Hello 🙂

It can take courage to embark on this journey. So, firstly, let me thank you for looking after yourself in this way. It’s an act of self-love. High five ✋!

In this quick article, I want to help you understand the context for somatic inquiry and what to expect, so you can get the most out of it. I’ll also include some useful resources at the end. 

What’s the context for this work?

You’ve probably come to somatic therapy looking to resolve particular issues like a relationship problem or anxiety. You’ve maybe tried talk therapy and yoga and meditation and medication and it hasn’t worked. 

Why? Because the issues are in the tissues, my friend. The body keeps the score. 

Life gives us challenging experiences. And any emotional experience that was too overwhelming to process will have left an energetic imprint on your nervous system.

The excess energy from overwhelming experiences is pushed down into the body and drives survival patterns and behaviours in response. 

For example, if you were bullied at school there might have been overwhelming fear, which you had to push down and repress. This stuck fear in the body then keeps that part of you stuck in a survival state and you will respond by (say) hiding and staying small. 

Unless we address the stuck emotional residue in the body, that survival pattern will keep looping, even decades later, at which point it is often dysfunctional and causing a lot of suffering (e.g. you can’t start a business or express yourself because your nervous system is still trying to stay small).

And you'll repeat the painful behaviours and thought patterns (or attract the same situations/people) until the emotional imprint is resolved. 

But these issues can’t be resolved by thinking about them. You can’t heal with an intellectual conclusion! 

Nor do many ‘wellbeing’ approaches work with this. There’s no yoga posture you can take that will shift decades of shame or anger. 

We have to go into the body and meet these stuck, frozen emotions directly. 

What we are doing in a session is we are starting to reconnect to these incomplete survival responses/stuck emotional residue from the past that we were forced to repress. 

We acknowledge them, feel them, listen to them, help them feel safe enough to get ‘unstuck’ and cease the endless looping. 

There are a few key characteristics of this work:

• Direct experience: we’re always working with what’s here in the present moment

• Safety: parts of us became stuck because they felt unsafe, and they need to feel safe again and realise that the danger has passed - so creating an environment of safety is paramount

• Curiosity: we are always coming from a place of curiosity and exploration - what actually *is* my experience? Not what I imagine or assume it to be

What are we doing in a somatic inquiry session?

I’m working with you one-on-one in a Zoom call, helping you to discover and process some of these emotional imprints to make your life better :). 

I play the role of a supportive guide to help you navigate your inner world of thoughts and feelings. I’m not an expert that is here to ‘fix’ something within that is broken. Nothing is broken or wrong. The attitude is one of curiosity and exploration, not overt manipulation and fixing. This obsession with fixing can be just another trauma response.

There are a few principles that govern how we do this: 

• Window of tolerance: this is the capacity of your nervous system to contain a particular experience without getting overwhelmed or disconnecting

• Increase your capacity: by moving between a resource and the emotional residue your nervous system can grow in capacity to contain and process emotions

• Transforming the stuck emotional residue: healing happens when we are able to contain and be present with our emotions/sensations without being overwhelmed.

The lighter the load of emotional imprints from the past, the lighter we feel, the less reactive we are and the more clearly we see our relationship to others and the present moment.

What’s the process?

The actual process has two main parts. 

Firstly, we cultivate a sense of safety in the body to support us to stay present and grounded in our experience. By practicing this repeatedly, we increase our capacity to be with intense or challenging emotions and sensations. This is like the ‘base camp’ from which we explore the mountain range of your inner experience :).

Secondly, once we feel well-resourced we start to investigate a particular part, trigger or issue. 

I use a wide range of questions, inquiries, techniques, exercises to help you explore your inner world of thoughts, feelings and sensations. In this way, we uncover the stuck survival responses at the root and process them so they can complete and finally ‘unstick’ themselves.

Healing is a lifestyle

You can't heal our nervous system just with a quick session a week. For real transformation you have to build these practices into how you live your life. 

A critical part of the process is continuing your exploration outside of session. That is where the majority of the work is actually done. 

Together, we will figure out what approaches work best for you and your unique nervous system. Then I’ll give you a few simple exercises to try for a few minutes a day. 

You don’t have to do them. I don’t mind :). You can do what you want. But the people that engage with this work the most outside of session are those that get the best results by far. 

How to prepare for a session 

You don’t need to prepare anything. Just show up as you are! 

There are a few things it can be helpful to bear in mind:

• Set yourself up so you don’t have to worry about your posture / holding your phone / being disturbed etc.

• You don’t need to ‘perform’: whatever is happening with you is perfect, you don’t need to make any particular emotions appear or produce a particular result

• You might feel a bit anxious before a session, this is normal :). It tends to fade for people as soon as we get started.

Post-session integration

After a session, remember to give yourself a bit of time and space to integrate what has unfolded. This is just as important as the work itself.

Your nervous system needs time and space to rewire itself based on what it has learned in session. This could be by taking a walk, having a bath, meditating, journalling or whatever you do to relax. 

Note that it’s also not uncommon to start to have more difficult emotions coming up when you start this work. This is normal, you’re not ‘getting worse’, it’s just that these emotions—previously hidden—are starting to come to the surface to be felt. 

Helpful resources

Here are some resources I have created to teach you some core practices and principles that you might find helpful.

• The Nervous System Regulation Mega-Toolkit

• Intro to Resourcing: the most foundational healing practice

• The 15 Core Healing Principles

• How To Feel Your Feelings (video / blog)

Hope that helps. Any questions, just send me an email (ben@drunkenbuddha.net)

Look forward to seeing you in session! 

🙏🔥❤️

Ben