Somatic coaching and the nervous system regulation are buzzwords these days, but what exactly is somatic coaching and how can it help you on your journey?
Tune into today's episode where I will debunk some myths and show you exactly how and why somatic coaching can positively impact your life. If you want to FEEL more joy, pleasure, and love then this episode is for you!
I am also so excited to announce I will be offering live virtual breathwork sessions starting in December. You can click the link below to get on my waitlist and get first access to this offer. Breathwork is one of my favorite somatic tools and it will leave you feeling lighter and more grounded in your body than ever before.
Get on the waitlist here.
Let's Connect.
Free guide: 5 ways to find Calm: Get the guide here
Come find me on Instagram: @findherwildcoaching
Check out my website and my offerings here
Somatic coaching and the nervous system regulation are buzzwords these days, but what exactly is somatic coaching and how can it help you on your journey?
Tune into today's episode where I will debunk some myths and show you exactly how and why somatic coaching can positively impact your life. If you want to FEEL more joy, pleasure, and love then this episode is for you!
I am also so excited to announce I will be offering live virtual breathwork sessions starting in December. You can click the link below to get on my waitlist and get first access to this offer. Breathwork is one of my favorite somatic tools and it will leave you feeling lighter and more grounded in your body than ever before.
Get on the waitlist here.
Let's Connect.
Free guide: 5 ways to find Calm: Get the guide here
Come find me on Instagram: @findherwildcoaching
Check out my website and my offerings here
Hi, my name is Bridget and this is my podcast, wake Up and Thrive. My intention for this space is to help women around the world live more awake, aligned and truly alive. I believe wholeheartedly that we are designed to live, feel and experience the full range that life has to offer, and in doing so, we can live fully turned on in all areas. My story began with sobriety and has since been an initiation into rediscovering parts of myself that I forgot about or had abandoned. Learning to reclaim all of who I am has been the greatest gift of living awake, and together we will go on a journey of helping you to do the same. You can expect to learn practical tools to help you connect deeper to yourself, your purpose and those in your life. All you need is an open heart and an open mind. So if you're ready, it's time. It's time to wake up and thrive. Happy Monday, good morning, welcome back to Wake Up and Thrive. I hope you guys are listening to this after a restful weekend. Let's be honest, I'm sure it was busy and packed, just like mine was, but I hope you you guys got some time to go outside and just enjoy where you live.
Speaker 1:I have really been like savoring this season. This is my birthday season, so I always used to joke that it's my favorite. But I'm not kidding you Like it is my favorite. I have never, ever, ever, seen trees this bright, colorful, crisp, like beautiful fall autumn trees. And in my neighborhood there are so many freaking trees Like that's all you see. All of the houses are pulled really back, far from the street, so you're just trees, trees for days. So I've really just been savoring, like, all the details and just loving all of it. And why am I sharing that? I actually don't really know, other than the fact that I'm looking out my window at these beautiful trees. But honestly, it does sort of relate to what I'm talking about, because a year ago I wouldn't have noticed this. A year ago I wouldn't have been taking the time to really just enjoy and be fully present to what's in front of me. And this kind of goes along with what I want to talk to you guys about today. So I was recently interviewed for a magazine and they this article will be published at some point in 2023. So I'll share that here once it gets published.
Speaker 1:But they asked me a question about what was the biggest turning point or the biggest tool that you learned that really transformed your journey, and immediately my thought was somatic coaching. It was learning to get into my body, learning to use my body to enjoy my life Right, just like I'm using my eyes and my, my note, like all of my senses, to really enjoy this season and every like, all the beauty that is around me. This is something that came through somatic coaching for me, so I've talked about it a lot before on here. I've mentioned the term, but I thought I would just do a whole episode to sort of debunk some myths about it and explain how it could, how it has helped me and maybe even how it could help you. So let's dive in.
Speaker 1:So somatic coaching, by definition, is a. It's derived from the word soma, which means body, and it is a relatively new area of expertise. But it is becoming more and more popular as we start to do more research on trauma and the nervous system, and I'm really excited that I'm I'm sort of a part of this now, while it's still just being introduced, there are still so many people that I meet that are like, what somatic coaching, what does it mean? To get into your body, why is that even like helpful? And so it's. It's really kind of an exciting time to be first of all being trained in this but also to be sharing it with all of you guys now. You guys are ahead of a lot of people in this world.
