Short talk by Dr. Nicole Cain encouraging mindful body awareness: pause mental activity, notice physical sensations (alarm signals) and treat them as informative rather than problems to suppress. She frames bodily sensations as wise solutions that can guide practical or subtle strategies to regain personal agency and choose how to feel.
Chapters
If you could just sit for a moment and we live a lot in our brains. We're busy, we're analyzed, we're thinking, we're doing all these things. But if you could just sit for just a moment, pause what you're doing, and then just allow your mindful awareness to go into the body. And I was doing that as the music was playing, very beautiful soundtrack that you guys had playing, and I was feeling sensations in my chest, and I was noticing what my body was saying. My brain was like, what are we going to talk about? Want to make sure we give the greatest value? And I think oftentimes the body has the answers. We're just not maybe necessarily trained to notice the body as much. And so as you sit here and as you notice your body, what is coming to mind and what are those sensations saying to you? Are you feeling restless? Are you feeling nervous? Are you feeling on a deadline and you're feeling impatient or irritable? Are you feeling a little bit of sadness? That is the alarm. An alarm doesn't necessarily have to be negative, or our alarm is our body is talking to us. And a big paradigm shift that I'm on a mission to bring to the conversation is that our alarm, our body, our sensations, our symptoms, they're not problems. They're not problems to be suppressed and solved, but rather, they're the body's wise solution to what may be going on under the surface. And so, as you sit here today, the first step is to just notice where you're feeling the feelings, where you're sensing the sensations. And then as you begin to familiarize yourself with the voice of the body, as you begin to notice what those sensations are telling you, you'll find that you become more adept at leveraging that information into activities or strategies. Can be very practical, maybe esoteric for some of us, but you'll be able to leverage the information from that alarm, from that sensation in the body, into strategies that not only provide relief, but can actually help you begin the process of taking back your own personal power, taking back the programming that you've inherited throughout your entire life, and getting the chance to decide, what is it I want to feel?
