Tools for Calm - Orienting
Your body is kind of like a tuning fork. It picks up on your emotional experience and what's happening around you and hums in resonance. Sometimes this is wonderful. But when you're feeling stressed and dysregulated, it's less wonderful.
In those moments, what can you do?
If you have a magic toolbox full of tools for calm (which we all do to some degree - various strategies we turn to with varying degrees of awareness) you can pull one out and give it a try.
Here's one of my favourite somatic (body based) tools in my own magic toolbox. This is also a tool that I regularly use with and teach to clients for easing stress and regulating their nervous systems so they feel more calm, present, easeful and able to see more creative solutions to the challenges they're dealing with (because sometimes it's hard to see the creative way out when you're stressed out in survival mode).
This particular tool is known as orienting.
In my toolbox, 'orienting' is a fancy word for 'looking around'.
It's deceptively simple: take some time to slowly look around your space, moving your whole head and neck, not just your eyes. Look up if it's comfortable, look down, look behind you. Notice where your eyes like to rest - are there colours or shapes or objects in your environment that you are drawn to? A view out the window? Pause there for a few moments.
And then when you're feeling complete, take a moment to notice how you feel having spent some time orienting. This pause at the end is just as important as the looking around bit, as it gives us time to recognise how we feel now. Do we feel different? If we do, different how? Even if we don't feel 'better' but we do feel 'different', this can be useful in that we have the experience that our uncomfortable feeling has changed. And sometimes when we're in the middle of feeling stressed, it's easy to think we're going to feel like that forever.
This very simple practice does a few things. Among them, it helps the part of our brain that's always scanning for threat to recognise there aren't any tigers under the table, no sky sharks swimming around by the ceiling (I'm assuming you don't have any of those at your house, anyway. If you do, it's probably good that your body is registering threat and maybe you'd like to run away).
That said, sometimes people see floors that need vacuuming or laundry that needs folding, and these undone tasks register as a different kind of stress - so if this is you, perhaps choose a different orienting environment, or a different tool from your toolbox.
Keep an eye out for more tools coming, and if you're reading this before February 20, 2024, and you'd like to come and experiment with this tool and many others in a facilitated group class, come along to 'Tools for Calm' - a 60 minute Zoom workshop I'm running soon.
If you're interested, there are two times to choose from - see those times in your timezone and book your place by clicking here: https://ellenmay.as.me/tools-for-calm