A Child’s Worry
It felt like there were two hearts in my body: one heart in my chest and the other in my throat. We were on our way home from a store off the main highway. From the back of my family’s truck, my mind was at it again — ruminating over a scene from Growing Pains. Carol Seaver was jumping in her room and without warning went through the floor.
What was meant to be comical seemed to attach to the part of my five-year-old brain that fed on fear. Would the house be just like that when we got home? I didn’t understand my feeling but there I was, experiencing it, nonetheless. There was no reason for worrying about something like this, no one was exercising anywhere unsafe and nothing traumatic had occurred, but just as Carol lost her grounding in the comfort of her home, I too lost my grounding in the comfort of my mind.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been a constant worrywart. Ruminating to me could be seen as the equivalent to absently picking at a scab. Though I haven’t been on medication for being this worrywart, I have found that at certain times I can control my perspective with the help of my arms, legs, belly, and lungs.
Connecting to the Inner Child
What took me over 20 years to learn is that the body strengthens the mind when breathing through ways that many of us are unaware of. When I awoke my dormant passion for belly dance, my dancing carried me into a yoga studio where I learned breath exercises that reached not only the place of mindfulness but also bodyfulness.
Have you ever heard of Bodyfulness? Somatic psychologist Christine Caldwell coined this term meaning to check-in and reflect on our senses, bodily systems, and movement. We ‘experience’ the body beyond just being aware.
For instance, the cardiovascular system can be one simple place to begin playing with bodyfulness because we are able to see how our breathing is or where we may be holding our breath. According to Dr. Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg, breath practices help us to adjust stress response systems.
What this means is, we can become more resilient with stressors. Have you ever noticed that babies are more adaptable to changes around them than adults are? This is because their nervous system is more flexible. So, they don’t wear themselves out with stress as we adults habitually do.
Being aware of this small gem of knowledge leads us right into the next gem that’s behind every breath: checking in with our nervous system through heart rate variability (HRV), something we want to increase in order to bring flexibility to the cardiovascular system and stress -response system (just like babies). Sometimes we need to slow our heart-rate and other times, like when exercising, we need to increase it. Checking in with our interoceptors (inner sensations) links to our emotional intelligence and knowing what we feel and how likely we are to make good decisions.
To experience the body is to work to make it stronger and bring change, which in turn, makes the mind stronger. Being aware of bodyfulness and engaging with it for mental health is kind of like taking your daily dose of vitamins. Build healthy systems for unpredictable times of stress.
An Adult’s Stress
While in my 300-hr yoga teacher training I explored a few breathing exercises through conscious movement that unbeknownst to me, would become tools to dig my way through bouts of depression and grief less than a year later. As Caldwell says, emotion and breath coregulate each other. I noticed that sporadic irregular inhales mirrored my grief. The following exercises reminded me to let my body help:
Marching:
Marching in place for 30 seconds connects us with a few principles of Caldwell’s bodyfulness: oscillation, balance, and disciplined movement. Oscillation is going back and forth with movement in an attempt to find stability.
Pursed Lip Breathing:
This exercise rebalances the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body/mind. Caldwell emphasizes that we must keep a balance between these two gases, otherwise, it may lead to health issues. While sitting, we’d inhale for three seconds through the nose and exhale through the mouth for 6 seconds. The exhalation is twice as long as the inhalation.
Here is where we can take in our atmosphere and our bodies at the moment. In bodyfulness, a maintained balance between the external and internal environment is necessary. If we favor one type of sense over others, such as the external environment where we’re hypervigilant, it can lead to mental instability.
Double Breath: (“tense with will, relax and feel” scan): This is where we inhale through the nose quick then longer, tense the body, then exhale out through the mouth quick then longer.
Working with breathwork through bodyfulness simply offers a new perspective. And this perspective motivated me to move away from my “growing pains” of illogical worries and grief and into a place of healthy rhythm that communicates to the nervous system that I’m okay in the moments I choose to work in. I’m grounded by being my own vehicle.
And so are you.
