Learning to listen to your body
Learning to listen to your body
I’m a somatic psychotherapist. Or at least, that’s one of the parts of the work that I have the privilege of doing in this world. The word ‘soma’ in Greek means “the living body” so somatic psychotherapy moves beyond what we might call ‘talk therapy’ to include bodily experiences. This approach is grounded in an appreciation that our embodied experiences can be correlative, causative and caused by psychological experiences – especially traumatic ones. The kinds of modalities (types) of therapy that I work with all work from the body up – and in session we are often exploring the sensations and experiences that come from a ‘felt sense’, that is, they are felt within the body. Now this frequently feels like learning a whole new language. Many (most?) of us aren’t used to tuning into and paying attention to what our body is sensing or feeling and typically we struggle to find language for how to describe these noticing’s.
The thing is our nervous system is literally designed to send us signals ALL the time relaying our embodied experiences in every moment. There’s all this incredible ‘data’ right there waiting for us but we so often just switch to whatever story our brain is telling us…and trust me, that really is a story. You see before we have what’s called ‘explicit memory’ (from trimester three in utero through to about 2-5 years of age) we relied on our felt senses to get our needs met. When we were babies we communicated our need for food, warmth, comfort in very simple, yet reliable ways (as long as those needs were met, but that’s a whole other blog). When we started to be able to communicate with caregivers in more tangible ways, we then had some of these valuable signals reinforced – sometimes positively, other times not so much. And for many of us, we learned that we had to ignore those need-based nervous system signals (our body’s way of speaking to us) in order to be loved, accepted or acknowledged in our family. Little by little we learned to disconnect from this inner wisdom, and instead we learned to rely on our somewhat skewed cognitions that our brain cobbled together based on some of those really early explicit memories.
When I was away at a conference in Bucharest last month, I had this weird experience where my whole nervous system was really unsettled the entire time I was there. It started when I was on the plane flying from London and to begin with, I thought maybe it was because I was tired, or that I didn’t really like the airline (for those of you who have flown Ryanair you’ll understand what I mean!) but it didn’t get better when we landed, and I was in the airport. Now I’m all about ‘knowing things’…I’m always reading, studying and learning new things so of course I was running through all the various reasons why I could make sense of this feeling. I ran through what I knew about the history of Romania’s capital city, started to make a cursory assessment of the psychosocial and economic situation of the city and whether that might have a bearing. It was like I could sense an underlying pain, anger, hurt in the people and / or the land. In my body it felt like an extreme lack of safety. So much so that I decided leaving the hotel wasn’t an option for the 3.5 days I was there. I felt anxious, on edge, jumpy and really quite scared all the time. And the annoying part? I couldn’t make it make sense!!
I’m all about things making sense and understanding the root cause of a situation. After about a day I realised that the lesson I was learning was around learning to let go of needing to ‘know’ or ‘understand’. I realised that it wouldn’t matter if I knew why I was feeling the way that I was feeling in my body because I’d still be feeling it. So instead, I turned to my body and asked it what it needed to feel less anxious / edgy / jumpy and afraid. Moment to moment I asked the sensations “what do you need right now to feel safe enough?” And then I just listened. Sometimes that was yoga, sometimes it was missing a conference session, or sitting at the back during a session. It was often a call to go swimming (for some reason I’d taken my bathers, cap and goggles with me even though I hadn’t been in a pool for about 18 months) or to have a shower or a bath. Sometimes it was a walk (around the hotel grounds because my body kept saying it didn’t want to leave that space. I walked, swam, rocked, tapped, yoga’d, meditated and napped. I just kept trying things until it settled enough to get through the next moment, and the next, and the next.
This lasted the entire trip, and my nervous system didn’t feel safe again until I’d landed back in London and was in my car driving back to my parents’ house. It was actually a palpable awareness when I realised that I was fully back in my body and able to reconnect to my brain properly. I still can’t ‘make sense’ of the experience, except as an incredible gift and reminder to honour my body and to respect its innate wisdom, to listen carefully and respond accordingly, even when it doesn’t appear to make any sense!
If you’d like to learn what your body is saying to you, and would like a safe space to talk about how they may impact your mental health, please get in touch with us: www.theabaker.com.au / hello@theabaker.com.au / 03 9077 8194.