Somatic Therapy and Yoga
If you’re curious how somatic counselling and practicing yoga share common ground, read on for some interesting insight from Kerri Neild as she shares how these two modalities can be healing and beneficial therapies.
Somatic Therapy is a form of body-based counselling. It recognizes an individual’s innate capacity for wholeness and thus believes in a compassionate and non-pathologizing approach. Instead of focusing on “problems” with behavior it turns its attention towards what the obstacles are to experiencing wholeness and wellness. Through collaboration between client and therapist it creatively offers what a traumatic experience was missing or needed so that the body can experience the ease of knowing that the event is in the past. True healing happens when we work in tandem with both the body and the mind.
“Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah” The second sutra in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras could be translated to “Yoga stills the fluctuations of the mind.” These fluctuations or vrttis are what psychology names imprints or conditioning, stuck patterns that effect our sense of well being and wholeness. The Sanskrit word for these imprints is samskaras, ruts or grooves in our consciousness. Samskaras can be negative or positive, with the negative ranging from limiting beliefs or anxious thoughts to traumatic pieces. One way of describing trauma is, “too much, too fast, too soon.” When something highly emotional happens and it is too fast to metabolize or work though, or it’s chronically repeated, it has the potential to be stored in the body as one of these imprints. As neuropsychologist Donald Hebb said, “Neurons that fire together wire together”, the more emotional the impact and if there isn’t enough relational support or time to process it, the more likely this neuron wiring leads to a samskara or trauma trigger. These imprints are fragments of body feelings, narrative memories, and physical sensations showing up in the present moment but linked to our past. These imprints hook our attention and if we can’t shift to the present moment, we suffer under the false belief that these traumatic pieces are who we really are. It separates us from our true nature of a body/mind that is spacious and flexible awareness.
The practice of yoga whether it be movement, breath, focusing the mind, or opening the heart, helps to still these fluctuations or imprints so that we can bring awareness and compassion to them. The practice of yoga helps build the capacity to stay with a feeling without creating a story. It helps us to stay present and to explore easefulness, in other words it helps us to build and know safety which is essential as a starting place to work through traumatic imprints. Yoga can also be helpful for building capacity to feel life force energy, a sense of empowerment and freedom that can feel dangerous if we have had experiences in our past where power equals danger. Being able to feel our life force and befriend our needs is essential to having boundaries which is another way we know safety and easefulness. For me the two practices of Somatic Therapy and Yoga are intertwined both allowing an individual to experience more compassion, ease, and empowerment. Every person is different and our needs change depending on what is happening inside of and around us. While it’s true that Yoga creates a container in which we can self-regulate and be present sometimes there are imprints that need more support and this is where Somatic Therapy could be helpful. Somatic Therapy gently helps a client move between the pockets of stuck, anxious, or traumatic pieces to more resourced, resilient, and wise parts. In this way it helps us to befriend our whole self without it being overwhelming or numbing. As traumatic imprints are stored in the body and much of it is implicit it is essential to use modalities that include the physiology.
“In this field, the vast and ancient philosophy, science, and practice of yoga intermingled with the relatively new field of Western psychology, and the important innovations of somatics and neuroscience. When these two bedmates bring together each of their gifts, a new creation is born that is greater than either alone, and brings new evolutionary possibilities with it.” -Mariana Caplan
To learn more you can visit https://www.lifeisbeautifulsomatictherapy.com/ or come in to the studio to enjoy one of Kerri’s yoga classes