Helping Your Body Find Safety and Steadiness
When we’ve been under stress for a while, it isn’t always enough to tell ourselves to relax. Our body may still be responding as though it needs to stay alert, even when there is nothing we need to deal with right now.
These two recordings are designed to help you gently experience something different: moments of safety, support and steadiness in your body. You don’t need to force yourself to relax or make anything happen. The idea is simply to practise noticing what feels okay, safe or settled, even if that feeling is quite small at first. These recordings can be downloaded to your phone or listening device.
This recording helps you connect with a felt sense of safety and begin creating an inner anchor you can return to.
It can be particularly useful when you feel anxious, unsettled, overwhelmed or caught up in your thoughts. With repetition, the familiar experience of returning to your safety anchor can become a useful way of reminding your body, right now, in this moment, I am okay.
Sometimes trying to make our whole body feel calm is simply too much. The Steady Self recording takes a gentler approach.
It guides you inside to find one place in your body that feels okay, comfortable or relatively settled. You then spend a little time resting your attention there and allowing yourself to experience that steadiness.
The place doesn’t need to feel wonderfully peaceful. You’re simply looking for somewhere that feels a little more okay than somewhere else.
Over time, this can help you become more familiar with what steadiness feels like in your own body and give you somewhere internal to return to when things feel difficult.
Using the recordings
There is no need to do both recordings every day. Choose the one that feels most useful at the time. Regular practice is what builds a felt sense of safety within you. You can also use them when you’re already feeling reasonably okay—not only when you’re stressed. Practising when things are easier can help the experience become more familiar and accessible when you need it.
Most importantly, don’t try to get it right. These are gentle practices for noticing and experiencing safety and steadiness, rather than exercises you have to perform perfectly.
If You Would Like to Learn More
These two recordings give you a starting point for helping your body experience more safety and steadiness.
If you’d like to understand more about why it can be so hard to switch off, and learn a wider range of practical ways to help yourself when you feel stressed, anxious, overwhelmed or unable to settle, I’ve created a complete online course called I Can’t Find My Off Switch.
The course helps you understand what may be happening in your nervous system, recognise your own patterns, and discover different ways of helping yourself come back towards calm and steadiness. It includes practical exercises, explanations and a collection of recordings you can return to whenever you need them.
I’m currently offering the complete course to my clients for $50.
If you’d like to do it, just contact me and I’ll send you the details.