Learn to listen to your body in ways that will deepen your intuition and cultivate a sense of support, comfort, groundedness and safety.

What is Somatics?  Somatics comes from the Greek root soma which means “the living organism in its wholeness.”  This is the best word we have for the wholeness of what we are – the integration of mind, body, spirit. 

Because of the world we live in, most of us will need to do some healing and restoration within ourselves before we can live our most aligned and authentic purposes.  We start this process by beginning to feel our body – to listen a little at first, and then more deeply to the messages it is sharing with us.  This is different than what most of us have been talk (i.e. that we need to change our minds to change our lives.  Or talk about and figure out our issues.  These are top-down approaches.)  I’m not interested in dominating my body, I want to be in relationship with it!  Once we begin to speak our body’s language we can send messages to our tissues and cells and nervous system that we’re okay. (Bottom up approach).

Our instinctual body and our rational mind see the world differently.  It is important to note that there is a difference in how our rational mind receives and perceives threats and how our instinctual body receives and perceives threats.  It’s also important to note that they remember threats differently too.

Explicit Memory – what the mind remembers.
Implicit Memory – what the body remembers.

In order to fully heal, we need to access both types of memory.  Often, we navigate our traumas by trying to retrain our minds or to spend a lot of time talking about them, trying to figure them out.  This can absolutely be an important aspect of healing.  Also though, we need to address the ability of our bodies to feel safe – this will not happen simply because we tell it to “feel safe body!” or because we’ve talked about how to feel safe.  This is because our rational mind is not in control of our nervous system.  We need to speak in the language of the body to communicate safety.  And we need to be patient as the body learns what it’s like to be able to feel a sense of safety.

Learning the language of the body – sensation words!!