Somatic psychotherapy is a branch of psychotherapy that brings awareness and attention to one’s experience of life through their physical body. It is inherently a mind-body approach that honors the interconnection between one’s psyche and emotional world and the lived experience of sensation, movement, feeling, and presence experienced in the body.
Somatic Mindfulness is that specific form of mindfulness in which we bring nonjudgmental attention and curiosity to the body, the senses, and the various capacities and ways of knowing that are alive in our physical form.
There are specific skills and techniques that support well-being that are simple to access through awareness of our somatic experience. Feelings of being grounded, aligned, centered, contained, protected, and connected, are at their core, experiences that live out in how we inhabit and connect within our own bodies.
We’ll walk through some practices that can support you in connecting to yourself in these ways through your senses and in your body:
1. GROUNDING
To feel grounded is to feel at home in oneself, to feel connected, anchored, with a sense of stability and surety. This practice will support you feeling grounded, more anchored promoting more calm and stability.
The Practice:
- To start it helps if you take your shoes off. Walk outside to a nice patch of fresh green mown grass or stand on a pad or rug on a firm floor inside. (Being outside is inherently grounding)
- Take a moment to let yourself plant your feet. (You can also do this inside, sitting in a chair or anywhere you can feel your feet on the floor or the earth.). If it feels okay to you, close your eyes and feel your feet on the ground.
- Take note of the sensations you experience, of the grass, the softness/hardness, the strength in your feet. Paying attention to the connection your feet are making with the ground, even lifting your toes to really plant the balls and heels of your feet to the earth.
- Now, breathe into this, even breathing “into your feet”, feeling your breath from your feet up into your body, and out of your body, through your feet and into the earth. Taking it further, you might visualize roots going down out of your feet into the earth, feeling planted, rooted, anchored, grounded here.
- Spend as long as you like feeling into this space, taking note too, how you feel in the rest of your body, calm, empty, full, light, whatever it is, just take in what your experience is in this moment. Feel into what it feels like in your body to feel grounded.
2. ALIGNMENT*
When we are aligned in ourself our thoughts, feelings and actions are harmoniously working together. There is no inner conflict, but a sense of space, openness, purpose and focus. When we are aligned our actions are in line with our intentions, needs, feelings, and are adaptive to the stressors or demands of our environment. To support alignment somatically we engage a practice of straightening and lengthening the spine.
The Practice:
- To begin it helps to open our chest by rolling the shoulders back. Do this by shrugging your shoulders up toward your ears, roll your shoulders back bringing your shoulder blades together and then allow your shoulder blades to gently slide down your back, releasing any tension or effort as they come to rest. You can try this a few times if you want and just rest comfortably in the openness that is here, noticing how it feels in your body to have an open chest with the shoulders back.
- Next, in either a sitting or standing position, with the shoulders back, chest open, keeping your chin parallel to the floor, imagine a cord gently pulling from the crown of your head upward. At the same time, feel your feet planted on the ground, you can press or feel the anchor of your feet to the floor/ground, allowing the imagined cord gently pulling up.
- Spend a few moments and breathe into the space created here, this aligned, lengthened and more open space and just take in how it feels in your body.
3. CENTERING
- To be centered is to feel ourself in ourself. We all are familiar with the feeling of being scattered, our attention on numerous different things, our energy drawn in different directions, and the drain that can bring to our system. Centering supports bringing our attention and energy back from all the things outside ourself and into our body, allowing us to move with all of our energies and attention consolidated from a central place. When we are centered, we feel more focused, less distracted, calmer, and more integrated with our authentic experience.
The Practice:
- You can start by considering what structures are at the center of your physical body. The skeleton, our bones, are the foundation and structure of our body and we will spend some time feeling into this.
- You can do this either sitting or standing but sitting may allow you more ease with bringing your attention into your body.
- With feet planted on the floor, allowing your body into a relaxed open alignment as much as feels natural, take a few deep breaths bringing your attention into the feeling in your lungs as you breathe. Focus on the breath as it fills and empties from the lungs supports centering as the attention is brought into the body in this way.
- Next, bring your attention to the base of your spine. Feeling the contact of your sitz bones in your chair. Just in between is your tailbone and the base of your spine. Allow your attention to become aware of your tailbone, just taking in any sensations you may feel here, imagining and just noticing this part of your body.
