(#28) Body-Based Healing, Somatic Awareness, and Self-Regulating Tools for Anxiety

What is somatic healing? What does working with the body really mean? Somatic coaching involves integrating the mind, body, and soul to create long-term transformational change. Tune in to today's episode with your host Rae, to receive:

• Insight into somatic healing terms like nervous system regulation, mind-body connection, and more
• Rae's personal story of discovering body-based healing and why it was so transformational 
• How somatic healing can improve your life 
• What somatic work is NOT and why long-term sustainable change is the best approach for transformation
• How anxiety manifests in the body and how to self-regulate your nervous system 

Join the Masterclass Pass this year to receive: 

• 9+ masterclasses each month throughout 2024 on a variety of topics like: Somatic Practices for Processing Anger, Embodying Confidence, Emerging from People Pleasing, Self-Regulation for the Mind-Body-Soul Connection... and SO much more!
• An online personalized Masterclass Pass Journal for your notes and reflections 
• The Masterclass Pass Journal includes a 6-month and 12-month reflection practice
• Lifetime access to all masterclasses
• A group WhatsApp community for ongoing support and connection 
• Surprise bonuses and discounts to future offers
• $50 that you can use towards the group program Anxious to Embodied

The first workshop for this year is Be Your Own Bestie on Wednesday, February 21st at 7:30pm (EST). 

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Disclaimer: Please remember that the information shared on this podcast is intended to inspire, educate, and support you on your personal journey. It does not substitute for professional mental health advice. I am not a psychologist or medical professional. If you are experiencing any emotional distress, mental health challenges, or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified professional.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Radiant Life podcast. I'm your host, ray the Stematic Coach, and I'm here to support you in healing your past, living in the present and creating your future so that you can become the most centered, embodied and happiest version of yourself. Each week, I'll be bringing you episodes to help you navigate life's challenges, ease stress and tension and learn more about holistic healing, spirituality and wellness. If you're interested in becoming the best version of yourself so that you can live the life of your dreams, then you're in the right place. Subscribe to the podcast and the monthly newsletter and follow me on Instagram and TikTok to know when new episodes are released each week. I am so happy that you've landed here. Let's dive in. Hello, my friends, welcome back to the podcast. If you are new here, I'm Ray. I'm a Stematic Coach and Breathwork Facilitator, and if you aren't new here, welcome back. I'm so glad that you're tuning in for today's episode. I know at the end of last week's episode, I shared a little bit about a few things that are coming up either later this year or even this month, and I wanted to highlight the masterclass pass that is coming up soon, in the next few weeks. So our first masterclass is going to be on self-compassion, and this is all about being compassionate with yourself, really understanding yourself in a deeper way, and I'm calling it be your own besties, so being your own best friend and really meeting yourself in a way that maybe you haven't done so already. And for today's episode on the podcast, we're going to be doing a deep dive into somatic healing what that is and how it can support you on your journey, either with anxiety or any other bigger emotions that might be coming up. So the masterclass pass comes with nine different workshops over the course of this year. They'll be on a wide range of topics anything from processing anxiety somatically processing anger, people pleasing breath work, inner child's healing and so much more. So each month there will be a different workshop, and for this month, the workshop is all around self-compassion. So I'm really excited to bring to you this offer. I did this at the end of last year for the September through December, and it was a really big success and we had a lot of fun with it. It also comes with an online PDF journal that you can use throughout your time in the program, and there will also be a WhatsApp community for us to connect outside of our group calls. So if you have any questions about today's podcast episode, send me a DM or an email, and if you have any questions about the masterclass pass, same thing just send me a note or check out the show notes with all the information.

Speaker 1: 2:58

So, as we dive into today's episode on body-based healing and somatic work, I wanted to define some terms. So somatic coaching is really using the body and connecting with the body to move through something that might be coming up for you. So this includes connecting and creating a connection between your mind and your body. So the mind-body connection is really about understanding, so using that self-awareness that you have in your mind and bringing that awareness into your body, noticing different sensations, different ways that your body might be communicating with you, and using that information to move forward. It also includes really creating a safe place internally for you to process different stored emotion little tea or big tea, trauma from the past. And what we're doing when we really create that strong mind-body connection is we're taking those limiting beliefs, those fears that live in our mind and we're metabolizing and processing them from a body-based lens, so from the perspective of the body, and what this is doing is strengthening your self-awareness, your emotional intelligence and your capacity to hold and process any kind of uncomfortable emotion, thought or belief. Then we have nervous system regulation. So nervous system regulation is again really working with the body and it's understanding your specific nervous system response to stimuli or something from the past or something from the present that is eliciting a specific response. It also includes understanding what your unique window of tolerance is, and what that means is basically the capacity for your body to feel a feeling, hear a thought, be exposed to an external stimuli, and how you respond to that internal or external stimuli.

