Sarah 0:14
Welcome to co-regulation conversation. Today you find me out on a hike in the Chugach up on this really cool ridge above this gorgeous lake on a summer evening. Oh wow! One of those dreamy Alaska summer nights, and just incredible spots. Kind of place that blows my mind sometimes about where I live and all of the incredible, incredible trails and wild places we have access to. On a like on a half day or afternoon evening excursion. So this episode, this episode I recorded up high on the ridge, and when I we feed you into that part of the of the episode, there's some wind. Yeah, we did what we could to minimize that part of the audio, but yeah, there is some wind, and I also just want to name that this is the this is part two of the conversation that we started last week on the somatic skills, somatic processes that have supported this athletic breakthrough that I'm having right now, and I started out a little bit rambly on this one, so you know a little bit of a disclaimer. I wasn't sure if we were going to use this as an episode or build it into a blog or what, and then as I started going, it just kind of evolved into the the episode that you're listening to now. So, yeah, a little bit of a disjointed start because of that, and yeah, I think from there we can just get into this. If you haven't listened to the other episode, I think you'll be okay. Though I would invite you to go back and listen to that one as well, just to you know hear where these ideas began and the more details about the athletic journey that this has led to, you know, it's just been it's been yeah pretty interesting, and for me at least to live it, and I sure hope it is for you to listen, and I hope there's something in it for you either to consider for yourself and your own process, or to like sense into the possibility of for yourself or others, and just to open up possibilities of ways that we might use these somatic skills in our lives, in our recreation, in our fitness journeys-you know-in in all different aspects of life. You know, they really aren't separate in my way of seeing this, and I think of somatics as a lifestyle. I think I say it later in the episode that it's it really is something that's a way of seeing the world and a perspective, a lens that I bring to everything now and for me, the this athletic the athletic results that I'm talking about here, they are especially interesting because of how tangible they feel. Like I'm actually able to physically move my body in ways that I never have before, and the way that they impact other parts of our lives, like our relationships, or our creativity, or our, you know, who. Knows parenting dynamics or advocacy or work life-all of that-they those areas feel just as impacted for me, and they are even harder to put language around because of Yeah, they they have less of this like very tangible results that I can speak to when I'm talking about the athletic side of things. So I think it's actually hopefully it's a cool example of the application and results, and then we can also consider that it's also in the way that it's impacting my athletics. It's also impacting all of these other areas of life, and we might have a. It's like a different way of seeing those, but they definitely are happening. So,
Speaker 1 6:03
yeah.
Sarah 6:03
Okay. With that, let's get into this embodied athlete episode, and I hope you enjoy. I'm having a breakthrough athletic summer, and it's been really fun. I have, after a handful of years in a slower season with different priorities, fertility journey and nervous system healing, and a body that wanted to move slower and not be pushed, and yeah, the this is maybe a tangent, but the a big part of that healing year was what was the uncoupling of the work around uncoupling my athletic ability and my like my ability to do cool things outside or feel even like my attachment to feeling strong and like I can keep up, like all of that detangling that from my worthiness for sure. But like at the that foundation of that was like my sense of of safety and like belonging. Yeah, so like all of that whole tangle, the somatics, you know, like so, so like during that season, there was a lot of focus on healing and rest and going slower and learning how to deactivate and learning how, like physiologically, helping my nervous system resets to a different baseline instead of kind of running high in that place of like, am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? And like trying to like and getting some yeah relief from that question whenever I do something athletically that felt impressive. But then I have to kind of like keep chasing that. Anyways, as yeah, the I've been in a big process of doing a lot of therapy and nervous system work around all of that, and the I mean the the root of that goes of the work. I mean actually of that that piece of work feeds into this first bullet, which is the bullet about feeling safer in my body? Just generally, like a different, a different baseline felt sense of like okayness, and another way to describe that would be the like my sort of set point for my normal nervous system place like baseline is significantly like lower, and then it than it was, and all of that gives me just like a lot more capacity and space to move into challenge without being. Overwhelmed like pretty fast, like I had been previously. But before I go into more of number one, I want to like tell the rest of the story about the like season that I'm having, which is that I'm I have after a really cool Brooks Range trip in the beginning of the summer, I've come. I came home and started doing long day hikes slash trail runs, and have been like Exploring that type, that way of moving through the mountains as a kind of light and fast trail running mode, even though it's mostly hiking, but like trying to like cover some ground in a day. It's Really cool, and I did a backcountry route that previously I had only done across like three days backpacking. I did that in a day, and it kind of blew my mind. Didn't kind of it really blew my mind that I we could do that in a day and have a really good time doing it. It was so pretty, and then since then have been connecting up a bunch of different trails around here and backcountry spots and locations that I'd been to in different ways, but never connected up because I'm not used to covering this many miles in a day, and it's just been so fun. I mean, to have to PR in my 40s, and I'm 44 with my like longest hiking days so far. It's pretty neat, especially coming out of such a slow or a slower era where I really wasn't sure if I'd be getting back.
