The poet David Whyte famously said, “Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.” Truly Whyte has mastered the art of using language in a way that  transports us deeply and efficiently into a core experience of our feeling, our wondering, our humanity.  For example:

Self Portrait

It doesn’t interest me if there is one God

or many gods.

I want to know if you belong or feel

abandoned.

If you know despair or can see it in others.

I want to know

if you are prepared to live in the world

with its harsh need

to change you. If you can look back

with firm eyes

saying this is where I stand. I want to know

if you know

how to melt into that fierce heat of living

falling toward

the center of your longing. I want to know

if you are willing

to live, day by day, with the consequence of love

and the bitter

unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even

the gods speak of God.

— David Whyte

from Fire in the Earth, 1992 Many Rivers Press

So often I find myself grasping in vein to find words to describe the ineffable, the brilliant, the beautiful emergence of Self that can take place in psychotherapy. For me, David Whyte’s Self Portrait sums up our profoundly human challenge to know ourselves, to find belonging and connection with others without compromising ourselves, all the while while holding awareness of our finite nature and the unyielding paradox of love and loss. There is also the flavor of the victorious in these words, though, because we can and do succeed. We can and do rise to this challenge. Resiliently. Resplendently. All right here. 129 words.

When we gather to practice yoga, whether together or on our own, we get to bring special awareness to phenomena we are experiencing all the time. Each asana brings a different set of emotions and sensations and associations. We might find ourselves feeling the heat of rigorous effort, the delight of feeling our bodies open a little more, the frustration of confronting a limitation. We might notice all kinds of thoughts about how we measure up to others in the class,  or to someone we saw in a magazine once. We may find ourselves bored or distracted in a pose that doesn’t hold much stimulation for us, or completely overwhelmed by a pose that does.

During each asana, we can practice noticing what happens as we encounter the vast range of different sensations and feelings that might come up. And we can even get pretty skilled at working with ourselves so we can stay with whatever feeling or sensation a little longer—sometimes long enough to change how we experience ourselves in relation to it.

The same is true in a somatic psychotherapy session. A yoga practice or a therapy session—these are both just defined spaces for looking more closely and carefully at what is happening within us so that we can experiment with different ways of relating to it.

Tantric philosophy suggests that these inner experiences that emerge during a practice or a session are just vibrations—just energy and matter clanging together in ways that feel one way or the other. (Incidentally, Tantric philosophy and quantum physics agree that everything is made of vibrations—not just our inner experiences.)  These vibrations aren’t good or bad, right or wrong. Vibrations are just vibrations.

Even so, we dread certain poses for the kinds of vibrations they bring up in us, and we tend to avoid those poses.  We gleefully practice other poses for the vibrations they bring up in us. We tend to get very skilled with those.

Of course, this is true throughout our lived experience. We avoid the relationships and pursuits that bring up inner sensations and feelings that are harder to hold. Or if we can’t avoid those triggers we find ways to numb out the inner experiences they elicit. We can go on like this for years, avoiding whole aspects of ourselves. As a result big parts of ourselves can get shut down, or remain under explored. All because the vibrations felt too big or too intense—or too something—to be with for any length of time.

What if instead of defending against them, we could practice supporting ourselves in staying with these vibrations just a little longer? We could slowly expand our capacity to step closer to them and see what they are made of. We could notice what happens if we keep breathing as we approach. What might our repertoire of poses or relationships or endeavors include if every inner experience were explored in this way?

Authentic Movement and the Power of Getting Seen

Every Monday afternoon, I meet up with my friend and dance partner Lauren Tietz of Earth Sky Body Works, and together we explore what it means get seen. It’s a fairly abstract concept so we follow a specific protocol of tried and tested steps.

One of us assumes the role of Witness while the other becomes the Mover. The Mover spends 20 minutes feeling into her inner experience and following any and all movement impulses that arise therein. After 20 minutes is up, the timer rings. The Mover says something about what just happened; the Witness listens wordlessly. Then the Witness shares her observations while the Mover listens. Then Mover and Witness swap roles and do the practice again. It’s a process called Authentic Movement, based on Carl Jung’s work on active imagination and developed into its current form by pioneering dance and movement therapists Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler, and Joan Chowdorow.

Sometimes Lauren and I meet in a dance studio. Sometimes we meet in an abandoned field. Or under a bridge. Or at a public park. In the public spaces, passers by become unintended witnesses to our work. There is no music except for any that happens to be audible in the environment, the wind, and sounds of the city.

