Martha Eddy – The Shift Network – Reset Your Nervous System & Regulate Your Own Wellbeing With Dynamic Embodiment℠ Movement

A calm nervous system provides a baseline for healthy reactivation of an alive and receptive nervous system — and a happier you.

Did you know your nervous system can become dysregulated even if you feel like you’re in a passive state of mind?

To calm or balance your nervous system, you first must know how it works — taking time to feel it so you can discern how it impacts your everyday behavior.

Sensitizing movements enhance your bodily awareness as your body senses a change in the status quo. When you speak, walk, draw, or dance — then learn to pay attention to the new sensations — you’ll gain empowering new information about yourself.

This consciousness-shifting process, moving the body to increase self-awareness and act with greater clarity and conviction, is known as DE somatic movement.

By paying attention to the soma (the living body), you’re listening to your body, which is capable of both survival and expression.

This somatic listening supports self-regulation, self-care, and greater health. It can be a tool for guidance and attunement with your outward direction and your inner truths.

In this opening module, you’ll come to understand the key components of the nervous system — the involuntary (autonomic) functions and the voluntary functions.

Martha will share how you can awaken connection to the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve, and the skeletal-muscular system — through awareness of glands, organs, fluids, and the nerves that activate them.

You’ll discover the power of choice as you work with, through, and hopefully against different types of stress. Each stressor is experienced through your body — and slowing down to feel and move your body is a huge part of the solution.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How your body and consciousness are related
• Neurocellular awareness and how to access it
• An embodied map of the nervous system and its key functions
• The causes of dysregulation — from stress to conflict to trauma
• What to do to calm your body
• Guided movement practices for balancing your nervous system, including embodied visualizations and meditations, relaxing movements, and play — all within a caring and socially aware setting

Why is early motor experience important?

How you move today is based on your early childhood experiences.

As you’ll discover in this module, by learning and even practicing the basic coordination of baby movements, you’ll gain insight into your adult self.

Connections to old, stuck places often emerge. Because some infant movements are hard to perform as an adult, Martha will share the adaptations she’s created for going through developmental movements of creeping, crawling, toddling, and walking that are easier on the body — with options to sit, stand, and lie down.

This Relax to Focus^SM movement series can be done seated in a chair, on the floor, or standing — as your body sinks, rises, encloses, spreads, advances, and retreats.

Martha will guide you to experience how you first behaved as a baby — with movement responses, including vocalizations.

When moving, even from one seated posture to another, you’ll also explore different moods and states of mind. You’ll learn “movement scales,” rituals or sequences for aligning with your attention, finding different emotional responses.

You’ll also become alert to the nonverbal communication habits that are connected to your posture, your movement, and the pitch of your voice.

In this module, you’ll explore:

• A neurodevelopmental approach to your habitual movements — or baby movements, as Martha calls them
• Your relationship with your caregivers and its impact on your personality and behavior
• Brain-mood-body movement connections — and why movement is behavior
• How you breathe and move when you’re calm or stressed — and ways to coordinate breath and movement
• Four easygoing guided movement practices to support effective approaching and withdrawing, bonding and defending, and reaching and pushing — to locate what’s inside, outside, and between different parts of yourself as you calm your nervous system

Conflict resolution is an important skill in life. Bringing your body wisdom into handling conflict can expedite staying present.

In this module, you’ll explore embodying peace at home, in work, and at play.

Martha’s EmbodyPeace approach includes numerous models of resolving conflict — developed over 40 years while working with people of all ages in schools, universities, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations.

Martha will explain traditional systems of negotiation and mediation. You’ll explore how embodiment, including inner and outer awareness (interoception and exteroception), establishes the ground and insight for peaceable responses to conflict.

Interoception is awareness within the body — and sadly, it’s rarely taught.  New vocabulary will help unpack how you have access to your inner wisdom and bodily knowing.

Using the flow of movement that emerges unconsciously through hand gestures or postural shifts, you’ll learn how Martha’s Active Witnessing Process can help you find words for feelings, and movement for action. You’ll feel more embodied.

Exteroception refers to your senses that pay attention to the environment outside of your body. Martha will guide you to explore this space of inner and outer flow, the betweenness.

As you balance your nervous system, you’ll ask yourself:

How do I see, feel, then react to disagreements, conflicts, abusive situations, and harm? How do I come into feeling safe? When do I feel safe enough to stand up for a systemic change?

