Our visual perception is busy staring at screens

We communicate through a screen, surf the Internet, read texts, and watch broadcasts for a variety of purposes. Devices that display visual information are at the center of the field of perception for many. We are so involved in the context that we often fail to notice that much of what is so important to us would be inaccessible without the intense work of our visual perception.

Eyes get tired.

Enhance the quality of presence using this simple practice

This practice will help keep resources available, restore the state of your vision, and relieve feelings of increased tension. If performed regularly throughout the day, the practice will enhance the quality of presence in daily activities.

Note: The immediate effect may be a decrease in visual acuity: as the eye muscles relax, vision may become more blurred. Some time after the practice is completed, visual acuity will fully recover.

More practice: Stress Relief. Working With Head and Face

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Proprioceptive signals that our nervous system sends from our skin, muscles and internal organs to our brain allow us to notice what happens to the body. When we are highly agitated or anxious, we literally stop feeling it. The exercise will help to return to a state of presence, calm the mind and somewhat pacify excessive emotionality. It will allow to physically feel the boundaries of the body and facilitate return to a normal sense of self.

Many people have certain issues with maintaining healthy boundaries nowadays. If done regularly this practice can help restore a more balanced present state, reduce the intensity of bodily impulses and reactions.

Recommendation: exercise everyday in the morning before entering into the daily routine. The effects will gradually increase after approximately 10-14 days of regular practice. Add more practice during the periods of acute stress or other situations when the feeling of center is lost or when feeling less grounded than usually.

Please refrain from practicing if you feel weakened or unwell. Choose rest instead.

More practices: Working With Head and Face

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We use face to maintain or avoid contact with others. When we are in a fight/flight or freeze state, our capacity to engage in meaningful communication, to comfortably accept the presence of others reduces significantly. By working with head and face we improve the sense of presence and feel more grounded, we facilitate the connection with ourselves and the outside world, as well as other people.

Recommendation: Practice once or twice a day for 10-15 days to make the body remember the process. After this period of learning the practice can be especially effective if used to cope with excessive activation or moments of distress. Practicing when you feel relatively well will help develop the positive feedback loop that facilitates the much needed change in the moments when you feel out of balance.

Please refrain from practicing if you feel unwell. Choose rest instead.

Read more: What’s Grounding?

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This event that took place in the past

Many of us find it difficult to balance productivity, success, and having good life overall. The huge amount of burnout cases in North America indicates some deficit in the area of harmony and balance in a number of people. 

Events that we label as negative and try to avoid often come from a lack of inner resources. Conflicts, arguments, attempts to resolve by force what can be alleviated through reasonable compromise – much of this would not happen at all if we felt fully resourced. A lack of internal resources makes us less flexible, more susceptible to outside influences, our actions and decisions happen to become more stereotypical and, in some cases, automatic.

We need good access to inner resources if we want to live our lives, to be conscious and responsible in our decisions, and to be able to feel empathy and love – for ourselves and for others.

For Whom is This Event

This program is suitable for almost anyone. It will help participants to understand the causes of excessive fatigue or emotional instability, provide practical tools for balancing inner states in various contexts: from ordinary day-to-day circumstances to difficult and extreme situations. Participation in the program will give the opportunity to organize professional and personal tasks more consciously, and perhaps even help to rethink various aspects of life. After all, not only the professional environment but also personal relationships and family is also a space where we lose, spend, and find, replenish resources. The program provides keys to difficult circumstances and helps to manage aspects of our states, so that challenges can be overcome with confidence and in a conscious way.

Eight Weeks of the Program

What the Program Includes

Weekly meetings include elements of theory and practice. 

Each of the 8 meetings is aimed at in-depth study of a specific topic. 

Participants will be able to “take away with them” a set of practical skills for working with resource states.

Potential Results

• Understanding your own strengths
• Greater presence in the body
• Better capacity for emotional containment
• Deeper interpersonal connections
• New ways of handling sensitive situations
• Energy management and understanding of limitations in everyday situations: at work, at home, in relationships
• A shift to more effective ways of self-regulation and enhanced ability to manage difficult circumstances

We often have difficulty putting into words what is going on with our internal resources. The program helps to shape the language so necessary for this purpose.

History

The first internal resources management program was created and delivered by me in 2016. Up until 2020 multiple groups took place in different languages, several long-term online programs were organized, as well as a number of in-person events. Some programs involved working with professionals: middle and senior managers in the fields of banking, energy, education, petrochemical industry and transport in Russia, others were open for everyone. There were also specialized workshops on internal resources management, such as a workshop for teachers and educators in Bogota, Colombia.

Between 2021 and 2024, I was mainly engaged in the individual practice, and did not conduct internal resource management programs. 

The current program, in addition to the materials from previous years, incorporates what has been developed by me over the period focused on individual therapeutic work, including aspects related to trauma and its impact on internal resources and our capacity to manage them.

