Many of the Floreo Emotional Regulation lessons focus on body awareness. Awareness of one's own body can play a significant role in understanding and managing one's stress level. It is also important for learning new physical movements, for identifying physical needs (for example, discomfort or pain one might be experiencing), and for building strong social relationships. This post will focus on body awareness as it relates to emotional regulation.

Many neurodiverse individuals have differences in the way their sensory systems develop, and awareness of 'body in space' may be delayed. To support this development, consider using some of the simple body scanning methods in Floreo's Crystal Cave and Guided Focus for Body Relaxation. These lessons bring the Learner's attention to extremities (hands and feet) and an area where many people hold tension (the shoulders). The banner instructions in Crystal Cave which the Coach reads to the Learner involve simple actions for the Learner to do to draw the awareness to hands, feet and shoulders. Guided Focus for Body Relaxation uses those same areas as a modified body scan, but includes more complex instructions, such as holding the breath for a few moments before exhaling. 

In the Guided meditation lessons (Guided Meditation: Sitting in the Snowfall, Guided Meditation: Sitting in the Aquarium), Learners are asked first to feel how their feet are touching the ground. They are asked to relax various parts of their bodies in a more conventional progressive body scan which brings attention from the feet to the head (e.g., let your feet relax, let your legs relax, etc.) They are also asked to tune into their senses: what they see (the snow, the bubbles, the swaying seaweed), what they hear (the crunch of the snow as it falls, the sound of the water bubbles), what they might feel in that space (the cool air, the cold snow, the soft water). Attention to the senses, further extends one's body awareness.

In one of our newest emotional regulation lessons, Peaceful Painting, Learners are asked to identify their emotional state at the end of the painting experience.

One of my teachers used to say: Tension [in your body] is holding on to something that is not really there. If we are chronically holding tension somewhere in the body, our muscles learn to stay contracted in that area. When we increase our body awareness, we can bring our attention to where we hold tension, and we can learn to introduce a more relaxed state to those areas. Building an understanding of how our body is feeling is really a lifelong learning process, so these Floreo lessons can be helpful at any stage to support body awareness.

Floreo's Director of Applied Digital Therapy, Rita Solórzano MA, CCC-SLP, is a Speech Language Pathologist with over 30 years of experience.