Chewing more than you can swallow?

What do you do when you're overwhelmed?

I'd like to share with you some ideas about something that I'm taking from a training that I'm currently doing, which might be a resource to you in dealing with feelings of overwhelm

I'm currently training in a somatic practice called Body-Mind Centering (BMC) which focuses on experiential anatomy and developmental movement (I'd love to tell you more about it so feel free to ask).

In developmental movement, we talk a lot about how we started as an organism. Asides from it being truly mind-blowing to learn about how we created ourselves from scratch, it can also give us a clue to what we can do when we feel like life is giving us more than we can handle at any given moment.

One of the things we learned was about the basic movement rhythms that we get to experience as an organism from our initial existence as a cell and how this basic movement lays the foundation for more complex movement patterns that we later develop like crawling, sitting, standing and walking.

The cool thing is that even though your movement patterns are fully developed at this point in time, they also include the more primal basic patterns that your body organized itself around when you first started your journey here. This means that you always have the ability to go to an earlier, more basic, simple rhythm and that you can use that ability as a resource for support when you feel that the reality that you're dealing with is too complex.

In the training, we were guided through performing more and more complex movement patterns but always with the invitation to go back to an earlier or maybe even the earliest, most simple movement pattern of all, which is cellular breathing.

Cellular breathing is a special kind of breathing that exists underneath respiratory breathing. It’s the kind of breathing that brings you right to the present moment, to the most simple, receptive state of being that was there before you developed into the complex organism that you are now.

To me, there's nothing more restful and restorative than connecting to my cellular consciousness.

So in that exercise whenever I felt like I needed a break from moving in a more advanced way, I knew I could go back to just "being" through my cellular breathing and that created space for me to rest and feel more like I’m coming home to the simplicity of just being me.

This practice of BMC is all about finding the support in the body to do anything we want to do physically. As simple as this may sound, I find it the most transformative and profound. Finding the supports I'm body for movement is a very strong metaphor to my life reality where most of the time I find myself reaching for things without making sure I’m well resourced, which results in feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm.

Interestingly enough, in Monday night's Joyful Movement class the common thread in the before class sharing was "tired".

My invitation/question to everyone, inspired by my training, was: how can we keep listening to our body throughout the class and do it in a way that honors our energy level at each given moment and includes only the amount of effort that we feel we can afford to put into the movement and not a smidgen more?

One of the students shared at the end of class:

"I felt like I was in the groove. I surprised myself a little bit. I was moving in the same way as before but it just took less effort for me. I just learned something new tonight and for me, your advice was just right"

"I liked class tonight because I just accepted whatever I felt like and I felt very relaxed and a little more energized."

If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now or recently, I invite you to extrapolate from my sharing into your life and see if there is something that you can do to make things more simple if you can take off, or maybe let go of some effort, so you can feel more supported.

As always, feel free to write back and report what you figured out as well as ask me any questions about what I shared.