Amanda Blake embright.org

Stress to Serenity Guide

a 7-Day Centering Challenge

Contents

Guidebook

The embright Story……………………………………………………….3

Centering in the Face of Challenge……………………………………..4

Coming to Your Senses………………………………………………….5

From Stress to Serenity………………………………………………….6

Guidelines for Practice…………………………………………………...7

Troubleshooting…………………………………………………………...14

Audio

Welcome to the Centering Challenge

Day 1: First, Get Present: Increase Somatic Awareness

Day 2: Center in Your Body

Day 3: Center in What You Care About

Day 4: Take Centering Into Action

Day 5: Embody Dignity, Connection, Virtues, and Vision

Day 6: Practice Centering in Action

Day 7: Center In the Mystery

The embright Story

embright exists to explore and celebrate the wisdom of the human body in all its complexity, and to help people learn to tap that wisdom so they can live with a greater sense of joy, satisfaction, contribution, and meaning.

embright (which means “to brighten”) was born as I was completing my certification as a Master Somatic Coach. As I changed my relationship with my own body and helped others change theirs, I saw many people’s lives improve, especially my own. I wanted a way to share some of the powerful practices I was learning with more people, and embright became that vehicle.

I created the Stress Serenity Guide so that anyone - including people I might never meet - could experience the power of embodied transformation for themselves. So as a thank you for expressing interest in embright, I offer you this gift. I hope it helps you call forth more of your own brilliance.

I am deeply grateful to my teachers at Strozzi Institute, who inspired the creation of this program. What I learned from them has been of incalculable value, and I’m lucky to be able to pay it forward by sharing the Stress Serenity Guide with you.

So I invite you to pay it forward as well. If this program helps you in some way, please share it with others who might also need a little more serenity in their lives. You’ll be doing them a favor, and you’ll be joining me in my mission to seed the world with more love. Plus, you’ll look cool. How can you refuse? :-)

Feel free to forward this guide directly or send folks on over to embright.org so they can get their own copy.

Share the love!

Warmly,mandy

Centering in the Face of Challenge

I’d like to introduce you to a practice of centering. Many of us have centering practices in our daily lives. For you it might be running, or meditation, or gardening, or playing music... any number of activities can serve to bring us home to ourselves when something throws us off.

So why take up another one?

When I first learned how to center in the way I’m about to share with you, I was a dedicated yoga enthusiast who had been meditating for many years. And yet this practice offered me something new: a way to take my centering practice into my daily life and interactions with others. I found it to be very applied and very practical.

I haven’t given up my yoga practice and if anything I meditate even more now than I did when I began. Even so, I still use this centering practice on a daily basis as I encounter the everyday challenges of living.

You see, life throws challenges at us. It always has and it always will. The challenges can be great news – you got that promotion you’ve been wanting. Or a new and very high profile client has hired you, and now you need to really step up and deliver.

Or sometimes it’s not such great news – you lost your job. You’ve just been told that someone you love is very sick. That person who really rubs you the wrong way has just become your boss.

And what about all those little daily challenges: a red stoplight at just the wrong moment, kids screaming in the car when you have a headache, the growing list of important phone calls you just haven’t had time to get to.

Those challenges don’t have to define you. How you respond to them is up to you. But that’s so much easier said than done!

And that’s right where this centering practice comes into play.

Coming to Your Senses

This practice is about coming to your senses. I mean that quite literally. It begins with tuning in to your sensations and feeling more of what is going on in your body. Armed with a stronger sense of what is so for you, right now, you are in a much better position to exercise choice about how you respond.

That’s because your mood predisposes you to certain actions, and the sensations in your body are tightly interwoven with your mood.

You can see this for yourself by trying the following experiment.

As you’re reading this, slump into your chair. Let your arms go slack. Let your chest collapse, maybe drop your head a bit. Think of the last time you felt really down about something. Let that memory take hold for a moment.

Now say, with as much enthusiasm as you can muster, “I’m having a fantastic day!”

How was that? I’ll bet your tone of voice is a dead giveaway about just exactly how “fantastic” you do (or don’t) feel. When I do this exercise in groups, people often burst out laughing at the obvious and ridiculous incongruence.