Sarah 12:12
I really like part of that healing process was kind of really trying to detach from my needs to get my fitness and athletic ability back the way I used to have it, and then I I also was very committed to if I was going like coming if I was going to come back into this place of pushing my body athletically and like doing challenging hard days outside in this way that I really wanted to do it from a different place, meaning not from a place of earning, belonging, or worth, or whatever was going on there, but also not from a like a nervous system place of pushing through and overriding when I had discomfort and activation in my body, in my nervous system, and like that was the only way I knew how to manage that previously, and since I've been in this deep dive of nervous system exploration, so yeah, the the. The impact of that has has helped me like come back into this. The impact of those learnings has helped me come back into this world. This these sports from a really different place, and I'm having so much more fun. I have so much less internal conflict about going outside because I'm not dealing with the consequences of that override pattern and the the internal conflict that it created. The activation would be one side of the conflict, and then the override would be like the kind of compartmentalizing or the pushing down of that noise in my body, and then that just like having that kind of push pull in your body is really tiring and felt bad. So you know, it was like it was intelligent in a way for my system to want to take a break from all of that, and to realize that there are consequences of going into outdoor situations when that dynamic was my kind of my main main one. So so. I am super pleased to now be like really experiencing it from the inside out. This experience of being in such a different place and having the ability to do these hard big days and recognize that I have capacity to do them, and I don't need to. My body isn't autopiloting into override first off, and then when there is challenge, I'm able to be with it in a really different way than than I had before. So huge wins for nervous system work along the way, and I broke down the main wins into four categories, and so I'm going to go into those now. And yeah, the first one is feeling safer in my body. So that's such a big part of nervous system work is the helping the body notice safety cues when they're available, when they're around, because we're so good just naturally at noticing threat cues. But if we we often have to like become practiced at noticing the quieter, more subtle signals that things are okay because they're just not as noisy as the things might not be okay signals, and so that's like that's a whole big chunk of nervous system skill building, and is not just a cognitive concept. There's physiology involved with it too. So, yeah. But the the ways you know the the ways I'm in that practice all the time. Now it's like it's a lifestyle. It's not just a something you learn and then it's done, but it's like a way of being. In that I'm always now looking for sensory experiences that delight me, that feel. I mean, oh my gosh, it's so pretty right now. I'm looking. Okay, let me tell you, I'm looking out at this lake, Plutona Lake, and it's getting kind of late here. It's evening. The sun is starting to go down, but this lake is just so gorgeous out below me, and the mountains all around it. A few of them have glaciers on them. There's a little bit of texture on the water from the wind, and I'm just gonna take a picture here or a video so you can see what I'm seeing. Okay, so yeah, that's you know in nervous system terms, that's the orienting and resourcing skill. Noticing what is your what your sensory experience is-that's orienting and noticing, and then attuning to the pleasant part of that sensory experience-is resourcing. You know, and that's there's lots of different ways to do both of those.
