Ep 5: Why HSPs NEED Embodiment Practices

If you're a highly sensitive person who's spent years in talk therapy and still can't shake the 2am spirals, the dread in your chest, the sense that you understand everything and yet nothing's actually changed, this episode is for you.

In this week's episode, I'm sharing why talk therapy alone often isn't enough for HSPs, and what embodiment practices do differently. I'll walk you through my own journey with somatic healing, the research behind why our nervous systems process things so much more deeply, and the practices that have genuinely shifted things for me and my clients.

Tune in to learn:

• Why talk therapy can leave HSPs feeling insightful yet still stuck
• The nervous system science behind why our anxiety is sensory and emotional, not just thought-driven
• What a "bottom-up" approach to healing actually means, and why it works when talking doesn't
• My top embodiment practices for HSPs, from somatic touch to dance to yoga
• How breathwork sends your vagus nerve a message of safety

Check out the blog post that accompanies this episode: [BLOG POST URL]

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, and today we're going to be discussing why embodiment practices are so important in your healing if you are somebody who is highly sensitive. Hi, and welcome to Awaken or More. My name is Rachel, and I teach highly sensitive high achievers to step into lives of peace, power, and purpose so they can finally start living a life that feels like. So I want to start this episode off by saying wholeheartedly that I am not anti-therapy. But as somebody who is a highly sensitive person and has done a lot of talk therapy in my life, I really do think that when we do talk therapy in total isolation and we don't include embodiment practices, we really do prevent ourselves or healing ourselves because so many of us have stayed in these patterns throughout our lives. We've repeated them, we've done all the work, we've got all the journaling, we've done all the self-help books, we've gone to all the therapy, still feel the same. And I think what it's important to understand is that we cannot actually get to a place where we feel confident, we feel that we have great self-worth, we feel that we can kind of take those risks in life, especially if we're highly sensitive, unless we feel safety within the body because talk therapy alone, although great, bypasses the cues that our body tells us about what is going on, and our body is often the first to speak before the mind or our voice can. And when the body and the mind are out of whack, we aren't gonna get to a place of stability. I wouldn't say that, like, it's great to just work with the mind or it's great to just work with the body. I think that it's about kind of meeting with them both, especially if you're highly sensitive, because we are really active in our upward-flowing energy, and we do have a really uh active mind, so it's important to bring ourselves back into the body, but we do also need to shift limiting beliefs. So I want to really go into today's episode and explore what embodiment practices are best for you if you're highly sensitive. And these are ones that I've used on my own healing journey and that I do through my one-to-one coaching with my clients and in my group programmes. If you've never heard of this word embodiment practices, you might have heard of the word somatic movement, which it also incorporates embodiment practices, and this is feeling into the body the sensation of the body in full attention. So doing something with full attention to the body and using the body to kind of also express how you're feeling and to regulate the nervous system. So there are lots of different practices that you can do. This is called a bottom-up approach. So we're working with the body first and then the mind follows rather than traditional modes of therapy and healing, which have kind of brought I can think my way to feeling safe. So when we talk about embodiment practices, there are some ones that I really enjoy, and I'm gonna share them with you today. So the most probably the most heard of one is sort of breath work, and breath work is a beautiful skill that you can develop, and it doesn't need to be complex, it can literally be sitting with your breath and noticing it in a somatic way. That means really noticing the sensation of the breath within the body, becoming aware of the physical sensations. So some help to regulate and bring you into that state of calm. I'm talking about that state of calm, I'm still talking about activating the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, which is our rest and digest state. So this is where we want to be. When we want to feel calm and we don't want to feel agitated and alert, often we find ourselves in these fight or flight states because of the natural stresses of modern-day living. We look at an email from a work colleague, and it's not simply an email, it's like a tiger is literally coming to chase us, or that we're literally at death's door. And I think that when we can kind of bring ourselves into that more regulated state, we help to tone our vagus nerve, which is the body's main pathway to calm, and we help to bring ourselves into a more clear state of being, both mentally and within the body. So breath work can be fantastic for that, but it can also be a great tool if you're somebody who finds that they are in freeze a lot, and that's when we kind of shut down and we isolate and we feel kind of like sluggish. And this is kind of where people who are depressed kind of go as well, and that's a more extreme version of it. I actually do a great course on inside timer, which is beginner's breath work, which takes you through a range of breathwork techniques that you can do from ones that regulate to ones that are more activating. The breath is such an easy thing to tap into, it's with us constantly. So just remembering that you have the power within you to take control of your state really gives you that autonomy over how you show up in the here and now. If you're somebody who is quite anxious, um, for a lot of highly sensitive people, this can be something that we often find ourselves looping throughout our lives. And there's nothing wrong with you, it is actually wiring. One of the ways, rather, that I've really found really helpful is connecting with nature as an embodiment practice because not only does nature take us away from our busy minds and into the sensory experience of calm, your mind