Meet your emotions to heal your pain.

What is Somato Emotional Healing/Release and how can it help with your pain?

Thoughout my years as a bodyworker it has become personally and professionally clear to me that the our physical body and our emotional being have a huge effect on each other. The New York Times Bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk is being spoken about a lot these days showing us just how true this is. In his book he shares neuroscience studies that show how trauma, little and big, impact our body/mind. IFS, Internal Family Systems, or Parts Work, is one of his favorite techniques for healing trauma, and this is the technique at the core of my Somato Emotional session.

What is trauma? Watch this 7 min. video where Bessel explains it.

What is IFS? Check out this video to learn more.

Longer IFS interview with Dick Schwartz and Aubrey Marcus. (podcast)

No one gets through life without trauma. Many don’t want to see, or more essentially, feel how we are storing emotional trauma and unexperienced experiences still in our body that are blocking our authentic, free expression into the world.

Why would you not want to feel your emotions fully? Because its painful. Its painful to feel grief, sadness, anger, hurt. But what I am pointing to is that either way… we are hurting. Whether it is in the form of IBS, a tight back, neck pain, migraines, painful periods, hip pain, heart attack, anxiety or cancer. We are hurting.

Many of our addictions, socially acceptable or not, act as avoidance mechanisms, keeping us in a struggle within ourselves. Checking our phones, scrolling on social media, turning to food, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, checking the news, watching tv, gaming, even meditating… these can all become addictive behaviors preventing us from actually meeting the uncomfortable emotions present within us.

Feelings of powerlessness, weakness, inadequacy, fear of death, anxiety, insecurities of one form or another. These are all painful feelings we find subconscious ways to avoid. The grief of regret of what could have been. Internalized stories of not being good enough early on in life. Persists anxiety because of repressed anger from a degrading comment made to us long ago. There are so many feelings we don’t want to fully feel.

And thinking or talking about our pain in therapy is different then feeling the full bodied rage that lives locked up within us.

At your core, you are greater than your pain, fear, anxiety. This work reconnects your to this core. And I’ll tell you the greatest secret of all. At your core You are Unconditional Love.

When you align to that you are free.

We were never taught and supported in how to fully feel our feelings, frustrations, anger, rage, and shame. Our parents didn’t learn, their parents didn’t learn, and our culture isn’t promoting it in healthy ways either.

So often this conditioned way of survival continues without us being aware of it at all. This is a sort of unconscious slavery. But it’s not too late to learn and have that space held for you while you liberate yourself.

Then you can then model this freedom and empowerment to your children, your friends, family, your community and feel free to feel without fear. That is why I am so passionate about this work.

It’s scary to let down our guard, that wall built around our heart out of fear of getting hurt again.

Here are a few other examples of somato-emotional realizations, unique to each person:

• Upper back pain, rooted in a betrayal, heart break, or resistance to vulnerability from not feeling unconditionally accepted, loved, and emotionally safe/secure.

• Throat, our communication center, feels unfree to speak and express in the ways it longs to.

• Stomach pain due to our ‘second brain’, our gut feeling, ignored.

• Glutes lock up tight… the ‘oh shit!’ muscles related to survival/money/basic needs being met.

• Solar plexus gets locked up in the upper belly/mid back due to lack of confidence, self-love, self-trust to go after our dreams and hearts longings.

The past several years have been a huge trauma event that rippled out throughout the whole world, and it will take many years, even generations to recover from. Depending on how we seize this opportunity to grow and heal through this will determine how we teach the next generation to do better.

I have noticed that most of us are most motivated by our suffering. But it need not be that way.

We don’t have to be brought to our knees before we seek out help or make changes to our habits. My greatest hope is to teach my clients how to grow resilient, empowered, fearless, and fully embracing a full spectrum relationship to their emotions before a terminal diagnosis or other added trauma in their life. And I promise you that befriending your emotional body is far less scary than your mind wants you to think.

Lets quickly explore an emotion many struggle with… anger.

When we have a healthy relationship to anger it empowers us to have healthy boundaries. When we learn the value of anger we are able to direct our energy in powerful ways that help us fulfill our greatest desires and dreams.

Yet so many struggle with having such a relationship to their anger because they were told that it is a negative emotion. Many see the dark side of anger at some point early on in life and sware anger off completely… then struggle to have healthy relationships, with others and themselves.

We were taught that it’s better to just be ‘nice’, pleasant, agreeable, and not rock the boat. And then we swallow our feelings through food, alcohol, drugs, destraction. And the pain continues to build within.

Pharmaceuticals like anti-depressants are being used more and more to try and quell anxiety and emotional pain… without getting to the root of it, causing often lifetime dependancies.

In a Somato Emotional session I guide you to listen to your body through sensation. We will ground your body to teach the nervous system safety and resilience. Pictures arise, memories… breadcrumbs to connect the dots. We move at a very gentle pace, so as to bite off only as much as you can digest at one time.

I help you to meet the emotion. We give color, texture, and voice to the pain, emotion, contraction, numbness.

What is stored in your body is waiting for you to come and get to know it, to love and accept it. Once met energy can flow more freely. Pain can resolve. The pain comes mostly from the resistance and fear of being with it more than anything. With courage, patience, and compassion as loving witness the resistance melts away. You come to know your inner wisdom and strength in the process.

I whole heartedly believe that the body is wise. It doesn’t make mistakes, and it is always working in our favor. This may be controversial, but I stand by this. The body points us towards embodying our Soul more deeply within this human experience. Feeling more deeply, teaching us to be more present and at home in our body. Till we come home to the heart of what and who we truly are we cannot find that freedom we seek.

This journey is the most worthwhile one I have found on my several decade journey of healing. I look forward to share this profoundly transformational session with you, moving from survival to thriving.

If you have any questions, fears, or worries about this work feel free to book a consultation call.