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How movement of the eyes and heart are both key for deepening attunement with your emotion
• The delightful surprise of finding words for feelings, and movements that support statements and actions
• The C.A.P.S. system of conflict resolution — Cool Down, Agree, Points of View, Solving Problems
• Interoception of rising emotions — clarifying proprioception, kinesthesia, nociception, neuroception, and visceroception
• Using “the balance of inner and outer focus” as Ariadne’s string to find the way back to a self-regulated state
• How to use Martha’s Active Witnessing Process
• A somatic social-justice perspective, anchoring your body as you picture transformative and restorative justice — and experience “body alerts” to your own bias and prejudice

As you apply what you’ve learned in the last three modules, you’ll begin to notice your personal stressors — plus the larger pressures on our culture and world.

In this module, you’ll explore what Martha calls the Stress-to-Trauma Continuum, which asks the questions:

How do stress and trauma differ? How are they the same? When does internal conflict or conflict with others play a part in what’s happening? How do our bodies and awareness of the vagal nerve responses, body tone, and movement help us recognize what state we’re in?

Martha will guide you to ask personal questions, understanding that you and your classmates will have very different answers. Questions will include:

What can you control? What do you need to let go of? What is the role of intuition? How can you be more observant of the present moment? What helps you look into the future without fear? When is it helpful to recognize these issues — and when do you need to set boundaries?

You’ll ground and center, then imagine a slightly stressful situation and explore how it can be of service to you. You’ll learn the bodily skills that can balance the nervous system enough for safety and help you find physiological calm.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• The similarities and differences between stress and trauma
• The vagus nerve’s role in determining our psychological and emotional states — and how a myriad of common psychological and physical symptoms, from anxiety and depression to migraines and back pain, link back to an issue with the vagus nerve
• Differences between homeostasis (maintaining body systems such as blood pH or body temperature) and allostasis (maintaining stability through altering physiologic parameters to counteract challenges)
• Movement’s role in stress and stress management, including the positive use of reflexive responses
• A 5- to 10-minute movement practice, Calming the Nervous System & Engaging the Parasympathetic Nervous System
• How to dissipate stressors with return to the breath and imagery strategies
• A guided movement practice where you’ll embody boundaries with your lymph, muscles, and gaze, strengthening your ability to act for change

Everyone has unique bodies and pasts. Your genetics and life lessons — nature and nurture — influence who you are today.

In this module, you’ll review which function each type of movement serves —  for instance, relaxation, activation, interaction, and play.

You’ll reflect on which activities are best for you and develop a map for handling your emotions and body sensations in different situations.

You’ll use journal writing, visualization, movement, and vibration as ways to perceive what is, support what feels challenging, and move into new bodymind states.

You’ll explore Dynamic Embodiment’s O.S.O. model — Observe, Support, and Optimize.

You’ll work with the mystery and anatomy of breathing. Martha will walk you through three-dimensional breathing using your thoracic diaphragm to breathe in all dimensions.

As you breathe, you’ll reinforce different postures that hold stories and impact your neuroendocrine system, hormones, and chakras. Martha’s guided practice will help you experience how surges of hormones can be released through breath and movement.

You’ll track which activities you’re most likely to stick with. As Martha will share, we only benefit from what we actually do, or at least imagine. You’ll find the pathways in your nervous systems to be who you fully are, as a unique individual.

From there, you’ll commit to a practice — your personal journey.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How to use journal writing to help uncover when you’re stressed, irritated, and more
• How belly breathing also moves your pelvic floor, vocal cords, and some of the fascia around your brain — and how each can serve as a support
• Which habits get in your way right when you’re hoping to regulate your system
• Your profound resiliency skills

In this module, Martha will help you see the ways you glean support and create separation from the people around you.

You’ll also explore ways to work with conflict, stress, and trauma — and learn to notice which systems set up chronic tensions like humiliation, abuse, or feelings of neglect and unworthiness.

Understanding the social systems you’re operating within helps you connect more deeply with others — and connection is your key to healing.

You’ll explore how bonding with and defending are responses to other people. How do they show up in movement? When do you attach, and what does your body do? When do you separate, become more numb, or even disappear a bit? What’s useful and what’s harmful about each of your responses?

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How to notice the ways you “other” people or groups — in this process, Martha will help you learn more about your own systems of dysregulation
• How your eyes and vision help with orienting you
• Techniques for regulating your gaze during a “group sway” practice
• What happens when you or someone you know is blocked by shame, humiliation, or destructive forces — and how to dialogue in a way that supports compassion and healthy desire
• Guided movement practices —including the body language for saying yes and no, gazing with compassion, rocking to co-regulate, and techniques to calm your nervous system