Tag: Health

We get so confused. We get lost in thinking about our feelings, so lost we forget how to feel them.

Feelings are an experience, one we have directly. Our direct experiencing requires a body. We need a brain and sensory organs and the nerves to connect them.

Or maybe not all of that. Even an amoeba has “direct experience” when it engulfs something, or when it is tapped with an aversive stimulus, or whatever happens to amoebae.

For you and me, though, the brain, the sensory organs, and the connections are required. By sensory organs: I mean eyes, ears, taste buds, olfactory nerves, the sensory cells of proprioception. It gets a little murkier when we talk about interoception, that sense of “what’s happening in my body” because interoception synthesizes a lot of information.

But that doesn’t obscure my point.

My point is, we confuse our direct experience with our interpretation (our story) of our experience. For many people, the experience and the narration of it happen nearly simultaneously, and you might even wonder why we should bother to make such a distinction.

As therapists, especially as body psychotherapists, the distinctions are important.

What I experience and what I tell myself about what I experience are not the same thing. Try this exercise to separate them.

Stop whatever you’re doing (like reading this page) and take a moment to notice your direct experience. Stop thinking and notice what your body is experiencing. Notice without thinking about it.

Difficult? It can be.

To support your awareness, try this. Sit where you are and notice what you notice. Then put your hands over your heart and press in, just a bit. Hang out there for a few breaths.

Then bring one hand to your belly, pressing on both chest and belly. Breathe a few times, then allow the second hand to land on your belly. Keep breathing and noticing.

Now press your feet into the floor, just a little. Notice what you notice. Hands on belly, feet on floor. Breathe.

Let your hands and feet relax, and just notice. Just allow awareness to spread through your body, no story, just being aware. Hang out here for a few minutes, then bring your attention back to your reading.

You might have noticed a tendency to label experiences. Adding language means you’ve added thinking to the experience. Take a moment to see if you can notice, pause, and then let the language come.

How was that?

Clients want to talk about feelings, but they rarely understand that it’s okay, even good, to experience their feelings while in therapy. Therapy isn’t a consultation around how to manage your feelings. Instead it’s an opportunity to experience things in a different way, helping your nervous system learn flexibility and your mind find ways to soften rigid patterns of thinking and behaving.

Body-oriented psychotherapy works with direct experience of the here and now, which speaks to prior experiences in the way our minds create a story.

Esther started to tell me a story about her experience and became tearful. Talk therapy would note the emotion and move along with the story (content). Somatic therapy prioritizes the language of the body, so I would invite her to stop talking and feel her feelings, whatever they are. What are you noticing? This is an invitation to share experience, whether somatic (“my throat is tight and I feel like I can’t breathe”), cognitive (“I hate crying and I want to stop”) or remembered (“when I was a kid, my mother would yell at me for crying”).

Tears are welcome in this therapy practice, and so is fear, grief, anger. We don’t need to shut down the feeling to get to the story. We can experience the feeling, let it move and change and ultimately move out of the body, and then return to the story, which, oddly, may be different now.

All of our direct experience is connected to our past experiences and, though we do not yet know how, to our future experiences. It makes sense that our minds use narrative to connect these pieces of ourselves. But when we spend more time in the narrative than in the experience, we can feel cut off from ourselves. Sometimes we feel like our lives are not even real, that they are more of a story happening to somebody than our authentic experiences.

Bioenergetic therapy helps people connect to direct experience, and thereby connect to themselves. My therapist used to say the goal was for people (me, in this case!) to have more of themselves. For me to have more of myself, less of who I thought I was supposed to be.

Get more of yourself. Your actual, real self. Spend time with just you, noticing your awareness of yourself, your surroundings, your thoughts, your feelings. Notice your own amazingness, your breath, your body, yourself. Your feelings are just your feelings and your body can hold them. You can breathe and have a feeling at the same time. All of it is you.