So, hello and welcome to the Compassion in Therapy Training Series. My name is Raymond Rodriguez and I'm here today to speak with you about embodied healing and somatic approaches to trauma recovery. I am a clinical social worker with over 20 years of experience in community based clinical practice. My clinical interests are in the areas of immigration, diversity, LGBTQAI+ Empowerment, spirituality and working with marginalized communities. And in the last decade, I have become a trauma specialist, assisting clients with issues around complex psychological trauma. And post-traumatic stress disorder. I am certified in EMDR or eye movement. The sensitization and reprocessing and also in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. And I am on faculty with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, which is work that I truly value and cherish in being able to bring some of what I'm going to talk about today, that through the trainings in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. So let's get started. And I like to start by talking a little bit about mindfulness. Mindfulness is such an important concept that I think all psychotherapists could benefit from learning more about it and integrating it more fully into their practices. So what is mindfulness? You know, it's one of those words that you hear all the time. You know, "you gotta to be more more mindful," or it is sort of part of our sort of language these days. But I find that oftentimes we don't really fully understand what it means. So for me and the way that I like to define it for myself and for my clients is that mindfulness is the capacity to witness our experience. Let me say that again. Mindfulness is the capacity to witness our experience. Another way that I like to describe it is, being with an experience rather than being in it. Yeah? There is a subtle distinction when we're able to be with something rather than when we are in it. So let me give you a short example about that. Say that you or your client, that you're that you're angry and, you know, you're looping, looping in, in, in that anger. That tends to be more when we are in it. Yeah? When we are with our anger, we're able to talk about it. We're able to reflect on it. We're able to consider different possibilities. When we're with it, sorry when we're in something, we tend to be more, more reactive, more, more impulsive. And we. Tend to also lack the capacity to be reflective, to pause, to check in. Much has been written about mindfulness these days. And I always like to also not that mindfulness is something that has been practiced in the East and by indigenous communities across the world for millennia. Most often from a religious perspective. In the West however, mindfulness is a quite recent phenomena of only a few decades to be exact. And it was popularized by some teachers and authors that you may already be familiar with the like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein. Mindfulness also has been extensively researched and has shown, it has been shown to have very positive health impacts. And also mental health impacts in a wide array of conditions. And that research for me supports the usefulness of mindfulness. And hence why it could be very helpful for all of us to bring into our practices again, for ourselves and for our clients. And the beauty of it also is that mindfulness is actually quite expansive. Flexible, adaptive. And it is something that we can practice in a secular way, in very small ways. Or more elaborate ways. I always like to share with my clients that, you know most often when we think of mindfulness, we think of sitting down cross-legged. Eyes, eyes closed for a prolonged period of time. That is the typical image that most people carry when they think about mindfulness. However, there is a variety of mindfulness practices that are just much more accessible that ourselves and our clients can integrate throughout their days in very minor ways that I find actually very, very useful. We can think of mindfulness as a skill. And this is how I like to talk about it with clients too. Mindfulness is a skill that we can practice and we can learn and that we can effectively use in a variety of contexts. One very important benefit of mindfulness practices is that it teaches us to be curious about our inner experience. Mindfulness and curiosity are actually very good friends. And I always like to joke with clients that they tend to travel together. In other words, if we are mindful about something that ishHappening with us. In our bodies. In our emotions. In our mind, we are actually being curious about the experience. So when we're mindful and we're able to again notice our inner experience, we're actually being curious about it. Mindfulness and compassion are also very good friends, and they also tend to travel together. And so when we're mindful, we're also being compassionate or there is a greater capacity to be compassionate about our inner experience, the things that are, that we're going through. And the things that are around us as well. And I also like to say that if we look at the world around us, there's so much happening, so much strife, so much difficulty, so much stress, and certainly so much trauma. A dose of compassion would be very, very helpful to all to all of us, ourselves and our clients. There are very many modern mental health therapeutic modalities that rely heavily on mindfulness practices. You may be familiar with some of them. Like MBSR or Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction or Mindfulness Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or EMDR. And certainly the psychotherapeutic modality that I practice, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. All these psychotherapeutic modalities have in common that they have mindfulness as a central skill to support clients with. And that support in processing or being with whatever experience th client is having. These practices I find that require the capacity to observe our internal experience as the vehicle of exploration of that experience. And so, again, these are all ways that I find very, very useful. To learn more about mindfulness and direct methodologies to bring into our practices as well. I also have found in my own practice that clients that are curious about their inner experience and are able to hold a mindful lens towards their lives, they have actually better outcomes in psychotherapy. Or their progress in psychotherapy tends to move a little faster. So then the question before us is how do we bring mindfulness into your practice? And again, many authors will bring different ideas, different ways to do that. I just want to share with you some of the