Come to your senses

If it comes, let it; if it goes, let it still. But in any of these circumstances, do not lose thyself”.
— Ogwo David Emenike

Somatic Therapy

Somatic (body-based) therapy is about nervous system care and whole body living. To experience mental health and to have a relationship with our Self - our Authentic Being - we must step into intentional compassionate interaction with our nervous system. Choosing to engage in somatic therapy is choosing to listen to what your body has been communicating to you.

We can learn to befriend the body and nervous system by understanding the intricate and powerful strategies it has been using to protect you and in doing so you can offer conscious communication of the subconscious operations - making the implicit, explicit. You can have a deeper, more compassionate relationship with yourself and your body knowing how to care for yourself, communicate your needs, and show up for yourself with love all while experiencing personal agency, respectful living, and satisfying connection to others.

In my practice, I blend body-oriented approaches incorporating presence, attunement, intuition, and trauma-informed touch.

I am a certified Transforming Touch® Practitioner (TTP), trained with Dr. Stephen Terrell creator of Transforming the Experience-Based Brain (TEB), a trauma-informed regulation-focused model incorporating light touch as a method of somatic trust building to support developmental repair to the parasympathetic nervous system.

I am actively training in Somatic Experiencing® (SE) right now. This is a three year intensive program arising from the life’s work of Dr. Peter Levine. “It is based on a multidisciplinary intersection of physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics and has been clinically applied for more than four decades” (SE 101).

Our brain and our body are never separate from one another.

We come into the world communicating in sensation and affect. Before we ever develop language, we communicate within and through our nervous system. In the first year of life, the brain doubles in size all through integration of the five senses or sensory pathways.

Somatic therapy is the return to our origins, it brings us to our senses.

Your brain is a tiny organ of about 2-3% of your full system. It’s essential that we reconnect to and move in relationship with the other 98%. Our brain, the organ in our head, is also not our only “brain” in the body. Remember, we have been communicating the needs of our livelihood before the brain in our head was even fully developed. Beginning in our earliest development in the womb, an extensive network of nerves form directly connected to the skin, the heart, and the intestines as well as other organs along the spinal cord bringing to life in our five senses and our ability to interact with the outer physical world. Those same womb-originating neural networks surrounding the heart and the intestines communicate directly to the brain in your head, what we call “a gut feeling” or “a heartfelt sense” is our body communicating to us intuitively and emotionally. Learning to trust your body is part of your healing. (Siegel 2010)

Developing greater conscious awareness of our body allows for development of self-trust.

Through the engagement of our full system of being, we can use as much of the body as possible for processing, shifting, energetic discharge, and living in recovery. This is the practice of embodiment. The expansion of emotion allows a greater capacity of tolerance to be established so that emotions do not get acted out in dysfunctional thought or behavior as well as allows the brain adequate time to process the information in the emotional experience integrating the cognitive, emotional, behavioral learnings in the here and now. (Selvam 2022)

This is why we slow down. We can only move as fast as the slowest part of our nervous system. In the experience of early childhood trauma, aspects of your healing and recovery may be dependent upon developmental repair and reprocessing. Developmental trauma heals through the developmental processes of the body system. Talk therapy alone will not do this as research indicates neural connections are stimulated in partnership with the body and nervous system. It requires our breath, our awareness, our curiosity, and our ability to be relational within.

[Sources: Selvam, Raja. The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes. Berkley, North Atlantic Books, 2022; Siegel, Daniel. Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York, Bantam Books, 2010]