somatic releasing
Aside from yoga as somatic movement, or nerding out on books like The Body Keeps the Score or Understanding the Messages of Your Body and the work of Peter Levine over the last decade, it is only over the last few years that I started studying somatic healing practices. Somatic healing is a body-centered approach that focuses on the link between body and mind, and looking at healing by focusing on the body and how emotions appear in the body. A big part of how it began to impact me was the awareness of trauma (not necessarily intellectualising it) and linking it to pain, stress and my own bodily sensations when both safe and seemingly unsafe.
This intimate connection between mind and body - not separate whatsoever - is changing my language and ideas of looking to body as process not object (my many thanks to friend and colleague (and tremendous yoga teacher and massage therapist) Beth for introducing me to Stalking Wild Psoas which has offered me a poetic, nerdy new vocabulary to relish around our selves as an “supple, intelligent universe” (Beth’s words) these days. Swoon.) This work is speaking to me now more than ever, in a world that seems to squeeze more out of each of us, at a pace that our nervous systems cannot sustain, and creating strain and dis-ease in many spaces we occupy.
My share is more than about book suggestions (which I still highly recommend!) and more about my continued mind-blown revelations in the concept of body as a unified whole (I am trying to remove “mind/body/spirit” from my vernacular because it furthers the idea of separation of these parts of us). A month back, I began a new somatic healing practice - for me to take and experience. Generously gifted to me by a colleague, I have been chipping away at it most days of the week, almost all of its curriculum felt and experienced rather than intellectual. At first, my very not-subtle-search-for-sensation head hardly felt the subtlety of the hip work we were doing. Not even a week into my beginning this journey did I, for the first time in my life, with no other “reason” why, get frightening and excruciating cervical spine pain. It was clear to me almost right away that this was no coincidence. This very subtle, almost imperceptible movement released something deeply stored in me, something I was not aware was there, and gave it a point of release. I have been letting it guide the way since - think subtle body work, different ways to move my body, and slowing down enough to notice the threshold between safe and unsafe and how my body has been responding to this.
It is not my first time being humbled by teachings that are soft, quiet, intimate. Time and time again, they bring me closer to myself, and even more so, to my environment, to our planet, to this much larger than “I” in the scheme of it all. It’s a journey I’m still on, and an honour to be able to help support people’s healing with some of these profound practices.