Your Body Holds the Key to Mental Wellbeing

Mental health is conventionally addressed through mind-focused approaches, but this misses crucial aspects of wellbeing found in the body and spirit. Trauma becomes stored in our nervous system, creating patterns that affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors long after the original experience.

• Every person experiences trauma—both "big T" traumas like major life events and "little t" traumas like childhood embarrassment
• Trauma is anything too overwhelming for us to process in the moment
• Panic attacks and anxiety are normal, natural trauma responses from the body
• Body-based tools like sunshine exposure, cold compresses, and specific breathing practices can help regulate the nervous system
• Mental health disruptions are often rooted in nervous system patterns, not just the mind
• Yoga is a powerful somatic trauma recovery tool that creates space for body awareness and healing
• Accessing the wisdom in your body can help re-pattern your nervous system

If this podcast episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on Instagram at The_Nourished_Woman, or through my website, KeriMarino.com. If you're looking for a space for deeper support, mentorship or simply a space to feel held, I'd love to have you join us inside the Nourished Woman Sanctuary.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Holistic Mental Health
• 1:36 Understanding Trauma: Big T and Little t
• 4:21 Body-Based Tools for Panic Attacks
• 6:12 Nervous System Patterns and Healing
• 7:37 Yoga as Somatic Trauma Recovery

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Welcome to the Nourished Woman podcast, a space for women on a growth and healing journey who want to experience more joy, play and pleasure while feeling deeply rooted within themselves. Body play and pleasure while feeling deeply rooted within themselves body, mind and spirit. I'm your host, keri Marino, somatic yoga therapist, mentor and mama of three. Let's dive in love Well-being. Are we feeling balanced emotionally? Are we feeling flooded? Are we feeling numb? Are you feeling anxious or depressed, or witnessing yourself struggle with addictions or eating disorder, or really sitting in the heaviness of trauma? So all of this is that mental health arena. So all of this is that mental health arena. And conventionally, when we address mental health, we go and see a mental health practitioner either a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist or maybe even someone like your general practitioner and you'll share what a space to talk through what you're going through, or some medical interventions like a medication or to manage your stress or things like that, and all of this is fantastic. Right? I am so happy to see that we are having more conversations about mental health, that more and more people are being transparent about their mental health experiences and struggles, and also mental health by and large is a very mind focused approach. So this is called a top-down approach. So it's where you work on the mind to impact what's going on within you as a whole, in your life and your experience of it. And this mind-based approach is obviously valuable and I am not discounting it in any way. But also, you are not just a mind, you have a body and a spirit, and so when we leave out those other aspects of self, body and spirit, we're really missing out on much of what actually contributes to you having improved mental well-being. So let's get into that just a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 2:40

We'll use trauma as an example. So, first off, every single one of you have experienced trauma in your lifetime. It could be early childhood trauma. It could be big T trauma, so like major experiences that you had that happened one time or happened on multiple occasions, things like neglect or things like experiencing the loss of someone that you love, on and on and on big T trauma, and then there's also little t trauma, and so those are oftentimes things that you don't realize how much they're impacting you when it happens. So an example in my life is a body shaming experience that I had when I was in elementary school where my body was being made fun of and I've done a lot of growth and healing around that now. But me as an eight-year-old I didn't really understand how big of a deal that was and it became a very influential experience for me. That's a little t trauma.

Speaker 1: 3:47

So with trauma, ultimately it is anything that is too much, too big or too fast for you to process in the moment. Your body and your nervous system cannot digest what is happening to you and maybe you don't have the brain development like maybe your literally brain is not developed enough to be able to make sense of it. If you were a child or a teen or a young adult, maybe you did not have the support, so maybe you didn't feel like you were like met with love and compassion and had a space to talk it through and work through it. Maybe your body wasn't able to move through its natural response to whatever was going on, like it was shut down from being able to have that primal expression that a body does have through trauma.

Speaker 1: 4:41

Just this week I had someone reach out to me because they are having panic attacks because of a major medical crisis that their sister is going through and they were asking me how can I stop the panic attacks, and I told this lovely young person that the goal is not to stop the panic attacks, like, actually, a panic attack is a normal, healthy, natural trauma response that her body is doing, and like it's natural when you're going through a major, life threatening medical crisis with someone you love, and so her body is trying to process this experience. It is overcome with anxiety. That is leading all the way up the ladder of experience to anxiety induced panic attacks, and so I was giving her some very practical body-based tools of okay, here's the things that you can do to help your body so that it does not feel like it needs to go that far, it needs to go into a panic attack. So we talked about simple strategies that she could take Things like going out in the sunshine and feeling the sunshine on her skin, things like ice cold cloths on her face, things like a specific breathing practice, different body and somatic based tools that make a difference. So, bringing this full circle we have all experienced trauma.

Speaker 1: 6:12

Trauma is anything that we can't process in the moment. When we experience trauma, it gets stored in our bodies, and specifically your nervous system, and then that becomes a pattern in your nervous system and then that becomes a pattern in your nervous system, and so anytime you experience something similar to that, it wires you up to have the same nervous system response which impacts how you think, which impacts how you feel, which impacts what you do, which impacts how you perceive something, which impacts what you're noticing in your body, and on and on and on. So you can actually see that this disruption in your mental health is not actually rooted in your mind. It is rooted in your nervous system, and accessing the wisdom that lives inside of your body can help you to re-pattern your nervous system. And yoga is like the OG in terms of somatic trauma recovery, because it gives you a space to be aware of your body. It gives you a space to tune in and slow down and breathe and honor your body, and then there's also somatic healing practices.

Speaker 1: 7:37

If this podcast episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a message on Instagram at the Nourished Woman, or through my website, kerrymarinocom, and if you're looking for a space for deeper support, mentorship or simply a space to feel held, I'd love to have you join us inside the Nourished Woman Sanctuary. The beautiful music you're hearing is from Shawn Johnson and the Wild Lotus Band, and you can find them on all streaming platforms.