Spelunking the Mindbody for 75 Minutes

(Timeline note: this was published June 5, but written a couple weeks prior)

I’ve had a ton of stress over the last few months and there was another event over this last week. I saw my regular therapist a couple days ago and she had me do a little grounding meditation towards the end of our session. Afterward, I told her that it helped a little, but I still felt so nervous that I was slightly shaking my hands throughout it, and she suggested I go all the way and shake my arms as much as I felt like. I did it once or twice and immediately sensed that it would really do something emotionally if I kept it up; she said to go ahead. It didn’t take much of that before I started crying really hard. But the rest of the day and the next day my whole body felt better - more than just relaxed. It was a free and unblocked lightness that I haven’t felt much at all for years, outside of a few specific and short-lived situations (which include my early IFS therapy sessions).

In addition to that therapist, I’ve been doing paid video sessions with my guide Maija recently (yeah, I’ve got a lot of work to do). We’ve done sessions ranging between traditional IFS therapy and more somatic and imaginal stuff that’s sometimes literally like “what if you could melt right now?”

Today with Maija, I noted the constriction and tension I felt around the stressful situations, which felt localized like a snake shape down the center of my body. We explored whether I could recall that sensation of the unblocked outer body and its energy, which worked pretty quickly. Once that was back, she had me try to hold the constriction and the unblocked-ness in consciousness at the same time. Right away I could feel that something was happening. The unblocked sensation grew, the world around me faded away, and this led to an ability to experience all sorts of really nice emotions and sensations - connectedness, relaxation, exploring within the mind.

My sense of my body was very different from usual - very little of my awareness was focused on the world outside my own body, and my proprioception was altered. I felt floaty almost the whole time; my arms felt further apart for a minute. I felt like I was gently spinning at times, sometimes along two contradictory axes at once. Once, I felt like I was rotating forward slightly, and she had me try to mentally roll into that, and that gave me a surprising playful sensation like being a kid and starting to go down a hill, like rolling down or being in a sled. Maija asked me if my sensations this session had a color, and somehow it felt like a pastel rainbow.

I said late in the session that my overall mental state over most of the last few years had been like having only a few foods to eat, most of which I didn’t like, and then I’d found a pantry in my house that I hadn’t been in for ages with good stuff in it. Today I had a chance to sample a couple things and get a glimpse at how much more might be in there. After we hung up, I still felt a lot of energy in my nervous system and body, and laughed and shook for a couple minutes.

I can feel that this is setting building blocks for me to understand my subjective experience, and change it for the better in the future. This fits a pattern that has been really working well for me - to get myself to experience a positive sensation or feeling by using some brain technique like imaginal or somatic work. Over time, my mind and body learns what it’s like to feel those positive things, and then I can find those sensations more easily and remain with them longer in the future.