Finding Centeredness in Uncertain Times

As the pandemic unfolds, it’s easy to get swept away in your emotions. You might notice a sensation of tightening around your chest, a pit in your stomach, or maybe it’s harder to take deep breaths. These correlate with anxiety and panic.

When these sensations arise, somatic or body-based practices can help you become centered. Here are a few simple steps.

Somatic Practice to Stay Centered

1.     Notice the bottom of your feet and their contact with the ground.

Get curious what sensations are there. You might notice if one foot is warmer than the other or if there’s a buzzing or throbbing in the bottom of your feet. Maybe you notice that your socks are too tight or that you can’t feel anything at all. Welcome whatever you notice.

2.     Balance your hips.

This is best done seated. Shift the weight of your sitting bones from side to side a couple times, then front to back. Find a position that’s balanced, where the muscles around your hips relax, and where it doesn’t feel like you’re doing any work. From there, make your sitting bones heavy into your chair.

3.     This contact of your feet with the ground, combined with balanced hips, provides your base of support.

This base of support holds up your upper body, but it also supports your emotional self. When you feel overwhelmed, come back to the physical sensations in your feet and sitting bones, and remember that in this moment you’re safe. You can repeat to yourself, “right now, I’m safe.”

4.     From this base of support, stack your spine.

Stack your vertebrae as if they’re a bunch of quarters neatly arranged as they rise upward. Again notice the felt sensations in your body, this time starting with your lumbar vertebrae and moving upward toward your cervical vertebrae. You can experiment with leaning your torso side to side, forward and backward, to find an alignment of your spine that feels effortless. Let the bones of your spine support your uprightness as the muscles around your spine relax downward with gravity.

5.     Balance your head on your spine.

You’ll likely need to shift your head back a little from its typical position, to not strain your neck.

6.     Take a few belly breaths. Close your eyes and notice how you feel.

What’s different compared to when you started these steps? What’s similar? How’s your emotional tone?

When your body is still, centered, and your mind is connected to the felt sensations in your body, it’s easier for emotions to move through you rather than getting stuck.

As the intensity of emotions feels stronger these days, older emotions that have been held in your body like fear and anger are likely getting triggered too. When this happens, come back to these steps. Remember your base of support and find centeredness in the vertical axis that runs through your body.

Once you’ve found this center, it also becomes easier to reconnect with the wisdom in your body. In her new book “Untamed,” Glennon Doyle says,

“Your body is nature, and nature is pure. I know that’s hard for you to accept because you have been at war with your body for so long. You think your body is bad, but it’s not. It’s wise. Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of. Your body is telling you what direction life is in. Try trusting it.”

Your body is an incredible resource to not only become centered but to learn how to navigate these bizarre times. If connecting with your body in this way feels foreign, consider online somatic coaching.

Sound Somatics offers a 6-week customized program to release emotions held in your body, reconnect to your inner knowing, and align your mind and body to move forward with integrity in your life and leadership.

As Glennon Doyle reminds us, integrity is where all parts of us are integrated as we move through life. During this pandemic, reconnecting to our inner landscape and cultivating integrity provides guidance on welcoming whatever next is on the horizon.

Schedule a free 30 minute consultation to see if somatic coaching is right for you.  

We all know it’s important to find a sense of inner balance and centeredness. Most of us struggle with figuring out how to do this on a daily basis, amid busy schedules and endless to-dos. Working with the body through somatics teaches us steps to make this happen. Somatics teaches us that shifting our body allows us to change how we think and feel. This post describes steps using somatics to cultivate mental and emotional wellbeing, which is foundational for embodied leadership.