Listening to the Body
The body has wisdom that needs to be unearthed, but how do we listen to it? Somatic Experiencing® offers a way to listen to your experience in a deeply personal and intuitive manner. You may have heard of somatic work as “releasing trauma from the body.” Somatics can’t be distilled this simply. Rather, SE is about listening to the body and guiding it to find a natural discharge. It is hardly a one-size fits all approach.
Move Slow to Go Fast.
Imagine that you’re in the back of a busy kitchen collaborating with different cooks, servers and other kitchen staff. It’s a bustling environment and everything appears to be going fast. However, if you’re back there and you actually move fast, what happens? Food gets dropped, wrong ingredients get added, things go wrong. To work effectively and efficiently, you need to slow it down.
Our bodies are no different, and there are actual physiological reasons we need to slow down doing somatic work. If we engage in a shaking exercise offered to us because a book or influencer told us all we need to do is shake it out, the message does not get relayed to the brain, and the feeling of stuck-ness remains. Instead, we need to feel into what it is the body innately wants to do before engaging in an action. This requires listening long and deeply to the intricacies of your internal experience. From there, internal cues will tell you what and how to engage your body.
Listening
I keep saying “listening” what do I mean? Interoception is the ability to listen to internal cues and be able to interpret them. Physiologically, we tend to mean being able to sense hunger, thirst, pain. From an SE perspective, this expanded to listen to cues that go along with emotional experiences, memories, and states of nervous system activation. Let’s bring this to life.
If I’m focused on a moment in my life I felt insignificant, when I listen within through interoception, I listen to the cues in my body that to come together to form what I define as “insignificant.” As an example, I might feel a pinch in my chest that comes with heat and moves up in down. There might be a trace of pressure welling up under my eyes giving me a feeling that I need to cry. Finally, I may have a scratchy feeling at the top of my throat with a sense that I can’t vocalize something of importance.
This is all a schema of the experience of feeling insignificant. And it’s just as real as an experience of hunger. But we tend to not pay attention to this as much, partially because of how we become socialized and prioritize building intellectual understanding. Since we inhibit this so much, we often need to rebuild this skill so we can listen to what our body wants to do to find the resolution we crave.
Your Body, Your Process
Now that we have an understanding of what it means to “listen,” let’s return to the important of slowing it down.
Pretend that we’ve learned that the innate action your body wants to do is shake. If this is done too fast, the brain will not perceive the action of shaking nor will it connect the action to the activation in the body. Several components need to be online to have the desired action work for perceived relief:
Internal resourcing needs to be online.
The body experiencing needs to have a connection with another system.
The body needs to experience low levels of activation within a window of tolerance.
The action needs to be slowed down enough to be internally felt.
We need resource, connection, low-grade activation of an experience, and we need to experience the discharge in a slow mindful manner.
How is this fast, you ask? Well, when we slow down and listen fully, we can find resolution far faster than if we just talk about it. Talking keeps us in the cognitive zone, and has strong tendency to keep activation alive. While we believe your story matters, and we use story to build connection, telling it doesn’t resolve the disruption. Feeling it, being curious and exploring it, however, allows shifts in activation to occur.
This approach is a gentle and intuitive process that can’t be distilled into a strict protocol and bottled into the trendy language of “nervous system regulation.” This is not about become calm or finding stillness; it’s about building flexibility, adaptability, and resilience. Sometimes calm will be the direction or the outcome of a session, but over time, the goal is for your to be able to find more choice, be able to seeking grounding with less effort, and build your ability to move through the world more intuitively.
If you’re looking to disentangle wounds, find more expansion, or gain a deeper relationship with yourself. Reach out to me and give SE a try.
