How Somatic Healing Works and the Importance of Getting Out of Your Own Way

In this episode, Sarah and her guest Eliza Meadows, discuss the unique techniques of somatic healing and its powerful benefits. Somatic healing involves soothing your nervous system in the midst of something uncomfortable. This discomfort can include emotional pain, fear, traumatic memory, or feelings of anxiety. Eliza is a licensed therapist and a certified Organic Intelligence Somatic Coach. Eliza explains the fundamentals of this method, which has been branched off from "Somatic Experience".

Eliza Meadows website: https://www.elizameadows.com/
Organic Intelligence website: https://organicintelligence.org/
Sarah's Somatic Healing Exercises sheet

TSD Mindfulness Virtual Meditation Center FREE monthly meditation group meets the third Saturday of each month at 10:00 AM New York Time/3:00 PM London Time. Third Saturday of each month. Join us, May 18, 2024. Register at https://www.tsdmind.org/group

Important links:
TSD Mindfulness Virtual Meditation Center https://www.tsdmind.org
Sarah's Mindfulness Coaching website: https://www.sarahvallely.com
The Aware Mind on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/TSD_Mindfulness/

This episode is a meditation for beginners, and mindfulness for beginners resource. Intermediate and advanced meditators will also benefit. The Aware Mind produces content that supports stress reduction, anxiety relief, better concentration and focus, and trauma healing.

The Aware Mind is produced by TSD Mindfulness, a virtual meditation center, offering mindfulness classes, certifications and private coaching for people with past trauma, anxiety and depression disorders, business leaders, and people who work in the helping professions (i.e. counselors, healers and yoga and meditation teachers).

Transcript

At this point, every information portal is saturated with mindfulness content.  But this show is a unique, unusual, curious take on mindfulness.  Some of what you hear will be completely new to you.  Let's dive in and take a look at the nature of the aware mind. I invite you to deepen your awareness so that you may be liberated and inspired. 

I'm Sarah Vallely, professional coach. I help people overcome anxiety, heal from past trauma, improve their relationships, and maintain better work life balance. Welcome to the show. Our topic today is somatic healing and how to get out of our own way. My guest today is Eliza Meadows. She's been on the show before.

We did an episode about our own mindfulness meditation. We're going to Practices. I'm so glad that she's back. She is a licensed therapist and nutritionist and specializes in working with people who have anxiety and a history of trauma. She is also a certified mindfulness based stress reduction teacher and a certified organic intelligence coach, which you will hear more about in this episode.

Welcome Eliza. Thanks, Sarah. Really good to be back. So I want to outline what somatic healing is. I know so many of us have heard that term, and we might have a vague sense of what it means, but a lot of us might not really understand what somatic healing entails. And I want to begin by Mentioning the difference between top down and bottom up therapy or coaching when you're working with people top down a typical example is cognitive behavioral therapy.

And what happens is, is we talk about the thinking that is causing some issues, causing stress. We talk about how we can change that thinking that will then trickle down. And. We will start feeling better physically. Our nervous system will start settling after we reframe our thinking. Uh, bottom up is different.

Bottom up. We use exercises to directly soothe our body, directly soothe our nervous system that in turn help bring peace to the mind, the somatic healing. Definitely involves this bottom up approach directly addressing the nervous system and the body. I think any good therapist or good coach will use both ways.

The reason is, is because, honestly, some clients aren't that interested in the bottom up approach. approach. They really want to stay in their comfort zone, which is talking about some of those thoughts. And then some people prefer working directly with the nervous system. So being able to have both of those tools, I think is the most effective.

Talking more specifically about somatic healing, we need to understand trauma because somatic healing addresses, heals trauma. Trauma and trauma is held in our bodies on a cellular level. That's the ideology behind somatic healing practices and that these emotions are held in the body. They're, they're essentially trapped is one way to think about it.

The part about somatic healing that often loses me is understanding on a concrete level, like, how does that even happen? Like, how do our emotions even, like, get in our muscles and in our body? Like, that's just really hard for me to wrap my brain around, but I I was reading one particular article and it used the word impulses and it said that you can think of the emotions trapped in our muscles as impulses.

