049 – Mini Musing: Emotional Anatomy

Sarah Tacy [00:00:06]:
Hello. Welcome. I’m Sarah Tacy, and this is Threshold Moments, a podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown, and the pull feels real. Together, we share our grief, laughter, love, and lifesaving tools. Join us.

Sarah Tacy [00:00:32]:
Welcome to this mini musing. It’s one that has been on my list for quite some time.It’s about emotional anatomy, which means how you hold your body affects how you feel, but also how you feel affects how you hold your body. I would say this is gonna be more than a mini musing. It’s an area that I’ve spent years exploring and teaching on when I used to teach yoga anatomy, which I did 100 hour modules, and I did modules just on emotional anatomy or Just on Breath. And it helped me. And the reason why with the anatomy trainings that I did, I didn’t just teach muscles and bones. It was multidimensional yoga anatomy. So we wanted to look at the energetics, and we wanted to understand. I I wanted to share what I understood about the nervous system to get a feeling for if a class was happening in the AM or PM, how it might be different or how your body might respond differently.

Sarah Tacy [00:01:34]:
And if People were working with privates, and they say they’re tired. Is your person underwhelmed, or are they overwhelmed? And how to work with the nervous system, and how to balance posture while honoring the state that they’re in. So not to override messages, but to support and perhaps enhance what is well and good while being able to be with what is hard. And every posture we take has a corresponding physiological, I could say, repercussion. And there’s a lot of these things I’m gonna say today. Better if you’re not driving, but you could imagine or try later. If you were to make fist with your hands and then flex your wrists. So that your fists kind of come in together and bend your elbows and squeeze your hands really strong.

Sarah Tacy [00:02:27]:
And notice where your breath moves to and just notice the feelings that you might feel. I loved this one. We did it at the end of many of the anatomy courses, a 100 hour modules. We would put pairings, muscle pairings together that often happen together, synergistically. And it would be a great way for the students to remember. Oh, what muscle is it? Where does it go? What would the action be? But then also when these muscles work in this particular coordinated unit. How does the breath change? How do the emotions tend to change? Knowing that everything is different body to body, but just getting to have that felt experience in their bodies. And I always thought it was so amazing that just by making a fist, my breath shifting.

Sarah Tacy [00:03:28]:
Everything for me comes a little bit higher up into my chest, and there’s some agitation. And I thought it was also interesting that in so many yoga poses, the arms are straight. If you were to straighten your arms and turn your palms to face forward, And again, just noticing what happens to your breath, where it goes. I, for me, my gaze even shifts. We’d love to talk about the eyes for a whole episode 2. The gaze shifts. My breath becomes more full. I don’t wanna say too much.

Sarah Tacy [00:04:09]:
I think I’ve given some time for you to have your own experience, so now I’ll speak my experience is that I feel way more centered. I tend to move back in my body a little bit more, my body weight back just a little bit more. And you think in yoga, there’s Tadasana mountain pose where you take the arms just as I’ve described. There’s down dog where the arms are overhead even though you’re inverted. Even in up dog, the arms are straight And the shoulders roll back. So there’s position after position that might make our breath be a little bit more universal. There are many positions too that, like, really rotate and make us find our breath in a small space, but there are many positions where the arms are straight, which gives us a feeling of hopefulness, generally, possibility. If you were to take your arms overhead and gaze up, And if you were to allow the body to roll down and in a bit and let the shoulders roll down and in, you can again, where does the breath go? How do you feel? And then try to smile.

Sarah Tacy [00:05:26]:
So it may be obvious that these don’t go together And we’ve most likely, everyone on here has probably heard, and maybe it’s new to you, that if you smile for a few minutes. It can change the way you feel, and you’ll actually feel happier just by smiling. And I have had the experience where I was going through something really hard and something that really hurt, and I felt super attacked. And I wasn’t able to sleep. And generally, things during my day do not keep me from not from sleeping. And this time it was. And so I was like, okay. I’m just gonna smile.

