Eve says tuning into your body can help you lead a happier life (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Do you ever feel wired, but tired? Does your head never stop whirring, thinking and worrying?
Eve Menezes Cunningham is a trauma therapist, who specialises in somatic therapy, a body-centric approach which treats mental disorders with physical methods.
Somatic practices can be varied, but might include breathing exercises, dance, martial arts, sensory awareness or massage.
‘It sometimes feels like we’ve been conditioned all our lives to disconnect from our bodies,’ says Eve, who is also the author of 365 ways to feel better: self care ideas for embodied wellbeing. ‘Somatic therapy invites you to reconnect and listen to it, instead of just ignoring it.’
Somatic therapy is based on the belief that emotional trauma can cause physical instability. This therapy encourages you to tune into your body and attempt to work out what it’s trying to tell you, so that you can heal and live a happier, healthier life.
Here, Eve talks to Metro.co.uk about how to feel better every day.
How do you start connecting with your body?
The best thing to do when you feel nausea, or tightness or tension is just sit with it. Put the palms of the hands together and place it over the part of your body which is hurting or where you might be feeling tightness, in the chest or in the belly for example.
Then, get curious about what this physical manifestation is trying to tell you. Stop overriding and ignoring your body’s signal and listen instead.
You say that somatic therapy can be very effective to deal with past traumas that may be still affecting you. How does that work?
Any exposure to trauma, especially early exposure in our childhood – such as abuse, neglect or violence – creates a hyperactive alarm system in the body. We can get stuck in flight or fright or freeze responses – even when we may no longer be living in traumatic times.
The recent advances in neuroscience have shown that our brain and bodies then struggle to regulate our emotions, continuously flooding our bodies with stress hormones. This can wreak havoc on the immune system and bodily functions, leading to depression and burnout.
Books like The Body Keeps The Score, by researcher Bessel van der Kolk, revolutionised trauma therapy by helping trauma survivors to understand and reinhabit our bodies. Tolerating what we feel can lead to lasting healing.
How can we do that?
Find a way to build a relationship with your own body and self again. It’s working metaphorically with any kind of pain, any kind of illness, any kind of injury.
I suffer with endometriosis and when a therapist suggested I talk to my ovaries, I thought she was insane. But it really helped. This was back in my 20s, I was in pain every day, I was completely disembodied. I didn’t know what feeling was, but I used to cry all the time and I couldn’t articulate why. When she asked me to imagine talking to my ovaries, I had a sense they wanted me to stop biting my tongue, they needed me to speak up myself and they were also encouraging me to be creative. So my body was literally coaching me through extreme pain to express myself. And when I did, my symptoms started to ease.
When you start hearing what your body is trying to say, then what do you?
It’s listening to the body and identifying how you feel and then taking action. For example, if you’re feeling anxious, you might want to use some strong movement that helps you ground yourself. This burns off excess stress hormones and works with the body’s fight/flight impulse, too. Rather than sitting there and letting your thoughts make you even more anxious, go for a run, or a walk. Anything that has you connecting with the earth.
What if you’re constantly feeling tired and anxious and don’t want to go for a run or a walk?
Many of us have learned to override our exhaustion limits until we’re burnt out. It’s advisable to learn some tools that help you take yourself from feeling stressed to feeling calm. You can use breath practices to lift and lower the nervous system. I’m also a huge fan of Yoga Nidra (it means yogic sleep), a relaxing yoga process where the body sleeps but the mind stays awake. Some say 30 minutes practice is the equivalent of 2 hours of sleep.
Before you start the relaxation process, you set an intention and then do a gentle body scan where you start tuning in to different parts of your body before exploring different themes.
This process calms the fight or flight responses, and activates the parasympathetic system – the calming part of the nervous system, which helps with your immunity, digestion and stress management. It also potentially activates the pineal gland that releases melatonin. This helps boost your immune function, regulate blood pressure, cortisol levels and induces sleep.
It’s not just about the body though, we need to address our thoughts too.
In what way?
