10/22/2020
Titration is a technique we use in Craniosacral Therapy to help the body to orient to health and decompact intense sensation.
Where do you feel health in your body? What are your resources?
All feelings are negotiable. Even the most intense feelings of pain, fear, tiredness and, even air-hunger (the urge to breath), are perceptions inside you. Alex Hutchinson in his book ‘Endure’ shows that our supposed physiological limits are deeply dependent on context and prior learning.
With practice, it is possible to modulate, and eventually shift, even the most stuck and scary feelings inside you. This is a radical concept, but it is a consistent theme emerging from researchers in pain, tiredness, breathing and anxiety.
Start by learning to feel the baseline sensations of the size, shape and weight of your body. Establish feelings of safety and health, even if they are only hinted at or feel very far away. Dig deep, it can be tricky if you have been disconnected from feeling for a while.
Try to remember peak experiences in you life. How do you know what joy and ease feel like? You are not alone if finding simple words for sensations is hard at the start, most of my clients struggle initially!
Once you have a baseline of resourcing feelings, be curious about the scary, difficult stuff. Go slow, take breaks and always make sure you have part of your awareness anchored in your resources.
Don’t grab on to the feelings and don’t try and change them. Just be curious; ‘This is how my body feels right now’, ‘This is me right now’. Appreciate that your body and brain are working hard to protect you, but sometimes they get stuck with noisy alarm signals and difficult action patterns.
Try negotiating with what you feel from a place of curiosity rather than fear. Paradoxically, just noticing intense sensations from a safe perspective is frequently enough for them to change. Good luck, you might be surprised.
