The Power of the Herd (51 page)

We all feel overwhelmed at times. If you've been suppressing emotion and sensation for years, you might be worried about “opening the floodgates” when you invite the body to speak. For this reason, people who relate to computer metaphors find it helpful to add a “self-regulation program” to their “hard drives” as they boot up the first time.

To get started, imagine “breathing into” the intelligence centers in your heart and your gut, not to relax anything, but to infuse the neural cells concentrated in these areas with oxygen and awareness. The goal is to create a kind of “email connection” between the brain in your head and the other two “brains” in your body. So as you breathe into your heart and then your gut, also imagine that the “light” of consciousness centered in your head is traveling down your body, lighting up these other intelligence centers as you “plug them in.”

Before you invite your body to send messages to your brain, however, let your brain send an important message to your body. Tell the body that you'll listen to its concerns and insights,
but only if it releases this information one message at a time.
You should also do this with any sensation that seems to hold a lot of information, energy, or tension, such as an exceedingly nervous stomach, a lump in your throat that's holding a lot of emotion back, a fist in your heart that's struggling to “get a grip,” or a dizzy, “crowded” head.

Some people find it helpful to imagine a whole herd of mustangs crowded into an intensely activated sensation. Even inexperienced riders know that when you approach a corral of feisty, untrained horses, you don't swing the gates wide open and let all them all run free. You take one horse out at a time, halter it, teach it a few basic safety and socialization skills, and then go back and get the next horse. Because somatic intelligence often communicates more like an artist or a poet than a scientist (and can jump-start creativity as a result — a concept we'll explore later), the body seems to find this wild-horse image meaningful and enjoyable, immediately understanding the self-regulation wisdom it conveys. And I have to say that, in teaching abuse survivors and soldiers with post–traumatic stress disorder how to use the body scan, the request to “take out one horse at a time” or release “one message at a time” works much more easily than most people would expect. It is as if the body, like any horse or child or employee, appreciates limits that are set fairly and clearly, even as it wants to speak and (finally) be heard.

The first step of the body scan involves mapping the sensations. In doing this, you draw your awareness to each part of your body and notice
what
you are feeling without trying to relax out of it or change it in any way. The following chart offers some examples of sensations people commonly encounter. Remember to notice what feels good or peaceful, in addition to tension-related sensations.

Also check for body postures — usually involving some combination of shoulder, back, pelvis, and solar plexus engagement, though sometimes also head, neck, arms, feet, or leg position. And remember, this is not a relaxation or self-hypnosis technique, but a simple body-awareness or mindfulness technique.

In preparation for the scan, don't roll your neck, loosen your shoulders, try to stand straight, or ground yourself. Just stand or sit in a position that comes naturally to you at that moment (as postures can change from day to day and situation to situation).

Rather than second-guess the information contained in a specific sensation or body posture, it's advantageous to “ask the body itself.” An easy way to do this is to pick a prominent sensation — let's say shoulders slumped forward. Accentuate that posture (rather than trying to adjust, relax, or wriggle out of it). Then “breathe” into the sensation without trying to change it, in this case imagining that you're creating an email link between your slumped shoulders and the brain in your head. Ask, silently, one of the following questions: “What information is held in this sensation?” or “What is the purpose of this posture?” or “What do you want to tell me?” or simply “What do you want me to know?”

Clear your thinking brain of preconceived notions and just wait for an answer to rise up from the body to the brain. Sometimes the information is obvious and received quickly. In the case of slumped shoulders, many people feel “the weight of the world” or see a statue of Atlas hoisting the earth on his back. Another common image is a yoke around the shoulders. One woman saw this yoke attached to a wagon carrying all her family members. Through this image, she quickly realized that it wasn't work responsibilities that were getting her down. Her spouse and children weren't “carrying their own weight” around the house. When she received the message and spoke it out loud to me, her shoulders lifted and rebalanced themselves.

The fascinating thing about this technique is that if you truly get the message, the body
releases the tension and/or adjusts itself.
Really! I've seen it a thousand times. Conversely, if the mind is second-guessing the body, quite often there's no change in sensation or posture. I often see this happening with people who say, “Well, I
think
I'm just a little stressed.” The key word here is
think.
Don't think,
ask!

