Week 4 Embodied Stretch

Stretching 

Into the warm 

Soft, 

Living 

Flesh 

Of my body, 

And past 

Still, 

I find myself 

Suddenly 

Aware 

Of the bodies 

That hold 

The humans 

I love, 

And I pause 

A moment 

To stretch 

Into that awareness, 

Occupying briefly 

Shoulders, 

And toes, 

Mouths 

And skin, 

That aren’t mine. 

And I breathe 

To a count 

Of four, 

And find 

My edges 

Safely 

On my mat.

Embodied 

By Scorpious 

“When we find ourselves in a situation in which our buttons are being pushed, we can choose to repress or act out, or we can choose to practice. If we can start to do the exchange, breathing in with the intention of keeping our hearts open to the embarrassment or fear or anger that we feel, then to our surprise we find that we are also open to what the other person is feeling. Open heart is open heart.” 

― Chogyam Trungpa

Perspective 

Week 4 is embodied stretches. Embodied stretches are not conceptual ideas; this means learning to form and perform tangible embodied movements, ways of responding, and ways of self-resourcing to take courageous action in our life, work, and relationships with access to the qualities of our embodied Self. 

To gain access to the qualities of the Self, you must learn to befriend and attend to reactions of your nervous system reacting to cures of threat and protection. To do this, we use the BASIC Method when forming and practicing embodied stretches. 

I will not teach you how to develop embodied stretches here because we do that with access to the Self in group. It is highly creative, so we must practice together 1:1 and in group. 

You must know how accessing your Self is directly linked to the nervous system and how the nervous system works so you can master using the BASIC method in your embodied practice. The basic method means to befriend, attend, shape, integrate, and connect. 

In groups, we will move through each stage, and I will teach you embodied techniques that map to each stage to achieve your goals and dreams. 

Lastly, in this training, I will finish by reiterating that every week, repeat by practicing what we learned in weeks 1, 2, and 3. I'll share at the end how this is fundamental to how these practices naturally develop and how this will help you discern your way through and out of the trap of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual bypassing. (A significant and genuine trap)

How is embodied leadership connected to the nervous system? 

Remember from week one: 

The qualities of the embodied Self are ALWAYS in the realm of the 8 C's & 5 P's of Self: creative, connected, calm, curious, compassionate, courageous, confident, clear, and present, persistent, perspective, playfulness, and patience. 

The qualities of Self are felt in and on the body. Suppose you don't feel this way in the present moment. In that case, your task is to learn to self-regulate, co-regulate, and use ways to befriend, attend, shape, integrate, and connect. 

At this stage, it's important to emphasize the role of our ANS or Autonomic Nervous System, its adaptive competing needs to scan and react to cues of threat vs. safety in the environment, and its competing needs for protection over safety to survive. Its role guides our perception of our world and our ability to make decisions, take actions, and learn and grow. 

The #1 thing you must know is that your nervous system must be in a ventral vagal state to access the qualities of being that allow you to learn and grow. Suppose your nervous system is in a state of fight-or-flight (parasympathetic). In that case, you cannot think your way out of it. You will be in a protective state and cut off from the tools to access new ways of being and adapt to challenges until you actively shift your state. 

The only way out is to learn to calm your nervous system to regain access to these tools of your ventral vagal state. That is to use the BASIC method to Befriend, Attend, Shape, Integrate, and Connect, thereby returning to a state of safety and connection to again be able to respond (learn) vs react (repeat)

There are 6 main things we must cover about the nervous system. You'll learn more about this in the Intro To Embodied Leadership, Lesson 3: The Autonomic Nervous System & Embodied Leadership Development or read pages 1 through 41 of Polyvagal Exercises For Safety and Connection. 

