Somatic Coaching and Reconnecting With Yourself
One of the primary offerings of somatic bodywork is that it creates a space and a context to listen deeply to the intelligence of your body.
If trauma, stress, and anxiety are running you, the messages the body speaks are fairly limited. They lack nuance and are almost always negative. They come in the form of “I’m not good enough” or “I don’t belong”, to name just a couple of the usual suspects. At one point in our lives these old messages may have helped us make sense of the world or even kept us safe, but as adults they have little to offer us in terms of accessing a deeper knowing inside. This lack of access to our deeper self has huge implications for how we develop a competency and confidence in knowing who we are and what we want.
Modern Life Teaches Us To Ignore What Our Bodies Are Telling Us
Culturally we are not encouraged to feel our body as a guide to inner knowing, and this can leave us constantly searching for help outside of ourselves. For instance, the advancements of fitness and health trackers now operate on a precision designed to tell you when and what to eat, when to workout, when you are stressed. There are even AI-powered apps that tell you when your posture is slouched. This is not to dismiss the value of technology in supporting peoples’ well-being - it has its role to play - but in many ways we live in a culture that outsources our own internal health app we are all hardwired with: our body.
Somatic Bodywork Can Reconnect Us With Our Body’s Messages
By definition, somatic bodywork is designed to loosen up the contractions in our body that hold us in the grips of trauma and stress (and the old messages that accompany them) and aid us in reorganizing our nervous system in a way that allows us to feel more of our body. The human organism as a system is designed to feel sensation throughout the entire body. Somatic bodywork, in helping soften the armor (tightness) of the tissues, allows for more sensation and therefore more of the intelligence of the body to come to the surface. This creates space for new, healthful narratives to emerge. Importantly, it also creates more space to feel our body so that we know when, for example, we are hungry, tired or (you guessed it) slouching. Much about our culture has pruned out of us our innate ability to place our attention on the sensations in our body constantly giving us feedback, and instead we are conditioned to leave our body and place our attention elsewhere.
What I have seen again and again with my clients is that, as the body loosens and lets go, we are more able to access that which wants to come to life inside of us. We can better feel what we love and what we long for. We can get much closer to accessing a state of being that is truly present and open and knows what it needs. In other words, we can see ourselves more clearly and more authentically because we are not living in our body simply in the way we have been conditioned, but rather in the way we were designed.
If you’re interested in learning more about how somatic coaching can help you manage anxiety, stress or trauma, please reach out.