Somatic Intelligence – Deep Respect for Our Body’s Wisdom
Our body has been with us our whole lives. It learned to walk all wobbly and bobbly knees in the joy of delight of our first steps. It helped us win the first tug of war at elementary school with all the other bodies on the schoolyard. Our body also went through the tragedies that we saw on the news when Kennedy was assassinated or during 911’s major attacks on U.S. soil. Almost everyone we know remembers these profound tragic moments, and our body’s nervous system and fascia keeps an internal record of these experiences. In essence, the body stores the feelings and emotions and carries the memories until a new disruption occurs and wakes us up to a familiar emotion.
Somatic intelligence means we know and respect the great wisdom that our body has learned throughout our lifetime
and respects our unique set of experiences. We don’t have to remember all our bad memories, however processing the emotions that are stored allows us to evolve and transform beyond patterns that keep us stuck and held hostage to them.
For those of us that feel like emotions are unwieldy, and we feel like we can’t control them, the good news is we can find a new way to be with them and feel a greater sense of agency.
It is possible to release emotions without engaging in the story or narrative or to relive a memory that is not meant to be remembered. In other words, we can have choice over our ways of being with our traumatic memories, and choose how to diminish their effects on our day to day life.
For many of us we experience a conditioned tendency to loop in negative stories in our mind: to fight, flight or flee from discomfort. A simple disruption in our day can evoke fear even when we are not necessarily in a dangerous situation! This can be described as fear or anxiety. We feel constantly anxious and it causes other symptoms in our body like belly aches, sweaty palms, or shortness of breath.
An unexpected email, text, or phone call from someone out of the blue, somehow takes us into an intense emotion, and we call that irritability.
Our fast speed living seems to evoke urgency, a survival instinct – a feeling of being on autopilot and disconnected with our lives
while also feeling too much spinning in our minds about what is going wrong.
Why should we pay attention to our body wisdom, when it comes to our brain’s tendency to run amuck?
Because our body keeps a running record of our experiences in unexpressed emotions that are held. Releasing and processing emotions, allows us more freedom, peace, and ease in our day to day lives. Knowing that we have to go to practices that allow us to consistently release patterns of holding is life changing.
Jennifer Degen
February 8, 2023
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