A Quick Somatic Tool For Divorce Stress

Your body isn’t “being dramatic” after divorce, it’s doing its best to protect you. When your nervous system gets stuck in fight-or-flight or shutdown, you can feel tense, numb, hyper-alert, or exhausted. I'll walk you through a simple somatic practice that helps you feel safe in your body again without overthinking your way out of stress.

I teach pendulation, a nervous system regulation tool from Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing work. The idea is really simple: notice a place of discomfort in the body, then intentionally shift your attention to a place that feels more neutral or easy, and slowly move back and forth like a pendulum. You’re not trying to force calm, fix your feelings, or make tension disappear. You’re training your body to remember it can move between hard and easy, and that neither state has to take over forever.

You’ll get a step-by-step guided process you can use in two minutes or ten, whether you’re dealing with divorce anxiety, emotional overwhelm, or that familiar sense of being stuck. If you want a practical, trauma-informed way to rebuild self-trust and resilience from the inside out, press play.

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DISCLAIMER: THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR EDUCATIONAL, INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND ARE NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING PSYCHOLOGICAL, COUNSELING OR PROFESSIONAL HEALTHCARE ADVICE. 

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Transcript

Welcome And Nervous System Reset

Karin Nelson 0:00

Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast for divorcing and divorced women who want simple tools to help them feel safe in their own bodies again. I am your host, Karin Nelson. I'm a divorce coach who loves helping women reconnect with themselves through their nervous system and not just their thoughts. In today's episode, I am teaching you a quick somatic practice called pendulation, which is basically an easy, gentle way to help your body remember it can move between hard and easy instead of just feeling stuck in one or the other. Let's get started. Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body, and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming You Again, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome back, all of you amazing women. Thank you so much for being here. Today is one of the shorter episodes where I teach you a somatic

Pendulation Explained With Peter Levine

Karin Nelson 1:13

practice. And this somatic practice specifically comes from Peter Levine. He is the creator of somatic experiencing, and he has spent decades studying how the body naturally moves through stress and trauma. So during his study of the body and somatic practices, he noticed something like really simple, but actually pretty profound. And it was that a healthy nervous system is always swinging like a pendulum between activated and settled, activated and settled, feeling tension, feeling hyper-alert or activated, and then feeling ease. Kind of like how the rhythm of our breath works sometimes, right? Inhale, exhale, or your heartbeat. Sometimes it's faster, and then it naturally goes back to a rhythmic pace, right? It's a natural back and forth, and it's supposed to happen. You're not supposed to be stuck in one or the other. It's totally normal for our nervous system to be going back and forth, to be moving in and out. It's actually how your body just naturally processes hard things, stressful things without getting overwhelmed by them. But what happens sometimes, especially during divorce or during a tumultuous or difficult marriage, is your nervous system can get stuck in a heightened state, right? Stuck in that fight or flight where everything feels like alarm bells are going off. Or we're stuck in shutdown mode, right? Where we just go numb, where we're just trying to survive from the day-to-day. And either way, the natural swing of being able to move in and out of the nervous system's normal rhythm gets stuck, right? It stops swinging. It gets frozen on one side of the pendulum or the other, and it stays there like much longer than it's meant to. So if you've ever actually seen a pendulum swing, it actually is like a very gentle swinging motion. It's not like really fast, it's not going like crazy back and forth. It's very gentle motions. It's on purpose. It's it's like just moving purposefully, safely, gently. And so this practice of pendulation is intentionally helping you relearn how to purposefully in small, like safe moments, allow your body to relearn what it's naturally supposed to do, which is move in between the hard and the easy, the uh activated and not activated, or the shutdown and back to your baseline.

Try The Practice With Me

Karin Nelson 4:10

So let me walk you through this. I want you to just sit quietly or lay down if that feels more comfortable. And the first thing I want you to do is notice a place in your body where you might feel some tension. Maybe you're tight in your shoulders or you're feeling discomfort in your stomach or in your chest. Just notice. Maybe it's your jaw, maybe it's your neck, wherever it is. I just want you to notice it. You don't need to fix it, you don't need to change it. You just need to notice it. Now I want you to gently shift your attention to a different part of your body, a part of your body that just feels more neutral, maybe a little more at ease or a little more relaxed, maybe your hands because they're resting to your sides or on your lap. Or maybe it's your feet that are touching the floor. And I just want you to, again, we're not trying to change it. We're just gonna sit there and notice. And just do this for a few breaths. Just notice what ease feels like. Notice what that neutral, easy feeling feels like in your body. Then I want you to go back to that place where you felt the tension, and I just want you to notice it, just briefly. Just pay attention, even if it's just for a few seconds, and then go back to the place where you feel the ease. Again, we're just noticing. We're not trying to change anything. There's no agenda. We're just noticing and being aware of what each one actually feels like in your body. And I want you to do this a couple of more times. Go to the place of tension, do a few breaths if possible, go to the place of ease, do a few breaths if possible. And I just want you to notice this back and forth, back and forth, like a gentle swing of a pendulum. You're not trying to make the hard or the unease feeling or the discomfort go away or disappear. All we're doing is we are reconfirming to your nervous system that it is safe to move back and forth between the ease and the discomfort.

Why Back And Forth Heals

Karin Nelson 7:03

That's it. That's the whole practice. And you can do it for five minutes, you can do it for two minutes, you can do it for ten minutes, however long feels good to you. But over time, as you do this practice of being able to sit and notice the discomfort without needing it to change, without needing it to go away, and then moving into a place where you feel ease, and again, noticing and not needing it to take over, just noticing what you're doing is you are alerting your nervous system that it is safe to be in your body, that it is safe to have the discomfort and the ease that neither is bad or wrong or better. It's safe. The hard, challenging feelings, the discomfort, they're not going to stay there forever, and you're not going to stay stuck in it forever. And the ease is always close by. All right, my friends, practice this one, see how it works for you. That is what I have for you today. Thanks for being here. I will be back next

Work With Me And Subscribe

Karin Nelson 8:15

week. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karin Nelson Coaching.com. That's www.k-ar-in-n-e-l-s-o-n coaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.