Befriending the body and nervous system so as to restore a steady source of safety inside yourself and experience your full aliveness.

We can’t think our way back to healing, regulation, or out of trauma. Our animal body occupies physiological states in response to what it perceives well before thought emerges. It also holds and stores our lived experience.

Before our mind has begun to create meaning about a situation, the body first initiates a response that takes us into connection with people, places, and experiences or move us away from connection and into the protection of fight, flight, or shutdown. This happens through the process of neuroception, the body’s surveillance system if you will. 

To heal and bring about balance and peace, meeting the body’s experience before the vortex of thoughts and story the mind made about the experience of the body is crucial. It supports the body to uncouple meaning from sensations so that it can hold, digest, and ride the wave of emotion without tipping over into disconnection and a spiral of stories. 

Restoring a felt sense of safety and connection in the body will change the story we tell ourselves, and opens us to a different way of relating to ourself, others, and the world. 

In the words of Kimberly Ann Johnson, story follows state. 

Similar to a talk therapy session in that we start with a conversation, but the focus is not on the story and what happened, although we may go there, but rather on how the story lives in your body. The inquiry and questions take you to the body and engage different parameters the body communicates in: Verbal, movement, image, emotions, and sensations. 

Depending on what we’re exploring, we may go into one of these streams:

• Embodiment practices to digest sensations of fear, shame, anger, etc. 
• Follow the body’s wisdom to bring about completion of fight and flight trauma responses held in the body
• Inquiring into core sensations and coupled beliefs that find root in childhood trauma
• Pleasure practices as central to trauma resolution
• Somatic practices to uncoil coping mechanisms, practice embodying new shapes, and habits, and ways of being.
• Parts work to integrate exiled parts of us, and unburden protective parts that no longer serve

For anyone wanting to expand what is possible for them by expanding what is possible to hold in their body without disconnecting. The capacity in our body is the single most important determinant of our ability to access more of what we desire, or walk away from what we don’t. 

 Common capacity challenges: 

• You’ve doing all the work but something refuses to change
• You recoil into habitual behavioral patterns in the face of discomfort, difficult emotions, and sensations. 
• Addictions and co-dependencies
• Autoimmune conditions, chronic illnesses, and female hormonal imbalances 
• Trauma and chronic stress 
• Inability to feel pleasure
• People with things like anxiety, adhd, phobias, ptsd, depression, etc. which are nothing more than long held coping mechanism holding important information from the body, Their unwinding requires slow and titrated nervous system work, not suppression pills
• People worn out of all the self improvement and long to just rest from the race of self-development
• Want to take more risks, live more authentically, and cultivate harmonious relationships