Last year I celebrated 10 years since graduating from the Body Therapy Institute. As I reflect on how much has changed in my practice over the years, one thing I'm most grateful for is the ways we connect with your embodied experience through somatic awareness.
One of my favorite ways to work with somatic awareness is through the intention setting we do at the beginning of the appointment. I ask for your intention as a way to:
Begin to center our time around what you care about (not only what hurts or what you're concerned about)
Attune our energy and the energy in the space
Choose what modalities may best serve and support you today
Even if we've been working together for years, I always want to honor that you are constantly changing and your needs for support are constantly changing too. Setting an intention together helps to tune into your somatic awareness, and helps to make sure that I hear and offer the support you need today.
Setting an intention helps to better align us both towards how you want to be supported, what shift you have the capacity to make today, and why that shift matters.
Through intention setting based on somatic awareness, we can make contact with your change process, and work with your physical concern or pain more consciously and respectfully. I can have three folks come in with a similar concern of left shoulder pain. But they will each have very different intentions about how they want to care for themselves and the kind of support they want that day. For one person the tension is a way to create a rigid boundary for their heart while they grieve, for someone else maybe it's a pattern of shrugging off receiving support, and someone else could be stiff from sleeping hard all night on their shoulder because they were jet lagged from traveling for work and really need more rest. When we assume that the tension or stress needs to go away without considering why it's there and how we want to approach it, we risk missing the opportunity to experience and honor our life.
When we take our time to connect with what we care about and consider our discomforts from that place, we begin to experience our lives differently and more becomes possible.
Experiencing tension and stress is not inherently bad. It's our natural process of adaptation to change. By just trying to get rid of muscular tension, we might miss the change process that the tension is actually supporting. When our change process is blocked or suppressed –either consciously or unconsciously, by us or by cultural norms or by oppression– we experience suffering.
Our physical experience is not just symptoms or pathology, it's where we feel our aliveness. In my approach to bodywork and coaching, the physical body is our entry point into feeling the entire soma (body, mind, emotions, spirit, social context) as connected and communicative. You are more than where you hurt, and where you hurt often has a lot more to say.