“Trust your body. Listen to it — not [only] to the specific circumstances of the moment but to the deep, primal messages of your evolutionary heritage:
I am at risk/I am safe.
I am broken/I am whole.
I am lost/I am home.”
Emily Nagoski
When we are stressed, we feel at risk, lost, even broken. Learning to manage stress means listening to the signals of the body so we know when to take nurturing action that brings us to a feeling of safety and wholeness… of being at home.
We’ve been doing this through paying attention to the breath and to the body. This week is about taking some “action.” It’s about movement.
In the video below, I introduce the important concepts we will be working with this week.
Introduction to Week Three
Download your “Mindfulness Practices” lab report here.
What is Movement?
Remember when we learned about the body’s stress response cycle in Week One? In general, when it works as evolution “designed” it, it goes something like this:
stressor/threat –>
physiological response, prompting FIGHT or FLIGHT –>
FIGHT (kill the lion) or
FLEE (escape the lion) –>
achieve safety and return to homeostasis
An even shorter summary is: RISK –> ACTION –> SAFETY
We can now see a few problems with this model for 21st-century hominids:
- In most cases, neither fighting nor fleeing are culturally acceptable options (though you may want to, you cannot punch your boss or run away from him)
- Sometimes, we cannot fight OR flee, so instead, we FREEZE.
- And if we FREEZE, or we don’t FIGHT OR FLEE, the stress cycle is interrupted, and does not resolve.
Stressus Interruptus
When our “first-world problems” stress us out, we usually cannot discharge our stress the way our hairier ancestors did. We either bottle up the rage or the desire to escape, or we numb ourselves. This numbing, as I’ve shared before, often takes the form of disordered eating or drinking, or compulsive behaviors such as sex or shopping.
What’s a modern ape to do?
We need to take ACTION that discharges the stress response. We need to complete the cycle. As Emily Nagoski writes, you need to “do things that communicate to your body, ‘You have escaped and survived!'”
In short, the research tells us that these activities include:
- walking
- running
- dancing or any other form of physical activity/exercise
- sleep
- affection and connection with others
- meditation and mindfulness
- yoga
- tai chi
- therapeutic crying (the proverbial “good cry”)
- primal screams (in an appropriate context!)
- art or other creative outlets
- expressive writing/journaling
- self-compassion and kindness (more on this next week)
You’ll recognize a few things we’ve already learned (or will learn) in this class. As for the rest…. as I said in the video, experiment! Find the activities and restorative practices that are nurturing for YOU.
Just Dance. Shake It Off. Let It Go.
Can I suggest a dance song for you though? Get your Taylor Swift on and “Shake It Off.”
Why Ms. Swift? Well, have you ever watched a nature documentary and seen an animal that’s about to be eaten “play dead”? That’s an extreme FREEZE response…. a form of our numbing behaviors. It’s an evolutionarily ancient strategy to make the moment of death less painful. But imagine instead that the animal manages to survive. What does he do next?
He starts shaking. He’s literally discharging the interrupted stress response by shaking it off. Perhaps you’ve experienced this if you’ve ever woken up from a surgery that involved anesthesia (an induced freeze). Often you come out of the surgery trembling… it’s the body’s natural way of discharging the stress associated with immobility.
This week, we’re discharging the stress. So start by shaking it off!
Take a look at the list above and select an activity that can help you discharge your accumulated, interrupted stress-response energy. Which items on the list appeal to you?
For me, it’s dancing. I dance in two different competitive and performance lines throughout the year, so that’s MY go-to form of self-care. I find that learning complicated choreography, getting feedback on the small changes that will improve my form, and seriously sweating while twirling and kicking — and even whip-nae-nae-ing! — reduces my stress and makes me feel amazing. Plus it’s my girl-time when I get to hang out with my dancer friends.
What I have a harder time with, though I’m working on it, is just letting go and dancing in a way that feels good to ME. I like choreography and counts of 8. I sometimes freeze when the coach says “improvise!”
But when I put on some music at home, with no one watching, and just start moving … it’s a totally different experience. I tune in to how my body wants to move, to the stretches that feel good and the ones that don’t, to internal sensations and muscle movements, and to external sensations like my feet on the floor or my hands in the air (like I just don’t care!)
