somatic practice
A somatic approach to working with stress and overwhelm involves returning to the inherent wisdom our bodies already hold for managing difficult experiences.
Focusing on our bodies can be uncomfortable for some, and for a host of valid reasons. Yet somatic approaches to healing work can be extremely valuable, namely because of the primacy of the body’s nervous system in holding patterns of trauma and overwhelm. Because of this, we gently engage with our physical selves as well as our emotional/spiritual and mental selves so that we can metabolize trauma and transform patterns that keep us feeling stuck.
My role is to create a comfortable or neutral space for you and as we engage throughout the session, guide you to pay attention to sensations that arise. These sensations, or lack of them, can be linked to activation in your nervous system via fight, flight and freeze, your instinctive survival responses. We work with your own rhythms and use conversation, breath, posture, gesture, guided meditation, emotional/physical resourcing, consensual touch or self-touch, and rest to support the integration or release of your body's survival energy. With pacing and curiosity, we can explore new ways of relating to overwhelm and steadily build capacity for difficult emotions as well as pleasant ones.
I strive for everyone to feel that they are working with someone who is non-judgmental, present to their needs, and interested in their growth as a person. If we journey into this work together, I invite you to truly come as you are. If you are arriving to a session distracted, angry, contented, exhausted, confused, ambivalent, anxious, excited or in any other state, I welcome you. The work happens when you show up exactly as you are.
How does this work, technically speaking?
Read if you are feeling keen, but it is not essential to know this before engaging in sessions together.
When our physical or emotional safety is threatened, or perceived to be threatened, a momentum of energy fuelled by our Autonomic Nervous System, via the hypothalamus in our brain, is activated. This energy can show up in the form of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, fluctuations in our respiration, temperature and heart rate, as well as changes in our muscle tone to name a few. These responses prepare us to fight or flee to safety. We can also experience elements of the freeze response under threat and loose connection with our higher cognitive processing aka out thinking capacity, and or, experience physical disassociation, numbness, and collapse. Unless specifically trained, most people’s survival responses happen instinctively and are beyond our control.
We also know through people's lived experiences, storytelling and recent findings in epigenetics, that survival energy can echo in our system long after the threat or perceived threat is over. It can remain with us for days, months, years, even generations.
For some people this bound energy can become a chronic state and change our physiology and behaviours over time. Symptoms like, persistent sleep disturbance, chronic pain, digestive issues, hard time focusing or remembering, autoimmune or fibromyalgia diagnosis are some examples of the way our physiology can change due to trauma and stress.
One way to understand trauma then, is to consider this mass of energy embedded in our body, challenged to be integrated or released due to an imposed loss of deep collaborative relationship to our embodied selves.
This work understands however, that trauma and ongoing stress are experiences that can be tended to and mended. We have been managing states of stress since time immemorial. Connection with nature, our loved ones, healers and spiritual leaders in our communities, as well as embodied practices, when engaged with collectively or individually are examples for ways we have metabolized overwhelm historically and presently.
Some of the psychological and physiological states that we are managing today are the result of intergenerational trauma, developmental trauma, systemic oppression, and acute traumatic incidents. Often it is a combination of one or more of these categories. For this, a steady, focused approach that considers traumatic physiology can be foundational to helping organize the effect of trauma on your whole person.
I highly encourage you to reach out if you have other questions on what this modality can look like, what you can expect in sessions or to hear a little more about my background. We can email or chat over the phone for 20 minutes of free consultation and gain more insight into what spending time together in sessions can look like.