ones that I find most useful derive from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy that I that I practice. One simple way that I find to bring mindfulness into your practice right now, even you know, tomorrow. If you're seeing clients tomorrow, is actually to invite clients to simply notice what is happening for them right now in the present moment as they share about a particular experience. So a simple question that you can ask your client is what's happening right now, as you say that or as you talk about that experience, that incident that you had with your boss. Or while driving or while walking down the street? What's happening right now as you think about that? As you share about that? What do you notice inside right now as you describe what happened with your coworker or in that incident where you were walking down the street? If you want to make it more specific. Say a client is sharing about anger. You know that they're very angry about this incident that happened at work rather than inviting or going further with having a client share, or just talk about their anger and getting caught up in the story. Or the meaning of that anger. Another possibility is that we can turn to that curious, mindful perspective. About their felt sense of that anger. So you may ask your client as they're sharing about the anger about what happened to them is, you can say something like, "How about we get curious about that anger right now and how it's, and how you're experiencing it right now. You can follow with another question. Where do you feel that anger in your body? Or you can say, can we study that anger that you're feeling right now? You can get more specific with it if you like, and say something like, how intense is that anger? You can even bring a scale. 0 to up to 10. Where ten it could be the most intense and zero being no intensity at all. So where are you right now? Or if you don't want to use numbers, you can use more. Is it a lot or is it a little. Or is it very intense? Or is it mild? Or is it somewhere in between? Like the intensity is medium. How does that anger live inside of you right now? How does that anger move inside of you? Or does that anger have a sense of direction or impulse or purpose? These are just some possibilities for exploring what in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy we call "the pressing moment inner experience." The here now, and how that incident that happened let's say a few hours ago or a few days ago or even, you know weeks or decades ago continues to impact you in the here now. Continues to live with you in the here and now. And I'll speak more about this momentarily. But for right now I just want to convey that there are very simple ways that you in your practice you can include mindfulness practices with your clients and that you can begin to more fully integrate these skills if you aren't already doing so. And effectively explore your clients' experience as it's happening, in the moment with you in the consulting room. And now I want to move to another topic that I find very useful and that in particularly furthers this conversation about mindfulness and how we can study more mindfully, an experience that a client has in the consulting room. And that concept which you may already be familiar with, is the "window of tolerance." The window of tolerance, as you may already know, is a term. And an understanding developed and coined by Dan Siegel, who is a neuroscientist that studies and specializes in the intersection of mental health and neurobiology. The window of tolerance is truly a tool for sensing into our inner experience and for really making sense of what's happening with us. And there is some mindfulness at its center. So what is it? So in order for me to explain this better, I prepared a couple of PowerPoint slides that I like to show you now. As a way of more directly and specifically help you understand this concept. And I'm going to pull my PowerPoint slide right now. And so, so this right now is a very simple depiction of the window of tolerance. As you can see, there is an area. And in between that area, think about this green line. This space in between these two parallel sections. That is what we call the window of tolerance. And let me explain more specifically what that means with an example. Every day we go through ups and downs. You know, things happen to us. Whether it's very simple things like, for instance, I have to get up in the morning and I'm a little bit rushed because I am late to an appointment or simply to go to work, right? In most situations within these ups and downs of life, to varying degrees, you know, we're relatively okay. Yeah? We have access to how we feel, what we're thinking and perhaps also our bodies. We call this a "state of regulation" or "regulated affect." That is when we are within the window of tolerance. On this slide it's that purple line that refers to regulated arousal. This is the place where we want to be most of the time. And again, to varying degrees, right? And so what happens? Now consider that we are stressed or anxious or angry or perhaps afraid? In these moments. And I'm going to move to the second slide here. In these moments we begin to see what we call "dysregulated arousal." And that is where our affect goes beyond that window of tolerance. In these moments, our attention narrows. We become focused and ready to take actions. And a lot of this believe it or not it's happening automatically. We call that "procedurally," and it's happening in our bodies. There is a number of neurochemicals that are released into the bloodstream to support our immediate taking action. And guess what? This immediate taking action that becomes possible in dysregulated arousal goes beyond our cognition. We can think of these moments as increase arousal. Where the energy, including the our bodies, our mind, and our emotions are again geared towards addressing the situation at hand quite, quite quickly. Usually dysregulated arousal, as you can imagine, has to do with moments. Where we feel that we are a threat. That something bad can happen. That there is an immediacy to something bad happening. When this arousal is heightened, that's when we call "dysregulated arousal." This heightened arousal, as you can see from this slide, shows up in three distinctive ways based on our very basic neurobiology. Or a different way to saying is our very basic wiring that is common in all mammals. And these three responses are the responses of fight, flight and freeze. There are other responses that are also possible. But for simplicity's sake. Right now, I will just focus on the three responses of fight, flight and freeze. And so then what is fight? This happens