Pause: Grounding to Find Calm And a Reset [Pause 68]

This episode invites you to take a much-needed break from the hustle and stress of everyday life. As a licensed clinical psychologist and somatic experiencing practitioner, Dr. Kimber gently guides you through simple yet powerful grounding techniques—like relaxing your jaw, softening your gaze, and paying attention to the small details around you—to help release the tension your body unconsciously carries.

Through thoughtful insights and calming breathing exercises, Dr. Kimber shows you how just a few mindful tweaks can reset your nervous systems and reconnect you to the present moment. Whether you’re at home, running errands, or feeling overwhelmed after a challenging day, this episode offers accessible tools for finding ease, cultivating self-awareness, and bringing a sense of calm back into your life. 

Settle in, get comfortable, and join Dr. Kimber for a restorative pause you didn’t know you needed.

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

0:00

Foreign welcome to I thought I was over this pause where we get grounded and regulated and I help you reset no matter what is happening in your day. I am Dr. Kimber Del Vallier. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I am a somatic experiencing practitioner and more. More importantly, I am someone who believes I can help you change your life by changing just some tweaks and how you're showing up without really adding much to your life. Now, of course, you're listening to this podcast, which is in addition. But let me tell you, if we can build your awareness of your stress, that is holding, holding, that is staying in your body, we can do a lot for you. We can make a lot of progress in a very short amount of time. One of the tips that I have is take the tongue off the roof of your mouth and create a slight gap between your top teeth and your bottom teeth. We hold a lot of tension in our jaws. So in this moment, I'd invite you to just lightly massage your jaw. Just giving it a little bit of love. Again, you do not have to do deep tissue in this moment. Let's just give it some light love. And the thing about your tongue being up against the roof of your mouth, it is very natural to put your tongue up there. But when we are distressed, when we're distracted, when we're stressed out, we like slam it up there. It's as if it's permanently glued to the roof of our mouth and we're sending signals of distress from the bottom of our brain stem all the way down into our gut through the vagus nerve, saying, hey, distress, distress. And what's cool is if you catch yourself throughout the day and just relax your tongue, it helps you. It helps your system be a little more grounded. Because when we have distress, it filters everything. We suddenly go from enjoyment and noticing the birds in the sky, maybe listening to people's voices, just the tone. We go from being present to then suddenly noticing the tone of voice in a more threatening way. Like we hear neutral tones as more threatening, more aggressive. What we pick up on people's faces as a neutral face can become more angry. And what we know in the social psychology research is that when we are filtering with some threat response inside of us, when we are activated in fight or flight, a face that actually is showing fear is then showing anger. Right? If you're gonna have some activation, you are going to misinterpret facial expressions. And so it's a massive deal if we don't have awareness of, ah, my body is distressed. Right now. So what am I filtering? How am I filtering it? And is it really true? Am I really picking up things accurately? And other social science research will say, oh, we all overestimate. We overestimate our rightness, our certainty, our intuition. So it's just. It's something to keep in mind. And it's humbling. It's humbling. Our brain is very efficient, very effective. And so we have lots of shortcuts that it tries to do. And if we do not have awareness of them, well, then we develop a lot of patterns and we can view the world as less connecting than it actually is. So I am passionate about grounding ourselves. And we can ground ourselves. I talk about this often. You're rushing in, running an errand. If for those of you who actually run errands nowadays, right? Just noticing what's green around you. If the sun is shining, can you feel it on your body as you're walking from your car to the store where you're running your errand? What happens when you take the tongue off the roof of your mouth, when you soften your eye gaze? What happens as you take in that sun? Maybe you notice the sounds of the birds or see a bird or notice the color of the pavement even, right? We got lots of different shades of gray or black. Do you notice that? What happens to your body as you take in more of these details? And in my life, as I have taken in more of the details, well, I have found a lot more connection, a lot more friendly faces, a lot less shallow breathing on my part, a lot less forehead, brow scrunching. And