The impulses are there. And these trapped memories affect our nervous system. So that's the bottom line here is that, you know, we're getting triggered into fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and it's, it's very uncomfortable and it can really have an effect on the quality of our life. And coaches and therapists who use this approach work with the parts of the trauma one at a time, typically move through the healing process.

A really good resource is The Body Keeps a Score. That's a pretty well known book that covers this trauma really held in our body.  Thanks for setting the stage for us.  Well, as you know, I'm trained in this method called Organic Intelligence. We are looking primarily at post trauma growth. Rather than going back to the trauma itself, there's some real risks in that.

Whereas in Organic Intelligence, What we're looking for is to rebalance the neurobiology that has gotten imbalanced because the system was overwhelmed due to some either chronic stress that has been stored in the body as a trauma. or due to an acute scenario that was overwhelming to the system and the physiology didn't have a chance to protect itself with our fight, flight, freeze responses.

What we look at is how to get the system to increase its capacity for intensity again, actually, because what happens in trauma is that the system becomes overwhelmed. And we no longer can process or work with the natural intensities of life, full schedule, lots of activities of daily living to take care of, challenging relationships.

So what we're trying to do is increase their processing capacity to handle complexity and therefore their resiliency. We can access that through these five channels. It could be what we're feeling in our body, what emotions are present, what images arise when we're thinking about something. The meaning we make out of what's happening for us, our stories, what we might perceive as the experience of the body, but also of the mind and heart.

So basically what I'm hearing, Eliza, is that when we've had trauma, our nervous system will react more than someone maybe without that history will react to situations that maybe wouldn't be that much of a threat to someone else without that history. And because The nervous system is more sensitive in a way, right?

It's probably because it's the nervous system is already engaged on a semi permanent basis. So it doesn't take much to just hit that nervous system into higher gear. Then what ends up happening is. We just get overwhelmed. We have this anxiety and sometimes we can start questioning, well, why do I feel like I'm in flight right now?

Why do I feel like I'm just frozen when this isn't really that huge of a deal in the big scheme of things. And so it can be really confusing, but I think you explained that in a really good way to help us understand why that's actually. Happening when this stimuli is coming in to our experience, these are the different ways that that stimuli can come in.

It can come in through what we're seeing, right? We know that that's how the education model for learning happens is that we're in the sensory phase where things just come in. We are seeing images. We are also feeling physical sensations, whether they're from the outside world or they're coming from within us.

And then some emotions might be coming up because we do have a lot of emotions that are connected to past trauma.  I really appreciate you pointing out that, yeah, if somebody is feeling overwhelmed with what's happening in their life due to something that happened in their past,  It's not their fault. I just think it's so important and I appreciated you pointing that out that it can feel confusing because it could be like, you know, I used to be able to do this.

XYZ thing without that much problem, but now for some reason it feels really overwhelming. And that is an indication that there's been overwhelm in the system and we just need to back down the intensity so that the system can start to auto organize again. When I say auto organize, we're looking for those really healthy wave like pattern of we're in a resting state.

And then our Our system accelerates up to meet a challenge, like, Oh, I have to go check my email. There's an excitation, and I, my energy rises, and I do that, and then it decelerates, and I'm in a restful state again, and we want to see this wave like pattern throughout our day.  All right, so let me use an example and see if I can walk myself through this process.

So let's say someone goes through a breakup. That is somewhat of a current trauma. It also can bring up old trauma.  It's post the breakup and then it's like that time where just things just feel really awful. So that physical part could be just maybe pain in the chest. That would be that physical channel, the emotions, maybe it brings up an abandonment trigger.

Maybe the emotion is just feeling so rejected, so hurt, you know, real emotional pain. And then the images might be memories of the relationship that could be like exacerbating the emotion. I feel like the meaning channel could be used in a really bad way, or it could be used in a really good way. The meaning channel could be Oh, well, this means that I'm unworthy, that this is my fault, that people are never going to choose me, I'm not good enough.

