Ep.21/ Somatic Therapy: Living, healing & feeling through the body with Emma Cully
How can we develop our ‘felt sense’ and enter into a greater mind-body connection to experience life with more connection?
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Emma Cully is a somatic practitioner, wellness consultant and therapeutic yoga teacher. Having experienced Emma’s work at a day retreat, I wanted to talk more to her about FEELING our way through our experience rather than just THINKING through it, the mind-body connection and utilising somatic work alongside traditional therapies to resolve and heal trauma and psycho-somatic symptoms and states.
Emma’s work helps clients to navigate emotions by working with the felt sense and nervous system. She invites clients to get curious about the qualities of an experience and to discover what the nervous system needs to efficiently regulate, using a variety of tools including breath, movement, touch and sound. She helps her clients ‘map’ the features of nervous system states, revealing patterns of thought and behaviour, working towards elevating those which serve, and getting ‘underneath’ bigger emotional experiences through the felt sense.
We have a tendency to think our way through life but we have an entirely new layer available to us when we can feel our way through as well. On top of which, our stories and our perceptions about what is going on in the moment or in our lives can shift when we listen to the body’s queues and make little steps to bring ourselves back towards equilibrium. Put into a therapeutic context with a specialised practitioner, working with the body alongside the mind can help to resolve trauma and its symptoms, since life doesn’t just happen to the head but to the body.
In this episode:
- What is somatic therapy and the ‘felt’ sense
- Tuning into our body’s signals before we act
- How somatic work can be utilised alongside traditional therapies to expand our awareness, understand ourselves better, take deeper ownership of our experience and help to process and heal trauma
- The functionality of fight / flight and freeze response and what happens in moments of trauma so you can understand trauma as a full bodily experience
- Creating safety through a resource or within the body
- How the mind-body connection is often disrupted by our ‘go-go-go’ lives where we often override the queues our bodies give us about what we need
- How somatic work can support those with anxiety or depression and help us know what is available to us and develop safety, neutrality and preference
- Ideas and tools for getting into our body and our ‘felt’ experience - ones which you can do anywhere anytime - in order to bring around greater connection, collaboration and vitality within our lives
“Removing that charge will shift your physiology. Being able to check in with your body and to realise that you’ve been impacted, it gives you ownership over the experience OVER ‘that person made me feel like this and I feel like this and I’m so annoyed’ Instead you can be “OK I’ve been impacted. What do I need? How can I support myself through this?” It gives you a moment to pause and give you space in between the autonomic story and the cognitive story so that you can readjust and see what will better serve you to stay in alignment with yourself.”
- Emma Cully
To contact Emma:
Email : emma@keepitconscious.com
Website: www.keepitconscious.com
Instagram: keep_it_conscious
