The HYPER-lands of the Bodyverse where it’s hot, fast, and intense. 

And more specifically, the Fight response. 

Before you continue reading, maybe find some stabilisation, a resource, a layer of support that you can orient to? 

Maybe put on your practitioner hat and only read through your mental perception? 

Or maybe you want to ride out a wave of experience and go full in body-first? 

In any case, begin with a pause.

Feel for choice. 

And then continue. Ready? 

Alright. Let’s start with a little theory. 

The physiological movement of Fight is a movement toward perceived or actual threat with speed, intensity, attack, irritation, frustration, rage or aggression.

In your daily life incomplete Fight loops can show up as, for example, irritation – seemingly without any specific reason. 

Or ‘anger issues’. 

Or chronic stiffness, tension, and bracing.

Or being defensive and fight-y around your boundaries. When your NO feels like you are ready to pounce. 

Sometimes it also finds its expression in the form of autoimmunity – when the Body perpetually fights against everything and everyone. (That’s me 🙋‍♀️)

When we are in the HYPER-lands, the tendency is to move too fast and then get flooded with overwhelming sensations or emotions, then perhaps drop into a collapse or a functional freeze, where you look okay on the outside, but on the inside you’re gone.

Containment of difficulty is essential when meeting hyper-arousal in yourself, and your clients. 

I want to offer you three ways to practice containment:

1. Doability:

“How can this be doable?”

“What if we could just touch into this difficulty for a moment or two, but not stay there?”

Alchemy happens when we bring choice and awareness into our difficulty. 

Reminder: when we begin actually doing doable things, most of the time it will feel like we are doing ‘not enough’. Can you trust that it IS enough? 

2. Dual awareness and orienting to resource:

“What if even as some parts of you experience this activation, we can also notice the parts of your that can be connected to stability?”

“As you notice the difficulty (e.g. the emotion of anger), could you also notice gravity holding your Body?” 

3. Felt sense experience of present time and place:

“As you notice a familiar pathway of emergency, could you also notice the here-now?” 

Working with the Fight is not about calming yourself down, or regulating yourself, or feeling it all at the maximum speed and intensity, or hitting some pillows.

It is about fortifying and resourcing your physiology.

It is about unshaming of your experience.

It is about welcoming ‘valiant protectors’.

It is about yielding into natural forces that are far bigger than any human challenges, and creating the conditions for the Fight to find its natural completion.