I think this is part of why we LOVE watching kids dance. They’re so uninhibited. They just move in the ways that make their bodies feel good. There’s no plan, no choreography. It’s just pure, joyful, in-the-moment aliveness.
In fact, I snapped this video the other day of my son (age 6) dancing to the music that played while a new level in his Wii game loaded.
If dancing appeals to you, try channeling your inner six-year-old and just MOVE.
Beyond the stress-reducing, mind-quieting, heart-pumping, smile-inducing benefits, it’s a way of connecting, I believe, to a universal human energy. As a species, we danced long before we wrote epics or built cities or filed tax returns. Dance is a way to connect to our primal life force.
Happy dancing!
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
Alan Watts
“Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body.”
Martha Graham
“To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.”
Agnes de Mille
“When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It’s to enjoy each step along the way.”
Wayne Dyer
“The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.”
Charles Baudelaire
“It is important to note that movement alone, done automatically, without attention, does not provide the brain with any new information…. The moment we bring attention to our movement, any movement, research shows that the brain resumes growing new connections and creating new pathways and possibilities for us. And that is when we feel most vital.”
Anat Baniel
*
“It ain’t what you do, it’s the way how you do it.”
Louis Armstrong
How do you move throughout your day?
Anat Baniel says there are really only two types of movement: automatic movement, and movement with attention.
You can probably guess by now which type of movement is associated with greater ease and less stress — the mindful kind, of course!
Baniel, in her book Move Into Life, references the quote above from Louis Armstrong as a recognition that life, like music, is made up of lots of moving parts — organize them one way, and you have a gorgeous symphony. But when you have disorganization and carelessness and chaos, you get a discordant mess!
Awareness of Movement
Last week we brought attention to the physical body throughout the day. This week, I am encouraging you to bring your awareness to the movement of your body.
Consider some of the following:
- Does your day feel fast-paced, too slow, or somewhere in between?
- Do you always perform everyday tasks the same way (making coffee, making the bed, getting set up at work, etc.), or do you vary things from time to time?
- Do you bring variations into your exercise activities (e.g., switching up yoga and aerobics, or trying different styles of dance, etc.)?
- Do you take breaks during the day to check in with how you feel physically and emotionally?
- Do you eat a variety of foods, or do you tend to eat the same foods repeatedly?
- Do you notice when your body feels uncomfortable during the day (either while exercising or while stationary), and make adjustments, or do you tend to not notice bodily discomfort and tension until the end of the day?
- Do you explore new places in your neighborhood or city?
This isn’t about judging your answers to your questions. You are who you are — some of us seek greater novelty, and some of us seek the comfort of routine. But if, while considering these questions, you see places where you could incorporate movement, attention, and/or new perspectives, you can enhance your sense of vitality.
Mindful Walking
One powerful mindfulness practice that can help us slow down a bit and pay attention to how we move is MINDFUL WALKING. Before watching the video below, take a moment to just walk around the room you are in right now at your normal pace. Don’t try to alter anything… just walk around the room once or twice.
Taking it SLOW
Many of us experience stress as the opposite of slow — we feel rushed, frantic, and time-starved. The speed can often make us careless… adding to more stress! And then, sometimes, when we do get a chance to slow down… it somehow doesn’t feel right. It’s almost like if we DON’T feel stressed, we think we’re doing it wrong!!
Just think about all the connotations we have in our culture around the word SLOW — we associate it with laziness and stupidity. I want to encourage you to spend some time being SLOW this week.
Slow gets the brain’s attention. We are more present and attuned to sensation. It’s like the brain realizes, “WOW, this must be really important! Look how careful she’s being!”
Slow takes us out of the time-trap that we’ve set for ourselves. I like to think of SLOW as a form of “moving without arriving.”
So often our movements are about getting somewhere else. We drive to get to work. We eat to not feel hungry. We exercise to tone our muscles. We cut the grass so we can have a pretty lawn.
It’s not that having a purpose for the movement is bad; it’s that the movement, if we’re not paying attention, can simply become a means to an end. The movement part (which is really most of our life, right? How long does it take to eat vs. experience satiety?) becomes an “on the way” moment to the goal.