Sometimes when I’m moving I feel—and imagine I look—like a dancer, playing with form, alignment, agility, rhythm, strength.  It’s easy to get seen when my authentic offering feels like a thing of beauty and connected expression. From this place, expressing my vulnerability feels like a show of power.

Sometimes when I’m moving, though, I feel—and imagine I look—disconnected, distracted, bored, sullen, swollen, anxious, awkward or any other in the vast range of regrettable human afflictions. My movement pulls me hulking or slug-like or powerless or ill-conceived. During these sessions, there is a small but very real part of me recoiling from myself. Still I press forward, continuing to lift the veil on inner experiences I’d much rather leave covered.

On these days, I sometimes say with words just how lousy it feels to get seen like this. But even if I don’t say it with words, my body expresses my twisted revulsion—just as much as it expresses a much stronger, much more vital deep-seated longing for even this darkness to be held. And a prayer that under Lauren’s constant gaze something will shift, and it will all feel more bearable—maybe even like the beginning of renewed vitality.

It does.

Every time.

Once, during a very dark time in my life, my therapist told me that I “needed a bigger cosmology”—a comment as confusing as it was compelling. It about eight months months after I had lost a close friend to suicide, and my grief felt ocean sized. It threatened to tear me apart.

I wasn’t sleeping or eating much. Meaning had drained away from my daily life and relationships. Anxious thoughts gripped my nights. Over and over, I chronicled the ways I’d failed my friend, and then on the flipside, the ways she abandoned me by exiting her life how she did. (Please know that I’ve changed some details of this story to protect the privacy of those involved.) The feelings of grief—the sadness, the rage, the regret—they felt so, so big, and like I had no place to put them.

I remember wanting so desperately to rid myself of those big feelings. I tried to imagine just cutting them out of my body and putting them in a box to keep on a shelf in my therapist’s office. It helped sometimes to imagine this, like I could take a break from them and then come back the next week and try to hold them a little with my therapist’s help. At least I wouldn’t be struggling alone with them week after week.

Ultimately, though, something in me had to grow bigger in order to hold all of the emotion that I was trying to process. It was as if I had ceramic bowl in the core of my Self that held all my feelings. In my grief, the bowl continually overflowed, spilling over the sides, making a painful mess throughout my life. I needed to swap it out for a bowl that could hold much, much more. I had to learn how first.

In Somatic Experiencing work, we often think in terms of expanding a client’s capacity to be with big feelings or sensations, kind of like helping them find that bigger bowl inside. It’s a stepwise process that requires working little by little, in a titrated way, to stay in contact with difficult feelings with a lot of support and connection to resources along the way.

I so desperately needed this bigger container as I was grieving the loss of my dear friend—and I remember the moment I found it. I was, once again, in my therapist’s office, hunched over on her green sofa, and, once again, feeling that familiar dread and an overwhelm so unbearable I feared it might literally knock me off my feet. I told my therapist I was worried that my feelings were going to flatten me, crush me into the carpet on her floor.

She smiled quietly in understanding, but then let me know that she was pretty sure that wouldn’t happen. She pointed out how solid and strong my feet and legs looked making contact with the ground. She felt certain they would hold me up.

Something about her confidence in me made me get curious for a moment. What could she possibly be seeing? I looked down at my feet pressing into the floor. I first saw and then felt, from the inside, just how right she was; I felt solid and strong through my legs. I became aware of my own endurance though gail force emotions. After all I had been through, I was still holding myself up! These feelings were not actually knocking me down!

Whereas the grief had felt utterly unbearable before, now I could now see that I was bearing it. I felt so grateful to her for pointing this out, and in my gratitude, I became aware of how, in this very moment, she was helping me hold myself up. Warmth spread through my heart. I had an image of our whole healing community, the lineage of therapists to which we belong.  I felt all of them holding me, helping me hold myself, and my bowl expanded even larger. I felt the sky, the beauty of the stars, the magic and mystery of this life. My friend had moved on, but I was still alive.

With this new expanded container, it wasn’t that the grief felt any better. It didn’t feel better. It still doesn’t. But for the first time since my friend had died, I could hold it. And there was enough space in there for a few other feelings too. I hadn’t delighted in this big, beautiful world in so long. But there was all my delight and so much gratitude sitting right alongside this grief. I had found that bigger cosmology, one big enough to hold all of it.

