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?...
Tips for When You’re Emotionally Triggered
Whether you're highly sensitive or not, everyone gets triggered emotionally. The sensitive folks just have a lower threshold. Once we're triggered we tend to react in predictable ways. From an autonomic nervous system perspective, we tend to react by running,...
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...
Is it Safe to be Highly Sensitive in Today’s Chaotic World?
Life has always been more challenging for highly sensitive people. We feel more of everything and that means more emotional pain as well. And who wants more of that? And that’s the problem. Nobody wants emotional pain, especially the highly sensitive person (HSP). We...
The Power of Self-Healing Science
A wise doctor said, "If the patient believes they can heal they're absolutely correct, and on the other hand, if the patient believes they cannot heal .... they're absolutely correct". I'm not sure about the absoluteness of that statement, but in general it's a good...
Tapping for Anxiety and More: A Forty-Year Journey of Self-Discovery
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...
I Can’t Believe This Is Happening Again
Have you noticed that some experiences in your life, often the less pleasant ones, have a habit of repeating? Have you ever asked yourself, why is this happening again? This post will offer insight on how to make sense of these repeating patterns or themes and more...
Befriending and Healing Ourselves and Others with Focusing
Speaking of natural healing, Focusing is the most natural and essential healing process I've discovered in my lifelong pursuit of healing and wholeness. Hands down. So, just what is Focusing? For me, it's not really a technique. Although Focusing was discovered at the...
Your Body Stores and Releases Trauma Naturally
Your body is your subconscious mind and is just waiting for you to connect with it. I'll say more about learning how to listen to your body's healing language a bit later. Your body partitions off and stores intense or traumatic emotional energy as a form of...
Emotional Stress Release for the Highly Sensitive Person
I remember a patient from many years ago who was experiencing back pain years after, actually a decade after, she had been injured in an auto accident. I was treating her with acupuncture and a variety of manual therapies but I was only able to provide her with...
The Unfathomable Mystery of the Highly Sensitive Body
Over the last fifty years I've observed a gradual shift towards including the body in the pursuit of mental, emotional, or spiritual healing. I'm not speaking of the body as an object to be treated but rather as a source of wisdom when we turn our attention to the...