Mindfulness based Somatic psychotherapy
Mindfulness based somatic psychotherapy is a holistic, gentle and respectful approach to healing. It offers the opportunity to develop deep insight leading to self-awareness, choice and transformation. It invites us to become aware of our somatic experience - in other words, our felt sense and our embodied selves.
We normally spend a great deal of our lives up in our head and not utilising the larger perspective and intelligence that is always available to us. The felt sense is the experience of physical sensations within our body at any given moment, which is directly linked to our thoughts, emotions, images and memories. This is also known as the mind/body connection.
Our body holds the story of our entire life experience. The meaning which we give these experiences both shape who we believe we are today, as well as the lense through which we view the world around us. This conditioning is continually being expressed as habitual and embodied patterns of thoughts, emotions and behaviour. It has influenced how we respond to the world around us, how we respond to our inner experiences, how we physically move our body, the idiosyncrasies we develop and all our default ways of being. We then call this our character or personality.
To a large extent we have bought into the erroneous belief that our personality is fixed and we are powerless to change it. These ingrained patterns can either be resourceful and empowering in their nature, or limiting and self-defeating. The balance of how these helpful and unhelpful responses play out depends on many factors throughout life. Our earliest experiences in childhood lay the foundation for deeply ingrained core beliefs and patterns. As life continues, these beliefs and patterns can either be reinforced further or guided into new directions. This is based on the premise of what science calls Neuroplasticity. Which way this goes, is mostly determined by what life throws at us and the resources available to us both internally and externally at the time. Much of this internal phenomenon can remain outside of our awareness and therefore outside of our control, causing us to believe that we have no choice in the matter.
When we experience overwhelming and traumatic situations and do not have the support or means to process the events or the emotions and energy that we experienced at the time, it will remain undigested and trapped within our body. This causes a disruption to our nervous system and natural innate state of free-flowing energy (also sometimes referred to as Chi, Qi, flow state, breath, life force or spirit). With this trauma, a repetitive feedback loop in the system can be triggered that continues to play out in our thoughts, memories, and the physical body as if the event is still happening in present time and feeling as if you have no control over it. We are unable to stop this automatic response occurring until we bring intentional awareness to the experience and learn how to respond in a new way. A new perspective and sense of meaning can then be made, liberating us from the conditioned patterns toward wholeness and the choice and freedom to embark on new possibilities.
Being aware of our somatic experience can be developed by present moment awareness skills (mindfulness) and cultivating a deep listening so that we notice the information our mind-body is continually conveying to us. By making the unconscious conscious, we then have the ability to make new informed choices. We are able to transform those parts of us that no longer serve our wellbeing as well as gain access to the beneficial resources and states that we already have within, but did not recognise.
Ultimately, if the path is desired, as it is in many ancient spiritual traditions, the mind-body experience is an inner journey towards self-actualization, beyond suffering and re-connecting to our true Self, which has always been with us and has always been whole.