Sarah 18:38
So, if like each of those feel like kind of like an accordion of their own, of their own, like skill sets inside of those. But I'm gonna get too too in the weeds with that because of this is just a blog post, and that's stuff that we practice in the membership and in my deeper trainings. So, yeah, ways that like the body just starts to feel safer because it's used to noticing safety cues, feeling resource. more often, and all of that helps the baseline settle. And then the other piece that helps the baseline settle down, like come down, is the release of discharge of stored activation. Discharge like learning how to discharge activation, both in the moment and in in like stored from from previous situations too, and so this now is getting into this. Second skill set, and this one, this one. Okay, so one way to describe this experience from for me at least is the feeling of like a gas stove. You've cooked over a gas stove, and if when you leave the gas on for a little while before you get the the flame lit, when it when it actually catches, there's this big boosh, this big pop of fire because there's lots of gas in the air. There's a lot already, and the so there's a lot, a lot to light up, and that is for me similar to the feeling I had of when I had a lot of activation, my my in my body kind of norm like my normal my baseline was like that, and the. the it didn't take much to light it up, like poof, like kind of set it off. And also, when something would set would like happen, it would feel really big, really fast. Like I'm thinking about sometimes when I was out ice skating on these lakes, and there there'd be like a crack, like a popping sound that the ice makes sometimes, which like legitimately is a spooky sound, but the response that my body would have would be like, oh my gosh, like a huge, huge like jump and like gasp and like a lot of adrenaline, dump like a big response. And I've noticed as things as my system settles, as this process has gone on, that the the feeling in the body is really different, and it's like lighting a gas stove that just is on is like on low, you know, doesn't have any extra like ambient noise in it, so it just lights up really smoothly, and it's really adaptable. You can turn it up, you can turn it down. It's pretty cool. Like it responds with the right amount of activation for the moment. That's like the most ideal situation, nervous system wise, and it feels very different on the inside. And one of the ways that that has so so to help that happen, this skill of learning how to discharge and settle devation has been really big, and that this is one, this is a tricky one because it is something that some somatic techniques, you know, in the way that somatics now is kind of has made it onto the Instagrams, and people are talking about it in lots of different ways. This is there are somatic practices where people just have you shake in order to like discharge to like create this response, and there is absolutely something to that type of practice. I mean, there's people, many people. Some of my teachers have gotten said they get a lot out of that type of, yeah, type of working with that type of practice. But I am a so I what I say my suggestion in this realm is that sometimes it can help when you're learning how to discharge to have that like external practice of the they call it like a top down practice of like okay I'm gonna like get my body to shake or even like I'm going to go through a process that gets my body shaking. There is really something quite powerful, more advanced, but really important in the process of learning to discharge that is more bottom up and has to do with helping the body feel so safe that it can it is able to release the tension around the stored charge from the inside And maybe, maybe it needs a like a.
Sarah 24:45
It probably probably not maybe it probably needs some kind of container, some type of attunement, and co-regulation and care in order to feel safe enough for that to happen. Just because we've had so much conditioning in our culture, and just like Western white culture, at least you know, speaking for the culture that I was raised in, a lot of cultural messages about holding, containing that. We do not have practices around like this. Actually, is a natural process of the body. I don't think we always would have needed to like learn how to do this in somatic therapy, but because of how separated our culture has become from traditional practices and ritual and community and you know dancing and drumming and like the things that maybe more indigenous and other cultures that are closer to the land maybe had like ways to do this, but we're having to both unlearn the cultural messages we had about like not being weird in order to allow these processes to happen organically and learn how to disinhibit and feel safe with others as these as these release discharge cycles happen. So that's all it's all big stuff. It's not necessarily an easy thing to learn, and again, it's not a cognitive awareness, though it helps to be cognitively aware of kind of what might be happening. But there is this physiological and interrelational aspect to it too. That's can't be can't be minimized or forgotten. So, yeah, that's learning to discharge. And the I wanted to say in here that the that there there's discharge that happens in the in the moment of a stress cycle, and we might like, you know, like cross a river that was kind of like a little bit intense, and have like a bunch of energy in the body afterward, and then like need to need to shake or like let it all out after after you're made it to the other side, and you're connected in with like the solid ground on the other side, and then and then also many of us have not known how to do this our whole lives, and so we have maybe our bodies holding the cycles in there that they didn't know what else to do with, especially if you're an overrider like me, because that is one of the things that happens with that override pattern is that that stuff that wanted to move gets just kind of like tensed up, the body tenses up little micro way in many micro ways to kind of keep that energy in. So there's those two levels of discharge that we might need, kind of like the the daily the daily cycles moving through those, and then whatever, yeah, the stored stuff. So okay, that brings me then to the third piece of this, which is about yeah. The third piece of this is about because I was feeling safe in the body, learning to discharge. Oh, uncoupling! Yeah, this is about uncoupling activation and threat. I just heard a sound that made me jump a little bit, but it must have just been a bird or
Speaker 2 29:05
a squirrel.
