Episode 14: How Moving Your Body Can Help You Heal
Welcome to the Safe Enough Podcast! This podcast is an exploration of what it means to feel safe enough in order to live the kind of life, or make the kind of changes that transform our lives, into those with all the love, connection, belonging and purpose that we seek and strive for. My name is MacPherson Worobec, founder of the It Begins To Move studio. I am a safety and self-worth recovery partner, and I’m so happy that you’re here.Â
This is the first of a 3 episode series about different ways to gently connect with your body, so that you can cultivate an embodied sense of safety, as the foundation for work in cultivating a deep down knowing that you are just as valuable as every other human being. This episode will talk about how movement can be a tool for gently connecting with your body and creating a felt sense of safety. The first thing I’d like to say, is that it’s not just about moving.  I’m a yoga teacher and yoga therapist, and I actually think that prescribed movement sequences can do the opposite of bringing healing. Not only can they send your nervous system into a state of activation, making trauma responses worse, but they can take your deep awareness, the kind of awareness that allows for change and transformation, away from your body and away from your healing process. I’d like to highlight a specific kind of movement, that I have found to nearly always bring a sense of connection and a sense of embodied safety.
So in previous episodes I’ve described what safety is, and to summarize here, it’s a state that is nervous system based, felt in your body, and that can’t be faked. It’s way more than simply an absence of threat, and it’s based on a whole bunch of things, including your current moment environment-both your physical environment as well as your social environment-and also your experiences from the past. Trauma and addictions physician Gabor Mate says that, “safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.” Neuropsychiatric researcher Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory supports this notion that what brings regulation to a nervous system that is activated by fear or threat, is not simply the absence of fearful or threatening stimuli, it’s not the removal of a threatening thing, but instead, what brings safety is the intentional activation of a different part of the nervous system which is turned ON by the experience of safe connection. When the experience of safety and connection are present within you, your brain is then able to turn ON a particular part of it that promotes soothing. This part processes and integrates experiences of shame, invalidation, abuse, neglect, gaslighting, devaluation, pain and suffering. This part really needs to be engaged in order to feel safe and valuable, however, the experience of threat turns it OFF. This is a tough feedback loop, because the thing that can help soothe a fight, flight, freeze, fawn, analyze and collapse response, is the exact thing that’s turned off BY these responses. And this is where a special kind of movement comes in.Â
Thomas Hanna, a movement therapist and philosopher of the mid to late 20th century, observed that there are certain kinds of body movements associated with certain kinds of nervous system responses. Hanna listed 3 different kinds of body movement patterns, but each with the same underlying process and function of self-protection. Before the Polyvagal Theory, before the decade of the brain and all the neuroscience research that we have today, Hanna observed that muscular tension, as a self-protective nervous system response to an unsafe environment, is patterned. That if a person feels unsafe in their environment, their body will tense in one of 3 predictable ways. So that’s very interesting, but the most interesting part of Hanna’s theory, or most interesting to me, is that he says that if the protective body tension isn’t unwound, or if the same protective response is elicited over and over, then bodies get stuck in those patterns of muscular tension, because your brain can “forget” that it’s doing the tensing. It just gets used to it. In neuroscience, this is called habituation. When your body and brain stops having to direct as much attention - or any conscious attention - to the process of doing something it's done 1,000 times before. You’re accustomed to doing something, you’re used to it, you don’t have to think about it. It’s automatic. This is also how we describe a habit. Well, tensing muscles constantly with no break is certainly something your brain and body can get used to, and do without having to think about doing. That tension could become habitual, and your brain can become habituated to sending tensing signals, meaning that your brain might be able to ignore, or even forget, so to speak, that it’s sending those tensing messages to you body muscles. Consider driving a car. By the time you’ve done it 1,000 times, especially driving a route you drive every day, you don’t have to pay as much attention to what you’re doing when you drive, as you would, say, driving a mountain pass you’ve never driven, at night, in a snowstorm. When you’re driving a route you’ve driven 1,000 times, it’s not difficult to do it automatically, without having to direct your attention to the gas pedal, the brake pedal, the speed you’re going, all of the other cars on the road, the stoplights and stop signs, the street signs and pedestrians. Once you’re used to driving that familiar route, you have have lots of extra attention to direct elsewhere simultaneously, while you drive, and say, hold an in-depth conversation with another person, tend to your kids when they’re fighting or having an emotional reaction, or YOU can even have an emotional breakdown while driving familiar roads-I’ve certainly sobbed while driving many times, tears flooding my eyes to the point of making my vision blurry. But if I’m on roads that I’m familiar with, I’ve hardly had to slow down. To say this another way, your brain directs its awareness to things that are new, and doesn’t direct it’s awareness to things that feel very familiar. When there’s nothing new or novel going on, nothing that you haven’t done a bunch of times before, your brain and body can carry out an action without needing to pay attention, without needing to use much of your awareness and complex processing brain parts to do it. You know the phrase, “I could do it in my sleep?” Well that describes a form of habituation. Something that doesn’t ACTIVATE your brain, body and nervous system. This concept of habituation is used a lot in addiction treatment and medication management. Sometimes your body can habituate to certain levels of substances or medication, such that your nervous system or your biochemistry is no longer ACTIVATED by that substance. Certain levels of stimulation don’t create ENOUGH of an action, response, or change in your biochemistry anymore, and your body and brain don’t even notice. Like the doses that you may have become habituated to, don’t even get your brain and body’s attention anymore. And higher doses may be needed to get your brain and body’s attention, and elicit the intended response or action. And this is exactly what Thomas Hanna noted about chronic, constant, self-protective muscular tension, is that your brain can habituate to it. And that means that if you experience self-protection all the time, your brain doesn’t even realize it. It “forgets” so to speak, that there’s this constant outpouring of tensing signals sent to your body. That this tension response becomes stuck there, chronically tensing, but your brain and body continue with regular day to day activities, forgetting that it’s simultaneously experiencing chronic self-protective tension. This completely matches with what modern neuroscience has begun telling us about the process of traumatic stress responses that get “stuck” in the body. Stress responses, which are neurological, biological, chemical, endocrinological, physical and behavioral, and also ADAPTIVE and APPROPRIATE, become automatic and therefore traumatic and problmatic when they’re not unwound, and remain. Trauma neuroscience researcher Bessel van der Kolk says in his famous book The Body Keeps The Score that, “In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them.” Thomas Hanna and modern neuroscientists alike, say that when you can become aware of sensations, then you can begin the process of unwinding those automatic and long-standing responses. Eastern wisdom traditions have been saying this for eons. The Polyvagal Theory notes that there are 3 different body-based nervous system self-protective responses, and Hanna’s 3 patterns are so correlative! I think that if Thomas Hanna were alive today during the advances in neuroscience, trauma theory and the Polyvagal Theory, I think he would be working diligently in partnership with Stephen Porges, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Pat Ogden, Bruce Perry, Deb Dana, Dan Siegel, Janina Fischer, Deirdre Fay and the like, bridging gaps and creating more options for cohesive and embodied healing of chronic traumatic stress. So here’s how Thomas Hanna’s movements help. Â
So as I stated earlier in this episode, taking Mate’s assertion that safety is actually a sense of connection, not just the absence of threat, Hanna’s movements bring two kinds of connection: connection with self, and connection with others. Hanna’s movements, or what he calls “somatics,” actively bring the awareness part of your brain, into connection with parts of your body that may be holding chronic muscular tension. And again, if there’s chronic muscular tension, this body imperative is not a bad thing to be scolded for. It is an expression of self-protection, and certainly deserves to be respected and thanked for. When awareness can remain present during a shaky experience that’s unfolding in real time, or a shaky experience that happened before, often a sense of safety comes. That felt sense of safety may be instantaneous, like a relief for finally having that connection with self, but it also may take time. Building a felt sense of safety may take many repeated instances of being able to rely on the connection between brain and body, and being able to remain regulated or to be able to consistently regulate when dysregulation occurs, before a reliable felt sense of safety remains. Neither is better than the other. The instantaneous feeling and the feeling built over time both make lots of sense. So special kinds of movement that connect awareness to the body - like Hanna Somatics - can help establish a felt sense of safety. Special kind of movement can also help facilitate a deeper kind of healing that comes from having the awareness part of your brain engaged in the feeling process, once that felt sense of safety is there. And once the awareness and embodied sense of safety are both there, then there’s so much sense-making, processing and integration, and ultimately choice, agency and transformation that finally become possible! If you’re interested in experiencing Thomas Hanna’s special, connecting type of somatic movement, you might want to register for the very special upcoming event Experiencing My Self-Worth. During that event, I’ll be demonstrating somatics movements. Or, you might want to download my free video This Movement Can Help You Safely Connect With Your Body. You can do both of those things on my website itbeginstomove.com. That’s all lower case and the word to, t-o, not the number 2. Itbeginstomove.com. The event Experiencing My Self-Worth, will take you through a more in depth experience of multiple Hanna Somatics movements, so if you’re interested in learning more, I really hope to see you there! And if you find this podcast helpful, please rate it on your listening platform to increase the chance that others can find it too. If there’s any question or topic you’d like to hear me address, leave it in a comment or a review! In the next episode in this series I’ll be talking about how journaling can be used to gently connect with your wise, inner knowing. I’ll see you there, and Take care, kind soul!