But if we were using that channel in a more healthy way, that meaning would be, well, it just wasn't the right fit, we weren't good together, there were some issues that we couldn't resolve. How might someone in that situation use, use this approach? That's a good example. In order to describe that, I have to bring in  one more major concept, which is positive reinforcement versus negative reinforcement.

What negative reinforcement is, removal of a painful stimulus encourages The behavior to continue  with positive reinforcement. It's the including of a positive or pleasant stimulus encourages the behavior to continue. What happens with people who are going through a painful situation is they may have had the experience where their system is almost trained to expect that it has to get worse.

before it gets better because of a history of  negative reinforcement. It's like the no pain, no gain. We're looking for the person to actually learn to trust that having a more pleasant experience can lead to positive change. I'm likely to try to find one of the channels that the person can connect with that has a more positively valent experience so that we can reduce the intensity of what's happening for them in that moment and therefore reduce the experience of overwhelm.

We might even go back to a positive memory of the relationship, which would be more of the meaning channel, more of the thought.  Let's say they even said something like, it felt so good to just cry, cried all of the grief that I felt, all of the loss, to really just let go and let our heart open and feel all of that sadness come out can feel so relieving.

So then I might say, well, how did you feel afterwards? And then I say, you know, it was funny, but I felt a lot more relaxed. And I'm like, oh, isn't that fascinating? And even as I heard you say that, I saw you sit back in your chair a little bit. So now I'm kind of switching to S channel sensation, and I'll say, oh my gosh, I can see you're even breathing a little bit more easily now.

Now we've kind of come down a whole notch. Let's say that we're getting really ramped up. It's like, it was horrible. I'm not good enough. I don't know what I'm going to do. And then we're able to identify some little piece that has a little bit more of a positive framework around it and get in there and you see their systems start to decelerate.

So now we're back onto our  of looking for those waves of intensity. What we begin to see then is increased processing capacity. It's not overwhelming to be able to feel the healthy natural spectrum of emotions and thoughts that would be associated with a breakup because they have the resiliency and the capacity to feel that.

If you've got the capacity for it, you can have a very intense experience and it doesn't register as negative.  My understanding of the nervous system and how I work with clients is this idea that our nervous system is like our smartphone or our smart thermostat. It's conditioned. It's conditioned to respond in certain ways in certain situations over time.

You know, just you're, you're learning through all these experiences you had, especially when you're a child. And so when we do something like this, when we move into a more settled, calmer physical feeling in the midst of something traumatic or semi traumatic, then what you're doing is you're literally conditioning your nervous system to say, oh, okay, this actually isn't as dangerous as we thought.

I can survive through this. And the more times you can go through that process of having a settled nervous system while in the midst of something difficult. that those just compile on one another and you eventually recondition your nervous system and your nervous system won't necessarily respond in the same way.

So to me, that's so much the essence of somatic healing is that balance.  I think you defined resiliency. That is the goal of this work  for post trauma growth. To help folks who have a history of trauma to be able to be with the challenges of life with the complexities of life that no longer feel overwhelming, like you're saying.

So we have image, which would be the images that arise in our mind,  sensation, orientation, meaning, and affect, which is the emotions. And so then what would orientation be? Ooh, I'm so glad you asked.  Yay!  Yay!  What we're doing in organic intelligence is we're moving from the nervous system being very disorganized or dysregulated into a place where we can, through using techniques, so we're using a little bit of effort to move through our day by bringing in our brain.

practices of meditation or breathing or CBT, changing your thoughts. And then we move into auto organization where it really is just set it and forget it in a way. I mean, that's oversimplifying it, but that you really can handle more without feeling overwhelmed. And the orientation is the key to setting the initial conditions.

So that we can move towards auto organization. Part of our awareness is able to stay attuned to and alert to and aware of our external environment around us.  In the moment, this dovetails really nicely with mindfulness. We're using awareness of seeing, hearing the birds outside, and I can see what's around me.

Is this is giving direct sensory input. into our nervous system that is telling the reptilian part of our brain that doesn't respond much to our executive thinking. We can think, Oh, I'm okay. Settle down. There's nothing wrong. We could think that all day, but our nervous system, we might still feel really ramped up when we're orienting to our external environment.

