Somatic therapy is a relatively new approach to treating trauma and mental illness by taking the body as the foundation and guide for healing. Somatic therapy integrates movement, body awareness, and breathwork with a safe space and trusted therapist to progressively heal trauma that is “stuck” in the body.
Have you noticed when you think about a stressful situation or a scary memory how your body responds to your thoughts? Perhaps your breath becomes shallow, your palms sweat, maybe you stutter or experience a muscular twitch. All of these “symptoms” are ways that the body is expressing the associated trauma that is stored at a cellular level in the body. Somatic therapy goes to the root of trauma by addressing how it is held in the body.
While somatic therapy might seem new to the modern Western scientific community, it’s techniques are as ancient as the healing profession itself. Shamans from nearly every culture on the planet use some form of somatic therapy in conjunction with pharmaceuticals, ritual, fasting, and prayer to heal everything from snake bites to schizophrenia.
The first ritual that we all can relate to and must tend to now is grieving. We do not have a way to grieve collectively for the catastrophic losses of our environment, our food and water, our children, and our basic kindness. The news headlines are traumatic enough, and yet each of us also faces personal traumas that threaten to keep us stuck with incurable chronic illnesses. A somatic approach to grieving is a necessary first step for all of us if we are to begin the brave journey to collective healing.
Somatic grieving is embodied grief. In this process you start where you are, sitting at your computer or phone, reading these words. Take a deep breath and recall grief.
- Notice: scan your body from head to toe. Take time with your organs and joints, these are places where trauma can get really stuck and become sites of chronic pain and cancer. Where is there tightness? Hesitation? Flutters? Nervous energy? Stuck, heavy feeling?
- Breathe: once you’ve identified one place in your body that is especially stuck, heavy, tight, nervous, etc. send your breath to that place. For example, if you experience tightness in your chest as you breathe in, imagine the breath gently entering that tightness, giving it permission to loosen a little. Do this for several deep, long, slow breaths, allowing your full body to move with the breath as much as possible.
- Vocalize: With the next exhale, open your mouth and allow the vocal cords to vibrate with a vowel sound. “Ooooooooooooohhhhhhh” or “Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh” start small and simple, allowing this to build in volume and change shape. Make sure to keep moving your whole body along with the waves of your breath coming in, raising your body, and out, lowering your body. Continue exploring vocalization with different vowel sounds, allow this to rise and intensify, and quietly slow down until you are ready to stop.
- Movement: Now that this energy has been activated, it is time to move with it. Make sure that you incorporate shaking, tapping, brushing, and jumping with your movement and continue to vocalize as you do so.
- Metabolize & Integrate. When you are ready, slowly melt to the floor wherever you are. Completely let your body collapse on the ground, surrender fully to gravity. This is often a moment of a huge upwelling of emotion, as all the emotional energy that has been stuck in your cells is now circulating in your system. Allow for the big release. Breathe with it, vocalize with it, move with it, but stay on the floor. Stay present without judgment and give yourself to this full-bodied expression. Allow the waves to rise and fall, and when you are ready lay down on the floor comfortably, close your eyes, and just be present with your breath, with the physical sensations.
We must grieve before we can heal. Grieving is healthy, grieving is strength and compassion, grieving is full bodied honesty. Ready to take a deeper dive into the fullness of your beautiful humanity? Ready to transform despair into action?
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and as always:
Stay Kind. Stay Real. Stay Savage. ✊