1. Neuroception & interoception 

2. Co-regulation & self-regulation 

3. The Three Branches of The Autonomic Hierarchy (ANS) 

4. The competing need to protect against threat and to allow for safety and connection. 

5. The need for safety to learn and grow 

6. Bottom-up (80%) vs Top Down (20%) approach & The Vagus Nerve 

1. Neuroception & interoception 

Neuroception is the Nervous Systems radar. It scans inside and outside the body into the environment for threats of threat & protection and safety & connection. It's important to remember that it scans for THREATS FIRST in order to survive and then switches to safety when it senses a cue of safety. This means you must learn to actively override your protective response and create a cue of safety yourself, or you will be locked in a protective state! 

Neurocpetion launches a cascade of embodied events that send information from the body to the brain via efferent fibers in the Vagus nerves. 80% of information goes bottom up. 20% of information goes top-down via afferent fibers. See #6 below. 

This cascade of embodied events creates perception! YES - this is real! Read that again. Neuroception launches a cascade of events that go bottom up: sensation, emotion, feeling, thought, mood, judgment, story, belief, behavior.

This is why when we drop-into our bodies in group, the story in our head shifts and changes about the problems we have in life; this is why 1:1 coaching is so powerful along with being in the group. You are literally becoming capable of seeing your life and challenges in new ways and then priming yourself to take action and make better decisions. This is embodied Self-leadership training!

Interoception is the ability to bring our explicit awareness to implicit sensations happening on and in the body. The sensation is sending a message up to the brain. The sensation is becoming an emotion when we identify with it. There is a state change in the body. We have a feeling (label of good or bad or a judgment) with language. Then, there is behavior and automatic story that gets created. 

These sensations have adapted to send cues of danger (to help us survive), and it is up to us to reshape these cues into sensations of safety to allow us to take action in our life and grow. 

With interoception, we can bring our awareness into the body to sense and be with these sensations. Hence, we ask, What am I feeling? Where do I feel it? What does it need or want?

2. Co-Regulation & self-regulation 

The ability to directly connect to a sense of safety and connection is adaptively THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR OUR ABILITY TO LEARN AND GROW. Our nervous systems adapted to feel safe in groups. Nervous systems need to sense cues of safety and connection from other nervous systems to begin to let down the protective states. When leaders in a group know how to self-regulate, they become grounding resources for others' nervous systems. When leaders are dysregulated, they dysregulate others. This is why the group is so powerful and essential. 

The 7-stage structure of our groups and our 3x3 check-in practice act as a layered system, allowing your nervous system to relax, open, and connect progressively. 

Dig deeper: By the end of your second season, I want you to know the 7 stages of the Embodied Leadership Training Group and to be able to describe how each stage is important for our nervous systems and protective parts to learn to trust us and relax so we can do deeper work. Describe what would happen and how your nervous system and protective parts might react if the stages were disorganized or unpredictable in some way. Then describe how this is shifting or deepening your sense of appreciation of the containers or lack of containers in your default life and relationships. What does this inspire in you as an embodied self-led man who is graduating from this program? 

Once you learn to access new levels of safety and connection in the group, you become more capable of bringing that out into your default life and relationships. This is also what you must learn to do to respond to challenges in your life vs. react to them. Again, we do this using the BASIC Method, breath, and embodied practices.

This calms the body, shifts the story in your head, and allows you to take conscious action! 

3. The Three Branches of The Autonomic Hierarchy (ANS) 

I will cover this more in our 2-hour training. It’s important it be given the time it needs. 

4. The competing need to protect against threat and to allow for safety and connection. 

The nervous system is adapted to keep us safe. This means it is strategically advantageous to assume things are dangerous before check-ing for cues of safety or if no cues of safety are overtly recognized. This is important for people, mainly because of The Man Box. The Man Box tells people they need to be tough or hard or not show weakness to be a person. This is why Artifact #2 of The Unshakable Executive Method is The Man Box. This means we aren't primed to learn to embody cues of safety initially. This leaves us in a state of protection! BOOM! No wonder so many leaders are emotionally stunted and lost in boyhood protective patterns, unable to learn and grow. 