- You can spend as long as you like here, but allow at least a few seconds of your attention to this part.
- Now slowly, subtly bring your attention into the next vertebrae of your spine. Again, allowing your attention to rest here for a few seconds.
- Continue to move your attention, vertebrae by vertebrae up your back, spending at least a few seconds with each one, or one relaxed inhale and exhale with each.
- Allow your attention to slowly move up through your spine until you finally get to the base of your skull.
- Again, allowing yourself to observe, notice and take in how you feel in the rest of your body as you move through this centering practice.
- A couple of notes: !1) Spend as little or as much time with this as you have or feel comfortable with. The idea is to bring the attention and energy back into the center of your body. When you get to the top, if you want to work your way back down to the base of your spine feel free! There isn’t a right or wrong way to do this, just what is effective at helping you feel more centered. (2) If you’re new to meditation or body scanning/somatic awareness, and even if you’re a veteran, you will likely notice your mind and attention wandering while you do this. Simply notice where it went and bring the attention back to where you left off and continue.
4. CONTAINMENT
Containment supports feeling “at home in our own skin”. It is an experience of being at home in our own bodies, without our attention and energy getting caught up in the external world and all its demands, pushes, pulls, and expectations. Like a container, we hold within us all of our various parts: thoughts, feelings, values, strengths, challenges, shadow and gold.
Containment also helps us know our limits, our edges, where we end and an “other” begins. We know ourself in ourself. Containment supports self-compassion, openness to experience, and getting to know oneself more deeply.
The Practice:
- One practice to support feeling containment involves connecting with the bounds of our physical container: the skin.
- I sit here now, having worked up a bit of a sweat after planting in the garden this morning. The fan is blowing and I feel its breeze upon my skin. This sensation helps me get in touch with this part of my body.
- To practice it can help to be outside in a breeze, or in front of a fan. Feeling sensation of warmth, cool, moving air, water, sunshine or other element allows us through awareness of that sensation to get in touch with our body’s largest organ, the skin. If you are wearing clothes, as I imagine most are, you can also sense the contact of clothes to the skin.
- Start by bring attention to the face, one of the more sensitive parts of our body. Closing your eyes, bring awareness to the sensations you feel. Slowly scanning with attention, the forehead, the eyes, cheeks, lips, chin. Continue moving through, noticing the hairline, the top, sides and back of the head, getting a sense of your edge, the boundary between you and the world outside of you.
- Continue slowly scanning down through your body: the front, sides, and back of your neck, the tops of your shoulders, chest, arms, belly. Feel and notice the sensations, the edges of your upper, mid, and lower back.
- Scan and get a sense of your hips, abdomen, and bottom. Feel your upper legs, lower legs, knees front, sides and back, calves, tops and bottoms of your feet, and in between and around your toes.
- As you scan and become aware of your skin you can bring a gentle reminder to mind and affirm what feels okay and right to you. Things like: “This is my edge. I exist here, within this container. All of me is welcome here in this space. I am okay within my body. All of me is here. What is here is me.”
- As always, allow yourself time to take in the experience of feeling your container and of being contained. What does containment feel like in your body, your mind, your heart and emotions?
5. PROTECTION/BOUNDARY
Similar to the experience of containment is a sense of boundary. Like our container, our boundary is that edge between us and the world, but it is focused on protection, that which keeps the me inside my body safely separated from unwanted intrusions from the outside. Boundary is that shield between us and the world, allowing us to feel a sense of safety and well-being in the face of intrusions or violations from the outside that are not in line with our needs. It protects us to support our needs being met.
Boundaries are a complex subject and multihued in their expression. The purpose of boundary is protection and when we feel protected, we feel safe, we feel more clarity around our sense of self and our emotional experience and we develop a more refined ability to differentiate between what may be our internal experience or that of someone or something else external to us.
The Practice:
- Having practiced containment, we have a clearer sense of our edge and sense of self within our skin. Coming from that place of awareness you can bring your attention now to the world outside your body.
- Hopefully right now, in this moment you can sense, there is no threat and everything is okay. There, most likely, is no need for protection in this very moment. It can be important to just take that reality in for a moment.
- To practice boundary, you can feel into the space, just surrounding your body and the edges of your skin. We might call this your energy field. There is awareness here, in the sense realm of touch and feeling.
