Memories Are Stored In Your Body - Somatic Experiencing E120

Hi there!

We're going to talk about somatic awareness.

Somatic awareness is our full body's experience of a situation,

An event,

A memory,

How our body is experiencing.

You think about your breathing,

Your heart rate,

Even things like our vision.

Our vision can get into tunnel vision or even like a blurry,

Fuzzed out vision depending on what we're experiencing.

You might even get bladder urgency or you have to suddenly pee.

Or muscle tension in shoulders,

In our legs,

The fight or flight response in our body will even create muscle tension.

The whole system working together because we also have organ involvement,

We have our hormones,

There's so much that's happening.

The blood flow of our body system will go where it thinks it's needed.

So,

For example,

If we're in an anxious cycle and we have those other response systems,

So our heart is racing,

Maybe our breath has gone up to a chest breathing,

So a shallow short breath.

We might even have the tunnel vision or blurred out vision that often comes with anxiety.

When that's happening,

The blood flow in our body is going to go to the muscles that are creating the tension,

Often the legs or the shoulder area,

Because our body thinks it's helping us.

It's like,

Oh my gosh,

There's a threat,

There's something going on,

I need to get ready.

So,

The blood wants to fuel the areas,

The muscles,

The body systems it thinks is in need of most attention,

Even though often it's not because we're not really in a crisis in the moment.

But somatically,

Our body will be participating as though we are.

So,

The somatic awareness is about how we become aware of this and connect to it,

Because our body is the biggest tool in emotion regulation and awareness.

When we notice what our body's doing with emotion or with memory,

Then we get to work through it.

We get to regulate the system and train our body.

When we're thinking about memory,

We have our mind memory,

So we might have even a vision come through in the mind or thoughts that go through in memory.

We also have emotional memory,

Maybe having just an emotion come up and it brings about a thought memory.

Then we have the body.

We have the cellular memory in the body,

And we have the somatic experiences within the body.

We also have the energy imprinting,

But I'm trying to not talk too much about energy therapy in these.

I'm going to leave that as something totally separate so that we could just focus on the things that I know most people are familiar with.

The body system,

The mind,

The emotion,

The cellular,

Which I'll tell you in just a moment,

And then the somatic experience,

How our full body is going through an event,

A moment,

Or a memory.

With the cellular memory,

There's so many different stories about transplant recipients,

Individuals who have received an organ transplant,

And how they take on different bread examples where taste,

The taste of food.

One woman talked about after receiving organ transplants,

When she started to heal,

She was craving a beer,

And she never drank beer before.

She's like,

I don't even understand this.

Lots of other examples of taste,

But also psychological.

Some people increased happiness or sadness or anxiety or anger.

There's many,

Many different individuals who shared their personal examples after receiving an organ transplant and these shifts that they felt inside self,

Or even taste in music.

Also,

Some people started having skills and abilities that they never had,

But that the donors had in all those examples.

That's a great example when you could try to conceptualize cellular memory.

Our cells in our body remember a lot,

Sometimes more than our cognitive brain remembers.

If we've had difficult experiences in earlier childhood,

Sometimes those experiences get put into folders because our body knows what we're able to handle.

Sometimes it'll store those things away because we're just not at a place to really process those emotions or the situation at that time.

But cellular,

Organ-wise,

In the body,

The body remembers those things.

The memory of that can create elevated experiences in our now,

Even though we're not experiencing the things that we had before.

The cellular memory then spills over or contributes to our somatic experience that we're going through.

When you're thinking of somatic experience,

Again,

It's the body's participation,

The body's voice,

If you would,

In what it is going through.

There's many examples that you might have awareness around,

Around your own somatic experience that you let yourself have comfort around,

Or maybe those that you found yourself starting to experience and you're like,

Okay,

I need to piece away from this experience right now.

Some common examples,

If you think back when you first learned to ride a bike,

Think about the times you fell.

You might feel in your body for a moment the ouchy feeling,

Not the same as when you actually fell.

It's not going to be that level of pain,

But a twinge feeling oftentimes is the best way to put it.

Kind of like when you hit your funny bone,

That kind of feeling-ish.

It's different for everybody,

But that's an example.

Or if you've ever broken a bone and you think back to that experience,

You might feel it somatically in your body in the moment.

The memory is there in the mind,

Then the emotion might come,

Then the body experience,

Or in any order.

