There are two objective physical indicators for nervous system dysregulation : 1. Looking at the back of your throat, on either side of your uvula where your tonsils are, if one side is higher than the other, you are dysregulated. 2. If the trapezius muscles {triangle from base of spine, point of shoulder and midway down the back} are at two different tightnesses.
How to regulate and restore balance :
A. At the base of the skull is the emergence point of many cranial nerves. Laying on your back and providing gentle pressure and movement to the point where the spine enters the brain case can help floss nerves and create space.
B. Keeping your head still and looking to a hard right until you discharge via a yawn, sigh, or swallow. Repeating looking to the left. This variation can also be done while moving the head.
From ‘Healing power of the Vagus Nerve’
How do you know you are dysregulated?
How do you regulate your nervous system?
If you want to become an expert at reading the signals of your body and creating healthy prosocial ways to regulate yourself so you can allow your body to enter into a self healing state and access creativity and flow, reach out.
Currently working on a comprehensive list of easeful techniques to regulate your nervous system I will release in my museletter, share / dm your email if you’d like to be added.
If I could only teach one meta skill to every humanimal it would be attunement.
In giving bodywork I am attuning to the impact of my touch on the receiver. When you are using significant weight, this becomes even more crucial. Only move at the speed and depth of being able to sense your impact on the other person{s}. Start low, go slow. In bodywork someone’s attunement level is not falsifiable, unlike potentially empty words.
As an AFAB autistic raised in an intergenerational war refugee trauma / emotional abuse context I was trained to turn my hyper sensitivity to tracking the wellbeing of those around me to survive as a helpless child dependant on my caregivers. As I process from the bottom up, I am taking in an enormous set of data and forming a perspective {40 per cent more sensory stimuli then allistics at minimum, and much likely more}. This makes me unparalleled for not putting you in a box preemptively, which is much more labor and recovery for me, but results in a high definition experience of being felt and seen for you. Feeling feeling felt for the first time in your life seperate from typical knee jerk assumptions/ judgments is an experience that most have when working with me. This externally enforced sensing can cause a paradigm shift in your perspective of yourself and your ability to pursue a new pattern seperate from what has been entrenched in your experience, as there is now another being who holds the new viewpoint and is seeking data to support this.
When you share what you are working towards and how you want to be perceived I will shift my comprehensive data collection drive to finding moments where this new frame is true, and opportunities to choose a new fork in your thought or action even when the pre existing pattern is dominant. The transformation occurs in the pause, assisted by a compassionate witness who holds the vision of your preferred path.
Do you want to feel your body played like a professional instrument?
Do you long to be holistically taken care of, body, mind, and spirit, by an attuned nourishing presence that holds your wellness as their motivating force?
Then body domming is your dream come true.
What is a body dom?
A body dom specializes in the art of professionally conducting the orchestra of sensation in your body as their beloved instrument. Body domming draws from diverse disciplines : massage, contact improvisation, body handling, corporeal consent, somatic therapy, sensual wrestling, surgical bodywork, psychedelic / trance state navigation, and sensation play. Body domming creates a generous, compassionate contact container of high access to an exquisitely attuned embodiment expert’s physicality. Within this corporeal container, an expansive playtonic permissionary perspective encourages you to fully inhabit your intuition through emancipating expression without reservation – catalyzing a co-creative space of fluid, free improvisation.
Body domming is a revelatory rapturous release if you spend most of your time trapped in your head, intellect, future, or past, for this perceptive penetration is forced presence via pressure—a movement meditation squeezing out all other stimuli to focus on the present moment at the point of contact – giving weight and waiting for you, the receiver, to relax. The immediacy-inspiring intensity of sensation is a forcing function for increasing interoception, dilating internal sensations that were previously able to be numbed or ignored, and surfacing subconscious communications to be sorted by sentient awareness through compassionate cathARTic witnessing and freedom forward facilitation.
Lest you consider this punative, body domming also can feel like you are being lovingly mothered. Through transpersonal tactile transmutations, you receive reparative experiences of rebirth, being held in a welcoming womb, cradled, feeling cared for and nourished as an adored baby. This radical reference allows you to repattern your attachment system towards uncomplicated caregiving, encouraging courage in expressing your needs and desires, and recalibration towards how ecstatically expansive you can feel in your body, empowering new prosocial perspectives for overall orientation.
This modality is also flexible enough to encompass experiences of pushing against, away, and being felt in embodied strength, anger, and other disowned emotions, sheparding you into somatic sovereignty. Through high-resolution attunement, your nervous system can finally feel the trust necessary to discharge frozen survival responses and liberate that energy that had been previously padlocked into patrolling triggers and traumas toward a greater depth of immersion in and authentic response to life as it presents in the moment.