But you are here! From my perspective, when people learn to actively co-create containers of safety and connection, our masculine ability to protect and serve turns into a safety-creating machine! We learn to create a brave space and, in turn, find purpose in doing this for others! It's beautiful. It's the mature masculine the world needs!

5. The need for safety to learn and grow 

In a state of threat and protection, the nervous system and brain can only access what it already knows. This is a protective pattern to save energy and limit reaction times when your life is at risk. You fight, you flight, you are free - you don't think creatively, connect emotionally, nor can you be compassionate, caring, courageous, or confident! Woza, that's the Self! You see that! That means you can only be in protective parts. 

When you drop into a ventral vagal state, you access the tools to learn, heal, and grow when you access the embodied qualities of the Self. 

Dig deeper: Compare this to the topic of brotherhood and what happens to you and other people in the group as we are initiated into this container. What connections can you make to our culture and what people need in order to become healing resources for the world? What are you inspired to do or how are you inspired to show up in your own life and community? 

6. Bottom-up (80%) vs Top Down (20%) approach & The Vagus Nerve 

I saved my favorite for last. The Vagus nerve means "Wandering" Nerve. It extends from your big toes, behind your knees, around your groin, anus, lower intestine, up along your back line, behind your heart, behind your neck and ears, front of your face, eyes, and top of your head. 

It sends 80% of information bottom-up (Afferent Fibers) and 20% of information top-down (Efferent Fibers). What does this mean for your practice? The story in your head follows the state of your body. You are better off focusing your attention on your body (top-down) because this significantly shifts your perception of challenges; this allows you to see the world as it is - not as the fear story shows it to be.

Top-down meditation approaches are ways to escape your reality and give yourself a safe harbor to begin to find some peace. They are highly effective mindfulness tools but do not provide what is needed to make the full journey toward wholeness. This is well documented by meditation masters and somatic teachers. Read Chapter 1, Somatic Meditation, of The Awakening Body, for a wonderful overview of meditation techniques and to realize the result for us and society of "Underplaying" the body in our practice. 

Top-down approaches or "mindfulness" (shamata) were never meant to be the primary meditation mode. They were tools to calm the mind with the core intention to drop into the body. Our consumer culture and environmental needs motivated us to over-rely on them. Awareness (vipassana) or bodyfulness/somatic mediation practices are bottom-up and invite a direct and unconditioned connection to everyone and everything via the nervous system and environment.

DO NOT BE FOOLED!!!! Top-down approaches are extremely powerful! But you must drop into the body or get trapped in a spiritual bypassing trap. Or a fantasy protective part often referred to as a blisshead, sparkle pony, psychopomp, or toxic positivity. 

What I am teaching you here are somatic embodied practices. I intend to teach practices that will allow you and me to become whole human beings and fully resourced leaders. 

As we move into weeks 4, 5, and 6, we continuously restart with what we learned in weeks 1, 2, and 3. 

Wait. What? Why? 

Think critically about your practice: Why would we do this? What fundamental and natural connection can you make on your own? What do you notice about these practices and how they interconnect? How do they develop almost naturally one from the other? 

Please pause momentarily to reflect on these questions; don't just read them. Take them in, noodle on them. Print out this guide and read it before bed. Allow this to sink in. Idea: Set time aside with the person  you want to befriend from group and talk about what you notice.

