Somatic Skills: Resourcing

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Show Notes:

Episode 5: Somatic Skills: Resourcing

In this episode, Sarah continues the Somatic Skills series with Resourcing, a partner practice to Orienting. Recorded on a sunny fall walk in Anchorage, she explains how this skill helps the nervous system find safety, stability, and presence by noticing what feels neutral or pleasant in the moment.

Sarah shares why resourcing is essential for counterbalancing stress, how the nervous system processes safety and threat, and how small, everyday practices can build capacity for expansion and ease. The episode ends with a guided resourcing practice you can try right away.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Welcome & introduction
• 04:30 Micro practice to settle
• 09:38 Nervous system basics
• 20:07 The “counter vortex”
• 21:25 Orienting vs. Resourcing
• 28:37 Everyday resourcing examples
• 31:51 Guided practice
• 35:20 Closing reflections

Resources:

• Submit your questions for the Q&A segment here.

• Photos and links from this episode: www.mindandmountain.co/podcast

Transcript:

Sarah 0:00
Oh, hi, there, hello, welcome back. Here we are for another co regulation conversation. It's me again, Sarah and I am here today to add to our somatic skills series, part one of that we covered the skill of orienting. And today I'm going to introduce you to a partner skill resourcing. And I'm looking forward to it that one, first one, was received really well. I really enjoyed sharing it and teaching about it in this format, and I heard from a few of you that it was appreciated and impactful. So I am looking forward to rolling into part two of this series today. You are catching me on a neighborhood walk. It's a busy day for me before I head out on a trip, lots to do, and it's been rainy here all week, and it was supposed to be rainy today as well, and I was kind of excited about that, because that always helps me get a lot more done when the weather is like, kind of inviting you to be inside and not pulling the attention outside as much. And then today turned out to be a really pretty sunny day, pretty nice day, which is lovely right now because I get to walk in the sunshine and the falling leaves and it has been productive. So so far, we're making it happen. Yeah, is that a thing? Is that a thing for other people? I'm curious if that's true for you as well. Do you get more done on crappy weather days? Yeah, it's fall here in Anchorage, you might hear some crunchy, crunchy leaves under my feet. Got lots of yellowness in the trees, and now I'm already starting to land on the ground. It's kind of bittersweet after a really nice summer. And yeah, I'm I am happily leaning into fall this time around, and feeling like it's okay that we're slowing down here moving into the fall season, always a little bit intimidated by what's coming with winter ahead. But, yeah, it's it's been a good year, and I feel pretty, pretty lucky that I got as much sunshine and hiking and all of the good summer activities in as I did this year. Okay, so let's do a little micro practice, just to, like, come into our bodies and and land here a little bit. And then I want to tell you about resourcing, and then we'll do a resourcing practice at the end together. So just inviting you here first to notice the pace that you're operating at and see what it might be like to notch that down just a little bit, maybe I'm coming into a slightly slower walking pace. And if it feels okay for you, maybe also you just just slight down Shift, see if it feels okay to slow it down a bit. And then let's just notice how the body's doing. See if there's any thing that it needs right now, sometimes we lose track of ourselves and our busy rhythms of life and

Sarah 4:43
see if there's any movement or bathroom breaks or food needs that we maybe hadn't noticed before when we were moving a bit faster. Easy to do. I'm.

Sarah 5:02
Yeah, and then I invite you just to notice where you are right now in time and space, what day is it? What's happening around you? We take a moment to do a little bit of orienting, having a look around, having a listen. Maybe you'll hear this person who just ran past me, and

Sarah 5:35
also a small plane that's flying overhead. So maybe you're hearing something in my space, or maybe something in yours, noticing the ground underneath you and also what's above you, giving your Body a moment here to land where you are and yeah,

Sarah 6:06
and then see if there's something nice about something that you notice, something pleasant. Is there anything that's nice to look at or that feels comfortable on your body. It could be again, any of these senses,

