Somatic Movement for Stress Management
How can you live more in flow state?
Do you ever wish you could go with the flow more? It can be so hard to interrupt cycles of stress, because these are well-grooved pathways in our wiring.
When it comes to rewiring our mind-body system for more ease, we can interrupt the cycle with ‘top-down’ approaches (mind-based interventions like mindset shifts or visualisations) or ‘bottom-up’ approaches (body-based interventions like movement and breathing).
Our society prioritises top-down approaches because we generally believe that our mind is in charge. The issue with these kind of cognitive interventions, however, is that they don’t always trickle down into our body. For example, we may use positive affirmations to try and ingrain a new mindset, but unless our entire organism can believe these new sentiments, patterns of stress, anxiety and emotional dysregulation still occur.
In other words, logic may convince your conscious mind, but it might not convince the primal part of your brain and body.
For those of us who haven’t had success with cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), hypnosis or talking therapies for stress reduction, somatics offers a doorway into bottom-up nervous system reprogramming.
In other words, when you embody your body differently, your state of mind will change.
So if you want to be able to ‘go with the flow’ more in life, first allow your body to flow.
Something like 80% of our body is made up of fluids, but although this means we have the capacity to move and interact with flow, many of us are held and constricted in tension patterns. Because our mind-body system is a two-way communication system, this physical tension is associated with psychological states, and whether the root cause is psychological or physical in origin, the whole system is affected in this feedback loop.
Unravelling tension reduces our systemic stress load and improves our overall health and wellbeing. Releasing chronic muscular contractions frees up energy resources, and mobilising fascia encourages movement of blood, lymph and hormone messengers. Facilitating the healthy functioning of all these body systems sends feedback to our brains that we’re safe and well.
In my Finding Flow somatic sessions I teach fluid movement with guided imagery and meditative cues to help drop you into a mind-body state of ease.
We look to embody the quality of fluidity to remind the mind-body of our potential for flow.
This practice can be challenging if there’s lots of rigidity and restlessness in the system, but over time you start to learn which doorways into this fluid state are most accessible to you. For example, you may respond well to certain cues or hypnotic imagery; it may be certain movements or positions that help part the veils of rigidity and restlessness to make way for this state of ease.
Once you’ve developed this as a practice, you can start to bring these doorways into your daily life, taking ‘microdoses’ of Finding Flow in order to shift your state. Over the repetitions, you start to groove new pathways in your nervous system, until a state of flow is your default mode.