Speaker 1: 5:06

And then the last term that I'd love to define is inner child work. This is something that I also talk about often, and what this is is really working with the part of yourself that was created from zero to 14 years old and as we go through our adult lives, this part of our lived experience still exists. So, as your adult self today, you're able to go back to and understand these previous lived experiences, these previous parts of yourself and inner children, and re-parent them today as your loving adult self. So there's a lot more that I could say on all four of those terms semantics, mind-body connection, nervous system regulation and inner child work but I wanted to kind of give the foundation as we move into the rest of our episode here. So how did I find this work right?

Speaker 1: 6:04

I was struggling with anxiety for so long and I went to a yoga festival with one of my best friends and that's where I discovered breath work. So I discovered breath work first, and this was in June of 2016, and the first time I did breath work I was in the middle of Vermont, surrounded by like a hundred other people, and I was like this is the craziest thing I've ever done. It was so cool. It's such like a big emotional release. I really felt like I moved forward with my anxiety and with grief that I was processing so much further like forward than I had with any other modality that I had tried. So it was really, really impactful for me and it kind of led me down this rabbit hole of other things that were out there besides the things that I already knew about. So it kind of opened up this whole world of body-based healing. So fast forward, maybe two years after that.

Speaker 1: 7:05

So we're in 2018 and I'm still struggling with anxiety and I'm looking for like the next thing, and so I decide to go on Instagram actually, and I'm like I wonder if there's somebody that specializes just an anxiety, like an anxiety coach, and I type that into the search and I actually end up finding somebody. I was like I didn't even know this thing existed and she had a somatic background and I booked a session with her and I discover what I have like a lived experience of connecting with an inner child of mine and I discover where my anxiety was coming from, at the root. I had this like seven year old inner child that was kind of throwing a temper tantrum and I was able to re-parent her from being well, I must say what I have been. I think I was 27 then. So as my 27 year old self, I was able to re-parent the seven year old part of me that was really upset and I was able to re-parent the seven year old self. That changed everything for me. My anxiety went from like an 11 to like a 3. I was like what is going on?

Speaker 1: 8:20

So I took this experience and I ran with it and that's when I started going for my somatic coaching certification. I went and I got breath work certified after that. So it's funny that I found breath work first, but I actually started with somatic coaching in terms of, like, professional development and getting my certifications and stuff, and then it was kind of just building from there. And so why I love it so much today is because I know the impact that it's made in my life. I know that I feel so much safer in my body of experiencing something that's so uncomfortable, like anxiety or grief or sadness or anger, and I know that I can metabolize an emotion and come out the other side instead of trying to like, think positive or think my way out of something. I know that I have the tools and the emotional landscape to move through anything that comes up for me and that is why I love this work so much, because you do it once, you learn it once and you have it forever. So, body based healing it can help you with increasing your self compassion. It can help you with the ability to reparent any inner children and self regulate your nervous system. It builds resilience, it helps you to feel more free and be able to just play and it helps you increase your emotional intelligence and understand yourself on a deeper level.

Speaker 1: 9:49

It's a different conversation. It's not your typical, you know conversation that you might be having in traditional CBT therapy. It's different. There's energy work involved, and that, to me, is something that just allows you to go a little bit deeper than only working with your thoughts, which are important, yes, of course, but only working with that part is leaving out a lot of what's, what's needed in the conversation and what it is not. So body based healing is not one size fits all. It is very, very unique and tailored to the individual and it will differ for everyone because everyone has a different, lived, unique experience. So it is definitely not a one size fits all. It's unique. It's something that, if you're working with a trauma informed facilitator will be able to move at your pace, and it's encouraged that you are being active in your own healing journey. So so it requires some sort of your participation in your own journey of healing.