Modern neuroscience means we know that listening to our inner critic is likely to trigger a stress response. The self-loathing loop keeps us in stress response with the amygdala, the alarm bell of the brain, staying in high alert. You forget your resourcefulness and become trapped in a vicious cycle.
But by learning to catch yourself, you’re enabling yourself to regulate (do something to help yourself feel better), maybe by working with the breath. This helps the prefrontal cortex, the more evolved part of the brain, come online and we self regulate.
What breathing technique do you recommend that’s good for self regulation?
Try Ujjayi breath. With your mouth open and palm of hand in front so you can feel your breath, imagine yourself fogging up a mirror as you inhale and exhale, from the back of the throat. It’s often called Darth Vader breath!
Ujjayi breathing helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system. It also helps tone the vagus nerve which ultimately decides how we feel – 80% of signals from the body up to brain are via this nerve. Conscious breathing is a great tool as we don’t need special equipment. It’s a simple, easy way to feel better every day.
3 ways to feel better every day
Set intentions. Simply pause before any activity and ask yourself some questions. How do you hope to feel afterwards? What do you want to achieve? This focuses your mind on what you want, versus what you don’t.
Deal with the mid afternoon slump with ‘yogic caffeine’. Try a yoga pose called the Little Bridge pose. Place the soles of the feet to the floor with knees pointing upwards. Rest the back of your skull on the floor and gently life your hips. Pull your arms together to clasp your hands behind your back and breathe deeply to stretch the ribcage and abdominal muscles. The deep backbend enables the nerves in the upper back to stimulate a wakeful feeling.
Create your own mental happy place with visualisation. You can reconnect with a sense of peace, ease and safety any time you want by imagining a time when you felt completely at ease, happy and well. This will flood the body with feel-good hormones, especially good to do before you go to sleep.
Do you have a story to share?
Get in touch by emailing [email protected].
MORE : The best (and worst) no and low-alcohol drinks, according to Metro’s big taste test
MORE : The Big Happiness Interview: Why stargazing can make you happier
Eve says tuning into your body can help you lead a happier life (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Do you ever feel wired, but tired? Does your head never stop whirring, thinking and worrying?
Eve Menezes Cunningham is a trauma therapist, who specialises in somatic therapy, a body-centric approach which treats mental disorders with physical methods.
Somatic practices can be varied, but might include breathing exercises, dance, martial arts, sensory awareness or massage.
‘It sometimes feels like we’ve been conditioned all our lives to disconnect from our bodies,’ says Eve, who is also the author of 365 ways to feel better: self care ideas for embodied wellbeing. ‘Somatic therapy invites you to reconnect and listen to it, instead of just ignoring it.’
Somatic therapy is based on the belief that emotional trauma can cause physical instability. This therapy encourages you to tune into your body and attempt to work out what it’s trying to tell you, so that you can heal and live a happier, healthier life.
Here, Eve talks to Metro.co.uk about how to feel better every day.
How do you start connecting with your body?
The best thing to do when you feel nausea, or tightness or tension is just sit with it. Put the palms of the hands together and place it over the part of your body which is hurting or where you might be feeling tightness, in the chest or in the belly for example.
Then, get curious about what this physical manifestation is trying to tell you. Stop overriding and ignoring your body’s signal and listen instead.
You say that somatic therapy can be very effective to deal with past traumas that may be still affecting you. How does that work?
Any exposure to trauma, especially early exposure in our childhood – such as abuse, neglect or violence – creates a hyperactive alarm system in the body. We can get stuck in flight or fright or freeze responses – even when we may no longer be living in traumatic times.
The recent advances in neuroscience have shown that our brain and bodies then struggle to regulate our emotions, continuously flooding our bodies with stress hormones. This can wreak havoc on the immune system and bodily functions, leading to depression and burnout.
Books like The Body Keeps The Score, by researcher Bessel van der Kolk, revolutionised trauma therapy by helping trauma survivors to understand and reinhabit our bodies. Tolerating what we feel can lead to lasting healing.