I stumbled upon this technique while working with beginning riding students. I was teaching a woman who couldn't keep her heels down (an important
position for optimal balance and safety — you don't want your feet sliding through the stirrups, especially if you fall, as you could easily be dragged). After telling “Maggie” to keep her heels down ad nauseum, I finally wondered what would happen if she asked her ankles what they were trying to accomplish; they truly seemed to have a mind of their own. I directed her to momentarily accentuate the tension in her ankles, causing her heels to rise even higher, and then ask her body what its purpose was in emphasizing this position despite our efforts to change it.

Then, of course, she asked me
how in the world
she was supposed to ask her body anything. For some reason, I suggested she “breathe into that tension, sending it oxygen and awareness with an open, inquiring mind.” Within seconds, Maggie's eyes shot wide open and her head jerked to the side, as if a faint electric current were jolting her brain.

“I keep getting the phrase ‘
Gotta be on your toes!
' she said. “It's playing over and over again.”

Much to my amazement, Maggie's ankles seemed to relax of their own accord. I asked her to continue to breathe into her ankles and ask what they were trying to convey through this phrase. Was she a former ballet dancer? Or was her body communicating some kind of concern by creating a posture that was essentially a metaphor: “Gotta be on your toes!”

Maggie's ankles continued to relax as she remembered falling off a horse at her previous instructor's barn. A flashy appaloosa she “didn't feel connected to” had shied and dumped her when the wind suddenly picked up. “Gotta be on your toes” made sense, as Maggie was once again riding a horse she didn't know. So we addressed this concern by allowing her to dismount and do some ground work, leading and bonding with my older, more experienced lesson horse, contrasting his gentle, poised demeanor to that of the younger, more spirited gelding who had thrown her at another stable the year before. Thirty minutes later, she remounted and experienced no trouble keeping her heels down.

The following week, however, Maggie told me that she'd been riding a friend's horse during an impromptu trail ride, and her ankles had tensed up again. This time, she quickly read the message, got off, and walked the horse for a while, petting him for a few moments. Then she got back on, feeling safer and more connected. Once again, her heels stayed down.

Everyone's body “speaks” a bit differently, though there are some patterns. Some of my clients, including one skeptical scientist who didn't consider himself the least bit intuitive or creative, have found that breathing into a sensation produces colors with consistent symbolic meanings, like red for fear, yellow for
caution, blue for comfort, and lavender for love or connection. Some people “hear” brief clichés, strange poetic phrases, or song fragments that, when they later look up the lyrics on the Internet, turn out to be relevant to a current challenge in their lives.

I advise scanners to close their eyes when checking for a message. The body, which as I mentioned earlier often speaks more like an artist or a poet than a scientist, can relay visual material, sometimes in a sketchy, monochromatic format, sometimes in Technicolor. Once in a while, people experience intricate mythical or metaphorical minifilms, “waking dreams” that turn out to be deeply meaningful and even transformational. More often, people see static, symbolic pictures. Some of my students have accessed unique, highly evocative images that they've turned into business logos.

People occasionally receive brief, nonsensical visions or phrases. One teenager felt a tension in her thighs before directing her horse to move from a walk to a trot. When she breathed into the constriction, she saw a pterodactyl flying next to a purple sun setting over a mountain shaped like a pineapple. Yet when she acknowledged this strange scene out loud and checked with her body again, the tightness released completely, suggesting there was no further need to interpret the message. Apparently, by sending herself a goofy image that made us both laugh, this colorful young rider transformed the anxiety she often experienced in changing gaits. Her body wasn't sending a metaphor to be analyzed; it was urging her to laugh and have fun, apparently advising her not to take riding so seriously.

In scanning down your body, learning to receive its sometimes mundane, sometimes creative, sometimes amusing or uplifting messages, you'll not only activate the wisdom of that “other 90 percent” but might also find that you're never bored while waiting in line at the bank or the DMV again. More important, you can use this information to make decisions that draw on the wisdom of all three of your “brains,” as one trauma survivor learned to do in her very first session.

“Emily,” a therapist who had read one of my previous books, brought a rape survivor to do some equine-facilitated learning activities with me, reporting that “Amy” seemed to be stuck, unable to move forward with her life. But Dr. Emily also had some concerns about the safety of this work. While hopeful that these sensitive yet powerful animals might provide an important key, she wasn't sure if Amy would be grounded enough to interact with a loose horse, even one known to be unusually generous with fearful amateurs.