u/nomad01010

Last year I started experiencing anxiety around some career stress. Then I came across this TikTok where a Buddhist monk suggested to “stop resisting” & associate into your unwanted feelings & body sensations. Seemed like a counterintuitive & interesting idea so I tried. And it helped.

I continued experimenting with this & found that if I breathed into the feeling & exhaled and removed attention off that feeling (with don’t care attitude), it would shift into my body. Over the course of several weeks i felt the feelings shifted from my abdomen area to back where I started getting muscle knots. I also started getting body spasms as I would do the removing the attention technique. And then one day it culminated in a release with accompanied shaking and my back arching. And my anxiety around those thoughts disappeared.

Googling around AI suggested that I’m actually doing what’s called somatic experiencing. Great!

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I was journaling & ran across a troubling thought that I’d experienced for a long time and accompanied with a knotted feeling in my body. So I decided to focus on it for several minutes. After a while it shifted and exploded into anxiousness. It’s a pretty disconcerting feeling. Comes and goes. And I’m also experiencing somatic tenitus that shifts in pitch & volume constantly.

I feel like I may have thawed an old wound that I’d very much like to resolve but I’m also very mindful to do it safely. Online research suggests I should tread with caution. I had a rough childhood & I do have patterning around high functioning fight or flight which looks like I’ve exposed. Anyway, it’s fairly disconcerting but manageable right now. Perhaps I’m in a so called “healing crises” where everything feels raw & amplified.

Any help & guidance regarding this is appreciated!

I’ve been using Sedona method for quite a while & have made some great progress. However, I’m curious what people think about its effectiveness for someone in fight or flight. Basically for someone who has a sensitized nervous system. Or someone with frozen feelings that need to release before they can be processed.

Going through a difficult time in my life, I started to journal earlier this year. It helped so I continued. Since then it has evolved into something I engage in several hours a day. 

For me it follows this pattern. I start writing in bullet points about individual thoughts exactly as they come without interpretation. Often they are attached with an emotion. I notice that my bullet points about a certain situation form a stack that loops over and over. I write whatever comes up, even the repetitions. 

Over time, patterns start to emerge. Loops repeat and I can label them (which I find very useful). And start to become aware of variations and tangents. I become very familiar with the feelings (in my body) attached with each thought. Sometimes, I can stop and use therapeutic techniques on them (like reframing, somatic-experiencing, releasing, connected breathing etc).

Oftentimes I get into this flow/trance like state where vivid childhood memories start surfacing with strong realizations. 

I am noticing that over time, a thought loop about a certain situation shifts. Certain thoughts drop out and so does the underlying feeling. Certain thoughts I had my entire life have greatly reduced in frequency. Others have disappeared altogether. 

Not sure what is happening at a neurological level really. Perhaps I am boring my brain out of dropping a subject lol. Or by looking at all my thoughts about a situation from all angles exhaustively I allow my conscious mind to find a solution or realize the futility of the pattern.

Can't help but feel I have found a way to emotionally process my identity. My feeling is that if this is actually working then you could potentially process all your emotional baggage like this leading to emotional freedom. Needless to say this is an arduous process.

Wondering if anyone else has tried something similar. Just want to compare notes & iterate.