by the end of the day, I'm not just crashing because when we are in distress all day long, well, we're gonna. That cortisol is gonna run out. The tent muscle tension is gonna give way and we're gonna crash. So one of the ideas is let's give you mini breaks throughout the day, and that helps you. So just remembering to take the tongue off the roof of your mouth, softening your eyes. And I learned this from Twig, who is a somatic experiencing body worker. He also taught me that you soften your hands because when our hands are gripped, we're again sending signals to our body that we're distressed. So when you're driving, soften your hands. See if you have way more room for those people who cut you off, those people who aren't very communal as they drive. Can you be less distressed? Can you be less pulled in? I rarely honk my horn, even though I live in the Los Angeles area. Instead, if someone's on their phone at a light and they're not going, I blink the lights. Why do I do that? I do that for my nervous system. My nervous system doesn't like loud noises any more than me honking at someone. So what are some ways that we can more gently communicate to our fellow community members, our neighbors, in a way that helps both of us? So today I want to continue to invite you to find easy ease in your body by finding a quiet place, a comfortable place. We're going to practice some silence because when we can quiet our mind, we have something to compare it to. When we're going about our day and it's busy and it's hectic. The idea that we want to have when we're training our mind is we know we need to have some discrepancies. So when I'm going, going, going all day long, it's very hard to capture quiet. And yet I can. I can make quiet. I've been doing it. I'm somebody who was on the hamster wheel for a very long time. And then I had a massive loss in my life. And it kind of. It. It took, didn't kind of. It took everything out of me. And so I learned how to be quiet. I learned how to be slowed down. And it has changed everything in the quality of my life currently. So as you have found your way to that comfortable place, I'd like you to notice your sits bones. This is your pelvic area that is really grounded our butt. Just notice the weight of your body. If you are standing, notice the weight, your body weight on your feet and just see what happens. If you can settle just noticing the weight, see if you can subtly relax just those muscles that are used to holding you up. If you have something that you're leaning against, notice the support that that's offering you whether you're standing or sitting. I invite you to just notice. Imagine a string pulling you up into the sk. Into the heavens, and another string pulling you down into the core of the earth. And see if you can get just a little taller. Find a little more space for your spine. You can even play around with your chin, moving it a little bit up, tucking it down, and just seeing what feels so kind of just right. I like to move my shoulders up into my ears and then relax them by bringing them back and down. A lot of us hold our tension in the shoulders. Again, take the tongue off the roof of your mouth. If it has found its way there, then soften your eyes. If it feels comfortable to you. I invite you to close your eyes. This is not a requirement. If you want to keep your eyes open, then I invite you to have a soft gaze. That means you are not looking at the details in front of you. And it's often helpful to just have that 45 degree gaze down on the ground. When we are picking up details, it's, it's, it's activating our system, saying, hey, it's not all safe here. And we just want to communicate in this moment now, I am safe. And, and I don't even mean like from something exaggerative, like, no, safe from intrusion, that right now you're all here, all, all present. You're just inviting your nervous system to stop whatever it was doing before and getting present now and then just see what happens. If you put a hand on your chest and a hand on your diaphragm, your belly, and play around which hand feels good, one place versus the other. In some of the research that Dr. Dan Siegel has done, he says that usually people have a dominant hand that likes to be on your chest, one on your, on your belly. So just play with it. But then see what happens. As you inhale, see if you can make that belly button go out away from the spine, and then as you exhale, see if you can bring it back in. We're just inviting a deeper breath. And often when we do a deeper breath, we are just engaging that parasympathetic nervous system which is, allows our body to kind of rest. So one of the counts I love is a four count in and a six count out, because it's, to me, it's very easy to do. And then as you warm your body up with that four count in, six count out, see if you can progress to the eight count out. And it might feel a little less comfortable. So don't strain. You're just on the edge of comfortability. Expanding the fascia that's around your lungs, possibly just