Finding Comfort And Ease In The Middle Of A Pandemic

We have survived almost one week in lockdown 4 #2.  I hope you are all doing ok and keeping safe and well. 

Whilst in lockdown, it is so important to continue to seek and find comfort wherever we are and whatever is happening around us.  What does this mean to you? Finding comfort. It means scanning your environment and making adjustments to bring more ease eg close the curtains, turn up the heater, put more clothes on, adjust the way you are seated when watching Netflix.  All those minor adjustments to bring more comfort to the way we are in the world.

And every time we scan the environment and move towards comfort, it is helpful to note what it is that we are doing (to name it and note it) so we can then notice the impact on us when we do that and choose to do this again (and again) if it is useful to us.  Otherwise we can tend to get stuck in the opposite - feeling unsafe. 

Wherever we are and whatever we are doing, we are always looking for danger - the automatic survival part of our brain does this - scanning the environment and our bodies response to it for safety, danger and threats to our life. The technical word for is it “neuroception” which comes from Stephen Porges and the polyvagal theory,  describing an unconscious process of responding to the cues in both the world around us and our bodies.

Deb Dana describes neuroception as a ““wordless experiencing”, a deeply subcortical experience far below the realm of conscious thought that activates along a continuum of safety to danger to life threat”.

We are always neurocepting –  it is a survival response. When we perceive the environment we are in and the people we are with as safe, our nervous system can settle into our rest and digest and play modes. When we perceive danger, our nervous system responds by preparing our bodies to mobilise to protect ourselves (either fight or flee responses). If a life threat is perceived, we may go into a freeze response in order to survive. This is all automatic and we don’t choose how we respond.

Right now in this world of a global pandemic, it feels that there is always a slight element of danger. Someone described it to me as feeling like there is always a dark shadow in the room, but not knowing quite how dangerous this shadow is. I thought that was a perfect description.  

What this means is that our neurocepting is telling us that the environment is not safe. And to be perfectly honest, its not! So how do we operate so that we are not constantly in that heightened nervous system ready to respond to danger or life-threat?

We can find comfort wherever we are. We can rewire the brain to find comfort and ease which allows the nervous system to settle – no matter what is happening around us.

Ways we can do this include:

• ritualise the creation of a home sanctuary when doing your yoga, meditation or breathing practices (or any self care practices). Light a candle, shut the door, burn some sage, put your favourite music on – create this home sanctuary for you. Create a safe space for your time with you.

• Find resources that comfort you eg when you enter a space, take the time to orient yourself to the space and place by sitting and looking around you. Really look around you. Find something pleasing to the eye and note how it feels inside as you look at this object/ view.  This is external resourcing.

• Use an Inner Resource – remember a time when you felt comfortable or at ease,  and use the senses to bring felt sense of being in that place alive.  What could you smell there? What did you see? Feel on your skin? Hear? Taste? And note where you felt this in your body and know you can return here at any time using the memory to invoke the feeling in your body.

• Soothing touch – place your hands on a part of your body that invokes tenderness and kindness. And note what this feels like as you do so, the “felt-sense” of being soothed.

• Simply always try to move towards comfort in whatever you are doing. Every time we move towards comfort first NOTICE, then NAME it and then NOTE it (noticing and naming and noting what it is we are doing to move towards comfort) and then we are rewiring the nervous system to find comfort rather than danger (based on the work of Amber Gray).