If your nervous system is chronically in a fight / flight / freeze / fawn state, proximity to peace via a nearby regulated nervous system through touch and breath are the only reliable ways to communicate safety to pre-verbal parts. Through body domming you can bypass the wordy quagmire of social misinterpretation with a direct line to the humanimal nervous system – finally entering into a restorative parasympathetic state – the rest and digest, tend and befriend, and mate and relate mode that is the foundation for creativity, flow, and connection to self and other. If you are working on a convoluted issue that you are unable to solve through top-down processing, entering into this bottom-up sensate state allows access to the full wisdom and data processing capabilities of your subconscious as it speaks through the body, and can result in revelations around the solution you are seeking through feeling and freeing the foundations of your form.
This practice is expanding and could include you! If you are curious for more detailed left brain logistix or are ready to apply please email x @ Raz. Ma
Integration is the incarnate implementation of an intention.
Sharing the harvest from my work aiding people with life-changing Integrations, the following frames build upon psychological research into rewards and motivation.
These ‘power ups’ help you bridge the gap between intention and implementation – helping you stick with your habit changes. . . How are your daily habits leading you towards the life you dream of? . .
Change your identity :
Psych research demonstrates that the most sustained changes in habit stem directly from a change in your identity / narrative.
For example ~ I am a healthy person who prioritizes physical wellness.
Instead of ~ ‘I can’t eat junk food’ or ‘I need to get in shape’.
This identity change creates congruences across a variety of choices, such as whether to go for a walk, whether to engage in binge eating, and what to get at the grocery store.
. . Don’t > Can’t :
‘Don’t’ points to a change in identity and leans on character congruency, ‘can’t’ requires more novel willpower, which you can quickly exhaust, as you only have a certain amount per day. . .
Small wins fuel the engine of change :
Break down big goals into small pieces and projects. Create a calendar where you have a visual acknowledgment of success in adding one more link to the ‘chain’ – this creates a lot of inertia to not want to break the ‘streak’.
These little wins keep giving a much-needed motivational dopamine reward boost to keep you going, and don’t end up taking much from the large overall ‘pile’ of dopamine you will receive when you accomplish your big goal.
These little wins keep giving a much-needed motivational dopamine reward boost to keep you going, and don’t end up taking much from the large overall ‘pile’ of dopamine you will receive when you accomplish your big goal.
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Tip jar for good behavior:
Putting a small amount of money into an account when you engage in a healthy habit, such as preparing a good meal, that you can then put towards a related support splurge, like going out to a nice healthy restaurant, helps create a sustaining dopamine reward trickle.
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Take small bites :
Try to make a 1% improvement daily – something manageable, but when in aggregate will add up to a lot.
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Consistency :
If you slip up one day on a habit {such as exercise}, forgive yourself, but ensure you will engage the pattern the next day, so that missing your chosen habit does not become the new pattern! Aka, one day is ok, but double your effort to return to the desired habit the next day. . . Create an easy on-ramp :
If you engage in the behavior you are attempting to move away from, such as having an unhealthy snack, see it as an isolated incident rather than a reason to give up completely. Consider that you may have set your challenge bar too high and see how you can create more intermediate steps to make the change closer to a smooth ramp and less like lunging up a huge step or climbing a steep ladder. . . Increase intertia : Friction breaks Addiction.
Make the habits you want to increase easier and those that you want to discourage harder. Create space from satisfying your impulses immediately – even if only momentary – like needing to click through a separate folder to access your social media apps, not saving your passwords, or taking the batteries out of the remote and having a book close at hand when you sit down in your ‘relaxing’ spot. . . Pleasurable Physical Triggers / Reminders
Create common pleasurable physical triggers you will come across to encourage your desired behavior. For example, if you would like to drink more water, acquire a vessel you love to touch that is pleasing to you and always have this vessel with you. Tie drinking water with a color such as blue {eg. getting a vessel that is blue} and place blue cups and imagery of water in prominent places, set a timer to go off every hour with a waterfall sound – to encourage you to get out of your chair, stretch and have some water, etc. If there is a negative stimulus affecting your water consumption, such as not enjoying the taste of tap water, gather spring water, or get mineral drops or a healthy electrolyte solution to add to your water. . . Accountabilibuddy :
Someone you check in with that you are externally accountable to often makes the biggest difference, as you are motivated to not disappoint them. . . Reach out if you’d like to explore me being an accountabilibuddy or want help creating supportive structures for change in your life.
Miraculous healing : “My shoulder/chest is still so loose, and there’s no pain or stiffness anymore…it’s crazy! I just can’t get over how much intense change came from a hug. I’m so grateful that I encountered you and your work – it felt like the most kismet ending to my year.”
