Your body doesn't speak in words to recall the trauma of your past. Instead, our body speaks through body sensations like strain, pain, bracing, stiffness, changes in breathing, heart rhythm, insomnia, inflammation, fatigue, or chronic pain.
Signs that reflect how our body has adapted to a survival state as a result of unresolved trauma. How can you learn to listen to your body without fear, anxiety, or being self-critical?
Often there is a disconnect between what you think and feel from what you sense. What might feel exciting or fun can be adding strain to your body without you noticing. You may feel stuck and unable to shift habitual patterns.
Talking about your past trauma, trying to think positively, telling yourself to let go, or saying you're in acceptance are thinking your way out. It may help you to reframe your perception but it won't help you to tap into the wisdom of how the body holds trauma.
Body/mind practices like yoga, breathwork, meditation, or mindfulness can help but may not get to the heart of healing trauma. Unless you're tuning into the interoceptive property of fascia.
How we do that in SomaSensing is to make the distinction between sensing and feeling. Where feeling is linked to emotion. I feel nervous, I feel excited, I feel good. Sensing is linked to body sensation, it feels stiff, soft, gel-like, springy, spacious, restricted, or stuck.
Sensing helps you listen through your body and notice areas of holding patterns. Guiding you to release those areas of strain, to cultivate your sensory awareness in a way that allows you the freedom to move with ease. To reconnect with natural motion whilst releasing trauma patterns that put your body under strain.
Changing the language of your body by shifting your state.
You get to learn and listen to the language of both your nervous system and your body's fascia. You get to notice how they are intertwined and how to distinguish between proprioception, your body's sensation in motion and interoception. Sensations linked to emotion. You learn how to regulate your body's physiology by reducing your allostatic load.
Allostatic load is the negative impact that chronic stress has on our well-being. Resulting in hormone imbalance and inflammation.
True healing and recovery happen when we can reduce this load.
People who practice SomaSensing body unwinding, often describe a feel-good nurturing sensation of release, vibrancy, vitality, or ease. Body language signaling a reduction in allostatic load. Discharging stress hormones and restoring the body’s inner rhythm. Bringing the nervous system into regulation.
Simple sensing ways to reduce allostatic load
1. Somatic pause - take moments in your day to pause and rest in your body
2. Sensing at sunrise. Let the first light of sunrise reset your body clock
3. Sensing your energy versus managing your time
4. Quieten the noise in your day. The noise of social media, the news, traffic, and your inner critic.
I leave you with a clip of my mom, body unwinding at 82. Her healing journey through generational trauma, brain surgery, chronic kidney disease and diagnosis of an underlying sarcoma. Today, pain-free and medication free. The trauma never leaves you. Neither can you "fix" the body. You learn to listen to the language of your body,and cultivate somatic awareness. In a way that helps you tap into your inner wisdom to resolve and recover from past wounds, implicitly.