Somatic Meditation and Practice to Come Back to Center and Self

What if the answer isn't thinking harder?

So many women are trying to think their way through emotions, anxiety, overwhelm, conflict, and stress. But what if your body already knows something your mind can't access?

In this guided somatic episode, I walk you through a simple body scanning practice designed to help you reconnect with yourself, regulate your nervous system, and come back to the present moment.

Whether you're feeling overstimulated by motherhood, stuck in a spiral of overthinking, struggling with a difficult conversation, or simply feeling disconnected from yourself, this practice offers a way back home to your body.

Inside this episode, we'll explore:

•  What body scanning is and why it works 
•  How to move from stories into sensations 
•  The difference between present-moment feelings and historical reactions 
•  Why your body may be responding to patterns instead of what's actually happening 
•  How to create more capacity for emotions without fixing, judging, or suppressing them 
•  Practical ways to support yourself through overwhelm, anxiety, and activation 

Because healing isn't always about finding the right answer.

Sometimes it's about learning to listen to the wisdom that already exists inside your body.

Click here for working 1:1 with Becca on nervous system regulation, building capacity, and support. 

If you’re ready to stop living on autopilot and start leading your life with deep presence, I’d love to work with you. Book a free interest call here: Click Here

💌 Want more? Follow me on Instagram @themotherhoodmentor for somatic tools, nervous system support, and real-talk on high-functioning burnout, ambition, healing perfectionism, and motherhood. And also pretty epic meme drops. 

🎧  Did you love this episode? Be sure to follow and please take a quick moment to leave a review and send this episode to a friend. I'd love to hear from you on how this podcast impacted you, send me a DM or an email. 

Transcript

Somatic Body Scanning Practice

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. I'm Becca, a holistic life coach, mom of two, wife, and business owner. This is a podcast where we will have conversations and coaching around all things strategy and healing that supports both who you are and what you do. So grab your iced coffee or whatever weird health beverage you are currently into and let's do the damn thing. Somatic practices are a way that we can start to be in our body in a new way. We can learn to start feeling more grounded, centered, present, learning to feel into ourselves and coming back into the present moment so that we can practice moving and being in a different way that we maybe haven't had access to or haven't felt the choice or the ability to. And today the practice we're going to do is a centering practice. You can do this standing up, you can do it sitting down. A reminder that somatic practices, especially the way that I'm leading them, can often be very relaxing and soothing. They can feel a little bit meditative. And so they're not necessarily great for the first time you practice them, the first time you're listening to this, to be distracted. So to be driving or doing something. So I encourage you, especially the first time you practice this centering, to just do it while you're standing in the kitchen. Do it before you wash your face. Do it right when you wake up in the morning. One of the ways that I've started using this is just noticing during the day when I feel off-centered, when I've kind of disassociated from myself, or, you know, I'm dealing with the kids and they're kind of overwhelming or overstimulating me, or, you know, I'm in conflict or I need to set a boundary. And I just, I feel off-centered. I feel like I've been grabbed or pulled or pushed, and I just I can't find my center of gravity. This is a great time to do this practice. And what's so beautiful about these practical somatic embodied movements is that they're available to you anytime. They don't require a ton of time. They aren't hard. In fact, it it only takes a moment to feel so much better, to feel capacity and room in your body to move through the day. The somatic practice of body scanning. Body scanning is a great way to check in to yourself in a very embodied grounded way. When you are feeling flooded by something, or you might feel a little bit numb or disassociated, or you're feeling overwhelmed. Body scanning is a great way to get you back into the present, into your capacity to be able to feel and move from your values. For body scanning, I like to get comfortable. So for a moment, see if you can just get comfortable. If you can be sitting where you can lean back on something, if your neck and your shoulders are tired, find a pillow to put behind your neck and shoulders so that you can just let yourself be held. So take a moment and just let yourself feel being held by the ground, by the chair, by the bed, by the pillow. Feel gravity holding your body and see if you can release your body's holding of itself, letting all of your weight fall onto the thing that holds you. From this place, starting at the tip of your head, of your skin on your scalp. Feel and notice your scalp. From your scalp, noticing your head, your mind. Maybe it's tired from feeling like it has to carry the weight of the responsibility of the rest of the body. Can you feel tension in your forehead? Feel the back of your head and your skull and the spaciousness. Your eyes and your eyebrows. Feeling into behind the eyes.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Your sinuses. Your jaw. Your mouth.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Feeling to the back of your skull where it connects to your spine.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

And feeling into the neck, the muscles of the neck, the bones of the neck. Noticing your throat, the front of your throat, the inside.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Does it feel tight?

