Guía práctica

Description

• Any practice can trigger unexpected intense reactions. Only engage in them if you have minimal support, space, time, and resources. If you don’t have these now, seek help from a professional, don’t try to cope alone!
• Before engaging in any practice, decide to give agree with yourself to switch your attention and give yourself a chance to feel a bit better. Trying to regulate yourself while resisting is a futile task (at best, you will blame me, at worst – yourself) and at the same time, it is extremely common.
• Strong feelings are normal. It is normal to experience and express them without harming yourself or others. All these practices are not meant to make you experience less or feel numb, but to help you take a break and do something useful, or simply to feel a little better for a while.
• Two opposite reactions to strong feelings are too much (overwhelm, being consumed by emotions) and too little (detachment, dissociation). Both are normal and necessary for survival. In both cases, it is important to engage in practices that help return to a balanced emotional state.
• It would be optimal to combine nervous system regulation with actively caring for any existing feelings. To do this in the simplest way, you can imagine the feeling (based on bodily sensations) as a suffering baby or animal that you hold in your attention and take care of. You can put your hand on the place where you feel the emotion to make this caretaking more tangible.
• No single practice works for everyone; there is no one for whom nothing worked. Try and make sure to stop immediately if strong unpleasant sensations arise. If none of these practices suit you, there are others.
• Tears, trembling, and burping, despite frequent condemnation, are not unpleasant sensations. These are tension release reactions that are very useful for letting go of any “excess.”
• All these are practices, so the more regularly you do them, the more noticeable their effects will be in the long run.