Speaker 1:So coaching as a whole is a body based coaching modality and there's tons of different tools under it. I've mentioned this before. I'll talk about it a little at the end, but I am going to be. I am in the process of being trained to lead breath work, which is another incredible somatic modality there can be. There's, there's a ton. I mean yoga could be considered somatic coaching if used properly. There is sound baths. There is Kundalini yoga is another one I love. There is soul flow is a type of dance. There's feminine embodiment courses out there I'm sort of drawing a blank, but there there's a lot of different. Some massage therapy can be another form of somatic therapy, if you will not necessarily coaching Reiki, like. There's just a lot of different energy body based modalities that can be underneath this umbrella of somatics.
Speaker 1:Okay, but what I really love about somatic coaching is somatic coaching believes that the people don't necessarily change because they have knowledge right. Knowledge is actually not power. Applied knowledge is power. So, in other words, people change because they engage in new practices. So somatic coaching is a way to teach you to actually physically embody what it is that you're learning. And I think a huge barrier to getting help for a lot of people, especially people with trauma, is this fear of sort of reliving the story of what happened, having to rehash and talk about their life experiences.
Speaker 1:And somatic coaching allows you to let your body do the talking, allows your body to do the work and it helps you to really release blocks like true, true blocks that are stuck in the tissues of your body, sometimes without ever having to talk about it. Okay, so consuming so much knowledge and then engaging in so much talking can only take you so far. It really really can. It is literally. If you just think of the body, it's engaging just from the neck up, that is. That's such a small part of you as a human being, like think, just think about, proportionally wise, how much there is from the neck down right. There's so much more body and of course, you're from the neck up as part of your body as well. But you get what I'm saying. Like you have to incorporate the body If we're only incorporating the mind and cognitive behavioral therapy, talk therapy we're missing a huge aspect of the human experience. So I've talked about this before but I want to just share it just for you know, purely the sake of context, about how I got into this work.
Speaker 1:So in my journey, I started out working with a mindset coach. She was from the Life Coach School and you know I wouldn't say anything bad about her. I believe she was the perfect coach for me at that time. Truly because of her flaws in her coaching style, or at least what I deem flaws in her coaching style, it actually led me to this work. So I'm super, super grateful for her. I don't have any hard feelings towards her, but her only tool was to teach me to change my thoughts.
Speaker 1:There was one in particular situation circumstance I kept bumping up against. I remember saying to her if I could change my thought, I would, but it feels like it's attached to my bone. What I now know is it was attached to my nervous system. It was in the tissues of my body and I had to address the body first. Otherwise it's almost like when you don't address the body or the nervous system, those thoughts, those positive affirmations, they can't stick, being able to really clear out your body from anything that's trapped inside there. Anger, resentment, sadness, grief, like all of that is energy and it gets locked and trapped just for sake of just the society we live in, the way that we carry ourselves. We are not in a society that promotes expression, that promotes somatic release.
Speaker 1:I'll talk a little bit about that more, but I share that story because I think some of you guys are in a similar situation where you're reading the books, you're listening to the podcasts, you understand it's you. I know that you're what's creating your experience, but you're still not making that same shift or that shift. You're still experiencing the same patterns of behavior. I am telling you guys, it's because you're not incorporating the body. If you're not working with me, find somebody and I will say there are a lot of therapists now. I just met two of them locally and it was wonderful to hear that in their practice they incorporate somatic tools. It's not just coaching. You can absolutely find a mental health practitioner, but not everybody is trained in this. Just make sure that they are involving the body.
Speaker 1:The number one myth, or misunderstanding, if you will, about somatic coaching is I've heard a lot of people say, yeah, I know somatics, I practice it all the time. Then I talk to them and they really think it just means feeling your feeling like letting yourself cry, letting yourself be upset, learning how to bring yourself back to calm, regulating your nervous system. This is part of it. I think that's awesome. That is absolutely part of it is allowing your body to do what your body needs to do to release the energy. But a lot of somatic coaching most of it actually is learning to actually be with that experience. In the somatic coaching world we call this like creating a somatic body, which means you can actually hold more of life, you can hold more stress, you can hold more chaos because you have stretched your window of tolerance. You have stretched your nervous system not stretched it, but become more resilient to being able to go outside of your window tolerance and being able to bring yourself right back down to homeostasis. You do this by learning how to be the observer of your experience. This does absolutely involve working with the body. So somatic tools, somatic coaching it teaches you how to separate from your emotions and work with them from an objective standpoint, because if you're in the emotional experience, if you're actually angry, working with your anger becomes really hard to do. I don't know if that makes sense. That's a really important part about somatic coaching.