Now shift your posture. You may want to shake your hands and arms, or even get up and walk around to shake off the previous position. Go ahead and sit up straight, and take a deep, full breath. Relax your shoulders and your jaw. Sit squarely on your hips. Relax the muscles around your eyes, lift your chin, and look out into the distance.

Now say, “wow, things are looking really grim.”

Again, you will probably notice an incongruence between the words and what you are feeling inside.

This is because your body is not separate from your mood and your actions. Rather your body, your mood, your words, and your actions are all tightly interwoven and typically pretty consistent with one another.

Here’s an example: If your morning has started off badly, and you trip over your son’s skateboard, you might find yourself yelling at him in anger. Whereas if your morning started off just right, your mood might predispose you to gently but firmly remind him to pick up after himself. A different mood leads to different actions. And the actions you take impact both your relationships and your results.

You just experienced for yourself how shifting your body, even in very minor and contrived ways, can influence mood. Recent research at Harvard University confirms this. After asking subjects to sit or stand in so-called “power postures” for as little as 2 minutes, Dr. Amy Cuddy and her team found that the postures produced hormonal, psychological, and behavioral changes in participants.

In other words, shifting your body will shift your mood and your actions. So let’s put that knowledge to use.

From Stress to Serenity

When you’re confronted with a challenge, your body reacts. A structure in your brain called the amygdala bypasses your conscious, rational mind and immediately filters the incoming experience into one of two buckets, evaluating the situation as either safe, or not safe. In the face of any perceived threat – even if there’s no actual threat – a complex set of reactions will occur in your body that readies it for action. This is the well known “fight or flight” response. It’s online 24/7, ready to react whether the actual or perceived threat is physical, emotional, or relational.

Most of the time, most of us don’t notice these alarm bells going off until we’re so far down the path that it’s too late (or at least quite difficult) to do anything about it.

This practice is about learning to catch yourself before you step onto that path. With enough practice, centering can become second nature to you, so that it becomes your default go-to reaction when you’re under pressure.

What would you say is your default reaction to pressure now?

What if you could build a new default that offered you more choice, resilience, and equanimity? If you did that, what would be different in your life?

Centering: Guidelines for Practice

Centering is a foundational practice of somatic learning. It is central to everything we do. Even in my practice group for Advanced Somatic Practitioners we always begin our sessions with this basic, fundamental practice.

To get the most out of your practice, follow the guidelines below.

Daily 1-2-3

1. LISTEN Each day during this 7-Day Centering Challenge, download the day’s centering practice to your computer or mp3 player, and listen at least once to the recording that leads you through the centering practice. The recordings are only about 5 minutes long, so feel free to listen more often if you choose.

2. PRACTICE Pick a place to practice, and practice at least 3-5 times throughout the day. The more the better. There’s no need to add any time to your schedule as you do this. It’s simply a matter of shifting where you place your attention as you’re going about your day-to-day activities.

3. LOG Make notes in your log book as you go throughout your day, and / or at the end of the day. This will help you focus your attention, capture your learning, and track your progress.

Place of Practice

In order for this practice to have real benefit for you, you’ll need to pick a place to regularly train. Any athlete or musician knows this: the body only learns through practice.

This centering practice is about training to embody a more resilient and resourceful response under pressure. In order for it to be available when the heat is on, you have to practice over and over when you’re NOT under pressure. This is like an athlete training for a competition, or a musician rehearsing for a performance. You want to get it into your muscle memory so you can call it up quickly when it’s most needed.

To find a good place of practice, think of something that you do several times each day. It could be getting up to get a cup of coffee. It could be walking across the threshold of your office (or any doorway). It could be walking to and from the car. It could be picking up the phone, or stopping at a red light. My recommendation is to find a situation where you’re regularly standing and walking, as that seems to work best for the early stages of training.

Eyes Up

In many centering practices, the tradition is to close your eyes and go within. If you already have a practice like that and you find value in it, by all means continue. You will likely find this practice to be a nice complement to what you’re already doing.