Our eyes are telling us There's no real immediate danger here. I'm looking at some trees out the window. I'm looking at a lamp on my desk. I'm hearing the whir of the refrigerator in the background, or I'm touching the cup that's in my hand. And this is on a visceral level, a  direct experience input into our nervous system that says there's nothing going on.

You're okay. I'm okay. In the beginning of working with somebody who's more disorganized and working towards this being more self organized. We actually teach orientation as a foundational skill to go back to again and again and again. to help the system calm down, be in a state of less intensity so that we do have that increased capacity.

We've got room to take in more challenge. What this is reminding me of is an exercise that I call levels of satisfaction. Have someone close their eyes, And think of something that's going on in their life for no other reason other than it's just something going on in their life. And then I have them put a satisfaction level on it.

Very satisfied, a little bit satisfied, neutral, not satisfied, very not satisfied. If it's somebody who's dealing with a lot of anxiety, a good chance is the satisfaction level is going to be pretty low. And then I will have them consider something else going on in their life. And Do the same thing, assign a satisfaction level.

So I might do that three times. And then I have them take note of the present moment, the temperature of the air in the room, and I have them put a satisfaction level on that and are usually pretty neutral, or they're quite satisfied with the temperature of the air or to notice their comfort in the chair that they're sitting in, you know, something that's really in that.

moment, and then they realize that when they shift their attention to the moment and what's going on, they are actually somewhat satisfied. So is that kind of on the same line of this orientation? Yep, in the moment, realistic input of how you're doing right now. Even though there might be some really big challenges in your life, In this particular moment, the fact if you're, if we're sitting here talking to one another in a relatively relaxed setting, that high percentage of you is really okay.

Yeah, it helps register that consciously, even amidst the larger challenges or the parts that aren't satisfying. And that aligns so much with mindfulness because in mindfulness, you know, what we're trying to do is let go of the future and let go of the past and just be here in the present. And, uh, so that could be so good for our overall well being.

Considering that somatic healing is Getting out of your own way so that your body can do its thing, which is naturally heal, right? Another aspect of somatic healing is that we are completely capable of physical healing, emotional healing, mental healing, all of that, as long as we can get out of the way.

And so for me, When I meditate, I consider that a practice of getting out of my own way, right? I'm letting go of all the, the thinking, the worry thinking, the rumination, all that. It doesn't need to be part of the experience. So I'm shedding, shedding, shedding. And so I'm just there and my body, I swear, I just, it starts like healing.

Like I can feel it. And the one thing that's the most pronounced is my jaw. So I have some. TMJ. And when I meditate, it just starts to release. Our bodies really can heal once we let go of the shame and the overthinking and, and all those things. What, what are your thoughts on that as far as, you know, how that plays a role in organic intelligence?

We're getting out of our own way. And letting the organic, natural intelligence of this being that we inhabit can correct itself. Trying its darndest to do its best to bring us through life and all the trials with just the best that it can. I share with you when I'm sitting in meditation and getting more and more relaxed.

I'll even sometimes get, you know, real releases from my muscles. I get quivering, shaking. You know, my sense is that it is a pent up stress or trauma that has been housed physiologically that just needs to release. Feels so good. At least through my practice, one of the typical success stories of that is abdominal pain, abdominal issues.

Is that through, you know, Coaching through therapy, if it's direct somatic healing, you know, often those abdominal issues will get better. But if listeners are wondering, you know, is somatic healing right for me? Is organic intelligence right for me? Here's some ailments that somatic healing is usually effective in treating.

And I'd love to hear from you Eliza what you would add to this list. Some mental emotional manifestations of trauma such as anxiety, panic attacks, Disassociation, OCD, maybe some more physical manifestations of trauma, loss of sleep, lack of focus, abdominal pain, nervous system activation. I've heard migraines, and this work can be helpful for migraines.

