Somatic Bodywork and Finding Center in the Workplace

At one time or another everyone experiences tension and conflict in the workplace. This may take the form of conflict within oneself, but very often is centered around interpersonal dynamics. From agitation and frustration to contempt and hostility; it’s commonplace at work.

Reactions To Workplace Conflict

One of the core offerings of somatic work is that it highlights that the way in which we respond to stress in one context of our life is very often the same way we respond to stress in other contexts. Most people - when pushed outside their comfort zone - will automatically react with either a fight-back mentality (in which they become louder and more aggressive), or a move-away tendency (in which they do everything possible to avoid conflict, and become small and quiet). The more expanded view of these types of reactions to stress includes fight, fight, freeze, appease, and dissociate. We all have a tendency for one - a conditioned tendency - that almost always traces back to how we learned to secure a felt sense of safety and belonging when we were young (see previous blog on shaping). 

Reframing Workplace Conflict

One of the more challenging things for people to see clearly on a somatic level is that their conflict at work is less about what the other person is or isn’t doing, and more about what’s happening in their own body. It’s incredibly tempting to think that the variable to whether or not we have a good day at work is other people, but mostly the variable is our own ability to manage ourselves by choosing to respond to stress from a place of center rather than from our conditioned tendency. This of course is not to say one should remain in a workplace that is toxic or to minimize the real harm of actual workplace violence. Rather, the offering is to open to a deeper understanding that the stress at work is not necessary something someone else caused, but instead is how we are allowing what they triggered in us to run rampant through our own nervous system.

This ability to center of course comes from how practiced we are in noticing and regulating our nervous system. A move to fight back or, conversely, to move away and retract always has a correlate in the tissues of the body. In becoming defensive and argumentative we notice a shift in how we hold tension around the belly, chest, eyes. Often the head juts forward. In becoming overly deferential and acquiescent the head often drops down or tilts, the tenor of the voice shifts as the breath moves less in the body and the sternum becomes still or pulls back. In nearly all of our “off center” reactions the energy comes up into the torso, neck, and head and we focus our attention on narratives rather than stay connected to our feet and legs in order to maintain our felt sense of ground.

How Conflict Can Be Healthy

This of course is not to say that we ought to regulate ourselves in an effort to avoid conflict; rather, the practice is to learn to respond to conflict from a place of center wherein that conflict can be used to generate more communication, understanding, and connection. Somatic bodywork creates and holds a container in which we can more deeply feel how center lives in the tissues of our body. When we can more accurately attune to what it’s like in our body and nervous system to be centered, we deepen our felt sense of what we need to do in our body in order to regain that center during times of stress - times when we want to fight or take flight. If we can feel on a sensation level what is happening in our body and if we can shift in our body the ways we might be conditioned to contract, we give ourselves more choice in how we respond to workplace conflict. 

In finding our center we actually increase our ability to be in healthy conflict and increase our offering in our work relationships because we can contain more without needing to immediately pull away from the discomfort or, alternatively, push others away by becoming overly aggressive. One of the aims of somatic bodywork and somatic coaching is to help clients learn to feel when they are reacting from a conditioned tendency and learn to shift how they are in their body to respond from a more centered place.

Are you looking to center yourself in the workplace and better manage healthy conflict? Reach out to certified somatic coach and bodyworker Lennon Molofsky with Mindbody Somatics today to begin a journey to relief through somatic bodywork.