Sarah Tacy [00:06:03]:
I’m gonna keep smiling, and it didn’t hold. And what I wanna offer up as I give you some science behind emotional anatomy and how empowering your posture can be. I also wanna leave this little description that came from Dawn Stapleton, who is one of my first teachers in the yoga world. Don just left this realm early January, so I believe it was the beginning of October. He was a master teacher. He brought so much fun and humor and depth to everything that he did. And the more that I go back and hear his work and study. I’m like, man.

Sarah Tacy [00:06:46]:
It was so ahead of his time with everything that’s coming out about nervous system and trauma resolution. Like, he just created beautiful space. And one of the first principles that he taught us was the as is principle, which is awareness of sensation through internal scanning. And Peter Levine’s work, I keep telling in every polytheth, like, the grandfather of somatic experiencing, he really brings up. He says, like, the way to heal trauma is basically through the as is principle. Like, he would say through scanning, through focusing our attention on the sensations that are And not trying to change them. If you’re feeling shitty, you wouldn’t smile to try to change it. You would be with it first.

Sarah Tacy [00:07:33]:
And as we are with the sensations that are, that naturally movement is going to shift and occur so the smile would happen on its own because it’s authentic. And this is really huge for me. Don was a really beautiful writer as well. So he says, accepting the moment as is, accepting yourself and your experience as it is manifesting without following the reflexive impulse to change what is happening by denying your actual experience Or by trying to change others by denying their actual experiences in the moment. Rajanthanaka theory interprets the 1st sutra in the Shiva Sutra as saying that consciousness created itself in order to experience itself, which means that we’re not here to deny our experience or judge it as good or bad, but to truly be present with our feelings or desires or state of being, and then watch And even be an active participant as life and past beliefs evolve and unfold. I just wanna see if this is a practice for me because I’m often like, oh, this doesn’t feel good. What nervous system tools can I do? Should I tap on my thyroid? Should I shake it out? Like, what should I do to try to make it feel better instead of being with it? And just saying that in that process of learning how to do that, the posture comes. So let me tell you a little bit about Amy Cuddy.

Sarah Tacy [00:09:00]:
So here’s some science, and then I definitely wanna talk to you about Candace Pert. You’ve probably heard me say a thing or 2 when I talked about updating old patterns, which is a really great one, especially, you know, this whole New Year thing. That is an earlier episode that I’ll put in the show notes. But if we’re to start with Candace Pert, we would start by talking about this woman who is a professor at Harvard, and she works with the Harvard Business School to help the students understand how their nonverbal cues are deeply impacting the people that they are interacting with. Their nonverbal cues are gonna get them hired or not, close the deal or not. And she wanted them to understand how simply shifting their posture could change the trajectory of their lives. So as I just said, this could be an inside out job. She’s also saying perhaps this could be an outside in job.

Sarah Tacy [00:10:04]:
This could help the women in business school who struggle the most because they’re less likely to raise their hands, often because of socialization, to do better if they understand that if they uncross their legs and they open up their chest and they lift their spine up while they’re in class and they put their 2 feet on the ground or they spread their legs a little wider, all these postural cues that are thought to be masculine, that it might actually help them take more risks, and I’ll explain why. So What she had people do in her study was to take a power posture, which is, again, chest open, arms open and wide, legs Sarah A Bit, or it could even be, like, hands on the hips, elbows wide, the chest is up, and hold it for 2 minutes. They tested their saliva, and they noticed within just 2 minutes, those people in the power posture, that their testosterone increased. I believe it was up to 20% and that the cortisol went down 25%. And so the testosterone is going to make it so that people are more likely to gamble, to take a risk. Also, more likely to get hired because they sound more confident in what they are sharing. In the cortisol, of course, is a stress hormone. There was a lot of feedback about this study about, like, yeah, but how does this actually work in the real world? And so that getting hired part was the part that they tested.

Sarah Tacy [00:11:42]:
So they had different participants who had no idea what the study was about Tacy power postures and powerless postures. And powerless postures are more legs crossed. Isn’t it so interesting that the female posture should be legs crossed and that the arms should be crossed? And I’m not saying here that women should try to become more like men, but just societally, that that’s the message. And if the hand is like holding the throat and the shoulders are in, that is the powerless posture. So what they found was But then those people, after they did 2 minutes of either posture, then they would walk into a room where they were going to be interviewed. When they got into that room, the interviewers had no idea what the study was about. They were just their only thing was to ask questions and to have a a straight face. And having a straight face is harder for somebody on the other side than having Someone looking at you like they don’t get it or someone looking at it like, oh, I’m totally on the same page as you.

Sarah Tacy [00:12:51]:
So the interviewers have no idea what the study is about. They conduct a 5 minute interview. And at the end, they write down who they would hire and who they would not hire. So if I were to update those numbers, the testosterone of the high power positions increased by 20% and the lower power positions went down by 10%. Then the cortisol, the high power postures went up 25%, and the low power postures decreased by 15%. Those people who went into the interviews after the high power, they didn’t go in there continuing to hold the high power not sure it was more neutral or whatever they would do day to day. And the people interviewing them found that they had greater presence. They found that they were more captivating, authentic, confident, enthusiastic, passionate, and more comfortable.

Sarah Tacy [00:13:47]:
So Amy Cuddy’s leading messages, tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. 2 minutes Could be all it take. There was another man, Thomas Hannah, who had a book called Somatics. And he said that over time with repetition, our emotional responses create habitual patterns and become our learned posture and our learned experience of life. He had 1 posture called the red light reflex posture, which is mix of upper cross syndrome and a flat back. So upper cross syndrome is at the shoulders. Shoulder blades move away from each other. Shoulder blades the front of your chest closes in a a bit, and then the tailbone tucks down.

Sarah Tacy [00:14:35]:
It comes with a tight jaw, constriction around the eyebrows, forward head posture, contraction of the neck and shoulders, internal rotation of the shoulders, flexion of the elbow. I could go on and on. The pelvic floor contracts and knees and feet our valgus, meaning they drop in. And the reflex is about withdrawal, our response to dangerous fear evoking situations. And the green light is more of what you would think with the military. If you think of that really upright posture, so there’s an overextension of the upper body. And I would say even in yoga, this was overdone for a long time where it’s like, shoulders back, shoulders down. It can be overdone.

Sarah Tacy [00:15:18]:
And I find that type of energy when the chest is always open, which I I definitely had in my twenties, can lead to lower back pain. And It’s really great, positive, enthusiastic energy, but it’s draining. It’s like the energy is going up and out And not connected back down to your feet. So it’s opening of the jaw, the eye, the face with the pulled back of the neck. The shoulders are down and back as the chest lifts and the arms are turned out. Relaxation through the abdominals and pelvic floor, tight butt, hips forward, external rotation through the legs. And this is about action to respond with effort. So every posture has a corresponding biochemical process and every biochemical process has a corresponding breath pattern.

Sarah Tacy [00:16:09]:
We kind of said this, like, you smile. How does it feel? You frown. How does it feel? And to take this just a little bit further, if any of you have had a massage, I actually haven’t had this experience, But I hear it’s kind of common where you have a massage and you just start crying on the table. I had that experience at my 1st yoga teacher training in Nosara. So not on the massage table, but I think that I was brought up. I think the messaging that I got was not crying meant that I was tough, and being tough was rewarded. Being tenacious was rewarded. Pushing through was rewarded.

Sarah Tacy [00:16:50]:
Not feeling the pain was rewarded. And crying was not something I was comfortable with. So I’m in, like, day 4 of this 100 Hour Module, Don Stapleton, Amba Stapleton. We’re in the middle of the jungle in Costa Rica. The breeze that’s open Doors on Either Side. The breeze is coming through, and we’re in this flow and I just start crying, and I don’t know why. And it was my 1st experience of crying and not knowing why. And all I could possibly say is that I was moving my body in so many different ways and twists and turns and having the heat and doing the chanting.

Sarah Tacy [00:17:29]:
The things within me on a cellular level were shifting, in emotions who had the freedom to emote without needing the pattern behind it, which again, Peter Levine would say like, this is how we heal the trauma. So it then becomes interesting to me that when we talk in yoga about the shushumna, the central channel, or the chakras, the different energy centers in the body that all have corresponding emotions. It could say, oh, that’s really woo woo. That’s really out there. And yet there are studies that say that people can die of a broken heart. And then Candace Pert came along. And She is the former chief of brain biochemistry at the National Institute of Health, and she was the 1st chemist to isolate the opiate peptide. She was a pioneer in revealing a more complete picture of the body mind intelligence.

Sarah Tacy [00:18:24]:
She demonstrated that emotions occur at the cellular level. So So meaning, like, not just in the brain, in the cells all over our body, within organs, around the spinal column, inner spinal fluid. So these emotional cells resided in our immune system, our digestive system, our heart. It became clear to her that individual fields of studies such as immunology, endocrinology, neurophysiology overlapped and should be studied as multidisciplinary fields. So the cellular intelligence is based on biochemical processes happening at the cellular level. So her book is called Molecules of Emotions. And what it points out is that we are not just a switchboard of on and off nervous system messages. The in fact, before the nervous system, before there was ever a nerve, there was chemistry happening.

Sarah Tacy [00:19:29]:
There were peptides. There were receptors. And that these were also feeling and reactive and responsive peptides. Peptides is what can considers our molecules of emotions. They can act as neurotransmitters for the nervous system. It’s thought that perhaps that’s only, like, 2% of what they do though, that they’re actually traveling through the extracellular space, through the blood, through the cerebrospinal fluid. All the cells in our body have a membrane or an outer layer that allows some things to penetrate and come in transfer waste out to block other extraneous substances. Like, if you think of an orange and that the orange peel might be like the outer level of a cell, which allows some things in and keeps some things out.

Sarah Tacy [00:20:24]:
All the cell membranes have hovering receptor molecules that act says vibrating rhythmic keyholes to the cell. When little vibrating ligands, which are peptides, neurotransmitter, steroids. When they pass by the receptors, imagine them, like, swimming through the extracellular matrix. This dance can occur between the ligands, the molecules of emotion, and between the receptors. If their perfect vibratory match, then they bind. Once they bind, the ligand transfers a message through the receptor deep into the cell where the message can actually change the cell state dramatically and trigger the reproduction of new proteins. This translates into changes in behavior, physical activity and mood. So as we change our posture, Different cells begin receiving different messages depending on the posture we take.

Sarah Tacy [00:21:23]:
Amy Cuddy just talked about 2, but there are so many different hormones that we have. Candace Pert studied specifically at the beginning the opioid peptoid, the one that makes, like, the endorphins, the ones that make us feel really good or when we don’t have it that we feel really bad. Found that almost every peptide receptor could be found at the spinal cord as a site that filters coming incoming bodily sensations. I think this is all really interesting because when we look at the field of somatics, the work that I do now, that instead of saying yoga where we’re saying change your body like this, and it has a lot to do with proprioception, how you your awareness of your body and space, that this is asking us to tune more into what Dawn literally thought at the beginning of a 100 hour course and all the way through their thousands of hours of teaching That we could also keep tuning into saying, how do I feel now? What are the awareness of my sensations NOW. And what that might show us as we track what our sensations are in the moment is that it might show us our no’s. It might show us our hell yes. It might show us Boundary Repair. It might show us images and sensations that don’t even make sense, like the time that I just cried in class without knowing why, but that I could then have trust that what is happening is meant to happen that my logical mind doesn’t have to know it all that there is an intelligence beyond me and within me and that all the cells in my body are part of that intelligence, that the mind is non local.

Sarah Tacy [00:23:24]:
That instincts are happening throughout the body. And here I might also say that trauma can impact our ability to feel those sensations. And that could be, you know, a session for another time, or just to say that the small doable pieces of what we become aware of are exactly what we can handle in the moment. So if I were to try to round this out, knowing that this could be an octopus with way more than 8 tentacles. Meaning, I could take this in so many directions and bring in so many more authors lived experiences. But if I were to round this out and say, how is this useful for thresholds? 1, I would say that if you are about to have a hard conversation with a boss or you’re about to have a presentation, it might be the perfect time to embody it until you become it, knowing that perhaps later, you could go back and dive deeper into the unmet needs of the body, the trauma responses, the patterns. So if you have something coming up big and immediate and you have not healed all the patterns around it that one might say, okay. I’m just gonna take this Big Wide Posture.

Sarah Tacy [00:24:51]:
It could help me the way that a workout could help me. And right now, I’m thinking about that scene in Ted Lasso where the boss woman, when she says, do you know what it’s like to walk into a room, a boardroom with all men? And she’s trying to help another man find his power. And she’s like, I go into the bathroom, and I I think she goes up on her toes and she raises her arms up in the air, and she makes these cat claws or these leopard claws and bends her elbows a little bit their nice and wide and opens her mouth wide and sticks her tongue out and goes. And then she’s like, and then I go into that boardroom, and I do what I’m here to do. And so just saying like that is also available. No shame in the game. And isn’t that great? And there’s also the idea that when we change our state, this very much reminds me of Tony Robbins. I know that Tony Robbins often speaks about this, about changing your state so that when you’re trying to fix the problem, you’re not trying to fix the problem from a state of disempowerment, but a state of empowerment.

Sarah Tacy [00:26:01]:
You start to see through a new lens. You start to, as Marie Forleo would say, like, find things that are figureoutable. And And so, again, we can use our posture. We can use exercise. We can use our breath to begin to change our state so that we might be able to see the problem from a new lens. With more time and space option 3 or some third thing that we can take away from this emotional anatomy is that when we do have the time and space and the resources to sit with the discomfort, what we often do in the somatic practices that I practice is that we don’t necessarily just go into the bowels of discomfort, But also resource the person while they are visiting a hard moment so that they can be with the sensations that Dawn talked about and that Peter Levine talked about, and that the sensations themselves will know what to do. There’s often a physical impulse that might the shaking that might be pushing, that might be pulling, that might be, like, a little scream or growl. Like, there may be these impulses that come through, or it may just stay sensations, or there may be visions.

Sarah Tacy [00:27:11]:
But there’s a whole process that sometimes along the way gets stunted, and it gets held in the cells and it gets held in the patterning. And so as we understand that our cells are our emotional that our cells are intelligent, that if we could spend time to let them finish their intelligent process, their animal process, well, we’re well resourced if possible. Oftentimes, in the presence of another when possible, then we may be able to complete patterns that are holding us back, that are numbing us out, that are causing us to go to resources that are less helpful for us in being on our aligned path. The last thing that I would say is that maybe this has already been said. Your mind is nonlocal. Your body is instinctual. And part of the processing and unwinding is to be with that, to honor our bodies as intelligent. As like, half for me, just having the scientific proof that It’s Not.

Sarah Tacy [00:28:28]:
When people say like, oh, it’s just in your head that actually there’s intelligence in our mind. And even when our head can rationalize why something happened. If our body has not finished the process of being within sensations and having an outlet, then it’s not complete. So we can use posture, we can use exercise, but we can also use being with the sensations and staying with curiosity, and knowing that there is an intelligence that will finish the process. So I’ll close out here and say, may I trust in the intelligence of my body? May I find right support to be with me as I sit with sensations that are challenging. May I find resources so that I can be in the wave of discomfort or that I can be with what is needed, the unmet need, the Taking the Pushing the Sound. May I utilize my understanding that I can use my posture as a resource, and that it may help me to see through a different lens, and that it may give me courage when I can’t seem to find it on my own. And that as I do the inner work, Those postural changes won’t be something I have to effort.

Sarah Tacy [00:29:51]:
They will be something that show up for me. Show Me. May I? May I trust? May I learn? May I listen? Thank you.

Sarah Tacy [00:30:10]:
Thank you for tuning in. It’s been such a pleasure. If you’re looking for added support, I’m offering a program that’s totally free called 21 days of untapped support.

Sarah Tacy [00:30:23]:
It’s pretty awesome. It’s very easy. It’s very helpful.

Sarah Tacy [00:30:27]:
You can find it at sarahtacy.com. And if you love this episode, please subscribe and like. Apparently, it’s wildly useful. So we could just explore what happens when you scroll down to the bottom, subscribe, rate, maybe say a thing or 2. If you’re not feeling it, don’t do it. It’s totally fine. I look forward to gathering with you again. Thank you so much.