Have Your Healthy Habits Paid Off?
Are you working on getting healthier, but not seeing the progress you want? Do you feel like you’re doing everything right? Eating “clean?” Exercising daily? Going to bed early and waking up early? Maybe you’ve even implemented a meditation practice? Perhaps you still aren’t seeing the results you expected. You’re not looking and feeling how you want. Your back is still aching and it’s impeding your work at the gym. You’re still feeling tired, foggy and sad many days out of the week and you keep finding yourself engaging in self-sabotaging behaviors.
Your conscious mind keeps telling you all you need to do is be more disciplined, but maybe there’s something more to it. Maybe there’s something keeping you stuck, in pain, feeling tired and repeating those self-sabotaging behaviors, that you're having trouble seeing. Perhaps it is because it doesn’t live in your conscious awareness, but instead in your subconscious mind. This is true for most of us.
What Could Be Holding You Back?
We hold emotional traumas, memories and experiences, behavioral patterns and beliefs in the subconscious mind. When the energetic charge from a certain experience isn’t able to fully pass through us, it can get stuck there. “Energetic charge?” What is she talking about? Stay with me… Emotions are energy in motion and if we don’t let them run their full course by facing them head on, instead of avoiding them, they get stuck.
So, how does the subconscious mind manifest? Well, it’s in the body. Where does the subconscious mind live? In the body. How do we work with and begin a therapeutic relationship with the subconscious mind? Via the body. We have this great gift in the body, in that it allows us to work with our subconscious and discover these trapped emotional states and beliefs that are controlling us. This article from the NIH maps emotions to the body, but it isn’t so clear cut. Oftentimes different emotional patterns show up in different physical areas, depending on the person.
What is Somatic Coaching?
Now, I want to introduce you to my work: somatic coaching. In the practice of somatic coaching, we are able to develop a dialogue with the body and ask it to reveal what the subconscious mind is holding on to.
You may be thinking this sounds very esoteric and vague. How do we actually start this process? We begin by seeking out areas of pain, restriction, tension or numbness in the physical body and we start a conversation about that feeling. We ask the logical brain to leave the room for this conversation and we focus on getting in the body. We work on having no expectations and allowing the body to speak for itself, instead of letting the mind interfere, which is what most of us are doing all day, every day. We then use a series of targeted questions and guidance to create space in the mind so that the body can show us what is trapped, and we work through that past trauma or emotional charge, so we can allow it to flow through us and pass. We take its power over us away by facing it head on. For some people who have been living in a constant state of fight or flight for years, this process can be very uncomfortable, as they are disassociated from their bodies.
Why Choose Somatic Coaching Over Traditional Talk Therapy?
You may be wondering why this method would be any better than traditional talk therapy. Well, you’d be shocked at how effective this work is. My clients always are. I’ve seen people confront a past sexually traumatic experience that they say they haven’t thought about in years and “isn’t a big deal” in the first session. I had another client tell me that he got more out of our first session than 6 months in traditional therapy. Which brings me to my next point.
Traditional talk therapy, while certainly having value and providing a safe space for people to share their fears, anxieties and sadness simply isn’t the most effective way to improve mental health anymore. That’s because it works exclusively with the mind. And the mind is always telling stories, trying to prop up your identity and reinforce your already held beliefs and patterns, which is the opposite of what you want to do if you want to see true mental and physical growth. Somatic coaching allows you to cut to the heart of the matter and face your true emotions with more ease and speed. In this article, by fellow somatic coach, Matt Perry, he shares his take on why coaching and somatic coaching in particular, can, for certain groups, be more effective than traditional therapy.
In somatic coaching, we bypass these features of the mind, and work directly with the body and subconscious to heal, feel and release the past. It’s the quickest way I know of to become that new version of you that you so desperately seek. This method is highly effective for chronic pain management, autoimmune illness, anxiety, gut dysfunction, and chronic fatigue patients.
Let’s Take the Next Step on Your Healing Journey!
If you feel like you’ve hit a wall in your healing journey or you’re just ready to explore the next level in your mental and emotional health, come experience a somatic coaching session with me. In person and virtual appointments are available.
I offer somatic coaching in conjunction with a holistic health coaching program as well. We design the right type of program for you, 100% customized. The first step is a free consultation, which you can book here.