Jessica M
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Healing can be immediate and complete, even from lifelong conditions.
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Miracle healings are uncommon because they require deep trust and resonance with the practitioner. This is a subconscious process, as your nervous system chooses on an involuntary wetware level that a practitioner can hold you compassionately in a transformational experience.
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Miracle healings are rare because your nervous system has to become vulnerable enough to be repatterned, when all of it’s past survival wisdom experience is based on that pattern. In essence your ego is {abstractly} trusting your life with the practitioner.
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You have to trust a practitioner enough to protect you while you become the former-caterpillar-not-yet-butterfly structureless goo inside the cocoon to experience the complete liberation from the old subconscious structural scaffolding to rapidly crystallizing a new aš yet untested form. This is a high bar and rightfully and wisely so, as there are those who would prey upon your vulnerability instead of honoring your soft sovereignty.
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May we all find fun facilitators to flourish into our inherent wholeness.
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Grateful to be a corporeal creator + incarnate innovator on the evolving edge of therapeutic touch.
In the jester’s path to peace, those around you are invited to join in the belly laughs of a humorous harvest from previously heavy harm – Comedy Alchemy. .
In aiding patients to integrating inner harmony, health, and values alignment, I often utilize an internal family systems // parts work frame to bring out the characters that are ‘driving the bus’ of your life. . If you find that your bus driver is steering you somewhere suspect, try to turn them into a vivid character, find out the wisdom they are trying to convey {often something they are protecting you from, or a misguided attempt to get a need met}, and find a more prosocial way to give them the support or acknowledgement they crave. .
Here is a technique I invented employing this frame that has helped many patients understand who is driving your bus and regain control of the wheel in a fun way : .
Trauma drama : .
What if your parts // character{s} were in a Broadway production // reality TV show // soap opera? .
On stage, you must amplify all aspects of your expression – so the audience in the back can see + sense your character. . How can you turn up the dial to 11 – ridiculously out of proportion? Act as if you are on a reality TV show and the producers are pushing for higher drama for ratings. .
. Caricature your character – leaning into lampooning. This expansion allows the nuances of the issue to inflate, and this increase in size allows the details of your character and context to be fully seen, felt, and expressed. .
. When the previously entangled energy is egregiously expanded, you gain the neutrality of spacious distance through not personally over-identifying with this overblown character.
. Describe this part : what is their name ? what are they wearing? what are their catchphrases {to know when it is their voice speaking to you}? how can you tell when they are driving your bus? . . .
Actualizing aspiration via authoring an avatar & adorning accordingly .
In therapeutic spaceholding & incarnate integration work aiding patients in creating a character to step into supports personality // pattern change.
Conceptualizing your desired future self as a character creates the required reflective psychological distance to disentangle from your past narrative so that a new story has spaciousness to be spun.
This deep habit change work is most immediately integrated with repetition as ‘neurons that fire together wire together’.
Thus linking change to clothing creates a material multiplier effect via frequent physical reminders {eg. color, form, movement memories}.
Additionally, when we externalize our aspirations via our enrobed expression we exponentially expand our pool of allies to include all those we come across who witness our adornment and are altered in the manner they interact with us, or when they ask about the significance of dress and we get to verbalize our values.
This is a throwback video of my creativity doula meta character :: the movement muse.
As a Movement Muse I inspire and support you in motivational movement, magnetizing you towards your goals via embodied empowerment.
Call it body based physipsychological counseling // corporeal coaching
How has your clothing helped you create change in your life?
Our attire can be a soothing second skin that helps us nourish our nervous system via : warmth, compression, weight, texture, bilateral motion, modulating sensory stimulation, space for deep belly breaths, breathability for skin, & supporting a sense of safety.
While capitalism encourages us to procure items designed for nervous system regulation such as weighted vests // blankets + compression clothing, to be eco-responsible we can also create the same effects by layering or altering the items we already own {eg. adding a heavy liner to a favorite jacket}.
We can sew textured pockets + patches onto beloved garb to create a diverse sensory diet & we can even fill our new pouches with ancient fidget toys such as worry stones or gifts to lubricate social interactions and thus reduce social anxiety. Alterations can also create safety, for example in my SA trauma healing process, I created hidden interior pockets to hold my phone & practiced dialing 911 unseen from within my clothing by touch.
We can provide ourselves with avenues for titrating // reducing sensory input through hoods, scarves, or hats, modulating the level of stimulation based on our surroundings.
This handmade piece is called the BodyBow { after BrainBow hat…welcoming new naming suggestions!? }. The woolen warmth, compression of contour cocooning design, & empathetic engaged energy elicited from those beholding the BodyBow – all serve to regulate into rapture, revelious raiments attracting additional adventurous atelier aliens.
