You're listening to the Reconnection Rescue Podcast for mothers and daughters with your host, Brittney Scott. A podcast where we process all things mother daughter relationships and the direct effect it has on the relationships we hold as adults. Welcome back and this episode, we're going to do some body work together. We're going to do some muscle relaxation. And we're going to do some breath work. Talk therapy. Is great. I mean, it's what I do every day. I fully believe in it and I know that it works. But. Somatic bodywork, really focusing on your nervous system. Really working to decrease your fight or flight, like your risk, your body's response to certain things is going to take talk therapy to the next level. It's going to. I make a lot of your healing last and. It's going to just put you into a different state of mind, like when we can get your body on board to what your brain believes like that body and mind connection. It. It's just going to make more sense. It's going to make you feel much better. And it's going to have a deeper effect on, on your outcomes and what you're hoping to happen. And so this episode is going to be all about your body. And so if you are doing anything other than sitting down. I would like you to pause this and come back to it at a time where you can actually sit down. In a chair, in a room that's quiet. If you're not by yourself, you're around people you trust. Like I want you to really be able to relax and I want you to be able to go through these exercises. So if you need to pause and come back, do that, but I want you to sit down and if you're ready to go. We are going to move on and get started. When people bring up the nervous system, I want to make sure that you understand that your nervous system consists of two parts. The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. Those two parts make up the whole. Your sympathetic nervous system is responsible for your body's fight or flight response. This system's activity increases when you're in stress or in danger. Your parasympathetic nervous system is rest and digest. Part of your brain responsible for relaxing your body after periods of stress or danger. it's more of The parts that you don't have control over. Your heart beating, Your kidneys working like those kinds of things the things that just functioned because they function. But also part of you resting and bringing your body back down to a relaxed state is your parasympathetic nervous system. Because of trauma. Or honestly, even just living in our society today we are often in fight or flight mode when we're not actually in any real danger. Like having anxiety, like excessive anxiety, debilitating anxiety can put you in to fight or flight when there's not even real danger present. And so the body work we're about to do next is going to help you to calm that and put you into. A state of more rest relaxation, and to help you feel safe. We are going to start with progressive muscle relaxation. So, if you're sitting, I want you sitting in a position that puts your feet onto the ground. So don't have them crossed up in like the chair with you and make sure you're sitting in a chair or on the couch and your feet are touching the ground. I want you to kind of close your eyes and just focus on your breathing. And then through this exercise, you're just going to follow my words and just kind of do, as I say, And. I'm going to use the script that I use for children, because I think it's so much cuter. So if you laugh or giggle a little bit, that's fine. Just kind of continue on with the exercise. And all you have to do is just follow my instructions. Okay. With your eyes closed. And you're breathing calm. We're going to start with your hands and arms. I want you to take your left hand. And pretend that you have a whole lemon. And we are trying to make lemonade. I want you to squeeze the heck out of that lemon with your left hand. Get all that juice out. You have to squeeze as hard as you can. We want every last drop because we want tangy lemonade. We want like our cheeks to pucker when we drink it, because it's so tangy. Squeeze out every drop of that lemonade keeps squeezing. We haven't gotten all the drops out. You're doing great. Okay, you got it. I want you to drop the lemon and relax. You can wiggle your fingers, kind of loosen up your hand. And I want you to feel how much better it feels when your hands relaxed versus when it was tense and tight. And now I want you to take your right hand. I want you to squeeze the heck out of that lemon. We need lemon from two juices to make the lemonade we're trying to make. So I want you to squeeze it. And keep squeezing and hold it tight. Because we want every drop of that limit out. You did it. You can relax and let go, go ahead and drop the limit to the floor. I want you to wiggle your fingers and your hands. Feel how good it feels to feel relaxed versus when your muscles were tight, intense. Next arms and shoulders. I want you to pretend you're a furry lazy cat. You want to stretch. Stretch your arms out, straight in front of you. Raised them up high over your head, and now pull them back kind of behind your head. Cut a fullback, pull back. I want you to fill a pool in your shoulders. Keep stretching. Don't let it go yet. Keep holding it. Okay. And to let your arms drop back down to your side. And one more time, we're going to stretch, put your hands out in front of you. For your arms up over your head and then kind of pull them back behind your hair. We want to fill that pool in your shoulders. I want you to keep stretching. Don't let it go yet. Keep pulling. Okay. Now drop your arms back down to your side. Feel the difference when your arms and your shoulders are relaxed versus when they were tight and tense. Now your shoulders and your neck. I want you to pretend that you're a turtle. You're sitting on a rock. Buy a nice peaceful pond, just relaxing in the warm sun. It feels nice and warm and safe here. Oh, you sense danger. Pull your head into your house. Pull your