You know these versions of a human being:
Wake up to an alarm to get there “on time”
Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at a certain time
File your taxes by the deadline
The things outside ourselves began to tell us how to live even when we are babies. We all had a very short window to know our own rhythms before something was telling us what our schedule of needs, wants and sensations should be. The cost is that we lose our listening and the art of this somatic or body-based listening hides inside as if it was a stupidity or weakness rather than the intelligence that it is. This is more than knowing how you feel but sensing where you feel and allowing the deeper art of listening to take over. The way we need to listen is different than an auditory process that goes up the brain stem into the ‘CEO’ manager of life part of your brain. It might be more like a reading concept, like reading brail. The fingertips become alive with sensation, detecting bumps, slowing down the mental state so that it does not get ahead of itself assuming what is there. You don’t use what you see and make up a story about it and call it factual, you feel what the bumps are indicating.
Somatic Awareness is like this, it allows you to slow down the ‘CEO’ manager part of your brain and lets you stay up and out of the subconscious ways you start moving, speaking and operating with the chatter as truth. Let’s move into a personal story to help highlight a day when I realized my own connection to my body was coming back on-line. It was becoming lest prescribed to do things that I thought were the scheduled things to do without stopping, without feeling signals of emotional drain, physical drain, pain, tension, lack of full breath, and hunger. Prior, my body always held the story of keep going and I could not feel how tightly it wrapped my own arms over my chest. I was outwardly a pleasant person, but I was clamped into it and my schedule for life. The clamps were blocking entrance, dead set on moving forward. I didn’t want any past thing to drag me down and the schedule of my trying allowed a sort of holding it all and moving forward. I did yoga for decades before I trained in Somatic Experiencing and advanced my own trauma therapist certification to include the tools that intuitively know how our neurobiology holds our hard things.
THE REALIZATION IT WAS WORKING
On the say I realized a different sort of schedule was working for me, a body centered effort to feel myself more through various daily practices I had committed to, I was walking to a trailhead, preparing for the hiking trail that would burn into my muscles and take me away into nature’s version of hard things. This activity is my church, and I was feeling the anticipation. I felt a looseness in one boot and looked down to see a shoelace sliding away from its knot. I thought, “can I stop and tie my shoelaces now?”. Suddenly my mind boomed with this childhood to adulthood progression of knowledge. I was aware of how in childhood, everyone wants us to stop and tie our shoes. It is very important we learn how to tie our own shoes so that we can do our start to the day on our own and adults will stop our day dead if they loosen. I remembered Velcro’s entrance into my life, my mom indicating it would help me go faster in the rush to preschool. I wanted to move faster ever since she mentioned this and something in me changed. I wanted to tie, I wanted to feel “big” being able to run this task on my own. Velcro or tie-ups, either way, the days of stopping evaporated. I learned to rush.
My mother tried to make it fun and sing a rushing song. I remember now she was doing it for herself too. We didn’t want to feel how this all felt, our only time together slipping away. We collaborated in the grown-up message: you shouldn’t stop as much, you shouldn’t feel it if you don’t have time to, anything can be tied later, just get where they tell you to get to. There were alterations to the message, like don’t be untied if someone is looking and then you should tie. Also, if you need to get somewhere, or finish something, if it’s not too risky and no one can tell, you can be untied and going somewhere, just don’t let anyone see it. It’s subliminal that getting something done, getting to something or through something faster, takes priority over slowly sensing how to proceed, in what direction, and for what purpose.
It dawned on me that all of us recovering from all sorts of things are actually discovering how to stop, how to pause, how to notice untied shoes again and actually care about a gentle re-tie, even relacing. Some of us have to face the “dam it, these shoes are worn to the soles, what have I been doing!” part of this awareness. Recovery from “the things” that happen is not a fix, it’s a repairing of false concepts of who you are, of what life should look like, of your memories, and of your relationship to yourself and others. It means you have to feel the untied places and even more, feel them in progress, so that you can sense into them and care what they indicate. Then you exercise the focus to keep going but you have multidimensional awareness of the necessary stops and the essential untied moments you have to have. Muscle memory blooms with safety rather than danger cues of tension and pain and tells you about loving kindness towards yourself. It starts to be familiar and also you know it has been forgotten to feel this way, all at once back home inside. Then, you want to cultivate an awareness to come back repeatedly. The ‘come back repeatedly’ is what I call a daily regulation and integration practice, a DRIP. You’ll want to consider a few for yourself if this speaks to you.