From this place of expansion, that miserable, dark journey through grief took on a shifted meaning, one that included qualities of triumph, transcendence, a sense of arrival. I don’t think I could have found my way to those qualities a moment sooner than I did. I needed all of those hours, session after session, trolling the depths of my anguish, wondering if I could ever come up for air. As I’m writing now, I realize I had been working on making that bigger bowl all along. Every tear, every sleepless night, every well meaning word from a friend, every prayer for my friend’s peace—all of it part of its construction.

I sometimes tell my clients that there is grief in every transformational process, and there is transformation in every grief process. In this moment, I’m struck by what that really means. Grief tasks us to find a way to hold the enormity of our loves and the enormity of our losses. Both can take up whole universes, it seems.

Yet we can expand big enough to hold both. We can. And we do.

 

With loving reverence and deep gratitude to all my teachers along this path. 

Om Namah Shivaya Gurave

 

 

In Somatic Experiencing, we pay attention to how the nervous system is naturally pendulating—moving from higher states of activation as found in fight, flight, or freeze to the lower activation states found while resting, relaxing, or socializing. As clinicians, we are always exploring how fluidly a client’s system can move between these two states. Does it get stuck anywhere along the way? Does it shift immediately to extremes? Does it shift at all?

This pendulation idea is important because in life we are continually tasked with moving into higher states of arousal and stress (think about how you feel on Mopac during rush hour!) and then shifting back into more restful states (now think of the feeling as you pull into your driveway, Mopac but a memory). In our modern culture, most of us tend to get a little stuck in the high stress states. Then we can’t take advantage of R & R time as effectively—until we find a way to downshift into it. Some of us become so stuck that we live with non-stop high activation and, as a result, struggle with anxiety, depression, and the range of other mood and health issues that can result.

I was recently in a Bodywork and Somatic Education training with Dave Berger, a master Somatic Experiencing trainer, physical therapist and psychotherapist. During the workshop he recommended interval training to help even a stuck a nervous system to pendulate more fluently. I’ve been incorporating interval training in my running practice ever since and have felt some great results.

During interval training, we bring the body into a state of high arousal or stress by choice (essentially mimicking a fight or flight state) for a brief period of time. Then we downshift to a more restful and relaxed state, tracking our sensations as we do. Then we do it all again. And again.

You don’t have to be a hardcore athlete to benefit from interval training. If you already have some sort of somewhat regular fitness practice—walking, hiking, dancing, swimming, bicycling, yoga, really any kind of movement that can be modulated to increase or decrease the intensity—it can work for you. If you don’t have much movement in your life right now, I recommend building that practice first for several weeks before trying interval training. And of course, if you are new to exercise or have health issues, it’s a always good idea to consult your physician before starting any new program.

Here’s what to do:

1. Warm up in your usual way but add orienting—let yourself look around your environment and notice some details that you haven’t let yourself take the time to see before. Notice any other people near you. Notice the colors, the textures, the sounds of your environment.

2. Start your first interval. Increase you speed and/or intensity of you physical exertion all the way to 10 on an intensity scale of 1 to 10. Stay at this level of output for 30 seconds to two full minutes. Expect that this will be difficult. It is!

3. Observe yourself. As you move, track your inner sensations. Notice all the sensations of your body gearing up for fight or flight. You will feel your respiration and heart beat ramp up. You also may feel tension in the jaw, muscular activity around the shoulders, a fixed gaze of determination or other markers of fight or flight. Just notice all of those.

4. Work to your own edge. If you can’t quite make it to 30 seconds, that’s OK. Just work until you feel you are really pushing the limit of what you can do…and then see if you can hang in there just another couple seconds.

5. Downshift! After no more two minutes at highest output, drop the intensity A LOT—to about a 2 or a 3 on your intensity scale. Keep moving, but with ease. Feel your physiology recovering. Track all the different sensations as your respiration quiets, and your fight or flight-like sensations release. You’ll stay at a 2 or a 3 on your intensity scale for 5 to 6 full minutes.

6. Re-Orient! This is an important step. Don’t skip it!! After a couple of minutes, start to let yourself look around your environment again. Notice new details of what’s around you. Notice people you close by, if there are any.

7. Repeat steps 2 and 3 several more times. I try to incorporate three to four intervals during my routine run. See how you respond and find the number of intervals that feels right for you.

Remember: This way of moving is a tonic to the nervous system; it should feel good to your body to do this. It may not feel awesome during the high intensity part of the interval, but it might actually feel awesome during the low intensity interval. Certainly after your workout, you can expect to feel more revitalized, more buoyant, and calm but alert.

