My favorite healing resources to help you move past talk therapy
Welcome! If you’re here, you’ve been reading my Sunday Soother newsletter (subscribe here) on modalities, tactics and approaches to help you move to healing and wholeness beyond talk therapy. I recommend first reading my post on why talk therapy was no longer enough for me.
Here are several of my favorite resources and tools, broken into three sections. Section 1: To try if you have anxiety. Section 2: To try if you have emotional overwhelm (which can look like lashing out, getting triggered, getting super defensive, shutting down completely, or anywhere in between) and Section 3: How to stop believing things that no longer serve you so you can create a life you want.
I should say, though I’ve grouped them in those three areas, any tool from any section is going to help you. They are all lovely modalities, geared towards addressing the physical body, the emotional body, and the subconscious mind, and they can all certainly help no matter what you are dealing with.
Just pick one that jumps out to you as a starting point, try it out, and dip in and out of these approaches. Right now I’m heavy into hip yoga, breathwork, and conscious breathing, but previously I’ve been into hypnosis, inner child work, and others. These tools are meant to be used over a lifetime, and different tools will be needed at different times. Don’t try to do everything at once; trust that you will know what you are called to when it’s time.
If you are struggling with anxiety, try…
Conscious breathing: If you were to pick any practice off of this list and make it a daily habit, I would advise this one. Conscious breathing is the first thing I assign to my clients and I do it myself daily and it’s made the biggest impact on my anxiety out of anything I’ve tried. Conscious breathing is merely aware, controlled breathing. It helps anxiety because it helps tone the vagus nerve (the vagus nerve is a cranial nerve from the brainstem to the colon that carries sensory information and is critical in regulating the nervous system) and send messages to your nervous system that all is under control. There are lots of different kinds but I practice alternate nostril breathing and 4-7-8 breathing daily, and I explain them in a video here. Try alternate nostril breathing for 3-5 minutes a day. It’s crucial to make this a regular practice, not just something you do when your anxiety is heightened, though that will help some.
Yoga: No duh, you might be saying. Well, specifically I recommend hip and hamstring yoga videos. My favorite is this one, just 20 minutes. We carry anxiety and fear and other heavy emotions in our hips and our hips are often so tight from sitting all day those emotions are never able to release. Yoga focused on hips and hamstrings will settle your anxiety and fear that is stuck in your hips. Of course, any kind of yoga practice is generally excellent for anxiety and mental health.
Another yoga pose I ask my clients to do a few times a week nightly is legs up the wall before bed.
Soundbaths: The practice of sound bathing, as the name suggests, is the practice of being deeply immersed in sounds and vibrations, usually that come from crystal or metal bowls. You lie down, the practitioner plays the bowls for 30-60 minutes, and you come out of it refreshed and grounded. It’s relaxing, and there’s also science behind why it may work. This article states, “There’s speculation that certain sounds — in particular, binaural beats created by playing two different sound frequencies at the same time — may actually shift brain activity into beneficial brain wave states. Just as sounds oscillate at different frequencies, which are measured in hertz, so too does the brain’s electrical activity. And there’s evidence that listening to specific binaural tones may adjust the brain’s electrical activity in ways that reduce anxiety and pain while promoting memory and attention improvements.” Of course these are normally held in person but there are lots of virtual sound baths going on now that you can attend. Before COVID I was attending sound baths at recharj in DC, and they now offer some online.
Micronutrients + diet: There is emerging evidence that particular deficiencies in vitamins and minerals play a much bigger role than we thought in anxiety and depression (insomnia too, and lots of other issues). In particular, B12, magnesium and Vitamin D are important to include in your diet and via supplementation. Check with a doctor, naturopath or nutritionist to see if you may have a deficiency in any of these areas and supplement accordingly.
Baths with epsom salts + magnesium spray: Baths are just wonderfully calming as they are, but when you add epsom salts and magnesium into them, they will truly work to help settle your body and nervous system. This strategy will particularly help with sleep, too, especially if you use magnesium spray on the bottom of your feet before bed.
Earthing: Earthing is merely the practice of sitting your butt in dirt (grass, dirt, sand, whatever) or walking barefoot on those surfaces. Anything that gets you back into and connected to nature is going to lessen your anxiety, but there’s also more to it. Dr. Andrew Weil writes, ““Earthing” also called “grounding” stems from the idea that in modern city life we no longer have direct physical contact with the Earth, and therefore are losing out on purported health benefits of exchanging electrons with the surface of our planet. A handful of small studies have found that grounding appears to provide some general health benefits, such as better sleep, less pain, reduced stress and tension, and better immune function compared to study participants who weren’t grounded.”
