Pause: Resetting Your Nervous System in Moments of Overwhelm and Sorrow [Pause 65]

This episode was recorded before the July 4th tragedy in Texas and other flooding around the US. May anyone who is grieving have the experience - you aren't alone.

Welcome to another episode of I Thought I Was Over This with Dr. Kimber. In this intimate Pause episode, Dr. Kimber invites listeners into a space of gentle reflection and nervous system reset. Drawing on her own experience of grief—recording on the anniversary of her son's passing—she offers guidance for anyone carrying difficult emotions like sorrow, overwhelm, or disappointment.

Through mindful breathing exercises, sensory awareness, and the wisdom of poets and mystics, Dr. Kimber explores the power of pausing and the healing found in simply being present. She shares practical tools, from centering prayer to journaling, for navigating pain and making space for what is. Whether you’re in need of comfort, or a moment to just catch your breath, this episode provides compassionate companionship and a reminder: you have the capacity to hold whatever life brings. Settle in and allow yourself this pause—you matter, and you’re not alone.

Check out past episodes and more information here: https://www.drkimber.net/podcast-info

Please remember that this podcast is not a replacement for treatment by a healthcare or mental health professional. This content is created for education and entertainment purposes only.

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Book: Still: Making A Whole When Parts Go Missing

Transcript

0:09

I am so glad that we have found each other today. I'm Dr. Kimber, taking you on a journey to help you reset your nervous system. Wherever you find yourself, I just want to invite you in this moment to take the tongue off the roof of your mouth, to soften your eyes, soften your forehead. You may be asking, how do I do that? Well, just notice your eye socket. See if you can soften into that area just by noticing it. When we find ourselves stressed, when our bodies become very efficient because we're not breathing very well, that part of our. Our body gets tense and tight. We may even find ourselves with rounded eyes. Straining can get headaches there. So the invitation today, right now, is to soften that. And in my pause episodes, my goal is to help you reset your nervous system. It's to help you have a redo wherever life finds you. Right now, whatever you're carrying, whatever you're burdened with, you're excited about. This is an invitation to just pause and notice. I'm recording this on my son's death anniversary, I guess you would call it. His name is Baby Long beach, and he was 33 and a half weeks when he died in my womb. And we only got to see him face to face as we said goodbye. And so this episode is just an invitation for those of you who are carrying a lot, carrying grief, maybe you're carrying anger, disappointment, devastation of a different kind. Maybe you're feeling overwhelmed. But this is an invitation to reset. And I was recently reading one of my old sun magazines, which I really, really enjoy, and there was an article by Lynn Castile Harper, who is a specialist in Alzheimer's, and she was describing kind of her process around accepting limitations or creating space right when we have these limitations that we're so profoundly confronted with, with Alzheimer's or dementia. And she says this in the article, and I think it really captures some of the intent of why we pause, why we need to actually create space for nothing. And she says, I've also gravitated toward the Christian mystics who move past the cognitive and into a deeper level of connection with the self, with the universe, with the divine that transcends words. I belong to a tradition that values words, studying the Bible, preaching erudite sermons. But the mystics say that silence is supreme, that the divine is actually met in silence is silence. If we can become more comfortable with absence and even see it as sacred, then I think we can become more comfortable with gaps and absences and loss within ourselves and not see that as a diminished capacity to Relate to the divine. So come in your diminished capacity and settle yourself if you wish, finding a place that's comfortable, sitting, laying down. If you're walking, I want to encourage you to, to notice your pace and play with it. We want to live on the edges of where we haven't been prior to this moment. Living on the edges of. If we're go, go, go. How can you slow down and it kind of feels uncomfortable, or maybe you've been very slow and not have a lot of energy. How can you make your mind in this moment more alert? Pay attention. Ask yourself to really follow along with a new alertness. So I want to invite you, if it feels comfortable, to close your eyes. Everything that I say here is an invitation. You know your body more than I. Of course, we're not even in the same room. So trust what you know rather than what I'm saying or where I'm directing. But let's just make contact with the lovely gift of breath by breathing in and out of our nose. If your nose allows today, there's no need to change your breathing. It's an invitation to just notice it and your mind may wander. And if it is, just bring it back to your breath. And in the same article, we could try a different method. Harper says that there's a practice called centering prayer. And in centering prayer, if our thoughts start to enter when we are having silent moments, like right now, where we're focusing on something, then we bring our mind back to a sacred word. The idea is not to ruminate on that word or make it a prayer, but it's to use the word when the mind becomes distracted, to invite the self back into silence. And so if tracking your breath feels less enticing to you, then have a word. Don't spend too long thinking about one, just grab one. I'll throw some out. Carry hope, Love, real. So as your mind wanders, you can capture that or come back to the sensations of your breath. But the goal in this moment is to focus now on the sensations. And of course, it's normal to wander off. There's no judgment there. And now let's move to the sensations in our chest. Noticing as you're breathing slightly deeper, the in and out of your breath, the moving of up and down. And if it feels good, you can put your hand on your chest. On your heart can be a very grounding experience. Again, keep coming back to the sensation. And now let's move to the belly, noticing your belly button moving away from your spine. And as you exhale it coming back into your spine. So just play with it as you have this deeper breath. Sometimes if we've been breathing very shallowly, we can get a little light headed. So be gentle. No need to really speed it up. Unless you're really falling asleep, you can use that as a tactic of speeding it up. Just know you might get a little dizzy, so make sure you are sitting down or lying down. Just notice your breath in and out of your belly. Continue to take the tongue off the roof of your mouth. And now we're