Restore with Awareness

02/17/2024

Please check out my good friend, Karena's amazing "Somatic healing meditations" podcast.
I was lucky enough to be interviewed by her for her episode this week, and I got to share one of my favorite somatic exercises designed to help relieve physical and mental tension and stress and regulate your nervous system. Let me know what you think in the comments!

This Feldenkrais Exercise for Deep Relaxation is a deeply soothing and effective way to release stress and tension patterns from your body! Through very slow and gentle movements made with focused attention, The Feldenkrais Method helps your brain reorganize your whole musculoskeletal system to be m

10/23/2023

✨✨✨ Please check out my FREE audio recordings on Insight Timer, a free app where you can listen to guided meditations, yoga classes, inspirational music...
https://insighttimer.com/restorewithawareness/guided-meditations
My recordings are designed to help people calm their stress and anxiety and find relief from chronic neck, shoulder and back tension and pain.

If you like them, please like, follow and share with anyone you know who might benefit from some relief!
Each week I'll add a new recording -- this week I'll be adding a gentle guided exercise to improve fluid movement through your spine. It's my go-to exercise when I have neck, shoulder or back pain!
Now it's yours for FREE!! ✨✨✨

07/02/2023

July is a good month to find relief for your chronic back pain!!

I'm teaching 4 weeks of back pain-relieving classes on line.

Thursdays, beginning 7/6 at 7pm EST / 5pm MTN / 4pm PST

Sign up for the month and receive an audio recording of each class + Bonus class on Tuesday 7/18.

Purchase monthly class package here: https://restorewithawareness.com/virtual-sessions

If you're not sure, attend 1 class for FREE! (just shoot me an email so I know you're coming)

04/12/2023

Workshop on Sunday, 4/16!
We've been misled when it comes to self-care and stress relief! Most "expert" advice about it is completely missing the most important piece!

The problem is that our stress and anxiety lives in our bodies, not in our minds, and until we learn to calm our stress response at the nervous system and physical level, we'll keep cycling helplessly like we have for so long.

It's so much effort to shift our mindset or only focus on the positive when we feel anxious and stressed. We must meet ourselves where we are—in our nervous system and body first.

Practices like yoga or exercise are good to help manage our stress, but what I'm talking about is different than just managing stress. There are actually somatic (physical/mental) practices designed to regulate your nervous system on a deep and permanent level, so you can thrive, rather than constantly managing or distracting yourself from fight/flight and freeze states.

I invite you to join me and my dear friend Karena, a trauma-informed emotional healing coach, for a powerful 3-hour workshop to learn effective tools to shift stress deep in your body and nervous system so that you can feel empowered to find peace and at ease yourself.

You'll leave this workshop with 4 tangible tools you can use to soothe your stress under any circumstances.

In "Soothe your Stress + Transform your Tension," you'll receive:

🌼 Education about how and why your body holds onto stress (and what to do about it).
🌼 A powerful nervous system regulation technique (that will help you calm deep parts of your brain and body).
🌼 2 profoundly relaxing body-centered exercises to help you release tension throughout your musculoskeletal system.
🌼 A transformative somatic emotional processing technique to help you listen to (and release) the stress producing emotions that are stuck in your body.

This is more than stress relief. This is re-patterning the stress response deep in your body and nervous system.

For more information, see comments below.

11/30/2022

Hi Everyone,
I’m having a 3-hour on-line workshop this Sunday morning (12/4) to offer a few simple, dependable tools to use that effectively address stress as it comes on, right in time for the holiday season!

[*For more information, link is in the comments!*]

We've been misled when it comes to self-care and stress relief ... and most "expert" advice about it is completely missing the most important piece.

It's too challenging to just "change our mindset," "focus on the positive," or, for some of us, even sit and meditate when we're having a stress response.

The problem is that our stress and anxiety lives in our bodies and until we learn to calm our stress response at a deep, nervous system/body level, we’ll keep cycling helplessly like we have for so long.

I invite you to join me and my dear friend Karena, a trauma-informed emotional healing coach, for a powerful 3-hour workshop to learn effective tools to shift stress deep in your body and nervous system so that you can have tools to be peaceful and at ease.