If you are struggling with emotional overwhelm, try…
I think of emotional overwhelm as an outsized emotional reaction to a situation that you feel is out of your conscious control. Angry outbursts, emotional shutdowns, or anything in between can be placed in this category. When we are feeling emotional overwhelm, generally I find that we are out of touch with our emotions; that we grew up in a househould that did not permit healthy expression of emotions; that we are operating from an emotionally wounded place. The tools below should help you get back in touch with these emotions so that you can more easily balance and regulate them and spend less time in outbursts or shutdowns.
Inner child work: Inner child work was for me, groundbreaking, and one of the most impactful tools that helped me come to wholeness within myself. The inner child includes what a person learned as a child, before puberty. The inner child is often conceived as a semi-independent subpersonality subordinate to the waking conscious mind. If you are often reacting from a wounded, outlashing place, this is your inner child. When you can meet them where they are, greet them, tend to them, and bring them back into the light of your consciousness, you can begin to be more accepting of yourself and your emotions. We most often meet our inner children in guided meditations. I have an inner child meditation and journal prompt series you can access here.
Breathwork: This is a different kind of breathwork than the conscious breathing I recommend above, or than you might expect. Generally it is 20-60 minutes of sustained, rhythmic breathing techniques. It can actually be quite physically uncomfortable at first, and it causes lots of sensations, like tingling, cramping — my hands always cramp up. But the afterglow is like… nothing I’ve experienced. I’m a huge proponent that emotions live in the body, and all I can tell you about breathwork is that the experience of doing it is like contracting all of those tough emotions into one tight little ball, then release it like fairy dust into the air, and they’re gone. If you feel ready to start, I love this little 15-minute breathwork meditation that comes with great instructions.
Emotional processing or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: I find that when emotional overwhelm comes up, it CAN actually be useful to engage the logical, thinking mind to talk us back off the ledge and question our thoughts and what we’re experiencing. I suggest two strategies here; first, try my framework for emotional processing, step by step here. Second, consider trying this worksheet on a distorted type of thinking called “filtering,” where you only see and assume bad things. This is useful for getting out of our heads and trying to look more objectively at our reactions so we can better understand the emotions that may have been driving them.
If you are struggling with goal setting, achieving things that are important to you, or negative thinking and self-pity, try the following…
Future self journaling: This is a simple journaling practice, takes about 10 minutes a day, created by Dr. Nicole LePera. You may be at the point in your development where you are aware of a habit or belief that is not serving you but don’t know exactly how to change it. This journaling practice will help you rewire the thought pattern into a new one. I used this for a month with massive results around an abandonment wound I had in relationships. My thought or belief was, “I’m always going to be left for somebody else.” Using this worksheet for 30 days, as advised, I was able to begin to believe I could have a healthy, sustained, long-term relationship. It seems too simple to work, but it does, especially if you commit to it daily for 30 days.
Hypnosis: I struggled very badly with racing negative thoughts. In desperation, I turned to this sleep/hyponsis track on YouTube for negative thinking that somebody on Instagram had recommended, and… within a few days of listening to it I could tell a difference. I was thinking more neutral or positive thoughts, instead of going down a spiral. Try it out! (The guy has lots of other tracks, too)
Embodiment: Man, I could geek out about embodiment for forever. Here’s the deal: when we want to change, we try to do it through our logical mind, and sheer willpower. But when you bring your body into the equation, it paves the way for change so much more smoothly. Let’s say you want to be more confident. You try to trick your mind into doing lots of things to believe you are more confident. But try using your body instead. How would a confident person walk? Dress? Gesture? Would they dance? How? Dance is a wonderful embodiment practice for anything. Want to feel more feminine? Find some dance tracks and dance daily in a way that feels feminine to you. I love this definition of embodiment: “Embodiment isn’t about quieting the thoughts in the head and noticing the sensations of the body from there—it’s about bringing the abstract intelligence of the head into relationship with the body’s intelligence.” So simply, consider your goal or the change you want to make in your life, then try out body or dance movements you would associate with that state of being.
These are just a starting point. The world of healing is wide and vast. There are numerous kinds of therapys, body-based healing approaches, books, and so much more. I encourage you to simply use this list as a starting point, and take what serves you and leave the rest as you go on your own personal discovery process. Good luck!
If any of this interested you, you can explore my 1:1 coaching services, which incorporate all of the above, here.