This centering practice is a way to be mindful of, attentive to, and tuned in to yourself while you’re in your daily life, interacting with others. That’s what makes it so powerful, so practical, and so different from other approaches. So while you’re practicing, be sure to keep your eyes open and keep your attention present in the room.

There will be reminders of this on the recordings, but I have noticed that despite frequent reminders, many people still have a tendency to close their eyes while they are learning. This is partly because it’s easier to feel your sensations when you’re not bombarded by visual stimulus. Many of us are so used to tuning out our sensations that we have to close our eyes to feel ourselves. If you need to do this at first, that’s fine. Just keep moving more and more towards centering with your eyes open.

The Vocabulary of Sensation: Increasing Somatic Awareness

The body speaks in the language of sensation, and sensation has its own vocabulary. A good place to start (re-)learning this language (since we all already know it) is with three “R’s” of sensation: Temperature, Pressure, and Movement. OK, these clearly aren’t R’s, but perhaps that analogy will help you remember these basics. Start by paying attention to:

Temperature: where are you warm? Sweating? Sweltering? What’s cool, chilled, shivering, frozen?

Pressure: what’s contracted? Heavy? Loose or slack? Light? What feels numb or absent?

Movement: what’s spinning, buzzing, tingling, rushing, beating, streaming, trembling? What’s still?

Mood: what’s your background mood? Mood is a much richer landscape than we usually allow for. Are you joyful? Agitated? Excited? Calm? Angry? Enthusiastic? Irritable? Lost? Worried? Sad? Elated?

Why do this? What’s the value in feeling more?

One of the fascinating things about sensation is that it only occurs in the present moment. So paying attention to sensation is a good way to bring yourself present. And when you’re present (rather than stewing about the past or spinning about the future) you can be more responsive to what’s really happening in the here and now. And you can be more with the people you’re with, which will benefit your relationships in uncountable ways.

Feeling more also introduces more choice into situations where you might slip into a reactive mode. When you’re under pressure, sensations usually intensify, and often you’ll default into taking some action to make the sensations go away. This was true for a client of mine who, when she was overwhelmed, would automatically move into rapid action to get it all done, even if that meant doing the wrong things or doing the right things sloppily. Obviously, there was a cost to this.

As she began to pay more attention, she saw that it was easier for her to jump into action than it was for her to feel her reaction to the perceived threat of having too much to do, which she experienced as a bubbly sensation that created pressure in her chest. In any given moment, it was more comfortable for her to do the wrong things than to feel this sense of anxiety, although when she was dealing with the consequences of those decisions it was another story. Eventually, as she learned to feel the sensations without having to move immediately to action, she became more adept at making good choices for how to spend her time when she was overwhelmed. This is how feeling more creates more choice and better actions: it calms the sense of compulsion that accompanies reactive behavior.

This client’s experience also illustrates what’s now known about the importance of emotions in decision-making. It turns out that people who have suffered damage to certain emotional centers of their brains cannot make good decisions – or sometimes any decisions at all. This is because emotions tell us what we care about, and emotions communicate through sensation. You know you’re agitated, for example, because your heart is beating fast, or because your stomach is tied in knots. Tragically, people who have damage to certain parts of their emotional centers literally cannot feel their own preferences. So when faced with a choice, all the options feel about the same, and they wind up stuck. As it turns out, the more we can feel, the wiser our choices become.

For all these reasons and more, deepening your ability to feel your own sensations and identify your mood is a fundamental aspect of centering.

The Heart of Centering

The practice of centering begins with feeling more. When you have a name for something (temperature, pressure, movement) you can see it more easily. Once you’ve brought what you’re feeling into awareness, you’re in a good position to start shifting gears, if you so choose. This next step in the practice is what will help you settle the fight-flight response in your body. In fact I’ve been told that it’s clinically impossible to be anxious when you’re truly centered.

The heart of centering begins with paying attention to posture, but it’s not about posture. Your posture will be affected, but it’s more about coming present to yourself. It’s about aligning yourself so that nothing is squeezed off by unnecessary effort or tension, so that you are relaxed and open, energized and fully alive. If that’s hard to imagine right now, that’s simply because of the limitation of trying to put a physical experience into language. It will start to make more sense when you practice, I promise.