You'll leave this workshop with 4 tangible tools you can use to soothe your stress under any circumstances.

This workshop offers more than stress relief. This is re-patterning the stress response deep in your body and nervous system.

I hope you'll join us.

***For more information, link is in the comments.***

(The workshop is live and recorded.)

05/05/2022

Have you found yourself repeatedly experiencing feelings like worry, sadness, overwhelm or fear, that feel familiar but the circumstances are different? Or overreacting to situations more than the circumstances call for?

It’s believed that when you perceive an event or experience as traumatic or stressful, it becomes immutably encoded in your brain and body, causing you to feel triggered over and over again when faced with experiences that create similar feelings.

Havening Techniques® is somatic method designed to de-traumatize your nervous system by removing, altering, or diffusing the intensity of the emotional memory of your traumatic or stressful life event and its negative effects.

If you would like to shift uncomfortable feelings, and feel a sense of well-being and lightness, then this is an effective tool.

For more information, contact me at susan@restorewithawareness or schedule a 75-minute session, either in person or virtual: https://restorewithawareness.com/

This method is not psychotherapy, so if you're experiencing intense feelings, then I recommend you seek a qualified therapist to support you.

For more information about Havening Techniques, read my blog post. Link in comments below.

04/06/2022

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “What you focus on grows.” Well, in my blog post this week, I share an exercise that puts this Universal law into practice. When you start to see what’s going well and put our focused attention on those places, regardless of how small or seemingly trivial these areas are, you’re priming your brain to look for the good in all areas. You're also reinforcing neural pathways that make feeling calm and peaceful a habit.

A gratitude practice is more than simply appreciating what you have. It's intentionally changing your own biology.

Doing this practice regularly not only shifts your mood, but it actually changes the neural pathways in your brain.

03/30/2022

In my opinion, "Self care" is a term that is used much too often. It often leaves me with a feeling of guilt—like it's one more thing on my to-do list.
But as a fairly open-minded person, I'd like to believe I'd consider it if there's some deeper value that aligns with my desire to grow and evolve as a human. I wanted to really understand the purpose and explore whether there is some deeper reason to pursue it than simply indulging myself or staying fit.

In my blog post this week, I answer my own questions about "self care":
• WHAT is "self care," really
• WHY might you actually consider it
• HOW it benefits you ( and when it DOESN'T benefit you), and
• HOW you know the difference between pampering and actually nourishing your mind, body and spirit on a meaningful, deep, authentic level.

What types of "self care" nourish you on a deep level?

Chances are, you’re already including some self care practices in your daily or weekly schedule, so you can stop panicking or feeling like there’s one more thing you’re not doing!

03/09/2022

As human beings, we're both capable of creating new habits and also overriding these habits and creating new, healthier ones. The thing I find so hopeful is that it's not about forcing ourselves —it's neuroscience!
We can change mental, emotional and physical habits by rewiring our brains with persistence and patience.

One of the first questions new clients have is “how long will this take this Feldenkrais to work?”

03/02/2022

Do you move freely?

02/23/2022

There's great news for people who live with physical muscular tension and pain!
🌻 When provided with the right circumstances, a person who once believed they'd always have neck, back or jaw pain, has an excellent chance of eliminating it...for good.
🌻 This has to do with the fact that the brain is the master controller of the entire body, and as such, instructs the muscles to contract and grip, or relax and let go.
🌻 Many people mistakenly believe that they just need to stretch more, or get more massages or have better posture.
But the truth is that their brains have been managing their muscle tension. So to make a permanent change, you have to address your brain, not your muscles.
🌻 To learn more about how your brain has the ability to change your unconscious muscle contractions that are causing your discomfort, check out my blog post this week! (And grab your free audio recording to experience quick relief at the bottom of the blog page.)

THE BRAIN CAN CHANGE ITSELF. It is a plastic, living organ that can actually change its own structure and function, even into old age. This breakthrough in neuroscience is called neuroplasticity, and it’s changing the centuries-old idea that the brain is fixed and unchanging.