Your body, Your home. What we can learn from Somatic Therapy
People come to me looking to reconnect to their body daily as a dance therapist who works with somatic therapy techniques in San Francisco. Everything that you experience in life, you experience through your body. Since no two bodies are alike, we can never experience the world the way someone else does. The way we see colors, the way the ground feels underneath our feet, the way we hear music. . .all these experiences are unique to us. This makes how we go through life in our bodies even more profound.
Your Body is the Key to Healing
As you go along in life, your body collects memories and stores these memories as wisdom. Activities like how to ride a bike, places you have been to, basically everything you see, feel, hear, smell, and taste gets coded as a memory. Your body also keeps memories of how you feel and in more extreme instances , psychological trauma.
In addition to collecting memories, the body provides physical sensations that perform a variety of functions. You feel a sharp pain and that is your body’s signal that something is wrong physically. “Pay attention,” your body says, “take care of me!” You feel heaviness in your chest or your heart racing and your body signals what emotions you are feeling, whether it be sadness or anxiety. “Pay attention! I am feeling something!” your body yells at you. Noticing and heeding the sensations is important since there are consequences when we don’t pay attention, be they physical or psychological. If you ignore physical sensations in the body, you can find yourself with untreated or exacerbated physical illnesses. If you ignore the emotions that your body shows, you can find yourself numb or disconnected from yourself and suffering from illnesses such as depression or anxiety.
Somatic Therapy in San Francisco Helps People Reconnect
Professionally, as a somatic therapist in San Francisco, I see all the ways that clients are taught to disconnect from their bodies. Whether is is cultural (a lot of the Western world prizes “logic” over emotions and bodies) familial, or from trauma, people find ways to ignore, avoid, and deflect physical sensations and the emotions that are connected to them.
Personally, I have seen how my life suffers if I put off focusing on physical sensations. Tightness and tension take over my body and the more I put off feeling the feelings, the more they grow and make it difficult to focus on good things in my life.
Many of us continue to view our bodies and the information they provide as an inconvenience, or, even more unkindly, as something that we must bully into submission. This neglect and/or punitive mindset may at first be helpful, yet over time these attitudes harm us.
Your Body Is Your Home
An alternative approach is to think of your body as your home—your personally curated and unique space where everything in your life occurs and is shaped through your individual lens. Take a moment and think about your ideal home. What adjectives would you use to describe it? What would you like to feel when you are in that home? Few of us would use words like chaotic and disorganized to describe our ideal home. Yet by ignoring emotions and sensations coming from our respective bodies, that is what we cultivate in the most important domicile that we possess.
Imagine that your house has a section that is a little dirty or cluttered. In and of itself, that may not pose a problem but when you continue to accumulate dirt and clutter, the chaos multiplies. You can still live amidst the dirt and grime—but it may start to wear on you. You may continue to delay looking at the pain that your body signals and exist at a less-than-optimal state for a while. Some of us ignore our bodies and what they tell us until the situation is dire. It would be the equivalent of waiting until black mold or flames are covering parts of our homes and then saying “oh, maybe I need to do something about this now.” At that point, it can take a lot of work to connect with our bodies in a positive, meaningful way and improve our mental health. You may need heavy-hitting tools to rebuild your torched home.
Is Your Home On Fire? Time to Put the Fire Out
As a therapist, I think it is important to not get to the point that our relationship with ourselves and our bodies is the equivalent of living in a home with flames coming out the windows. You can, at any point in time, start to build connection to those sensations and the inherent knowledge that your body supplies. It may be scary but turning towards those feelings can lead to a richer, fuller, and more embodied life. If you are noticing ways in which you are disembodied or disconnected from yourself and your life, now might be the time to look into somatic therapy. As a dance therapist for almost eighteen years, I have seen people transform their relationships with their bodies and by doing so, radically change their lives.
Looking for a somatic therapist in San Francisco, I can help
If you have questions about tuning into your body, somatic therapy in San Francisco, anxiety therapy in San Francisco, or finding a therapist in San Francisco, I am here to help.