How do you regulate your nervous system with your clothing?
Integration Incarnate : Dress to Access : Adornment as Amplifier
Beyond accompanying you in underground spaces of soul-sprouting as a guardian angel, the bulk of my therapeutic support work involves weaving the wisdom you discover into material metaphors that serve as embodied engagement // physical reminders of your insights : Integration Incarnate..To guide you in identifying your own motivational mythology, I inquire as to what colors, sensations, textures, or movements represent realizations. Then, alongside you as a stitch witch, we craft costume, somatic sigils {movement metaphors}, & environmental empowerment to engage change..I encourage you to imbue jewelry, clothing, & other easily worn objects as embodied echoes of empowering experiences or ‘power pieces’ to be worn on occasions that have a higher likelihood of being triggering // challenging.. Dress as a Work in Progress : Adornment can be Aspirational
Consider the characteristics you wish to step into – what wardrobe evokes this embodiment for you?
Do you wish to feel grounded ? Choose a heavy coat that provides weight + compression for nervous system regulation.
Do you wish to feel protected ? Choose adornment armor – such as layers or a large protruding ring.
I dress to express + coalesce community :
This handmade BrainBow is my soul in hat form. Although abnormal adornment can be vulnerable, a community has coalesced around this chapeau – friendships formed + flourished due to the inspiration the BrainBow creates. The purmissionary nature of the BrainBow supports my intention to find playtonic playmates for my shy inner child.
For those of us with abuse and trauma in our histories, past protective impulses can derail our growth paths in an attempt to keep us small and safe. For example, in aiding a patient who is wishing to enact changes in their personality who has a childhood trauma history, they recalled getting small and hiding parts of themselves because they did not want to be preyed upon. This patient was experiencing what they thought were ‘irrational’ hesitations // self-sabotage of desired positive growth changes due to fear from the traumatized part of themselves not wishing to risk being seen because ‘being noticed can bring scary attention’.
Holding yourself back due to fear can also occur if you do not have a history of childhood abuse, especially if you are acculturated as female due to pervasive victim blaming culture. You are likely aware of the shame refrain of someone ‘asking for it’ due to their clothing or sensual // embodied personality. Thus, you will blame your behavior on your actions instead of the perpetration.
When attempting to break free of victim blaming // rape culture, reflect that if there were not for the harmful actions, there would be no harm done to those in any type of clothing or its absence.
Keep in mind that these protective impulses arise from an involuntary and well-intentioned past pattern, for when you were young or your body decided that you were not going to be successful in a fight // flight response, your nervous system make the executive decision {outside of your conscious control} to put you into a fawn state to try to appease the more powerful being that was the source of your challenge or fear.
Ways to overcome a self-protective orientation towards fear of being seen // taking up space ::
1. Journal to examine your ‘stories’ around being seen // taking up space : what phrases were told by your caregivers about being seen // taking up space? What formative memories of being seen // taking up space did you experience or witness when you were young? What cultural tales or tropes illustrate this from your background {eg. ‘tall poppies get cut down’; ‘don’t stick your neck out’}?
2. Come up with succinct new phrases // encapsulations to repeat to yourself immediately after the old phrases spring up. Eg. ‘Reach for your sun’ from an movement metaphor of mine : ‘It is of service for me to reach for my sun, as trees do, and in such natural growth I can create an ecosystem for others to thrive beneath my branches.
3. Collect examples in your life of experiences in which your ‘taking up’ space or being seeing was for the greatest good // inspired others, or cautionary tales as to the converse. Write these in a place where you can reference them regularly or when in a moment of doubt.
4. Create a healing team // co-evolutionary community around yourself who holds you to your new intentions. The aid in having an accountabilibuddy cannot be overstated, even if it is just a friend and not professional support.
{This hand-on support, specialized knowledge, and accountability is a large part of why you might choose to hire a specialist // professional accountability force such as a personal trainer, coach, or therapist, so that you have an external person to answer to in holding yourself to your intention}.
{ BONUS : you can replace [ being seen // taking up ] space with any ingrained habit // character change you are trying to adjust, as these techniques will work for most of the deep changes that are hardest to make}
I am so grateful and proud to see the rapid and cathartic changes made in my patients by translating complex psychological studies // concepts into researched-backed behavior change techniques and I want to continue to share these learnings if helpful to you!
Please comment if you would appreciate experiencing this material as a course {have a lot more material // techniques then I shared here} and any thorny challenges you have experienced with habit change you are seeking support with!
Grateful to be the wind beneath your wings as a supportive upward spiral // co-evolutionary current.
