Individual Somatic Movement Therapy

It’s possible to reconnect to our thoughts and feelings…

… through our body sensations. It’s done with “somatic movement.”

Somatic movement is any movement used to reach our (often hidden) inner world (our thoughts and feelings).

It allows us to recognize our acting, reacting, and interacting patterns. Only when we can examine them can we decide whether they’re worth changing.

The movement can be as minimal as breathing or making a facial expression or hand gesture. It can be as big and intense as running, jumping, or dancing around the room.

So… what happens in a somatic therapy session?

We’ll begin with movement…

The complete process usually takes about 12 sessions (it can vary from client to client).

When we first meet, I will ask you some questions about who you are and your goals. You might notice that I repeat your facial expressions, hands gestures, or general movement. It helps me connect to you by using embodiment, movement analysis, and somatic movement skills to learn about you and your patterns.

After that, we will go through a conscious movement session that can take between 10 to 30 minutes and help me learn even more about you (using the Laban Bartenieff Movement Analysis and Mindfulness techniques).

We will follow that session with a conversation about what came up in the session, focusing on your goals and setting expectations.

We will start with a guided imagination, breathing, and movement session in most sessions. As my work approach relies on Bartenieff development patterns, we will usually begin with breathing, grounding, and centering that can take place laying down or sitting if you can’t lay down. The rest of the movement will depend on the subject we are dealing with. It might be on the floor, walking, jumping, running, dancing, or leaning against something.

The type of movement and its intensity will often depend on how you interpret my guidance. It will depend on your own patterns.

I will never push you to move uncomfortably, but I will encourage you to get out of your comfort zone, so you can create the change you are looking for with my support.

When we do Pilates, jogging, play ball, or go to the gym, we move for the sake of movement. We have fun, gain muscle, speed, flexibility, and so on. In a somatic movement therapy session, we move to learn about ourselves and our patterns. You will be amazed how much you will learn about yourself when you take a step back and analyze your own movement patterns.

We will continue a discussion after and sometimes during the movement session.

We’ll raise your awareness of yourself…

I observe different movement patterns in simple tasks when working with a client. How they breathe, how they initiate a movement (picking up something off the floor, for example), how they engage in a conversation (facial expression, hand gestures, and core movement), and so on. It helps me reveal patterns of which the client is probably not aware.

For example, I had a client who kept saying: “I SEE that you are happy today.” “I SEE that you don’t have time today.” “I’m so happy to SEE you.” But every time she said that she closed her eyes. When I discover a pattern like that, I do not assume that I know WHY it’s happening. I try to come up with questions that will shed light on it and clear it up.

Every pattern we create serves us somehow or is from our past, and I will not attempt to “take it away” until a different, more supporting pattern is developed.

I come up with questions that help my clients figure it out independently.

Another client asked to work with me because he had consistent back pain. He did not come specifically for a somatic therapy session but more for stretching, strengthening, and working on moving to help his back.

I gave him a simple exercise of lifting an arm or a leg while lying down, and we worked on integrating breath support (using the breath to support the movement). We quickly discovered a pattern: he would breathe very deep and push all the air out quickly and strongly (almost explosive) at the beginning of the movement. After he exhaled, he didn’t have enough air in his lungs to complete the movement. He didn’t know how to use breath support and initiated so strongly that he had no resources to complete the process.

A conversation that followed the exercise revealed that he tends to initiate many things in this way. Strong, quick, and with 150% of his energy and resources. He exerts his resources from the beginning and gets to the end of the process with poor support. In this emotional and physical situation, the back muscles come into action for support. I showed him exercises for strength and flexibility, but learning to use breath support made the difference.

I’ll give you additional coaching…

My client’s back felt better, and he left with more concrete knowledge of how to take care of himself and his back. This knowledge will support him for the rest of his life.

At the end of the process, you might realize that your body-mind-spirit is very rich and has infinite growth.

If you choose to keep exploring, reveal more patterns and create ones that are more supportive for you, we will create a continuing process that will be flexible and specific for your discoveries.

Another option will be to join the somatic movement group exploration.

Sometimes we’ll pull back from movement and talk more. This could feel like a normal conversation, but on my side, I keep paying attention to your movement and help you notice the type of language you use, especially if you use verbs (that indicates movement) or phrases that have somatic meaning.

Take, for example, Carol king song:

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumblin’ down
I feel my heart start to tremblin’
Whenever you’re around

Each sentence is loaded with embodiment and somatic meaning. When we say that the “earth is moving under our feet,” it usually means a feeling of change, instability, and lack of grounding. But the most interesting part of my work is the understanding that each person experiences this moving ground differently.

For some, it’s scary, maybe even paralyzing. For some, it’s exciting and pushes them to action. There are no right or wrong patterns.

I would bring up questions such as:

• What is your stable ground?
• What helps you find stability, grounding, and centering?
• How does it really feel when it’s shifting?
• What can you do to support yourself through the process…? and so on.

My job is to help you go deep into the embodied experience of what you just said and reflect on what it really means to you. Then, when you are fully aware of your patterns, you can decide if you want to keep them or change them.

At the end of every session…

You’ll leave with a new exercise or tool to support you until our next session.

Usually, the exercise includes breathing, grounding, and centering practice that you learn during the session, using different body-mind-spirit practices and mindfulness techniques.

Other tasks will be related to subjects that came up in the sessions.

It will usually be related to keeping records of patterns by noticing them and writing them down. For example, if you tell me that you have many ideas but you never pursue any of them, I will give you specific tasks that will help you understand where exactly the process stops. I will probably ask you to write, specify your ideas, but what are you doing to execute them and what happens from that moment. Then we have more detail of the issue, and we can zoom out to the big picture. When we know what happens and when it happens, with my support, you might want to find out why it happens and how you can change it.

Other home tasks are more coaching-based. Those will be mainly written tasks to learn more about the resources in your environment and the systems that exist in your world.

As a social worker graduate, I’m basing my work on the strengths-perspective. I believe that a growth process should begin by finding all of our inner and outer (everyone and everything around us) strengths and recourses.