at the upper edge of the window above the window of tolerance. In a state that we call hyperarousal. In this state of fight, typically we experience anger or short term temper. Or we experience irritability or we are short fuze or we are quick to react. Quick to an emotional discharge. An emotional action. In a flight state, what we see is a sense of avoidance. Or procrastination. Or disengagement or distancing. Basically in a flight state, we're just not able to deal with the situation. We want to stay as away from it as possible. We can't bring ourselves to to deal with it. Some people in a flight state will turn to numbing activities, to addictive compulsive behaviors as a way of avoiding the situation. And as you probably already know or sense, these behaviors move beyond our cognition. You know, the addict knows that engaging in this activity is detrimental to them. But somehow they can't quite help themselves. They feel compelled to engage in it. And I don't know about you. But, you know, for some of us, I like to always add you know, social media. Sometimes I have found that I can lose, you know, half an hour or an hour without even recognizing it, getting lost on clicking and reviewing thing to thing in social media. And sometimes that response for me and for many of our clients as a form of a flight response. One of my clients called that you know, "doomscrolling." With so many, you know, negative things happening, social politically in our country. And across the world. So many catastrophes, wars, it's very easy to get caught up. And one of the ways that we avoid taking action in other areas of our lives is through just, you know, getting getting lost in in social media. The other response that I want to talk about is the freeze response, which happens, as you see on on the slide, at the bottom below the window of tolerance. And it is what we call a "hypoarousal" or a "hypoaroused response." In a freeze state, we feel paralyzed by the situation. We feel disconnected. We feel removed, we feel aloof. The person typically describes a low energy or a lack of energy, but they cannot simply summon the energy from within them to address the situation. Oftentimes in this state of heightened freeze, there is a vacancy that happens to the individual. It's almost like they're not there. We associate the state with dissociation. That the person, their body is here. And they may be engaged with you somewhat. But the felt sense of them is that like, they're not here. I don't feel them, you know, for myself and for some other of my colleagues, you know, one telltale sign of that dissociative state of being present is that I myself begin to feel kind of sleepy or fussy. Or like I'm here but I'm not here, or that I can quite follow or I begin to get distracted myself. In all these three states, in the state of hyperarousal and in this state of hypoarousal. It can we call those state heightened arousal beyond the window of tolerance. Or our capacity to be fully present to what's happening. We're also again, not quite present to our logical thinking, to the full range of our affect, to our bodies. We're more prone to reactivity. We are in a reactive mode. And in these states, as the slide points to both of the states of hyperarousal and hypoarousal, we have a harder time to integrate our experience. In other words, we have a harder time learning from what's happening. We're just so involved with the reactivity of it. With the action of it. We're in the hypoaroused state. The non action, which essentially is a form of action, right? If I am vacant and I can quite engage with the situation, right? It is an action in itself. So then, and I'm going to stop the PowerPoint now. But what is helpful about this? What is helpful about learning about the window of tolerance? I find that an understanding of the window of tolerance for ourselves and for our clients supports a deeper understanding of our present moment inner experience at any given time. In other words, we're not just talking about it and caught up in the narrative, which again, I don't want to minimize. There is a usefulness. There is an important and a time for that. And I find equally valuable when we can engage with our own and our clients window of tolerance as a different entry point for understanding. For making sense. For getting acquainted with the fullness of our. inner experience. And so how do we do that? Yeah. So let me just give you a quick example. Let's say a client that you're seeing comes in and they begin to talk about the stress that they're having. A situation around a situation at work. So you could possibly and maybe this is a way that you may work can continue on or launch into a problem solving, right? Or tell me more about it. And when did that happen and how did that happen and how did you respond? And what do you think is necessary here? Again, a very important and useful line of inquiry. But what I'm trying to convey here. Or support you with is that another line of inquiry that may be very useful is that as they're talking about their distress. Or they may really be as I said earlier in it. "Look what they did to me." You know. "This coworker at work." You might very gently, in what in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy we call "empathic interruption." And so you may say, "Let me come in for one moment. Yeah. And can we pause here. Yeah. And I'm wondering if you would be okay. Okay. Now I'm asking for permission. If we check in with this anger that you're experiencing right now." Yeah? And we can further say something like, you know, "Let's get curious about how this anger lives inside of you." Yeah? I find that that that type of exploration, that line of inquiry becomes a very fertile ground for a tremendous amount of other possibilities. Of helping clients move from a dysregulated state to a more regulated state thereby being able to tap more into creativity. Into wisdom. Into sources of inner support. Strength and also external supports from people's community and from their environment. So in the therapy, to also make it more specific for you all, I invite clients to check in right now. How are you doing inside? And I ask questions such as, are you calm? Are you content? Are you worried? Are you frightened? Can you identify the feeling, the thought that you are having right now. As you check in with yourself. Can you name them? If you were to give a name to what you're sensing in your self, what would that be? What sensations in your body are associated with how you think about this feeling? About this experience. Or as were talking about anger a moment ago, as you sense into that anger that's right here, right now when you talk about that incident with your