inviting something deeper. And if your mind is wandering, just bring it back, bring it back to the count. And now as you exhale out, I like to make some sounds. So the first sound I invite you to make is the S, like a snake. S for eight counts. So inhale through your nose if your nose allows it, and then exhale, making the S sound again. Four counts in, eight counts out. Just take your time. All of this is an invitation. You know your body best. I obviously am not there in person. So you just recognize what works for you right now in this moment and finish that One up. And then we're going to make the sh sound. The ship. And then let's make the ah sound. The ah sound, like we used to do with the Doctor, and keep that jaw softened. And then the oo. The oo sound. O. So a little more rounded in the lips. And finally, one of my favorites that I learned from Dr. Peter Levine is the VUE breath, which is the sound of a ship. I'm sorry, the sound of a lighthouse bringing a ship safely into shore. And the thing, why he calls it a vu breath is you're making a V sound with your lips, and then you're pushing the air to the back of your throat with the oo sound. And the thing that I love about this is you're really vibrating all of your organs, which sends a message to your nervous system. I'm safe. So you take an inhale, and then on the exhale, you bring your lips together in that V sound, like maybe you did when you were a child pushing a car. Vroom. You know, and then you're going to bring the air to the back of your throat so it sounds like this. Let's inhale V. V. And I really soften my tongue as I'm doing it. Let's do it again, one more time. In a common beginner error is that you are not loud enough. So I challenge you, increase the volume and then just let it settle again, keeping the tongue off the roof of your mouth. So I want to do an extended period of quiet, of silence. And one of the ways that you do that is that you find something to focus on. And I like using the breath simply because it's. You're. You're going to be breathing. It's automatic. You don't have to think about it. And the idea is, as you have thoughts, you have the thoughts go on. You notice you're thinking about thoughts instead of noticing your breath, and then you come back to your breath. If you have a clock that makes noise, you can also use something that's consistent. That also is something you. Yeah. Something your mind can focus on. The thing about it is you need something that is boring. So if you're listening to noise, but it's not constant, then your mind is going to automatically be trying to anticipate or noticing the nuance. So you need something actually that's very boring and your breath. Focusing on your breath is actually boring if you don't evaluate it and you just notice the inhale and the exhale. So I invite you to keep in that comfortable position. Maybe Making some adjustments, and then let's spend five minutes noticing your breath or noticing that constant sound. And again, the idea here, it's going to be very tempting to cut me off. It's boring in this day of phones and apps and really so much intrusion. And I don't mean that even negatively, so maybe it's a better word, is interruption. Interruption. See, your mind loves the surprise of a text. It loves the surprise of a notification. And right now we're trying to clear all of that out. All of it out, as you invite yourself to be present in this moment. Bored. We've got to keep anchoring ourselves in silence in boredom. It changes everything. We need to invite our children to do this, too. We already know our phones are making us highly distracted, which makes us less creative, less resilient, really less able to tolerate when we can't figure something out instantly. So time starts now. Follow your breath. If it's hard for you, just stick to your nose, noticing the air going in and out of your nostrils. Keep coming back to your breath. If your mind has wandered, bring it back. Keep coming back. It. Don't give up. Keep coming back to your breath. If it helps, put your hand on your chest or your belly. Okay, just check in. Let's end our time with a four count. Inhale, an eight count. Exhale. I'll count again. You know your body, so adjust it as you need to, but let's inhale. 2, 3, 4. Exhale. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 8. Recommend putting your hand on your belly. Make sure it's going deep. Inhale, two, three, four. Exhale. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Last one. Inhale, two, 3, 4. Exhale. Two, three, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And then breathe normally. Well, it has been a joy to be with you. I'm so grateful that you're here. Thank you for taking me along. If you are not on my email list and you want to hear about events, because I do do retreats. I have a weekly group where we practice getting grounded. You can sign up on my website. D R K I M B E R N E T. That's N as in Nancy. E as in elephant. T as in tiger. Be well. You matter and you are a sacred being. Until next time.