Sarah 6:29
just noticing how, if you intentionally look for something pleasant and find something that's at least okay. What happens for the body? Maybe there's a little bit of a deeper breath or again, like a notching down, and then we can just notice that and enjoy it. If it's happening, if there's not anything like that that you can perceive, that's okay too. This work. We do it just in like, little bits at a time. Can't really rush it. We can't really effort at it too much. So if possible, just like we just dropped into a practice, we're moving out of it. Now, if you had something enjoyable that you noticed, you can kind of hang there and keep a little bit of attention on that as we go, hold on to your experience. And you can also just let it go, and we'll move along now into some conversation. And that way we can, like, every little practice is kind of like a micro it's like an interval, like a little interval training, micro interval, and we just do a little bit, and then we can let it go. And now we get to maybe ease out of the body. If that's challenging for you, come up and think about, get some context for what we're doing here before we play with it again in a little bit. So yeah. Okay, so I want to start with a little bit of zoomed out nervous system context. The first thing I want to say. I don't know if I've said this clearly yet on this podcast, but I want you to know that when I'm talking about the nervous system, I'm talking about an actual physical structure inside of your body that has a huge impact on the way the body runs. It's it's not just an idea or like an energy, though, its actions overlap with a lot of energetic systems and spiritual systems, if those are things that you have studied, but inside of the nervous system work, I'm actually talking about the actual physical nerves in the body that, like, if you were in a like a cadaver class, you could dissect and find the nerves themselves and the brain stem.

Sarah 9:38
And that's that's important to me, because what we're we're working with this in a way, you know, we have to, we have to work with the nervous system in a way that feels maybe a little bit like intangible, a little bit it's not the nervous system doesn't work through thinking and logic. So that is a different part of the brain. And to super oversimplify it, the generally our thinking and strategy and planning and memories that lives in the prefrontal cortex, this forward part of our brain, underneath your forehead. You can put your hand there and like feel that forward part of the brain and the nervous system lives in the all of the nerves that that innervate our whole body, and then it connects up to the brain stem, which is the back of the brain. You can kind of reach around and feel where your skull attaches to your neck, the base of your skull, and there's think of brain stem in there. Limbic system is right underneath that area. Again, super oversimplified, but the brain stem, the nervous system, the it's Its job is to keep us alive, and it has this prioritization around this question of, Am I safe or am I in danger? Is there a threat that's kind of the access that it that it hinges on safety or threat, and the way it receives that information is through the senses. That's why I'm, like, always guiding senses. It's not just because, like, that's like, the woo, woo way to get to it. It's because that's the way that the nervous system receives information. It's through the way that these like nerves go through the body and then pick up signals through all of the different senses that we have. So this is why this is a different type of work, a different type of therapy than talk therapy, where we're, like, looking for cognitive understanding and insight and knowledge. You know how, like, you can understand what's happening and why it's happening. You can have, like, a ton of insight. This has happened to me and a lot of clients I have, like, I can see myself doing the thing. I know why I'm doing it. I know where it comes from. Even I have incredible insight, and yet I'm still doing it. What the hell

Sarah 12:42
so? Real, and that, to me, is an indicator of the difference between this prefrontal cortex, cognitive part of ourselves and the body, the nervous system, and the needs that happen below, below the level of thinking, below the level of consciousness. So in this work, we're often trying to, like, bring the nervous system experience, elevate it up to conscious awareness, so you can actually see what's happening and why it's happening, and understand, get a lens for what's happening inside the nervous system. And then when we have that conscious awareness of what's happening, then we can know how to work with it a little bit better. But a lot of the work that we'll be playing with with it is through those sensory channels.

