what is somatic therapy?
On July 1, 2018, I wrote a blog post called “The Truth Teller.” It was a piece on the intelligence of the body – body wisdom. Over the last few years, I have come to greatly appreciate and to depend on the body as a messenger of truth, the bringer of clarity, the well-spring of loving wisdom. The truth is, it knows more than we do. By this, I mean it knows more than our brain’s ability to answer life’s most essential questions.
The frontal lobe is a remarkable feat of evolution. It is what put a man on the moon, what produced the Salk vaccine, it is what conceptualized the world-wide-web and the Human Rights Movement. It’s what organizes our days, what allows us to analyze data, to predict through statistics, but it is absolutely ineffective at answering questions about the soul – the deepest, truest aspect of the self:
Who am I?
What is truth?
What is love?
What is the ultimate nature of reality?
As a therapist, I help clients access this inner reservoir of wisdom through a process called Somatic Experiencing – a therapeutic process that moves clients out of their story-telling, out of their conceptual thinking and their frantic monkey-minds into their felt-sense of things - the relationship between emotions and physical sensations.
Rather than merely bringing greater cognitive understanding, an inner integration takes place that is felt experientially and registered in the cells. It is this cellular experience of connection that brings the potential for healing.
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