coworker, what sensations come up with you? Yeah. Can you speak about those sensations? Can we name them? Can we study them together? Yeah. Deepening on the state that the client is in. In the here and now supports us. In being with their thoughts, their emotion, their sensations. From a mindful place. And again, it supports our capacity to develop more compassion towards our inner experience. One question that I also like to introduce as you know, I am exploring it in this way. Their inner experience in they here now is, you know, what's helpful to you. Yeah? What might be something that we can do to support this anger that your feeling right now towards your coworker. One of the few beauties that I find about that is that probably as you can hear in my words, is that it's a very gentle approach. It's very spacious. And it doesn't aim for anything specific, but actually supporting the client and their relationship with the client. In tapping into some of the creative sources, of finding ways of bringing in more inner resources, more external resources, things that may be more helpful. And support the client into returning to that window of tolerance. We are not aiming with this mindfulness practices and with the use of the window of tolerance to necessarily fix anything. But rather we're working towards greater mindfulness. Greater compassion. What I find in my practice is I chose bringing in that mindfulness and that compassion begins to soften whatever it is that we're going through, that we are experiencing. And these are skills that we can cultivate. And this is one of the things that I love about this. Is that the more we practice these skills, the more accessible they are to us. The more available they are, the more we can turn to them. I also want to add that these skills, these practices, they're not silver bullets. Yeah? They're not meant to be, you know, fix it all. You know get rid of it over everything. Yeah. And incidentally, I explain it this way to my clients. That this practices are for a tool box. And you know more, I imagine maybe. You've seen a toolbox. You may have one and you may use one occasionally, right? So if something doesn't quite work. You know, you try a different tool and if that one doesn't quite work, you try another one, right? You look to your toolbox for what may be the appropriate tool for this particular situation. The same thing with these mindfulness skills. And with the window of tolerance. It provides us with a toolbox of various tools that we can turn to at any time. And we could keep adding to that toolbox. I have my favorites also that I that over time that I have developed and I'm going to teach you some some of those momentarily. And there are many, many more. There are many books that are written about mindfulness and mindfulness specifically applicable to psychotherapy. I invite you and strongly encourage you to turn to that literature to further your learning about how to integrate mindfulness practices. And this concept of the window of tolerance into your practice. So the last theme that I want to focus on today in this talk is in what I call, "the body as an ally in healing." "The body as an ally in healing." And I like to underscore that name because oftentimes we don't think about the body as an ally. Most of us I find in Western culture actually engage with their bodies very, very differently. You know, we may just turn to our bodies simply when we notice the cues for hunger or that we need to go to the bathroom. Right? Or that I need a hug or, you know, like we say in colloquially at least in the United States where I live, you know, that I have gut sense about this or I have a bad gut feeling about this, right? That might be the extent to which I may relate to my body. Or when there's pain or when there's illness. Yeah? And so. For some other other people who know we may actually be in a constant fight state with our body. Because our bodies may not correspond to certain stereotypes of our society around beauty or about size or about shape or about you know, the color of our skin. And we may have a conflicting relationship with our bodies. So I like to delve more specifically about ways in which we can bring more allyship and healing through our bodies in our work with clients. We call this in Sensorimotor, "a bottom up approach to healing." In somatic based approaches such as Sensorimotor, the body becomes the entry point. It becomes the primary method to which we get to explore, study, we work with and process experience. A bottom up approach. And what it simply means is to pay attention to the body. When we honor and when we listen to the wisdom of the body. And I want to underscore that. I'm a firm believer and I would like and invite you to take that with you, that our bodies have an innate wisdom. It's a wisdom that's always there. It is a wisdom that we can tap into. How does that wisdom show up? Let me give you a simple example. When you cut yourself, you know, I imagine somewhere someone somewhere in your life you've had a cut. Minor or perhaps a bigger cut. You didn't have to tell your body to heal. It just naturally knows how to do that. Certainly you may need medical support. You may need medication to support that healing. But the basic mechanisms and bodily functions will move very quickly to bring us to a state of healing. That's the wisdom of our bodies in action. Another way that this wisdom shows up is in what we call information. Our bodies, believe it or not, are always communicating with us. At any moment we can learn to turn to our bodies and learn to listen to what they're sharing with us. And this may seem to some clients, perhaps to your selves, kind of like "what?" or weird or kind of out there. But it's actually quite simple. And I would like to say quite accessible to all of us. So as I mentioned a moment ago, you know, when we're hungry, we cannot know that. There are certain cues that our body shares with us that tells us that we're hungry. That's information. That's how our bodies communicate with us. One note that I like to add here also is that when you share these skills with your clients, or if you yourself have a curiosity of bringing these practices more fully to your practice with your clients, I find that there a lot more useful when you, the therapist, actually believe in them. When you have a direct, immediate experience with them and thereby you're more able to embody them. If you just learn this practices is because I'm telling you to do them or you've read them in, in, in, in book and you go and you try them with yourself, perhaps they may land more formulaic. More as a prescription. Like do this or do that. Yeah? It comes from a different place when you