Speaker 1:Then, speaking of the nervous system, so just an interesting fact that you might know, but it goes along with why I love somatic coaching. The nervous system is a huge buzzword, right. Everybody's talking about this ventral vagus nerve, this huge nerves nerve bundle in your body. But did you know that 80% of the nerve fibers send information from the body to the brain and only 20% Send information from the brain to the body? So when I hear this, it just reminds me that, yes, our thoughts can create an emotional experience for us, absolutely, and that's kind of where we get the word perception right. When we're looking at a situation or circumstance, our mind creates stories and makes meaning out of it, and that's how we can Create an emotional experience. We can create feelings from that, and that's that's great news because we can control that.
Speaker 1:There's also something called neuroception, and neuroception refers to sort of this phenomenon that 80% of the signals being sent to us, the majority of the signals, are coming from the bottom up. It's coming from the body up, so the body actually has nerves, nerve fibers. It's like wild you guys. But we all innately have this, where we can detect danger before our even, before our mind even catches up to it. Before we even can create a story about what we see, our body can start to react, which is why you have to incorporate the body. It's not just for people with trauma, it's for any human being with a human body. You have to understand the signals it's sending and most of us, it's not that we can't understand it, we're not even aware of the signals. So it's this complete repatterning and Rewriting how to sort of understand the language of the body. Dr Joe dispensas says the language of the mind is thoughts. The language of the language of the body is feelings, it's sensations.
Speaker 1:So one of the very first things I do with any of my one-on-one clients, any of my group programs, is we always start with a body-based tool or practice that you can put into place to start Relearning the language of your body, the language that is the body. The body is constantly talking, so just learning how to slow down and really tune in to that. And Speaking of my clients, so I was teaching one of my clients who's a single mama for and experiences Overwhelmed. Quite frequently I was teaching her this same concept and when we were talking about, in the moment, when you're overwhelmed, she was like I just can't even remember to like take a deep breath and I was saying let's just work with the body. So let's work on slowing down. Slow down your speech, right? Because when we're overwhelmed, like if we have to get out the door and we're running late, we can talk really fast, our hands can move really fast, our heart races, our breathing speeds up, everything speeds up.
Speaker 1:So if we can just use our body and slow down slow down the way that we're talking, slow down the way that we're moving, which seems really counterproductive if you're trying to get somewhere quickly, but the truth is you're actually going to have more access to your faculties, to your resources, to the part of your brain that you you need in those moments. So if we can slow the body down, it will send signals To the brain that we are safe, that it's okay, and it will turn on the parts of our brain that can help us come up with creative solutions to get out of the house quicker, can come up with ways to rationalize with your child, to get them to to move faster. Different, different I mean, there's so many different scenarios. This. This can happen at work for you with co-workers, it can happen at home with your kids, but just by simply using the body and slowing down, you can create a different experience for yourself. So the next time that you feel overwhelmed or in a frenzy, try that, instead of just trying to like Bypass your experience and tell yourself it's fine, we're fine, everything's fine. Well, you don't feel fine, right? So so try to just work with the body, try to slow everything down, try to soften the shoulders, try to open up your body a little bit, because we all also tend to like lean forward and and constrict I mean physiologically speaking. As we start to open, like soft, take your shoulders right now, you guys, and Round them down and away from your ears. Just soften them back down and Open your, put your chest out. Even that is going to increase blood flow throughout your whole body up to your brain, like all the things. Simply using somatics, using your body, to change and shift your experience. So it's really, really cool.
Speaker 1:Another really big reason that I love somatic coaching is you know, my tagline in my business is I help women become wildly turned on by life again. How do you become wildly turned on by life again. How do you actually enjoy your life? Well, you have to be in your body to be enjoying it, because that's where pleasure lives, like I mean, just think about what I was talking about in the beginning of this episode, about seeing the trees, enjoying the crisp breeze outside, like really taking time to take it all in. It's something that we don't do. I mean, how often do you eat a meal and rush through it instead of sitting and like savoring every bite? What does this taste like? What does this beautiful meal that I just prepared, or was prepared for me, actually feel like in my body? We don't take the time to do that right, and I'm going to be hosting a masterclass coming up on how to help women increase their desire for physical intimacy, and I credit somatic coaching to helping me with this, because it's all about sort of reawakening our relationship to pleasure in our body. Many women want to enjoy their life, but they want to do that by like shifting things outside of them or changing their mindset, and it's so counterproductive because you can't.