That day, I stopped and tied my hiking boot, walked a few feet, and realized the other one was off tension as well, and stopped again. I literally laughed out loud, letting time pass, aware of my former self becoming annoyed at the delay. I slowed my tying down and felt into the “bowl of breath” between my hips where if I feel into and send my breath from my pelvic floor up through my bellybutton and get a bowl-like sensation. Then I moved this breath up my ribcages, collarbone and to the top of my head. Crouched down and feeling myself, I felt possessed with awareness that I would hike that trail like a Queen, knowing that she walks in nature, in her body and all things are held as she rises in the woods. Maybe it sounds “woo-woo” to you but the tools in my Toolbox Approach are things I can literally feel now.
The phases of healing: Narrative Healing, Reprocessing Healing, and Relational Healing feel like a structure that is fluid for the inner work and repair but also the holding on to myself and moving on in life well, at home inside. Whatever accomplishments happen or do not happen, the home is where I can live. Let’s take home a few somatic awareness tools that you can use and consider choosing as a daily practice. They are best used at the start of the day. The second-best use is when you have caught an emotional trigger in your Conscious Mind, or the chatter part of your brain we tend to believe much of the time. The somatic awareness tools gently unravel the yarn that knots up your thoughts and parks a spool of tightness in your subconscious self, demanding you live like this in much of what you do without your awareness. This means your tone changes, your speed changes, your vibe changes, your actions are messages to others and yourself you would never consciously intend. We have to unwind that spool and become part of a Higher Self Mind that has gentle, paced, choice and does not believe in urgency but trusts awareness is a guide and an answer to most things.
TAKE A MOMENT
Before the somatic awareness practices are shared, first, take a moment to consider which type you are more of:
You get in your head thinking about a situation between you and another person and think if you could only understand it, there would be some ease to how you feel. You aim for something that will help things and worry that you are overthinking it but also feel responsible to do so for some reason. You want to make sure your solution is smart and not too emotional, but you wonder if the situation is benefitted by your emotional awareness and that someone should really recognize that.
You get in your head thinking about others and how they should stop being a certain way. Mostly you are frustrated and resent having to think about this but also think other people should understand the obvious facts and stop wanting to look too deeply into things. You are thinking into it only because the way they are forces you to, so you are thinking about how annoying that is.
Obviously, we are all extremely multidimensional and not of only two types. The two types above are basic guides. You can also answer the question: “Which do I struggle more with, my thoughts getting in the way of the way I want to act, or the way I act getting in the way and then I am forced to think about it due to the feedback I get?”. One is an issue with inner thought boundaries and the other with outer feedback boundaries. Sometimes we are moving back and forth between these kinds of problems. The bottom line is, STOP THINKING OF A SOLUTION! The Somatic Exercises below help get you back home inside yourself, offline from chatter, and into a Higher Mind. The mantra I often latch to many of these practices is helpful here, it gets you back to this place: “I am the powerful person that guides my life”.
SOMATIC AWARENESS PRACTICES TO CONSIDER
The Wet Suite Zip Up: Starting with both hands gently below your belly button, breathe in. Then, keeping one hand as an anchor for where your breath fills from, use the other hand to act like it is zippering up an imaginary wet suite. The breath goes into the anchor hand and the other hand zippers up. As each section of your body is passed, you are more you, contained and in possession of your experience. Zipper up all the way to the top of your head. Then, one arm at a time, smooth down the wet suite arms, one at a time, squeezing and pulling each wrist at the end of the smooth down. With the basics down, repeat several times and indicate to yourself that you have not retreated, you have come back home and are not distracted by outside influences, you guide your life, not others’.
The Head Clamp Lift: Staring with one palm pressed against the forehead like a suction, breath into the pressure between your forehead and hand. Then, on the exhale, take the other hand and suction it to the back of your head right below the crown and before the brain stem starts to go down into the spinal cord. Using the pressure of both hands against the front and back of your head lift the head up and out of your shoulder sockets, at least that is how it may feel. Keep breathing higher into your head as you lift and release, lift and release for more space into your Higher Mind. Start to indicate to yourself you are taking back your mind, breathe up through all of yourself and make a light smile. Allow only sensation for what you are doing, notice the chatter is gone.
PARTING THOUGHTS
The truth is, more than any other phase of healing that I included in my toolbox approach to inner work, The Relational Phase of Healing, can be a blend of all the phases. It is both of the other two phases, Narrative Healing and Reprocessing Healing, because it detaches from the story you are telling yourself and reprocesses “threat” by recognizing the only reason we are ever threatened is because we lose contact with ourselves and believe anything the chatter says. Then we live inside the chatter subconsciously with our bodies and the actions we start to take. I have developed a life mission to be more than a trauma therapist through using this Toolbox Approach on myself and sharing it with therapy goers. That is the purpose of the phases of healing courses, this Holding Space Subscription and the “You Are Not Broken” introductory book coming out. There is an easy listening feature on Spotify called the ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always podcast for those of you not always able to stop quite yet but looking to dip your toes in inner work and healing from whatever has brought you here.
Find me on LinkedIn and I can welcome you to any of these communities that way as well.
Share this post