Speaker 1: 10:57

It's also not like a rapid transformation, like rapid transform transformational therapy or something like that, like we're talking about long term sustainable change and really transforming that relationship that you have between your mind and your body, so that it is completely different. So we're talking about really regulating your nervous system, understanding your body in a different way, reparenting in our children, understanding previous experiences, past trauma, and how it affects you today. So there's nothing really about that that's like rapid and fast. It's supposed to be tailored to your pace, meeting where you're at and moving forward gradually over time. And that's also to say, like from my personal experience, the story that I shared earlier, when I had a lived experience with my inner child as my 27 adult, year old, adult self that for me actually was rapidly transformational because I never had experienced something so tangible before. So, even though it was gentle and it was at my pace and it was involving, you know, breath, work and meditation, and there was nothing fast about it, it did create such a huge impact for me because I knew something now that I didn't know before. So, even though it's not fast, you can receive like big results because it's really just so much more information, so much insight. And then all the other things take a little bit more time.

Speaker 1: 12:26

So the nervous system regulation, the tools, the practices, integrating all that knowledge that does take time, alright. So, foundationally, understanding the body's role in how it shapes your thoughts, your emotions, your behaviors is really important for body based healing, and what this means is that your body also has a voice, an opinion and a perspective, and we're so used to working with our thoughts and naming our thoughts and being with the minds that when we shift and we start working with what our body might have to say about an experience, it opens up so much more information, like a wealth of knowledge that we didn't even know existed, and it's really eye-opening and what this is called when you're able to understand here and listen and communicate with that voice of your body. That's called somatic awareness and this is very significant in being that safe place to perceive and understand what your body might be feeling and how it might be responding Either something that's happening now or it can also be something from the past, and this is why somatics is so cool, because our body is holding on to past trauma. And when we're able to have those conversations, get quiet, go into those places of something that's stored in our body, that's when we're able to shift and release it and create a new belief or a new story, and it's another way of working with your subconscious. So we're talking subconscious reprogramming. We're talking transformation, really, and freedom and changing the narrative of something that may have happened in the past, healing and moving forward.

Speaker 1: 14:23

And you can see this with anxiety and how it manifests in the body and what we're doing when we're doing body-based healing is we're getting to the root of the anxiety. We're working with the subconscious. So we're going right to the source. Instead of running away from it, we're going right towards it and we're creating this safety, this understanding, this love, and we're changing it from that place. It also manifests in the fight, flight, freeze or fawn nervous system responses. So being aware of each of those nervous system responses fight, flight, freeze or fawn and how your personal nervous system responds in each one is one. Your default is one, one that you don't ever really go to like how, what is your response to External stimuli and what might that be coming from. So somatic healing also allows you to get towards any unresolved trauma. If you have chronic stress or chronic anxiety. It allows you to get to those deeper places and really get to the root of anxiety working with your subconscious and understanding how the anxiety is manifesting in your body and some somatic practices that you can use to explore, grounding, centering, creating more safety. This is really at the foundation of being able to have somatic awareness, being able to foster that mind-body connection and understanding your nervous system and being that safe place. These are practices that help you get there.

Speaker 1: 16:02

So I always say breath, sound and movement. Those are three things that you can always come back to to do what's called getting getting into the body, getting into that place where, instead of being in our mind, we have embodied awareness. We're in our body, we're connected to our intuition, our own energy and that have that felt sense of embodied awareness. So for breath, you can always do some breath work. This can look like mindful breathing or doing a shorter integrative breath work. This can also look like the VU breath, which is a combination of breath and sound. So mindful breathing can be Inhaling for four seconds through your nose, holding your breath for seven seconds at the top and exhaling for eight seconds out through your mouth. And Then integrative breath work can look like doing the pulse, active breath, which is inhaling twice through your nose and exhaling twice through your mouth and Then moving into a top holds and repeating that twice. So you can kind of make up your own blends. You can make up your own breath patterns. You can check out the studio when it's out in March for all different integrative breath work practices and you can also do the VU breath, which is inhaling through your nose and on that exhale, making the sound of VU, voo. So that's breath and a little bit of sounds.

Speaker 1: 17:30

And then you can also do movement. So movement can look like very consciously and aware, very consciously and awarely. So movement can look like consciously moving your body in a specific way, fixing your posture in a way that maybe opens your heart, stretching consciously with awareness, with love. It can look like even sending your breath to a specific part of your body that might need it. So if you're carrying your stress in your shoulders, if you're feeling like your heart is closed, if you're really needing some grounding, some safety, some Holding from the earth, you can always use your breath to send that energy to that place in your body. So really working with the body, working with the breath, breath, sound movement, using those tools and combining them to meet your anxiety with where it's manifesting in the body.

