It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

by Mark Wolynn

Practice: Using Healing Sentences to Integrate Uncomfortable Sensations in Your Body The following practice can help you enter an embodied experience of ease. In it, you’ll learn how to access, rest in, and expand your body’s deepest energy sensations. First, witness what feels unsettling in your body. Where do you feel tight or contracted? Heavy or shut down? Numb or anxious? Nausea or pain? Often, the largest sensations can be felt in our throat, chest, solar plexus, belly, or womb. Wherever you feel it, place your hands on these areas of your body. Next, breathe into the sensations and visualize calming them. It’s as though you’re gently calming a small child. Energetically, it is the small child part of you that lives in those places and craves your attention. As you breathe in and out, visualize this child feeling held and comforted. Next, say one or more of the following sentences: “I’ve got you.” “I’ll hold you until you feel seen.” “I’ll breathe with you until you feel safe.” “I won’t leave you.” “I’ll breathe with you until you trust me to take care of you.” As you say these words, tune in to the energy at the core of your body. Feel the positive sensations that live there—warmth, tingling, the pulsing of your blood, waves of energy, a current flowing up and down, back and forth, in and out, spiraling round and round, swirling in the shape of a figure eight—however you feel aliveness moving inside you. Whatever sensations you feel there, visualize the uncomfortabl...