going to play with our senses. I invite you to notice the sound closest to you can often be your breath. And again, no need to get it exactly right. This is all about practicing redirecting your mind. And now the sound farthest away. And if you have both ears covered, maybe take that device out of an ear so that you can hear something other than me. And now let's notice the taste. What taste is lingering in your mouth. And again, I encourage you to notice it without evaluation. No question of, ooh, do I like that? Ooh, I don't like that. Like, just allow it to be. It's such a good practice just noticing what is without needing it to be different. And now noticing touch, noticing fabrics against your skin, noticing the temperature in the room, noticing the temperature of your body. And maybe in this moment, as you're coming into your body, you're noticing if you're hot or if you're cold and your body's wanting to make an adjustment. And I encourage you just in this moment to hold on, live a bit in that discomfort. Now that it's come online, let's just tolerate it a little bit, right? As long as we're not putting your body in danger. As we move to the smell, what smell do you notice? And whether your eyes are open or closed, you can notice visually what's, what's a close thing to you. Even if your eyes are closed, just notice colors or shapes behind those eyelids. Lids. Or if your eyes are open, what are you picking up now? What do you notice? And then looking farthest away, if your eyes are closed, just keep looking in what's new behind these eyelids at the same time that you're softening software softening our eyes can carry so much. And so now if you would like to go to adjust, maybe you're hot, maybe you're cold. I just encourage you take, you know, be loving by doing what, you know, grabbing that blanket or shedding that layer, that would help you feel more comfortable. I'm going to read you another poem. But I do want to. I'm going to make a comment about eyes. The boys have been gone and I've been home by myself. And sometimes it's hard for me to sleep, especially this time of year when I'm recording. There's. I live on a place where lots of fireworks go off pretty much up until midnight. And you know, these sometimes are big and so my body can have a hard time settling. And I love a weighted eye mask. It really just. It tells my whole system. Ah yes, there's lots going on. But right now, oh, now you can rest, you can settle. You even if there's unexpected noises outside. And it just is a very lovely. You know, if any of you are struggling with insomnia, just notice, you know, notice if you have a different eye mask. Some are really weighted, you know, are heavier than others. And if I'm not home by myself or struggling to sleep, I actually need an eye mask that doesn't have any weight. It's too over stimulating. I guess you would say something. The weight of it just actually doesn't. Does not help. So no, I have, you know, I have a couple eye masks and. And want to encourage you to play with that too. So in a stim light of kind of again holding. Holding grief right now and sharing that, creating space for you in this moment to touch into your grief. There is a poem, Ada Limon, who I love in her book the Carrying. She has a poem called Instructions on Not Giving Up. I'm going to read it twice to you and just see if something lands shimmers. Instructions on not giving up. More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crab apple tree. More than the neighbors almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy colored blossoms to the slate sky of spring rains. It's the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy the world's baubles and trinkets leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath. The leaves come patient plodding, A green skin growing over whatever winter did to us. A return to the strangest idea of continuous living despite the mess of us. The hurt, the empty. Fine then, I'll take it. The tree seems to say. A new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm. I'll take it all. Instructions on not giving up. More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crab apple tree. More than the neighbor's almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy Colored blossoms to the slate sky of spring rains. It's the greening of the trees that really gets to me when all the shock of white and taffy the world's baubles and trinkets leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath the leaves come, patient, plodding, A greenskin growing over whatever winter did to us A return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then I'll take it, the tree seems to say A new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm. Take it all. I'll take it, the tree seems to say A new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm I'll take it all. And is there a part of you that can capture that, that can believe that? I'll take it all, I'll take it all. That's what I had to learn in my grief, in my despair, as I had a three and a half year old who of course didn't understand the permanence of her brother not coming home. And she needed a mother who could comfort her, who could be with her, who could play with her. And there was a way of just coming into being held by so many people, not just myself, but my therapist and my dear, dear friends. And somehow I found my way through that winter that came upon us in the summer of 2006. And partly that's why I'm here with you right now. The gift that my son gave me, baby Long beach gave me was that the only moment that I know I have in the future is the one right now. So I'm so glad that you're here, that you're giving this gift to you. To feel, to slow down the treadmill of life can just distract us from feelings. And so if you have something difficult that you are needing to process, I just invite you to just stay in this space. Allow the words to come. There's some really cool research around journaling and that there's something very profound about journaling the negative emotions. There's something unprecedented about that, that when we're in lament or when we're grieving, when we're in anger, there's something about untangling it on the page. It can be very, very helpful. And interestingly enough, the opposite is true for positive. If we journal about the positive can diminish the experience, actually. And the way they make sense of that is that we have something to work out on the page. We have something to untangle inside of us. With these negative experiences. We have to integrate them. We can't jump to the end when we are in negative feelings. We can't jump to the end and pretend what happened didn't happen. Or what I'm feeling isn't what I should be feeling and just pretend. We can't do that and find maturity and find growth. So here we are together. And if you can stay, stay with yourself. Stay with the feelings you have, the capacity. I believe in you. You are a sacred being and you matter. It's been so lovely to be with you. Take care, Sam.