Jon Kabat-Zinn says that no moment is an “on the way” moment. We only have moments to live! Each unfolding moment is the only moment you have to be alive. So instead of rushing through the meal, can you savor the taste of the food? Can you enjoy the sensory pleasure of eating?
When we bring deliberate attention to our actions, we can begin to appreciate the small micro-movements of the body, we can luxuriate in a gentle stretch, we can truly smell the fresh-cut grass we’re mowing…
The best way to experience this initially is to do something slowly. So for this week, I want you to pick ONE activity (one that generally takes about 10 minutes) to do slowly. Maybe it’s cooking breakfast, cleaning up the kitchen, putting on makeup, getting dressed, tidying up before bed, etc. For this week, do it slow (think somewhere between 50-75% of your normal speed).
Pay attention to how the muscles in the body move and how the body seems to just “know” what to do, even though this was probably once an activity that you had to learn carefully. Pay attention to your exertions as you do the activity — are you “efforting” more than you need to? Are you standing or moving in ways that, when slowed down, you recognize are not helpful for your body? You may discover, in this slow variation of the activity, different ways of performing the task. You may discover variety! {And we’ll return to this practice next week, when we practice paying attention to and staying with our difficult emotions. Stay tuned!}
Also pay attention to the mind as you do this — is there a desire to speed up? Is there frustration with the slow pace? Just notice, without judging. There’s no “right” way to do this. It’s a way to connect to the body, and also to understand a bit more about your relationship to stress. We often find that even though our stress stresses us out, we also take a bit of pride in it. We might be a bit attached to our stress and the adrenaline rush it can provide.
So play with this … taking it slow … walking mindfully … moving without arriving … and see what happens next!
“Nothing happens until something moves.” Albert Einstein Some stress researchers emphasize the concept of allostasis instead of homeostasis. Where homeostasis means “remaining stable by staying the same,” allostasis means “remaining stable by being able to change.” They emphasize adaptability as the crucial element in stress management. Adapting, changing…. they’re both forms of movement. Not necessarily physical movement, but it’s a shifting, a moving from one viewpoint to another, one mindset to another, one strategy to another. As a beginning teacher, I often fell prey to the idea that if my students didn’t understand something I had taught them, the solution was to simply to teach it again… the same way… but maybe just a little louder this time. That’s what we often do when we encounter difficult or stressful situations — we do what we always did. We repeat the SAME ACTIONS that clearly aren’t helping… but we just do them more forcefully, and with greater efforting. If we just TRY HARDER… we’ll figure it out. And sometimes we do. But many times we don’t. We just exhaust ourselves with all the efforting… and then feel even worse because we haven’t “solved” the crisis. What if we didn’t try harder? What if we tried differently? more gently? with greater awareness and attention? What if we varied our approach, and asked, What happens next? Metaphorical Movement Practice #1: Variation The next time you’re feeling stuck and stressed, take a moment to pause and breathe. Use the breath — or whatever practices you have found most helpful — to slow down for a moment so new options can open up. Ask yourself: You get the picture. EXPERIMENT. Think of a baby learning to roll over, or walk. She plays with her body in all sorts of ways, moves her neck in one way, then another, tries to flip left, then right …. She doesn’t try to roll over a few times and then say, “DAMMIT! I’m never going to get this!!!” She keeps trying — not the same thing over and over again, but different variations of movements, until the combination of practice and muscle development and movement allow a successful completion of the action. Like mindfulness, variation can be a practice. It’s hard to innovate in one area of our life (especially a challenging one, like stress), without practicing smaller variations elsewhere. Here are some ideas to get you started: Metaphorical Movement Practice #2: The Goldilocks Zone I want to share a famous story from the life of Siddhartha (before he became the Buddha): One day, as Siddhartha was still living as wandering ascetic, starving himself and depriving the body of its needs in a very “effort-full” search for enlightenment, he came upon a lute teacher and his student. Siddhartha heard the teacher tell his student, “If you leave the string too slack, the instrument won’t play. Tie it too tightly, and the string will snap.” According to legend, this is where Siddhartha discovered the famous “Middle Path” of Buddhism. Enlightenment comes not through a hedonistic search for pleasure, on the one extreme, nor through a rigid program of starvation and deprivation on the other. It’s about finding the “Goldilocks zone,” the space between relaxation and effort, between laxity and rigidity. As we