Sarah 13:54
So we've got the brain stem in the back, the prefrontal cortex in the front, and those parts of the brain are connected through a little like spaghetti strand that's called the angular cingulate. This, by the way, you do not need to know this to understand nervous system work. So this is just if it's this context interests you and helps you, like, buy into what we're doing here, for the brain nerds,

Sarah 14:30
so that Angular cingulate is the pathway between our consciousness and our thinking brain and the brain stem that's operating on survival, and when we're feeling safe, when that nervous system is that hinge point is reading that things are safe in the environment, then that Angular cingulate, it plumps up. Right? And it it gets big enough so that messages can travel back and forth between the thinking part of the brain and the brain stem. So that's helpful, right? That we can, like we can read the signals that we're getting from our environment, and then we can think about what they might mean with the prefrontal cortex, and we can use our experience and our long term thinking to like make a plan about what we want to do. Did you hear that squirrel that's really helpful when that Angular cingulate is plumped up, and there's communication between these parts of the brain. But when the nervous system reads that we are under threat, it shrinks down the angular cingulate, and they say that it goes down to the width of like a spider web gets super small and not as much communication can happen between those parts of the brain and so and there's actually less blood flow that gets to the prefrontal cortex when we're under stress, this part of the brain that allows us to think long term and to remember things from the past that were helpful, and to think think about our like, our long range goals, all of these things, they actually like. Blood flow shuts down to it. There's less activity, and it can't communicate to the brain stem as well. So in those moments when there's stress on board in the nervous system, this brain stem and the nervous system communication through senses is how we can speak to the body. We can't really speak through like language and intellectual we can't talk ourselves out of a panic. You can talk for instance, we need to come in through the body. Okay? So then the other thing I want to speak about here is how the this, this nervous system that's hinging on like, Am I safe, or am I not? It has this default. It wants to keep you alive. Priority One is survival. So it's going to do that by really intentionally, intentionally, it's Its job is to identify any threat and to keep us on high alert when there's anything that resembles that threat. So it learns pretty quickly when something goes wrong, when there's something scary or dangerous that happens, and it moves toward contraction, toward getting a little bit more contracted, a little bit more vigilant, because it knows that's going to help keep us alive. And then you know, because we're living in a modern world where many of our threats are not life threats. They're existential threats. They're long they're like future threats, they're social threats. Maybe that move toward contraction might be keeping us alive, but it also might be making us like really stressed and unhappy. So the work we're trying to do here is to help the nervous system learn that it can sometimes move to contraction, but it's also possible to move toward expansion and to be able to, like, determine the nuance between when it's okay to do which and we have to, like, put a little bit more effort into this move toward expansion, move towards safety, because the default isn't going to catch that. So these initial practices that I'm introducing for you are the ones that are like kind of over emphasizing safety presence, the experience of feeling resourced and aware of all of the things that are going on that aren't going to kill you right now, all the things that aren't threatening, because we can take for granted that the nervous system is going to notice the threat and the F the work then is to help it also notice the rest of the rest of what's going on. I.

Sarah 20:07
One of the ways we talk about that is through the idea of stabilizing the counter vortex. You can think of the stress vortex, or the trauma vortex, as the attention that wants to go toward the threat towards the discomfort, toward pain, toward tragedy. All of that attention that like naturally wants to like go toward drama or activation. There's a gravitational pull toward that. And sometimes, once we get started, it has its own gravity toward it and ends up in a vortex. And then you're just more and more scrolling after having started with the news, you're just stuck there in the trauma vortex. And in this work, we are trying to build out a counter vortex that has as much pull to it as the trauma vortex does. So these practices, orienting, resourcing, co regulating, these are practices for stabilizing that counter vortex. I

Sarah 21:25
Yeah, okay, so let's talk a little bit here about orienting and resourcing. So I think about orienting the practice we did last time, previous somatic skill episode that is a practice that answers the question of, where am I now for the body? Because, again, that prefrontal cortex might know where you are, but the back brain and the body, it speaks in senses. So if we're not taking enough time to, like, really land where we are, our head might know, but the body might not. Sounds weird, and it kind of is like, how can that be true? But it really does seem to be true that we need to bring the body up to speed with landing, like, where am I right now and then? Maybe orienting also speaks to the question of like, Am I safe? Because we're looking around just to, like, let the senses notice the neutrality of the world around us.

