So one of the things that I think a lot of people really struggle with in body-based therapies is figuring out how to describe how you're feeling. Typically, when we answer, “how are you feeling today?” we have some kind of emotional word, like, we feel good or sad, or we might even get really specific and say, “I feel really betrayed today.”

But we're actually going to change the whole meaning of the word “feeling” when we're working in a body-based, mental health therapy space. Because if you think about the word “feel,” it really is a physical word, right? So we're going to try really hard from now on to only describe how we feel with physical descriptors.

For example, if I'm asking about how you're feeling in a certain part of your body, I might even ask you to choose kind of where you're feeling something in your body.

So now we're going to try really hard to learn this new language of describing how we're feeling with physical descriptors. So I might ask how you're feeling in a certain part of your body and actually help you describe it. Um, so a lot of people quickly go to like tension in their neck or their shoulders, or maybe they've got a headache or a tight jaw.

Um, You know, if you have somewhere, somewhere with pain in your body, that usually is a little bit easier to describe what's going on. Um, rather than somewhere that's maybe more neutral or not in pain, but that is still important to learn how to describe. Okay, so we might describe it as something like, well, it feels deep inside or maybe it's, you know, it's more shallow.

Or there might be shooting pain through the bone or just in a certain part of your body. Um, is it more, you know, surface level or like a, like a tingling on your skin? Is it hot or warm? Cool. Cold. Maybe it's just neutral. Um, it's, you know, room, temperature, body temperature for this particular area in your body.

If you were to think about it, um, and actually visualize it, does it have a shape?. You know, does, what does it look like if you were to think about this pain, this feeling, maybe it looks like a blob, you know, there's really no shape to it, or maybe it is very circular, you know, that it, it actually, you can envision it like a circle in your body.

Um, is it radiating out or does the boundary of it? Is it very rigid? It's like, this is the pain is right here and only right here. You know, sometimes we're really not sure. A lot of times, we're not sure how to describe our pain mentally, emotionally, physically. It is really difficult to pinpoint that,

if you're a very visual person, you might even be able to give it a color. Um, this is not something that everyone can do or has to do, uh, but if a color comes to mind or even a certain image comes to mind when you're thinking about this pain, that can be relevant and helpful to what we're doing in a body-based therapy.

Now, I think where people get really stuck is okay, what's next. We're here. We've just told you how our pain feels. We can describe it really clearly, but what's next is I think the thing that most people struggle with when they first begin this type of therapy.

What do we do after we start feeling these feelings and these sensations in our body. We can describe it really clearly, but what's next is I think the thing that most people struggle with when they first begin body-based therapies.

So if that's you, if it's hard to sit in that space, um, I want you to just think about this for a moment. If somebody asks you how you feel emotionally, and you say I'm having a really bad day today, and then someone immediately has some kind of advice to give you about how you could fix that. What's your initial reaction.

You know, you come to me and you tell me, you just had a really rough day at work. I'm exhausted. I just, you know, everything went wrong. And then I say to you, oh, well, you know, you should really work on getting better sleep at night because then you wouldn't be so tired and it wouldn't be so hard to handle those stressors when they do happen.

What is your reaction right now? What do you feel inside? How do you deal with that? When someone says something like that, the feeling probably isn't. So consider that what you're feeling right now. And then I want you to think about the fact that we don't really want advice. A lot of times when you simply just let things be as they are, and you don't try to avoid them or change them, they end up changing on their own anyway.

Anyway. So if you just pay really close attention to what's happening without trying to manipulate it, things start to go in the direction that they're supposed to go into.

We want to know what does it feel like to have this sensation in my body? And over time, you start to recognize what that feeling that sensation means for you personally, you know, a tight jaw might mean anxiety for you, whereas somebody else it might mean something entirely different.

So keep that in mind that these feelings don't have to have a particular meaning to them. That is the same for everyone, but they will have a particular meaning to you. And the only way to really know what that meaning is, is through observation, through sitting with not knowing what it means

we have to be able to sit in the unknown before we can ever come to a knowing so we can actually use our intuition and say, Hmm, my jaw is tight. That means I'm actually feeling really uneasy about this conversation with this, with my partner. And here's the reason why, and it's not from a place of needing to fix and needing to figure out it's from a place of deep inner knowing.

So that's why we have to get comfortable with just feeling these things before we can actually know what they mean.

So I hope this was a little bit helpful and gives you a little bit of insight into what our work together might look like in the therapy room or the virtual therapy room. And if you would like to just sign up for an email list and learn a little bit more about somatic therapy, I'll be sending out monthly newsletters sometimes with videos, sometimes just words.

So feel free to sign up below. And if you're ready to actually book therapy sessions, and if you're a resident of Georgia, then please feel free to click the button below to set up a free consultation call today. Thank you.