During a Friday morning class with Mandy, she had us rolling out our quads. It was that “hurts so good” feeling… until it wasn’t. In some spots it just plain hurt. She reminded us to back off when that happened because pushing too hard can make our whole nervous system feel unsafe, counteracting the benefits we were trying to achieve.
Just the night before I had been at a yoga class focusing specifically on a resilient nervous system. As we were working through some gentle movements, the teacher reminded us of how when we perceive danger, our body can go into fight, flight, or freeze, even if it’s just from discomfort in a pose we’re pushing too hard, or too much talking by the teacher, or feeling too close to the person next to you.
Our nervous system is constantly on alert for perceived danger, based on its knowledge of things that have been dangerous in our past. This is called neuroception: our ability to detect safety and danger cues in the environment without conscious awareness. But it’s more than just interoception, it’s how we perceive and interact with our bodies and our world. Neuroception is a key part of understanding our nervous system as I talked about in our last blog. When our nervous system senses safety, it moves us into a state of connection. When it senses a threat, it moves us into a state of protection.
So becoming aware of the stress we’re feeling in our body can help us to then regulate our nervous system. This can be the beginning of reshaping our nervous system to bring the baseline higher to be in the ventral state more often; to realize we’re out and find our way back to it more easily. Some great and easy ways to do this are with breathwork, sighing, and moving the spine. Don’t believe me? (I didn’t at first, either.) Try it! You can do any of these three movements (forward/back, bending, twisting) standing, sitting, or lying down.
And if you want a full 10 minutes of yummy twisting stretches, try this video:
See you in the studio!
