Pause. Refocus. Breathe. The Selah Technique gives you real time tools to navigate the Stress - Calm Continuum to optimise wellbeing and nurture your health. Harness the power of breath and utilise your nervous system as your most powerful resource. Listen to the reciprocal conversation between your body and brain. Takes care of your best self.
Breath > Bridge > Body + Brain = Balance
BREATH - Breathing acts as a bridge between your conscious and unconscious mind, allowing you to regulate your automatic stress response. Though stress can impact breathing patterns, practising conscious, diaphragmatic breathing creates an opportunity to communicate with your body and brain to self regulate and recover.
BODY - Your sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the ‘fight or flight’ response, preparing your body to react to stress and danger. Your parasympathetic nervous system, promotes ‘rest and recovery’ slowing your breathing and calming your body. Stress perpetuates a high sympathetic fear response.
BRAIN - Breathing creates a foundational rhythm in your brain, evident in the memory-associated hippocampus and executive-functioning prefrontal cortex. Deep breaths deactivate fear centres in your brain. Your Vagus nerve has 80% of its fibres communicating from body to brain, only 20% brain to body.
BALANCE - Homeostasis is your body’s ability to maintain a stable equilibrium through physiological processes. Your body and brain work together to regulate the internal conditions. A position of balance in your body means all internal organs are functioning optimally, representing good health and state of wellbeing.
Selah VI
Selah VI is an innovative, evidence - based approach to promoting physical and emotional wellbeing. Selah VI is the collaboration of 40 years work in understanding the body and brain by Anna Tetlow and Jenifer Armstrong, JLA Consulting Psychologists. Workshops in the MASC Program provides strategy that contains clear steps to assist in self - regulating emotions within a motivational framework. Understanding the role of emotion in the body is beneficial to our wellbeing in a truly biological sense.
Life, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio teaches us, is self regulated for the purpose of survival. The brain and body work together to regulate the internal conditions necessary for our survival. When it comes to external threats to our wellbeing or survival our body unconsciously and automatically responds emotionally. Automatic, emotional responding is faster than cognition and our selective attention.
While the body naturally self regulates emotion, our automatic emotional experience can become dysregulated following trauma, addiction, injury, illness and prolonged stress. Neurologist Dr Robert Scaer suggests stress is not always traumatic, but the cumulative effect of stress and the context in which the stress occurs can become traumatic experience.
Emotional dysregulation means you are no longer automatically responding for your immediate wellbeing or survival but instead re experiencing an intense past emotional state. This becomes the present day legacy of emotional dysregulation.
Damasio’s self regulatory system emphasises the homeostatic principal of balance within the body, noting importantly that for every system there is a counter system built to restore balance.
To restore healthy automatic emotion regulation we need to work with the body’s emotion regulation processes.
Once restored, individuals no longer continue to reexperience their emotional past and are once again automatically responding for their immediate wellbeing and survival, returning to a position of balance within the body. A position of balance in the body means all internal organs and milieu are functioning optimally representing good physical health. Optimal internal functioning is experienced as a state of wellbeing.
Built from passion, experience and expertise, Selah VI aims to help individuals move forwards freely.
Anna Tetlow
Anna’s professional background originated in elite performance. She trained and graduated from The Royal Ballet School in London and danced professionally for 10 years. During her international career, Anna danced in six pre-eminent ballet companies, working with leading choreographers in world premier productions.
Retiring due to injury, Anna re-trained and began working in multidisciplinary integrated medical clinics in Harley Street London with celebrity clients from film and theatre. Anna subsequently relocated to Australia and commenced working with The Australian Ballet Company and the AFL and in injury management and rehabilitation. Anna works closely alongside leading medical professionals collaborating in patient care, specialising in pain management, pre and post-natal, pelvic, spinal and injury rehab, pre and post operative rehab programs.
Central to her work Anna has developed The Selah Technique: (Breath > Bridge > Body + Brain = Balance) The Selah Technique which is both holistic and evidence based, maximises physical and emotional resilience and assists in navigating the Stress-Calm Continuum. The Selah Technique strengthens respiratory muscles, postural and interoceptive awareness, corrects dysfunctional breathing patterns and improves parasympathetic capacity for performance and recovery.
Founder of ‘Anna Tetlow Pilates’ and ‘Ballet at the Boulevard’, Anna runs her Melbourne studios utilising over 20 years of global teaching experience. She provides holistic and individualised support to nurture the next generation of elite performers. Anna mentors students, teachers and leading professionals in their fields of expertise, in training the respiratory system to optimise performance, health and wellbeing.
Jennifer Armstrong
Jennifer has over 20 years’ experience working as a psychologist. She began working with individuals suffering severe mental illness and moved into treating addiction. Her experience working with human suffering led her to specialise in trauma, developing the MASC (Motivating Affect Self Control) program now utilised in residential and private settings. MASC was created to facilitate a correction to the body's trauma experience and has broad applicability for anyone trying to better understand the processes of emotion and their impact on our wellbeing. Jennifer is a founder of JLA consulting psychologists.