As you read this, can you feel the stress of your day creeping into the space between your ear and your shoulder? The resentment you’re holding onto slipping behind your shoulder blade? Your unspoken truth creeping its way into your already over-clenched glutes. Your emotions, as well as everything you consume in life, lives in your body.

Everything in life has a vibration. Everything is energy and energy is never created nor destroyed. Your emotions vibrations range from high vibration: love, joy, passion to low vibrational emotions: fear, guilt, rage.

Your brain constantly collects info through your five senses. Emotions are your nervous system’s best guess on what will keep you safe. Its only job is to maintain safety. The safety of your nervous system is determined solely by what has kept you safe aka alive in the past: What’s gotten you here. How have you handled situations in the past? Which emotions have kept you alive? Which emotions and reactions have been modeled to you?

Without any rewiring of your nervous system, how you’ve learned to love, to cope, to make a mistake, to be calm (could you ever be calm?!) as a child is how you’ll continue to do it. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results; well, that is exactly how your nervous system is wired except it doesn’t actually want a different result.

Good news! You can rewire your nervous system. You can experience life and emotions differently. One way, my favorite way, is through the physical body.

Based off all 5 senses, your nervous system guesses what to do next based off what it’s done before. Sir Isaac Newton taught us that an object in motion, stays in motion. Hence, the tension in your shoulders continues to get tighter and tighter until there’s tingling in your face when you move your neck a certain way. The vibrations then travel from your nervous system to your fascial and muscular system.

Your fascial system is the lining of everything inside of you. In Latin, fascia means band or bundle. Dr. Tom Myers describes it as a spider web connecting everything inside of you so that it’s as if we have just one muscle because the fascial system ties it all together. Your fascia slides and glides past each other to support movement, lymphatic drainage, muscular strength and so much more. When your fascia is tight whether due to emotional distress, repetitive motions, dehydration, stress or lack of use/movement, you will experience knots, aches, pains and typically difficulty releasing the emotion.

Fascia is constantly described as an orange. The outer skin layer is fascia, each slice of an orange wrapped in “fascia” and if you split the slice of orange in half and see every drop of juice held tight = more fascia. Fascia is influenced greatest by low forces imposed over long durations.

At Soul to Sole we call this the Aim Small, Miss Small Method. Small changes applied over time will lead to massive shifts.

• If when you forward fold, you can’t touch your knees and your desired goal is to touch your toes, set smaller more achievable short-term goals to get you there.
• If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a week and you want to quit, start with cutting one cigarette a day.
• If you’re feeling depressed and want to feel happy and loved start with focusing on feeling content or bored first. Or ask yourself what is 1 thing you can do right now to simply feel 1% better? 1% higher vibrational?

The Aim Small, Miss Small Method isn’t about quick fixes or catchy tag lines, it’s about creating long term changes. It’s about adapting a new LIFESTYLE. But one that doesn’t trigger the nervous system. Remember, your nervous system likes everything to stay the same, consistent, reliable. So inevitably, when you begin to feel triggered by too much change around you, you fall back into the same familiar patterns.

There’s a quote that says your nervous system will always choose a familiar hell over a new heaven.

The physical body is my favorite approach to mastering your nervous system and taking control of your emotions to prevent defensiveness and reactivity.

The issue’s in the tissues. If you can notice where in your body is beginning to feel tension, then you can prevent outbursts and unnecessary aches and pains.

One avenue is yoga. Amongst the many forms: Hatha, Vinyasa, Power, Bikram, etc. There is one form that addresses your fascial system best at that is called Yin Yoga. In Chinese philosophy, yin speaks to the passive feminine energy: earth, moon, cooling, grounding, receiving energy. Yin yoga is a form that holds postures or shapes for 3-5+ min each. It is about maintaining minimal sensation to effect more of the deep connective tissues (fascia) than the muscles. If you’re looking to release trauma and tension in your body. For those looking to connect back to their bodies, those who say they can’t or don’t feel, yin yoga is a great place to begin to notice sensation.

(Find a sample yin yoga class below)

My favorite lane is myofascial release. Myofascial release is typically done with a foam roller or a tennis ball. I teach myofascial release with a squishy ball because the main focus isn’t necessarily on where you’re choosing to focus on but rather not triggering your nervous system.

For those who need proof that it’s not about white knuckling and knuckle biting your way through 3 minutes on a foam roller:

• Bring your big toes and heels to touch
• Gently yet effectively lock out your legs as much as possible
• Hinge over and reach for your toes
• Notice how far away they are

Next, for 1min on each side, so gently roll the bottom of one of your feet:

How to Myofascial Release your Foot:

** Remember to stick to your sensations. On a scale of 1-10, 10 = I can’t relax and breathe through the sensation

• Grab a ball of any kind
• Place the ball under one foot and scribble around noticing area of tightness, tension, pain, sensation, lack of sensation, etc.
• Find a “hot spot” aka one area that feels tight. Remember your sensation scale! Pulse in and out of that area. If the sensation is too strong move 1mm in any direction off of the “hot spot”
• End with flushing back your heart. Start with the ball under your toes and roll the ball to your heel, pick your foot back up and then repeat

After rolling for 1 min on each foot bring your big toes and heels back to touch. Gently yet effectively lock out your legs and reach for your toes again. Convinced now?!

If you’re looking to feel different, you need to start to interrupt your patterns. After your nervous system collects all the information through your 5 senses, it guesses what to do next. Your physical body senses danger before you have an emotional reaction.

The goal of evolution is turning your reactions into responses. How would your highest self, the person you’d like to evolve into react? Then, follow the ABC Method:

The next time you’re triggered or react in a way that you didn’t like:

A: Awareness

Close your eyes & find a pause. Acknowledge sensations in your body through all 5 senses. You can do a quick body scan meditation: starting at your right foot, scan your body for sensations up your right side then up your left side noticing any and all sensations: temperature changes, tingling, numbness, the clenching of your jaw & glutes, tension in your shoulders, holding your breath, etc.

B: Body

Try a body exercise to support rebalancing your system. Based off where you felt (or didn’t feel) sensations, try on a body exercise. Lengthen your exhale longer than your inhale, square breath (below), soften your shoulders, stick your tongue out during exhales making a “haaa” sound, feel your feet on the floor rocking from the inside to outside edge, find a yin yoga posture, tap the area in your body, etc.

C: Connect

Reassess, did the body exercise support you in the moment? Would something else have been more supportive? Option to try something else. In my opinion this is one of the best ways to quickly build your mind-body connection and trust in your body.

Rewiring your nervous system is a practice. There is trial and error – a lot of error. Sometimes you’ll try an exercise, and it won’t affect you the way you think it will or the way it did last time. The goal is to, judgement free, notice and allow yourself to choose again should you need to. Or choose to feel lighter, freer, or perhaps just 1% better.

Ready to feel lighter in your body—and life?
Book your free connection call with Gabs now.
You don’t have to do this alone. Your nervous system deserves support.