A Practice for Regulating Your Nervous System

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In my opinion, the greatest thing, one of the greatest things you can give another person is the quality of your presence, the quality of your attention, the um the feeling of your nervous system, the texture of your nervous system, how you're showing up.
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It can be a gift to somebody, really.
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So doing sitting, so like sitting, a practice that is like um intended to ground you and regulate your nervous system, uh, bring you back into your body, it can be really, really useful for yourself, the way you show up in your own life, feeling a wider bandwidth to be able to metabolize emotions that come up, think, deal with the stuff that you you have every day.
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And then also for those that you love, those that are in your sphere of influence, giving them the gift of someone who's fully present.
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I think that's probably one of the greatest gifts we can give as men in our life is full presence to another person so they can feel our love, they can feel our heart.
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So the practice that uh has helped me tremendously, and a lot of this is gleaming from Jonathan White with um with a lot of the courses he puts out uh is doing some seating, some seating, sitting, sitting down, and being barefoot or socks work.
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Socks will not mess up this uh this practice.
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Try to remove the barrier between you and the ground.
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You know, we're grounding, so it seems to make sense.
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I don't know anything uh technically about the uh electrical magnetic fields of the body and the floor.
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I don't know if you can ground through the cement of a house.
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But uh hey, it sure seems to help me.
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So um the practice is quite simple and it's just like this.
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You know, you find a comfortable chair you can sit in and you go barefoot.
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And with your feet on the floor, one of the things that uh I've been encouraged to do that I really like to do is just kind of pitter-patter the feet for a second, maybe kind of stomp them just a minute, and really get awareness of the feet.
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There's a little bit of a tingling sensation that happens when I do that, and that helps me to pull my attention down into my feet.
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The the the thought process here is that we're scattered.
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This is the idea here.
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We're scattered.
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We're everywhere.
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We're thinking about the business, we're thinking about our work, we're thinking about finances, we're thinking about what we want to do, we're thinking about this weekend, we're thinking about what we did last weekend, we're thinking about you know who we ought to become, our greatest fears and insecurities, we're thinking, thinking, thinking everywhere.
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And uh not only do we lose that energy in our body, we scatter it just everywhere else when we can enjoy it ourselves via a practice like this, but also those who are in our life, they feel the scatteredness.
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They don't get our direct attention, they don't get the love that we can gift them, the presence we could gift them because of that scatteredness.
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So the idea here is to instead of being everywhere outside of our head, everywhere, every everything, everywhere all at once, one of my favorite movies, we're gonna bring this into the body and try to bring it down, down, down, down, down, all the way down to the feet.
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So the foot consciousness, as you might hear it referred to if you're hanging out in the swimming pool of thought, um, is a good place to play with, a good thing to anchor to.
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So pit or pat of the feet, stomp them a little bit, maybe a little foot massage, just to get the awareness of your feet going.
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And what's really cool is just by doing this, you can already feel yourself getting lower.
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The idea is that instead of your sense of self being here and attached to everything outside of you, we're gonna bring it down into the feet.
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So feet are on the floor and just notice it, you know, like if you were gonna have to write a couple sentences about how the floor feels.
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And let's not think about this in terms of intellectualizing, let's not, you know, really get sharp in the brain on trying to interpret the way the floor feels, but let's get the feeling from the feet.
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Let's really feel with the feet.
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So we're not like, we're not gonna write home about this just yet.
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We're just gonna feel, get a real good feel for it.
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We're gonna get to, we're gonna write about it in a second, but right now we're just gonna feel.
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So we're not actually gonna write, but that's the thought process.
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Feel the ground as if you were gonna write a few sentences about describing what it's like.
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And don't start writing in your mind just yet, but just feel really deeply.
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I wonder if there's something else that you could feel.
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I wonder if there's a deeper quality to the connection you have to the floor right now that you could become aware of.
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Really be present with it.
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You can notice how the weight of your feet, the weight of your legs, pulls you down into the ground.
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Um, I believe from a physics perspective, there's an opposite and equal response going up into the feet.
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Question mark, maybe.
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So maybe in the same way the floor is pushing up into you.
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Maybe.
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Possibly.
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Check that on contacademy.com.
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So we're just being present with the feet.
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And one of the one of the really cool things you can play around with here is imagining, and it's not like just pretend, it's more of just like a feeling as if is something that Jonathan White says a lot, that I I really do uh I like that a lot.
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You're feeling as if the feet are just subtly, slowly melting.
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It's it's so slow and so subtle that you you it's hard to detect at a glance, but if you sit and you really pay attention, you're gonna feel as if the feet are melting.
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And obviously, you're not gonna look down and see puddles.
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If you do, please call 911.
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But but there's this feeling energetically of this uh, there's this energetic release, and you can even feel that.
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You that you can really feel that from a physical perspective, the toes and the tissues of the feet soften.
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So let's pretend we're in a competition here.
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You and ten others, the one who relaxes his feet the most will receive a bag of money.
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So, how would you relax your feet?
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One way you might encourage that relaxation process to happen is to imagine that your feet were in a couple inches of water, and your goal would be to absorb the water into the feet.
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Really allow the pores to open, really relax, relax, relax the feet so they can expand and take up as much room as possible in that little puddle of water and absorb as much liquid as possible.
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Relax the feet, relax the feet, relax the feet.
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If we were able to hook up some electromagnetic readers to the feet and could feel the tension, can feel the contraction in the muscles, could you relax them more?
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Could you relax them more?
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Relax them more.
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Relax them more.
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Almost as if you went to pick up your leg right now, your foot would kind of just kind of hang like seaweed.
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Almost the way a wet mop just, you know, lays on the ground, kind of just sloshes around.
