How to heal trauma with self-resonance

Dear < first name>, 

In our last email we learned about the importance of naming our emotional experience, and how peeking underneath our feelings to get to our own needs is a deeply transformative practice. 

And I wonder: do feelings and needs guesses feel strange? Do you wonder how to actually use this information in practice? 

I wonder if my how-to video on self-resonance would helpful for you to watch. In it, I show how we can bring gentle questions to ourselves and how being patient and attuned to our body’s response begins to create a warm and compassionate resonance loop within ourselves.

Practicing resonance creates the conditions for neuroplasticity in our brains by catalyzing neural growth and building the fibers of attachment that are necessary to support our emotional wellbeing.

Taking guesses about our emotional experience helps our nervous system to relax, our immune cells to become more effective, our brain to become more integrated, and our whole system to start running on oxygen instead of cortisol.

Often, especially in the beginning, we have no idea how to touch into what’s going on in our emotional landscape.

This is the wondrousness of making guesses for ourselves: noticing how our body responds to our genuine curiosity is how we uncover what’s actually going on. It’s a bit of a treasure hunt to uncover the next clue and the next, using our body’s response as a guidepost.

We do this by addressing ourselves with our own name, which builds the fibers between the part of us who witnesses our emotional experience and the part of us who is having the emotional experience.​​

Within this relation, we become the asker and the answerer!

When we both ask and answer, we create a warm connection with the body, and we begin to hear what messages the body has for us. When we are able to “catch” our own emotional experience, the body is able to relax.

Over time, this practice gives our bodies an enormous gift: the sense that we can trust ourselves not to judge, belittle, or reject our emotional experiences. This is the first step on the path to growing the neural fibers of attachment that our brains need in order to be self-compassionate.

There is nothing that calms the limbic brain (the emotional alarm system of our nervous system) more deeply than being understood, seen, and validated in our emotional experience, exactly as we are. 

Are you able to give yourself that today? 

Warmly,

Sarah

PS: If you would like to begin or deepen your self-resonance practice, you can find upcoming beginner events here, and self-study courses here.