A.C.E.

One part of the way that we help facilitate change in our nervous system state to bring us toward embodied wholeness is in building awareness in our bodies, and noticing where our attention tends to go. Pain is loud, and often our attention is drawn and fixated to the parts of ourselves that are experiencing pain. It can be helpful to bring awareness to how we are moving or holding ourselves at rest, how our habits contribute to our holding patterns, and at the most fundamental level, noticing when different sensations in our bodies start to arise. Cultivating awareness also helps us bring attention to areas in our bodies that feel good, supportive, and pleasant. These supportive sensations can be used as resources to come back to when our attention is normally fixated on pain. We can learn to find these feelings of support throughout our day to day experiences.

A - Awareness/Attention

As we start gaining more awareness and exploring sensations involved in manual therapy, it can be helpful to get curious about what you are experiencing. Starting to notice sensations and acknowledging them as information for us to pay attention to, rather than something that needs to be fixed, changed, or gotten rid of, allows us to stay with the felt sense. Sometimes new sensations will come to our attention in different areas of our body, or we can use touch to bring awareness to these areas. With more curiosity, we are able to stay with sensations that we might normally dismiss. Over time, learning to stay with these sensations is part of how we build capacity, which is the nervous system’s ability to manage relative stressors before it gets overwhelmed.

C - Curiosity/Capacity

E - Exploration/Expansion

As we start to recognize more of our felt sense, we can learn to explore this felt sense in different areas of our body. We can shift our awareness to an area of our body that we don’t always tend to, and keep our attention here. Reinforcing awareness to new areas can allow us to access these areas when we might need to throughout the day. For example, we might realize that shifting weight to our heels while we are standing brings our awareness there, and helps us feel supported from underneath us if we need to stand for a long period of time. Maybe our back pain lessens in the process. Another example: maybe with every time that we get stressed, we clench our fists as a way to brace or guard. As we bring awareness to our hands, we might be able to let go of that bracing. As we let go of that bracing, maybe the shoulders are able to loosen and the unpleasant head and neck sensations that often come with increased stress start to change. Exploring how sensations in different areas can be used to inform us helps us to expand our capacity.

We can teach ourselves new ways to move, hold, and express so we don’t get caught in the same patterns during stress.