3 Ways Qoya Can Support Your Mental Health
Wow, what a time we are currently living in, isn’t it? A time that is extremely challenging mentally, emotionally, and even physically on some. While we’re all struggling to adjust to a new “normal” (whatever that even means), our mental health is at risk to take a hit. We need to focus on not just surviving each day, but truly supporting our minds and nurturing our bodies to get through this.
I’ve always leaned on movement to help release emotion, feel grounded and ease stress. I’m so grateful to have Qoya right now to help me through!
I want to share with you 3 ways Qoya can support your mental health through this incredibly challenging time:
1. Calm your body and release the fear
If you’re breathing, this pandemic is affecting you. It’s a scary time and every single one of us is affected on a cellular level, whether we are conscious of it or not. We need to move the tension out of our bodies in order to ward off anxiety, depression, and even PTSD.
Many people are experiencing traumatic loss or vicarious traumatization right now just from watching the news and feeling unable to do anything to change what’s happening.
We watch these events unfolding from our screens and our bodies go into survival mode. Chemicals surge through the body, preparing us to fight, to run like hell or to play dead (aka fight/flight/ freeze) in order to protect ourselves.
If left unchecked, the body will stay in survival mode and operate with coping behaviors including hypervigilance, panic, and avoidance in order to stay safe.
Your prefrontal cortex, or thinking brain, also goes offline in survival mode, keeping you from being able to think clearly, make rational decisions, and regulate emotion.
We NEED to move fear-based energy out of our bodies for the sake of our mental, physical and emotional health.
Qoya is so incredibly effective because it calms the nervous system through a variety of movements such as circling and shaking that move toxins and fears out of the body in a healthy way. Think of it as a weekly detox for your nervous system.
2. Process and integrate your emotions safely
Have you been feeling foggy or confused about what is happening right now? Or stuck in a tense anxiety loop with the same fears on repeat, perhaps interrupting you from your work or life at unwanted times?
Strong emotion and fear that is unprocessed often keeps us in survival mode because the emotional right brain is nonverbal and communicates with us through somatic experience.
Our brains naturally want to make meaning of our experiences, but stay stuck because unprocessed trauma stored in the right brain has no temporal memory. We only have body memories that can hijack our brains when we sense danger.
As I noted above, we need to both feel and move through our feelings through movement to bring the thinking brain back online.
Enter Qoya as a healing practice.
Because Qoya involves sharing, intention setting and movement, it provides a powerful opportunity for self-healing. This combination allows you to integrate right brain processing (emotional, somatic experience stimulated and released through movement) with left brain processing (thinking, verbalizing, decision making through sharing and intention setting) with the playful fun of creative expression. It’s a triple win for your mind, body and spirit!
3. Playful movement heals and eases stress
So many women who dance Qoya with me say they feel so much more relaxed after a class because they let their “wild side out” with fun, unencumbered movement. It feels so good to return to your inner child and rock out like you did when you were 5, 9, 16 or 22.
This kind of movement gives you a burst of feel-good neurochemicals such as dopamine and serotonin in your brain that help you feel more balanced, happy and energetic.
Qoya heals on the unconscious level by unlocking hidden wildness, assertiveness and gifts that may have been hidden because somewhere along the way someone told you it wasn’t okay to embody those aspect of yourself.
In Qoya, breaking the rules is encouraged! Smash the patriarchy with movement!
It’s important to note, however, that while many people experience Qoya as therapeutic, it is not therapy, nor am I practicing therapy while I am wearing my hat as a Qoya teacher. I am suggesting Qoya as a supplemental practice to support your mental health. Qoya empowers you to deeply feel and release feelings that may be hidden in the shadow of the subconscious or body-mind through natural, free movement. Join me for one of my weekly, FREE, Qoya classes in my Facebook Community, The Embodied Woman! I’d love to move through this uncertain time together.