Sarah 22:53
So then the resourcing practice, it's it has, it's a lot. It has a lot of similarities. They often go side by side. Inside of resourcing, we're specifically looking for things on the neutral to Pleasant end of the pleasure continuum, and the way we know that something it like lands on there is by the way that the body responds to it. So sometimes you look at something that you think you're going to like looking at like, for instance, like a favorite photo of like a favorite location, say, I have a photo in my office of this beautiful place in the Brooks Range that I've been to a couple times. And I love love it there. So we could potentially resource by looking at this beautiful photo. But then if what comes up for me is the sadness of the fact that I'm not there right now, or this, like, worry of like, oh my gosh, what if they change the laws in our country and destroy the Brooks Range, like, that's going to be a tragedy. Okay? So there's potential for that picture to land my nervous system on the discomfort side of the continuum, if that's where that goes for me when I'm looking at the picture. So in that case, that's not going to work as a resource in that moment, because that's instead bringing up something challenging for my nervous system. So yes. So we're looking for things that, again, have that like neutral quality to them, or maybe something that creates, like a pleasant, pleasurable type of feeling for you. And I think about resourcing. As asking the question of like, what is okay right now, or maybe even what is good? And that's an important question on this nervous system. Hinge point right on that hinge that I told you about inside of the brain stem. Am I safe or not? That's going to tip. That's what tips the balance. If it's reading threat, it's going to contract. And thank you for that, like very wisely. So thank you for keeping us alive. And if it reads safety, it allow it might allow for softening, might allow for expansion, and the nervous system only allows for change. Well, it'll allow change toward contraction under threat, but it will only allow for change toward growth and expansion when it's feeling safe. So we really have to, like, reiterate this feeling of safety for it. That's like, a huge part of this work is helping land the feeling of safety in the body in a way that the body understands and then believes. You can't convince it. Usually by talking. You have to show it and help it actually feel that, and then build capacity to let that safety feeling can like live on inside of you. So resourcing, we're looking for evidence that shows us that the world is not all bad, that there's some good stuff happening, some good very and like this often works best and on micro scales. So it's like, what do my eyes like looking at? And you know, though, like I said, the way we know that that's working is that there's like, some signal in the body that some of some kind of down regulation, like it's easier to be present, maybe there's an easier breath, something softens. And sometimes it's really random, like sometimes you notice, when you're like looking around, that the color yellow is really grabbing your attention. And then my body, like, fills up with this warmth when I am noticing yellow, and so I find myself resourcing off of a Cheerios box, because something about that is landing in a way that feels good, so it doesn't have to make sense. And this is where we get again, like into that dilemma of trying to break down our traditional understanding of cognition and the value of it and bring it back to like but what's happening in the body is really what matters here. It doesn't have to have a logic to it. If the body's enjoying noticing a yellow Cheerios box, then that's the resource that's working for me today.

Sarah 28:37
This maybe you heard that small plane overhead, and this might be a good time to just let you know that I live in an area of Anchorage that's pretty close to a small airport, where lots of little, little planes take off, not the major airport, but the little like Bush planes and the smaller ones that go between villages and things. So there's often small plane traffic. Maybe you heard some of that. Okay, let's do a resourcing practice together. Maybe you've already been doing some of this, as I've talked about it. Bonus points for you, if so, this is something I weave into. It's like kind of a constant practice now, not in an effortful way, but just as my body's learned that this is something that helps feel good, helps me feel good, it it's just something I find myself doing often is like noticing, like wearing clothes that are physically tactilely comfortable so I can resource off of that and enjoy that throughout the day, and looking at things that are pleasurable, and noticing how that lands in my body and. Having favorite rocks on my desk so I can touch them when I'm noticing activation come up over a stressful situation I'm navigating at work. So just these things that like help remind the body that, yeah, there's stress and there's also goodness, and these things can coexist so we don't get sucked all the way the body doesn't go all the way into the trauma vortex and think like everything is stress, which is, I don't know that sounds dramatic, but that certainly it was something that I found that my body was doing before I learned these strategies. So if you want to try some resourcing with me, let's let our attention just spread out a little bit. Zoom out. I am walking by a tree right now that has some bare scratch marks on it, so that's cool. I'll take a picture for you to see if you're curious. But why don't you also, just like, see what it is that your eyes are drawn to right now, and you don't have to use sight, if that's not your easiest sense right now, you could also notice what your ears are drawn to, listening to, or if there's a tactile sense that's calling You, let's just notice where you're at right now. And so just a little orienting.

