Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode we are going to talk about the importance of softening your belly.

More to come on this in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so an informal, you could say meditation practice that I've been doing for years has just been softening my belly throughout the day.

I do this at the beginning of like a sitting meditation practice, and at this point it happens very quickly and organically in my meditation practice.

But as a tool throughout the day or as an invitation for my nervous system to disarm itself against everything coming in life itself, softening the belly has been a beautiful practice for me.

There is a lot of tension we hold in the abdomen region for a number of different reasons. A lot of it is conditioning. From a very early age across genders, there's a lot of sucking in in this area, a lot of tightening, gripping, but this is also where we experience a lot of emotion.

It's often the first place that we experience emotion because of our gut brain, which is in this abdominal region of the body.

So if you've had things like gut instinct or fear responses, you often feel it in the belly region.

It's one of the first places before we go up into our head brain that we are processing something as potentially threatening that we might need to brace ourselves against.

And so if it's more severe creating a trauma, there is a lot of energy that can get stored in what we're just going to call it generally the belly region.

And it's very easy to walk around the whole day without even realizing just how much tension we're holding there, how much subconscious gripping is happening because it's become so much of our default response that we don't even realize there's tension there.

It's one of the cool things that can happen when you engage in a meditation practice or a yogic practice or any sort of relaxation practice.

You get to see all these areas of the body that are tightening subconsciously and it seems to be especially true for the belly region.

And so because there tends to be so much emotion stored in this area, so much subconscious gripping in this area and a lot of our traumas tend to be connected to this area as well, the invitation and the practice of softening the belly is a really important strategy for communicating to yourself that you are safe right now.

That you don't need to be on the defense and it's okay to let down your guard.

Of course this may not feel true in every moment, but when this gripping is a subconscious pattern, it will often show up in the majority of moments where we don't need it to.

And so you can notice us like when you're standing in the grocery line or when you're driving or when you're in the shower in the morning contemplating your day or even when you're in bed at night and the day has passed and you know you're you can totally let go right notice what's going on in this region of your body.

And you'll probably see depending on how much you've worked with this area of your body that there's actually a big emotional shift that occurs when you really let it settle right even just right now as you're listening you know tune into your belly.

You can even place one hand there and just on the next hill let it soften on an inhale feel as though you're breathing deeper more down toward the pelvis almost like the breath is being pulled down into the pelvis.

Just letting the belly get heavy relax that ease.

I notice when I do this first thing that you might notice is my voice gets a little deeper because my body is more grounded my center of gravity drops.

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