consider the stress in our lives, it’s about trying to find that Goldilocks zone between FREEZE and FIGHT, between not being able to play our instrument at all, and snapping under all the pressure. Though this sounds challenging (more on how to do this in a minute), I also find it very empowering. It reminds me that managing and reducing stress is not (necessarily) about being calm. We NEED a certain amount of nervous system activation just to get through our day; the inability to even muster this energy is a hallmark of depression. So we don’t need to feel all this pressure to be “relaxed” all the time! Feeling “at ease” is not the same as “getting a massage.” As I said in the first lesson for this week, we can learn to BE WITH the stress and STILL BE OKAY. Not too loose, not too tight, just enough movement to play the instrument with the right amount of effort. I love these words from Carl Honore:
I am so excited to have another dear friend share her wisdom with us this week. I met Jenni Derryberry Mann almost 10 years ago when we were in the same prenatal yoga class. We were both pregnant with our first children, and our daughters ended up being born just five days apart! It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Jenni has been teaching yoga since 2003, and she is now the owner of Blooma Nashville, a yoga studio that focuses on pre- and post-natal yoga, childbirth education, and family wellness. Jenni teaches at the studio, and also facilitates women’s circles. In both practices, the element of community is important to her. Her yoga practice focuses on the connection between body and breath, and how that leads to a deeper state of ease.
Here is my interview with Jenni, plus some yoga practice for you!
What changes in your life have you noticed since you started your yoga practice?
While completing my month-long yoga teacher training intensive, the changes were profound. My physical and emotional stamina grew. I became more adept at sitting with my own shadowy stuff and gaining real insight into it. My body changed; it felt like I’d fortified each muscle from within. In the years since, yoga has been a safe harbor in stressful times and a joyful expression of movement and breath in happy times. Yoga helps me bend time by nurturing my body, my mind, my emotions, and my spirit all at once. Yoga transformed my relationship with myself – what I can feel within, and what I can do about that.
How does yoga help us…
*connect to the body?
The asanas – poses, shapes we make with our bodies – immediately connect you to the most obvious expression of self. An achy back, a tender knee, a tight spot at the shoulder blade, the numb feeling in your belly, the crazy list-making mentality in your mind. A light in your eye, a floating feeling in your heart, joy welling up through your whole being. Those are all body connections, and they are all part of waking up to what is expressing through you.
*reduce stress?
Pose after pose, we move from the breath. That is the ritual of yoga practice. Breathe and move, breathe and feel. Ritual, something you do again and again, creates a rhythm. And rhythm leads to relaxation. The mindful ebb and flow of breath resets the nervous system, dialing down fight or flight signals, so you can rest easy in your body.
*improve health or produce other benefits?
A stressed you is a sick you, or at least a depleted you. Of course, our amazing human bodies are built to handle quite a lot of stress for quite a long time. But most of us live in a hyper-stressed state, with that flight or fight switch flipped to On nearly ALL the time. Even if the ringer is turned way down on your inner alarm system, it’s a bit like our mobile devices: When was the last time you actually turned that thing off? Chances are, you only power down your device when it starts to act glitchy. The memory is maxed. The system freezes up. The battery drains super-fast, even after a whole night of recharging. See how that metaphor plays out? Yoga—like all the mindfulness practices: meditation, yoga nidra, women’s circles, and so on—takes your body offline from the stresses of daily life. Your inner self guides the outer you to enjoy a deep breath. Your cells exhale a soft sigh of relief. And the message gets through to all of you: there is no emergency here. There is an opportunity to connect to a deepening sense of peace. And in that space, we’re better able to make the decisions that deeply support our well-being.
What have you learned about yourself and/or your body through practicing yoga?
One surprising lesson learned from the strenuous experience of my yoga teacher training, and in my continued practice since then: my relationship to food. Before training, I hadn’t identified myself as an emotional eater. I’d always been healthy and fairly fit. But I quickly realized that when I was working deeply in both the physical and the emotional realms together, my mind would check out of my body and right into a fast food drive-thru! I’d be 6 breaths into a Warrior pose, fantasizing about burgers and slushies. I can’t say my yoga practice freed me from that entirely, but I can say that my practice has helped me cultivate more mindfulness around the triggers, their significance, and what action I choose when that fantasy shows up in stressful times.
