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're going to talk about why focusing on the breath can sometimes be activating in meditation and alternatives to that.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so if you've ever meditated before, you may have noticed that sometimes focusing on the breath can feel particularly activating.

This is not true all the time, but as a mindfulness teacher, I have seen many times over where people feel when they focus, especially on the belly while they're meditating.

It can create a bit of a panic response or just feel more activating in the system.

And one of the reasons for that is that there is just a lot of energy and emotion stored in the belly region of the body and just the body in general.

And there are going to be certain areas of the body where we bring attention to that is going to bring up more emotion.

The pelvic region, the groin area, the belly region is another one, sometimes the chest region, the throat region can be activating.

And if there has been trauma in different areas of the body or intense emotional experiences there or surgeries, physical traumatic experiences there, there can be a lot of emotion.

I talked about this with my nose in middle school and it being made fun of and I did a body scan like 10 years later, thought I was totally over that thing.

And then when I brought my attention to my nose all this emotion came up around it.

So the body can certainly hold emotion, but there are going to be regions of the body that are less activating than others.

For instance, attention at the fingertips is going to be much less activating than attention at the belly.

It's very rare that you're going to experience a significant emotional response with awareness at the fingers, same with the toes and same with like the ears or the top of the head and also at the nostrils, which we're going to talk about in a moment.

And so the more activation there is in the system, the more trauma there is in the body.

In general, the rule of thumb is the further out in the energy field you want to start with your attention.

And this is why a lot of different somatic therapies and different therapies in general that are integrating some form of mindfulness.

So actually make the point of observation something seemingly external.

And I say seemingly because I'm going to mention things like sight and sound and you could make the argument that those are happening internally.

...