shoulders up to your ears as high as you can, and push your head into your shell, kind of like pulling your, your head into your shoulders. I want you to hold it as tight as you can. You don't want to be seen. Being inside your shell means that you're safe. So hold it, hold it until the danger passes. Okay. The danger has passed. You can come out now into the one sunshine. And once again, you can feel relaxed and feel warm. Watch out now, more danger. Hurry, pull your head back into your house. Go back into your shell. Pull those shoulders up to your ears and hold it tight. Hold it tight. Don't let go yet. Okay. Danger has passed. Now you can let go and move on. We're going to move to our jaw. You have a giant job breaker bubble gum in your mouth. Depending on your age, if you watched ed and Eddie, I want you to imagine that when your cheek gets so big, Now I want you to bite down on this as hard as you can bite down. Clint. Hold on tight. You're trying to break that job breaker and it is kind of hard to chew. Okay, you did it. You got it. Let your jaw hang loose. You can kind of wiggle it around a little bit. Notice how good it feels when your muscles are relaxed versus when they were tight, intense. Now we're going to move to your face and your nose. Here comes a pesky fly. It's landed right on your nose and you want to get him off your nose without using your hands. That's right. Wrinkle up your nose, wiggle it around, help use your mouth and your cheeks and let those help you wiggle your nose around. Scrunch it up. Really good. Okay. Good. You've chased them away. Now you can relax. Oops. He came back now he's on your forehead instead of your nose. You're going to use your eyebrows, wiggle those up and down, up and down. Get that fly. Off of your face without using your hands. Okay. Good. He's gone. You did it. Notice how good it feels. When your muscles are relaxed versus when they are tense. We're going to move on to our stomach. You're laying in a meadow on a nice blanket. It is a beautiful day outside. The wind is blowing. It's warm, you're enjoying some fresh air and quiet time, but here comes this cute baby elephant and he's not watching where he's going and he doesn't see line there in the grass. And he is going to step on your stomach, make your stomach as tight as you can, because you don't have time to move. Hold it really tight. Just get ready for him to step on your stomach. But if your stomach is very hard, he won't hurt you. Squeeze those stomach muscles and hold it. Okay, you're safe. It looks like he went the other way. You can relax. Now, let your summit go soft. Breathe in and out. Notice how good it feels to feel relaxed. It feels so much better than when your stomach was tense. But oops, he turned around. He's coming back, hold your stomach as tight as you can. Hold it. Hold it. He's not, he's not going to hurt you if your stomach's tight enough. And okay. The dangerous gone, the baby elephant is gone. He's not going to hurt you anymore. You can breathe. Notice how good it feels to be relaxed. And now we're going to move to your legs and your feet. I want you to pretend that you're barefoot. You're standing in a big fat mud puddle. And you are a kid. Okay. You are not an adult. This is fun. This is not gross. You are going to push your feet down. Into that mud. You want the mud to squish up between your toes. You keep pushing, you trying to get to the bottom of that puddle. And this is so much fun for you because it's squishing all around your feet. Push down, keep pushing, spread your toes apart. Try and let the mud come up between your toes. Okay. Now pull your foot out of that mud puddle. Notice how good it feels to feel relaxed. We'll go your toes, let the mud come out of that and kind of just shake your foot loose. Get all the mud off. It feels good to be relaxed and not to be tense. When you're ready, take a deep breath and then open your eyes. You are done with progressive muscle relaxation. I hope that felt relaxing for you. I hope it's something you put into practice because it can really change. Getting your body to recognize. When it is actually safe. Because a lot of times we, our body's responding to old stimulus to old triggers. To triggers from our childhood. And that may not be what's actually in front of you. And so if you're in a situation where. You know, you want to stay, you know, that feels triggering, but that the person in front of you is not a danger to you. Then really work on bringing this into practice so that you can get your body to catch up to what your brain knows and get them working together to retrain your brain on what is safe and what isn't. And when it can relax in that way, you're not going into fight or flight during times where you actually don't want to, where you, you want to stay and you want to maybe get through this tough conversation. You want to. You want to know? You can manage it. You want to. I don't know, something as simple as you raising a toddler in the tantrums are driving you crazy and they make you feel out of control. While they're throwing a tantrum, you do progressive muscle relaxation and let your body know, like, although they're out of control a bit right now, I am actually in control. My body is allowed to feel safe and I can get through this, which in turn is going to help my toddler get through this and learn how to manage their own emotions. And so it's a really powerful exercise. If you put it into play. Now we're going to move on to some breath work. There are many different styles of breathing, of getting your body to relax in certain ways. And we are going to start with two very easy ones. I'm kind of, as time goes on and I record our episodes and. Yeah, bring you more episodes. I'm going to add in some of the more tougher ones that. That also helped, but can be harder to put into practice if you've never really done breath work. Or focused on your breath and, and getting it to slow down and to be. Effective at calming you down. So we're going to start with two of the