Practical Magic | Shake It Off
Stress may begin in your mind but it lives in the body. And it lives on, and on, and on...until you shake it off.
When we can remember our most primal instinct for dealing with stress, we can make peace with our body and break free of harmful patterns of tension and agitation.
The Practical Magic Tool of Shaking
As unconventional as this may seem, this tool is incredibly powerful for dealing with stress, anxiety, tension, and general body pain.
Yes, I am referring to shaking like a dog, cat, or gazelle that has managed to escape from a lion.
Because the undeniable truth is that we are mammals with the same primal instincts, and often similar biological wiring, to our friends the cats, dogs, and gazelles.
You may have noticed that animals spontaneously shake after a traumatic event, and then will get back to their usual selves. The same mechanism of shaking off stress is available to us.
Except we live in so-called polite societies that do not find body shaking socially acceptable. We've become so disconnected from our bodies that we're not always aware that these mechanisms are available to us or how they work.
Why and How Shaking Can Help Manage Your Stress
You may have heard of the concept of the fight, flight, or freeze response. When our bodies are confronted with a physical or emotional psychological trauma or shock, we stimulate an automatic response that prepares our body to meet the attack.
Our muscles are pumped with enough blood so that if we run, fight or jump, we have the power and tension available to us. Our attention narrows to one focus, and our sensitivity to pain diminishes so that we can deal with the attack and have the power and courage to keep going. While all of this is happening, our digestive system, immune function, and various other important bodily processes are compromised while all energy in the body is concentrated on responding to the attack. Basically, your entire mind and body change when you're dealing with a stressful person or event.
Since the stress response is designed to fight, flight, or run away, it's assumed that once we use our muscle power to run very fast or fight back it will wear out of our systems effectively. The stress response will leave the body.
However, we live in a society where it's not acceptable to attack your annoying boss or run away from a difficult conflict you're having with your partner, so we have to stay with the stressor. This can often trigger the freeze response where we shut down as a result of this stressor. And unfortunately, the freeze response doesn't come with a built-in mechanism to be released from our systems.
We're dealing with constant stressors in our lives: worrying about the future, feeling paralyzed by doing our tax returns, looking at our bank accounts, dealing with family conflict, or managing a threatening email chain at work. These sorts of stressors still provoke the same physical, biological, and primal stress response of muscle tension, blood pumping, adrenalin, increased heart rate, and compromised immune system and digestive system.
We don't consider these stressors as traumatic as being chased by a lion, so we don't have a ritual for getting that stress response out of our system on a daily basis. So we live in a perpetual state of a stress response. This toxic cocktail of hormones can start to weigh down our systems and cause discomfort and health issues.
I have found that body shaking is the number one fastest tool to take our armor off after a stress response so that we don’t go through daily life feeling weighed down, debilitated, and experiencing pain and discomfort.
The Qi Gong Practice of Shaking Like a Tree
One shaking practice is called the Qi Gong practice: gently shaking like a tree. Qi Gong is an ancient Chinese movement practice. Qi is the Mandarin term for lifeforce energy, and Gong is the Mandarin term for a ritualized, repetitive movement or endeavor.
Gently shaking like a tree is exactly what it sounds like. It involves standing with your feet about hip-width apart, firmly planted into the ground into the earth like a tree's trunk. Then from the extremities, from your fingertips inwards, start to gently shake your body as if you were a tree in the wind.
There are plenty of videos on YouTube; search for ‘Qi Gong shaking like a tree’ and you'll find some demonstrations of what this can look like.
The TRE Tension-Releasing Method
The TRE method is a precise sequence of steps to arrive at a shaking where you're specifically targeting the psoas muscle, a large muscle that wraps from the spine around the pelvis. The psoas muscle is seen as an area that holds a lot of emotion and trauma in your body. Relaxing and opening the psoas muscle can help relieve a lot of built-up stress.
If you're feeling good and not currently working through a lot of trauma, you may try the TRE method at home on your own, or if you feel like you need some support it’s worth searching for practitioners in your area who could help take you through these movements.
My Personal Shaking Practice
I practice a one-hour movement practice called The Class by Taryn Toomey that incorporates shaking techniques. One of my favorite movements in the class is where we spend 3-4 minutes doing a sequence of jumping jacks, hopping around, and full-body shaking to some awesome dance and rock music.
I’ll also have a few mini shakes throughout the day. If I've been sitting at my desk for a while, I'll stand up and give myself a good five-second body shake from top to tail.
Sometimes when I'm about to get into bed, I'll clench every single muscle in my body one by one, and then release it at once.
What I've found is the more I allow my body to have these primal, animalistic shaking responses, the more it happens on its own. For example, a few hours after hearing or witnessing a harrowing emotional story, my whole body will shake or tremble briefly. I like to think that's my body responding, “we don't need to hold on to this anymore so we're just going to let it go.” That pain and suffering, which is valid and important, does not belong to me and does not need to stay in my body.
There is no right or wrong way to shake it off. This is your body's most primal instinct; it knows how it wants to do it.
Your Shaking Practice
If you're curious to start this as a practice, start small, shake out your wrists, shake out your ankles. Have a little shake while standing or while lying down. See how it feels.
Our bodies are designed to go through these cycles. If you have gone through my Align + Flow course with me, or if you’re a 1:1 coaching client, you’ve heard me say many times, “You have to complete the cycle.” We're not designed to stay in a constant state of stress, and if we don't complete the cycle by shaking off this energy we’ll never return to a sense of stability.
Magical living is about deliberately turning our attention and our love, compassion, and curiosity towards the places that we neglect or are long-buried because they exist only under layers of social conditioning.
I invite you to get in touch with that deepest, darkest, oldest part of your humanity and see what happens when you commit to shaking it off.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Episode Resources:
TRE Tension-Releasing Method
The Class by Taryn Toomey
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