Quick Self-Regulation Tips for HSPs When You’re Triggered Emotionally
If you're a sensitive person living in a Tibetan monastery, you can most likely ignore this post and the need for additional self-regulation skills. On the other hand, if you're involved in the world, a householder, with all the daily challenges that life inevitably...
Bodily Awareness Trains Your Brain to Quiet Anxiety
You can learn the practice of embodied mindfulness and the principles of neuroplasticity to transform your brain, enhance your perception of reality, and quiet anxiety. The knowledge is important but the practice is essential for transforming your brain, your...
Expressive Writing for Anxiety and Neurological Balance
Expressive writing is a powerful tool for addressing anxiety, supported by three decades of research, for restoring emotional and neurological balance. This is important because our response to stressful emotions either enhances or imbalances the functioning of our...
Anxiety and Our Body’s Hidden Potential for Transformation
Much of our anxiety is driven by an overactive mind in the form of excessive thinking that's fueled by limiting beliefs. One helpful approach for dealing with this mind stuff is to, in a sense 'lose our mind' by connecting directly with our felt bodily experience in...
An Easily Overlooked Mindfulness Practice for Anxiety
I began meditating in my mid-twenties to help with anxiety. I was so serious about feeling better that I moved to a meditation retreat center in the Catskills In winter. There, I worked in the kitchen in exchange for hours of daily meditation time. I left as anxious...
An Updated, Parts Friendly Version of Tapping for Anxiety and More
I was introduced to Tapping in 1983 by my friend and chiropractor Dr. Craig Williams. In those early days of Tapping it was called Thought Field Therapy, or TFT. I found the process to be very helpful with phobias, addictive behaviors, anxiety, and especially for...
The Impact of New Neuroscience on Our Belief in Self-Healing
A wise doctor said, "If the patient believes they can heal they're correct, and on the other hand, if the patient believes they cannot heal .... they're correct". I'm not sure about the absoluteness of that statement, but in general it's a good bet that what we...
Surprisingly, Turning Towards Chronic Pain Offers Relief
It's natural to want to distance yourself from chronic pain, whether it's nature is physical or emotional. Yet, the more we resist, avoid, or brace against chronic pain, the more we fuel the brain circuitry that's creating the pain. Without a doubt, it's...
The Mindfulness Solution to Chronic Pain and Why it Works
The treatment of chronic pain is a prime example of where high-tech, modern medicine has fallen short, disastrously short. Conventional medicine is focused on resolving symptoms in body parts when the real cause of most chronic pain isn't the body, but in stress and...
Overcoming Difficulties to Embodied Mindfulness Practice with Heart
In a recent post, 'You Can Learn to Connect with Your Body to Ease Anxiety' I suggested that while mindfully connecting with your body is very helpful, it can also be difficult to impossible for some. In this post we'll look at some of these difficulties and how...
Kindness Transforms Your Nervous System and Others’ as Well
A simple act of kindness, like holding a door for a stranger, a friendly pat on the back, or chatting good-naturedly in the checkout line at the market, triggers a positive cascade of neurology and neurochemistry that's potentially contagious. Hopefully contagious....
You Can Learn to Connect With Your Body to Ease Anxiety
While our instinct is to turn away from anxious thoughts and feelings, learning to mindfully turn towards them awakens the neural circuitry we need to heal. Our bodies are both the source of anxiety and the key to its resolution. We learn very early in life, as early...
You Can Add Mindfulness to Your Treatment of Seasonal Depression
If we better understand seasonal depression, or seasonal affective disorder (SAD), we can be more resourceful when it comes to treating, or ideally preventing SAD. It can also be very helpful to understand that many of the SAD symptoms can be reframed as symptoms of...
Is Your Body A Quantum Source of Intuitive Guidance?
Most everyone has had meaningful intuitions, premonitions, or forebodings at some point in their lives and yet may find it difficult to believe their experience, and even less likely to understand how it happens. While there are different types of intuition, a...
Key Embodiment Concepts for Effective Mindfulness Practice
Embodied Mindfulness is an eclectic amalgam of embodied, self-regulating practices and supportive science. For a complete list of the practices and science see ‘The Embodied Practices’ page at www.stevetemplin.com. Since one size does not fit all, the variety of...
Energetic Grounding for the Highly Sensitive Person
A common trait of highly sensitive people (HSP) is that they can become fearful of and overwhelmed by strong emotions. Energetic grounding is an embodied process that allows a sensitive individual to experience and process emotions without fear. We live in a culture...
Slow Breathing, An (Almost) Quick Fix for Calming Your Mind
Slow breathing is the most direct and dependable strategy for calming your mind that comes to mind. When in doubt about what to do to create more clarity, calm, or focus, I'll remind myself, hopefully sooner than later, to breathe more slowly. I say that it's 'almost'...
Slow Breathing for Alzheimer’s Prevention
There's very encouraging news for individuals who are willing to devote some time to self-care with an inner, self-regulation practice. Not only does the inner practice produce more emotional balance and ease, but it also creates measurable biological changes. A...
Is it Naive to Believe that Compassion Can Transform a Society?
Do you have a belief that love, compassion, and cooperation are viable avenues, possibly the only way forward, for healing our social and political division? If that's true for you, do you often feel at odds with a larger cultural bias towards opposition and division?...
Why Do I Resist Meditating?
It's a scientific fact (backed by decades of neuroscience research) that you can change your brain to positively influence how you think, feel, and behave. Regardless of what's happened to you (and to your brain) in the past, today is the day you can begin to update...