Morning ☀️

Hormesis! Wonderful for depression, anxiety, and stagnation.

Everyone needs to be able to put the shower on cold for a while when their body is craving “hormesis”, or positive stress. Feel the cold and feel how seeking only comfortable hot showers might in the long-term be making you feel more uncomfortable. While cold showers may feel uncomfortable during (although if I start slow I find a delightful response that my body has been wanting some coolness!) they have a long-tail effect of making you feel blissful for a while afterwards.

Pairs well with Wim Hof breathing prior.

For those already familiar: Here is a cool short piece on the benefits of cold showers/ice baths through a scientific lens.

Wim Hof Breathing

Morning ☀️

It’s great to do 1-3 rounds of Wim Hof breathing prior to a cold shower, somehow it makes your body way better at withstanding the cold, and better poised to receive its benefits.

I do WH breathing before an interview, or an online class, or a date—anything where my body has locked into panic mode and I’m starting to think too hard, and really need it to not do that please, thank you very much.

For those already familiar: This is a cool short piece that explains the benefits of WH from a purely scientific lens.

Cold Water Immersion (Showers/Plunge)

Night 🌙

When I get home I realize I’ve been holding myself tense through psychological stress and sitting down a lot.

Everyone needs to know how to release the tension and stress stored in their own body.

What you need: 1 or 2 lacrosse balls/myofascial release balls, a light foam roller, an intense foam roller (optional), a squish MELT foam roller (optional, highly recommended)

Guide to Foam Rolling Yourself

This is my fav guide for using a foam roller and etc to get tension out of your body and those “hurts so good” points.

See the guide here.

@bigbuddhi on twitter has a lot of wisdom on foam rolling yourself, I want to take one of her classes to learn more about her perspective.

Morning ☀️

Night 🌙

Stretch your hips! Your hip flexors! Your hamstrings! Stretch your glutes! Stretching is a key way that trauma healing happens, because as “the body keeps the score”, we can achieve drastic psychological change by getting a release in our physiology. So many things can be caused by tension stored in the body! Start stretching if you aren’t already!

Whenever I’m too overwhelmed, moving around too fast, and my heart’s beating too fast, I lay down with my bare skin pressing against my acupressure mat. (You can also stand on it)

Video tutorial series

This mat is one of the few places I can go to feel rest. I don’t sleep well at night and can’t nap, but I have been able to lay down on this mat and even take a 45-minute nap, multiple times! The acupressure mat is quite nourishing. You can buy it for $30 here.

3/15/2023 I just discovered that acupressure mats come in a variety of strengths (see image below).

This thing really works for occipital release/neck pain! Lay down on it, with your feet on a chair/your bed. Breathe deeply and rest with your neck receiving light pressure for 5-20+ mins. I often feel fantastic through my body when I am done, so I frequently do this release before sleep. It’s $20 (the link is $40 for 2) and you can buy it here.

Get exposure to nature/greenery/water/the sun/the moon. For some reason this is really important. Get exposure to sunlight in the morning to sync your circadian rhythm and have a great day. I crave greater exposure to nature, it’s quite grounding and peace-instilling..

Night 🌙

A new way of thinking about movement. Go very slow and explore your range of motion. Start with free videos online and see how you feel.

Learn more about feldenkrais here.

Spend time sitting down and just actively do nothing. When I’m overwhelmed or too busy, this gives me time and space where it’s okay to just be alive. Sometimes this is when the stuff in my emotional backlog pops up to the surface to be resolved—if we’re busy all day long, it will never come up.

I don’t advocate the use of illegal substances. However, you’ve probably heard about mdma because it is in phase 3 clinical trials for being a miraculously effective root-cause treatment for PTSD via fear extinction. all that is to say, if you’re planning to take MDMA, this website will tell you everything you need to know about how to safely take it for therapeutic purposes #harmreduction (https://rollsafe.org/).

Some evidence suggests using Gendlin’s Focusing prior to an MDMA session can help one prepare for the spontaneous emotional healing that occurs on MDMA. Look into IFS, and PSIP as these are promising adjuvants to MDMA as well.

Morning ☀️

The spirit of qigong is basically “do simple postures for 15 minutes a day to increase your aliveness, make your system seek nourishment, exercise, meditate, and heal.”

Also “I find that if I can’t hold a simple posture for 5 minutes a day, there must be something really wrong in my life and I need to reorient my entire life to fix that.” ←This for me evokes a spirit of qigong being excavatory, that engaging with qigong is a process of restacking yourself until you are resilient.

