- Your Body’s Built-In Gentleness Instinct
Did you know that your body has a built-in Gentleness instinct? Let us recap what most of us have learned in our health science classes:
Our Autonomic Nervous System
The autonomic nervous system is a control system that acts largely unconsciously and regulates bodily functions such as heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal. There are two main branches of this nervous system, which are:
1) The fight/flight/freeze response
The fight/flight response first described by Dr Walter B. Cannon in 1915. He was an American physiologist, professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School. The freeze response was later added by Dr David H. Barlow in his book “Anxiety and its disorders: The nature and treatment of anxiety and panic” that was first published in 2001. He is an American psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Psychiatry at Boston University.
This activation/deactivation of the fight/flight/freeze response is fairly straightforward during our caveman times when we are trying to hunt for food, or to escape being eaten by wild animals / being killed by natural disasters. We activate these responses whenever we feel unsafe with any of the above threats, and after the threat is gone, we simply deactivate the fight/flight/freeze response and go back to our usual calmer caveman activities such as socializing, eating and sleeping. Activating the flight/flight/freeze response helps ensure our survival till the threat is gone.
However, as society gets increasingly industrialized, we find ourselves getting chronically stressed by longer-term fears (such as fear of unemployment, health crises, relationship troubles, political unrest) that can last for years. It then becomes necessary for us to find out more about this other nervous system response that we used to return automatically to feel safe and calm again. How can we intentionally activate this other response?
2) The relaxation response
The relaxation response is our parasympathetic system, it is the other response that we go back to when we no longer feel threatened and unsafe.
This response was discovered and described in the book “The Relaxation Response”, published in 1975 by Dr. Herbert Benson, a Harvard Physician with Miriam Z. Klipper. The inspiration to write this book was from Dr Benson’s research on this group of Transcendental Meditation (TM) students who visited the Harvard Medical School in 1968 and asked to be studied, as they felt that adopting the practice of TM could help to reduce blood pressure. The book also includes
a simplified secular 9-step technique modified from TM, which is designed to help elicit the relaxation response.
The Importance of eliciting The Relaxation Response
Being able to intentionally elicit the Relaxation Response is vitally important as a self-care practice to help address or even prevent stress-related health issues in our modern society. According to the Benson-Henry Institute (BHI) in Massachusetts Hospital founded by Dr Herbert Benson, roughly 60% to 90% of doctor visits are for conditions related to stress. This concept of intentionally eliciting The Relaxation Response is such a significant health discovery that the book continued to be a best-seller and even had an updated edition published in 2009, 34 years after its first publication!
Why am I renaming the Relaxation Response as our Gentleness Instinct?
Even with this groundbreaking discovery made by a highly-esteemed Harvard Physician who risked his career to share his findings in an easily-understandable format to the global public way back in 1975, people are still preoccupied with being chronically busy and stressed out. Relaxation now comes in the form of yoga and meditation classes that you do once a day or once a week, depending on your work schedule. Most of us are still feeling stressed for most part of the day, and then spending an hour or even just fifteen minutes to devote to a relaxation practice.
A healthy body should be in a calm and relaxed state most of the time, not for just fifteen minutes a day.
We should be studying, doing our work and/or taking care of our children in a calm and relaxed state most of the time.
Because of how the term “relaxation” seems to be misinterpreted and repackaged to refer to relaxing activities and holiday trips, I choose to rename this as our body’s built-in Gentleness Instinct instead.
To me, just thinking of the word “Gentleness” helps me to soften my default armor.
The word “Gentleness” helps give me permission to feel my physical sensations and feelings that I have in the Here and Now.
It is easier for me, especially as a naturally sensitive person, to embody Gentleness as my default state of being.
Knowing that I have an built-in Gentleness Instinct helps give me permission to face my everyday life with more gentleness instead of trying to hustle and bulldoze my way through life.
Would you like to try this out?
Reacquainting yourself with your Gentleness Instinct
Here is a simple two-step technique to activate your body’s Gentleness Instinct:
Step 1) set the intention to allow your instinct to be gentle on yourself.
Step 2) feel how you feel in your body after you have done Step 1.
Does that feel simple and straightforward for you?
Were you able to feel calmer and more relaxed?