How can we do that?
Find a way to build a relationship with your own body and self again. It’s working metaphorically with any kind of pain, any kind of illness, any kind of injury.
I suffer with endometriosis and when a therapist suggested I talk to my ovaries, I thought she was insane. But it really helped. This was back in my 20s, I was in pain every day, I was completely disembodied. I didn’t know what feeling was, but I used to cry all the time and I couldn’t articulate why. When she asked me to imagine talking to my ovaries, I had a sense they wanted me to stop biting my tongue, they needed me to speak up myself and they were also encouraging me to be creative. So my body was literally coaching me through extreme pain to express myself. And when I did, my symptoms started to ease.
When you start hearing what your body is trying to say, then what do you?
It’s listening to the body and identifying how you feel and then taking action. For example, if you’re feeling anxious, you might want to use some strong movement that helps you ground yourself. This burns off excess stress hormones and works with the body’s fight/flight impulse, too. Rather than sitting there and letting your thoughts make you even more anxious, go for a run, or a walk. Anything that has you connecting with the earth.
What if you’re constantly feeling tired and anxious and don’t want to go for a run or a walk?
Many of us have learned to override our exhaustion limits until we’re burnt out. It’s advisable to learn some tools that help you take yourself from feeling stressed to feeling calm. You can use breath practices to lift and lower the nervous system. I’m also a huge fan of Yoga Nidra (it means yogic sleep), a relaxing yoga process where the body sleeps but the mind stays awake. Some say 30 minutes practice is the equivalent of 2 hours of sleep.
Before you start the relaxation process, you set an intention and then do a gentle body scan where you start tuning in to different parts of your body before exploring different themes.
This process calms the fight or flight responses, and activates the parasympathetic system – the calming part of the nervous system, which helps with your immunity, digestion and stress management. It also potentially activates the pineal gland that releases melatonin. This helps boost your immune function, regulate blood pressure, cortisol levels and induces sleep.
It’s not just about the body though, we need to address our thoughts too.
In what way?
Modern neuroscience means we know that listening to our inner critic is likely to trigger a stress response. The self-loathing loop keeps us in stress response with the amygdala, the alarm bell of the brain, staying in high alert. You forget your resourcefulness and become trapped in a vicious cycle.
But by learning to catch yourself, you’re enabling yourself to regulate (do something to help yourself feel better), maybe by working with the breath. This helps the prefrontal cortex, the more evolved part of the brain, come online and we self regulate.
What breathing technique do you recommend that’s good for self regulation?
Try Ujjayi breath. With your mouth open and palm of hand in front so you can feel your breath, imagine yourself fogging up a mirror as you inhale and exhale, from the back of the throat. It’s often called Darth Vader breath!
Ujjayi breathing helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system. It also helps tone the vagus nerve which ultimately decides how we feel – 80% of signals from the body up to brain are via this nerve. Conscious breathing is a great tool as we don’t need special equipment. It’s a simple, easy way to feel better every day.
3 ways to feel better every day Set intentions. Simply pause before any activity and ask yourself some questions. How do you hope to feel afterwards? What do you want to achieve? This focuses your mind on what you want, versus what you don’t.
Deal with the mid afternoon slump with ‘yogic caffeine’. Try a yoga pose called the Little Bridge pose. Place the soles of the feet to the floor with knees pointing upwards. Rest the back of your skull on the floor and gently life your hips. Pull your arms together to clasp your hands behind your back and breathe deeply to stretch the ribcage and abdominal muscles. The deep backbend enables the nerves in the upper back to stimulate a wakeful feeling.
Create your own mental happy place with visualisation. You can reconnect with a sense of peace, ease and safety any time you want by imagining a time when you felt completely at ease, happy and well. This will flood the body with feel-good hormones, especially good to do before you go to sleep.
Do you have a story to share?
Get in touch by emailing [email protected].
MORE : The best (and worst) no and low-alcohol drinks, according to Metro’s big taste test
MORE : The Big Happiness Interview: Why stargazing can make you happier