Speaker 1: 18:31

And then the last topic that I'd love to share about Body-based healing is the ability to metabolize and regulate emotion. So this is something that the foundation I've talked about a little bit so far is really creating the safety in your body to even be able to sit with the discomfort. Sometimes we don't even know what we're feeling. So I guess the first step might be even like having awareness that you're feeling something, so the mindfulness to say like I'm feeling something, and then the second step of that would be like having the safety in your nervous system To regulate that emotion or even just sit in that discomfort. So there's. It's not like we're always meant to be, you know, grounded and safe and centered. That's not feasible, unrealistic. It's okay, I'm really angry right now, or okay, I feel a lot of shame right now, or I'm super anxious. Do I have the safety in my body to Sit in this discomfort or am I going to have a numbing behavior? Scrolling on my phone, watching Netflix, binge eating? It could be anything, but those are the more known known behaviors, I would say, of avoiding sitting with discomfort.

Speaker 1: 19:49

You'll also learn to expand your personal window of tolerance. So I touched on this a little bit earlier. But what that means is, as you're creating the safety to sit with discomfort, you're also expanding the space in your nervous system that feels okay to move in and out of being in a regulated state. And as that capacity grows and grows and grows, you'll feel safer with feeling a range of emotions like anxiety and instead of running from it or feeling like it's wrong or bad. It's just going to be kind of like another emotion that it's okay to feel and understanding it in such a deeper way where there might be a little bit more self-compassion there, because your window of tolerance is a little bit wider.

Speaker 1: 20:41

And then we have that mind-body integration. So we mentioned how the mindful awareness needs to come first, and then that somatic awareness comes in. So we have the awareness to be present, to be in our lived experience, and then we have the awareness to say, oh, I'm going to come into the body, I'm going to feel this sensation, that's, you know, in my throat space or in my heart or in my back or my neck or wherever it might be. And so the first step is that mindful awareness and then the second step is that somatic awareness and that is that mind-body integration, or one piece of it at least, and fostering that relationship. Changing that relationship is so helpful for regulating your emotions, for feeling safe in your body, and it's a learned tool that you'll always have. This also gives you the ability to self-regulate, so you're creating that safety in your body, you're expanding the window of tolerance. You have that mindful awareness, you have that somatic awareness and now you're able to self-regulate.

Speaker 1: 21:46

So this episode was jam-packed with so much information. I shared a little bit about defining different terms like somatic coaching, mind-body connection, nervous system regulation, inner child work. I shared a little bit about my personal story. We talked about the foundation of somatic healing, body-based healing, how anxiety manifests in the body, some somatic practices that you can explore for grounding and centering, and how somatic healing helps with regulating your emotions and how you can start doing that today. So I hope that you enjoyed today's episode and if you did, then you would absolutely love the master class pass. We're going to be doing and applying all of these tools in these classes throughout the whole year. We're gonna be doing somatic healing, breath work, inner child work, journaling. Every class will be a little bit different and on a different subject, but it's going to be a deep dive master class workshop with all these different tools and fun experiences that you'll be able to walk away with with just so much more emotional intelligence, self-awareness and self-compassion.

Speaker 1: 22:53

So if you have any questions about any of that, please just send me a DM. Reach out. I always love chatting with you. If you have any questions or suggestions, too, for podcast topics or podcast guests definitely reach out to me about that as well. I'm looking to kind of come up with some more ideas of ways that I can support you and I want some. I want to know what you're feeling we're like.

Speaker 1: 23:18

We're almost like 30 episodes in, so I'd love to hear from you. Let me know. And, yeah, I hope you have an incredible rest of your week and I hope you have an incredible rest of your day and I will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. If you were moved or inspired, please share with me by leaving a reading and review on Apple Podcast. It means the world to me and I am so appreciative for your support in helping my podcast grow. If we aren't already connected on social media, head over to Instagram and TikTok and follow me at Ray the Semantic Coach. Make sure you check out the show notes of today's episode for links to freebies, opportunities to work with me and ways we can stay connected outside of the podcast. I am so happy that you're here and I can now eat to talk with you on our next episode of the Radiant Life Podcast.