At this stage, I want to introduce the topic of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual bypassing. This is why we limit intellectual and conceptual discussion in groups and intentionally show up to practice tools and skills to drop out of our heads and get into our bodies. Do you see this connection? Can you see the difference between thinking and conceptualizing and embodied practice? It is entirely possible to put in a lot of intellectual "work" to understand these concepts and ideas and to be completely unable to embody them. In other words, we read a book and acquire this information as a way of escape or to fullfil a sense of curiosity. Then we stop there, we make no shift to embodied practice, and for many people are completely unconscious of this mistake because we “think we have learned something”. In a way, this is one of this work's major cul-de-sacs or traps. But, what is different about embodied and somatic practice is that it constantly invites you to connect with your body, your natural present state of being, the environment in your body, and in the world around you. In other words, genuinely practicing these tools cuts through what you "think" you should do or "might need to do" and shows you in a naked, raw, unfiltered, unconditioned sense what you "can do." and “must listen to”. And what you can do leads to the next thing you can do, and then wowza, you're cooking with gas! Until BAM SMACK! Real life hits you in the face, bringing you back to weeks 1, 2, and 3. But guess what? These tools work. You get better and better at using them to respond from a state of openness. There's a reason in Buddhist practice, these tools are called “the indestructible path”. They invite you to get out of your head, into your body, into your own nervous system which is connected to the ground, your relationships, your work, and your partner, and the natural environment and to communicate with your life in the moment as it is.

Listen to your body! Listen to tension in all forms. It's your protective parts that resist. It's the story in your head from those protective parts that get in the way of showing up fully and completely in your life and relationships. You can trust your Self and you can trust your body. If you are scared or feel you can’t - you were not meant to do this along. That is why this program exists. Find a teacher, mentor, therapist or guide who you feel connected to and enter into practice with them as a mirror to regain your own sense of embodied leadership. That is what we are learning to relax into and to allow to shine through. Learning to feel what your Self feels like, so you can discern your way through. 

In another wonderful work, cutting through spiritual materialism, Chorgym Trunga says working with the body is "so natural it becomes super natural," it opens you to communicate with your life from a place of ultimate creativity. 

And this brings me to that ultimate creativity. This is what we do together in our group and in our 1:1 sessions. We learn to bring our awareness of these trailheads and parts into our container. We then learn how to open up and to be vulnerable and authentic so we can drop-in again to be-with-them. And then, we allow the natural process of the 8 C's & 5 P's of self to do its work: creative, connected, calm, curious, compassionate, courageous, confident, clear; and presence, persistence, perspective, playfulness, and patience. 

We are noticing what our focus areas are in our life, and we are learning to craft embodied stretches that allow us to step into discomfort and practice responding to challenges, tests, and triggers in more empowering ways.

Learning Objective: 

Co-actively craft an embodied stretch(s) by being vulnerable, open, and authentic in the presence of the people in the group to witness and guide you deeper. 

Learn the BASIC method to Befriend, Attend, Shape, Integrate, Connect, and overcome challenges, tests, triggers, and traumas of daily life 

Embodied Practice: 

Design embodied stretches in groups or 1:1 based on your focus areas, trailheads, or protective parts you've come to know. If you feel lost or confused, just relax and go back to what you learned in week 1, 2, 3 - 

relax and seek out sensational moments in your life to find a trailhead, then you’ll have a cue to craft an embodied stretch. 

• Learn how to prime yourself to perform your embodied stretch in the wild natural environment of your life. 

• Find a naturally occurring event that will trigger your embodied stretch automatically. 

• Use the Basic method inside and outside of group to reshape your response to environmental tests and triggers, self-regulate, and co-regulate and take deliberate embodied action that allows you to expand and connect to the world around you.  

• Prime yourself to bring your embodied Self to your edge in the challenge zone in your life, work, and relationships. Your stretch is to notice the somatic sensations happening in or on your body, the story in your head to see how creative, connected, calm, curious, compassionate, courageous, confident, clear; and present, persistence, perspective, playful, and patient you can be with your activated parts. See if you can discover what they need and speak for them, not from them, or take action for them, not from them.

Journal Questions: 

1 . How has your embodied stretch shifted or changed your relationship with what it means to be a leader? 

2. How are your embodied stretches training you to become the primary caretaker for your parts?

3. How are you using co-regulation and self-regulation to allow you to take risks or reshape your nervous system response to challenges? 

4. How have you noticed yourself repressing, suppressing, expressing, or letting go to perform an embodied stretch?

5. How have you used your skills of interoception and shifting your state to perform an embodied stretch?

“Letter To Self” Work Statement & Share Your Experience of Your Stretch In The Community Chat