have a direct experience with something. Where you know it intimately and you have seen the power of these practices. The ways in which they support you too. In other words, it becomes a parallel process with your clients as as you support the client in engaging with them in learning these practices. So a note for you to also consider these practices and try them for yourselves outside of what you do with clients and see how they work for you. This is in fact how I myself develop a toolbox that I can turn to and tha I use more explicitly with my clients. I bring to them the tools that I also find very useful for myself. And so a moment ago I was talking about the body conveying information to us. So the language of the body is sensations. Our bodies are always sensing something and sharing that as information with us. If you were to bring some attention to your body and gently scan it right now, you will find different sensations that are happening. And so the beauty of this is that we can learn to make sense, to understand the language of sensation. We can get to know our sensations much more intimately than what most of us, most of us do. In an everyday life. And certainly my clients. I tell you I want to say, about 95% of my clients come in with a very rudimentary understanding of their bodies and the ways of their bodies are sharing information and having a robust language for making sense of internal sensation and internal experience. So in the form that I practice psychotherapy, which I find very, very important, in fact, crucial for addressing traumatic memory, traumatic activation for my clients. And that is key to develop a language to make sense of our inner sensations. And I'm going to share with you an exercise momentarily. Yeah? That that will go a little bit further into how do we develop a greater language for understanding and making sense of inner sensation. But one way that I encourage you all to do is to simply go online. If you just search on any search engine body sensations, list of body sensations, you'll see many different things by many different authors come up. You can print some of those. Familiarize yourself with the language. So that then you can bring it to your practice. You may have seen in psychotherapists offices that they have a poster with emotions and languaging for various emotions. You can find similar posters that also speak about sensations. As I said earlier, most of us just simply don't have an expansive language to describe and make sense of the subtleties of our of our inner sensations. So in practice I help clients in having a direct experience. And I bring in direct and indirect ways so that they more directly can develop a language and relate to their body sensations. So what is a direct way of helping clients develop a language and get to know their sensations? Well, simply by giving them a list. You know, if you print a list from online, one that you like and you share it with them and you go through it and then you negotiate, bringing that language into practice. That's a very direct way that you can bring in this idea of befriending the body. Using the body and the language of sensation as an ally for healing. An indirect way of bringing in again more information, language, developing that allyship with our bodies is by guiding clients to turn to their bodies and offering them a menu of possible sensations that they can relate to. So let me give you an example of this indirect way I'm talking about. Say a client is speaking about tension or perhaps they're speaking about that anger with their coworker and, you notice, you can observe that there is some tension. Yes? So you may ask them. You know, where in your body are you feeling that tension? Or if they didn't speak about the tension, but you're noticing it for them, you may again empathically interrupt them and you may say, you know, "As you share about that anger, I notice a lot of tension or some tension in your body. Can we study that a little bit more right now?" And then you can ask, "Where in your body are you sensing that tension?" Say the client responds, it's on my chest right here. Like I feel very tense here. "So then feel into that tension in your chest around that incident with your coworker." Yeah? See, I'm now linking the various components. Right? They came in with the with the incident with a coworker. They're talking about their anger. And now we're connecting the body and the information that is sharing through that tension. Then we get to know that that that tension. Is that tension pulling or pushing? Or is that tension collapsing? Does that tension have a sense of direction? Does it expand or does it want to constrict? Does it want you to hide? Or does it want you to move forward or act forcefully? It's easiest for a client to know or to relate to what's happening with them or to connect to what's happening with them when you offer them a menu rather than open ended questions. So an open ended question if you were to ask them, again if you want to explore that tension on your chest. In your chest, right? If you were to ask them, can you describe that tension in your chest? That's an open ended question. But a more specific and indirect way is, again, as you sense that tension. That anchor in your chest right now, you can go into, does its pull, does it push, does it collapse? Does it have a color to it? Does it have a texture to it? Those are both ways of, again, of studying more fully that sensation. Why do we do that? Or what could be helpful about that? In my experience, again through the use of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, in my practice, the more we can turn to and explore it, it brings us into that mindfulness space of being with rather than being in it. In other words, we're a little bit less in it. We're, through that mindfulness, the anger, the tension actually begin to soften. And that softening for some people, especially if they're in in one of the states of dysregulation, the hyperarousal. Or the hypoarousal. That's softening actually becomes very, very useful. And very, very welcome. It's also important to note that sensations come and go. Most of us are very quickly to want to go to meaning, to make meaning out of it. To resolve it, to do something about it, to move away from it. Again that flight response, right? Or to act it out. What these practices that I've been sharing with you. And using the body as an ally have a different purpose. Is that befriending. It's that turning towards. It's about that being with. And as I said a moment ago, thereby allowing some spaciousness to the fullness of that experience and being with it. I like to say also that, you know, making friends with our