Format of Work

Online, once a week. Meetings length: 1h 40min

Every Wednesday 7pm-8.40pm Eastern Time

Dates:

January 29,

February 5, 12, 19, 26,

March 5, 12, 19.

Meetings recordings will be available for participants during the program and for a limited amount of time after the program.

Pricing

Participation in the complete program can be paid in full or divided into 2 parts.

Means of payment:  e-transfer, PayPal or Wise

PayPal payments

The service charges commission on every transfer, which affects the price. 

PayPal price: Full Payment: CA$260 or US$198; Payment in 2 installments: CA$146 or US$110 each, Participation in the first meeting only: CA$26 or US$21

Contact us:

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Systemic and Family Constellations

An example of an approach where one session really matters. In most cases, even a single successful constellation work will give impetus to a new solution or, at least, change the client’s attitude to the problem.

In some cases, I leave the opportunity to perform minor constellation works sequentially – in this case, we are decomposing the problem situation with the client step by step. 

This is especially relevant when we do not have much of emotional and energy resources available, which is often the result of a traumatic event or prolonged exposure to adverse factors. In this kind of treatment, it is important to avoid making the process ‘too much’ or ‘too fast’. The main focus here is on the stress response. Together with the client we develop a level of tolerance that allows us to approach the solution of the therapeutic problem without overloading the nervous system.

When working with Systemic Constellations, I pay attention to body signals, maintaining safety and having choice. Client may ask to pause or end the work at any time, take a break for cookies and a cup of tea, or postpone the continuation to our next meeting.

Body-Oriented Modalities

In the event of a recent adverse event such as:

• acute physical trauma (please check with your doctor before scheduling a session to make sure there is no immediate medical intervention required, bodywork does not replace medicine)

• emotional overload – an aggravated reaction to an event of a working nature, a stressful situation in the family, or other context, subjectively experienced as severe stress

a session of body-oriented therapy (CranioSacral Therapy, Integrative Bodywork) makes it possible to calm the stress reaction, to properly integrate excess energy. Even one session done on time can bring significant relief.

Lasting Issue: Prolonged Treatment

A long-term change of state, or continuous presence of an intense stress factor, usually requires medium or long-term work

Often we are dealing with symptoms that continue to be present for a relatively long time. Such difficulties require, as a rule, consistency and regularity in the approach. Weekly, biweekly, or at least once a month; The recovery process will most likely take some time. For chronic symptoms (persistent pain or tension, prolonged stress, etc.), it is unlikely that one session will completely resolve the problem.

There are some exceptions to this rule, though:

Sometimes significant efforts have already been made to solve the problem (client tries the techniques on his/her own or in other therapeutic modalities). The state of things indicates that everything is “almost ready” for changes, but something was missing to achieve a result. In such cases, a body-oriented therapy session may serve as the “missing link” to start a larger process. Such sessions sometimes have striking results, they are accompanied by states that are associated with transformational experiences. In some cases, after such a session the shift in therapy is so significant that the problem recedes.

Traumatic stress. Accompanying the Recovery Process After a Traumatic Experience

Traumatic experiences significantly affect our response to stress. Safe situations could be perceived as sources of severe threat, and sometimes the opposite happens: the nervous system does not respond adequately to threatening circumstances. Affected person “freezes” in a dangerous context or continues to act as if nothing happened, as if there is no threat at all. If there has been a long-term exposure to adverse, threatening circumstances, there are especially pronounced changes in the area of ​​​​normal reaction to stress.

Accompanying recovery after a traumatic impact, body-oriented work makes it possible to normalize, optimize the stress response – small problems no longer cause an exacerbated reaction, also the pattern of ‘complete ignorance’ of possibly threatening situations fades.  The work improves adaptability, flexibility in everyday contexts.

Judith Herman (1992) identified specific therapeutic goals for the different stages of recovery from trauma and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. At the first stage, therapeutic work is mainly dedicated to the restoration of safety. The second stage is devoted to the internal processing of what is connected with the trauma itself, the recognition and re-processing of what happened. Work at the third stage is related to safe and healthy reconnection with the outside world and other people.

Accompanying recovery with body-oriented work is possible at different stages of this extended process. Many experts point to the effectiveness of body-centered approaches for restoring access to internal resources, among the most famous, the importance of working with the body is emphasized by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk in his landmark text on trauma therapy “The Body Keeps the Score.” Meanwhile, it must be highlighted here that body-oriented work is not a substitute for psychiatric interventions or conventional psychotherapy.

Approaches that offer subtle body work, such as CranioSacral Therapy, help restore natural regulation of states, relieve tension associated with trauma-related reactions. Systemic and Family Constellations provide access to content related not only to personal experience, but also to transgenerational, inherited layers or contexts, which are often the initial sources of intense and painful stress reactions and symptoms.

