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Somatic self-care prioritizes connection to and care for your soma, helping you move towards aliveness and wholeness. Our bodies are both the vessels and the instruments of our experiences. Somatic self-care is an art, a practice of attuning to the whispers and wisdom within. It is the tender act of nurturing our nervous system, honoring the sacred connection between body, mind, spirit, and the systems that shape us.
Functional freeze is a nervous system experience that occurs when we are in fight, flight, and collapse simultaneously, with little access to the ventral vagal (safety) branch of our nervous system. What this looks like in our day-to-day experience is a constant sense of overwhelm, like you can’t possibly take on more, AND a constant sense of urgency to do more anyway.
✨Somatics✨ is a trendy word these days and yet I often find that folks have only a vague sense of what it means. This makes so much sense because people are often using it to talk about anything that has to do with the body…and there are a thousand and one ways to work with the territory of our soma so it can all feel a bit confusing…
This somatic meditation, based on the work of Kathy Kain and Alaine Duncan, can help our nervous system shift into a more easeful parasympathetic response - helping our body to choose relaxing instead of bracing.
I can’t tell you how many times someone has come to work with me in the hopes of learning “how to better manage their emotions.” This expectation makes so much sense in a colonized capitalist culture where there is a multi-generational paradigm that has taught us to relate to Life from a place of control and ‘power over’. It even permeates healing and wellness culture…
Having a yoga and/or meditation practice doesn’t necessarily equate to a spacious nervous system.
This is a visualization practice intended to support us any time we are feeling drained, small, resentful, or afraid. As we move through our day we can sometimes experience power leaks - we might be giving our power away through obsessing about a person or experience that we do not ultimately have control over.
Written by Katie Allcorn
33 days into my sobriety, I cried into my tuna sandwich. I was crying because with all the mercury and discarded by-catch, I didn’t believe in eating tuna but here I was, eating it anyway. I was crying because I felt ill-equipped to be a mother. I was crying because work stress wouldn’t give me a minute. But I was mostly crying because I was no longer comfortably numb, and I was feeling all the feels that could be felt.
We are in a space in time where the collective energy of fear is like a dark and heavy cloak we can find ourselves swimming in. In order to move through it we must first allow ourselves to feel it, and then ultimately allow that darkness to catalyze us to take action and return us to our values.