2. Orientation & Stabilization

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How to find More Support and Resilience with one Simple Exercise.

This short video is the second of a teaching series of three. Each video contains a short teaching and an exercise you can do with your clients. The first video is “The What’s Wrong Attention.” Start there. Then watch “Orientation & Stabilization,” and “Organismic Microclimates.”

I want to look more at orientation, which is getting the attention more into the external environment. This involves all the senses: hearing, seeing, smelling, and the tactile sense.

Just by working to get the attention into the environment we get a little benefit to the nervous system process. There are several reasons for that. One of them is that I become accustomed to being an observer, a witness, as opposed to a person who has to do everything to make sure everything is OK.

Oddly, by just letting the attention go into the environment, I am not controlling things so much, I am just letting that attention free and my system gets a different message: by letting things happen I may get supported.

Let’s explore that. Right now I look out of the window and I see the movement of the trees in the wind. That’s a very pleasant movement. And so are the green colors. My attention is attracted and available to what is pleasant in the environment.

But the “What’s Wrong Attention” (see the previous video The What’s Wrong Attention) would look for what is wrong: there is wood that is rotten, there are probably termites, and so on. We are having to do battle in a way with the “What’s Wrong Attention.”

Instead we are trending the attention into the environment, and not only towards what I like about it, but towards what is. Orientation then really means neutral awareness. Getting my mind and attention in the same place and the same time.

One way to do that is to simply name what is out there: fence, tree, bird, road, house. Naming those things just as a simple way to get the mind and the body back together.

In your practice, why don’t you add some of that: name sounds, sights, what you feel with your tactile senses. Run through some cycles. Here is an example. I see the tiles out there, I hear an airplane, I feel the sensation of my fingers touching each other. Do cycles of those, where you say “I see, I hear, I feel the tactile.”

Let this aid our work in orientation, and to get our mind and our body into the same place and the same time.

This video is part of the OI Expert Master Class Program. I’m making it public to give you an idea of the teaching format we apply. Develop clinical excellence by mastering the art of Organic Intelligence^®. OI Expert is open to all Somatic Experiencing^® Practitioners, Sensorimotor, Hakomi, and HEARTraining^® graduates. Learn more about OI Expert >

Duration: 2:50