Do the Embrace the tree posture, the most basic + classic exercise in qigong.

I’ve been doing this exercise regularly. I started at 3 minutes and am increasing my length of hold by 5 seconds each time until I reach 15 minutes. This works quite miraculously to clear out my stuck energies, putting me in a more loving, accepting, and fluid state. My perception becomes clearer. I am grateful for this qigong practice.

Although much of qigong is just staying still, you can still hurt yourself. Don’t push yourself past the point of being forceful, but do challenge yourself to resist wanting to exit the pose out of boredom/distraction/etc.

Benefits

Morning ☀️

Bioenergetics is like the super-saiyan version of qigong. It is particularly useful for breaking through psychological ‘armoring’, acculated tension and ways of holding yourself that block awareness of painful feelings in the body. Bioenergetics allows you to break free from this armoring and experience the emotions locked beneath, freeing you from symptoms of armoring such as hypervigilance, held tension, difficulty connecting with others, numbness and dissociation, chronic pain, difficulty breathing, poor posture, chronic anxiety, and emotional numbness.

Bow & Arch instructional guide (classic bioenergetics exercise)

Bow & Arch 20min

Arms & Neck & Shoulders 30min

#meditation

Super helpful for embodying and helps immensely with meditation. Can even do a 1-minute bodyscan over and over to build up the muscle of embodiment. Embodiment is everything :)

Morning ☀️

Night 🌙

Morning walks are great! Move your body and expose yourself to nature. Get some sunlight. See other people. Try to avoid using your phone during your walk for good tech hygiene (or even experiment with not bringing it—it somehow completely changes the character of the walk towards more boring and more nourishing).

Sometimes I like to take quite long walks, just to kind of see how far I can go, and how much of the world I can explore on foot. This adventuring is nice and gives me a sense of novelty and agency, bringing beauty into my life and helping me see that change is possible. It’s interesting to see what happens when you let yourself go free, guided by your sense of curiosity and following whatever is interesting to you.

I tried neurofeedback at Balance Float Redwood City, apparently by the end of the session my brain was performing worse by their metrics! I will try again.

Morning ☀️

This feels great, highly recommend. It is said that simply standing on a full-body vibration machine is a more effective workout than most cardio. You can actually do workouts on the machine, such as squats and pushups, for an amazing experience. Vibrating your body is a healing experience, and also is innervating, improving your somatic awareness.

You purchase one here.

Morning ☀️

Basic essential full-body exercise plan: Pushups, pullups, and squats. Start with just these as you will build muscle quickly and then move on to variations. You can do 5x5—5 sets of 5 reps of each exercise. Start with simple variations and once you can do them consistently, move up.

Pushup variations from easier to harder: modified pushups, incline pushups, normal, narrow/wide/uneven pushups, weighted pusups

Pullup variations: start with resistance band to decrease weight pulling you down, normal pull-ups/chin-ups, narrow/wide grip, weighted pull-ups, one-handed pullups

(all you need to do pullups is a doorframe and a pullup bar!)

Squats: normal, weighted (goblet) squat, pistol squat (missing some gradations here)

Be careful that you don’t injure yourself

Night 🌙

See this video

Every night before I sleep I do this practice. It helps me get some sensation in my body. Having the humming/vibration is blissful and helps offset my pain, sending me into bed.

Morning ☀️

Best done on an empty stomach, at least not full.

Essentially, you just exhale in short, rapid bursts through your nose, spending no effort on inhaling—the inhale happens automatically in service of the exhale.

You can pair it with qigong to increase the challenge and/or bliss.

Morning ☀️

Night 🌙

Exercise and increases flexibility. Can be sacred or ceremonial, a way to honor your body. I like trauma-sensitive yoga, though I’m still only beginning my exposure to all the kinds of healing yoga that are out there.

Morning ☀️

Night 🌙

This has surprising results for stress management and dealing with tension in the body.

Official Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di5Ua44iuXc

Backup unofficial link: Donna Eden’s Daily Energy Routine

Does paying attention to your heartbeat or your breath make you uncomfortable? Does taking ‘deep breaths’ to calm down not do it for you?

I made a 4-minute video on how to breathe in a way that doesn’t suck. I have insomnia and heart palpitations, and this trick helps me sometimes. And at the very least it’s quite fascinating and puts me in touch with my body in an entirely new and very high-bandwidth way. I’ll put excerpts below from the book that inspired me to start doing this that will explain the precise instructions to help you get going.

