What is somatic work?
Somatic frameworks like Somatic Experiencing and Alexander Technique explore how our sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, behaviors, and movements are all translated through our corporeal selves. Our muscles, bones, organs, connective tissues, fluids, and breath weave a tapestry of experience that influences how we act and who we are in the world. Somatic work helps us gain consciousness through our sensing, feeling, thinking to integrate past experience, embody the field of possibilities that exists in the present, and move forward with curiosity into a revitalized reimagined future. Our intentions and actions better align, and our intuition and reasoning become more unified.
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Somatic experiencing
Somatic Experiencing aids us in healing trauma. “It is the life’s work of Dr. Peter A. Levine, resulting from his multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics.”* Trauma is a personal or systemic event or dynamic that happens too much, too fast, or too soon for us to fully process. Real and/or perceived threats overwhelm our autonomic nervous system (ANS), and interrupt the healthy manageable shifts between sympathetic charge (“gas”/”go”) and parasympathetic discharge (“brakes”/”rest and digest”). What traumatizes one person may not traumatize another; trauma is not determined by the circumstances. Rather, it’s the facility with which a person’s nervous system is able to metabolize the experience(s) that will lead to trauma or not. A dysregulated autonomic nervous system can manifest in many different ways including, but not limited to, excess muscle tension, chronic pain, anxiety, panic attacks, hyperactivity, depression, apathy, exhaustion, digestive issues, autoimmune diseases, migraines, and more.
The goal of Somatic Experiencing is to aid us in processing these overwhelming undigested events or dynamics that have gotten stuck in our nervous systems. Flow states are accessed by interrupting the feedback loops of our autonomic nervous system that behave based solely on the information and options (or lack thereof) available to us in the past, and offering opportunities for repair based on the possibilities of the present.
Somatic Experiencing taps into a deeper level of listening to our body-mind-selves to follow the maps our systems are drawing for us toward healing. In-person sessions incorporate a mix of dialogue and supportive touch. Online sessions incorporate a mix of dialogue, guided supportive self-touch, and distance energy work.
*source: http://traumahealing.org/about-us/
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alexander technique
Alexander Technique is an embodied mindfulness practice. It works with the musculoskeletal and respiratory systems in connection with our cognitive processes to expand our options for how we support and coordinate ourselves in stillness and movement. Deep undoing helps to release and redirect the mental-physical blocks that drag us down and keep us isolated and stuck in the same ruts. This undoing gives way to a more connected, expansive, mobility that may be applied to any activity (sitting, standing, walking, talking, cooking, playing an instrument, etc.).
Chronic habitual tension stops us from fully becoming the people we want to be. Alexander Technique teaches us to clear our “psychophysical slate” and redirect our energy to find more ease and coherence in our whole selves.
We are what we repeatedly do, and each of us have our own unique patterns of unconscious postural habits and excess tensions accumulated over our lifetime. These strategies develop out of necessity in attempts to adapt to our environments or protect ourselves in some way, and they are neither right nor wrong. Alexander Technique lessons provide us with more choice in how we carry ourselves, so that instead of being trapped by our habits, we can make educated conscious decisions for ourselves and our lives that uplift and sustain us, and in turn the world at large.
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specialties:
LGBTQIA+
Medical Procedure Trauma
Motor Vehicle Collisions
Prenatal/Birth Trauma
Veterans
Victims of Domestic Violence
Victims of Sexual Abuse
Anxiety
Chronic Pain/Fibromyalgia
Complex PTSD
Developmental Trauma
Depression
Intergenerational Trauma
Grief and Loss
Benefits may include:
Relief from chronic pain
Pain prevention
Trauma resolution
Anxiety reduction
Greater resilience
Increased calm
Improved balance
Fortified interpersonal boundaries
More gratifying relationships
Easier breathing
Better mobility & freedom in movement
Greater alignment, poise & grace
Increased sustainability and efficiency in the body-mind-self
Higher energy levels
Better posture
Increased confidence
Enhanced vocal projection
Greater presence and clarity of thought
Improved flexibility and adaptability
Better presentation and performance skills
Expanded mindfulness for every day activities