On Thursday, April 7, Amber gave her presentation entitled, “Somantics With Breath” which was an experiential adventure into using Somantic (body movements) with breath to calm an anxiety attack. 

Amber told about her life experience where as a massage therapist in California working for chiropractor she could not get her patients to heal with just touch massage along. Something was still impeding their recovery — the willingness to drop their beliefs, judgments, thoughts and negative emotions about their illness or injury. 

Amber’s class started with shaking off the stresses of the day and then she walked us through the 5 stages of healing an anxiety attack. They are:

Recognize the symptoms of an anxiety attack 

Find your self love which so you can start your healing journey 

Set an intention to heal this anxiety situation 

Find the inner courage— Your “why” you want to heal this situation

Doing the techniques that work 

To help us remember the characteristics of a anxiety attack, Amber played several minutes of  comic, Adam Ferrari doing a sketch called It’s Scary in Here from YouTube. 

This was followed by a few minutes of an anxious cat acting out and attacking a dog from Cats Being Superjerks on Youtube. This was to illustrate the anger and crazy behavior that can follow not effectively dealing with your anxiety.

Amber explained that the most immediate concern in conquering an anxiety attack is calming down the panicky mind, restoring some balance to the brain and integrating the Left and Right Hemispheres so you can find a solution to the problem causing your anxiety.

The group shared their symptoms of an anxiety attack which involved feeling warm, spinning mind, shallow or lessened breath, hypertension, headaches, tight neck & shoulder muscles & queasy stomach.

The various breathing techniques—deep abdominal breathing, and expelling the anxiety—that she demonstrated energetically relax the body and brain and help it to release anxiety. 

Then Amber said it was important to build the self love, strong intention and inner courage to deal with the anxiety situation. She demonstrated several imaginative and body focused techniques to deal with this. 

Amber said we have to rebuild our self love and willingness to overcome the anxiety challenge so we have the momentum, stamina and courage to deal with the situation.

Then she walked us through some movement exercises from Brain Gym called Cross Crawl, walking backwards, and Brain Buttons which also coordinate the Left and Right hemispheres of the brain and promote problem solving. 

She ended the evening with a song, Brave, by Sara Bareilles also on YouTube. 

Amber loved the laughter, sharing and open mindedness of the group.