Extended Practice — Finding relief from overwhelm

By Elizabeth Maynard

This Exploration is intended to help reorient you when you’re feeling overwhelmed by work. When we are in a state of overwhelm, it is hard to tell what we can do in order to shift our relationship with work and figure out what comes next. We are often instructed to focus or work harder, but often in order to reconnect to our project, it’s necessary to take some time to rest and recuperate in a way that will soften the anxiety so that we can return to our project. To start, you are invited to connect with the felt sense of your (potential) stress so that you can better attune to when your body tells you to slow down. From there, you will explore what this “stress” sensation might be trying to communicate about how you can reorient.

Elizabeth Maynard also contributed two blogs and two other Extended Practices to the Somatics Toolkit:

Blogs: Embodied awareness as pedagogy and practice for academic resilience and The perils of un-physical education

Extended Practice: Working with challenges, working from inspiration and Working with empathetic fatigue.

Further Reading

Gendlin, E. T. (1978) Focusing. New York: Bantham Books.

Salzberg, S. (2011) Real happiness: a 28-day programme to connect with the power of meditation. New York: Workman Publishing Company.