easier ones. The first one is called From MADEC breathing. And it's when you engage your diaphragm a muscle, right. It's right at the base of your lungs. And so if the top of your lungs is close to your throat, The bottom of your lungs, your diaphragm is closer to your belly. And it's right there at the bottom. And so we're really going to engage that through this. And so the goal of this is that while you're breathing your chest, doesn't move your stomach moves. Because often when we're breathing, we're breathing right into our chest, like right into those lungs, the top of our lungs. And so our chest is rising and falling and even What I want you to do. His work on your belly, rising and falling and your chest remaining. Still, we're going to breathe slow and deep into the diaphragm. And so one of the ways that I want you to start is I want you to just sitting down or laying down whichever you prefer. And I put one to, to put one hand on your chest. And one hand on your belly. And this is slow breathing. You don't have to do this fast. You don't have to do this quickly. Take your time, but I want you to keep practicing until you noticed the hand on your chest. Not moving. And the hand on your belly actually moving. If you want to teach this to children, maybe if you have a young child of your own or just other children around you. Grab one of their, their stuffies grabbed like a stuffed animal, a bear or something, and put that on their stomach. And the goal is that they want to see the bear and moving up and down. And so if that feels good for you, you can do the same thing, place a little Teddy bear, right on the top of your stomach. And you want to see that move up and down. Okay. And so with your hand, one hand on your chest. One hand on your stomach. We're going to breathe in together and then breathe out together. And then I will let you practice that without me breathing into the microphone. But I'm just going to go slow. And once I count to three, then I will start breathing and you can breathe along with me for this first one. Okay. One. Two. Three. Okay. And so if that didn't really work for you the first time, try again, you want to make sure that your belly is rising. It feels like the. The air, you kind of suck in as filling up your belly. And then your blowing out again from your belly. You want your belly to go back down? So feel free to pause here and keep trying that until you get it. And the next form of breath work that we will do is called box breathing. This is also another simple one kind of an introduction into breath work. And this one is Four counts. Four counts. A four. Box has four sides. So we're going to breathe in for four counts. Hold it for four counts. Breathe out for four counts. And hold it for four counts and that will be box breathing where think of the all four sides of a square or of a box. And kind of, as you're silently breathing, you are counting. And you're counting each of those fours inside your head, and it's just going to help to bring your body kind of back into itself. Kind of calm your mind. And get your, your mind, like your brain off of whatever is causing worry or stress or making you feel unsafe. And remember when I'm S when I'm bringing up feeling safe or feeling in danger, it's not, I'm not bringing up any kind of physical danger or you like you're physically. S unsafe someone is, or something is going to physically harm you. If that is the situation, please get yourself out of that. Like we are not going to progressive muscle relax or breath work through actual physical danger in front of you. I mean, like, Emotional danger. Like someone. Emotionally hurting you emotionally scarring. You like those kinds of things, like when you feeling triggered by something, someone said or something, someone did. I mean like nervous system, not feeling safe, not any kind of real danger. And so we will do one, one of the counts of box breathing together. And then again, you, you take the time and you practice this for yourself. And add it into your toolbox of getting your body to calm down and getting your nervous system to feel safe. And getting that mind, body connection. To a place where it's working for who you are today. And not the child you that is bringing all these triggers to your world. Now as an adult. So. Let's get started. I will do the counts. And tell you what we're doing on each, before each count of four, I'll tell you what the next step is. And then you will be kind of set to do this on your own. So I'll do it once. And then you pause and keep going, or just relisten to this section. Okay. I'll count to three and then start. One. Two. Three. We are going to breathe in and I'll count to four. One. Two. Three. Four. Now you're going to hold that breath for four. One. Two. Three. For. Exhale or breathe out for four. One. Two. Three. For now, hold it for four one. Two. Three. Four. Okay. Back to regular breathing. Well, that's it for this episode. I wanted this to truly just be about bodywork. And get a new started in relaxing your nervous system. And started in making that brain, body connection to knowing when you are safe and when you aren't, because it's going to take some practice. Of getting your body in your brain to be on the same page of knowing. Okay. Although this fuels triggering. I don't have to let myself respond in a triggering way. I can remind my body and my brain that I am safe. I can do some body work really quickly. These are all things that can be done. Without anyone noticing. Without anyone knowing that you're doing it. And so you can slow down your breathing and focus on diaphragm, breathing without anyone noticing. You can squeeze your stomach muscles, push your feet into the ground, pull your shoulders up and kind of roll them out without anybody noticing. That you're doing anything. If you need to remind your body that you don't want to keep responding to old triggers, you want to respond in a new way and create new behaviors. So. I hope you enjoyed this. And we'll chat soon.