Hello Practice Group Members!
Here are some notes and resources from our third call together (slides)
I framed this week’s session as focused on “going deeper”. In somatic shoptalk this is about cultivating greater attunement with your body – greater capacity and ability to follow your moment-to-moment experience. Importantly, this means that you are developing your ability to bring your presence to your moment-to-moment experience - the sensations and energy that happen to be moving through you at any moment in time.
Practices of “somatic attunement” are what support developing greater interoception – that ability to pick up your body’s signals, so that you can work with yourself rather than having your nervous system take over.
In addition to the skill of Interoception, I also emphasized “getting friendly with your body”. (I steal the phrase “getting friendly” from the Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron”). By “getting friendly with you body” I mean getting close to your experience with the qualities of warmth, friendliness and curiosity. Rather than imagining you have a laser pointer or are “tracking” your experience in a hard-edged way, imaging you are providing yourself with a welcoming invitation. What happens when you imagine orienting that way toward yourself?
Here is an audio of the guided exercise for this week, “Getting Friendly with Your Body”, in I invite you to “get friendly” with a specific part of your body in depth.
As always, please pace yourself. That means, if it feels to you that you would benefit from continuing with one of the earlier exercises, please do that. You will have the audio, so you can move on to the “Getting Friendly” exercise when you feel you are ready.
Some pieces by Pema Chodron on befriending oneself:
Kristin Neff on Self-Compassion
The Three Components of Self-Compassion
And for those inclined toward the Harvard Business Review: