A private client recently finished up a Personal Self Healing series with me and asked,
“How do I describe what you do? What is Somatics?”
After twelve (12) weeks of private sessions where this client learned many practices for working with anxiety, chronic pain, anger, and processing grief, they were profoundly grateful and wanted to spread the word, but was at a loss for such words! This is because the body doesn’t speak in words, but in energy, sensation, feelings, emotions, pain, pleasure, ease, discomfort, comfort, movement, and more. So let’s explore this embodiment coaching and somatic healing thing…
Let’s start with embodiment. This can be described in many ways: being in connection with self and body; the experience of being in your body; present moment experience of sensations; energy and quality of experience; self location or proprioception; connected and attuned to your body and senses; where the mind listens to the body; a type of meta awareness; body ownership; agency. In a nutshell, your internal felt sense and awareness of the data the body is presenting, which always happens in the NOW.
Somatics can get more complex as its evolution has taken it from the ancient Hindu traditions of Soma which were Spiritual, to the Greek study of the Physical body, to current Psychology and therapies like Somatic Psychology and Somatic Experiencing. It’s a long and winding road! Taken together, we get a holistic view that integrates the body mind, as it is in our lived experience.
The yogis described Soma as bliss, nectar, and wholeness and as the journey of coming back to the source of bliss, contentment, and joy. Soma was a moon God that was the master of plants; healer of disease; and bestower of riches. Soma was also a drink of the God’s; a watery medicinal plant growing near water and flowing with milky juice, the ambrosia of immortality (RgVeda). Soma held definitions as vast as a ray of light, water, air, wind, chief, the best, Monday, sky, heaven, and cosmic housekeeper. Soma was seen as an internal process of sublimation leading to higher consciousness, or samadhi in Sanskrit, the 8th limb of yoga, the goal of yoga. Five to seven hundred years later the ancient Greeks define Soma as body; the axial portion of an animal including head, neck, trunk, and tail. The corporeal body distinguished from psyche, soul, or spirit. Somatic came to mean relating to the body as distinct from the mind. Today, modern psychology has claimed this word to mean “…a field of study, somatic psychology has been defined as: ‘the study of the mind/body interface, the relationship between our physical matter and our energy, the interaction of our body structures with our thoughts and actions” (C. Caldwell 1997). So we come full circle in this holistic frame for somatic.
Because really, can you separate your mind from your body?
I define Somatics as practices that use the mindbody connection to survey our internal self and listen to body signals. Emphasizing embodiment, the internal physical perception of experience, and a holistic approach that includes the subtle energies (like prana, chi, spirit), the sensation level of experience (like temperature, weight, speed, rhythm, direction, texture, charge), and how those come together to form our feelings and emotions and the stories we make up about them.
So, why bother?
Well, it turns out that our modern day dilemmas of mental health, anxiety, grief, and chronic pain are sourced from too much time and attention to our minds and not enough in our body. When we ignore our body’s language and messages, or never learn how to attend to it in the first place, we lose contact with that bliss nature, our inherent goodness, our Self. We loose access to the present moment, that is only found in the body. We lose attention to reality and get stuck in the tricky and slick stories of our mind’s, which are mostly conditioned messages that have nothing to do with who we really are! This disconnect is very painful for us and creates our suffering.
When you come back to your body and cultivate a relationship here, you begin to feel better, and to heal. When you grow your interoception, your capacity to be aware and accepting of sensations in your body, you increase your sense of well being; expand your capacity for emotional regulation, gaining space to respond rather than being stuck in reactions; and you experience less pain.
In your work with me your first step is to…
Learn how to map your nervous system and identify resources for safety. This creates a container that feels safe enough to explore this new terrain (like putting on your rock climbing harness and testing the ropes). Then we build capacity for finding comfort within our discomfort. I use particular practices from
- Yoga like breath awareness and longer, slower, smoother breathing.
- Mantras, humming or singing for creating resonance and soothing vibration in the body.
- Yoga postures and strength training exercises help you build exercise tolerance and expand that window for increased safety in the face of pain as well as increased mood tolerance, and better mood altogether!
- Self massage techniques move fluid and lymph to create more ease. By paying attention to your sensory experience you enrich your body schema in the brain. Your body schema is like a map for your felt sense. And when we have pain or don’t pay attention to our bodies much those maps get smudged and sections “erased.” Then, when enough stressor’s move in, it shows up as pain in these “blank spots.”
- With TRE® we introduce novel sensations like tremors, vibrations, and pulsations to increase our brain’s body schema; release chronic tension patterns in your body; and down regulate your nervous system, bringing more ease and calm.
Through these multiple modalities we enrich your body maps for less pain and injury and more agency and personal power in your life.
So who comes to work with me? Anyone with a body that would like to improve that relationship and sense of well being! Often times folks come for emotional pain like grief or stuck states of anxiety or depression. And although I am NOT a therapist (I do not assess, diagnose, or treat) my work complements therapy and can be very therapeutic. Most of my clients do work with a therapist and in my work, we fill in the gaps the mind can’t resolve on it’s own. Then you have embodied tools and awareness to bring to your therapy sessions for faster growth and healing.
Many folks with chronic pain and autoimmune conditions come to me to work with turning down the dial on their physical pain, which doesn’t happen through swimming in the thinking mind, but working directly with awareness and the body. Just last week a client came to a session with a flare up that mapped most of his body. By smoothing out the breath and moving awareness to unaffected body areas, within a matter of minutes he was able to shrink that pain map to a much smaller area and turn the volume of his pain down. When the body is feeling settled and pain free, through my coaching work we focus more attention on how to work with the mind through mindfulness practices, self compassion, journaling, guided visualizations, and supported meditation. For those interested in yoga, we lean into the wisdom teachings to create more expansive awareness and deeper understanding of reality that is powerfully freeing. All this is customized to the individual’s desires and capacities.
If you’d like to develop and empowered relationship with your body,
turn down the dial on your pain, grow your emotional agility and intelligence, strengthen your body and your mind and move from surviving to thriving this work is for you! You are invited to join me. You can learn more about my offerings HERE.
