The goal of this exercise is to create within yourself and experience a similar body response to what a client who is afraid of grief feelings may experience. I encourage you to try to practice this from a place of curiosity about your internal body responses. Since we are mammals, there are predictable physiological responses that are worthy of our attention. We often judge these responses, even though they are universal. Noticing them from a curious place can expand our capacity for self-care and compassion for others’ experiences. So let’s have some fun and be curious about what we notice!
- Choose a time when you can be uninterrupted and you feel present to yourself.
- Find a comfortable place to sit where your feet are on the ground.
- Close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath.
- Breathe in normally through your nose and exhale slowly through your mouth as though blowing slowly through a straw.
- Do this four times at your own rate, ensuring each exhale is longer than the inhale.
- While doing this, bring your attention to your feet and your bottom and the back on your chair, being aware of your breath within your body container. The goal of this is to bring us to the present and feel calm, settled and in your body.
- From this settled place, imagine a person with whom you fear crossing paths – someone who puts you on edge and, if you met with them, you feel they would hurt your sense of well-being.
- With this person in mind, bring your attention back to your body and notice where there’s bracing in your body, or tightness. Perhaps it is in your shoulders, neck, jaw or hips? Perhaps you feel bracing in more than one area?
- Notice the difference between having this sensation of bracing and your previous calm body presence.
- Now, consider a client for whom deep feelings are scary and thus bring this sort of bracing. Perhaps showing emotion wasn’t safe in their past. Some clients talk around the loss or intellectualize about the loss or other subjects that are in a safe realm to connect with others about. But when we encourage them to touch on their grief, this bracing comes because their nervous system is remembering the past; it is doing what it is supposed to do – protecting from the experience of past danger. Their nervous system is not recognizing they may be safe right now. This can allow us to attune well to what their experience might be which may support us to support companioning them without the goal that they get unstuck.
