left trying to find home in a disintegrating world.
We might realise that what we thought we enjoyed before lockdown no longer gives us the same joy. We might find that our threshold for socializing and sensory stimulus has changed. We might find that we are questioning what matters, what’s important, what we want to prioritise.
In this process, it is vital that we leave space to feel. To feel is to access our intuitive knowing, and to return to a centre within ourselves that we can trust more unconditionally than the world around us. To be in our centre is a literal physical state, in which intuitive knowing spirals through the body, manifesting as trust in ‘ourselves’, which is actually trust in the inner wisdom innate to all humanity.
When we trust our bodies, and listen, we can feel our intuition as an expression of our interconnectedness.
*Psychedelic: no fixed perspective. Psychedelic: expansion of consciousness.
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My work is about equipping people with tools to feel and trust their bodies again, guiding them through the map of their somatic topography replete with memories and stories. I work with people from all backgrounds, using an integration of talking and somatic therapy, informed by 8+ years of experience in these fields.
