Is Meditation perpetuating your freeze response + the pattern of disconnect you are experiencing?

A common occurrence I’ve seen in the Women I have worked with over the years is that certain practices, are not as supportive as they may seem on the surface and one of those is Meditation.

Meditation has grown in popularity over the past decade or so and is known through almost all households throughout the world.

It has roots predominantly in Buddhism + Hinduism, both of which are classed as more masculinised religions, with an emphasis on transcsending the human experiences, which in turn is a pathway of bypassing the body and the felt sense.

Within the majority meditations you are asked to only become the observer or witness of the emotions that you are experiencing, instead of dropping into the felt experience of the emotions.

It creates an almost out of body experience, as if you are looking into the body from the outside instead of dropping down and into the felt sense. You are the watcher rather than the experiencer.

Which in turn means the emotional cycle never completes as you have not felt the emotion in its entirety, which is at the heart of the embodied + somatic teachings.

To have the ability to experience, feel and hold the sensations as they arise within the body instead of being the observer offers opportunity for the emotion to be alchemized, to no longer hold charge for you.

Feeling it is part of fully processing the experience.

To have embodied awareness is the art of building the capacity within your nervous systems and to have a deeper understanding of patterns that are playing out for you within your body and life.

The felt experience is at the heart of Feminine Spirituality and to feel we need to have connection and capacity to experience our body wisdom as the experiencer not the observer.

Another really vital piece to this topic is how meditation can create a perpetual freeze response for those who tend towards a down regulated nervous system stress response aka freeze.

It is a really interesting one because on the surface it looks like you are doing all the right things, being mindful, supporting yourself through a practice and yet, the reality is you are not changing your state out of freeze, you are actually creating an environment that keeps you in a freeze state.

One of the things that is important to note, if you tend towards the freeze stress response, is that any practice that creates stillness, is going to keep you frozen, even if on the surface you feel relief momentarily, what you are actually doing is not offering your body + your nervous system the opportunity to thaw the freeze when you stay in stillness, hence why meditation can hinder the resourcing and resiliency of your Nervous System and your overall wellbeing.

In moments of Freeze, your body requires movement, to thaw your Nervous System and to create a more resourced state, here are a few examples of ways to shift your freeze response:

Strength training

Shaking

Stomping

Sounding

Dancing

Kickboxing

These are just some ways to the way you can mobilize your Nervous System out of freeze.

When you are frozen, you need to move, in some form or another, which is why practices such as meditation, as well as yin or restorative yoga and yoga nidra won’t support your system as a whole, but will create more of an opportunity to stay where you are and in turn keep you feeling ‘stuck’ even when it looks like you are doing the right things from a wellness perspective.

One of the things to note is that those who do tend towards a freeze response, tend towards these practices naturally as they feel comfortable for the system that knows stillness already.

There are always going to be moments in time where these types of practices support, yet we need to be having the conversations around when and where that is and if they are creating more disconnect and aiding the freeze within a system that is calling for connection and mobilisation.

If you recognoze yourself within anything I have shared here and you are wanting to create new pathways in life and body so that you can meet life from a space of thriving, you are invited to apply for my 1:1 Mentorship Journey here.