How does SOMATICS work?
Our nervous system is KEY to healing and transformation. It’s responsible for directing and coordinating the body’s available energy and resources. The nervous system chooses whether our body needs protection, growth and repair, or engagement with others and what brings us feel alive and inspired. The nervous system reads signals from our environment, and sends energy to different parts of our body, choosing between protection or growth, repair, rest, creativity and connection. This process is mostly outside of our conscious control.
In order to be healthy, to feel good, to be capable of maintaining healthy relationships with others, our nervous system needs to be flexible. It needs to be able to activate into protection and return to rest and repair - it’s a cycle. Problems arise when we spend too much time in protection, when we don’t release the activation from our emotional body and nervous system and return to rest. Chronic stress from social, economic, health and other factors can keep our nervous systems in a constant state of alert, driving up cortisol, muscle and emotional tension. We have less resources for repairing our bodies and, over time, our physical health can decline. While we can’t always change the external factors, we can learn to find rest for our bodies and emotions. Somatic practices offer a way to direct our nervous system energy, to alter what’s happening in the body and brain so we can spend more time in rest, repair, creativity, choice and connection.
Somatic practices include things like mindful awareness of sensation, breath, sound, and movement. For example, we can alter our response to present-moment stress using a breath practice. There are also deeper layers to somatic work. Our body isn’t just reacting to present-day events. The experiences we have, starting in the womb, inform our physiology. For example, fetal exposure to high levels of cortisol (a stress hormone released by an anxious or stressed mother) can create changes to physiology that make the baby’s nervous system more sensitive to stress hormones both in utero and after birth. If stress (trauma, highly emotional experiences) continue, the body will continue to be “on alert” and respond more quickly and strongly to stressful events.
Everything that has happened to you has impacted your internal world - your “soma” - or living body. When painful things happen, whether emotional and physical, our nervous system tries to figure out what went wrong. For example, if we touch a hot stove, our subconscious mind registers the pain, makes a link between stove=hot=pain. As a result, we learn to move our bodies more carefully, changing our muscle tension and movement habits when we are around a stove. It’s an awesome, efficient protective feature of our nervous system.
The same subconscious process takes place when we experience emotional pain or relational wounding. For example, if a parent yells at us, and no adult takes the time to explain the situation or soothe us (or worse, blames us for setting them off) our brain goes about making sense of what caused the emotional pain. A three-year-old’s subconscious brain doesn’t invent a story like, “I guess Mom’s having a hard time controlling her anger because she didn’t sleep well/she was fired from her job/has emotional trauma from her own childhood”. A three-year-old usually invents a story like, “Mom yelled because I’m bad/wrong/stupid/unworthy/powerless/unlovable.” Without realizing it, we can take on beliefs like I’m not safe, I don’t belong, I don’t matter, I’m not enough. We start to lose connection to the part of ourselves that knows we matter, and these shifts in our inner world reflect in how we carry our bodies, use our voice and perceive the world around us.
The messages we perceive from our lived experience get deeply encoded in how we interact with other people and the world around us, just like how we interact with a hot stove. Often, these embodied stories are contain “triggers.” We have a strong response to a subconsciously remembered past painful event, like instantly pulling our hand away from a hot stove. These embodied stories impact our posture, muscle tension, heart rate, our voice, our mood, our movements, how we feel and act.
Our embodied habits of posture, expression and movement affect how well we cope with stress, loss and change. The good news is, that we all have the capacity for transformation. Somatics can offer a key to unlock this capacity, and to offer a window of compassion into how and why we do what we do. It can help us process stress from big life transitions, losses and change so we can feel hope and vitality again.