Sarah 29:13
Uncoupling, activation, and threat. So this is a lot of the work that we've been doing inside of somatic workouts recently. It's been really fun to figure out how to practice that inside of a workout space, and powerful, powerful teaching for many of us, the the practice of being able to come into a sympathetic nervous system response, which is the part of the nervous system that gives us fight or flight when we're. Feeling under threat is also the same same branch of the nervous system that gives us powerful, empowered momentum and movement and motivation and drive and climbing mountains and doing advocacy work and making change happen-that's all inside of that sympathetic nervous system branch. And the one of the big hinge points in the nervous system is how safe it feels. So if you know you're on that sympathetic nervous system continuum, but you're feeling like scared. Maybe you'd, maybe the like impulse is going to be to run away, or or fight back, depending, you know, on the situation and your propensities. But the if you're feeling really like taken care of and well resourced and aware of a problem, then maybe you're going to go gather some friends and figure out how to do about it, or maybe you're going to go climb a mountain and do something really inspiring and connect yourself to the strength in your body and the beauty and the nature around you, and then you're going to come back and do something to protect the land, like call your reps or do something for in reciprocity, but all of that is sympathetic nervous system in either threat or safety, and many of us have a like a smush there where it's like whenever we get activated, whenever there's Whenever there's a stress response, our body reads it as a problem. Whenever there's activation in the body, so like an example of this is that the you know you maybe have heard that the physiology of anxiety and excitement is very similar, maybe even the same, that it's activation in the body, and it you're either really excited to do some public speaking, or you're really anxious about it. But the body feeling might be just really similar, so you might. I mean, some I've heard some people too who do a lot of public speaking just just like play with exactly that idea, and when they're feeling anxious, be like, "I'm really excited, and recognize that maybe it's just like a neutral body sensation, and that they're interpreting it as anxiety, but maybe it is just activation, and we could read that as excitement if we were feeling more safe. So, yeah, all of that, all that work, that experience, that like embodied sense of what it means to be doing something hard, but not in my body jumping to there's a problem. Separating those things out has been really helpful. Being able to hold that sense of okayness or safety or a tether to, you know, yeah, something resourcing that can help has been like really helpful with going into doing the hard physical things with less, yeah, the hard physical things, and like enjoying them, actually having fun doing them, and not feeling like there's, I mean, it's it's really cleaned up. Amazingly, this this here has really cleaned up a lot of the nerve, like the mindset thought patterns that I had been having when I was would doing would be doing hard things. I'd often feel like I was either behind or really uncomfortable in my body. I was like too slow, working harder than everybody else because I'm not as good an athlete or whatever. All of this sort of negative interpretation of what was happening. There's a way you can even understand that as just an activated nervous system under, that's like perceiving threat, when, and perceiving that there's something wrong, when like as those things became uncoupled, and then I was I've been able to kind of recouple the experience of Activation with an okayness, even maybe a version of pleasure, like just wow! It's amazing to be able to move my body like this. Or these are beautiful places, and staying connected with the joy Of moving, even when it's difficult, that like that has been more possible as this process has untangled.