- You can imagine this as an energetic force field. It can be relaxed, soften and allow in the nourishment of safe touch and the vitalizing interactions with the natural world. And, it can harden, becoming a shield, an impenetrable energy that allows nothing unwanted within its borders.
- Allow yourself to imagine this, just hardening and softening this energy field around you.
- To help solidify a sense of boundary it can also help to integrate a movement of pushing. Our arms and hands are a primary physical way that we can create, communicate, and express our boundaries.
- Coming to a standing position, feeling the groundedness of your feet and legs to the earth, you can come into what many athletes call the “ready position”, knees bent, butt down, and hands up with the elbows bent. This is an active position of readiness, a physically activated way to respond to changes in your environment.
- Taking this stance, just notice how you feel. There might be a sense of “I am ready”, “I can protect myself”, “I am strong”.
- You can practice just noticing the differences in how it feels in your body to allow your arms and legs to relax, and then to come back into the ready position. You can try pushing out with your arms, extending them out. And even go to a wall and push, feeling the activation of muscles and strength as you physically practice this form of boundary.
- If you want to take it a step further, take a moment to relax and bring to mind someone you may be having a conflict with or with whom you feel a sense of violation or intrusion, noticing what it feels like in your body as you bring them to mind. You might feel tension, unsettling in your belly, or other sense of anxiety or discomfort. Notice that.
- Continuing to keep them in mind, you can energetically harden your boundary, noticing if you can and what that feels like. Continue, taking a ready stance, activating legs and arms and practice holding your boundary with that strength. What does that feel like? What are the messages here? What are you believing from this position? Things like, “I can protect myself”, “I am okay”, “I am safe”, “You can’t hurt me”, “I need space”, “I can take space” may come to mind.
- Allow yourself that space to take in this experience, noticing how it feels in your body, mind and emotions.
6. CONNECTION
Connection happens both inside of us, intraconnection, and outside of us, interconnection. We connect with ourselves and others to support well-being: meeting needs for belonging, safety, security, support, perspective, love, care, and meaning among others.
Real authentic, reciprocal connection takes place when we are both rooted in ourselves and safe in our relationships. The dynamics of how we treat our own experience can impact our ability to connect with others or with them connecting with us. If we are in the habit of dismissing our own feelings, judging, criticizing, or stifling our own experience this manifests in our relationships with others.
To support connection generally we will focus here specifically on intraconnection, connecting to you and your own experience.
The Practice:
- Begin sitting comfortably, preferably somewhere quiet with no distractions, so you can take a few moments to turn your attention inward.
- Give yourself space to allow a few full breaths, scanning your body for any areas of discomfort: pain, tightness, unsettling, anxiety, emptiness, exhaustion.
- Offering your attention to this place let yourself rest here with gentleness, curiosity, and care, just breathing into this place.
- Now, make contact with whatever part you are connecting with, by placing a hand or both hands on that part of you, noticing what that part of you experiences when you connect with it in this way. Does it change in anyway? Most often with contact some kind of settling occurs, bring calmness or relaxation.
- As you let in the effect of contact, you might notice, what is the part of me that is receiving contact hearing? Another way to ask this is, if the physical contact were words, what would they be saying to you? What is the message being sent through this contact?
- Allow yourself to take in this message, the physical sensation of contact and just notice how the part that is receiving is feeling and also how the rest of your body, and your nervous system responds as you connect with this experience and this part of yourself.
- Spend as long here as feels nourishing, and soak it in.
These practices are meant to be supportive ways to begin connecting with your lived, embodied experience. When done mindfully and regularly they will help you deepen your relationship with yourself, connecting you to your emotional world and support you to being open to what is taking place within yourself.
They are also helpful ways of getting in touch with your needs, helping you to gain perspective on what it feels like to feel grounded, aligned, centered, contained, protected and connected. When we get in touch with what these states of being feel like, they become more accessible and easier to access. When we experience the fulfilment of a need in an embodied and experiential way, it gives us a reference point to stay present with ourselves as we navigate the complexities and challenges of the world we live in.
Wishing you a nourishing journey of becoming more deeply connected in mind, body and soul.
*Adapted from “Sensorimotor Psychotherapy” by Pat Ogden and Janina Fisher
