A pranayama practice to activate a healthy sympathetic nervous system response
Healthy aggression is a good thing
Today, I’ll offer a short, guided practice to help you feel energized and to help you recognize how it may feel for your sympathetic nervous system to be activated without feeling distressed or in “fight or flight.” I was listening to a webinar recently with Kimberly Ann Johnson and it was titled, Nervous System Regulation as a Feminist Act. It was a beautiful presentation, and she was so passionate about it that it inspired this post.
Instead of always being even and “regulated,” she spoke about how our Fight response, which is part of the sympathetic system, is really necessary for our personal drive. It gives us the awareness that each of us matters in this world. It allows us to set boundaries, set goals, and get things done. It helps us get out of bed in the morning. Every inhale is a sympathetic response, every exhale is a parasympathetic response. Anger, grief and fear are underlying disregulated sympathetic responses so notice if they tend to be your initial responses to stress. That can give you some clues about what type of state your nervous system is experiencing. Excessive lethargy and fatigue can indicate more of an underlying disregulated parasympathetic state.
There’s nothing wrong about being in a sympathetic state especially when it’s a healthy response. If we’re really excited or passionate about something and following our heart to fulfill our goals or, if we are experiencing anger, fear, or grief, we don’t just talk about it, we allow the fullness of the emotion be expressed, not just to ourselves, but to others. We don’t need to be told to “calm down,” or “just relax” when we are expressing ourselves in a passionate way. We have agency over how our nervous system regulates and responds to stress, both good stress and bad stress.
We also have a social nervous system(a branch of the Vagus nerve) which is part of the parasympathetic system that works differently for people born with uteruses and has evolved for mammalian bonding. It gives us the ability to tend to our relationships and helps us feel like we belong in a group. It gives us the intuitive knowledge to take care of each other. There’s a collective intelligence between people born with uteruses at different stages of life experiencing varied levels of hormones that allows us to relate and care for each other within a group in a different capacity than those born without a uterus.
Healthy aggression is a healthy fight response. Having a healthy nervous system allows us to set boundaries, take up space, relate to others, and feel safe in being who we are meant to be. Being able to self-regulate our nervous system helps us to feel safe in our bodies, in our communities and within our society.
Feeling safe, seen, and heard is important for our nervous systems to be regulated. Creating an embodied practice for processing and expressing difficult and/or big feelings is necessary for being able to have a healthy and resilient nervous system. An embodied practice that allows us to be grounded and safe has to occur in the pelvis. All of our experiences have brought us to where we are today and, for people with a uterus, a lot of our experiences revolve around the pelvis and hips. Recognizing our sexuality and the changes we experience as we age and as our hormones change is vital to regulating our nervous systems. Meditation, pranayama, yoga and dance can help with creating an embodied practice.
It’s okay to claim who you are, meaning, you are not “too much.” Decide what is possible with this life you are living and use your nervous system, both sympathetic and parasympathetic, to guide you forward into the life you want to live. Use the sympathetic system to get things done, set healthy boundaries, say what you want, and feel your feelings. Use the parasympathetic system to acknowledge when you need to rest and then allow yourself to have the rest you need and to connect with others on all levels whether it’s personal, sexual, maternal, or societal.
What is your experience in your life? What is your particular circumstance? How does that impact the choices you make within a day, a month, a year, heck, even minute by minute? Notice your feelings. Pay attention to them. Give them a voice and an expression. Notice the things in your life that bring you to life. What gives you joy? What are the little sparks of interest for you? Love animates the nervous system. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to those around us to honor our feelings, express them, process them through an embodied practice, and follow our true North. We are given a life, but it is up to each of us to bring our own Selves to life.
This is not easy work. But, it is worth the effort. Listen to the whispers your body is telling you. Where do you think they will take you?
Here are some journal prompts to help you figure out where you tend to live in relation to your nervous system activation, whether you tend to be more in a sympathetic or parasympathetic pattern:
When you feel threatened or unsafe, what’s your initial gut feeling?
How do express what are considered negative emotions? Do you make excuses for the person or people who may have caused the emotions to arise?
Do you downplay how you’re feeling by ignoring what’s happening? Or, by deflecting?
When you are really excited, passionate, or joyful, do you allow that or do you hide your excitement because you feel that you might not fit in or be seen as “too much?”
Do you make choices to conform with what Society says is “good” or “right?’ How does that feel? Where do you feel that in your body?
To help you figure out where your nervous system tends to default toward, here are some clues:
Anger-fight response(sympathetic)
Fear- freeze response(sympathetic)
Grief-flight response(sympathetic)
Feeling foggy, sleepy, disconnected, overwhelm-dissociation(parasympathetic)
Panic, nausea, dizziness-fright stage(combination of both)
Helpless, despair-shutdown(parasympathetic)
In the audio recording today, I’m offering some energizing breath practices to activate the sympathetic system in a healthy way without experiencing the distressing signals of flight, fight, or freeze. Before you do them, I’d like for you to notice how you are feeling today. If you are feeling a bit scattered in your thoughts or like your energy is swirling above your head, then you may want to hold off on these. If you feel like you’re bouncing off the walls because you have so much energy already, you may want to hold off on these as well. Honor what you need today, and the practice will be here when you need it. If you want to bring some heat to your body, try some of these. If you feel unmotivated, or struggling to get your day going, try these. You want to feel energized by your practice, not depleted, so if you aren’t sure of what you need, try one of the breath practices and notice how it makes you feel. Give yourself grace to say, “this is for me today,” or “this is not for me today.”
Here’s a list of the practices I’ll be sharing:
Diaphragmatic breathing-this one is neutral but if you practice it first, it will give you a chance to tune into your current energy state.
“Ha” breath
Humming bee breath, or Bhramari Pranayama
Right nostril breathing, or pingala nadi breath
Breath of fire or kapalabhati
Double breathing
Ujayii breath, or ocean breath
I hope you enjoy these practices.
On a personal note, I have struggled with a lot of what I presented here and am on a personal journey toward building resiliency and safety in my own nervous system. I have not always felt safe in expressing my emotions or even acknowledging some of my emotions. I tend to avoid conflict and downplay my own feelings to avoid causing discomfort for others. I have armored up for a long time, but the armor gets heavy after a while. Some of that was due to personal boundary transgressions and fear of abandonment when I was young, and I think not expressing myself fully was a way of feeling safe and feeling a sense of belonging. I decided to write this today to share what I learned because it resonated with me. And, while I am no expert on all of this, I feel that the more we talk about this and share information and strategies, then healing and love will win, above all else. And, I think that’s worth the effort.
Take good care,
Sharon