Level 2A -- Stretching the Limits of your Comfort Zone
You know when things get just a little too uncomfortable and you put on the brakes? Perhaps things get a little too scary or emotionally uneasy. In any case, you reach a point where, if we moved past it, our life would not be what we are used to. If we continued, we would have to feel, do, think and experience new things. When you have to decide to continue or turn back, you have reached the limit of your comfort zone.
In Level 1, as the breath wave developed, we experience the awareness of our bodies, just as they were. We noticed how we held tension in the body and how we hid physical, mental and emotional stress from our mind so we would not have to deal with it right away. We see how we lock these feelings inour body and limit the range of movement that the spine can experience.
This in essence is the physical definition of the comfort zone in the body. The range of motion that the spine can move through, defines the range of emotion that you allow yourself to experience. Inside that range is what you are used to living, outside of that is the unknown. It's scary and we usually don't go there.
We all have emotions that we have decided that it is not ok to experience. Maybe it's anger, shame, defeat or even love. In order to prevent the feeling of that emotion, we keep our spine from moving into the position that would allow that emotion to be felt. At first, we just don't go there. But as time goes on and opportunities to feel that range of the spine and that emotion come up, we lock that range out of our spine with tension. It even gets to the point where we can't move that way and even getting close to that movement causes pain.
In Level 1, we discovered where these places were by experiencing them safely through breath, gentle movement and awareness. We became conscious of the places we lock with tension and explore what it is like to release these areas. We experience the feeling that with pain, there is also some emotion, concern or fear. We see that we are doing something that holds the tension in our bodies. For some reason, we don't release it and let ourselves heal.
When we are ready to ask the question, “Why do I keep this tension here in this way?”, we are ready to move into Level 2A and explore the comfort zone.
In Level 1 we used light touch in specific regions to bring your attention to the areas of tension. In Level 2A, we work with these specific areas called spinal gateways. In Level 2A we don't just want to make the mind aware of the tension it is holding in the body, we want to enhance the experience of what it is to hold in the body.
We stretch that spinal gateway so that you really feel the feeling that you were locking down with tension. We don't just make the spinal gateway aware of the tension that blocks the feeling, we make it super receptive to the feeling.
In doing this, you feel the emotion that you may have been avoiding for years. You see that it only lasts a few minutes, and you see how much effort and energy it took to avoid this emotion. You also realize how much more pain and suffering it actually caused you. You realize that it is ok to go there. You start going there and your comfort zone expands.
This expansion makes you more available to more feeling and you start to want more. A new phenomenon starts to emerge and begins to destabilize tension anchored in your spine. It starts to move things and basically reset the original parameters of the spine. A wave-like movement starts to develop that wants to ripple through your spine and shake up all the tension in there. Why not? You learned that preventing one emotion causes more pain and suffering than just feeling the emotion. So let's get a bunch of them out all at once!
This is the birth of the somato-psychic wave, a phenomenon unique to NSA that we will work with through the levels of care that follow.
As the spinal gateways get stretched and start to develop, they begin to want to share and exchange energy. When this starts to occur and two spinal gateways are ready to oscillate together, we are ready to move to Level 2B.