What is your favorite, go-to form of self-care?
Yoga nidra. It’s a sleep-based meditation. My favorite is Rod Stryker’s Relax into Greatness guided meditation. I like the short version (it can often be sampled at the Yoga International website, or you can buy the CD from Rod Stryker’s site). I pair 10 to 15 minutes of asana with that 25-minute meditation, and feel refreshed beyond expectation.
Can you give us an example of a time when you were really stressed, and you turned to your mind-body practice for relief?
Definitely! Almost daily during the year leading up to the launch of my yoga studio, Blooma Nashville, I practiced yoga nidra. I wasn’t always finding the time to get to a full yoga practice, but I could usually find 30 minutes to blend a few minutes of asana with this deep guided meditation. Yoga nidra incorporates a visualized intention into the meditation, so it felt very supportive of bringing my studio into being. Yoga nidra helps slow the brain so that you feel incredibly refreshed—as though you’d slept for hours—in a relatively short time. [See the links in the paragraph above for yoga nidra practices].
What advice would you give to someone who has never tried yoga, or tries it and thinks they’re “doing it wrong”?
I’ve been practicing and teaching for more than a decade, and I still get a kick out of hearing yoga teachers say, ‘It’s not called Yoga Perfect. It’s Yoga Practice.’ I encourage my classes like this: We’re going to make a bunch of shapes with our bodies today. Some of them are going to feel great. You might want to stay in those shapes awhile longer. And some of those shapes are going to feel physically uncomfortable or make you cranky. You get to decide whether and how long to stay in those shapes. Your body is different every day, every moment, every breath. Some days, things work well. Others, not so much. But know this: The big work is already done. You’ve arrived on the mat. Everything else is a bonus.
What practices would you recommend we try if we want to incorporate yoga into our stress reduction strategies?
As a mom and an entrepreneur, it’s been important to me to have simple ways to bring me back to a mindful place for body and breath. Yoga and breathing practices are perfect for this. On the yoga front, I recommend finding the shortest, simplest class on Yoga Journal, YogaGlo, or similar, and do that online or from memory as often as you can. And for breathing, I’m really loving an app called BreatheAware. A friend of mine developed it, very thoughtfully creating 2 to 3 minute breathing trainings that are perfect medicine for your well-being. I appreciate that the app emails and texts me reminders to breathe. Yep, even yoga teachers —well, at least me!— need to be reminded to breathe.
Jennifer Derryberry Mann is a prenatal/postnatal yoga teacher; the Studio Director of Blooma Nashville, which she opened in 2014; author/editor of Belly Button Bliss: A Collection of Happy Birth Stories; and mother to two daughters.
Instagram: @Blooma.Nashville and @JenniDbM
Facebook: @BloomaNashvilleYoga and @JenniferDerryberryMann
This week is super exciting because we have TWO guest instructors! I am excited to share with you my interview with Marc Anderson, Executive Director of the M2 Foundation. Marc and I both work in the field of mindfulness education in the Twin Cities, and I have been fortunate to collaborate with him many times, and even lead a retreat with him.
Marc has had a long and distinguished career as an artist, educator and spiritual leader. His interest in meditation began 30 years ago when he started practicing transcendental meditation. In 1993 he began studying Zen Buddhism, and in 2007 he was ordained as a priest in the Soto Zen tradition by Reverend Togen Moss.
Over the past 35 years he has earned an international reputation as a world-class percussionist, stalwart sideman, composer and record producer.
{I thought about including this lesson with Stephanie’s lesson on music from Week One, but Marc addresses many other body practices in this interview, too, so I decided to include it here}.
Tell us a bit about the mind-body practices that you do regularly.
I have several “regular” movement practices. I have a short yoga, cardio, strength training kind of thing I do most mornings after my sitting practice. It is so important to get it in. My energy comes up, my body feels supple and connected and it lifts my attitude.