bodies and with our sensations can actually be quite hard for some of us. So much of our Western learning in western societies is about looking outward. You know in Western learning we privilege intellectual capacity. Intellectual attainment. We deeply value logic over emotions and our somatic awareness. We are taught to value doing rather than being. We value material attainment. And being and feeling are actually relegated to being secondary or even unimportant. So in what I've been sharing with you actually goes against the grain of years of teaching and learning that are under our belt. So for some clients, this may actually feel challenging, very foreign and actually quite uncomfortable. Our educational system does not teach us or teaches us very little about somatic awareness. I don't know about you but myself, you know, I went through entire years of education. You know grammar school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school with very little learning on somatic prop-- basic somatic processes that are happening in my body. And how those relate to my feelings and to my thinking. And, you know, that leaves a deficit. A deficit. You know, we have these bodies and we you know, move around with them, but very little access, or a robust understanding of how all these processes, our somatic, or our soma, our feelings and our thinking are intrinsically connected. As a result, what I what I find is that many of us walk around with a tremendous amount of disconnection from our bodies. And as I said earlier, many of us are actually in a fight with our own bodies. So there's something I find very valuable in making friends with our bodies. In bringing compassion to our ourselves, in turning attention towards and honoring that wisdom that our body has, that our bodies are always willing to share with us. And so some of our clients will be disconnected from their bodies for very specific reasons. Some clients have experienced a lot of victimization or violation. May actually have a very hard time connecting with their bodies. Because disconnecting from their bodies was in fact one of the ways that they cope, that they were able to survive certain traumatic experiences. Things like body pain. If you're in constant pain, in chronic pain, or if you feel hurt and your body is in pain, or even with emotional pain. Or certainly trauma, old or new or ongoing as is the case with many of us would say you know religious trauma. Racialized trauma. Or the trauma that some of us are experiencing in this day and age. With the social political climate that we're living in this country, in other countries, and witnessing the wars that we are now witnessing in real time. These things can very quickly disconnect us from from our bodies. Perhaps the last place that we want to be is to feel in our affect and in our bodies the depth of the hurt and the pain of these very real situations for us. So what do we do in these instances? Is is that we start small and simple. We lean slowly and very mindfully with a tremendous amount of gentleness and care, rather than diving very fully into wanting to be with the fullness of our somatic and affective experience. So the way that I share with clients is that you know, we dip our toe a little bit. I grew up in the Caribbean island, in the island of what is now called Puerto Rico. The original stewards of that land were the Taino people. And I grew up very close to the beach, and that was a real blessing. But one thing for me, as you know contrary to other people. Is that I could never just dive in. I needed to acclimate. So I needed to move in when I went to the beach and get my feet wet, then my legs, then a little bit of my pelvic area, my torso. And I would very slowly and mindfully and gently get acclimated to the water. And for me that was necessary. That's what I mean of so we start small and simple. Yeah? In some models it is called titration or bite sizing. In which we turn into again the body very gently. And for short periods of time. And then we come out of it. And we distract ourselves and we go in a different direction. For these people, these clients. They will be better served by titrating. By bite sizing. By moving slowly. And getting to befriend their bodies as slowly and mindfully over time. So the rest of my presentation now, I just wanted to teach you three very specific exercises that you can bring in immediately into your practices. And these are mindfulness practices that support, that are helping clients getting more familiar with their body sensations. Helping them develop better language for sensation, and therefore befriending their inner present moment experience with compassion and with curiosity. These three exercises. The first one is just being with a what we call in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, being with the present moment experience and exploring sensation. The second exercise is about grounding. And the third exercise is about alignment. Is an alignment exercise that we call centering. So then let me just share with you. This, this exercise that again, I find it very useful. That I call present moment experience exploring sensation. Early on in therapy with my clients, I teach them the skills of what I call checking in. Which may seem like a simple skill, checking in, you know? But believe it or not, what I find is that many of us, you know, just start our days and we spring into action. And throughout the entire day, our attention is out there. Where do I need to go, the list, and what's next. Again, as I said earlier, very outwardly focused. We don't spend nearly as much time bringing the attention in. Or as I tell clients, turning he mirror inward and looking in. In checking in the very basic question is, how am I doing? How am I doinh? However, what's significant about this exercise in the way that I am sharing with you, is that we're actually moving from our thinking to our feelings and our bodies. How is my body doing right now? How is my emotional state? What is here now in my body, in my emotions, in my thinking? Yeah? I'm not doing this from a place of analyzing or grasping or figuring out. Right? I'm actually interrupting the automaticity of that way of being. Which is the way that we're most familiar with. Right? I feel something, what do I do with it? Right? The invitation here, which again draws heavily from mindfulness approaches, is about being with the fullness of what's happening inside of us. Checking in. How am I doing? Again, it's not about fixing it. It's just about simply learning to be with ourselves. Mindfully, with compassion and that curiosity. I invite clients then to go very granular with that inner experience. So what I mean with granular, is