I agree. That's often how dysregulation presents. These are some of the symptoms that we see. Maybe some of the listeners have heard of working on vagus nerve or vagal tone. That nerve comes down from our mouth, innervates our throat, our swallowing, our lungs, our breathing, and comes down into our digestive system.

So that's where often we'll see many of the symptoms. Restricted breathing, you know, the breath just feels really shallow. And that leads to higher blood pressure. It leads to a sense of panic. We can't get a deep breath. And that's where the digestive complaints would come in as well. Stomach pains, diarrhea, constipation,  an actual reduction in stomach acid happens.

Now, here comes in my nutrition part. When we're breathing shallowly and we're indicating that there might be an immediate threat around us. So our body shuts down the digestive system. It's not the time to be digesting food. We need to run and fight. Unfortunately, then over time that leads to a decrease.

stomach acid, and we can especially have trouble with proteins and a sense of early fullness. Like, we can't eat very much, and I hear that from a lot of clients who are like, Oh, I can't, just can't even eat. You know, it's just like a rock in my stomach. It's just sitting up there. Someone with a high ACEs score.

ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Event. We've seen that that leads to all kinds of physiological changes, but also more likely addiction. Whenever I see somebody who has a number of adverse childhood events that have happened, whether it be abuse in the household, addiction in the household, then I almost always see that they also are having trouble with it.

They're digestion and they're also having trouble with anxiety and it just kind of all goes together. Yeah, it's incredible, right? I mean, that's really the mind body connection. It's so true. We forget it when we get wrapped up in our culture that that's a thing, but it's so connected.  And so the last question I wanted to ask you is about self compassion.

What I've noticed with myself and my clients is that self compassion can be such a effective way to regulate the nervous system, especially for people who are dealing with shame. I'm not good enough. I'm not enough. Bad things always happen to me. From what I understand, self compassion is part of organic intelligence.

Is that true? Absolutely. We learn self compassion through modeling and experiencing a compassion from someone else. So the foundation of the organic intelligence framework is attunement. We talk about really meeting the client where they're at in attuning to whatever is happening for them is of the most important thing in the room that we validate their experience. 

and help them learn to have compassion for whatever difficulty, you know, some psycho education like we did at the beginning to say, this is exactly how we would expect a system to respond. That's been through the trials that you've been through. Any body, human body, mind, it's heart system that has experienced the challenges that you've experienced would probably have these.

sorts of symptoms and sort of malfunctions happening as it's trying to write itself.  Experience of the provider. Sitting in a compassionate way, just that in itself can help the person's system downregulate. They see that they're safe. They see that there's nothing wrong with them. There's nothing to be ashamed of.

That can help start to reduce that intensity that I was talking about.  It's so important to get the intensity to come down to a level where their system can digest and metabolize the events of their past. So to my clients who are listening, Eliza is talking about validation, which we talk about a lot, right?

It's understandable that my nervous system is triggered because of my past trauma. I've had clients say to me, It's okay. It's okay to have these emotions. Yes, it's okay. You know, all of that validation is, is so important. Well, Eliza, I've learned a lot just talking to you today about organic intelligence.

It's such a valuable topic. And I'm so glad you're out there using these tools as a coach and a therapist. I would love for you to share with the audience what you offer and how people can get ahold of you and any organic intelligence resources that you'd like to share. The organic intelligence website is full of wonderful resources.

There's a scientific article that has a free download right on the front page that, while dense, does get into a lot of the science behind it and I think is a wonderful. starting point for anybody interested in learning more. And that's at organic intelligence dot O R G. There's also a provider directory available now for certified coaches like me, for those who want to work with me more directly.

My website is Eliza meadows. com and I see people all over the world for coaching, or I'm licensed in the States or psychotherapy in. North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Washington State. I also do a live guided meditation on the free app, Insight Timer, every Wednesday morning, 8 a. m. Eastern Time. 

Thank you, Eliza. I'm so glad you are on the planet doing the work that you're doing, and I will put a link to your website in the show notes. So thanks so much for being on the show today. Thanks, Sarah. Wonderful to be here, and thanks for doing what you do. The Aware Mind Podcast is A TSD Mindfulness production.