Episode 24. Somatic kindness & transformational learning (with Seth Dellinger)

​In this episode of 10 Minute Mood, I speak with Seth Dellinger. He is a somatic practitioner, and we talk about kindness. Seth runs us through a brief guided exercise for how you can practice kindness towards yourself using your body. This is an easy five-minute exercise that you can do anywhere, just not while driving.

Seth and I also talk briefly about the importance of kindness and how we can apply kindness not just to our emotions or our thoughts or our relationships, but also the importance of applying kindness to our body.

Enjoy.

seth: What does it mean to be kind to my body? What does it mean to be kind with the voice inside my head? What does it mean to be kind in relation to my emotions?

What does it mean to be kind in relationship to other people? If I am not kind, learning is essentially impossible. I mean, I might be able to pick up certain skills, but inevitably, I’m gonna hit the thing I don’t know how to do.

Ideally every mistake I make is just another learning opportunity. Which is beautiful to say, but that’s not how most of us operate. I mean, it doesn’t feel good to make mistakes, but it’s incredible if you work at it

how much progress one can make in just taking things as they go, as we say.

aspasia: Right. And how you change responding to yourself in the noticing that, you know, that’s really what it, it is. How we go about responding to noticing that either us or our child or whoever is not doing something the right way,

or that is not ideal. That is really what we’re speaking about. So, yeah.

seth: Right. And what’s the right way to do something? I mean, in some cases there is, like if it’s a child tying their shoe and you can see things they’re doing that are not going to lead to success, you’re gonna try to show them.

But, you know, there’s a lot of things that we’re trying to do in life. Like if you’re trying to build a business or if you’re trying to improve a relationship. There isn’t necessarily an obvious blueprint. It’s like a lot of it is trial and error, right?

And so that’s where resilience is really needed in learning. Right.

So I personally think that meditation is really valuable given the way the world is right now. It’s a basic act of slowing down.

But, this was true for me years ago, and it’s true for a lot of people, is they try it and then they say, I can’t meditate, right?

aspasia: There’s too much going on. Can’t do it. Right. That’s what people often say. Yeah,

seth: exactly. There’s too much going on or I can’t stay concentrated on my breath. It’s boring. The thing about meditation is there’s actually an infinite number of styles of meditation.

One of the major obstacles is people don’t think they’re doing it right. They don’t know how to verify that they’re doing it right. But, , if we speak simplistically, if you close your eyes and you don’t do anything for 10 minutes, you are meditating.

Can you, can you, you know, refine that? Sure. But if you just close your eyes and you sit still. That’s an opportunity for your body and your mind to slow down

if you sit there the whole time and you hear a bunch of thoughts, you still weren’t running around trying to do so like, it, it, it is a slowing down

aspasia: that’s, that is right.

I sort of say it’s like it’s like a purposeful adjustment of your attention, for a somewhat prolonged period of time. Longer than you might normally sit in any one kind of, you know, mode of attention and that’s it.

seth: Yeah.

One issue people have with meditation often is also there’s sitting posture. It’s just not comfortable. So I, using the somatic practices, I, I teach something about here’s how to sit comfortably.

And even people not meditating, just sitting all the time.

Even if I haven’t sort of figured out sitting posture, I can sit in a chair, I can sit on a cushion, I can lean against a wall, I can lie on my back.

I mean. I can do the thing that I can do. Yeah. Rather than saying, “if I was meditating properly, then I should be able to do it like this. Therefore, to prove that I’m serious about this, I will force myself into something that I’m not ready for.” I will have an unsuccessful experience, and then basically condemn myself for being a “bad meditator.”

So, you know, how can I essentially stop judging myself at all times, giving myself a grade at all times and realize that certain things I can learn quickly and other things take more time.

So it’s, I mean, all of these are different forms of measuring myself by some standard other than listening to my direct experience. Because, you know, if I’m trying something new, sure,

there, there probably will be some difficulty and there may be moments where the skill that I need is just to be okay with a little bit of the discomfort. But there is a point where I start hitting overwhelm and I can continue at that point or I can recognize the overwhelm or if it’s a physical practice, it could literally be pain in my body that I’m gonna really feel tomorrow if I don’t stop now and rest.

But again, we can have this detached, abstract formula for what is good. And all I’m doing is, you know, counting how many reps and “I haven’t done the number of reps I’m supposed to do yet.” So I keep going. All the while I might be aware that there’s pain, but I’m literally counting

aspasia: through, through push through, push through like that.

Yeah. Ignore, push through. And that’s,

seth: that’s actually, you know, um, noble. “It’s noble of me to push through” you know.

Would you like to, uh, try a little somatic kindness?

aspasia: I would love to do some exercises.

seth: The practice we’re about to try, and people watching can do this, but please don’t do it if you’re driving a car.

I will say that because there’s gonna be a little movement, um, very simple.

So yeah, just be comfortable in your sitting, um, mm-hmm.

And then I’m just gonna invite you to take one of your hands mm-hmm. And rest it on your face.

We’re gonna sort of just hang out here for a moment. Notice the feeling right of your hand touching your face. And you can also think of it another way. Notice the feeling of your face touching your hand, right? So this is like, “oh, my hand and my face are in relationship here.” Okay? And then take your arm down.

Okay.

Now if we do it again, could you make your hand kind, right?

We don’t treat ourselves the way we treat others.

So I put my hand on my face and I sort of say, could I transmit kindness with this hand? Right? And again, I notice the structure and maybe I feel my bones under my skin a little bit. You can move your hand maybe to a slightly different part of your face or your head, just feel right. And another thing I mentioned already, but while I’m doing this, am I still breathing right? Because sometimes when I just even do something out of the ordinary, I might stop breathing. So I notice that my breath keeps coming and going. Okay. Now, part of what we’re doing right now is we’re holding our arms in the air, right?

Yeah. Which is an effort. So I’d say let’s be kind to ourselves and rest our arms now. So rest your arm. But one thing you can maybe notice now you’ve touched, I guess the left side of your face with your left hand two times, can you feel the left side of your face feels a little different than the right side.

Right. Can you feel your left hand is a little different than the right. . And you might even say, this is speaking a little metaphorically , but can you almost have a sense that even though they’re not touching right now, it’s like your hand kind of knows your face, your face kind of knows your hand.

So I mean we’re doing in a sense, a relational practice here. It’s just me relating to me. But now bring your hand up again. And as we pointed out, it could be, after a while it could feel like work. So what if I take my other hand now? And I’m gonna hold the elbow, I’m gonna support the elbow.

And now the hand that’s touching the face, that whole arm can be resting, but the rest allows the hand to be more sensitive. And I might also just move and touch different places. I can sort of like, you know how a dog does and they nudge nuzzle up against you. So I just feel, where do I wanna touch my face here or there?

Right? And then again, just let go of it all. So bring your arm down and we’ve done this on one side and not the other.

Okay. And so maybe I’ll just invite you to, what do you notice about the left side of your face versus the right side of your face?

aspasia: The first thing I notice is the warmth, right? The change in temperature. I’m just much more aware of sort of the surface area of it and just all the sensory information coming into it. The other side feels sort of like distant and flattened. So I sort of feel like a roundness to it, on the side that I touched.

But it also feels happier, which I know is a funny word to use, but it just feels brighter. And it does feel like it’s been in relationship with someone. It does feel like it was cared for. Um, I can, I can sense that.

seth: Now, if we wanted to explain what happened, we could get geeky and basically say that, the touch receptors and that neuroplasticity is at work here. But yeah, if you pay attention to the difference between the two sides, you kind of picked up on my theme. We could almost might say that one side of my face feels like it’s been loved. Yes. Or it’s a little more lovable or something like that.

But so that was a little taste of, of kindness.

[end of episode]

aspasia: thank you for listening to this episode of 10 Minute Mood. We have many more episodes available covering different topics around wellness and mental health. You can find us online, sydneycitypsychology.com au.

Thanks for listening.