very specific. Right? So if there is some discomfort, where is that discomfort? How does that discomfort move? So let's say with discomfort, I may ask questions like, you know, does it have a palpitation or is it jabbing? Is there that discomfort, is it more towards pain or is it subtle? Or is it numb? Or does it feel raw? All of that are granular ways of further exploring. Or that disturbance, let's say on the left side of your body. Does it have a sense of movement or an impulse of a sense of temperature? As you hear in these questions and as you can probably hear it in my voice, they're actually very curious questions. That they're not aimed towards anything specific. But just towards the exploration of that inner experience in the here and now. If clients, if you have a client that is in pain or a tremendous amount of discomfort, or if when you invite them to notice what's happening inside, nothing actually comes up or this is the very first time that they're trying an exercise like that. Then you perhaps can invite them to choose something more neutral. A sensation, like, for example, the sense of temperature right now that they are noticing. Temperature is always available to us regardless of where they are at. Or you can invite them to feel their clothes, how they are in their bodies, how they feel their clothes on their bodies. Maybe the tightness, the looseness, the places that they, that the clothes make contact with their bodies. Where there's some space between their shirts and their bodies. Or you might instruct them to notice the places where their bodies are making contact with the surface that they're sitting on. Notice what that's like. So, for instance, if your client is sitting on a chair in front of you or on a couch, you can invite them to feel into the support from the couch beneath them and behind them. Can you take in a little bit of that support? Yeah? And then you can once again, as I've been saying, study the sensation. How do you describe the sensation of that support. Yeah? Is that support felt more outwardly, inwardly. Does that support from the chair underneath you is it welcome? Or do you have a hard time taking it in? Does it feel unimportant to you? Or does it feel like something noteworthy? Significant? Novel? Yeah. What's the intensity of that support right now? Does it feel quite intense. Or does it feel subtle? Yeah. Or mild. Medium. Strong. Or is it too much or even unbearable to think of this, you know, support that's here with you available right now? Does it feel unbearable? Yeah? With other sensations, like I was saying earlier, anger, right? Does it have a temperature? Yeah? Does it want to say anything or does it want to do anything? Is there an impulse that go with that anger right now to move quickly, to jump, to scream, to to jump, to collapse? Yeah. To hide away? Like, what's the impulse of that anger right now? And again. We explore that through the body. As the client explores the quality of that a sensation then we went and move into exploring with them the impact of that exercise, so studying that sensation in this way. And the question there is, as you explore the quality of that anger and that tension in your chest, is there anything that shifts inside? Anything that shifts for you or anything that changes that may feel slightly different? I tell clients we're not necessarily looking for anything big. It might be something very subtle and noteworthy. The simple question that anyone can relate to any client. And this question comes from a dear colleague of mine, Janina Fisher. Those getting to know this sensation in this way. Does it make you feel better or worse? Everyone can relate to better or worse. I haven't yet met a person that can quite relate to that. And some things I insert in there. Better, worse or neutral. And so now I want to talk more about grounding. And grounding is all about feeling in body. One very simple way that you can bring grounding into your practice at any moment. And it's particularly helpful for clients that are coming in with some level of dysregulation, whether in a hyperaroused state or a hypoaroused state is to invite them to feel the feet on the ground. To simply feel your feet on the ground. And if you want to take a little bit of a step further, you can have them press very gently into the ground with their feet. So just press very gently and then release. What happens as we engage in this exercise. Of pressing gently with our with our feet and then releasing. Is that we're actually engaging various muscles on our legs and even the pelvic area, including the quads and the quads, are the biggest muscle in our bodies. We're helping the person become more in body. So once again, to follow up with what I just shared a moment ago. As the client is feeling dysregulated, be it because they share it or it was because you observe them. You can empathically interrupt and bring in one of these mindfulness exercises. "Can we try something?" It's the typical Sensorimotor Psychotherapy question. And it's an invitation to an exercise. "How about we play?" And we use that word very deliberate. Because we're not looking for anything specific. It may actually be that as you try this grounding exercise, nothing actually happens and that's okay. Then we put it on the side. We abort and we go to our toolbox and pull something else. But let's say that you invite the client. "Would you be willing to to try with me this grounding exercise?" Then I typically like to follow with suggesting. Or telling them what it is. I was thinking of just pressing on the ground with your feet and see what happens. Yeah. Then the next step is that I invite him feel into again, using that anger and that tension on the chest feel into that anger and that tension right there on your chest. And as you do that, just press gently and focus on your legs, pressing through your feet into the ground. Yeah. What do you notice now? Yeah. What happens? What shifts? What may feel differently right now? Another grounding, mindful practice that I like and that I find very useful. That is, again, part of my toolbox is just simply patting or squeezing your body. Yeah? So again, if a client is in a state of dysregulation or more like hypoaroused collapse. You can invite them to very gently tap. And if you've had a massage, some massage therapists actually include this as part of their massage, right? That at some point, typically towards the end they cannot go like this on your body. I invite clients. And I do it with an actually to just very gently tap their bodies. Yeah? And also I invite them to tap all over, including their legs and their feet and to go back. You may ask for how often do you do that? It can be, you