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Does it feel open? Is it tense with bracing?

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Just notice it. Relate to it. Nurture it. Maybe it needs a drink of water. Maybe you need to move it from side to side or stretch it. Feeling down into your shoulders, into your muscles. Feeling into the back of your shoulders and the fronts of your shoulders. Are your shoulders caved in and tense? Are they relaxed and hanging? You can tense your shoulders up all the way up to your ears. Hold them and feel that tension. And then see if they can drop. Wiggle and move around and see if you can get them to a place where your shoulders can feel that they don't have to hold themselves up anymore. Scanning down into your arms, feeling the bones, the muscles, the skin.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

The ability to move, to touch, to hold.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

The ability to make a fist, to fight. Feeling the tension, feeling the ease.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Maybe there's tingliness. Feeling down into your shoulders, the backs of your shoulders, to your chest, to your lungs. Feeling the full widescape of your rib cage.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

And here in your chest, feeling the front and the back and side to side. Feeling into the whole capacity, the width and the depth of your body, feeling down into your stomach, the inside, your organs, all of your vital organs that keep you alive, that keep you healthy, that digest your food, that give you butterflies, feeling into your belly, your skin, the fat that keeps you warm and soft, the abs, the core muscles all around your core and your pelvis that keep you upright, that give you balance.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Feeling into your hips and your glutes.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Noticing the full spine from top to bottom. Noticing how sturdy and strong it is, and yet how flexible it is. How it can bend and twist and move.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

It is sturdy not just in stillness, but in motion. Feeling down into your hips, your pelvis. Feeling internally.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Noticing if you are bracing in your pelvis or if you are relaxed. What sensations do you notice in your pelvis? Is there awareness and life and blood moving through the area? Can you feel desire or a no that comes from there? Feeling into your femur, your big bones, your sturdiness, the strength in your thighs, your knees, your kneecaps, your shins, your calves, your ankle bones, all the way down to your feet and to your toes. Wiggling your toes. And as you feel your body, as you are connected with your body, notice any areas that are bracing that have tension.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

And bring your awareness to it. What is that part of you holding? Maybe it knows something. Maybe it needs something. Maybe it has something to say.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Does it need more pressure or less? Does it need more pressure, like a massage, to help work the kinks out? Does it need less pressure where it needs to be held by something else in your body? Are your shoulders tensing and tight because you need to be able to feel your backbone that holds them without them having to work so hard? Are your eyes and your brain so tired because you are not using and feeling the strength and the wisdom that is in your gut and in your pelvis? Is your heart heavy because it has to feel everything instead of letting it move through your whole body?

SPEAKER_00 12:53

See if you can just be with the sensations that come up.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Body scanning can be so helpful, especially when we're feeling really big emotions. Noticing where you feel it, and paying attention to the sensation of what you are feeling instead of the story. The story often comes from our minds, our cognition, our thinking. But what happens is we get stuck trying to think our way through something that isn't always cognitive or logical. If it feels hysterical, it's often historical. If it feels bigger than what feels than what you logically know is appropriate, your reaction may not be to the present. It's likely coming from past or expected threat. And what has happened is that we have lost our language for this in our culture. We have lost our wisdom that knows from the neck down. Our ability to relate to our emotion, to our sensation, to our humanity, and even to our animal bodies. So, what would it look like the next time you feel something big or you get triggered, or you feel emotional, and you come to your body, and you notice instead of the story of what you're feeling, and even needing a label for it, a name for it, trying to find a probable cause, or jumping right immediately into fixing it, to helping it, to healing it, to making it go away? It's so much simpler when we can move to where am I feeling that? Is it in your chest? Is it in your shoulders? Is it in your head? Is it in your stomach? Is it in your throat? Does it feel high energy or low energy? Does it want to come up and out? Does it want to go down and low? Is it light?

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Is it heavy? Is it buzzy?

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Is it like trying to run, but you're running through mud?

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Is it tight and constrictive, or is it open and expansive? If it had a color, what color would it be?