3 ways to fix forehead tension: Child’s pose/standing forehead rest

I often get forehead tension between my eyes from overthinking or stress. When this happens, I can:

Make pain less intense be creating more space in your internal experience. Expand your awareness which may be contracted when you’re focusing hard at something on your phone. My awareness contracts frequently as I frequently find myself in high-stress states. When I expand my awareness, things work better.

Try this simple exercise the next time you’re driving to experience a state of expanded awareness: https://twitter.com/lemonaut1/status/1485386723529945089

For more info check out https://www.michaelashcroft.org/

Morning ☀️

Night 🌙

You can just move your eyes back and forth and process current emotions or unpack stressful situations after they’ve happened.

bilateralstimulation.io is an online tool where you can do your own EMDR session

Bilateral stimulation is somehow a really powerful tool for detraumatization, somehow getting past the frontal cortex to purge trauma from the reptilian brain. Try ‘butterfly tapping’. I want to check out “shamanic EMDR”.

Many people find that EMDR helps them heal their PTSD by breaking through dissociation.

Internal family systems, or IFS, is a model of the self and a system of therapy that can be used solo or facilitated by a therapist (preferred). IFS posits that you are made up of by sub-agents. I like this explanation a lot. Many find the IFS system very helpful, and still many more just enjoy the precision and clarity of self-perception derived from the way this model allows you to interact with yourself.

#meditation

Feel your feelings! I like the way this Redditor explains the process of Focusing.

If you are going to read a book about this, let this be the first one. Gendlin has his own book out on this, but word on the street is that this one is far more helpful for actual practice instructions.

This is also a helpful adjunct to meditation as you can actually process and digest the stuck emotions that come up.

I recommend this brand:

Improve your sleep quality by taping your mouth! Breathing through your mouth rather than through your nose may lead to poor sleep quality, weaker facial & jaw structure, and increased night time urination.

If you constantly pick at or bite your nails or cuticles, this subreddit is for you: /r/nailbiting

I found the wiki helpful. What ultimately allowed me to overcome a decade plus-long nail picking habit was the ‘nail oil pen’ and nightly aquaphor to moisturize my nails and cuticles.

Morning pages are the practice of writing anything for 3 pages, each day, private to only you. The key is consistency and just writing. This is a powerful tool to overcome perfectionism and confusion.

You can attain and stabilize a state of open-heartedness by doing loving-kindness, or metta, meditation. By cultivating good intentions towards people, you begin to see the world in a more positive and more forgiving light, and naturally act in more kind ways towards people.

One way to begin is by trying the loving-kindness meditations on the Waking Up app.

Alternatively, I’ve found these practice instructions on Reddit just wonderful (link). I’ve pasted below the section in particular that I find the most effective:

One very simple and ultra-relaxing posture that I like to do to get some rest (similar to the acupressure mat) is a pose where I pet my feet up on a bed or chair so that my hips and legs are at a right angle and my back is flat on the ground. My head could be supported by a pillow if the ground isn’t soft, and I’ll often throw on a blanket for comfort. This is helpful for getting a sense of rest and replenishment during a busy day, or allowing myself to relax enough to feel a sense of rest—I can’t just lay down in bed and take a nap just like that.

#todo figure out a better way to categorize this. Should i make a category that has the acupressure mat and just this pose, and call it ‘sleep tools’ or something like that? — part of it is a collapse between “list of tools” and “single tool that I use that might not have a particular name”.

Part of healing your trauma is cataloging your triggers. I have tons of triggers—stimuli that cause me to enter into black-and-white thinking, or enter a hyper-fearful state, or have some other type of strong emotional reaction where my decision making skills are compromised.

As it turns out, writing down when it happens, and what was happening immediately before the reaction, is necessary to create resiliency around these triggers, and to deprogram the automatic pathological response.

≈nbag or futon, or making space to stretch out. Adjust the atmosphere with aesthetically appropriate decorations, either as an opportunity for aesthetic expression or a shrine to your values. Try a colored LED strip or low-kelvin/warm lightbulbs for a more relaxed atmosphere. Mandala tapestries make cheap and lovely wall-covering decorations.

Use your fingers to tap your upper ribcage/heart area, gently or with enough force to get a strong vibration going. I do this when I’m feeling tension in my heart or to drum up compassion for myself/others. I’ll often do it when someone I care about is going through great pain, which is highly uncomfortable for me. Tapping my heart seems to ground me in that moment so I’m more present with what’s happening.