know 30 seconds. It can be long. Then you can pause and examine the impact of it, the aftermath of it. "What do you notice now? What shifts?" Then you can say something like, "Would it be helpful to try it again?" Yeah? "So how about we try it again and just notice what happens?" Yeah? Another grounding practice that I find helpful with some of my clients. Again, part of my toolbox. Is just to bring your hand to your chest. Or to the belly. Or to bring a hug to yourself. Like what happens as you do that? As you bring a hug to yourself. Or as you bring your hand to your to your chest? Another thing that I forgot to mention earlier. Is for you, the therapist to pause for a moment. Let's just be with that for for a moment. Yeah. To allow that going a little bit more in it. Right? So if I hold my hand right here. Or if you invite the client to how to do it, what do notice now? What happened as you keep your hand there for a moment. Yeah. So as I said earlier, these grounding exercises and by the way, there are many others. These are just three grounding exercises that I find very useful. Right? Their aim to again, helping us feel more embodied further developing that mindful connection with our bodies. And we also call it resourcing through the body. So then the last thing that I'll talk to you today is about centering. Centering is another mindfulness practice that aims towards feeling more aligned. Supported. And it also aids with the energy in our bodies moving more fully. The basic instruction for centering and using alignment for centering is simply to roll your shoulders back. Gently back, and then to drop them down. When we do that, automatically there is an alignment of the spine. There is a lengthening that naturally happens when we rol our shoulders back and then dropped them down. Yeah? If you're familiar with yoga practices. In some modalities of yoga, they call it mountain pose, right? Where you purposefully elongate the spine. Yeah. And notice the impact of that with my clients. I find this centering alignment exercise particularly helpful for clients that tend to go into a collapsed hypoaroused slump state. You know, these are clients that come in and just almost like drop on the on the couch, the chair in your office or even in front of you. If you're working on online. And it's almost as if they're not there. As is, again, as I said earlier, that there is this vacancy to them. Something happens if we invite the mindful practice of rolling the shoulders back mindfully and then down. Yeah? Another thing that you can integrate. And by the way. I also noticed that when we do this practice. Usually, not Always there's an immediate breath that comes up. There's an immediate "ah." Yeah?Because as I said earlier also. When we align, there's more space. The energy in our bodies moves more freely, right? So as we study the impact of this exercise. You could also follow or you could also ask the client, "And how is it to engage with the world from this posture, with this alignment?" Yeah? Or how is it to engage with yourself from this posture. From this feeling more your breath, from feeling more aligned. From feeling more centered, from feeling perhaps more more spacious. It's also worth noting that if had any time any of these resourcing grounding, checking in, centering, alignment, actually generates more dysregulation for the client. You simply abort the exercise, and it does not mean that you have done anything wrong or that the client is doing anything wrong or that they're being resistant. Right? Or that they are not being compliant with what you are asking them to. In fact, in the way that I practice. It, again, from a Sensorimotor Psychotherapy lens, it becomes very useful for understanding what are the edges of the client's window of tolerance. Because so much of trauma processing work is actually working at those edges of the window. So these exercises also serve as a form of assessment. And then tell me kind of where to climb is at. And adaptations that I can make to continue supporting them. And so you know, one of the ways that I use these practices, these resources, practices in session, is by negotiating where with the client that during the session if they're beginning to feel dysregulated or, you know distress, increase energy. Or obviously the opposite. Right like that decrease slump collapse. Like you see them kind of leaving the room. Or almost kind of melting, right? From again, from a place of dysregulation, right? Is that you can negotiate with the client that we will begin to one of these again, resourcing practices. So we'll interrupt whatever we're working on and we'll come back to it, do a little bit of resource. See what happens with that. And then return to the content that we were working on, yeah? So this is yet another way that you can keep with this mindfulness practices as this resourcing practices very alive in your therapeutic work. And what this last piece looks like is that you can say to a clients after having practiced Right? And this actually felt good. And I feel a little bit better, a little bit calmer, you can say to the client. "Oh, Okay. So how about we go back to that anger that you brought in that we were working on a moment ago, and we'll keep checking throughout this session that if that anger becomes too much, we can return to this alignment now. Yeah? How does that sound to you?" And then that client hopefully says yes, right? Okay. So tell me more about the anger and what happened. Right. So you keep, you do what you do. And as your tracking their activation. You're maybe sensing in yourself or they themselves may be sharing or feeling overwhelmed. Then you say, "So how about we go back to that grounding practice that we did a moment ago?" Or another segue could be, "This seems something that this might be a good moment to go back to that grounding practice. Would that be okay with you?" And then you go to that, you do it for a few moments. And then you see. Yeah? Would it be okay to go back to where we were or do you want to hang out here for a little bit longer? Right? So these are ways again that you can more specifically, fully and directly bring in these resourcing, mindfulness practices with compassion and curiosity into your mental health practice and certainly support clients in working through the trauma of their lives. It is a pleasure to share with you these wisdoms that have been given to me and taught to me and that I have found abundantly helpful. For myself in my own life. And most definitely in my practice with clients. I wish you all the best as you continue your journey in integrating mindfulness practices into your existing practice. All the very best to you. Blessings. Thank you.