It can come in any order.

You can have an emotion.

Often emotions are started by our thoughts,

Not all the time,

And then that combination.

We might start feeling anxiety around something we're thinking about,

Say we have to give a presentation or we have to go meet somebody new.

Just trying to think of random examples here.

We might have some anxiety coming up for us around that experience,

And then it starts spilling over where we start having memories of previous experiences where we felt anxious,

And now our anxiety starts going up instead of thinking of previous experiences where maybe we had calmness.

The body remembers,

The body's activated,

And then it starts opening up folders of memory for us and increasing the somatic experience.

You might also know this experience I'm talking about if you've ever listened to a song that brings in a memory,

And maybe it makes you laugh,

Maybe it makes you cry,

Maybe it makes you start thinking about a bunch of different categories or examples of a situation around that specific emotion.

So a song can activate the somatic experience,

We could feel it in our body,

We can have the emotion,

But you might also feel it in the body.

Heart rate might change,

Muscle tension might change,

You might notice different elevation of where your thoughts go if your heart's racing.

So what's happening for you in the moment when you're going through different memories?

Even storytelling,

If we're telling someone a story about a past situation or event,

We might physically,

Somatically start feeling the memory of whatever story we're telling.

And when you're kind of contemplating this idea of somatic experience,

Think about your five senses.

All the ways our five senses can even bring in memory.

It's used sometimes in therapy for trauma work,

You can bring in sensory work like different smells or sounds to help people process something.

But even in our own experience of just everyday walking through life or,

You know,

Living,

You might smell something and you have a memory,

A cigar,

And it makes them think of a grandparent or smell a favorite dish cooking that an ancestor,

A grandparent or aunt or uncle or their own parents or,

You know,

Somewhere in the family line,

It reminds them of the nostalgia of the family.

So our senses can also bring back memory,

Even feeling something.

It's often when you think about addiction and the ways that we have addiction as a reminder,

Addiction can be to anything.

But in this example,

I'm going to talk about a substance addiction,

When individuals are really working on sobriety.

And maybe we'll say alcohol was the substance of choice in this example.

So maybe there was a certain state store,

Or if you're not from Pennsylvania,

Probably don't even know what a state store is.

I just realized that we're kind of we're expanded here.

But in Pennsylvania,

We just had state stores before were you that's the only place you could get liquor and things like that.

But like,

Say there's a certain store,

Just leave it,

Say there's a certain store that you went to to get your alcohol,

Anytime you go past that store,

Or anytime you go past that exit to get off the highway to go to that store.

You might at times,

Maybe not every time,

Maybe it's every once in a while,

But notice a desire or an urge or a memory coming back from previous time when you were in a different relationship with alcohol.

So sense with our senses are very strong in memory,

Cellular memory,

Somatic memory,

But also drive and impulse and where it can take us kind of off the road,

We suddenly find ourselves getting off of that highway exit,

We want to,

You know,

Maybe stay straightforward.

So thinking about the somatic awareness,

And what your body experience is,

Knowing that sometimes our memory and somatic experience can be uncomfortable.

And as I noted,

Right at the beginning there,

How I said about kind of wanting to step away from the emotion or experience or the physical body experience of something,

That's where people are more guided to numb out or swallow our emotions,

Avoid ourselves,

Or addictions.

You know,

We can just kind of eat our emotions.

Sometimes people turn to food addiction to eat their emotions.

And the somatic awareness,

When we're thinking about emotion regulation,

Is allowing ourselves to practice and have some of the experience around emotion,

Just like in the embodied self energy therapy meditation,

How we went through four different types of emotional memory.

And you might have noticed how each one felt a different place in the body,

Or maybe in a similar place,

But had a different feeling within the emotion.

But we also notice that all emotions are impermanent.

None of them last forever.

You might feel or think that you're stuck in an emotion for a really long time,

But all emotions are impermanent.

If you think of some really hard,

Heavy,

Challenging emotions that you've had in the past,

You are not still stuck at that high level of emotion.

Even if you are just on pause of it right now,

Because you're listening to my voice,

It is still showing you the impermanence of emotion.

It is not cement on your feet,

Having you unable to move away from an emotion.

They all ebb and flow,

Even happiness.

People will seek to try to have happiness as their baseline,

But happiness is impermanent.

It ebbs and flows.