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And let's play with this idea, and we're just gonna notice the way this affects our nervous system, because this is the practice that I want to encourage you to participate in more.
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Let's just see if that foot relaxation aim can just work its way up into the calves a bit too.
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So now the the water per se is up to you know up to about your calf right beneath the knee joint.
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And here's something you can play with as well.
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Let's pretend that from the knee joint down, it's in water.
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You're really relaxing, and there's a very small minnow in the water, and it's going to brush you on your calf or your toe or the front of your shin.
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It's gonna brush you somewhere in that area, and you're going to see if you can feel it as soon as it happens.
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Don't strain in this illustration, don't pay attention sharply, don't really, really hold your attention, but instead expand your attention, allow it to take all of the foot, all of the calf, all of the shin in at once.
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So you're not concentrating your opening.
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The way you might widen your gaze to view a wide landscape, to take it all in.
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That's what we're doing here.
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So this shouldn't be a straining, this should be an opening.
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A smoothing of the attention per se.
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Now, this is totally a practice that you're gonna do more and more often if you find value in it.
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I sure as hell did.
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So I'm gonna add another thing on here, and then you can either just keep playing with the foot breathing.
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Uh, and again, shout out Jonathan White.
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You can keep playing with the foot breathing in the calves, or you can also add this other layer to it.
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If you feel like you've got, you know, one hand drip on the basketball, maybe we can add another one here and get into a nice rhythm.
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But again, it's all about just working with where you are.
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So, whatever level feels challenging for you, man, stay there.
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Stay there and keep working with it.
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There is no no gold star to be given for biting off more than you can chew in this practice.
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So the next layer you could add on here would be to become aware of your pelvic floor.
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So your nervous system, you know, like it all comes from the spinal cord and branches out into the body.
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So like your vertebral column or the spinal, you know, the spine, the bones in the spine and the uh vertebra, they house this the the uh nervous system, that spinal column, I guess it would be, of nerves, that trunk of nerves.
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That's the center of your spinal cord.
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If you've ever seen like a just fully, you know, exploded version of the human nervous system, it's like a brain with a long stem that goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down to like the you know, bottom of your pelvis, and then it just has like a spider web of nerves that reaches out.
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So the root of that, the root of that is like right in the the tailbone, you know, like the not your not the the anus, but like slightly back a little bit.
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So let's pay attention to this area here.
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And one thing you can do is just hook the back of the head, hook the back of the head, like it's being drawn up, almost like you're tucking your chin just a little bit here.
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So instead of this, you're tilting it.
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Almost as if you were wearing sunglasses, you'd want them to kind of like shift down your face just a tad.
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You're like, huh?
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Hook the back of the head in a way that pulls you upwards just a little bit.
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So it's so it's a in other words, it's gonna take the spine and somewhat straighten it, align it just a bit.
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Now we're not being stiff here, we're not gonna be rigid with the spine.
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We are just gonna allow a little bit of a of a lift from the back of the head.
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So with that lift in the back of the head.
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And again, if this all feels like too much, just stay there.
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Stay with the feet, stay with the cast, or stay with that plus the lift.
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Relax the pelvic floor here, too.
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Relax the pelvic floor here.
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We're really getting into the the tense parts of the body, the bottoms of the feet, the neck and head, the pelvic floor.
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If you think actually, what do you mean?
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Relax above the floor.
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Um pee on yourself.
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I hope you used the bathroom before this class.
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Uh, you may excuse yourself from the class to use the bathroom.
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Um do not pee on yourself in your chair.
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Go to the restroom and come back.
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But you want to feel as if you're releasing the pelvic floor as you would to release urine.
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Relax the pelvic floor.
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And once you get all these things going, once you have the foot breathing, or the the feet are just kind of like, you know, slowly gently melting, slowly, gently melting, and it's just this ever-so slight expansion of the tissues in the feet.
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You also have the calves that you feel conscious of.
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You also feel as if you're being somewhat lifted by the back of your head, and you're also relaxing the pelvic floor.
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Once you have all these things going, man, all these three things going, man, you can just notice, and then you can do this for as long as you like, you know, maybe five or ten minutes is I tend to do this for about 15 minutes every other day.
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You can notice what it feels like when you intend to incorporate your breath into this structure.
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So we've got the we've got the setup per se.
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We got the setup, man.
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We got the feet, the calves, the back of the head, the relaxed pelvic floor.
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If you can hold all that and be like, what next?
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Just notice the breath too.
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Just be aware of the breath, and then the idea would be to see.
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See if the breath can help to deepen, not intensify, deepen the feet, deepen the pelvic floor, deepen these uh sensations, and that is in a tremendous practice.
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Like once you finish this, like right now, how does your body feel?
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Uh fantastic.
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How do you feel?
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I feel great.
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I feel fantastic.
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This is like a wonderful start to my day.
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If you do this before a date, if you do this before a meeting, if you do this before a hang with the bro, you're the way you show up, and you're not gonna like walk in like Jesus, you know, like don't wear don't wear a robe and be goofy about it.
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Just use this as like a almost like a palate cleanser for another person's energy.
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Use this as a way to kind of refresh the body and move into the next next thing.
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So uh yeah, and like I said, I do this every other day for about 15 to 20 minutes or so.
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And there's different versions of this, standing seated, hold one foot, you know, all that kind of stuff.
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Um wonderful practice, my friend.
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Wonderful practice.
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I hope you use it.
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Generally, it's like a qigong inspired type thing.
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Foot breathing, pelvic floor relaxation, hook at the back of the head, sung, I believe, is kind of what we're in that department.
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Um, yeah.
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Enjoy.