The senses can be a doorway to an experience of safety when the body doesn’t feel safe.

Anxiety arises in us through thoughts or stories like:

“I don’t know how I’m going to deal with my boss when he asks me about the report I was supposed to hand in tomorrow!”

But at its core, we experience anxiety in the body: anxiety activates the nervous system, which activates other systems in the body … Result: You’re in a defensive flight/fight/freeze response. Not fun.

One way you can deactivate your nervous system is through the senses.

It’s called orienting.

It simply means grounding yourself in the present moment by using the senses to notice interesting details in your environment.

And that’s important because most of us get stuck in a defensive response whether there’s a real threat or not.

When you’re in fight or flight mode, you’re not able to notice anything else going on in your environment. So noticing what you can see and hear sends a clear message to the nervous system that you’re safe, that you’re not under immediate threat in the present moment.

And there you have it: senses can be a doorway to an experience of safety when the body doesn’t feel safe.

For example, if you’re feeling triggered by something a relative says at the family gathering you can look outside the window and notice the shape of the clouds and then notice the settling that happens in the body as a result of taking in that visual input.

In Somatic Therapy we practice going through the different senses and noticing details with our awareness to bring that much needed sense of safety to the nervous system.

We connect to sight, sound, touch or proprioception.

Notice with each sense how the quality of your awareness shifts.

For some of us certain senses give us easier, faster access to a regulated state.

You can try spending a little time with each sense. Notice which sense did you feel it was easiest to access a sense of calm?