In the beginning, practice this while standing. That’s the easiest way to get a sense of the alignment you’re aiming for when you’re first starting out. It’s also the easiest way to feel all of your sensations. Over time, you’ll learn how to center yourself in any position, including moving, sitting, and lying down.

Length: The Dimension of Dignity

Fully inhabiting your length is about identifying with your own sense of worth and self-regard. This is easy to see in its absence: someone who is slumped over probably isn’t feeling too good about themselves in that moment. Length is also about having your feet firmly planted in the world of practical action while simultaneously being connected to something larger that has meaning for you.

To come fully into your length, first feel your feet on the ground. Let your weight settle into the lower half of your body. At the same time, allow yourself to be your full natural height. There’s no need to reach, just feel your weight on the ground and your natural extension up.

Your skeleton is designed to hold your weight without any extra muscular effort, so line it up so it can do its job: ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, head. Go through your body head to toe, and relax your eyes, your jaw, your shoulders, your chest, and so on all the way down. Breathe into the lower third of your lungs.

Width: The Dimension of Connection and Community

Coming into your width gives you greater capacity to build both connection and boundaries. Both are critical for strong, healthy relationships of all kinds. Like length, width is easiest to see when it is out of balance. Imagine the unapproachable person with arms and legs crossed, pulled into herself, or the inappropriately friendly drunk who’s always got his arm around his new best friend, whom he just met. These are caricatures, but you get the idea.

To come into your width, set your feet hip distance apart. Rock from side to side until you feel yourself come to a balanced place in the center. Feel the sides of your body, noticing temperature, pressure, and movement along your arms and the sides of your torso, at your hips and down your legs. Feel the boundary of your skin. Where do you end and where does the air begin?

Depth: The Dimension of Time

Any living being is in an ongoing process of becoming, and we are no exception. Living fully in your depth is about relying on the strengths, competencies, and relationships you’ve built through the life experiences – good and bad – that you’ve had to date. It’s also about imagining into the future and envisioning where you’re headed and what you want to create. When this dimension is out of balance you might see someone stuck in their past or ignoring it’s impact, or someone who’s always one step ahead of themselves.

To inhabit your depth, lean back on your heels and then forward on your toes, back and forth until you find a center point of balance. Feel the back of your body, noticing temperature, pressure, and movement all up and down your spine, shoulder blades, and the backs of your legs. Move your attention forward a bit and feel your internal organs – gut, heart, and breath. Keep breathing into the lower third of your lungs. Start to bring your attention to the front of your body: face and chest, abdomen, thighs, shins, feet. If you were to take a step forward from here, do you know where you are headed? Metaphorically, balance yourself between past and future, in the present moment. Physically, bring yourself present by feeling all of your sensations, as much as you possibly can.

Love: The Dimension of Meaning

We are more than three dimensional beings. We live in physical space, but there are so many intangible aspects to us as well. You might call these psychological, or spiritual, or just let them remain mysterious. Suffice it to say, we all care about something or someone, and that love and care is an essential – perhaps the most essential – aspect of who we are.

So fill yourself up – all the length, width, and depth of you – with who and what you love. Place your hand an inch or two below your navel. From the inside of your abdomen, feel your hand touching your skin. Feel the weight of your hand on your belly (pressure) and its warmth or coolness (temperature). Feel if there is any movement happening there, in the physical center of gravity of your body.

Now call to mind and heart someone or something you love. Ask yourself these questions slowly, and see if you can let your mind rest while you allow answers to just arise. Be willing to be surprised.

What’s important to you?

Who do you love?

What do you long for?

What is the center of gravity for your life?

Let the answers fill you.

Don’t be alarmed if this triggers an emotional response for you. And don’t be alarmed if it triggers none. Just allow yourself to explore and be willing to be surprised.

When you first begin this practice, centering might seem like merely a tool or a technique to settle your physiological stress triggers. Actually, it’s a way of organizing your entire self – body, heart, and mind – to bring more of what you love and care about forward in your own life. As you practice, centering can ultimately become a new way of being.