Sarah 31:51
And then from orienting, that little shift in emphasis toward something that's on the neutral to Pleasant end of things, something that your body's drawn to. This might be especially important if you find yourself at home and when you're orienting, you're just like noticing all the to do list things. Oh, there's dust under here. Oh, I should sweep that and tidy that, you know, like that can happen, especially when you're in your like, regular home space. So here we're particularly letting the attention land on something that's not that, something that maybe you're noticing a color that you're drawn to, or maybe you're finding something beautiful. Maybe you have a cup of tea in front of you and you can smell it and feel the heat, and also maybe take a sip and enjoy the taste, multi sensory resourcing, and it's always a little bit of an experiment. So we notice what the body is drawn to spend a little time with it, and then the question is about what happens in the body, as you notice this thing is there a little bit of opening across your chest. Do you find yourself sitting back into your seat a little bit more heavily in a good way. Sometimes your perspective opens a little bit, or your thoughts slow down. So we're just like noticing the impact. And if it is something positive, then you just hang out and notice it. And noticing is like, I think of it as like watching a an animal in the woods. We're just watching it so we don't need to get in there and try to amplify it or expand it or maximize it in any way. We're just watching it roam, watching the sensation in the body as it happens, if what you found was like a bit unpleasant, where as you hang out with the pleasant sensation. It tips toward unpleasant. Then we just ease back out of it. Let your attention move around to something new. Maybe move your body a little bit. At any point we're. It starts to feel like you've hung out with that experience enough. That's a good thing to be able to notice how much is enough, and then we just let it shift, let the attention go somewhere else.

Sarah 35:20
Yeah, and you might find you want to try something different and see if it has a different impact, or you might feel complete for now, which would be excellent. Totally good. This work again, it happens in little micro doses. We want to titrate and just go bit by bit with it. So if you had a little embodied experience just now, whatever you had, you are doing it Nice work. Thanks for being here. And yeah, I hope there was something useful in the conversation. Hope that you're feeling a little bit more resourced, even just a micro amount is significant inside of the nervous system. The changes that happen on that level of our body happen in micro amounts, so we can just notice the little shifts. Call them big wins, because they are and then take a rest like you would at the end of a workout. Take a rest. Don't need to do anything more. Enjoy this practice. Feel free to pull it into your days. Let me know how it lands for you, and thanks for being here. This has been fun. So we're coming to a close for today. I have your questions on my mind, and I just haven't been feeling like these somatic skills episodes are the ones that are right for answering questions. So I'm going to continue on with answering your questions inside of the other episodes on this podcast. Again, if you have questions, please send them my way. I would love to receive them and answer them in a way that could support you and others here, if you have a question or you're experiencing something in your life, you can almost certainly bet that other people are and if you're willing to share, that would be very welcome. We've got a Q and A forum that I'll link up in the show notes, and yeah, thanks to everyone for being here. Thanks for everyone who's subscribed and left a rating or a review shared with your friends. It's really fun to see this podcast gaining some momentum and being received out in the world. So thanks for supporting it. It means a lot. Okay, until next time, take really good care of yourself and each other, and I'll see you again soon. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai