This short video shares some of my ongoing explorations of transitional movement, counterbalance, and the relationship between skeletal support, gravity, and muscular effort.
The focus is on the ankle and foot joints and how movement changes when unnecessary muscular effort is reduced.
Rather than lifting and holding the body upright through muscular effort, the exploration begins with the relationship between the bones, joints, and the supporting floor.
As the knees bend and straighten, weight shifts through the feet. The ankles, heels, balls of the feet, and toe joints have opportunities to participate in subtle changes of balance. These small movements influence the organization of the knees, pelvis, spine, and head.
The inquiry is not about eliminating muscular activity. It is about discovering how muscles can participate without unnecessary holding or bracing.
As weight transfers through the skeletal structure, counterbalance becomes a changing relationship between the moving parts of the body and the supporting surface.
The head does not need to remain fixed in position while the body moves beneath it. Instead, it can follow the changing movement relationships through the spine.
In these explorations, the feet are leading and the rest of the body is responding.
Movement as a process of discovery
Over many years of guiding balance classes, I have observed that participants often arrive with limited awareness of the movement possibilities within their feet and ankles. Some experience numbness, restricted joint movement, or fear about their ability to support themselves.
Rather than beginning with an expectation that participants can already sense these relationships, the guided patterns introduce small opportunities for joint movement and changing skeletal support.
Through their own explorations, participants frequently discover sensations and movement possibilities they had not previously recognized.
They may say, “I didn’t know that,” or “I’ve never felt that before.”
The movement itself becomes an opportunity for developing felt sense, recognition, and trust in their own functional possibilities.
The intention behind these transitions
These are not fitness exercises or demonstrations of positions to achieve.
The interest is in the transitions themselves: the subtle movements through which weight shifts, joints articulate, muscles respond, and the skeleton reorganizes in relationship with gravity and the ground.
The larger muscles are still participating, but they need not always be leading through effort.
They can become quieter participants in an ongoing relationship of movement and support.
My inquiry continues to be how guided patterns of movement can make these relationships available for conscious discovery, particularly for people who have never considered their bodies from this perspective.
The intention is not to prescribe a correct movement, but to create opportunities for learning through one’s own lived experience.
An ongoing exploration influenced by the Feldenkrais Method® and developed through years of teaching, observation, and lived inquiry.
Sensing myself. Sensing another. Discovering how to participate together.
For nearly twenty years, my exploration of balance has developed through teaching, observing, and listening to the unique ways individuals organize themselves in movement.
Throughout these years, I have become increasingly interested in the transitions between movements rather than the completion of individual exercises or postures.
How does the skeleton organize itself to transfer weight? What happens as we change direction, rotate, reach, or shift from one supporting leg to another? How can an awareness of gravity, skeletal support, and counterbalance offer new possibilities for movement with less unnecessary muscular effort?
These questions have gradually influenced the development of Guided Patterns of Learning for Lived Function.
More recently, I have begun recognizing something unexpected within my own spontaneous movement. As the relationships between skeletal support, rotation, and counterbalance become increasingly familiar, movement can begin to flow creatively, almost like a dance.
This expression is not intended to reproduce an established dance form, yoga posture, or tai chi sequence. Rather, recognizable shapes may emerge naturally through the exploration of functional movement relationships.
The accompanying diagram, Transitional Movement Patterns, introduces some of these possibilities through incremental illustrations of movement, including side-view skeletal relationships.
For participants in my Balance classes, these images may offer an alternative to remembering a list of exercises. They can become visual invitations to recognize how the body organizes itself through movement, allowing each person to explore within their own abilities and circumstances.
An additional direction is emerging through this work: the relationship between internal sensory awareness, the surrounding environment, and participation with others.
What happens to our spontaneous movement when another person enters our experience? How do our internal interpretations influence the way we move, respond, or choose to act?
These questions are beginning to connect the movement patterns with my developing explorations of inner language, listening, and conscious recognition.
I am also considering how these foundational movement relationships might be introduced in early childhood education, supporting opportunities to develop sensory awareness, movement choice, and participation in relationships from an early age.
This is an evolving exploration rather than a completed system.
My intention is to create accessible learning experiences that invite curiosity, encourage individual discovery, and support the integration of awareness into ordinary lived function.
The focus is not on achieving a particular movement. It is on discovering the relationships that make movement possible.
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of North America. Feldenkrais Method®
A woman demonstrates a sequence of recovery poses from lying down to standing up during a workout.
1. Standing
2. Sitting
3. Prone
Here are some reflections of this Feldenkrais Practitioner prior to a Breath Workshop held in April, ’26 to center and ground prior to leading a group through a specific guided patterns of movement. .
The focus of attention in the verbal guided patterns to go beyond the busy mind of thinking into an expanded awareness of the somatic experience
The process of observing the guided pattern suggestions is another focus of attention for balancing the somatic experience with cognitive conceptual function. This focus in this pattern leads with somatic experiences to redirect cognitive functional focus of attention. In the process of this focused pattern, the mind can enter a state not unlike a mindfulness meditation. In this mindfulness like state the cognition can expand beyond beliefs, opinions, evaluative thinking and social conditioning into a field that cultivates deeper awareness.
The guided micromovements focus on the body’s structural design for potential movement beginning with the core – the skeleton.
Why? The natural design of the bodies ability to transition through postural shifts is through the bone pressure using the force of gravity. Original movement transitions are not through muscle and soft tissue lifting the bone and bearing the weight of the bone matter. That only creates constraints, pain and limited function. Organizing the skeletal bones to transition through flexibility and expanded range of motion increases ease and effortlessness in functionality.
Micromovements through the perspective of skeletal function is its own separate type of workout from what is currently focused on, and this focus can be far more challenging than the current mainstream focus is aware of
Imagine repeating changing patterns of micromovements toning the muscles through available functional transitions that release the few muscles that have become the primary motivation for controlling movement. New muscle patterns are created as habitual holding is released through the tonification and dormant muscles are activated, while the organization in the brains is expanding through conscious awareness.
These guided patterns go beyond the conceptualization of cognitive intellectualization that has locked movement into patterns that eventually create diminishing capacity through its limited understanding. Beliefs, opinions and evaluative expressions lock down the brains functional capacity. This is expressed through a lack of flexibility in all qualities of function; mentally, emotionally and physically.
This suggests that these guided patterns for integrating movement through a focus that taps into conscious awareness that balances both the somatic experience and cognitive function can give all aspects of functional experiences a workout from perceptions, mobility to brain function. Ihe focus is completely on expansion and identifying limitation whether it is through thinking, emotional and physical patterns.
This fantastic connection in this process is that it is through organic functional movement, the brains focus of attention and mindfulness. Imagine a fitness workout that is actually a pattern for learning and going beyond what we know into a expanded reality that reduces fear, pain, effort and suffering into ease, flexibility, groundedness and agility.
Learning focus here is through the bones and not socially conditioned thinking patterns that come through titles, names, labels, trends and images of right and wrong beliefs. Current examples are the bastardization of the cultural practices of yoga and tai chi where cognitively designed exercises have been turned into chair yoga and chair tai chi. These are exercises packaged as a concept and they lack the somatic awareness component of the source philosophy. It’s the development of a marketing strategy for creating an image that taps into the focus of attention of society’s ego concepts of self image. Are they beneficial for becoming active. Yes, however they are examples of misleading advertising that is associated with the mindfulness and expanded consciousness of the traditional philosophies.
The above is an evolution of deeper understanding of social conditioning and the lack of balance between somatic experiencing and cognitive conceptualization that is developing from the focus of attention and observations of the practitioner of functional integration.
It is an example of reflection for tapping into and grounding thought patterns for organizing a focus on balancing the mind to guide patterns that will open students consciousness and not reflect boxed in cognitive concepts. Pausing to organize thoughts to set them aside to guide others into mindfulness is an important part of this practitioners process. I hope you enjoy the content.
Body Mindfulness – Core Body Functional Breathing Audio
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of NorthAmerica
by Renee Lindstrom, founder, Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning
Functional Breathing Patterns sensed with somatic awareness
Often when observing the breath patterns of an individuals I will see that there is a lack of skeletal movements in their patterns of expansion and contraction in the moving parts that could be recruited for fuller body supported whole movement for drawing in air and expelling it.
The body parts I refer to are the bones and joints that create flexibility, balance, expansion and contraction, and counterbalance.
Shown here in this slideshow.
The ribs are connected to the vertebrae and sternum. They are as high as the vertebra at the base of the neck and down to the floating ribs that in some can be close to the bony ridges of the pelvic bones.
If you look at an image of the ribs from a frontal view you will see that the attachment to the sternum isn’t bone. Rather the bone has transitioned into cartlidge and forms a joint for expansion and contraction.
In this back view you can see how the shoulder blade comes up to form a socket where the humerus bone rests in the cradle of the socket. Above the blade at top is the end of the clavicle.
In this picture you can see the skull on top of the vertebra in this upright position. It sits over the rib cage and pelvis. It becomes obvious that the shoulder blades, clavicles and arms are add ons to the core body skeleton.
In this picture you will view the skull over the pelvis and the pelvis over the feet. If you look at the hip and shoulder joints you will see the round heads of the upper arm and leg bones resting in the cradle of the socket. This same round bone is in the ankle joint and the top vertebra where the skull rests. The skull forms the cradle.
You can observe the elbow, wrist and knee joints bend however do not have the circular round ball at the end that sits in a socket. Your wrists can move in a circular motion though. Perhaps not in the same way as the ankle, hip and shoulder joints.
The above slideshow demonstrates the moving parts of the skeleton that supports whole breath through core functional skeletal movement patterns.The focus of attention in these guided patterns is movement where the muscles, ligaments and soft tissue are spontaneously moving in response to the skeletal micromovements. These micromovements with a skeletal focus treats the muscle and soft tissue as partners that follow and hold the bones in alignment. This focus is on core bone strength and the resilience of the muscles that are not resistant to functional movement patterns. Muscle strength is separate from bone strength, yet often in cognitive intellectualization does not include the understanding of the bone movement in functional postural transitions.
The patterns in The Mindfulness Body Breath workshop and Audios focus attention on education of whole function through postural transitions to enhance and improve natural rhythms of breathing. The guided patterns balance the somatic experience with the cognitive conceptualizations for increasing mindfulness through function.
More on Body Mindfulness Audio plus added bonus below: Free Intro to expanding somatic sensing in video embedded down below
These guided patterns are from Feldenkrais workshop that Renee has held since 2007. The feedback after each workshop has been positive with appreciation expressed.
Core Body Functional Breathing Audio
The Audio for Core Body Functional Breathing will guide you through patterns of movement to explore breathing with the focus on micromovements to release bones held in rigid patterns to encourage fuller intake and expulsion of breath and that is a natural function and not forced through concepts. These guided patterns generate a conscious felt sense connection to contraction and expansion through movement. This increase in awareness can support consciously releasing the constraints to blocking the resilience through the patterns of opposites that initiate contraction and expansion through bone movement that is needed for organic fuller breath patterns.
Included in this audio lesson offer is an intro and outro for the intent to learn how to engage the sensory awareness using the five senses in harmony and partnership with cognitive function. It is this practitioners experience that integration and development of new neural pathways do not develop through thinking that is dependant on beliefs, opinions and evaluative thinking. Neural pathways are developed on new actions that engage growth through novelty, exploration and discovery.
Read more on the benefits of Somatic Body Mindfulness and research of Feldenkrais below
How to purchase and enjoy – Core Body Functional Breathing Audio
How can you move a body part through function when you don’t know what it is somatically or the ability to different it from your body mass?
Intro to how to use your senses of sight (visions) and sound to differentiate felt senses of individual body parts.
In this short video Renee introduces the potential of expanding the felt sense of the bones inside through vision and imagination. Using pictures of the bone parts through the sensory perception of sight and sound the listener can focus on integrating this knowledge into their somatic sensory perception that can create a connection to the bone through the sensory ability to feel them independently through *function.
Read more on the benefits of Somatic Body Mindfulness and research of Feldenkrais below:
increase relaxation and windows of emotional tolerance and self-connection
improve sleep and sleep sounder
increase body functions, cognition and emotional responses of calm, mindfulness and joy
Exploring the body anatomy through the felt senses increases inner awareness and trust. This body exploration is a different type of strength training. The difference is the focus of attention on the body, mind and felt senses through guided patterns designed to expand conscious awareness of the body function. The strength of feeling one’s body through moving joints and bones deepens awareness of physical connections as postures change, like in the shifting transitions from sitting to standing and back to sitting. Movement is a series of shifting postures. The functioning healthy body is not stationary, nor poses. It is designed for a continuous flow of integrative movement patterns.
Feedback On Body Mindfulness Introduction
“I am excited!!! This is great! It is like you are there with me step by step. It’s what all of us are looking for, real Feldenkrais support” S
“That was great, Renee! You have such a calm and lovely voice. I’m happy to add this to my calming strategies.Thank you. ” H
“I really like this sort of thing and would welcome further “installments” in the series and/or a revised version of this one. I liked the pace at which you spoke, not too rushed and left enough time to do the exploration of the particular area of the body to which you were drawing attention.
I liked that you offered options re leg position (straight out or with bolster under knees) but wondered whether one position or the other is preferable. Or is it just that one would notice different things, depending on how the legs are positioned?” K
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of NorthAmerica
by Renee Lindstrom, founder, Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning
Launching TMJ – Jaw Release #1 – Side to Side
TMJ Jaw Release Guided Pattern Audio #1/3
These guided patterns are from Feldenkrais workshop that Renee has held since 2007. The feedback after each workshop has been positive with appreciation expressed. Here is a recent comment from a ’26 workshop.
I always appreciate my sessions with you and the learning. The focus on the tongue, back of throat and head hinging as part of the jaw release has really made a difference. Some of what you shared was new for me so it is taking me awhile to get the hang of it but I’ve been exploring those movements further at home and it’s been good. J
These somatic patterns are called Awareness through Movement Lessons and this workshop series is the integration of of moving parts that enhance ease in the jaw function. The patterns cutivate awareness of the joint movement through micro movements that increase efficiency.
A student may become consciously aware of the individual parts inside their mouth and in their facial features, neck, and further down the torso. It is a wonderful way to find a deeper inner peacefulness, and experience the calming influence of mindfulness.
These lesson contribute to:
Reducing jaw and neck pain
Headache support through pain reduction
Increased jaw function
Lessen scienty, tension and stress
Improve Jaw Function
Enhance sleep and relaxation
Read more on the benefits of Somatic Body Mindfulness and research of Feldenkrais below
How to purchase and enjoy TJM Jaw Release – Side to Side
TMJ – Jaw Release Side to Side #1of 3
Explore the anatomy of the jaw using guided patterns and mindful exploration for cultivating awareness through the felt senses and the skeleton.
increase relaxation and windows of emotional tolerance and self-connection
improve sleep and sleep sounder
increase body functions, cognition and emotional responses of calm, mindfulness and joy
Exploring the body anatomy through the felt senses increases inner awareness and trust. This body exploration is a different type of strength training. The difference is the focus of attention on the body, mind and felt senses through guided patterns designed to expand conscious awareness of the body function. The strength of feeling one’s body through moving joints and bones deepens awareness of physical connections as postures change, like in the shifting transitions from sitting to standing and back to sitting. Movement is a series of shifting postures. The functioning healthy body is not stationary, nor poses. It is designed for a continuous flow of integrative movement patterns.
Feedback On Body Mindfulness Introduction
“I am excited!!! This is great! It is like you are there with me step by step. It’s what all of us are looking for, real Feldenkrais support” S
“That was great, Renee! You have such a calm and lovely voice. I’m happy to add this to my calming strategies.Thank you. ” H
“I really like this sort of thing and would welcome further “installments” in the series and/or a revised version of this one. I liked the pace at which you spoke, not too rushed and left enough time to do the exploration of the particular area of the body to which you were drawing attention.
I liked that you offered options re leg position (straight out or with bolster under knees) but wondered whether one position or the other is preferable. Or is it just that one would notice different things, depending on how the legs are positioned?” K
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of NorthAmerica
by Renee Lindstrom, founder of Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning
Example of a foraging focus that demonstrates learning about a topic that retrains the lost art of nature wild crafting and connection
Pictures by Renee Lindstrom
These web pages, Awareness through Nature, were created in 2014. The pages were to document a journey into nature’s abundance in the surrounding landscapes of front and back yards, and the city blocks in the neighbourhood. It began with edible weeds, unique garden plants, herbs, trees, bulbs, roots, leaves, etc. It included naturally occurring growth and those purposefully planted.
The intention was to explore their nutritional and medicinal benefits, and create homemade tinctures, teas, infusions, essences, skin and hair products, and natural dyes.
This spring and summer, attention shifted back onto these pages as foraging came back into focus. The owner of some rental units let the landscaping go, and it inspired the wild crafting to emerge. Foraging has continued into winter. This includes mushrooms, lichen and tree needles for carbonizing water.
More new additions – three new affiliates. The intention for these affiliates is for those who are not actively making their own plant remedies. I do make them for my personal use and share ways for others to create them, yet, know not everyone has the time to make them. Here are fun and reliable sources for those interested in natural remedies.
Energy Muse
Crystal Herbs
Wishgarden Herbs
These three affiliates join the original Richters Herbs.
Energy Muse offers a nice range of crystals and accessories. This year, they began offering frequency generators that I am in love with. Crystals Herbs offers flower essences, while Wish Garden Herbs offers plant tinctures. A reminder that Richters offers garden seeds, plants, dried herbs and recently began to offer essential oils. Their logos are along the sidebar at the top of the page. Tap the logos to visit their websites.
Back to the evolution of these web pages. This site is one of many developed. The process was to learn how to interact online for business development and integrate lessons in a way that made sense. The streams of focus needed to have a unified focus. This year it came into alignment and came together.
At the time of developing practice sites, I spent time supporting coaching students in building theirs. This included social media accounts. One of the intentions was to offer them a way through the constraints they stated blocked them from moving forward. It was interesting to work with them to build these online accounts, only to discover that this isn’t what was blocking them from moving forward. It was a lack of confidence. It was a fantastic way for them to begin to let go of the story dialogue and begin focusing on their self-confidence.
The web pages have more than one learning focus at the Inside Awareness Center for Integrative Somatic Learning. The center’s educational programs focus on lifestyles and are broken down into nine life areas. There are webpages for each of these nine life areas. Some of the webpages in each of the nine life areas may crossover into other life areas. Like this webpage. It is located in the higher learning life area, yet I would like to announce that its creation has a perspective that links it to the career life area. The articles featured focus on learning the abundance available in the natural world. However, the development of it provides another learning focus on intention and building sites. This suggests the web pages will have an individual intent for cultivating awareness, and all the sites together will have an intention to encourage the use of intention, placement and the five elements in building business sites. The purpose isn’t to teach building sites specifically. It is about expanding consciousness of alignment with intention and the natural elements, and the social conditioning aspect that is becoming culturally conditioned behaviour in business.
I hope you will like and subscribe to stay updated on the weekly featured sites, or click the link to the feature webpages below to check it out to get a felt sense of the site and offerings.
Feldenkrais®, Feldenkrais Method®, Awareness Through Movement®, and Functional Integration®, are registered service marks of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America. Feldenkrais Method®
Copyrighted Property posted on Renee’s authentic accounts only:
by Renee Lindstrom, GCFP, Author of Somatic Archetypes
On Podcast – @ReneeLindstromofficial
Since 2007, this author has had the opportunity to work with people who have had long-term chronic physical pain. In these cases, the body has been the environmental stimulus to inner messages and emotional responsive reactions. Usually, in Canada, people in these circumstances will seek out acute care to resolve the pain complaints. In some cases, the results of seeking solutions can backfire. The backfire comes from the interactive seeds of socially conditioned language. In this health wellness area, physical constraints from pain, the evaluative assessments by practitioners are conceptual and focused on fixing strategies. Sometimes this works, and other times it doesn’t. It only works with certain personalities. In some personalities, it increases anxiety. The current socially conditioned language is such that some people take it personally, which essentially means internalizing it. Others brush it off. Both responses have their peculiar consequences.
There is another communication perspective that is grounded in somatic awareness. In this form of communication, it starts where you are in the moment. It is not conceptual. This means the first focus is not on labelling and diagnosing, it is on the behaviour. Yes, physical function has a behaviour! It’s called one’s posture and postural transitions.
Here is an example I have created to demonstrate what a somatic response might be. It’s not based upon anyone in particular. In this example, someone is seeking understanding, support and reassurance after the disillusionment of conceptual assessments and labelling………
Here is my written response:
Nerve pain assessment:
With regards to the nerves in these circumstances, they were the last to be ignited from the environmental stimulus contributing to their flare-up. Stands to reason, if the environment calms down, they will as well.
Somatic perspective of integration between mental, emotional and physical:
I am going to respond from a meditative mindfulness perspective.
You’re triggered. Something has happened that has stimulated past reactions to old injuries and events in your life that have come forward into the present. Perhaps not with conscious awareness in a way to catch yourself, however, somatically. It’s a somatic response directing your focus of attention through reactive conditioning. A reaction that is familiar and shaped by past events (muscle, mental and emotional memory). Does it present in the way that has been suggested? Perhaps to someone who has learned to diagnose and label living experiences as conditions.
So, let’s look at the past. Yes, you have acute situations that have created a familiar pattern of response that has reared its ugly head due to the many factors all playing out at the same time. Unfortunately, this means your physical body constraints in your movement patterns are similar to ones that have given you grief in the past. Your responsive reaction is conditioned by those old experiences.
How to engage your focus of attention differently?
By shifting your focus of attention.
Easy for me to write as I am not feeling the pain you’re having. However, the hyper focus on it can increase the levels of discomfort more than 10-fold.
How to shift your focus of attention?
By changing the thought sentence structure in your inner mental pattern of thinking.
Shift what if, or ……(whatever you’re saying to yourself), to, I have been here before and moved forward out of it.
Your new mantra, “I have been here before and moved forward out of it. I have been……..”
Micro Movements to shift focus of attention for calming the nervous system
The hyper focus is an aspect of your brain that is an alarm. It is a warning system of the brain, and right now, yours is in a glitch as all sorts of events have hit all at once. In meditation, we would focus on our breath. This is the absolute hardest when experiencing this glitch.
2. So, move your body in the breathing patterns I have shown you. This is where the body’s micro movement abilities can come in differently and play a big part in calming this glitch down. Right now, the glitch is telling you an elusive story that your body is letting you down, and it’s not your safe haven in the moment. So let’s change it. The body can be fluid or it can be rigid through the constraints conditioning it. Your body has gone into constraint due to circumstances. That’s all.
What do we know from past interactions?
The physical function is not isolated from the emotional reactions and thought stories in our mental process. It’s all one process, all stimulated together and interplaying off one another. Your glitch is your emotions reacting to the stories you are telling yourself. What you’re telling yourself is stimulated by the real felt patterns you are somatically aware of. The mantra above is what you tell yourself immediately upon catching yourself having these thought patterns that are not based upon the felt senses in the moment.
Why?
You can take care of yourself. You’ve done it before and have a historical pattern of it. You are identifying the past and what didn’t work, now identify what did. Balance it out. See number 3.
3. In meditation, we learn to create gaps between our thoughts to calm our thoughts that run together and create havoc in our emotional responses. We learn that thoughts in our mind run through in patterns that are not logical.
So we focus on our breath in sitting and watch these damn thoughts while attempting to become present in the moment. Soon, we notice that the thoughts slow down. I mean they, ….slooooowwwwwww down to the point of having significant spaces between them. That’s when the magic happens. That’s when somatically, the connection to what is really happening can be experienced. This is when you learn, the thoughts are the illusion. They have you spinning in circles, trying to catch your tail. In these gaps you see, hear, touch, smell and taste batter. All of a sudden, you can begin observing and taking in so much more information that is restricted by the thinking patterns you have learned. That all thinking is – learned patterns of thought. They are not real! They are your perspective based on old information and learning.
Let’s look at what’s real.
Your skeleton is real. It’s the strongest part in your body and lasts centuries after everything else is gone. Begin to adjust through the skeleton. However, if the pain and fear are too great, begin by focusing on your out breath.
As you breathe out, count, starting at one.
Each exhale will be different. Redirect your mental function by giving it this job. Count your breath.
Get a straw and exhale through the straw. Get your mental function to set a time for one minute and count the number of out breaths in that one minute.
Then continue to exhale through the straw without counting for another 2 minutes.
Come back and exhale while counting again, and notice if the number has changed from the first time. Notice if the breath out is slower, longer and if there are spaces in between.
Come back to it many, many times to train your brain with this pattern. Integrate it. Do it in times of non-fear to have it as a tool in your kit for when you are.
When you are in fear, focus on the exhalation, not the in breath.
Recap
We have a mantra, a perspective and a pattern of breathing. This will calm your nervous system and the glitch to create a new starting point. In this new starting point, your constraints, physically, mentally, and emotionally, can begin to limber up, increasing your windows of tolerance.
We have been through these cycles together before. You have this somatic experience, yet right now you are in a moment of old thinking that there is an acute care that will resolve this outside of you. It is an old pattern seeking relief and reassurance. That’s just one focus of attention that is decreasing the window of tolerance. Start by building the window of tolerance from inside. You’ve got this. I have witnessed it.
You’ve got a few people to sit in this with you to begin to build up your levels of tolerance. Recently, you’re strategies in bringing new people on board while in the acute stages didn’t support you rather added to deconstructing it.
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