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Pam King: I’m Dr. Pam King, and you’re listening to With & For, a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance towards spiritual health, wholeness, and thriving on purpose.
Jill Westbrook: Hello, friends and listeners. I’m Jill Westbrook, and I produce With and For with Pam King. And I’m excited to share today’s episode. But before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re aware that season two of With and For is coming soon. We’ll be launching brand new episodes with incredibly interesting guests. I’m so excited to get to share them soon.
And they’re coming on January 6th, 2025 until then we’ll be sharing shorter practical features and other talks and interviews from Pam. So stay tuned.
Last time, Pam introduced the Five A’s of Agility for Spiritual Health. This is a five step process you can implement throughout your life, whether it’s marked by chaos or calm to become more agile and adaptive to whatever life brings.
In this episode, we explore the first A. It all starts with attunement. Pam explains the immediate body level receptivity to exactly what’s happening with you right now in your body. Starting here is really essential because it connects us to reality. Ideally, it brings us into the present moment and moves us toward acceptance and a clear-eyed consciousness of the feelings, emotions, thoughts, and experiences of the moment, which will allow us to build from there.
Here’s Pam’s take on the first step of the five A’s of agility for spiritual health, attunement. Enjoy.
Pam King: The first A in the cycle is attunement. And by attunement, I mean actually attuning, listening, feeling, being aware of the sensations in your body. So we often talk about thriving as a process or journey or practice towards our purpose, but it starts with what we’re rooted in.
We are embodied people, and in order to thrive, we need to be rooted and connected and aware of our bodies.
For some people, attunement would be a form of meditation. There are many, many forms of meditation. Visual, audible emptying one’s mind.
Christians, acknowledge the goodness of God’s creation and our bodies are part of that created order.
A lot of the history of Christianity has often looked down on the embodied experienced and valued more spiritual experiences over our bodies. But we are in an era where we really realize that God has given us bodies through which we can know God and serve God. And our invitation as a Christian is to become fully alive.
And we can’t do that. We can’t fully glorify God if we’re not fully alive and we’re not fully attuned to our bodies. So, attunement is an opportunity to listen, to feel, to see, acknowledge, to hold your body. It’s to become aware of points of potential pain or stress. It’s an opportunity to become connected to parts that might feel enlivened. or light or sources of joy.
Different forms of attunement might sound like meditation, which for some people of faith might feel questionable. But think of this idea of attunement as an opportunity for you to know the vessel, that’s a word we use often as Christians, that God has given us.
You might be asking, how do I do attunement? There are many ways that we can attune to our bodies. One might be a body scan, where one reflects or contemplates light love, goodness, filling their body from top to bottom, or becoming aware. of how you are sitting in your body, reflecting from the top of your head through your body to your toes.
Another way of attuning are breath exercises. Taking long inhales. And even longer exhales. Another way is even going for a walk. Feeling your feet walk on the earth. Becoming aware of your limbs, the heat or the cold on your skin. There are many different activities that can allow us to be in touch with the sensations that run through our bodies.
Ah! Okay. For me attunement is something I like to keep fresh. So I do rotate through a few practices. And one that I particularly like is a breath exercise of breathing in deeply for say four or five slow counts, and then taking a very sharp inhale at the top of the breath count.
And then slowly exhaling that out for a longer count. There are many breath practices. That one I learned specifically from Andrew Huberman and the Huberman Lab podcast that he runs out of Stanford. And there’s a lot of great science around how that type of breathing actually calms down your parasympathetic nervous system.
Attunement is an opportunity to get curious about your body and what you’re feeling.
So often we go through our day on autopilot and aren’t even aware that our head hurts, our back hurts, we have to use the restroom, we’re hungry because we’re focusing on other things. So in attunement, the focus is really feeling the sensations it’s not thinking about the sensations or what they mean. It’s just feeling them. Whether it’s stress, whether it’s lightness, just feel it.
Jill Westbrook: Thanks for being with us. Friends next week, Pam will walk us through awareness. An open, curious, and non-judgmental approach to observing our minds. Until then, you can find a wealth of practices and resources on our website, thethrivecenter. org. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to With For to catch each of our weekly episodes this fall.
We’ll be back next Monday.
Pam King: With & For is a production of The Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary. For more information, visit our website, thethrivecenter. org, where you’ll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose. I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the Thrive Center and our With & For podcast team.
Jill Westbrook is our Senior Director and Producer. Lauren Kim is our Operations Manager. Wren Jeurgensen is our Social Media Graphic Designer. Evan Rosa is our Consulting Producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy.
I’m your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.
Pamela Ebstyne King, Ph.D.
Pamela Ebstyne King is the Executive Director of the Thrive Center and the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science in the School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary. Her life’s purpose is to help people thrive. To this end, her academic work focuses on psychological and theological perspectives of human thriving and social flourishing. Her psychological research focuses on spiritual and moral development; the role of transcendent beliefs, narratives, and emotions in virtue development; and environments that promote thriving for diverse people. TheThriveCenter.org translates research into resources that promote wholeness, thriving, and spiritual health, and she is the host of the With & For podcast.
Episode Summary
What’s happening right now? What do you feel? What physical sensations are present from head to toe?
The first step in practicing the 5 A’s of Spiritual Health is Attunement—a simple, direct process of connecting to reality, perceiving your experience of the present moment, and paying attention to our physical sensations. It’s as simple as a clear-eyed consciousness: listening, feeling, acknowledging, being aware of basic sensations.
In this episode, Dr. Pam King explains attunement and the foundation it lays for cultivating greater agility and adaptivity. She oconsiders theological and psychological grounding for the benefits of attunement, and offers practical techniques, including a body scan and breath exercises.
ANNOUNCEMENT: With & For Season 2 launches on January 6, 2025!
Show Notes
- Jill Westbrook introduces the episode
- ANNOUNCEMENT: With & For Season 2 launches on January 6, 2025!
- What is attunement? And how does it support personal agility and adaptivity?
- Connecting to reality, the present moment, and our physical experience and sensations
- Clear-eyed consciousness
- Listening, feeling, acknowledging, noticing sensations
- Embodiment and rooting in the body
- Our bodies are part of the created order.
- God has given us bodies to know and serve God.
- Pain and stress, joy or pleasure
- How do we attune?
- How to perform a body scan
- Breath exercises
- Walking as a spiritual practice of attunement
- Breathing
- Andrew Huberman’s breath exercises: “the physiological sigh” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSZKIupBUuc
About the Thrive Center
- Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
- Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
- Follow us on X @thrivecenter
- Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter
About Dr. Pam King
Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.About With & For
- Host: Pam King
- Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
- Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
- Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
- Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa
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