Centering in Action

As I mentioned earlier, there are many valuable centering practices that can help you stop and go within. But when you’re in the heat of the moment – a high-stakes presentation, an argument with your spouse, a pressing deadline – you often don’t have the luxury of pausing, closing your eyes, and taking a few deep breaths to get re-centered. You need a way to collect yourself on the fly.

So let’s start making this more practical in your day-to-day life. We’re going to take everything you’ve learned and bring it into action. So far we’ve covered:

- naming and feeling more sensation and emotion- centering in your physical body- centering in what you care about

The trick behind using these skills in daily life is to put your attention on these three things while you’re doing something else. You can start to train for this by adding movement to what you’ve already learned.

As it turns out, the cerebellum – an ancient part of your brain that helps mediate physical balance – is tied to the centers for emotional balance in your brain. This centering-in-action practice trains both those parts of your brain simultaneously, by joining balanced movement, sensory awareness, and physical alignment with the emotions of love and care.

Begin by centering yourself. Then, start walking. As you walk, practice feeling yourself more deeply, aligning your physical body, and filling up with what you love. Keep your attention on these internal states and sensations as you notice and take in the world around you. At first, it may seem like a lot to pay attention to. With practice, it will become more natural.

Many people will slip into their “ordinary” way of walking when they do this. For you that might mean walking fast, or being absent-minded, or letting your thoughts wander. When that happens, just remind yourself to feel your sensations, align your body, and center in what you care about.

If instead you find yourself striving to stay centered in an unwavering manner, relax. The practice here is not about being unceasingly centered – it’s about how quickly you can come back. I guarantee there are going to be events in life that knock you off center. The better you get at returning to center when those events occur, the better you’ll be at handling them. So practice that here. Let yourself occasionally get thrown off as you walk. Then just bring your attention back to centering. It is this practice of re-centering while you are in action that will help you translate this practice to your day-to-day life.

Troubleshooting

If you can’t seem to relax or if there are parts of your body that are numbLook for an emotionally competent bodyworker. In some cases, your body will get stuck in ways that affect your actions and behavior. Shifting your actions often requires softening your body. If you are interested in working with me, I work regularly with clients in Portland, OR and in the San Francisco Bay Area. I also do coaching sessions via phone and skype. While I can do a surprising amount from a distance and would be happy to support you, nothing replaces the healing power of touch.

If you can’t seem to remember to do it on a regular basisMake a public commitment. Announce it on the embright facebook page, if you like. A learning community can support you, and public accountability can help you sustain your commitment, so get others involved. Find an accountability partner to check in with. And be sure you’ve chosen a supportive place to practice.

If you can’t seem to call it up in the heat of the momentWhen you practice centering, you are literally building a body that has more emotional resilience and can respond differently under pressure. Among other things, you’re developing the ability to settle your fight-flight response when it’s not needed. Like doing sit-ups to build abs, building the ability to center by default will take time, attention, and practice.

Luckily, unlike going to the gym, you don’t need to add any extra activities to your life if you choose not to. You just need to add this focus of attention to what you’re already doing. Of course training your body takes an ongoing commitment. In fact research has shown that it takes hundreds and even thousands of repetitions to put a new sequence of movements on autopilot. I say this not to discourage you but to inspire you. If you’re stuck, it’s not a reflection on your capability or your character. You just need more repetitions. So keep practicing… especially when you don’t need it. Because that’s how you’ll be able to call upon it when you really do.

Help! I still get thrown off centerOf course you do. Centering is an ongoing process, not a static, rigid way of being. The goal is most assuredly NOT to be centered all the time. Rather, the aim is to cultivate the ability to return to center more and more often, with more and more ease, in an increasingly wide variety of life situations. Think of center like home base. As soon as you notice you’ve been thrown off, you can always come home.

Centering makes me feel tense and stiffMany people, when they are first starting out, find themselves striving for some kind of perfect or idealized posture when they are centering. As they apply effort they become more tense rather than more relaxed, more stiff rather softer. Maybe that’s you.

If so, you’re in good company. Our society trains us to be good students, to try hard, and to get it right. So your efforts here are coming from a perfectly reasonable place.

