This practice is somewhat advanced, to be tried once you’re quite accustomed to adventures in your internal landscape. You’re not dancing to music or creating moves yourself you’re simply allowing your body to move.Ī safety note: If you know you have unresolved trauma, you might like to find an experienced Somatic Experiencing therapist, a shaman, or another healer who has experience with working with the body’s expression of unresolved trauma rather than doing this on your own. We can, in fact, get into relationship with these sensations in our body – we don’t always have to distract ourselves through activities that look to convert that energy without directly “seeing” them. This might be the sort of somatic experience that you would ordinarily distract yourself from, or “run it out,” or “walk it out,” or “eat it out” (eating our emotions -)). You can use it if you’re feeling tetchy, uncomfortable in your own skin, like you need to move but you can’t pin-point how or why. It is based on some of the Somatic Experiencing work of Steven Levine, but this practice is for working with sensations that are not related to unresolved trauma. There is a practice I’ve been doing for a while that allows for just this: Emergent Somatic Expression. We’d do well to allow it to speak every now and then, to safely ride with it rather thank trying to always tame it. Our body has wisdom way beyond our understanding. So, in situations where the source of the sensation isn’t as clear as the example above, how would it be to simply stay with the sensation, to give it no meaning and to not unnecessarily move our experience of it into meaning-making and/or story-telling? Mindfulness tells us to “name it and you can tame it” but there is some arrogance in the assumption that we always have the power to tame our body.
We can, in fact, get into relationship with uncomfortable sensations in our body – we don’t always have to distract ourselves through activities that look to convert that energy without directly “seeing” them. Obviously in this case the reason for the stomach ache will eventually make itself apparent, and it may be a combination of both influences, but initially, all our body has told us is that there is a sensation. When I interpret it as nervousness about my presentation, I might seek out a friend to talk to for support.
When I interpret my sensations as the dodgy egg sandwich, I might make sure I know where the nearest bathroom is. The effect of both influences initially feels the same: it’s the meaning we give to the sensation that makes all the difference. Initially, the only thing that our body has communicated to us is the sensation – my stomach ache might be the dodgy egg sandwich I had for lunch or it might be butterflies about an upcoming presentation at work. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Really it’s, “I feel, therefore I am.” We feel emotions first as sensations/feelings in our body, then we identify them as particular emotions, then we (often) move up into our head and create a story about these emotions. Our body stores all sorts of information, all of which happens well before the thinking mind can get a hold of it.
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