Different stages of the recovery timeline require different interventions. For a client it means that this type of work in most cases will take time and demand certain regularity. However, within other therapeutic modalities, there is little evidence of universal “quick fix” solutions in this field, as well.

Ask a question / Write to me directly:

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• Until the day of the event, cancellations or date changes could be proposed by the client at no additional value.

• If a session is cancelled or a change of date is proposed by the client on the day of event, the full price of the session has to be paid. If an emergency situation has caused the change of date or cancellation, these cases are to be discussed separately.

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I also see how the well-established contact may create confidence that allows to look deeper into the heavy contexts within ourselves, the contexts where we wouldn’t like to approach with a person that we cannot fully trust. This subtle matter of deeper confidence helps change the communication from purely professional service somewhere closer to more individual presence and empathy.

The line of work may include sessions of Systemic and Family Constellations, CranioSacral Therapy and Integrative Bodywork, other Body-oriented Methods. Tools that belong to the approaches oriented on work with Stress Regulation and Resolution of Trauma are also in use. The palette of methods is wide, and solutions within each session may vary, though they all follow one common logic.

Like building a new home for an individual soul, in harmony and trust within. While dealing with manifestations of stress, we seek for the ways to regulate the nervous system back to the optimum and to learn to calm down the unpleasant responses. When working with trauma, we approach our own individual experiences, and also we make steps to reprocess the outcomes of transgenerational trauma: traces of the events of our parents lives or the lives of our earlier ancestors.

The sessions are done online or in-person in the studio in Mile End in Montreal.

Read more about the continuous work here

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When it becomes too much, survival responses are to be triggered. We become reactive, we rush for action rather than observing the variety of available options. Through the lens of the ‘survival mode’ we perceive the world as an unfriendly or unpleasant place. Our stress response systems are organized wisely, but there’s too much pressure, so the resources are to be mobilized. Conscience is not involved into this process, it’s merely a sequence of reactive responses that build up a particular state. Sometimes we find ourself losing our inherent qualities, such as generosity and kindness. It happens often as a reaction to stress that has reached it’s max capacity.

What to do

It’s always good to give your body some more rest. To sleep for an extra couple hours when you feel you need to. To enjoy your time with the loved ones, or even with yourself. Find out which activities do calm you down, and let yourself be lazy sometimes. It’s the darkest time of the year, after all. Preparing for holidays as well as celebrating may help get some peace of mind, but only if the process is seen as a source of joy, not as a pool of obligations.

When stress continues, everything that’s been piled up in the darker parts of our internal rooms gets more and more activated. If you feel that your reactions are getting a bit out of normal, are you in the state of permanent fatigue, or constant arousal, – please don’t hesitate to contact me. Whether an advice on how to make it through the holidays with batteries at full, or how to manage the internal resources, whether a request to calm the state of the nervous system with a sequence of bodywork sessions, or find a good practice that might bring peace to the body and mind. I work online and receive clients in person as well.

Have a wonderful rest of the month and let us look at the future year as calm and resourceful.

Book an Appointment

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I still perform Integrative Bodywork and Craniosacral Therapy sessions in person in the studio, though if you feel like working with your state, calm some manifestations of stress, I am available for online sessions, too. Systemic Constellations in one-on-one setting are offered via Zoom or Skype, as well.

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Grounding is developed by those who are engaged in physical work, and therefore are well aware of their motor and physical features. On the contrary, it may be almost absent for those who mainly operate mental structures, or objects and projects that do not require “here and now” presence. In the second case, natural communication with the body including the sensation of grounding, is often distorted or broken. Meanwhile, one can restore these ties. Visible increase of joy of life feeling as well as the contact with reality in its beauty will confirm such a change. Grounding always refers to the context of here and now.

Leaders are often well-grounded: in order to be able to influence other people with your will, you might need to feel your base.

“What can grounding offer us? It gives balance, ground under your feet, a possibility to stand, to contain life, a possibility to be able to discern, to stay in reality, on earth, even when things get hard or are very powerful.“

Merete Holm Brantbjerg, co-founder of bodynamic analysys

In our everyday speech we label the people who are not well-grounded as dreamers. On the contrary, “both feet on the ground”, would characterize someone we rely on. When we are “all in the air” in the difficult situation, we subconsciously turn away from presence and therefore make the situation even more difficult or dangerous. If this happens to you sometimes, that is something to work on.

Daily exercises focused on the body and bodily sensations (most accessible and ubiquitous are yoga and qigong) helps regain the sense of grounding. Working with a helping practitioner, craniosacral therapy or dance-movement practice will be extremely useful as well. A massage session may increase your grounding capacity, though not in all cases. It would be better to check the relevance of the particular service in advance.

In my resource programs, as well as in the individual online sessions, Grounding is among the first qualities we learn to restore and manage. 

I used several theses of Merete Holm Brantbjerg to create this text. Here is the link to one of her articles

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