A Body to mind approach to Somatic Psychotherapy

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For this you do not need to be a movement expert nor do you need to have good coordination. In fact if the exercises may feel a little strange, awkward, or even at times challenging, then they're likely to be far more beneficial than exercises you find easy and can just do without thought.

There are many types of exercises that can be used here but the overall idea is that they are done so that the mind can then see what sensations they start to stir up in the body, so does moving in this way open up a sensation or emotional memory? If so, where is this, what is the emotion?

Spontaneous movements are encouraged in that there's no real direction given other than just listening to the body and allowing for the movement to happen naturally in response to these sensations. This could be anything from needing to curl into a ball, needing to jog, rub or stand up or even shouting stop and are all examples of some that have been used and there are no right or wrong responses but these can be very useful for helping to move any emotions or actions that are stuck and need to come to the surface.

Other types of movements may have more of a structure and organised approach. Either using it as a call and response by making a movement and listening to the response that comes with it so using it as a way to bring deeper awareness in order to look at things from a different perspective.

Alternatively movements can be used to specifically start to open areas up and release what may be below. For example, emotions and stress can impact the posture or other areas and create new bodily postures, movement patterns and habits which at first protects us from the experiences but after a while locks it in and doesn't allow us to release it. So to help with this we use exercises to help adjust and change the posture, movement habits or tensions and allowing what's underneath to either start to be processed and resolved or it allows us access to work on them in different ways as they're no longer completely locked away.