Can you give an example of a tool? Bring your hands up as close to your shoulder as possible and imagine there’s this huge boulder in front of you. Start pushing it away, going as slow as you can. It’s not easy; you’re going to feel your arm muscles because you’re pushing hard. When you get to full extension, pause and wait for a few seconds. There are changes happening in our body, and it takes time for that message to travel up our vagus nerve to our brain stem to register. Take notice of any changes in your body. You might feel a sense of release. You might have this deep breath come that you didn’t plan for.
What comes next in the sequence? Once we create that felt sense of safety, the body is opening up, and now it needs to feel support or it’s going to go back into trauma response. I lead people through the process of creating a felt sense of support. Here’s an example: Put your hands over your heart, one on top of the other, and push in quite a bit. A really deep breath comes for me; that’s how my body gives me the message that this is nice for me. Experiment and move your hands around—sometimes we can do it higher, more centered, over to the side—and find the spot that feels the nicest for your heart.
What is titrated expansion? We each have a current capacity for how much we can hold at the moment without being overwhelmed, and I want to build my capacity so that a year from now I’m able to hold more. For many people in my courses, when they feel a lot of joy, then tears, sadness and grief seem to come, so it has been safer for them to just not feel much joy. To expand into your capacity to experience joy, you can’t go all the way immediately. You’ve got to find a safe amount of joy that you can have today that feels manageable, and then use a tool so that tomorrow you can feel a little more joy and still feel safe. We do this titrated or paced expansion, staying safe enough as we grow.
Can you explain your parts-work approach? If we don’t complete a trauma response, there’s going to be a part that is still stuck there in that moment of danger, kind of not knowing that we survived. In parts work, I teach people how to know their major parts in order to stabilize their system. Your inner critic, for example, is a major part that we’ve got to work with pretty soon, because otherwise your critic will continue to shame you and get you into trauma response. I guide people to notice how these parts show up in the body. Next time you feel something familiar in your body, you know, “Tat’s my inner critic,” and it doesn’t scare or frustrate you anymore. You’re like, “Oh, hello.” Tat is a true mind-body connection.
Sandra Yeyati is national editor of Natural Awakenings.
To read a longer version of this conversation, visit
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