Speaker 1:Joy lives in the body. It's a feeling, feelings. You experience it in the body. So if you're disconnected by it, from your body from the neck down. It doesn't matter what you do on the outside, you won't feel it. You really won't feel that joy Like. Just remember when you were a kid. Remember what it felt like for you waiting for your birthday or waiting for Christmas, like that is joy. We lose that as adults. It's not just because we are older and boring Birthdays are boring Like no, because I'm telling you this past, like my birthday this past year, I experienced that like giddiness of my birthday is coming. I'm so excited and just like receiving everything that was there. It was such a great day.
Speaker 1:But it comes from learning to feel pleasure again inside our bodies and this is this is a really fun part of somatic coaching. So we have we really do have the ability to feel good in any given moment using sound breath and movement, but it's it's an art and we have lost sight of this art. We live in a society that is set up where pleasure is not prioritized, pleasure is not prioritized, productivity is. We focus more and glamorize more pressure, like the pressure we put on ourselves, then the pleasure, then leaning into pleasure, and so learning to really get into the body and working to wake up these sensations. Many of the women I meet, like we're numb. We are literally numb. I know for me from drinking alcohol for so many years, like there were so many parts of my body I don't know. It's just like I had never felt before. I had actually never felt before because I spent so much time numbing my entire body and just living in my head. So if you want to feel good, you have to know how to recognize, feel good sensations in your body and it will change your life. So it'll make somatic coaching, will make the most mundane situations, like a normal fall day, into such an enjoyable and pleasurable experience and it will allow you to nourish your body in the way that it was created to be nourished. Right.
Speaker 1:We've heard you guys have heard about intuitive eating, intuitive movement. Well, this is somatic. This is somatics at play. Like that's what we're talking about. You can't read a book about how someone else eats and then eat that way and call it intuitive eating. Like intuitive eating is put the book down, get off the internet and tune in. Tune into how your body reacts to the food that you're putting in. What does it enjoy, what tastes really like, light you up, that sort of thing. That's what I'm talking about. So, yeah, again, I'm gonna sort of wrap this up.
Speaker 1:I could talk forever about it, but our bodies are so, so, wise, and so if more people were walking around connected to your body, their body, there would be less blaming, there would be less fighting, there would be more connection, more love, more enjoyment, more fun, right, and again, we all want more love in this world, especially now more than ever. But you can't think yourself into it. You can't just tell yourself a feel good story about wanting to put more love out in the world. You actually have to be it. You have to first feel it, then you have to be it and then it will overflow from you and out to the world. You have to become an embodiment for that feeling, and so somatic coaching is really, really, really just this amazing way to do that.
Speaker 1:So I hope that sort of gave you a little bit more insight and understanding into this type of coaching and even what it would be like to work with me. I do not ever start with mindset. It's just not an effective way to start. I think this is the foundational tool before you can even really dive into that work. And the last thing I want to say is that come the end of the mid-November, I will be certified in something called the Reset Breathwork and I'm actually really excited. I'm gonna be having my instructors, dr Corey and Jess the healing couple come on my podcast in the next few weeks so that you guys can really get a better insight into what this is and how it might help you.
Speaker 1:But I'm gonna be starting to offer monthly breathwork sessions and it is I just I can't say enough about it and I also can't explain it Like you have to experience it. But it is such an incredible way to reset your nervous system. It is an incredible way to release some baggage without having to talk about it, sometimes without even knowing what it is. Just, you will feel lighter, you will feel more grounded in your body than probably ever before and you will feel sensations that you're like you will be like holy crap, I didn't even know I didn't even know I could feel those sensations. Like I thought you had to be medicated to feel those, but you are going to truly get high on your own supply and it is just such a cool experience and I wanna invite you guys, if you're listening and you're interested and you wanna be in the first round.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be a monthly, very, very affordable class. It's like going to a yoga class, but online. It's a 60 minute experience and it's just incredible. Each month will be a different theme and I will be your guide, and I'm really pumped about it. So I have attached a wait list in the show notes. If you would go, click that and just plop on that. That just lets me know, first of all, that people are listening and interested in this and it'll also help me sort of get my offerings out to you guys. So click the link below and get signed up. You can look for that in early December, and that's all I got for you guys this week. Hope you have a great rest of your week and please reach out, as always, if you have any questions.