Somatic Healing: Learning from our Bodies
“Yoga chitta vritti nirodha.”
“Yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind.”
-Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras
Y’all, we are so much more than our brains. 🧠🤯 Just because we have cultivated a societally sanctioned focus on intellectual achievements doesn’t mean that there isn’t as much, or MORE, intelligence living in the body and begging to be heard. Stop thinking so much! (so easy to do, right?!)
If you’re familiar with the chakra system, then you understand that balance comes from a healthy exchange of energy moving up and down the body, flowing freely without blockages or a “cutting off” of any part. The crown chakra is not more important than the root chakra, their success is interdependent. We are the sum of our parts and each part deserves to be nurtured, teased out and respected.
Even the least spiritual person will attest to the frustration of dealing with any chronic pain that has no “logical” origin. Our bodies talk to us in a language we often haven’t learned. What a shame to waste the precious intelligence of the moving, shifting, seething energy fields under the surface of our skin. And it’s spiritual, sure, but it also just IS. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can get to work utilizing the time we have to maximize growth and expand fully into the beauty of having a body in the first place. If you’re just starting to get into this stuff, I recommend the books Healing Back Pain and Eastern Body, Western Mind. If you’re ready to take it to the next level, read The Body Keeps the Score.
I’m convinced that any effective healing practice ensures that there is a deep respect for the body and devotes time and energy to feeling through trauma and then learning what it feels like to be content, easeful, at rest. And re-learning. And re-learning again, until we can trust, release and be less fearful. It takes practice! Otherwise, years threaten to pass while we are constricted, repressed, boxed in, and held tight. When we make decisions from that place it hurts emotionally and physically and it may take us until our very final moments to realize how much freedom there is in letting go.
Here are some of the ways I’ve nurtured my own somatic experience, quieted brain chatter and found relief from stress and anxiety :
Meditation (including progressive muscle relaxation, visualization and yoga nidra)
Yoga and Pranayama (breathwork)
Hand on my heart
Mantra practice / literally just talking to myself kindly
Finding the places in your body where anxiety sits and putting a hand there, noticing
Massage
Baths
Acupuncture
Getting comfortable with sexuality
Releasing shame
Learning about evolutionary psychology and effective treatments for PTSD
Making products with my hands
Studying Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness teachings
EMDR
Herbs (CBD, ashwagandha, passionflower, milky oats, lemon balm)
How CBD can help us get into our bodies🦋
CBD is also helpful because it interacts with receptors throughout the nervous system, nudging it back towards balance. Without a calm nervous system, we aren’t in a place where we can receive. Instead, we are constantly anticipating future threats or mulling over past failures. Finding the present moment by starting from the bottom up, helps us land in a place where we are ready to learn new ways of being. Herbs are powerful tools in helping to prime and prep our body to be in this place of receiving.
How do you step out of your brain and move into your body?
We sometimes walk around like floating brains disconnected from our bodies and chattering away to ourselves about all the stuff that’s wrong. It’s not our fault that we’ve been programmed by evolution to keep ourselves safe in this way. By storing memory, anticipating the negative, focusing on the worst, humans have been able to survive certain threats and evolve as a species.
But the sophistication of this system is limited. There are fewer valid threats than imagined ones and the stories about the imagined ones often take up so much brain space that we forget to feel the present moment, we forget that we have choice, we forget that our bodies are just alive as the neurons firing in our brains.
The power to recognize and attend to our thought-based suffering is the key to our freedom. Finding ways to feel instead of think through our struggles can offer a path that helps us accept the present moment rather than constantly trying to escape.
There are SO many ways to do this! Somatic meditations, mantra, herbs and yoga are my favorites. What are yours? Your brain learns to behave more positively when you nourish the body first. Body based practices have truly done as much if not more for me than therapy has over the years. If I had never learned ways to notice my body and sit with it, calm it, hold it, then I’d still be trying to think my way through suffering.
Also, have you noticed that in our culture there’s a war on bodies? (Rhetorical question cause I know you know!) There’s a war on feeling beautiful and expansive. A war on healthy sexuality, a culture of drugs, food and alcohol that cuts us off from our bodies and drives us further into thought, into anxiety. This is good for business and bad for our growth. It’s bad for our happiness. Buy into your own fully expanded self, not the fake dreams that are being sold to us every day. That’s your job on this earth!