(gentle music)
- Hey there you guys, it's
Irene from IreneLyon.com,
and welcome to this video,
and today I'm gonna teach
you a bit of an exercise,
it's a practical tool that
will help if you are someone
that has a tendency to either
get really stressed out,
maybe you get anxious really easily,
maybe you live in a
constant state of anxiety,
this also is something that
you can use at any time
to just slow down, regroup yourself,
bring yourself back to your
body, back to your breath,
but without actually
doing anything too fancy,
so it's a real simple exercise,
so I'm gonna teach you
it in just a second.
I'll give you a little bit of history,
the reason I want to teach this,
because I get so many questions
from my students and clients
saying "what do I do when I'm
either not with you 1-on-1,
"or when I'm not doing a
specific exercise of mine
"that helps bring people down
"and out of their stress response,
"out of their arousal response?"
So this is the answer to that,
this is something that you
can do without any equipment,
any time of day, and it's
really really simple,
so this is how you do it.
Alright, so what you're gonna do,
and you can try this right now,
even if you're not in a
state of stress or anxiety,
it's a beautiful way to
come back to the body,
and one of the things to know
is that when we are not
embodied, not in our body,
it's a lot easier to get stressed out
because we stay either in our head,
or we sort of shut down
our human experience,
and we can't process the sensations
that need to be processed in our body.
So the first thing you're gonna do,
you can do this, I'll teach this sitting,
so if you're sitting right now
just find a comfortable place to sit,
make sure you can feel
your butt on your chair,
the feet on the ground, you can lean back,
I'm not leaning back
right now in my chair,
it's up to you, whatever
is most comfortable,
eyes stay open, for now, at least.
What you're gonna do is you're
gonna take your right hand
and you're gonna put it
just kind of under the armpit on the ribs,
very close to the outside of your heart,
alright, so right there.
Then you're gonna take your left hand
and you're gonna put it
on the opposite shoulder,
on this right shoulder.
Now, if for some reason
your arms can't reach there,
just due to constraint or restriction,
the arm is fine, the arm is fine, okay?
So you're gonna do that.
So just hold on here, and
it's a gentle connection,
it's not a squeeze,
it's not like you're trying
to squeeze yourself to death,
you just hold,
and you feel your pelvis
and you feel your feet,
and I'm gonna let you just
experience this for a second,
so maybe just let your body be felt,
feel your own body,
I'm gonna do it myself as well,
we'll just slow this down a little bit.
'Cause essentially, when we're
feeling anxious or stressed,
it's because things are going too fast,
and we need to slow them down,
but sometimes just
trying to slow them down,
willing our brain to
slow down, isn't enough,
we have to bring this
physical system into play,
'cause it's what is going up too high,
it isn't just always the head, right?
The heart rate might be up,
the muscles might be tense,
so we wanna just connect to the body,
find what we call our container,
and just wait, and you
can do this for minutes,
or for five minutes, ten minutes,
and you're not trying to do
anything other than just listen,
I'm gonna close my eyes right now,
and you just
sense,
and you just feel.
And even right now as I do this,
I can feel my system
coming down a little bit.
In many ways,
this is a way to do
do-it-yourself biofeedback,
do-it-yourself neurofeedback,
so you're listening to your body response
and you're just attending to it.
I'm bringing attention
still to my sitz bones,
I just noticed that I was
clenching my belly a little bit,
so if you find that you're
tightening the abdominals,
let them go.
I'm also noticing that my
back was a little bit arched,
so I'm just giving it a little
bit of a tilt in my pelvis
so that I'm not arched and
contracting by back muscles,
so maybe be aware of that.
Now I've borrowed this exercise from
one of my mentors,
Peter Levine, the founder
of Somatic Experiencing,
he writes about this specific,
he calls it "self-help technique,"
"self-regulation exercise,"
but he also borrowed it from someone else,
it's an ancient form of
energy healing called,
hopefully I get this
right, Jin Shin Jyutsu,
Jin Shin Jyutsu,
and it's an ancient healing system
for harmonizing life energy in the body,
so when we're stressed,
when there's trauma still
sitting in our system,
the life energy is
blocked, or it's chaotic,
or it's shut down completely,
and although this isn't going
to heal all past traumas,
it is a way to contain,
sense the body,
and bring it back into a
little more regulation,
because when we have anxiety,
when we have crazy thoughts,
and stress that feels just so crazy,
the energy flow, it isn't connected,
it might just be sitting
in one area, right?
When often people say they feel anxious,
they have a tightness in the chest,
or a tightness in the throat,
or they get a headache, right,
or there are sharp pains in
their back and their kidneys,
and we want to try to
harmonize that energy,
open it up a little bit, gently,
and one way to do that is to
really connect with the self,
connect with our skin,
so feel the skin, feel the muscle,
feel the tissue,
feel your feet,
and don't try to breathe,
just let the breath be there,
let the breath be there.
One little added note,
when we have anxiety,
when we're high and up
up up on the arousal,
and we feel kind of off the charts,
the last thing you actually wanna do
is take a deep breath in,
(inhales deeply)
like that (exhales sharply)
because taking a deep breath in
actually increases our heart rate,
physiologically it's just a fact,
exhaling (exhales deeply)
decreases the heart rate,
so if anything, focus on the
exhale when you're doing this,
but my advice is to just feel the breath
as you contain yourself.
Now, I'm gonna end this in a second
because we could sit here for 20 minutes
and I don't want you to have to do that,
but hopefully you've been practicing this
as you've been watching me,
hopefully you've been trying it,
and just re-establish your
connection to your pelvis,
to the belly,
have you started to
tighten the belly up again,
our culture, we're so often
tense in the abdominals
due to aesthetic reasons,
but if you can right now,
allow those abdominals to
just be less taut, less tight,
feel the jaw,
can your jaw area be
untensed, can it just be free, right?
Can your head and neck
soften a little bit,
so can you move the head so
slowly, really really slow,
looking down a little bit,
a little bit to the left,
a little bit to the right.
Alright, so I dunno about you,
but I'm feeling a little more centered,
a little more in myself,
a little more in my feet and pelvis.
Give this a try whenever
you feel the need to either
A, come out of a stressful experience,
B, when you're feeling anxious,
or maybe even just C, when
you need to just take a break,
maybe you're typing at your computer
and you're feeling tension in your arms
and you're starting to
get a tight head and jaw,
take your hands away from the keyboard,
come to this position
of having the right hand under the armpit,
the left hand on the shoulder or the arm,
and just lean back and maybe
set a timer for five minutes,
or two minutes, and just wait,
and come back to your body,
back to your breath,
back to your physiology.
Alright, thank you so
much for watching this,
being here today, share this if you feel
that this is something that
maybe others might want to learn
within your circles, practice this,
and leave a comment, let
me know how this goes,
obviously this is not my invention,
this is ancient medicine
from way long ago,
obviously we take what we learn
and we teach it in the way that
we feel it should be taught,
it can be taught, so please share,
practice this, let me know how it goes,
and if you're not on my
website watching this,
if you're on YouTube or somewhere else,
head over to my site, IreneLyon.com,
and I've got some tools
and tips and tricks there
that you can download, all free of charge,
so that you can learn a little bit more
about your nervous system,
how it gets kind of sped
up and too stressed out,
and what you can do to bring it back down,
so I've got a lot more stuff
over there that you can learn.
Take good care, and we
will see you next time.
(gentle music)