My anchor movement practice has been music. I’ve been drumming sinse I was a kid. It’s been so long that I often take it for granted, it’s ambient always in the air for me. These days I don’t perform as much so I rarely get the 3 or 4-hour heavy-duty workouts that I used to get. I do tend to it regularly though. When I working at the computer or just about the house, I stop a couple of times during the day and sit down and play. It’s a physical workout but it is also coordination, cross hemisphere activity, its non-linear, it’s exploring and creating and as only music can do, it is somehow magically healing
I also try to be regular about walking every week. I can’t seem to fit it in everyday but a couple of times a week I try to get a few miles in. I walk up the stairs to my 5th floor loft if the elevator isn’t on the ground floor when I walk in. I have started taking the advice of a friend and I park further away rather than closer just to get some exercise in. I’m a fan of building it into everyday activity rather than having to go to the gym.
And, I have very simple Tai-Chi, yoga blend routine that I do with some of my meditation groups. It’s only a 10 minutes but it happens a couple of times a week it is always invigorating. It’s really helpful when I’m getting sleepy doing meditation. 10 minutes of stretching and breathing always wakes me up.
A lot of your work involves music. Can you share how music helps us…
* connect to the body?
One aspect of playing an instrument or singing is that you have to learn very refined, specialized and sometimes difficult physical movements and manipulations. Like an athlete, you have to train the body for accurate movements, for speed, for endurance. The initial learning requires physical exertion and prolonged focus and concentration. Once the body remembers the patterned movements it requires less specific focus and that opens up space for the ability to listen and respond to the moment with spontaneity / creativity. In that way, music is an perfect example of the mind / body potential…training in the patterns freeing awareness to respond with virtuosity to the present moment circumstances.
* reduce stress?
It’s probably that we are focused on one thing. Music also seems to have a soothing healing effect, even for the listener.
* improve health or produce other benefits?
I sleep better, I’m happier, I’m more satisfied, I’m not bored, I associate with others often when I play. I get the creative juices going.
How does your practice help you connect to your body?
Well, I’m always trying to improve my technical capacity as a drummer. That is a combination of speed, fluidity, coordination and precision. It requires very careful attention to my body, how I’m sitting, am I relaxed, how does the right hand feel relative to the left hand. One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that relaxation is key. Its how I learn to accomplish new techniques, it’s the pathway to better execution and it is the way of real creativity. It is such a powerful lesson, it is all inclusive, it always applies, even in cases where a lot of physical exertion is necessary, the more relaxed the better the music.
What advice would you give to someone who says they aren’t “musical,” or tries it and thinks they’re “doing it wrong”?
Music, like meditation is a practice. There is no doing it wrong. I don’t think everyone is wired to tolerate/enjoy the practice of making sounds in pattered ways. Some of us find peace and exploration in it, some of us don’t. But, if you’re going to do it, suspend the judging mind, just practice, enjoy, learn, try and fail, make one beautiful sound and let that be enough.
What practices do you recommend people take up if they want to reduce their stress?
I highly recommend everyone create a little routine of yoga, tai chi, stretching, cardio, strength stuff that they can do at home 10 to 15 minutes. It’s best to have a little coaching from someone that knows what they are doing. I’ve hurt myself doing yoga improperly. There are a lot of resources and everyone can find a routine that is doable, that they LIKE and that is useful.
And, I would recommend everyone at least do some singing. It’s easy, you don’t have to do it in public, you don’t have to do it well. It’s just good to give voice. All spiritual traditions include singing/chanting for a reason.
And, if one is so inclined (almost everyone who has ever drummed with me has really enjoyed it) find a drumming circle, drum group (or it could be group singing), some music thing done in a group. It is the most effective happy maker I know.
From Sarah: A few months ago, I was on a board retreat for the mindfulness organization that Marc heads (the M2 Foundation) and Marc led us in an impromptu music/drumming jam. Marc started on the hang drum, someone else had their guitar and joined in, and the rest of us chose instruments and just added in our own sound (you’ll notice some of our instruments are, ahem, kids’ instruments — this doesn’t need to be fancy!)
It was so moving to see everyone doing their own thing, yet connecting to the larger energy of the group. It was awesome, meditative, and soothing, all at once. I took the liberty of capturing a few moments of it on my phone (because teacher) — you can listen in to about 35 seconds of the session here:
You don’t need expensive instruments to make music. Create your own jam!