your weekly mindful morsel

mindful morsels appear every Wednesday

Happy soft day to your beautiful spirit, Reader 💜

I started working through a particularly heavy EMDR target in therapy last week, and it’s bringing lots of stuff to the forefront that feels important to reflect on, but also scary for me.

I tried to apply the strategy of ‘getting curious’ about what was coming up, but I realized that sometimes curiosity doesn’t feel safe in my body. Particularly if you’ve experienced trauma, it can feel unsafe to question or to explore or to expand our edges. That can be a really hard thing to learn as a grown up.

There’s this thing with kids when they’re young that, ideally, you’re the safe center they can always gravitate back to. In new social situations, they can wander away but keep you in sight and come back every now and then when they need to re-orient and ground and rest. Having this source of constant security does wonders. What you’ll notice is that when kids have access to this resourcing, they tend to wander a bit farther or longer over time. They grow more comfortable with literally expanding that space. Having a secure center allows them to feel safe to be curious and explore.

As an adult, if you didn’t have that secure center as a kid, you have to learn a way to resource yourself so you can feel safer or safe enough to explore your own curiosities. This is a strong reason to build mindfulness practices into your everyday life.

I personally dig the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory practice for this: when you’re in a space you feel comfy, take a round of breath and look around. Notice 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can feel, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. (Feel free to switch the order of the sensory input – I just like this way because it creates a tidy container to start at a distance and move closer to my body.)

Having tools like this can help you mentally land back in your body that’s physically in your safe place when you most need it, and feeling resourced like this helps us feel safer to explore farther and longer. So we can get curious about hard things. So we can expand our edges. And we can do those things on our own terms.

Maybe 5-4-3-2-1 doesn't work well for you, so anything that helps you notice the physical details and sensations of the right now can work. Let me know how this lands, and I’d love to hear if you have any favorite mindfulness practices that draw you back to the present.

With gentle tidings,

Welcome to Zenful Mindings

I'm Brianne, a trauma-informed yoga & somatics facilitator, Reiki practitioner, and mindfulness advocate. I specialize in body literacy to help people reconnect with their bodies for a stronger sense of self, autonomy, and connection to natural rhythms.

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