OUR APPROACH
This space is dedicated to becoming intimate with the body. This can mean sitting with the parts of yourself that have been injured and overwhelmed by trauma: leaning into a safe space of kindness in which the body can restore its own balance and ease...But we also approach the body as the place where direct experience happens...where we can more fully participate in life. In this space, the invitation is to experience "the present moment" as something that flows through and expresses within the physical body... sensations, emotions, perceptions of the world...all of them deeply felt in the landscape of bones and blood and muscle.
This space is also dedicated to more fully embodying the body: dropping out of the wind-blown patterns of mind to find in the body a sense of solid, anchored strength and stillness. Trauma symptoms so often feel like a thunderstorm happening to the body: something imposed from the outside. But in exploring somatic techniques, it becomes clear that trauma is an inside job: all that energy is yours. Given the chance, the ancient intelligence of your body works to create ever higher conditions of harmony and wholeness. Our job involves co-creating that: being engaged and present, but also getting out of the way and letting the body release stored energy and relax into healthier ways of being. It may be that this work reveals the body as the realm in which deep transformation happens: of emotional, mental and spiritual concerns.
This work follows Peter Levine's famous observation: that humans (and other animals) tend to only release their trauma when they feel safe with someone else. And...it seems that a safe space of two can also also be a place in which you discover the body as a world...one in which qualities of being can suddenly awaken to change who you are and what your life is. Our job is to create that very intentional space: in which the body's natural, ancient intelligence is given the opportunity to bring a higher level of order to how the body is storing and expressing its energy and emotion.
This work also steps outside the normal bounds of somatic therapy, into territory explored in traditions like Tantric Buddhism and shamanism. We may be used to thinking of our anger (fight, rage) and fear (terror, flight, freeze) as extreme reactions which we’d like to get rid of to return to some kind of peace. Spirituality offers another view: that anger and fear might be Sacred Protectors in disguise. If they aren’t resisted…if they’re embraced in their fierce, explosive, expressive qualities…they can be primordially peaceful. Maybe not the peace that matches the image of a sitting Buddha; maybe more the peace of a Mother Bear defending her cubs: perfectly aligned in the sacred role of protecting what is most precious. In human consciousness, it may be our anger and fear protects our deepest heart-innocence. When our animal survival instincts remember themselves as Protectors, something new may happen. Something that includes the Tiger’s raw animal power…along with no small amount of Buddha's calm...and a blazing wildness in the heart that doesn't give one single fuck about a narrow, proper image of being "good". The strength that was clenched up in self-preservation can be expand out as a kind of fierce, wrathful generousity.
It's often the case that somatic work involves something like a waking dream - being open and listening for the flow of imagery that flows up from some underground river below your ordinary mind to offer insight, perspective - a reflection of a larger world.
Somatic work is often framed in scientific terms, as a rational process unfolding in the nervous system. But there is also something mysterious and magical involved. In our ordinary life, we may be led by our intellect - by the ideas and systems through which we've been taught to understand the world. Somatic work can drop you out of that conceptual, mediated experience of the world into something full of surprises. But more than that, it may be you discover the body contains and reflects the world and priorities of indigenous and ancient cultures, myth and nature. Far below the spirit of our times - with its focus on productivity, accumulation and image - something deeper may be found...as if stored in your bones. The sense of reality discovered in the body can support you in making unique discoveries about who you are and what makes you tick.
Peter Levine observes: "Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods." It's so often the case that - in the waking dream aspect of somatic work - some part of the World steps forward to support you. Maybe a Bobcat that lopes from dream to dream slinks in beside you and offers his support as you face a grisly memory. Maybe something beyond the usual frame of your ego awakens - some part of your own strength and inner resources - like an inner Dragon blinking awake and breathing a first small snort of fire. Something "greater than yourself" may step forward to offer Its blessing. And healing follows. So...this space is dedicated to holding an open, grateful, honoring invitation to those healing forces - however you might understand them.
GOING DEEPER
Buddhist tradition describes more than one body. They start with the familiar bone and guts physical body...the one in which you live your life. They then describe a body of waking dream - the energies and images of the collective unconscious that can surge up and inspire and instruct you - while at the same time connecting you to the world - a body - far beyond the boundaries of your skin. Somatic work engages this second body beautifully. The third body is one of formlessness: the part of us that is timeless and unchanging. Its this third body that offers a different kind of possibility that goes beyond traditional somatic modalities.
Fight, flight and freeze are body responses flowing out from the body-mind's perception of external threat. Our bodies' survival instinct may operate from a limited understanding of life: "I am here to meet threats from a hostile world." If the body's survival system consistently sends us messages that we are under threat...that there's a Tiger just around the corner about to leap...it can seem to be compelling evidence that any given moment should include threat assessment or some kind of subtle self-defense. In the view of many spiritual traditions, these survival instincts rely on you having a kind of allegiance or commitment to personal survival above all other concerns. This space offers the possibility of relating to life in a more free-flowing way in which fear and self-protection don't always hold the center of our concerns. It may be that we'd explore a radical possibility: that if your devotion shifts to something deeper, it could shift the sense of external threat on which much of our fear relies. Gradually, spiritual cliches like "everything is one" or "everything is god" might start to become felt and real. This shift in orientation can undermine the ideas which help persevere stress and trauma in the body.