When we work through the body new possibilities arise
The way we see ourselves and our ability to create the life we want is heavily influenced by our deeply ingrained Cartesian heritage. Remember Rene Descartes of “I think therefore I am” fame? When he made that declaration, he removed the body from what we’ve come to see as the seat of our intelligence, creativity, and agency. His view that emotions, feelings, and sensations happen to us and must therefore be overridden by rational thought, set the tone for the rationalistic tradition that still dominates today. Not only has this led to us becoming disconnected from ourselves, each other, nature, and spirit like never before, but it has left many of us feeling weighed down like the man in this sculpture by Dutch artist Thomas Lerooy.
However, when we move beyond thinking of the body as primarily useful in its capacity to carry the head around to do its important work, we discover that the body is, in fact, the seat of powerful intelligence, a repository of billions of years of evolutionary wisdom that helps us navigate our most important experiences and relationships. When we stop this daily practice of dividing ourselves, we discover that our body is the domain of becoming who we are and what we create for ourselves. As the domain of feeling, sensing, learning, relating, creating, it is through the body that we:
Make sense of ourselves, others, and the world…
Interpret history and envision futures…
Connect with others and the environment…
Express our perceived place in the world…
And, generate action toward the future we want.
As our bodies, brains, and even our behaviour quite literally take shape in response to our life experiences, the possibilities we see, the options we choose, and the actions we take – and are capable of taking – are affected.
This is true for every single one of us. Every action we take involves the body, and the body affects everything we do. When we connect with the language and intelligence of the body, new possibilities arise for us to creatively and skillfully guide ourselves through change, challenge, transition, and opportunity. When we work through the body we cultivate the capacity to:
- Direct our embodied strengths and unique talents towards results that matter most to us.
- Navigate complexity and ambiguity with greater clarity, presence and purpose.
- Manage stress and increasing complexity with embodied resilience, flexibility and agility.
- Build trust, communicate with greater skill and improve our relationships.
- Improve our health and wellbeing – mentally, physically and relationally.
Four reasons to embrace the power of embodied transformation
Everything is in constant flux. All of life is a never-ending process of becoming. As Guiseppe di Lampedusa wrote:
Even if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
This is especially true at times when change calls for us to ‘reorganise’ much of ourselves, let alone our lives and external circumstances. These transitions invite us to take a good look at habits and patterns of being that may not be serving us anymore or that need to be cultivated for the sake of what we are called to.
Inevitably, these are the transitions with the highest stakes, requiring more than a mere cognitive reorganisation of the ideas and beliefs we hold about ourselves and our ability to meet our challenges. This is when we need the wisdom and capacity of the body to move through change and when we need the totality of our being to support deep, generative healing and transformation.
These important transitions often come about because:
Change, even for the better, can be disorienting and deeply disruptive. You may have got the promotion you worked so hard for, landed your dream job, achieved financial success, entered a new relationship, or moved an existing relationship to the next level – but you just can’t shake the nagging discomfort it brings when you try to fully embrace your new place in the world. New demands on your time, energy, and abilities may feel overwhelming. The responsibility that comes with making decisions that now have far-reaching consequences may feel paralysing. The new power dynamic in important relationships may feel deeply uncomfortable.
The thing is, wonderful things happening can generate a level and intensity of energy that your body may not be able to tolerate at first. And when it does, your body will always tend toward restoring homeostasis, sometimes in self-sabotaging ways.
Working through the body can help your body and nervous system adapt while cultivating the embodied skills and competencies that support your ongoing success.
Whether you’ve been fired, your business has failed, your kids have left home or you’ve had a major health scare, transitions often challenge us to re-examine our sense of who we are and the capabilities we’ve taken for granted. Dismantling the structures of our being – home, marriage, or career – is not just painful, but profoundly challenging to our embodied sense of safety, belonging, and dignity. Many of us avoid the discomfort by denying, numbing or forcing our way through. In doing so we disown ourselves of the equally profound opportunity for realigning our embodied being with our new reality. Working through the body during these times invites us toward a new vision enabled by new embodied skills and capabilities.
You try to improve yourself or your life in some way but are just not getting the results you want. You feel stuck, blocked, out of options, paralysed by fear of failure, paralysed by something you may not have a name for, or – although you won’t admit it – by your fear of success! More often than not, these blocks are the result of deeply embodied patterns around what feels safe and available to us. Patterns that took shape – quite literally – in response to your previous experience. Even though the circumstances of your experience may have changed, your body always defaults to what it knows to keep you safe, connected and in dignity unless it is replaced by something better. Transforming embodied patterns that get in the way of our chosen future is at the core of embodied transformation.
Something in your life wants to come into being. Born either from a nagging sense of discontent with the status quo, or from a long-held vision, you want to make it happen but feel as if you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff – wanting to take the leap but frozen by the implications of making such a monumental change. Self-limiting behaviour often shows up strongest just when we need the courage to take risks for the sake of our dreams. Working through the body gets to the heart of the embodied patterns driving fear, resistance, and panic that sabotage our ability to take skilful and sustained action toward our vision. Embracing the power of embodied transformation during these times not only keeps us connected to a deep sense of care for our vision, but develops the skills and competencies we need to succeed – either through developing new competencies or by transforming existing tendencies and triggers that get in our way.
However fundamental change may be, our culture and education systems, unfortunately, do little to teach us how to work through life’s transitions. We are taught to rely on thinking, reasoning, analysing, and mental processing to negotiate change. We learn that our body is an object separate from the self doing the navigating. We learn to overlook the fact that we literally are the embodiment of our prior change experiences – of the beliefs, habits, survival strategies, and actions that we learned along the way. Importantly, how we are taught to navigate change fails to recognise that our historical shaping in itself becomes the force behind our need to change, heal, or transform for the sake of the future we envision.
Embracing the power of embodied transformation offers the possibility for us to creatively transform ourselves and the world.
How we could work together
As neuro-somatic coach and educator, I am committed to helping others embody powerful new stories in their lives and careers by harnessing the power of embodied transformation. In the words of Brene Brown:
When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.
Our stories are written through our bodies. Denying this doesn’t stop our story from being written – it just stops us from choosing how it turns out. We can choose to either ‘walk inside our story and own it’ or to ‘stand outside and hustle’ for our sense of power, belonging and dignity. Working through the body allows us to – quite literally – rewrite our stories from within.
Unlike most coaching, therapy, and learning modalities that are cognitive or linguistic-based, neuro-somatic coaching is holistic, highly experiential, and oriented toward cultivating inner resources that build on themselves in a positive, generative way. In neuro-somatic coaching, we work with the whole self as both the ground and vehicle for transformation. Transformation, in somatic terms, has occurred when we are able to act in new ways even under the same old pressures.
My practice is dedicated to skilfully blending cognitive and experiential learning to create the embodied capacity for change.
In working with you, I am committed to:
In working together, I am committed to:
- Providing you with the knowledge and 'cognitive' understanding of how your neurobiology works to enable embodied change.
- Guiding you to develop somatic awareness and connect what you learn with the felt experience in your body.
- Supporting you in turning cognitive learning and somatic awareness into somatic intelligence and wisdom to guide your unique path of transformation.
- Guiding you to applying your learning to the real-life situations that you find most in need of meeting in a new way.
- Providing a safe and comfortable holding space for you to explore, experiment, and practice a new way of be-ing.
- Setting you up on a path of lifelong learning, growth, and self-mastery.