Here’s a secret that might help: centering really isn’t about posture. It’s about aligning your system so that the maximum amount of life energy can move through it. Well-aligned posture helps, to be sure, especially as you’re learning. But striving for a certain posture with tension and rigidity will only cut you off from that energy or numb you to it.

Centering is really about relaxing tension and rigidity – not to the point of slack inattention, but to a point of calm alertness. Imagine a master violinist about to put bow to string, or an Olympic diver about to launch off the high platform. What these pros have in common is a relaxed, alert, focused, readiness for action. It is this sense of focused relaxation that you are looking to cultivate. Keep practicing.

Ouch! Centering hurts!For years, probably decades, your body has been accustomed to certain postures and ways of holding. When you ask it to shift and change, you may find yourself using muscles that are out of practice. As you start to use them more, these muscles may tire and become sore. That’s normal. Just keep “working out” and you’ll find that as centering becomes easier, changing your actions becomes easier, too.

Obviously, don’t do anything to injure yourself. No one knows your body like you do. So listen to your body, rest when necessary, and push yourself when appropriate. Trust yourself.

It’s not about getting good at the practice.It’s about getting good at your life. This practice will be of help to you if you use it in your daily life. It’s not meant to add time and another activity to your already-full life; it’s meant to add a new way of being to your life. During this challenge, it will add a few minutes to your day each day as you learn how it works. When you’ve got the basics down and you’ve integrated an ongoing practice into your normal, daily routine, then you’ll have it embodied and be able to use it whenever you want to or need to. I encourage you to return to this challenge as often as you need to in order to embody the ability to center yourself in any situation.

Learn More

Centering is just the beginning, and it barely scratches the surface of what’s possible with a somatic approach to building social and emotional intelligence. If you’ve found this introduction useful and want to continue the exploration, I invite you to check out embright.org, where you will find many more free resources to help you.

If you have specific questions or want to explore how to apply this practice in your unique situation, please visit the website to learn about coaching offers and upcoming courses. I’m available for private consultation as well as customized courses, and I would be happy to help you expand your use of this practice.

What Is Somatics

Somatics is a holistic, body-mind-spirit approach to learning, growth, and change. The word comes from the Greek word soma, which loosely translates to “the living body in its wholeness”. In Greek times, the term referred to the emotional balance, physical fitness, mental agility, and spiritual or moral compass that made for a good citizen.

In modern times this holistic approach to self-cultivation began its rebirth in the field of health care. Used successfully for decades in that domain, somatics is more recently being applied in the field of leadership development, where it is producing indisputable results.

About Amanda Blake

The idea of training the body to develop leadership capacity may seem a bit unusual. I thought so too, at first. The world had rewarded me for my sharp thinking skills with a degree from Stanford University and a respectable career running the business education program at software giant Intuit. Taking such a non-standard approach to leadership development seemed risky, to say the least. So how did I get there?

When I was a kid, my father had a business card that said “World Saver.” I wanted one just like it when I grew up. Instead I spent most of my early career wanting to make a difference but frustrated by how hard it was to do business in a better way. I tried just about every form of support out there, from career assessments to workshops to coaches. I studied and worked with the luminaries and leaders in the sustainability movement long before sustainability became fashionable. I searched

for years for my way to “save” (or at least serve) the world, all the while trying earnestly but unsuccessfully to think my way into more satisfaction, fulfillment, and effectiveness.

Then I came across an approach that was far more useful in helping me realize my goals than anything else I had tried. It gave me the fuel to take risks on behalf of what I care about and to persevere in the face of obstacles. I learned new skills for working with myself and others, and I discovered a way to marry my history as an internationally competitive athlete, yoga enthusiast, and mountaineering guide with the life of my mind. I loved it so much that I became a Master Somatic Coach so I could share what I had learned with others.

Now, I work with people in seminars and in private consultation to help them embody a more compelling presence, align their actions with their deeply felt cares, handle high-pressure situations with more equanimity, and develop more satisfying and effective relationships with others. I get to help people tap the best in themselves so they can make a bigger difference in the world – so they, too, can become the World Savers they long to be. I can’t think of a more richly rewarding way to spend my time.