Also you can massage your heart area to get out tension. This brings me a sense of self-compassion usually.

Play Brown Noise on noise-canceling headphones, or even on speakers plus maybe a subwoofer for max noise cancellation.

Noise canceling headphones/earbuds (like Apple AirPods) actually work wonders. They tend to be quite expensive but really nothing compares to active noise cancellation.

Loop brand earplugs are great for side-sleepers. They aren’t the quietest, but I sleep on my side so they’re the only ones I’ve been able to use.

Get an air filter for ambient white noise

Gun range headphones (DecibelDefense is the brand I got) are the most effective sound-blockers I’ve found––you can combine them with earplugs for maximum sound isolation. You can also use these for meditation.

Professionally sound-proof your room or build a soundproof box (if you’ve got, say, $5k to spare). I’ve seen it done and it’s really cool.

Can also hang up those mover’s blankets

Overall, best strategy intra-house is to not share a roofline with anybody. save for that, top floor corner room is ideal.

Blue blockers are plastic glasses that block out most blue light. They come in orange and red. Since discovering them, they have been a godsend in allowing me to lounge in bright environments of my house before bed, without hurting my eyes are messing with my circadian rhythm.

From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker — this was the necessary first step in my trauma healing journey. Reading this book made me realize that a lot of things I learned were normal as a kid were Not Okay. Also opened my eyes to the institutionalization and normalization of trauma in systems as ubiquitous as the school system, our economic system, housing system, cultural and social systems, etc.

Engaging the Movement of Life —book by an osteopath—good intuition on the mystery of healing implicit in embryology and the miraculous thing in water. In HS Biology they tell you that water is really cool and makes all life possible and that you should be really curious about it, and then go on to ignore that line of dialogue. This book is the necessary follow-up that gives you the holistic sense of water’s miraculousness and the life force that seems to be inherent in it.

Spontaneous Healing by Andrew Weil

The Inner Game of Tennis (Self 1 vs Self 2)

The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa

Make music, record podcasts with friends, jump around and dance to music, free-writing, journaling, write short stories, draw or paint, make a computer game. Do whatever it is that your soul (?) is calling out to you to do, if it’s what recharges you.

Everyone needs connection. Just say hi. I have lovely memories of saying hello to people who weren’t expecting it, that were delighted I didn’t see them as an NPC.

Have wonder about people. If you lean heavy into projections, suspend them for a moment and you will be surprised about the ways that they actually are.

Say one extra thing to people, eg your cashier or uber driver. It doesn’t matter what. Could be something you noticed, a question you have. You’re just making conversation.

Use the MEDS acronym to remember to check on your daily:

The only one who can save you is you—take agency! Take responsibility! This is not a political statement, this is the way life works. When you find yourself demonizing another person or group of people for your problems—take radical responsibility. This is the way, this is the holistic way of greater awareness, understanding, and agency.

“It’s not about perfectionism, it’s really about balancing the rate you metabolize toxins with the rate you consume them.”

Use ewg.org to vet out unsafe food, skincare products, cleaners, laundry supplies, etc. Most household products people use daily cause cancer or have research demonstrating a link to other serious health problems!

EWG also has a list of produce that should be bought organic (Dirty Dozen), as well as a list of produce for which pesticide residues are really nothing to worry about it.

UV radiation causes sever DNA damage and is aggressively linked to the development of skin cancer. Use sunscreen every day, especially if you’re going out during peak UV radiation (i.e. 12-4pm!). Check your weather app for the current UV index. Wear a hat or/and long clothes when in direct sunlight for extended periods to protect from the damaging effects of UV radiation.

I’ve created a list of recipes for easy healthy nourishing food here.

Also: I’m on the hunt for more good teas, teas that make you feel all good inside when you drink them.

Mountainroseherbs.com is the only place I know to get good cheap tea, they have some great blends that serve functional purposes such as focus and clarity or relaxation.

See the supplements section (supplements.codyhergenroeder.com) for more on some teas.

Apparently this helps holistic health because it builds your stabilizers. I’d be curious if it helps you to expand your awareness throughout your body. I’ve had trouble engaging my core in the past with all sorts of exercises so I’d be excited if this offered a long-lasting solution.

I hear it’s helpful for healing from trauma, and general embodiment.

Full List

Night 🌙

Morning ☀️

Night 🌙

Can use to regulate emotions, replace limiting beliefs, feel better and ready for social encounters.