Somatic Therapy
Following the wisdom of your body towards healing and growth.
What is Somatic therapy?
Somatic therapy allows not only your mind but also your body to reveal its truth about your experience. The body has its own way of communicating through sensations and impulses.
Often times when people experience pain and suffering they disconnect from their body to protect themselves. Unfortunately, this will also disconnect them from their own aliveness and vitality. In order to heal and transform your wound to something greater, we need to go back to the source, back to the body.
Here you will have a felt experience in real-time that can be more transformative than intellectual understanding alone.
Hakomi
Hakomi is the kind of Somatic therapy I offer.
Hakomi, like many therapies, focuses on transforming core material such as old beliefs, memories and neural patterns that keep us in a narrow experience of life.
This core material can influence us unconsciously. It can support our highest potential or restrict our sense of self.
Elements that make up Hakomi
- Presence
In Hakomi, the therapist holds a loving presence and acceptance for what is arising in the therapy room.
The focus is on the client’s direct experience as it’s happening in real time. This allows the client to discover the self experientially vs ‘talking about’ issues. - The Body
In somatic therapy, we see the body as a valuable, living resource that holds memories, beliefs and wisdom. Bringing awareness to the body can unveil old memories that are outside our conscious mind and bring us into a deeper understanding of how we view and respond to our world. - Mindfulness
Mindfulness has become a buzzword these days and can mean many things. In Hakomi, it’s where we help facilitate sustained inner focus on the client’s present experience, whether it’s an emotion, experience in the body, a thought in the mind, etc. We have the client slow down and study what happens when they allow attention to be here.
Often times this is an avenue for core material and is the reason why the Hakomi method can go deep into the unconscious faster than the conscious mind. Here we can have a direct dialogue with the unconscious. - Transformation
When we work directly with the unconscious there is more flexibility for change. This is always done with respect and permission from the unconscious.