Sarah 35:52
Makes me think a lot of the the athletes that I follow that are able to like really enjoy the everything they're doing. Like I'm thinking of Lail, Wilcox the biker, and Sophie Grant the endurance runner hiker who did the Alps challenge. Just seem to be really able to have a good time while they're moving, and that is a really good nervous system sign. Yeah, sign that you're connected with safety And not putting your nervous system under a threat response, which is amazing. So, okay, then that brings me to the last one, which is the skill of everything that happens after. It's the it's settling and integration. It's aftercare, learning how to be like enoughness, the feeling of enoughness and satisfaction. All of that has been also super important in a process of you know being able to move into activation cycles and back out of them again because previously with this sort of higher nervous system set point that my system was more more adept at more likely more often running at that higher place, and it was kind of like stuck sticky stuck there. Or even as things started to untangle, and I like learned like how to settle more, there would still be like a stickiness when I would go into an activation cycle; it would be hard to move out of it for a while. There was a phase like that, so this this again is a physiological process of is the nervous system able to, on that nerve and tissue and connective tissue, like in on that level of the body, actually physically, physiologically able to loosen up those those little connective tissue places, ways that it's gripping, and yeah, allow it to be softer, which is something that sometimes nervous systems don't like at first because they don't feel necessarily as safe because they're not as braced, and it takes some time to trust for a nervous system to learn that there is a way to be safe and soft at the same time, or like un, un, unburdened, untensioned, ungripped-all of that. Yeah. So that again, another like slow and steady process, but that has been really supported by again having a really good somatic therapist and doing quite a bit of work with another body to who's all who is very settled to learn what it feels like to settle inside of a safe co-regulation dynamic, and test it out. You know, test out the waters. Have someone model it in, like in like they have their body model it, and then yeah, the. This, yeah, what is that? This. Let's see if they're lost. Let me turn this up for a second. Okay, let their body model it. Yeah, learn how to how to have like little moments of deactivation, and then little little by little go go stretching those moments out, and. Luxuriating back into them because they do feel so good when they when it's like, wow, yeah. When you're not used to settling and you first start to experience what that what a slower nervous system rhythm can feel like. Oh my gosh, it's really so. Yeah, it feels so good. At least for for a little bit, you know. And then it's like maybe it doesn't start starts to not feel good because your body's not used to it, and so it needs to leave for for a little while, but you'll be able to come back. You know, it's like you kind of have to titrate your way into even something like settling and deactivation and enoughness. There's like so. There's so much deconditioning and unlearning from our systems too, from our conditioning around performance and maximizing, and capitalism getting us trying to get us to do do more always, and white supremacy trying to tell us tell us that we need to be Together all the time, and we need to be dominating our bodies rather than listening and working with them. Oh, there's a lot gender stuff. Yeah, yeah. None of this is none of this is small. Even even though some of the ideas sometimes feel very like our mind sometimes can wrap around them pretty easily, it's like yeah, I want to settle, like I want to deactivate. That's like let's do it.
Sarah 42:36
But the all the other stuff just means we have to go about it with patience and practice, and a container of safety and co-regulation, and all of that-all those interpersonal and relational aspects that help our bodies feel safer, willing, able to try new things. Yeah, but that has been pretty important. It's a big one, and yeah, I mean, all these really feed each other. So, none, not one of them is more important than the other. But they all four feel like they have been like four big buckets or pieces of the puzzle inside of what's felt like a huge shift in my nervous system, and in my yeah everything body, and opened up this totally different kind of nervous system potential, which is really really really fun and a real a pleasant surprise because I wasn't counting on it. I didn't know what would happen with my athletic journey. So, yep, pretty fun. Okay, well, thanks for being here along on this experience And I think we're gonna try to put this in a few different places. So we might write it up as a blog, and might also you might also be listening to it as a podcast. I hope that there's been some useful information here, going a little deeper into the experience and maybe giving you some ideas of things that might also support your process that your body is exploring. All right, yeah. So, if you know if there's anything that you want to really like, kind of take away any intention or a skill that you feel like you maybe are most curious about Developing, take note. Maybe you know, jot it down, or write it somewhere. Yeah, it was like grab that note for yourself, and yeah, trust that there's a way that your body's already like integrating some of this information and these ideas, and then see maybe if there's also other ways that you wanna be in practice or in community around this this kind of thing because it's really there's a lot we can do on our own, but I believe that most of our healing in this area has some relational component to it. So, yeah, can encourage you to keep that in mind as you're, yeah, thinking about ways you might want to, yeah, explore this kind of process. Okay, I am complete. Thank you for being here. I hope you have a really nice rest of your day. Take good care of yourselves and of your people, and I will see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