If you have trouble activating your Gentleness Instinct through the above two-step technique, it could be:
- You find that being gentle is a weakness
- You do not know how to feel your feelings
- Your mind is too busy and chaotic for you to feel your feelings
- You feel disconnected from your physical body
- You are not used to talking about your feelings
Though you can easily feel overwhelmed by the reasons stated above, the direct solution I see is simply to find ways to feel your feelings, and actually start to feel your feelings more!
How to Feel your Feelings
What does it mean to “feel your feelings”? It simply means being aware of our feelings and letting them travel as they need to without trying to control, numb, label, judge and/or rationalize our feelings. It used to be easy for us to feel our feelings when we were babies and kids. As we grow older, we start to follow our parents’ rules (usually passed on from what they learned from their parents) on judging which are the feelings we are allowed to feel, and which feelings are ‘wrong’ to feel. This causes us to second-guess our feelings so we no longer just feel what we feel. We often have an inner dialogue that keeps censoring and numbing feelings we should not be feeling, or try to rationalize why we are feeling such feelings. Our ability to feel our feelings becomes constantly interrupted and sometimes even numbed by our overactive mind.
How can you relearn to feel your feelings again? There are a number of ways you can do this:
- Expressing Intuitively
The most intuitive way for us to feel our feelings is in speaking intuitively, singing intuitively, drawing/painting intuitively, writing intuitively and moving intuitively. These are all simple ways we naturally know to express our feelings into form.
- Improving your light touch proprioception
If you are new to feeling your feelings, start with physically stroking a part of your body, such as your forearm, side of your face, front of thigh, really lightly with your fingers as if you are stroking yourself with a feather.
After doing one light stroke, get your body to remember what that stroke felt like for you.
This is how light a feeling can feel like.
You can also use both hands and lightly touch yourself from your feet, up your legs, belly, chest, face all the way to the top of your head, and from your head down along your arms to end at your fingers. Remember what the entire stroke felt like.
This will help you to be more sensitive to feeling your body energetically.
Once you are more comfortable with feeling light sensations, it is easier for your body to allow your feelings to travel around the body as they need to.
- Feeling intense emotions
For intense emotions such as fear and anger, it is a common tendency to energetically jump out of yourself and focus on the person you are angry with or afraid of. If you are angry with that person you will feel yourself wanting to rush towards that person and hurt him/her. If you are fearful of a person you may feel like you need to constantly be vigilant and keep fleeing away from that person.
In both cases, you are not energetically inside yourself.
If you are not in any physical danger, take a moment to remind yourself that this is about you, not him/her. Come back to yourself. Be curious about the intense physical reactions you are feeling in your body, such as rapid heart rate, rapid breathing, feeling like you want to burst, throbbing sensations, etc. Lightly touch those body areas that are having these intense physiological reactions and thank yourself for staying with yourself in an unconditionally loving way.
- Inhaling Therapeutic Essential Oils
You may also feel that inhaling calming essential oils (of pure, therapeutic quality) from the palms of your hands can help immensely as well. Our sense of smell is directly linked to the limbic brain (that processes emotions) and the hypothalamus (that governs heart rate and breathing rate), so inhaling soothing smells can give automatic signals to help calm our bodies physically as well). Do note that essential oils are not drugs, so we are not numbing our emotions, but rather, allowing our bodies to respond more quickly and effectively to these emotions. Please be discerning and do your own thorough research when you are using essential oils for therapeutic purposes like this. I only trust and use Young Living’s essential oils.
After experimenting with some of the ways to feel your feelings, do try out the two-step technique to activate your Gentleness Instinct again!
Here are the two steps listed here again:
Step 1) set the intention to allow your instinct to be gentle on yourself.
Step 2) feel how you feel in your body after you have done Step 1.
How do you feel this time now?
Are you able to feel the gentle, relaxing energies starting to flow throughout your body more?
Are you starting to ‘hear’ more positive insights and ideas being ‘whispered’ to you in your mind?
Do you have a sense of knowing how your life is flowing the way it should flow for you, and that everything is perfectly right?
Are you starting to trust your life’s natural unfolding a little bit more?
This is the magic of mindfully reactivating your instinct to be gentler on yourself. Your energy feels softer as you resistance to the world starts to melt away a bit more. There is more flow within you and out of you as you become more open to intuitive intelligence. You relax and trust more in the natural rhythm of your life.
The world always seems more magical this way!
Try it!
