Skillful means for nervous system regulation
These practices are offered as skillful means for meditators. They are not therapy. If you have a history of trauma, please work with them gently and consider support from a trauma-informed professional if needed.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a therapeutic modality developed to support trauma resolution by bringing mindful awareness to the felt sense of the body. With mindful awareness, we can learn to track and regulate the nervous system, release tension patterns in the body and mind, and support greater inner balance and wellbeing.
For meditators, these tools can support a deeper sense of ease and help balance attention and effort in practice.
Resourcing
With the skill of resourcing, we deliberately turn awareness toward inner or outer resources. A resource can be a sight, a sound, a body sensation – anything that invites a sense of wellbeing and safety.
Resources are not permanent objects. But when we bring our minds to them and rest there, we often notice a deepening sense of ease. In one moment, a resource might be the sensations of the breath. In the next, the weight of the body. The next, the feeling of sit bones connecting to the cushion.
How to explore resourcing:
- Ask yourself: Where is there already some sense of safety and ease?
- Where is there relative "okay-ness" within the body?
- Where does it feel safest to rest attention right now?
In seated practice, it can be helpful to resource yourself by first becoming aware of cues of safety in your environment. Look around. Orient. Then gently become aware of your body in space – the outline of the body, the weight of the body, the general felt sense.
Bringing a mettā attitude toward the body can also support ease. Appreciating and befriending the body, before going deep into body sensations, is itself a resource.
Let awareness be receptive. Practice listening to the overall sense of the body. This establishes a safe way into body awareness.
As you come deeper into the body, go first to a place of resource. Stay there until you feel a more global sense of wellbeing. Lingering in it, letting mindfulness fully know the resource. Sometimes the resource spreads its wellbeing to other parts of the body.
You may also cultivate resourcing by bringing mettā to the body – through phrases or simply through a kind, metta-infused breathing.
Find your own way into exploring what is a resource for you. Let yourself be nourished by it.
Titration
From a resourced place, mindfulness often becomes more stable. Our capacity to be intimate with all parts of our experience is strengthened.
The SE principle of titration can support us in opening to places of challenge or difficulty within the body and mind.
The image of the tangle:
Think of a tight knot of experience within the body or mind – a pain in the stomach, a worry in the mind, a pattern of reactivity. It is natural for attention to get pulled into these tangles, to try to solve them, to get rid of the discomfort.
But as we get pulled in, we often lose perspective. We lose mindful awareness. We become lost in patterns of aversion and reactivity.
How to practice titration:
- Come only as close to a tangle as you can while maintaining mindful awareness.
- Come in slowly.
- Rest at the edge of the difficulty.
- When you notice yourself getting entangled, back off.
- Return to ground and resource yourself.
This is a gentle process of trial and error. Most likely, you will continue to get entangled at times. That is okay. With titration, you give yourself permission to know that there is a painful tangle – and you practice coming only as close as you have capacity for.
When you back off, you are not failing. You are learning the rhythm of sustainable practice.
Connection to the Dhamma
The Buddha pointed to the fact that it is our reactive patterns of aversion, clinging, and numbing out that take us out of mindful knowing and into suffering. We try to secure pleasant experience and get rid of unpleasant experience.
When we practice noticing and resting in the feeling tone level of experience (vedanā), we find a doorway into staying within the stream of moment-to-moment experience.
Resourcing and titration support this capacity. They help the nervous system settle so that mindfulness can do its work. They are not replacements for insight or mettā. They are skillful means – supports for the conditions from which wisdom and love can unfold naturally.
A Gentle Reminder
These practices are not about fixing or changing your experience. They are about creating conditions of safety and balance so that you can meet your experience as it is – with clarity, with kindness, and without unnecessary struggle.
If you are working with significant trauma, please seek the support of a qualified professional alongside your meditation practice. These tools are complements to the Dhamma, not substitutes for care.