Healing from Trauma? This one tool will help.

The key to healing trauma is awareness.

It’s not for nothing that “healing starts with awareness” has become such a cliche among therapy enthusiasts.

There’s so much that can happen with simply placing your awareness on your physiology.

When you experience an emotion for example, you’re feeling the impact a situation has on your body.

You can use your awareness to work your emotions.

Here’s how …

Every emotion has a physical component to it.

Whenever we’re activated, certain physiological markers get triggered. A lot of it often goes underneath our awareness but that’s how we actually know that we’re being activated.

Those markers include changes in our heart rate, how strongly the muscle of your heart is pumping, the location and speed of the breath and your muscle tone (body tension).

You can learn to notice those things.

You can affect how you experience your emotions by simply bringing your attention to one or more of these markers when you are feeling something.

You don’t even need to shift anything.

The mere tracking of these sensations connects them with the brain and lets it know that these body systems are acting outside of their resting range.

Then you can notice that there’s nothing dangerous in your immediate environment. Your brain will automatically correct your bodily responses in order to bring your body back to balance.

This will cause your emotions to shift on their own.

You don’t have to wait until you are feeling activated to do this.

You can start practicing tracking your physiology when you’re not activated. It’s like going to the gym to strengthen your body awareness muscles.

The more you practice this, the easier it is to do when activated.

When you’re able to track your physiology in activation mode you are basically learning how to tolerate being with your emotions. That’s what allows them to transform.