And when we allow ourselves to have somatic awareness,

It's about sitting with and experiencing emotions,

Thinking about that emotional intelligence and those five categories.

If you think about the first one,

When it's about awareness,

We have to know what is going on in our body.

The experience can be uncomfortable,

But it's a training experience for self,

That then when we experience the emotions later,

We have awareness that we don't have to fear them.

Now I want to share some tools with you.

The first one is about noticing what your fear might be.

What your fear might be around your own experience of somatic awareness.

There's a type of therapy where we'll go through somatic experiencing,

And it allows what I'm talking about here about the training.

We're training the body system not to fear emotion.

It trains the central nervous system.

The central nervous system is elevated.

We don't have to escape.

We have awareness like,

Oh,

What is my breathing like right now?

What am I fearing in this moment?

How is my body feeling?

Where's my tension?

How's my heart rate?

How's it affecting my thinking?

Do I feel fuzzy?

Do I feel disconnected?

That then lets us be in the moment instead of escaping,

And when we're in the moment and talking through it with ourselves,

Again,

I'm not encouraging you to go into a deep trauma experience by yourself.

Do that with a trained trauma therapist,

But this is lower level stuff.

I'm going to explain to you how to do this.

It's lower level memory stuff where we're training the body.

We're noticing where we're elevating,

Whether it's breath,

Heart rate,

Muscle tension,

Or maybe joy elevation going through,

And then we're sitting with it.

We're using curiosity.

How do I feel versus,

Oh my goodness,

Let me get away from this feeling.

Ignoring ourselves will never bring clarity.

It will also not bring healing.

We can be our biggest advocate by giving ourselves love and compassion and awareness around what we're experiencing.

What you would do then first,

Again,

Is noticing what you fear and remembering impermanence.

All emotions are impermanent.

Then you're going to start with a low level memory.

Maybe it's a song,

Any of those things that I mentioned.

You can bring in something with your senses if that's helpful for you,

And then have the curiosity around your somatic experience.

All those things.

How am I breathing?

What's my body saying to me?

Your body's voice.

How do I feel in my body in this moment?

Even low level things,

We might still need a re-grounder.

Re-grounder thinking about how to get ourselves back in the awareness that we're not experiencing that thing right now.

You can use some of what we did in the energy therapy meditation for embodied self.

Another thing is you can use five senses.

If you're feeling like you're going through a memory,

Again,

Low level,

Really low level,

You're just training your body not to try to not know what to do or have comfort around emotion.

When you're having this lower level,

Even then you might need an awareness of like,

Okay,

All's good.

I'm still not there.

I'm here.

What you could do is use five senses,

Five,

Five things I see in front of me right now,

Four,

Four things I hear,

Et cetera.

Go down the list of the senses and use counting,

And that brings you into the moment that you're in.

You can also ask yourself just a simple question,

Where are my feet right now?

Or where am I in this moment?

That will remind you I'm just right here in this experience,

Not where I just took myself.

But it's just about training around different emotions that then give you training for future experiences or just understanding how you experience maybe even emotion.

Sometimes we don't even really know what we're experiencing or what our emotions are like.

Another tool,

In the moment awareness.

As we're moving through our day and we have lots of experiences in our day,

So in the different experiences of our day,

We're going to have different emotions around them,

Different awareness or memory within the body that might come up.

In your everyday,

You can have curiosity around those experiences where you sit for a moment or two with the somatic awareness and you work on the regulation system.

This is not about pushing away or swallowing emotion.

It's about sitting with it and I don't really want to use the word playing with the sequence of our emotions,

But it's almost like a playful curiosity.

I guess is why that word's coming through for me.

It's like a playful curiosity instead of an oh my goodness,

Get away.

We can sit with self in lots of different experiences without fear and that is going to give us regulation and awareness to be able to regulate and manage and understand our emotions in a lot of different ways.

When you're noticing in the everyday,

This can come through when you're driving,

When you're at work thinking about something,

When you're working on a project,

Even if you're trying to go to sleep.

We have a lot of different experiences in our day,

So just sit in the day and experience the day and notice what your body's doing within it.

I hope this information was helpful and again,

Pull what is right for you.

The more we know,

The more that we can decide what we want to weed out,

What seeds we want to plant,

And what we want to water.

Thank you so much everyone.

I look forward to seeing you again soon.

Have a good one.