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Is it fast? Is it slow? Is it tingly like butterflies, or is it buzzy like bees? And as you feel it, what does it want to do? How does that sensation want to move in you and through you? Does it move from your chest to your throat and it wants to come up and out of your mouth, but you just can't find the words to say? Does it start in your chest and then it moves to your arms, and you find yourself wanting to make a fist and a face? Allow that sensation to metabolize through and in your body. Notice its wisdom. Get curious about what it's telling you or showing you. What is your relationship to this sensation? Notice the stories and the overcouplings that come up. Notice how you feel about it. Notice that this is not you. It is an experience that you are having. It is a sensation that you are feeling, and in the next moment you might feel something different. See if you can watch it and notice it without over-identifying with it. See if you can be curious about it without having to have answers for why it's there or what purpose it holds. Anytime a sensation is too much and it's in your chest, see if you can find a place of you that feels neutral, that feels at ease, that feels present or grounded. So if you feel yourself starting to yell, and you feel it in your throat, and you feel it in your chest and in your head, check into your toes, check into your elbows, feel your shoulder blades and your backbone, and feel into the capacity of your body to hold that sensation. It cannot be stronger than you, it is you. See if you can resource within yourself capacity for this thing, and also remember that we are relational animals, we are relational beings, and so often we need other people to hold us, we need other things to hold us. So go outside and let the sun hold it. Bring a pillow to your stomach and hold it. Wrap yourself in a weighted blanket. Give yourself a cold or a hot drink. Put yourself in a bath or in the shower. And then see if that thing can give you capacity to feel what's inside of you by supporting what's outside of you. Part of self-regulating is knowing that you don't always have to do it by yourself. You have internal resources, yes, always. But you also have external resources.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

There are people who want to help you, who would love to help you.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Feel into the resource within yourself to be able to hold this.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Feel within your resource outside of you that can hold this with you, that can hold you so that you have capacity to hold this feeling.

Embracing Present Moment Awareness

SPEAKER_01 21:14

Trying to justify or validate why you feel what you feel instead of just letting yourself tell the truth about what you're experiencing and the sensation of it. Our emotion, our feelings, our sensation, all of it is just energy moving in us and through us. It's the energy that moves us to act. It's the energy that moves us to relate, to draw close to other people. It's the energy to push harmful people or scenarios away from us. It's the energy to run, to lift, to dance, to Have sex, it's this is all just raw energy. And when we move into needing a story or needing to validate, we separate ourselves from our humanity, we separate ourselves from our human experience of being embodied and relating to ourselves and to other people. We lose touch with what and who we are. We lose touch to where we are. When you are working through emotions, when you are triggered, so often, what a trigger even means, what people are talking about is that you are having a response to someone or something that doesn't feel it feels overly or underly appropriate for the scenario. You can feel that your reaction to the thing doesn't necessarily match the severity of the thing happening. You can feel that your body is not relating to the present, it's relating to the past. And this is one of the most powerful things in somatics is starting to notice when your body is feeling something in the present moment, or when your body is remembering something it did feel. Your body is remembering and responding and acting to a pattern, not the present moment, not the present person, not the present relationship, but a pattern from a past one. When you are doing body scans, it's so helpful and supportive to notice when you're feeling and noticing something that is historical or is a perceived threat. It's a perceived, it's an emotion that's not coming from the present, it's coming from a perceived story of what will happen or what won't happen in the future. When we are feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated, I find that so often women are trying to think, feel, and act in all three planes of time. They are feeling in the past, they are thinking in the future, and they're constantly acting out of the past or the future, never in the present, never centered, not in the room. And one of the reasons I love this body scanning, this tuning into the sensation and tuning into yourself, and even just noticing the room that you're in, noticing what time it is, what day it is, how old you are, noticing what you're doing and who you're doing it for is it brings us back to this place where we are not in the past, we're not in the future, we're here, right here in the present. And right here in the present, your body has capacity to feel what it's feeling because it's not trying to feel everything today and from yesterday and from the future. It's just this right here. You get to be in the room that you're in, you get to focus on the task that you're doing. And listen, we have brains, we have bodies, we have a soma that is consistently interacting with the past and the future. But start to use the past and the future as information, as supportiveness, not shame, not anxiety, not fact. Right? The only, the only perception we have that's fully accurate is in the present. Because even in the past, what you know now, you didn't know it back then. So the accuracy is going to change your feelings, your sensations, they're real and they're valid and they hold so much energy and wisdom and capacity for you.

Creating Capacity Through Body Scanning

SPEAKER_01 26:27

So when we body scan, we're creating capacity for what we're experiencing. We're creating capacity for emotion to move through us so that we can lock into the wisdom of it, to the energy of it, to what we know and how we need to move from that centered place. We're not just looking outside of ourselves for information, which is powerful. We need to look outside of ourselves for information and be curious and learn and adapt. But we also need to be aware of and feel ourselves. So I hope this practice will serve you. And I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for hanging out today on the Motherhood Mentor Podcast. If you love today's episode, share it with a friend or tag me in your stories on Instagram so that we can connect. Take up audacious space in your life, and I'll see you next time.