Troubleshooting: If you aren’t feeling this way or if you aren’t feeling really much change at all after your workout, it could be that:

-You are overdoing it. Especially if you feel more stressed after this practice, chances are good you are staying in the high intensity stage of the interval for too long. If it’s your tendency to overwork, you may be susceptible to doing so with this exercise. Hey, here’s another opportunity to correct that pattern and do something loving for yourself by taking it a little bit easier. Try shorter high intensity periods, or only go to 8 or 9 on your intensity scale during high output.

-You are underdoing it. It may be that all the sensations during the higher intensity intervals are overwhelming for you, so you are cutting that stage short to avoid that experience. Unfortunately, you also aren’t staying in the intensity long enough to trigger a pendulation. Your task will be to “befriend” these high intensity sensations little by little, with added emphasis on the “little by little!” For your first interval, stay at max output until you notice the impulse to drop out. Next time, notice all you can about what these high intensity sensations are like and see if you can stay with them a little longer after the impulse to drop out arises—about two or three full breaths. Don’t add any more time until you can stay in high output for this long with little or no overwhelm.

-It’s just not the strategy for you. That’s OK. We are all different, and while this works for a lot of folks, it just may not fit your body, your nervous system, your life right now. Give it a few tries and if it doesn’t help, let it go! Kudos for trying something new—and then a second kudos for listening to yourself and letting go of what’s not serving you!

 

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.  –C.J. Jung

Seeing more clearly into ourselves—our motivations, our feelings, our needs, our triggers—is a good thing. And it’s also a tall order. How do we make the unconscious conscious so that our lives don’t feel driven and sabotaged by forces within in us that operate beyond our awareness?

We can’t exactly think our way to knowing what’s unconscious to us. That’s clear by the definition of the word “unconscious.” It refers to inner experiences or psychological phenomena that are not known, and aren’t easily knowable, to the thinking mind. This concept really challenges most of us in our modern culture. We like to think a lot. We like for problems to have rational solutions—solutions we can find if we think hard enough. And, indeed, many important problems can be solved by thinking hard.

But as anyone who has ever had difficulty breaking a habit, or changing a relationship, or getting over a loss can tell you, this approach to problem solving doesn’t always work too well with matters of the heart or spirit. In these cases, you need another way in. You need a way to explore the aspects of your self that are hard to pinpoint—or even perceive—through thinking.

Emotion-focused and body-based techniques are some of the approaches in psychotherapy that can offer that. These techniques pay attention to channels of experiencing that are largely “sub-cortical.” This means they happen below the neocortex of the brain. (The neocortex is where rational thinking takes place.) We can focus our attention on emotion, sensation or sensing, and movement, however and when we do we can start to glimpse another realm of our being—one that stays largely imperceptible if we focus mostly on our thoughts.

This realm matters a lot! Our emotional, sensory, and energetic responses to the world drive us to make decisions in ways that are often beyond our awareness. We find ourselves in unhealthy patterns or struggling to move through a challenging situation—and we don’t really even know why.

By slowing down and carefully observing the feelings, sensations, and energetic shifts of the body—and then seeing just how these might connect to our thinking patterns and beleifs—we can start to do the work that Jung described as ‘making the unconscious conscious.’ We can look closely and at our innate and primed responses to our environment and our relationships. We can start to try on different ways of moving through these responses, inviting them to shift.

Change happens as we gain awareness of these sub-cortical processes and rework these old patterns from the bottom up. It’s this kind of deep work that ultimately transforms how we interact with our world—so we can live in ways that feel more safe, more satisfied, and more connected.

So what’s it like to focus on the body in talk therapy? If you have never been to a somatically oriented therapist before, or if you have only tried talk therapy, mind and body therapy might feel like a different experience for you.

I’ve had clients describe therapy with me as “interactive meditation.” As we explore areas of your life though talk, I help you to focus your attention on what is arising in the moment-to-moment of your inner experience in your body. This may include the sensations, emotions, or movement impulses, among others things. We’ll start to notice patterns and relationships between these different experiences over time. As we gain awareness of these patterns, we will start to work to help you shift in the places where you are getting stuck.

How much time we spend focused on the body and on moment-to-moment experiencing can vary a great deal from session to session, and from client to client. Some clients spend whole sessions working in this way, whereas others may prefer to move more slowly, just visiting this way of working from time to time. I do my best to attune to each individual’s unique pacing when it comes to integrating the body into therapy.