and your state of being will reflect your your surroundings if you're highly sensitive. So if you're in a busy, chaotic environment, or more often than not, you are going to feel that inside because you absorb so much more than others. So I would really start to think about when you can take time in nature to regulate yourself. That might be a short walk, that might simply be visualizing nature if you can't get to it. I know that I did that for a long time when I was living in a busy city, but I also think that nature has a lot to teach us. And if you are somebody who's familiar with Taoism, um, I do share kind of this weave throughout my teachings as well. Like this is this idea of like nature kind of guiding us in life, and we can look towards nature as a sort of influence on how we can live our lives. You know, nature doesn't hurry, it waits for things to unfold and it doesn't grasp and cling to things. And when we're anxious, we're grasping and clinging to the future. So looking for inspiration in nature and trying to embody that in your own self can be a really powerful tool for calming anxiety and connecting with something greater than yourself as well. As a highly sensitive person, one of my absolute favourite things to do is to move my body, and some people can kind of just go through their day, like, yeah, I don't really need movement. It's take it or leave it, I can just sit on the sofa and I'll be fine after work. But like for me, movement of some kind and most likely free movement is just so helpful for my mental state. And I know that you know, we advocate, you know, exercise, getting out there, running, and these are all great, but just think about what state you're in when you actually do that, because if you're in a sort of agitated state, you might not need to be more pumped up from running, you might benefit from doing something a little bit more calming. And one of the most fantastic um embodiment practices that I actually teach in my one-to-one coaching is something called mindful movement, which is something that Tichnahan, a Vietnamese monk who lived in Plum Village, he died a couple of years ago. I think it was like 2022 or 2023. Um, such an amazing person who brought modern mindfulness over to the West. And he did mindful movement, and what this does is this really gets us to synchronize our movement with our breath. And by this, we actually start to notice the things we don't notice. Like how much do we go through life kind of moving our body, not actually noticing we're moving our body, and that by that we can really come into the present moment and tap into that sense of what is going on throughout the body. And you can do this through mindful walking as well, which is a beautiful practice that helps shift you from do-do-do autopilot when we're walking on our phones, listening to everything, into hmm, I'm actually being right now. And these are really simple, there's nothing like groundbreakingly like new about these. So it's not about putting a thousand things in our routine and hoping that that will solve the problem, it's about picking one or two and really doing them well and doing them consistently, which builds results completely over time because everything is a practice. When I was younger, I absolutely was. I went to this like performing art school, going off topic a little bit here. I was, you know, quite a shy, introverted teenager in my early years. Um, and I absolutely did not want to perform or dance, hated it, absolutely hated it, would do everything I could to do, get out of it. Um, ultimate dread feeling. I felt like literally something was the worst thing was gonna happen if I got up on stage. Um, and that's kind of changed a lot now. Um, and I think now I'm older, I've learned to sort of tap into how much I actually enjoy being creative through dance and how much like dancing gives me such untapped joy because when you're dancing, you have no choice but to be in the moment with the rhythm of the music and your body, and it's quite a fearful thing at first because you're totally putting yourself out there, aren't you? You're like completely exposed to all the elements, to all the judgments of people, and you know what? Most of the time we know this, in fact, probably 100% of the time, most people are not concerned about what you're doing. And if they're concerned about what you're doing, they've probably got some issues that are uh like they need to work on. My final top embodiment practices is my yoga practice, which I've had for probably 15 or more years now, and as a yoga teacher, I'm actually trained in various modalities of yoga, and I can say that having a consistent yoga practice has not only made me a better person in who I feel I am, and it's benefited obviously my body, but it's allowed me to tap into knowing myself so much more, and that's not just the body, but also myself, all parts of myself, my emotional, my physical, my mental, and my spiritual self as well, which is what yoga teaches. And that we get such a preconception with yoga, and it makes me so angry when I see like all these people on Instagram just like, oh my goodness, I'm doing all these amazing backbends, and it's like, yes, but like A, that's feeding your ego, and B, yoga is not about doing these crazy poses and making yourself look in these ways, because this is so associated with the ego, and what yoga is more about and is completely about, rather, is tapping into something greater than yourself and understanding yourself. Well, after is only one part of a bigger picture with yoga. So if you've never tried yoga and you're highly sensitive, really do try to push away those people on Instagram who make it look like it's some sort of competition at the Olympics because it isn't. I started to unfollow some people who were doing that, and really, really grinded my gears. Um, so what I would say is these are my like top embodiment practices that I would really highly recommend using, and just remember that talk therapy definitely has a pace, but also does there, this does as well. And just because it seems simple, doesn't seem complicated, doesn't mean it doesn't work, remembering that often the simple things in life are the most effective. So if you enjoyed this video, please feel free to comment underneath, let me know how it was for you, and also please do connect with me on Insight Timer if you do want to have any of my guided audios and meditations and yoga practices. Some of them are indeed free. I hope to see you next time, namaste.